They straight up use the same old red scare arguments that the far right use against them lmao
Like holy shit have some self-awareness.
Motherfuckers saying eat the rich and then calling Mao a genocidal monster for eating the rich.
Can't make this shit up.
“The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
China has let some billionaires invest in their development. I don't see a plausible way around that. But I live in the US and I can tell you that China is definitely not a bourgeois dictatorship. That's why they're an official enemy. They're having tremendous success.
Yes, it is. But unlike China, that's not why Russia is an official enemy. Russia is involved in a competition between capitalists*. It happens all of the time. It's part of how capitalism works.
*We know from the recent experience of the early 90s what will happen to the people of Russia if NATO prevails, so even in a fight between capitalist nations you can pick a side. This definitely isn't a 2-way street.
It's the reason that the relationship developed the way that it did which is different (China only became an enemy by being a success outside of the imperialist order, while Russia was a never fully defeated enemy which desired to join the imperialist order but was unallowed without greater concessions/poverty to the imperialists). You're thinking in simple metaphysical categories. Rod_blagojevic (hopefully) means that China isn't a bourgeois dictatorship which is why SUCCESSFUL DEVELOPMENT has led to its enemy status. Russia is a bourgeois dictatorship which is an enemy because of its RESISTANCE. It's the process which is determinant and the category which provides the frame within which the process is understood.
Compared to the more immediate and brutal failures that left anti-communists (particularly in western / NATO countries) are willing to celebrate and laud as "true socialism", they're definitely "successful."
The Soviet Union is dead and gone, but during the decades it existed it made significant achievements in material development and improving living standards for their people. China may have become more capitalistic, but they've still got one of the highest home-ownership rates in the world, they aren't so beholden to the capitalists that they won't kill them for breaking Chinese laws, and their "greatest sustained increase in life expectancy in recorded history" is still holding up.
Any effort that takes power is more successful than one that doesn't, one that takes power for ten years is more successful than one that has it for ten months, etc.
All of the real-world examples of "Actually Existing Socialism" that we could draw from at this point in history could be considered failures in some regard or another -- the left is plainly not running the world right now, we lost the Cold War to the capitalists -- but it's useful to look at who got farther (further?) than the others, and who got absolutely massacred and sent into a dark-age of reaction almost immediately.
Broadly, I'd agree with your post, but I'd ask
Compared to the more immediate and brutal failures that left anti-communists (particularly in western / NATO countries) are willing to celebrate and laud as "true socialism", they're definitely "successful."
Which countries are these? And what relevance is there bringing them up as I am not one of these anti-communists. I just don't think hierarchical systems will ever recant power, and bureaucracies have a noted tendency to grow themselves (inspectors inspecting inspectors, writing reports which will never be read, ect.) so I am not sold on hierarchical bureaucracies being anyone's salvation.
The entire point of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is that the power lies in the hands of the proletariat (the overwhelming majority of people) via democratic mechanisms. Marxists do not desire for a benevolent king to rule and then one day abdicate the throne. There is furthermore no desire for anyone to recant power themselves, as the "withering away of the state" refers properly to the withering away of class distinctions as the proletariat, through its control of the state, destroys the bourgeoisie over time until there is no bourgeoisie and therefore no proletariat (nor any other classes) and therefore there is no living tool to mediate non-existent class antagonisms, i.e. no state. There is no abdicating anywhere in this process, only the minority who are oppressed by the state being pushed further and further out of existence as a class until they exist no more.
Bureaucracy is a real problem, but wringing one's hands about how it "grows itself" rather than investigating why it grows and how it can be combated is essentially a form of defeatism.
Be an anarchist, I don't care, but don't be one out of ignorance.
Completely? Never, that would be "communism" and it's essentially only achievable once the world order is socialist as, aside from issues of capitalist encirclement, if a country is one big co-op, that doesn't prevent them from having class relations with the global proletariat, and it turns out that co-op country is a petty-bourg country.
Partially? All the time. Other people have linked to you about land ownership in China and I'm sure you've heard about the seizing of private hospitals in Cuba and so on. It's a process that none of us are going to see the end of, though we see progress frequently (and if we didn't, that would indicate a serious problem).
When did Cuba seize those hospitals? Was it during the initial wave of transition, or significantly later? With China, the argument here is that there seems to be much backsliding in the proletariate's ownership of the means of production, and the reintroduction of landlords.
Edit: Also, I'm not sure how "China actually owns the land under the landlord's building and so the state is the real landlord" is functionally different that taxes, but maybe I'm missing something important.
When did Cuba seize those hospitals? Was it during the initial wave of transition, or significantly later?
The initial wave, but I probably don't need to inform you about the ridiculous degree of development in Cuba's medical system that is still ongoing and still oriented towards free services, public interest, and supporting the health of the third world at least throughout Latin America and Africa.
With China, the argument here is that there seems to be much backsliding in the proletariate's ownership of the means of production, and the reintroduction of landlords.
Edit: Also, I'm not sure how "China actually owns the land under the landlord's building and so the state is the real landlord" is functionally different that taxes, but maybe I'm missing something important.
Like a lot of things about China's laws, this is kind of complicated and you're better off doing your own research rather than idly speculating or asking some asshole on the internet (me), and this is on top of property law already being a complicated subject in general but as an example:
Ownership rights are protected under Article 39 of The Property Law of the People's Republic of China, which gives the owner the right to possess, utilize, dispose of and obtain profits from the real property. However, this right has to comply with laws and social morality. It can harm neither public interests nor the legitimate rights and interests of others.
In general, rural collectives own agricultural land and the state owns urban land. However, Article 70 of The Property Law allows for ownership of exclusive parts within an apartment building, which endorses the individual ownership of apartments.
Ownership of private property is at the mercy of public interest, so should a conflict arise between the two the owners can simply be told to kick rocks (though they are entitled to monetary compensation), which is a significantly stronger version of Eminent Domain compared to, say, America.
A land user obtains only the land use right, not the land or any resources in or below the land. A land grant contract shall be entered into between the land user and the land administration department of the people's government at municipal or county level. . . .
Article 12 of the Provisional Regulations on Grant and Assignment of Urban State-owned Land Use Right states the different duration of rights provided for different purposes.
The range of durations is from 70 years for a property of personal residence to 40 years for commercial use.
I will drop this ever-relevant article from Red Sails
https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
I was meaning to post something like this but you beat me to it, and honestly did better than I could do off the cuff. Whatever you want to call what China is doing, it is certainly not a Western capitalist country.
"I don't like these statistics and essays, check out this animated show where
because that has more tangible reality to understand real conditions by"
The show has a fantastical premise, but is a slice of life about Su Moting's daily struggles to pay her rent, buy the treats that let her continue working her mind numbing job, and how that cycle only repeats endlessly. There's an episode in the show literally about how Ting is so poor a curse that causes poverty doesn't work on her, and another about how she'd rather relive the same Sunday over and over again than have to go to work 5 days a week. This is media being created in the SEZ for the chinese market. If you don't see how something like that wouldn't be created by a person who wasn't living under capitalism, I don't know what to tell you.
Ting is so poor a curse that causes poverty doesn't work on her
If she can still pay her rent, that seems like an anemic curse.
Anyway, you'll get different phrasings of this, but the phrasing I will use here is that markets are not synonymous with liberal capitalism and neither is poverty. I don't see what the insight of a cartoon vs, I don't know, looking at the non-zero number of malnourished people who are still in China.
One major difference that might be left unsaid (idk, I haven't watched it) is that if she got evicted that doesn't mean she'd be out on the street unless she chose to be. Legally, she should have some home address (most likely where her parents live) that is designated as her housing in such a case but, critically, if she does not have any such place (like if her family is dead and she owns no house) she would be given housing by the state. She may not want this housing due to its location or some other issue (and "itinerant" homelessness is very common in some Chinese cities), but that's significantly different from being forced onto the street in the manner that people in America are.
define and name a single succes then , because if china is no success ,.... what can be ? ( you are not allowed to bring imaginary examples)
Maybe there are no successes? This has to be an option in any reasoned analysis. Maybe there is a critical flaw with the state socialist system that bends toward liberalism ~one generation after coming into existence. Maybe, as Kropotkin theorized, the continued attachment to currency dooms any fledgling socialist project. Idk.
there are also Coward Angloid Anarchokids less valued then medicine and so cowardly smug that think that they are qualified to judge foreign Revolutionary Nations....
Show
One of my favorite genres is someone saying "Eat the rich" and then some lib saying "we don't mean literally eat the rich" and then a bunch of anarcho-cannibalists being like "Yes we abso-fucking-lutely do" 🔪 🍽 🍽 🍽
Liberals: Defund the police is too complicated!
Liberals: What they actually mean when they say "I want to drag Jeff Bezos out in to the street and slowly [REDACTED] him until he [REDACTED] the [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED]" is....
me neither, but it just says "eat the rich'" not "i, personally, want to eat the rich". As long as somebody eats them, it's fine.
Composting the rich and using their nutrients to grow food is a green alternative I can get behind.
It's what I like to call the "moderating instinct." The moderating instinct is when people feel compelled to distance themselves from past proletarian movements so that their attackers won't associate them with the supposed atrocities of those movements. But it doesn't work because the attackers will do that regardless. So the moderating instinct leads people to not only distance themselves from their own goals, and to condemn their own movement, but to uphold reactionary lies about their movements, sometimes even outdoing those lies by exaggerating them, in order to further emphasize the attempt to distance. It doesn't matter how much we try to twist and turn and distance ourselves from atrocity propaganda, rubbish will be heaped upon the graves of working class leaders.
Now, at risk of falling victim to this "moderating instinct" myself, there is a very small minority of cases where there were actual atrocities or lapses in judgement or reactionary abberations in the records of particular working class movements, but in practice it is hard to distinguish these real failures which should be acknowledged and learned from internally in our movements from the reactionary atrocity propaganda and concern trolling which should not be fed or indulged in. So it is best practice to not feed the trolls by indulging the moderating instinct. They will not give you any credit for doing so.
I like this explanation a lot.
This moderating instinct also occurs in liberals and fascists too so it's fairly universal. Liberals obsessively do it to try and appease conservatives around the world right now and it is moving the liberal parties further and further right over time.
I think this can provoke a potentially harmful reaction as well, where instead of distancing themselves from past movements, people end up attaching themselves to them too strongly to the point where they end up becoming blind to the faults of these movements such that they fail to learn from them as they should, sinking into what is essentially just nostalgia
Its because we are uncivil and want solutions outside of the agreed upon systemic framework. When "progressive" liberals talk about change they mean minor prison reform. When I talk about change I talk about the balkanization and complete demilitarization of the USA.
Imperialism and Colonialism have been ruined by libs as well, like they would call the Hundred-year war colonialism because England took over Anjou or something.
I wonder if theres a CIA playbook on how to destroy words' meanings once their mobilizing potential breaks a certain threshold
no need for the CIA, semantic bleaching and euphemism treadmills are naturally occuring phenomenon.
Alright, but as an anarchist, what's your take on Khrushchev sending the tanks into Hungary?
The natural result of calling everyone who's cool a tankie is that they end up wondering whether maybe tankies are cool
Up next on Tucker Carlson - some kids in gradeschool are calling themselves tanks. The classroom needs to have a fuel station in the back corner to accommodate them.
What if we simply voted to eat the rich? Then the rich would voluntarily lay themselves out on a giant platter with an apple in their mouth because they lost a free and fair election and those are the rules.
This is the way libs use cultural capital to destroy the left, like the democrats are the graveyard of social movements famously and even knowing this, I still see many of the american left advocate to vote for them.
Motherfuckers saying eat the rich and then calling Mao a genocidal monster for eating the rich.
"So you want to put all these billionaires in jail? What would you do with the temporarily embarrassed billionaires who would violently oppose this? How is what you're telling me different from Cuba?"
Mark Twain American (White), good and cool, French (White) cultured and inspiring, Les Mis play me like very much. Viva Le Revolucion!
Russia Slavic (the bad kind of White) and scary, hard to read writing, history lessons from 9th grade ontological facts, MAD sounds like BAD and Russia did that or something, Gulag gulag gulag, human nature
I'm very sophisticated with serious opinions.
Russia Slavic (the bad kind of White)
Sorry Sweety, but the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance downgraded Russians to Asiatic.
This was a real thing that happened BTW.
Actually saying Kyyviyiviviyan Rus is part of Russian culture is advocating for colonialism and erasing uwukrainan culture, russians were literally invented by ebul ruzzian nationalist stalin to steal all the cereal from smol bean kulaks
Also, Ukraine is the true Rus because Russia was invaded by the Golden Horde and the Mongolians forced Russians to collectively forget the concept of private property.
Yeah I know, I remember the nazis considering Ukrainians above Belarusians in the subhuman hierarchy because Belarusians "had no concept of private property" and took it as a sign that proved the inferiority of the "peasant" Slavic character.
Wtf based
Belarusianssoviets(Just commenting to keep the rainbow thread going)
Sorry Sweety, but the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance downgraded Russians to Asiatic.
This was a real thing that happened BTW.
Did they actually use that term?
Centrists love being on the right side of history, but only after it happens.
The most tiresome version of this is people like Tim Pool claiming they are liberals or classical liberals when they are at very least fash adjacent reactionary trash. They have to hide behind lables and cant own up to their hate.
Adding "Classical" to the front of Liberal has the same effect as adding "National" in front of Socialist.
Idk at least I’m pretty sure Tim Pool is aware of his own bullshit, these people are true believers that evil tankies must be exterminated
I feel like trots shouldn't be allowed to use it because they were just as wrong then as now
As far as I can tell, despite getting some flak for it, his approach to Cuba did ensure its survival in the long term, so I'd argue that's somewhat better.
Yeah it’s legitimately so bad on the rest of lemmy now. Like some of the brainrot I’m getting in responses is amazing in all the wrong ways
I genuinely can't tell if it's some kind of astroturfing or it's organic. On a post about the UK banning encryption and apple threatening to pull out in response everyone was posting about how the UK was 'pulling a China'.
Imessage and facetime are legal in China.
I think it’s organic in that a lot of these people are extremely vocal and just post about tankies nonstop
I think it's a feedback loop. Get some astroturfing going in an echochamber and the lies bounce around and commingle so much that it becomes what people in there genuinely believe and repeat, making sure to do their part in getting it amplified. We all know reddit is severely astroturfed with that shit, and it worked. Now that lemmy got flooded with redditors, can we really separate out their regurgitation of propaganda as not being rooted in the astroturf? Even then, I'd be amazed if there weren't some Eglin Airforce Base personnel spending time on lemmy too, and reinforcing the success they had on reddit.
I guess does it really matter either way? They’re loud and annoying whether its 100% organic, 100% astroturfed, or whatever other combination of genuine comments to fake ones
Personally, yeah I would say it matters that we have a decent understanding of how anti-communism spreads in the modern cultural milieu and how alphabet agencies use social media to cultivate a narrative of hatred for "tankies" even among other self-proclaimed "leftists." I feel like whether it's truly a grassroots organic thing or not has some pretty important implications.
could you elaborate pls? I guess to me, obviously you won't be convincing astroturfing "people", and genuine people aren't at a point where they will be willing to listen to our points anyways. Making arguments for the broader audience seems like it would be the same to me
Sure. What I mostly mean is just the broad importance of understanding propaganda and how it works in order to prevent it being used against us as much as possible and to some extent how we can use it in turn. How can we ever do either if we don't know where the anti-communist rhetoric is originating in whatever given medium? This applies to everything, from how school curriculum is used to distort history, to how the MSM news parrots the ruling class line, to how feds on reddit seed conversations with tankie-hate and silence critical responses. If we don't know what the tactics used by our ideological enemies are to turn would-be allies against us, then there will never be anything we can do to counter it. (Maybe there isn't anway, but that's a pretty defeatist, nihilistic position that is evidently false based on how many of us here used to be libs ourselves whose minds got changed).
Of course propaganda used to gin up hatred towards communists isn't anything new, but the technology of social media (and imo the resulting level of sophistication) is. Having a grasp on how it gets started and grows and festers especially in left-leaning online circles is necessary if we have any hope of putting up any kind of roadblocks. I don't pretend to know exactly what we should do in each scenario, but there should be some basic differences in how we respond to genuine misunderstanding vs manufactured noise. Like if all of that anti-tankie online discourse really was just organic, just regular people with bad takes, then plain old education and discussion could go a long way in setting the record straight, at least for a lot of people. On the other hand, for any given narrative, knowing what talking points are being deliberately injected and where, will help us call that out and point it out as a lie but also as a tactic to bystanders so they know (or at least contemplate) that an agency is manipulating them right there and not just in the usual nebulous. For example, I've seen left-ish people on reddit be really surprised by who Jessica Ashooh is and the role she plays on reddit. It can be an excellent "in" in a conversation to help people realize for themselves that they shouldn't be believing some of the shit they're reading from their "fellow lefties" in their social democracy subreddit.
you won't be convincing astroturfing "people"
Completely agree. But that's rarely the point. It's the other people reading the thread that matter.
and genuine people aren't at a point where they will be willing to listen to our points anyways
I'm not so sure about that. Even if there seems to be zero headway when you're trying to get through their propagandized skulls, seeds can get planted that might grow, especially as their standard of living starts deteriorating and you've given them a plausible reason why. Of course there are plenty of lost cause fash out there too, but again... on the internet, it's the lurkers we should be aiming to get through to. If that kind of thing really isn't a threat to those doing the astroturfing, then why did the chapo sub become the largest leftist subreddit, frequently making the front page? Why did they have to ban it and shadowban so many of us that commented there? The lies and the bullshit has to be continuously maintained. They maintain it extremely well, but it does require maintenance. Anywhere we can throw a wrench in that feedback loop machine, we need to do so. We'll only know where to throw it if we have some idea how it works though.
(None of this should discredit the gold standard of countering propaganda and winning people over: positively changing their material circumstances. But we're talking about online discourse here, and there's only so much material change one can do via social media).
Hopefully that long ass response makes sense.
It's this
State actors and private intelligence companies do a lot of work to identify 'influential' accounts and then either approach them directly or target them digitally in order to get them to adopt the desired opinion or displace them and take their following. At one time this was spooky statecraft, now most digital marketing companies have software to do this.
I think it's largely because the existence of things like lemmygrad and constant badgering from beehaw slime has stirred people to do more anticommunist posting than they otherwise would
It's wild how bad it's gotten; it's legitimately worse than reddit itself now. At present the top post is a lazy anti communist meme with ten times more upvotes than anything else.
You got your anticommunism in my fascism!
And you got your fascism in my anticommunism!
It's because they always do this. The US alone has had histories of various "left" parties being formed like the Liberal party by people that considered themselves on the left but didn't want socialists involved. SocDems have always been like this and Anarchists are their own can of worms.
Can we just do the fun part instead?
"
