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Peasants, of course, famously not being part of the working class or having any role in revolutionary politics. No one knows why there is a sickle on the flag of the USSR and many other social groups, it's a complete mystery.
Easy logic.
City = Democrat
Country = Republican
Democrat = left
Socialism = more left = more democrat
Therefore, socialism is when city, not socialism is when not city
Western leftists love reverse engineering the concept of Oriental Despotism from cultural tropes they've absorbed, applying it to Mao/Stalin, and thinking it's not only a novel realization but also VERY materialist and leftist.
Radlibs think that if you disavow Socialism every three seconds you can gain mainstream credibility and then convince everyone to do Socialism But Good This Time.
Who would've thought that "NOT REAL SOCIALISM" sounds like extreme cope!?
"Literally every socialism that has existed was wrong, but we'll get it right this time"
The question of China has persistently bedeviled the global left.
No it doesn't. Pretty much the vast majority of communists and most socialists are on board with China. The only major parties who don't like China are the various MLM parties and the Communist Party of Japan. Everyone else is too insignificant to bother mentioning. No one care that your Hoxhaist party with De Leonist characteristics of 10 people thinks every Chinese socialist from Mao to Xi was revisionist. Chavez's and Maduro's party the PSUV alone is 7 million strong. There probably aren't even that many anti-China socialists unless you start counting random Sinophobic radlibs as socialists.
an authoritarian form of capitalism that fluctuates with the booms and busts of the global market
Just like how the Chinese economy busted during the 1997 Asian financial crisis or the Great Recession or the Covid Recession. "Oh no, China's economy grew by 4.9% instead of the projected 5.2%" doesn't count as "fluctuating with the busts of the global market."
In short, trash-tier article from the Jacobin. But then again, what else do we expect from them?
They get to feel correct and right, affirmed by their Western and largely liberal sources. Western leftists tend to treat socialism as a form of personal growth and self-actualization by having The Best Takes.
Because liberals have the cultural status as the good boys and girls who are tolerant and went to college. I guess if you work at a high profile magazine in NYC then your social circle will include ivy league liberals, so that probably impacts who you look up to.
They might not even be aware that it's liberals or they may just think of them as leftists, which is vague enough to include a ton of liberals.
Sometimes they're being strategic and do actually explicitly target a liberal audience. They think they're doing agitprop. Sometimes it's because they think they'll convince people to check out socialism if they distance themselves from the enemies of the US State Department.
But honestly I don't think they think about it that deeply most of the time. They might think they're being strategic but they haven't critically analyzed their approach. IMO this follows from that self-actualization tendency, which is the same one driving pointless online infighting (to be distinguished from necessary policing against V*ushites and reactionaries and so on).
What are western leftists
That's a good question, and the answer is dozens of different ideologies that disagree with each other on all kinds of things and have no single organization or ideology that represents them.
I don't think Jacobin has a single ideological framework that they enforce, they publish stuff from all over the place.
Is Jacobin describe the US or China in there? Lol, can’t make sense of it
Did the CPC even actually have term limits? I'm unclear if they changed the rules with Xi or if the rule was just some unwritten thing or if the western media just made it up entirely?
It was a de facto term limit. The truce made among the CPC was that every president gets two 5 year terms and then the next generation takes over. This provides for an orderly transition and everyone gets a chance to move up.
Xi regards himself as indispensable and nobody else can do the job the way he can. So he had himself written into the constitution and he'll basically be president-for-life now. This is causing everyone else in the CPC to be unable to advance a rank. They're all stuck where they are, and it's not going to change while Xi is alive. He's got another three decades of rule in him.
He's the one who decides how long his term of office is. Not the Party.
Big difference there.
Can you send me the Wall Street Journal article you got all this bullshit from?
So people in my org like Jacobin - I’ve never really read it but I’ve checked out their podcast and read a few articles and it all seems pretty weak. Is this just the best the US can do or is it actually a good periodical and I’ve just been exposed to the weak parts?
A broad spectrum ranging from ultra-Left backstabbers to social fascist backstabbers, but coincidentally skipping over the communists.
Jacobin is terminal Western leftism. Occasionally okay, it's mostly SocDem nonsense. It is the most fringe left wing thing imaginable to most liberals, too.
It's all over the place. They have good articles and bad articles.
It's widely regarded as the furthest left respectable publication.
Jacobin is infinitely better than a lot of other western outlets simply because they haven't swallowed the Neoliberal Mantra of "There Is No Alternative" to the same extent as the mainstream press has. Like most people can sort of instictively understand how fucked the current order is (not really, but they understand the parts that fucks them), but neoliberalism has so royally fucked their worldview that nothing is seen as an alternative.
A lot of their takes recently have sucked. They occasionally put something good out. This comes to mind
This article is basically about some random Chinese Trot with a heavily distorted retelling of 20th century Chinese history. Like most anti-Stalin critiques, it weaponizes Stalin's mistake in telling the CPC to self-liquidate and join the KMT as well as Trotsky's correct conclusion that the KMT would betray the CPC to push some bullshit "Stalin bad Trotsky good" talking point. It brushes over the reason why Stalin would have the idea in the first. The KMT wasn't founded by Chiang Kai-Shek, but by Sun Yat-sen, a genuine progressive who represented the progressive role that national liberation struggle has. After Sun Yat-sen died, there was a power struggle between the left and right wing of the KMT with the right wing under Chiang Kai-Shek winning. Chiang betraying the Communist at Shanghai was the first act towards purging the left wing. The CPC weren't stupid to stick to Chiang after he purged the left wing of the KMT. Their betrayal was part of that purging in the first place.
So much garbage from this article. Here's some random snippets:
By then, Wang himself was living in Britain, having been assisted in the move by the historian Gregor Benton. Benton has played an important role in keeping alive both Wang’s memory and that of Chinese Trotskyism in general.
Pretty pathetic how a particular Chinese tendency hinged on the generosity of some random white dude. Who can a bunch of self-exiles holed up in a country that still had a Chinese colony until 1997 possibly understand what the Chinese masses actually want?
Benton previously translated Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary into English, and he was also responsible for this edition of Mao Zedong Thought, which shortens the original Chinese text by about one-third. Wang himself died in 2002, at the age of ninety-five, and Benton expresses the hope that he “would have accepted my excisions in the spirit in which I made them — to preserve the integrity of his thoughts while spreading them to a new generation of readers.”
So this random Anglo proceeded to edit this random Trot's memoirs by cutting out a third of the text. And we're somehow supposed to believe the received English text is meaningful.
Mao and Wang were at one time both revolutionaries in the same movement, yet one died as a world-famous nation builder while the other ended his days as a virtual unknown in exile. As Wang recalled, the two men were never close comrades, but their friendship circles overlapped:
So this dude basically didn't know Mao nor was he part of Mao's inner circle. In conclusion, some dude who didn't personally know Mao wrote a memoir psychoanalyzing Mao and retelling early 20th century Chinese history who then had his memoir further bowdlerized by some white dude who probably never even set foot in China. I'm sure this text has important things to say about Mao and not be completely useless, if not misleading.
If he had known about the relationship in Marxist doctrine between workers and peasants, town and village, the former leading the latter, he would have slipped back into Shanghai or gone into hibernation in Wuhan rather than climb Jinggang Mountains.
Mao wouldn't have because Mao wasn't some dumbass dogmatist who insisted that material reality conformed to his preconceived notions. Wow, we almost got liquidated in Shanghai, yeah let's continue to stick around in that city, I'm sorry nothing bad would possibly happen. He correctly analyzed the situation and behaved accordingly.
Mao’s reaction to the failed insurrection — which later became known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising — seems to have drawn upon his literary knowledge. He took just two books, both of which were Chinese classics, to the mountains with him. One was Water Margin (水滸傳) — also known as Outlaws of the Marsh — the tale of a band of 105 men and three women who overthrew a corrupt dynasty from their mountainous hideout during the twelfth century.
Marx was a brilliant theorist, but he unfortunately didn't write much about waging guerilla warfare. Mao had to make due with what he had.
backward villages for the modern littoral, peasants for workers, a small number of communists in command of peasant armies for the industrial proletariat’s influence over the peasantry, and armed secession and protracted war for propaganda, agitation, long-term organization, and revolution by means of a general strike.
A general strike isn't going to do shit when China was ruled by warlords and imperialists. This is about as meaningful as voting the warlords and imperialists out of office. The only way to subdue the warlords and expel the imperialists out of China is through an army, a red army, a people's liberation army.
As Wang notes, Mao’s famous remark that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” encapsulates this mindset.
China was ruled by warlords at that time. I wonder how Mao came up with that idea.
The second Chinese revolution, which triumphed in the late 1940s, was largely a military takeover with the urban masses playing the role of spectators.
The vast majority of Chinese people in 1949 were peasants. There weren't "urban masses" because China was a semi-feudal semi-colonized country.
Wang Fanxi saw Mao as an opportunist who fitted theory to practice and strategy to tactics rather than the other way round.
This just means Mao wasn't some dogmatist who thought practice comes from theory instead of the other way around. This is supposed to be a good thing. Telling on yourself as some dogmatist who don't know when or how to adjust your praxis.
As Wang observed, Mao blended Marxist and Confucian terminology, referring to the final stage of his Chinese revolution as datong (大同: “Great Harmony”), a concept drawn directly from The Book of Rites (禮記) by Confucius
Reappropriating datong from Confucianism didn't start with Mao. It was done by an entire generation of Chinese socialists before Mao, including Sun Yat-sen. And another point, schools of philosophy reappropriating terms used by rival schools of philosophy is what Chinese philosophy has always done. Daoists reappropriated wuwei from Confucians to mean something completely different to the point where wuwei is more associated with Daoism than Confucianism. I guess Mao had to jettison over 2 millennia of Chinese philosophy to dogmatically follow the writings of a couple of dead German dudes who never set foot in China. And finally, as a nitpick, I don't think Confucius actually wrote The Book of Rites. The traditional narrative is that Confucius edited the text and the other Five Classics. It's just a way for the article to shoehorn some bullshit Orientalism by namedropping Confucius.
According to Wang Fanxi, Chinese Trotskyists were “shaken to the core” by the events of 1949 as they did not expect the CPC to emerge victorious. He concluded at the time that the Chinese revolution was the victory of “a collectivist bureaucratic party and in no way the victory of a Chinese proletarian party, that is, of proletarian revolution.”
This is pure cope lmao. And also telling on themselves for tacitly rooting for the KMT to triumph over the CPC.
Garbage article. I'm sorry this is a mess of a post.
Good work going through this ultra-Left shit rag disguised as a social Democrat article.
It only shows even further that the ultra-Left and the right opportunists will always without fail join hands to attack the correct line.
But such is the fate of "ultra-Left" phrasemongers. Their phrases are Leftist, but in practice it turns out that they are aiding the enemies of the working class. You go in on the Left and come out on the Right
:stalin-pipe:
Oh of course it's a Trot. Continuing Trotsky's line of absolutely despising peasants.
Regurgitating orientalist tropes and state department propaganda, but in a very leftist way so it's all ok.
How do you guys think they'll justify starting WWIII with China over Taiwan?
I've already had to deal with braindead libs claiming that the CPC is the Chinese equivalent of the confederacy because "they were the rebels and the wrong side won" or some such bullshit in the wake of :good-morning:
Wow that is a :galaxy-brain: take. I have never encountered that in the wild and I think if I did I'd have to get very very drunk and lay down for the rest of the day.
I've only seen that from Vaushites on Reddit. I would probably go crazy if I heard that in person
Western leftists/Eurocentric leftists trying not to seethe at the fact that non-Western peoples have explored various forms of socialist revolutions and accumulated a wealth of revolutionary experiences and knowledges where Western experience and knowledge is neither the paradigm nor the inevitable path nor even the most successful challenge. Level: impossible.
Hi, I'm a Westerner looking to understand China by learning one thing about it and extrapolating everything else from there, and I thought this article was great!
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
I had a mistaken "I should read Jacobin" phase when I first started radicalizing. It didn't last long and it seems nothing has changed since then.
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