Western coverage of events in China is highlighting a lurch leftwards by Xi Jinping. But this misunderstands Beijing’s approach and is fuelled by dismay that Xi has not followed the path that the West wanted him to.
what difference does a revolution make if the material conditions are on par or worse than other capitalist countries while facing the identical exploitation/wage slavery that workers in capitalist countries face
i don't care what a bunch of professors say about "developing socialism," it doesn't change the fact that the cpc continues to allow the exploitation of its people by foreign and domestic capitalists in the name of rapid industrialization. Is the best socialist system one that says " You will toil, sweat and never realize the fruits of your labor, but in 50 - 70 years we will have the largest economy on the planet because 1st world capitalists exploited your labor."
Income inequality rhetoric ignores that a class can reap the benefits of work via public investment (e.g. a bullet train), even if bosses make more as individuals. Working Chinese people are seeing the fruits of their labour despite billionaires and inequality. To recriminate them for not demanding more is recriminating the virtue of patience
"yes billions of dollars that have been generated by the proletariat funneled into a few dozen billionaires, but actually you are getting the fruits of your labor because the cpc built trains and other public goods! The bare minimum expected of a party that serves proletarian interests."
Yeah man great article, really winning me over with the unironic "the protracted people's billionaire exploiters isn't bad actually, since the party has sway over them they can live off of others labor"
idk why people take any criticism of china to an almost personal level when there is obviously a lot to critique. I would rather live there than in the US sure, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to advocate for actual workers' interests over the "pragmatic approach" that takes 100+ years and doesn't make attempts to alleviate capitalist alienation.
I gave you SO MUCH INFORMATION and you didn't even care to try and challenge your ignorance or learn ANYTHING
You don't care about the people of China you just care about winning a meaningless internet game. You don't know anything about socialism, or the monumental challenges that the Chinese people have had to struggle and overcome in the last century.
you sent me a bunch of professors saying that opening up chinese citizens to foreign and domestic capitalist exploitation is a necessity for developing socialism. That most likely is true, that doesn't mean billionaires, awful working conditions, and an unrealization of even a fraction of the fruits of the worker's labor is an intrinsic by-product of that. China is developing socialism for the ~future , but that does not require the exorbitant, exploitation of billions of people in the meantime. It's like seeing the bare minimum and being completely satisfied, and not asking why things cant be improved or better.
Do you understand even remotely the inequality of development in 1970's China? By absolute standards? I'm guessing you don't appreciate the magnitude of that. It's the contradiction that Mao couldn't figure out how to bridge. Western powers had developed some industry before the CPC took charge. But large swathes of the country were stuck in roughly medieval peasantry. Mao was able to spread wealth in an egalitarian way but not actually realize sufficient growth to survive western imperialism. There is essentially no reduction in global poverty over the last several decades without china taking large fractions of their alienated labor product and investing it in rural areas. Marx's ideas about socialism were written under the assumption of wide spread industrialism -- existing capitalist production. The peasants seizing there farms can produce a rural communalism at best, but you simply can't reach abundance that way.
you sent me a bunch of professors saying that opening up chinese citizens to foreign and domestic capitalist exploitation is a necessity for developing socialism
it was a necessity for china
seriously, do you have any idea how miserable china was in 1980? people couldn't afford fucking bicycles, they were poorer than all of sub-saharan africa except for like 2 countries, and much poorer, just try to picture the meaning of an $160 per capita gdp (no missing zeroes here, it really was in the low 3 digits)
they had to do something because clearly a planned economy just wasn't working, they didn't have endogenous capabilities for growth given that despite every previous effort they were still basically in the 19th century
if you don't have those endogenous capabilities then you gotta go somewhere else and they sure as hell wouldn't go to the soviets, so what did you want them to do? to stay miserable?
even with all the exploitation of the 90s (which has been falling consistently since the late 00s), they were still living in better material conditions than 1980. it was cool that people had some of the basic stuff before then, but life still fucking sucked over there
im not trying to aggravate you, but I sincerely do not understand the pov of someone who understands marxism and is also seemingly satisfied with the CPC
I don't look at Marxism as a set of unchanging dogmas, but a living ideology that examines contradictions from a scientific perspective, and therefore has to evolve and change as history progresses and as we learn new information. Actual revolutions and existing socialist experiments have shown that getting beyond wage labor and the dominance of capital is very difficult, and cannot be done on a basis of poverty. I admire the CPC because ever since the Chinese revolution, and especially since the period of Reform and Opening Up, they've been able to tremendously improve the living conditions of the Chinese people. If they had followed a strictly capitalist path, they could not have done this, as the history of capitalism decisively shows.
Yes, China has wage labor and capitalists, but that's not the be all and end all to Marxism- there's also the fundamental irrationality of an economy that's dominated by profit. Mao Zedong defined capitalism as a system of "profits in command," and systems of profit in command create poverty amidst abundance. Looking at the Chinese economy today, profits are not in command of it. The major sectors of the economy are controlled by the state, which works to benefit the people through five-year plans. The advances and surpluses created by the market sector do not create new poor people, but rather serve to lift up the living standards of the people as a whole. The lives of the workers may have many difficulties, but when you compare their standard of living now vs. before the revolution, they are much better off. This is a result of rational planning, what Engels calls socialized production according to a predetermined plan.
If profit was not the driving force of the Chinese economy, in which I include foreign investors in economic zones, why are the worker benefits and protections so poor and the hours expected of them so high? Profit in the name of reallocation to the parties directives is still profit raised from the worker that they do not receive. I'm not trying to argue that the Chinese citizen's standard of living in relation to their peasant past/other 3rd world countries has not greatly increased, I'm arguing that they can go much further than they are now in providing for their workers. There are homeless people in china, the Chinese healthcare system is almost identical to the United States one. China is the second-largest economy, soon to be the largest, if they can not provide mediocre relief for their workers currently, what hope is there in the future to free the populace from wage slavery?
I don't know that it's clear that they could be doing better. They have the second largest economy, but they also have an enormous population of over a billion people, and raising all their living standards is naturally going to take a very long time, especially from the incredibly low base they started from. I don't think it's reasonable to judge them by how well you theoretically think they could be doing, but by how they're actually doing and how they've done. And it seems like they're going in the direction you'd prefer. The 996 workday was just declared illegal, the past decade has seen a massive project to eliminate extreme poverty, and capital is being reigned in.
the Chinese healthcare system is almost identical to the United States one
Considering how often and how easily Chinese people go to the doctor, I don't think that's true. They may have private actors in health care, but only the US has problems with health insurance debt and bankruptcies.
China most definitely has an issue with healthcare debt/bankruptcies lol???? And where are you in the US where you can't easily go to a doctor/ER? (obviously, you'll get fucked money-wise, but general access to care normally is not an issue I've heard about, just the debt resulting)
It's not my job to answer for this or that policy decision that China has. I'm sure that if I did more research on this, I'd find the healthcare situation to be complicated and evolving and not at all black and white, just like with every other gotcha bit of trivia people use to try to attack them. Socialism isn't defined by one policy or issue. I've already given you plenty of information to argue for why China is a socialist state.
It’s not my job to answer for this or that policy decision that China has.
Not taking a side in this debate, but honestly I find the "it's not my job!" retort fucking lazy and sad.
Wasn't you're job to get into a debate in the first place, nothing on this forum is "your job". If someone brings something up you can respond to it or not, but saying that it's not literally part of your professional responsibilities isn't a fucking excuse for a lack of a response. I'd respect people more if they just said "I can't be arsed to do this".
The reason I'm saying "it's not my job" is because I have enough intellectual humility to understand that I don't know, and can't know, every good or bad thing that's happening in China. I'm not the one trying to deligitimize their claim to being a socialist state based on one potential policy.
I’m not the one trying to deligitimize their claim to being a socialist state based on one potential policy.
No but you are trying to legitimize their claim by posting a bunch of info. That’s sort of a “job” you took on there.
FYI I’m mostly agreeing with you in this discourse. Just hate the fucking “it’s not my job” bs. If that’s really how you feel just abandoned this whole endeavor and go touch some fucking grass.
So a lot of people's retorts to criticisms of China seem to hinge on the assumption that all China-criticizers are white westerns. Hypothetically if this poster was non-white and from the developing world, what would you say to them?
Stalin era industrialization carried the same level of suffering, if not more considering the fact that in the end they failed to acquire/replicate and surpass of the labor-saving methods used (and withheld) by capitalist powers. The idea is to lower the amount of labor input required as quickly as possible, if that means suffering to acquire the most advanced, capital-intensive and highest efficiency means of production so be it.
It reduces the mass of labor required for the same production outcomes - thereby reducing the mass of exploitation required for the same development. And more importantly it means socialists no longer having to be on the defensive technologically and economically.
Because we all know that it's better to get overrun by the capitalists than try something different. The CPC caught up in 60 years and you're what? Mad that it wasn't quick or utopian enough? Dictatorship of the Proletariat, nor socialism, entail a full escape from capitalist alienation. The point is that the CPC hasn't ceded control of the economy.
socialism does entail an escape from capitalist alienation lol, how can you argue otherwise? You own the fruit of your labor
but yes the cpc can have much stronger workers protections/rights. I mean just look at 996, while yeah it is "illegal" it is not enforced and expected of workers
i think there is a difference between alienation and voluntary contributions for redistribution. Like in a socialist country a factory owned and operated by the workers can decide that they can sell their product at 100% to other companies but offer a reduced rate for redistribution/donate it. The alienation would only occur if the latter was forced because they are having the product of their labor stolen from them in that case. But there is no reason to believe that a collectively owned factory would decide against the voluntary redistribution of a portion of their product to help other people.
996 is just one example, one that has been happening for the better part of a decade.
Yeah those are different things. I think it's unreasonable to consider China in the context of what maybe they could have done that might have worked and been less alienating. We'll never know. But it's clearly hard to compete in terms of existential survival with the capitalist hegemon when you're growing your new socialist economy slowly but in a way that isn't as alienating. It's the story everywhere in AES or former AES countries. The USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, China, they all had the same immediate strategy upon achieving victory. They also immediately had to try and overcome the contradictions that come along with inheriting a deeply unequal society and economy. No one said building socialism would be quick or easy. What I think a lot of us are trying to express is the idea that it's not unreasonable to wait and see what the CPC is going to do to resolve the contradictions that came with Dengism and opening. In another comment, you asked if people were supposed to just wait a while to see a brighter future? They literally are, but they also have seen the brighter future, very many of them. Yes, capitalist mode of production is alienating. It's still better than being a literal peasant in a lot of ways. Marx wrote about how capitalism paved the way for many improvements in European life over the old feudal nobility and serfdom. What's important is the idea that the Chinese economy nor government are controlled by a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. The CPC have social solidarity with the people. It's a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, not the magic contradiction resolution squad. They've taken a poor, vastly populated, relative backwater and developed it into a country that is just now beginning to challenge u.s. imperial hegemony. So yeah, critical support for developing to this point, let's see what they actually do with post-scarcity now that they've gotten close to achieving it. We used ours (imperial west, u.s. in particular) to create a global climate collapse. Hopefully the CPC is able to use theirs to shield their people from it. We'll see.
Sorry you've had how many successful revolutions in your country again?
what difference does a revolution make if the material conditions are on par or worse than other capitalist countries while facing the identical exploitation/wage slavery that workers in capitalist countries face
You feel like learning something?
603 Is Socialism With Chinese Characteristics Real Socialism?
Vijay Prashad - What is the Meaning of the Left?
Professor Zhang Weiwei (张维为): The China Model and Its Implications
China Has Billionaires
The Class Nature of the Chinese State A critique of “China’s Long March to Capitalism”.
Cheng En Fu: Seven Currents of Social Thoughts and their Development in Contemporary China with a Focus on Innovative Marxism
China: Three Models of Development
Chinese Communist Party: a party of workers or capitalists?
i don't care what a bunch of professors say about "developing socialism," it doesn't change the fact that the cpc continues to allow the exploitation of its people by foreign and domestic capitalists in the name of rapid industrialization. Is the best socialist system one that says " You will toil, sweat and never realize the fruits of your labor, but in 50 - 70 years we will have the largest economy on the planet because 1st world capitalists exploited your labor."
"yes billions of dollars that have been generated by the proletariat funneled into a few dozen billionaires, but actually you are getting the fruits of your labor because the cpc built trains and other public goods! The bare minimum expected of a party that serves proletarian interests."
Yeah man great article, really winning me over with the unironic "the protracted people's billionaire exploiters isn't bad actually, since the party has sway over them they can live off of others labor"
idk why people take any criticism of china to an almost personal level when there is obviously a lot to critique. I would rather live there than in the US sure, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to advocate for actual workers' interests over the "pragmatic approach" that takes 100+ years and doesn't make attempts to alleviate capitalist alienation.
deleted by creator
:data-laughing:
ok dude, have a good one lol
I gave you SO MUCH INFORMATION and you didn't even care to try and challenge your ignorance or learn ANYTHING
You don't care about the people of China you just care about winning a meaningless internet game. You don't know anything about socialism, or the monumental challenges that the Chinese people have had to struggle and overcome in the last century.
you sent me a bunch of professors saying that opening up chinese citizens to foreign and domestic capitalist exploitation is a necessity for developing socialism. That most likely is true, that doesn't mean billionaires, awful working conditions, and an unrealization of even a fraction of the fruits of the worker's labor is an intrinsic by-product of that. China is developing socialism for the ~future , but that does not require the exorbitant, exploitation of billions of people in the meantime. It's like seeing the bare minimum and being completely satisfied, and not asking why things cant be improved or better.
Do you understand even remotely the inequality of development in 1970's China? By absolute standards? I'm guessing you don't appreciate the magnitude of that. It's the contradiction that Mao couldn't figure out how to bridge. Western powers had developed some industry before the CPC took charge. But large swathes of the country were stuck in roughly medieval peasantry. Mao was able to spread wealth in an egalitarian way but not actually realize sufficient growth to survive western imperialism. There is essentially no reduction in global poverty over the last several decades without china taking large fractions of their alienated labor product and investing it in rural areas. Marx's ideas about socialism were written under the assumption of wide spread industrialism -- existing capitalist production. The peasants seizing there farms can produce a rural communalism at best, but you simply can't reach abundance that way.
it was a necessity for china
seriously, do you have any idea how miserable china was in 1980? people couldn't afford fucking bicycles, they were poorer than all of sub-saharan africa except for like 2 countries, and much poorer, just try to picture the meaning of an $160 per capita gdp (no missing zeroes here, it really was in the low 3 digits)
they had to do something because clearly a planned economy just wasn't working, they didn't have endogenous capabilities for growth given that despite every previous effort they were still basically in the 19th century
if you don't have those endogenous capabilities then you gotta go somewhere else and they sure as hell wouldn't go to the soviets, so what did you want them to do? to stay miserable?
even with all the exploitation of the 90s (which has been falling consistently since the late 00s), they were still living in better material conditions than 1980. it was cool that people had some of the basic stuff before then, but life still fucking sucked over there
im not trying to aggravate you, but I sincerely do not understand the pov of someone who understands marxism and is also seemingly satisfied with the CPC
I don't look at Marxism as a set of unchanging dogmas, but a living ideology that examines contradictions from a scientific perspective, and therefore has to evolve and change as history progresses and as we learn new information. Actual revolutions and existing socialist experiments have shown that getting beyond wage labor and the dominance of capital is very difficult, and cannot be done on a basis of poverty. I admire the CPC because ever since the Chinese revolution, and especially since the period of Reform and Opening Up, they've been able to tremendously improve the living conditions of the Chinese people. If they had followed a strictly capitalist path, they could not have done this, as the history of capitalism decisively shows.
Yes, China has wage labor and capitalists, but that's not the be all and end all to Marxism- there's also the fundamental irrationality of an economy that's dominated by profit. Mao Zedong defined capitalism as a system of "profits in command," and systems of profit in command create poverty amidst abundance. Looking at the Chinese economy today, profits are not in command of it. The major sectors of the economy are controlled by the state, which works to benefit the people through five-year plans. The advances and surpluses created by the market sector do not create new poor people, but rather serve to lift up the living standards of the people as a whole. The lives of the workers may have many difficulties, but when you compare their standard of living now vs. before the revolution, they are much better off. This is a result of rational planning, what Engels calls socialized production according to a predetermined plan.
If profit was not the driving force of the Chinese economy, in which I include foreign investors in economic zones, why are the worker benefits and protections so poor and the hours expected of them so high? Profit in the name of reallocation to the parties directives is still profit raised from the worker that they do not receive. I'm not trying to argue that the Chinese citizen's standard of living in relation to their peasant past/other 3rd world countries has not greatly increased, I'm arguing that they can go much further than they are now in providing for their workers. There are homeless people in china, the Chinese healthcare system is almost identical to the United States one. China is the second-largest economy, soon to be the largest, if they can not provide mediocre relief for their workers currently, what hope is there in the future to free the populace from wage slavery?
I don't know that it's clear that they could be doing better. They have the second largest economy, but they also have an enormous population of over a billion people, and raising all their living standards is naturally going to take a very long time, especially from the incredibly low base they started from. I don't think it's reasonable to judge them by how well you theoretically think they could be doing, but by how they're actually doing and how they've done. And it seems like they're going in the direction you'd prefer. The 996 workday was just declared illegal, the past decade has seen a massive project to eliminate extreme poverty, and capital is being reigned in.
Considering how often and how easily Chinese people go to the doctor, I don't think that's true. They may have private actors in health care, but only the US has problems with health insurance debt and bankruptcies.
China most definitely has an issue with healthcare debt/bankruptcies lol???? And where are you in the US where you can't easily go to a doctor/ER? (obviously, you'll get fucked money-wise, but general access to care normally is not an issue I've heard about, just the debt resulting)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-healthcare-debt/china-healthcare-costs-forcing-patients-into-crippling-debt-idUSKCN0ZQ03A
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-020-05551-5
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2012-07/11/content_15568517.htm
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-05/17/content_12522497.htm
It's not my job to answer for this or that policy decision that China has. I'm sure that if I did more research on this, I'd find the healthcare situation to be complicated and evolving and not at all black and white, just like with every other gotcha bit of trivia people use to try to attack them. Socialism isn't defined by one policy or issue. I've already given you plenty of information to argue for why China is a socialist state.
Not taking a side in this debate, but honestly I find the "it's not my job!" retort fucking lazy and sad.
Wasn't you're job to get into a debate in the first place, nothing on this forum is "your job". If someone brings something up you can respond to it or not, but saying that it's not literally part of your professional responsibilities isn't a fucking excuse for a lack of a response. I'd respect people more if they just said "I can't be arsed to do this".
The reason I'm saying "it's not my job" is because I have enough intellectual humility to understand that I don't know, and can't know, every good or bad thing that's happening in China. I'm not the one trying to deligitimize their claim to being a socialist state based on one potential policy.
No but you are trying to legitimize their claim by posting a bunch of info. That’s sort of a “job” you took on there.
FYI I’m mostly agreeing with you in this discourse. Just hate the fucking “it’s not my job” bs. If that’s really how you feel just abandoned this whole endeavor and go touch some fucking grass.
Leave me the fuck alone
It’s a public forum dude, if you’re goal is to be left alone I wouldn't post here. Perhaps take my previous advice.
disengaging from this
Welp thanks for taking my advice then.
Spend some time in Asia, China sticks out very obviously from the rest of Asia and especially its peer India.
So a lot of people's retorts to criticisms of China seem to hinge on the assumption that all China-criticizers are white westerns. Hypothetically if this poster was non-white and from the developing world, what would you say to them?
Stalin era industrialization carried the same level of suffering, if not more considering the fact that in the end they failed to acquire/replicate and surpass of the labor-saving methods used (and withheld) by capitalist powers. The idea is to lower the amount of labor input required as quickly as possible, if that means suffering to acquire the most advanced, capital-intensive and highest efficiency means of production so be it.
It reduces the mass of labor required for the same production outcomes - thereby reducing the mass of exploitation required for the same development. And more importantly it means socialists no longer having to be on the defensive technologically and economically.
And it's ~15 years, not 100.
Because we all know that it's better to get overrun by the capitalists than try something different. The CPC caught up in 60 years and you're what? Mad that it wasn't quick or utopian enough? Dictatorship of the Proletariat, nor socialism, entail a full escape from capitalist alienation. The point is that the CPC hasn't ceded control of the economy.
socialism does entail an escape from capitalist alienation lol, how can you argue otherwise? You own the fruit of your labor
but yes the cpc can have much stronger workers protections/rights. I mean just look at 996, while yeah it is "illegal" it is not enforced and expected of workers
I replied elsewhere and addressed the first part. It's hard to envision the necessary growth without some amount of alienation to reinvest elsewhere.
And yeah, they need to work on that. Let's see if they do it before continuing to shit on them, eh?
i think there is a difference between alienation and voluntary contributions for redistribution. Like in a socialist country a factory owned and operated by the workers can decide that they can sell their product at 100% to other companies but offer a reduced rate for redistribution/donate it. The alienation would only occur if the latter was forced because they are having the product of their labor stolen from them in that case. But there is no reason to believe that a collectively owned factory would decide against the voluntary redistribution of a portion of their product to help other people.
996 is just one example, one that has been happening for the better part of a decade.
Yeah those are different things. I think it's unreasonable to consider China in the context of what maybe they could have done that might have worked and been less alienating. We'll never know. But it's clearly hard to compete in terms of existential survival with the capitalist hegemon when you're growing your new socialist economy slowly but in a way that isn't as alienating. It's the story everywhere in AES or former AES countries. The USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, China, they all had the same immediate strategy upon achieving victory. They also immediately had to try and overcome the contradictions that come along with inheriting a deeply unequal society and economy. No one said building socialism would be quick or easy. What I think a lot of us are trying to express is the idea that it's not unreasonable to wait and see what the CPC is going to do to resolve the contradictions that came with Dengism and opening. In another comment, you asked if people were supposed to just wait a while to see a brighter future? They literally are, but they also have seen the brighter future, very many of them. Yes, capitalist mode of production is alienating. It's still better than being a literal peasant in a lot of ways. Marx wrote about how capitalism paved the way for many improvements in European life over the old feudal nobility and serfdom. What's important is the idea that the Chinese economy nor government are controlled by a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. The CPC have social solidarity with the people. It's a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, not the magic contradiction resolution squad. They've taken a poor, vastly populated, relative backwater and developed it into a country that is just now beginning to challenge u.s. imperial hegemony. So yeah, critical support for developing to this point, let's see what they actually do with post-scarcity now that they've gotten close to achieving it. We used ours (imperial west, u.s. in particular) to create a global climate collapse. Hopefully the CPC is able to use theirs to shield their people from it. We'll see.
compare India to China if you want to really look at the difference
No where has had a successful revolution.