:mao-aggro-shining: :denguin: :xi-shining:
pretty good results folks
China didn't adopt liberalism that is why. State control of every aspect of capital is inherently illiberal.
A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe:
the spectre of 11-Dollar Large Any Toppings
Xi watching in resignation as the communism button is powerless against the Hut :desolate:
Pizza Hut in China is pretty upmarket actually, it's good except for being kinda bougie
Liberalized China: still has long term socialist vision and clear path towards achieving it
Mao himself back in the 50s was talking about how its gonna take a couple of generations at least for China to be able to even try and be a moderetely prosperous and well functioning socialist society (and thats before the USSR collapsed), its not some new revisionist claim deng or Xi came up. Lenin was saying the same about the USSR needing decades upon decades to even think about functioning in line to any theoretical description or conseption of a full socialist economy and thats without forseeing WW2 and hoping for revolutions to hapen elsewhere to help. The line of "its gonna be more or less X amount of decades before being able (materialy, economicaly, infastractualy, education wise ,class conflict wise , safety wise, stability wise whatever) to move to a next stage of socialist development" is a pretty normal and usual language in AES through history. Vietnam, Cuba, USSR , Yugoslavia , all had such language and long term projections and theorized goals.
Marx thought Britain and the US had the most revolutionary potential lol, if the empires had succumbed to proletarian revolution first, the world would be a much different place.
They still do. Why do you think they spend so much time and effort swamping us with consumerism and propaganda and building false consciousness? Despite us being a labour aristocracy, it's here where the productive forces are most developed and the contradictions most apparent (we can feed and house everyone with ease, why are people houseless and hungry?).
If the US and Commonwealth go red, it's over for the Bourgeoisie.
Agreed, what he failed to see was that revolution would occur in the colonized world first and the labor aristocracy in the imperial core would be used as a counter-revolutionary force
Pretty sure the line they're taking is that 2050's when they should've amassed enough productive forces to start the shift from late-stage form of NEP they adopted under Deng and begin socializing their socioeconomic system.
Which is the most interesting part of the process in my eyes. We're starting to see the PRC step onto the global stage and from there we'll begin to see how much they walk the talk
I'm about to read Xi's book and will post passages in /c/literature when I do. Just did Blackshirts and Reds, State and Rev, and am doing an abridged version of Capital right now.
From what I read in State and Rev, I don't see any serious abandonments China has made from Marxism or Leninism. Lenin has a lot of ideas, but constantly repeats that "the form of the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship will be determined by the experience of the proletarians" and that the primary function of the state should be it's preservation of political capital and denial of political capital to capitalists as well as massive expansions of democracy.
Which some people say isn't happening in China, but Lenin (and Marx) are materialists and only judge expansion of democracy in relation to the society/social mode of production the revolutionary state emerged from. So yeah, China emerged from feudalism with not even a bourgeois democracy and now has by comparison a hugely democratic system (which is expanding, not contracting).
"Adopting elements" would be Khrushchev. Gorbachev was about adoption of capitalism wholesale.
not exactly the same elements
hmmm, wondering if USSR had anything like the Four Cardinal Principles
- The principle of upholding the people's democratic dictatorship
I think we're going to have to ditch the language (not the idea) of "dictatorship of the proletariat" if we want an American socialist movement to go mainstream anytime soon. We can keep the exact same concept, but we need to package it in something from the American political tradition -- maybe we talk about government that's actually "of the people, by the people, for the people." It's just too common to call even the most reasonable government action "tyranny," and the idea that socialism = dictatorship dictatorship is too deeply ingrained in American propaganda.
Just say "people's democracy" or "democratic republic" which is what most socialist countries call themselves.
"dictatorship of the proletariat" was Marx's materialist way of describing popular democracy in contrast to bourgeois democracy. As democracy and states are authoritarian dictatorships for the purpose of class oppression no matter who controls them.
It was also meant to drive home the point that "this is not good and by no means the final stage of communism". Mainly as a critique of the Gotha Program, which seemed to take a "free people's democracy/state" as it's end state which he thought was fucking stupid and meaningless.
I think some orgs have started saying stuff like "worker control of the government" or something to make it more understandable
Paul McCartney's "Temporary Secretary" but instead he says "Proletarian Libertarian"
There's a book about the period of privatization in Russia called Piratization of Russia that I remember being a really good takedown of the way capitalism destroyed that country. I should go back through and see if it is actually a good analysis, or if it stumbled upon its systemic statements accidentally.
Can I get a good side by side comparison of the two somewhere? From my understanding, Deng still kept a tight leash on the capitalist class whereas Gorby didn’t.
Yep, that's about it. Deng used the NEP as a model (which wasn't great, but they were able to get them under control after the program was ended). Whereas Gorbonzo decided to allow them to regain political capital and even appointed them to important positions in the government. Then sided with them against the people.
Deng never sided with them and maintained the dominance of the CPC over the capitalist class. Which is like the most basic tenant of ML theory, the use of the revolutionary state as an organized oppressive force directed at capitalists instead of workers.
there was essentially no capitalist class, or at least to say one capable of effecting any policy decisions of the communist party, until after the dissolution of the soviet union and suspension of all CPSU activity by the supreme soviet
Deng was a revisionist.
I honestly think he wasn't entirely wrong, but allowing billionaires and privatizing the healthcare system are absolutely unacceptable.
Every successful revolutionary has been a revisionist. Not only did Lenin switch to the New Economic Plan when their original ideas failed spectacularly, but the revolution was supposed to take place in Germany, not Russia and certainly not China.
That is true, but Lenin pointed out that the NEP was "one step backwards, so we can take two steps forwards" (he also thought it would last longer than it did.)
Dengism may or may not have been necessary for the survival of China (I suspect it was after the Sino-Soviet split), but we should never lose sight of the fact it was a withdrawal to allow development of production. Markets, let alone non-worker owned businesses, are incompatible with higher stages of socialist development and I am eager to see how China is planning to phase them out as it moves towards communist development.
Fair nuff, I think I read a touch of orthodoxy into your comment that wasn't actually there.
Now here's an interesting question: What does that say about Marxism-Leninism?
That depends on whether you treat Lenin's writings from the POV of early 20th century Russia and Marx's writings from mid 19th century Germany/Britain as holy scripture or simply as foundational works to building a scientific approach to creating the conditions necessary for a proletarian revolution, comrade.
The difference is in diamat application vs selling out for shitty pizza
I never said whether the revisionists were getting dunked on or doing the dunking
