I keep trying to have a take about this but it almost wholly defies that. I disagree with writing off leftists solely with the take that they just resent capitalists. That China has employed much of the incoming western investment in a vast program of poverty alleviation is very good. The fact that in doing so they've got urban economies much like the u.s. where workers get paid well to perform alienating bullshit jobs, or jobs in service of some dumb fucking tech company or online media corp, remains a problem. I imagine that at least some fragment of said urban left is freaked out about their bullshit job being funded by the wage exploitation of others somewhere performing hard industrial or agricultural labor. I guess the point though is that you can't wave the magic no exploitation but also no getting conquered by the west wand in 1970's PRC. GLF and CR, still unable to produce a coherent take on that. The Dengist line on the famine probably does exaggerate the extent to which it can be pinned on Mao and the GLF. As others have pointed out, massive famines weren't particularly rare in the long course of Chinese history, and early capitalism in pre-Napoleonic Europe was starving the fuck out of people. Industrializing causes a famine for pretty much everyone. CR is even harder to evaluate, since its hard to disentangle especially in English language sources which violence was performed by leftists on behalf of CPC interests and how much was performed by rightists acting in bad faith. That said, absolutely none of this narrative matters at all if China keeps pressing the socialism button. All of these contradictions between exploited and physically abused industrial urban laborers, rural agricultural laborers, and urban petit bourgeois non-productive labor are going to be easier to deal with when you've solved poverty. And I guess more importantly, when you've solved poverty by raising the standard of living of the peasantry and not by kidnapping a nation of African slaves or doing neo/colonialism across the Global South.
I keep trying to have a take about this but it almost wholly defies that. I disagree with writing off leftists solely with the take that they just resent capitalists. That China has employed much of the incoming western investment in a vast program of poverty alleviation is very good. The fact that in doing so they've got urban economies much like the u.s. where workers get paid well to perform alienating bullshit jobs, or jobs in service of some dumb fucking tech company or online media corp, remains a problem. I imagine that at least some fragment of said urban left is freaked out about their bullshit job being funded by the wage exploitation of others somewhere performing hard industrial or agricultural labor. I guess the point though is that you can't wave the magic no exploitation but also no getting conquered by the west wand in 1970's PRC. GLF and CR, still unable to produce a coherent take on that. The Dengist line on the famine probably does exaggerate the extent to which it can be pinned on Mao and the GLF. As others have pointed out, massive famines weren't particularly rare in the long course of Chinese history, and early capitalism in pre-Napoleonic Europe was starving the fuck out of people. Industrializing causes a famine for pretty much everyone. CR is even harder to evaluate, since its hard to disentangle especially in English language sources which violence was performed by leftists on behalf of CPC interests and how much was performed by rightists acting in bad faith. That said, absolutely none of this narrative matters at all if China keeps pressing the socialism button. All of these contradictions between exploited and physically abused industrial urban laborers, rural agricultural laborers, and urban petit bourgeois non-productive labor are going to be easier to deal with when you've solved poverty. And I guess more importantly, when you've solved poverty by raising the standard of living of the peasantry and not by kidnapping a nation of African slaves or doing neo/colonialism across the Global South.
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Fair enough then. That shit is so annoying and confusing to parse, so fair on him for trying to give a reasonable accounting of it.