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
Lmao, @wombat@hexbear.net, more and more people are saying this!
I remember that being the first sentence in a larger paragraph that went into the broader history of that era, does anyone have it saved somewhere?
Sounds like something that would've been in Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler.
Ugh, went into that thread and had to un-upvote at least one semi-lib take in there lol
Tbh though I think that thread legitimately helped me get past some of the state department BS I was still buying into.
Hahaha I am so proud of that thread. I like to think it was actually very significant in shaping the culture and politics of the site.
I do think that a CPC derived model and syntheses of the ANC post transformation would've lifted the country of South Africa out of the post apartheid economic worries better than the neoliberal treaties pushed through by the IWF in that time window after the fall of the Soviet Union.
From my own experience, it's a combination of becoming much more aware of the consent manufacturing machine and learning much more about what the US has been and is doing across the globe. Parenti, The Jakarta Method, and Blowback are probably the big three for me.
With the assistance of a couple of documentaries, Blowback completely transformed how I view the DPRK, and made me even more impressed by Cuba.
Yeah the DPRK stuff was really eye opening. The Juche gang must be given support
Cuba tho, my god, I knew the story (had a based teacher in HS who taught us about decolonization and the Cuba unit was awesome), but the Blowback presentation...
had a based teacher in HS who taught us about decolonization
This was what I was missing that the big three filled in for me. Actually, I should probably mention Fanon, as well. Nobody really connected for me that almost all those ebil communist revolutions were colonized people rising up against the colonizers. Watching Morales get coup-ed in real time (by a neo-nazi, with Ainez unleashing the military on people) shook something loose, but the Jakarta Method really hammered it home for me; That it was worker uprisings, indigenous people trying not to be fucking slaves. Every history class I ever took hid that shit through abstractions of Great Man Theory, Manifest Destiny, and pure bullshit propaganda. It's a fucking Class War; The Capitalists against the Communists. Nazi and Nazi-adjacent footsoldiers against the People.
Those reasons are pretty much the same for me as well, but also I've come to realize that China realistically is the best long term hope for humanity getting rid of capitalism and solving climate change.
Yes?
I mean, I think there's still plenty of critical support in the community, but considering how shit
has become, I think there's less ability to "what about."Cuba remains the most based country though, and I can only pray that the embargo is lifted due to deteriorating American power and Communism with American Characteristics can finally rise.
The only thing that would make me want to stay in Florida is liberation by Cuba
I'm honestly still skeptical about their commitment towards socialism and communism as a long-term end goal, but my stance is basically that I don't give a shit if they're socialist or communist or leftist or whatever, but that they have increasingly proven themselves to be a measurably better alternative to US global hegemony, which actually exists.
When they got involved in the middle east, they brokered an end to the war in Yemen, on favorable terms for Yemen (we'll see how it goes actually enforcing that arrangement over the coming years, but they did what the US never could, or even would).
They've been a positive force for development in several African countries through the Belt and Road initiative, and for all the crying about "debt-trap diplomacy", they've forgiven loans and always delivered on the promised construction.
They've done way the fuck more than other comparable nations to offset and correct the harm caused by climate change, reforesting man-made deserts, developing their renewable energy infrastructure, etc.
The best criticisms most people can give about China are either bullshit (the "Uyghur genocide" that neither the UN nor the majority of Muslim majority nations believe to be real, the aforementioned "debt traps" that never materialize), nirvana fallacy critiques that basically applies to every nation that actually exists in reality (like the hand-wringing over how they're only helping other nations to "curry favor"), or debate-bro wankery over how they don't actually count as socialist -- as though I'm supposed to be such a fucking crank that the label they slap on tangible achievement is supposed to me more important than the actual achievement!
Obviously there are real criticisms of China because it's a real country that actually exists, such as their really brutally strict immigration policy that doesn't even have any allowances for refugees (that came up in the recent thread about trump wanting to deport everybody), or that they're still kinda lame on LGBT stuff (supposedly getting better from younger generations coming into influence).
But they don't have to be perfect, they just have to be an improvement.
another EDIT: I'd like to add a point: they kill way more rich people than other countries (though the numbers are sometimes exaggerated). That sounds like a really crass thing to say, as though I'm just reveling in people I don't like being killed, but it genuinely signals that the capitalists do not own China like they do the rest of the world, because if they did, they wouldn't let themselves be killed so damn much! China holds them accountable to the law like everybody else.
undefined> another EDIT: I'd like to add a point: they kill way more rich people than other countries (though the numbers are sometimes exaggerated). That sounds like a really crass thing to say, as though I'm just reveling in people I don't like being killed, but it genuinely signals that the capitalists do not own China like they do the rest of the world, because if they did, they wouldn't let themselves be killed so damn much! China holds them accountable to the law like everybody else.
Ya I feel this - my thought in this regard has always been "I don't like the death penalty, but holding the capitalist elite to account in some way is better than not, even if I don't agree with the exact method." (And before someone comes after me for this, I do agree that ofc some amount of executions would be & have been politically necessary in a revolutionary scenario but I don't think that's exactly apples to apples).
I'm not sure where I stand on the death penalty either but I think the executions can be viewed as part of the ongoing class struggle
The point of killing capitalists is the fear that they will re-organize with their connections and remaining power and start a counterrevolution against the people. You can strip a capitalist of all their assets and capital but they will undoubtedly still have wealthy friends and a deep network. Perhaps executing capitalists that the CPC deems has deeply wronged the people is a necessity
That is totally possible, I could see a compelling argument for that. And again, I think it's far preferable to what we have in the West (let the elite run roughshod and shamelessly cater all of our social structures to their needs/allow them to dictate the nature of our social structures). There's simply a lot of context and nuance I really just don't have access to. I am also grateful to be some nobody and not the person who has to make these life or death policy decisions lol
The best criticisms most people can give about China are either bullshit (the "Uyghur genocide" that neither the UN nor the majority of Muslim majority nations believe to be real, the aforementioned "debt traps" that never materialize), nirvana fallacy critiques that basically applies to every nation that actually exists in reality (like the hand-wringing over how they're only helping other nations to "curry favor"), or debate-bro wankery over how they don't actually count as socialist -- as though I'm supposed to be such a fucking crank that the label they slap on tangible achievement is supposed to me more important than the actual achievement!
Obviously there are real criticisms of China because it's a real country that actually exists, such as their really brutally strict immigration policy that doesn't even have any allowances for refugees (that came up in the recent thread about trump wanting to deport everybody), or that they're still kinda lame on LGBT stuff (supposedly getting better from younger generations coming into influence).
But they don't have to be perfect, they just have to be an improvement.
This succinctly nails my main feelings.
When the site started, I probably hummed and hawed about State Capitalism, vaguely alluded to having problems with Deng / "Dengism" and joked about them never pressing the communism button.
After three more years of the accelerating death-cult of capitalism, my "critical support" of China has become less and less critical by the day because of the actual, tangible benefits to the working class that their system achieves while us anglos feed ourselves to the meatgrinder.There will always be criticisms, because there can always be improvement or advances. But at this point, shitting on China is completely unnecessary.
There are other reasons but I'll just mention one which is I think the CPC handling COVID. Remember the Wuhan field hospital they built in less than a week! The CPC reaction was one where we could say "hey here is a government that actualy cares about you".
I am sure a lot of people thought that yeah the CPC is the real deal at least when it comes to being on the good side, or even mostly good.
Also China continues to make great social and economic progress while the west went into a new crisis.
Consider where this community was three years ago, before the Reddit ban. We were the watering hole of the "dirtbag left." The handful of us who could read were Jacobin/Current Affairs reading DSA succdems. In the time since, the world has changed profoundly. We watched Bernie 2020 get crushed, then we watched what was perhaps the most sophisticated domestic counterinsurgency campaign in US history take place to pacify and redirect the 2020 George Floyd uprising (and not to be too self-important, but we got wiped off of Reddit as a part of that). Covid happened and millions of people died. The Liberals returned to brunch.
For the once-hopeful Bernie supporter, any latent belief that the US could be salvaged is several years in the rearview mirror at this point. All while the cold war has been escalating in lockstep with the domestic police and surveillance state. The China Bad shit just doesn't hit right. You need to have terminal Vaush-brain to find it appealing. You need to believe that, next to Russia and China, the United States is genuinely the lesser evil. That opinion is exceedingly rare here.
Speaking as someone who is not pro-china in particular (anarchist): the political situation has changed. obviously sinophobia existed before, but in these past 5 years the evil empire has really kicked it into overdrive in its effort to create a new cold war. China might be unrecognizable as communism to me, but I'm much less interested in that than in rejecting blatant US fearmongering about its imminent loss of status as the sole global hegemon.
also the memes are funny. can't deny that.
COVID-19 is what caused me to become China-pilled. I only started to reconsider my stance on China when it was clear that they were listening to the science and taking action to keep people safe while the US was telling people blatant lies and telling us to die for the line. The ramp up in anti-China rhetoric was very blatantly an attempt to shift blame away from domestic failures, and the speed at which the narrative shifted gave me whiplash.
That Chinapilled me too. I was already agnostic toward them with their modernisation over the past couple decades, but they were one of the few countries that actually gave a shit about their population when a crisis occurred. All liberals did was gaslight me and try to kill me.
I've definitely become more tankie as I've read more theory - although a part of me can't shake the thought that my belief in China is
. I feel like if China isn't at the very least on a viable path to socialism, then we live in a world where the baddies literally always win and I just can't bring myself to be that cynical.I sympathize, but I also think it's the natural trend of an alienated person's ideology to orient around hope. You'd either have something to hope for or just go insane (or both, like the Q hole). I don't think the fact that China occupies that spot in your conception makes is false, so long as you aren't a rapturist about it.
Edit: I should clarify that I think putting things in terms of "if the CPC is being honest" as some people even in the thread do, is a symptom of magical thinking. As Lenin said, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat must be state that cannot help but move increasingly towards communism. If you are making judgements based on really liking the cut of Jiang Zemin's jib or whatever, you are failing to assess things in terms of the actual empirical record and what we have reason to believe will be helpful or harmful for the cause of socialism.
Honesty is helpful, but what fundamentally matters is incentive.
Not that I think you are doing one or the other, of course, just providing some epistemic grounding.
Good comment. I'm generally convinced by the pro-China arguments I see, the feeling I'm describing is a voice in the back of my head that can't help but wonder if I'm wrong.
Yeah but if your ideology leads you to hate the PRC, it becomes hard to express that ideology on a forum that is concerned with the PRC without running afoul of the rule.
I consider it an acceptable loss, but we should call a spade a spade
Very unrelated, but to "call a spade a spade", while originally innocuous, has taken on some racist connotations over time and many people are not comfortable with it or find it offensive (such as my aunt, who would be bothered if I didn't say anything).
Just a small warning, I don't think its super well known or something most people would have thought about
Shit, I had just the faintest notion of a fringe use that was some weird racist thing but that's fucking baroque:
The British author Colin MacInnes, who was white, frequently used the term in novels like City of Spades (1957) and Absolute Beginners (1959) about the multiracial, multicultural London of the 1950s and '60s. MacInnes has been criticized for his exotification and sexualization of black culture in his books. MacInnes also coined the cringeworthy word "spadelet" to refer to black infants.
It's such a useful phrase though! Fucking hell . . .
tbh Many pro-china power posters also were banned or left. Maybe most of those who took part in the initial stuggle sessions in the first months
COVID China-pilled me. In America we got to see COVID victim mass graves. Told to go back to work, it's no big deal (while averaging 1 or 2 9/11s worth of death a day). Just a total failure of a response from basically every "western" nation in the worst way possible. China understood the needs of it's people and did what it could to protect them, for as long as it could.
we do a little materialismOn a related note, I'm reading The East is Still Red, by Carlos Martinez, very good, well sourced book on Chinese socialism, highly recommend to anyone curious about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, "reform and opening up", etc etc
https://redletterspp.com/collections/current-titles/products/martinez-epub
Yeah before covid I didn't give China much thought at all. They were just a "capitalist country pretending to be socialist" and I pretty much dismissed them out of hand.
Then covid happened, as you said. And moreover, there has been a steady stream of opinion polls coming from around the world that show that they are - BY FAR - considered the most "democratic" country based on what their own people perceive.
I ended up picking up Xi's book as well, and I'm sold now.
Honestly I think the thing that really broke the dam for me was learning how China's government is actually structured. Once I realized it wasn't the "authoritarian dictatorship" I was led to believe, but was in fact at least as democratic as the US, and probably more so inasmuch as ordinary people have a say in government, I found it hard to believe anything coming from Western media on the subject.
same with NK. i mean yes it's problematic to have a hereditary commander-in-chief but it's a perfectly natural response to generations of national trauma. blew my mind when i learned they have a multi-party congress.
of course go to wikipedia and suddenly every socialist state's legislature is just for "rubber stamping" despite being far more accountable to the populace then any western "democratic" institutions.
pure projection strikes again
i'm more skeptical of their commitment towards socialism but now i just kinda lurk and try to work on practice since no matter what they're doing over there they're not exactly trying to provide assistance to international revolutionary movements, and since posting is not practice.
I feel like it’s a “I didn’t move left, the narrative just moved to the right” situation. I neither stan nor demonize China. Like, yeah, I’m sure there’s civil rights violations going on there but that happens in all states, just in different flavors. So the extent of the criticism from the West feels outsized, especially when you observe that the China Man Bad media narrative just happened to ramp up right after China started restricting foreign entities from owning capital in China.
