Struggle session engage. Post your pathetic arguments so that I and the other China Good Posters can dismantle them and you can learn.
Key points:
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China is a democracy. It is arguably the most functional and responsive democracy in a major country today. Its citizens consider it more democratic than the citizens of almost any other country do their own.
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China is on a clear path to socialism and economic justice. No nation in history has ever reduced poverty in anything like the way China is doing it.
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The vast majority of people in the PRC support the CPC. This is not due to being brainwashed. Americans are brainwashed and still hate their government.
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Almost everything you hear about China in the West sits on a spectrum between malicious misrepresentation to outright fabrication with no basis in reality.
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China's ascension to the premiere global power is an extremely good thing for world peace and the global socialist movement. While China does not actively support other socialisms (sadly it's not as good as the USSR in this regard) it does not do imperialism. China will allow socialisms around the world to flourish simply by not actively crushing them like the US and Europe.
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Real talk, this is totally a capitalist talking point about China. The "poverty eradication" has come in many cases at the expense of the working class. If you've been in China at all and talked to people, you'll have met folks who lost their iron rice bowl jobs (and housing) as a result of privitisation and have never recovered. Pension plans are also being phased out, retirement ages raised, etc. Go talk to some Chinese Maoists or hard-core Marxists; many are pessimistic about the changes.
This isn't to downplay China's successes, which I could go on about at length. It just rubs me wrong when we talk about China's successes through a western, capitalist lens. It's the wrong way to do it and it puts emphasis on the wrong topics. When we discuss the success of communist or socialist governments it makes no sense to apply capitalist metrics.
you're mistaking a materialist metric for a capitalist metric
from marx himself:
[...] it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse.
the whole thing about marxism/materialism is that you cannot will capitalism away, you have to develop away from it (it's the main difference between idealist and materialist interpretations of history)
feudalism didn't replace roman slavery because some people decided to, and capitalism didn't replace feudalism because some people decided to; both happened because the newer system proved to be better at producing and distributing whatever it is that we use in our lives
So in good faith, how are we measuring "poverty eradication"? Typically this is claimed using GDP, which for me is a non-starter.
I say this because when I look at the results of the dismantling of the danwei system, what I see is human wreckage among working people without much education. I know people who have become permanently unhoused because they lost their state housing and weren't able to buy a place of their own. I know people who have lost their pensions. The migrant labor phenomenon started because of this, and it is further perpetuating the class divide because children of migrant laborers often cannot go to school in the cities their parents have moved to because they don't have a local hukou ~...thus perpetuating the underclass~. Basically, I'm looking at the material conditions we see anywhere else in the world when we privatise things.
Conversely, there are lots of people making lots of money, buying apartments and cars and slowly squeezing out what we once would have thought of as the lower middle class in China.
There are much more important measures that I think we could use - for example health outcomes and educational achievement in rural vs urban areas; I haven't looked at it lately but within the last decade literacy rates were still measured differently depending on whether you live in a city or in the countryside.
editing for clarity...using strikeouts
can you give me any numbers for those? genuinely asking, those are flaws that i'm aware exist, but i've never found actual numbers to see how significant they are
and while per capita gdp is a bad measure, i like looking at tiered per capita disposable income, and it's hard for me to see any class squeezing when this metric has shown an average 8% growth for all tiers for the last 7 years or so
When I get time I can look, but some of the sources may be in Chinese rather than English. There's been some pretty interesting academic research about it.
alright i'm cool with them being in chinese since it's mostly numerical data anyway (so the bad translation won't be that much of a problem)
The funny thing is, when Pinker and his ilk make that global poverty reduction argument for capitalism, the vast majority of that is in China. This only goes to 2011 but the trend hasn't changed. China has reduced poverty below levels in a lot of long-industrialized Western nation and is continuing to do. This is the primary reason for the enormous popular support of the CPC's leadership. People feel the material improvement in their lives every day.
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deng was worried about that too, he has a famous phrase where he says (in a very chinese way lol) that when you open the window the flies will come in
my problem is with takes like "the CPC isn't marxist anymore", it's dumb and pretty reductionist, and usually anti-materialist too (which is kinda funny, to use a non-marxist conception of reality to state that a party has abandoned marxism lol)
however, having doubts over whether the CPC can control capital as they administrate this historically necessary stage, that is a perfectly valid discussion to have imo. so far i think they've proven to be able to do so, but it's hard to know for sure, especially in the future
funnily enough, i think consolidating companies (which implies concentrating wealth) might be easier for the transition, as it's a lot better to remove a small number capitalists than millions of small business tyrants
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You are absolutely correct. It's being done explicitly to pat themselves on the back with rhetorical redundancy.
Please give this a watch, its a PBS documentary that was banned from being released because it was too pro-beijing.
This goes into the issue of poverty alleviation in China, and why it has to be done.
You make the point that they're moving away from a way of life where they've been for generations, into factories etc. But, have you considered that the land in China is not always amenable to farming? Many farmers in China that are still very poor have land that are frankly shit for farming. They barely eek out their survival, and they are isolated from the rest of the country, for generations. This kind of poverty is truly soul-destroying. Getting ill is a death sentence, and a bad harvest could sentence your entire family to death.
The next point I wanted to refute was that everyone is being sent to factories to work. This is not true, and many times the farmers are simply relocated to better land to farm. Not all of them become factory workers, there are other jobs available in China, such as working in the service industry.
And also, please don't assume all factories are like Foxconn, that taiwanese company is incredibly extreme compared to the other factories in China. Nowadays, factories in China are a lot more modern.
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That documentary was not banned from release, it was shown once, then pulled due to a problem with funding the documentary. PBS explicitly said there was no problem with editorial integrity except with the funding. There's definitely some ideological fuckery going on, but the thing is not banned in any way.
It's a brilliant cover isn't it?
Perfectly filmed and edited, all ready to go.
Pulled from cables, because suddenly, funding becomes a problem.
video link seems to be broken, is there another source? (or is my internet bad...very possible)
Yep, here's the youtube link.
Sorry I just automatically link invidious videos, haven't considered it might not load well.
I get random 500 errors from invidious, probably just too many incoming connections or something
Mega link: https://mega.nz/file/YagzVZTZ#vS7dPwnv5DVsbaB_GP4t3I61CWFzxdIRxix9ivHDsgI
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The neoliberal Pinker brag lines about reducing global poverty are lies. If you remove China and socialist nations from the data global poverty has been increasing. Capitalism INCREASES poverty, neoliberal austerity INCREASES poverty. You have fallen for a distortion of facts and given too much credence to their framing
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He’s wrong because he is stealing socialist valor and taking credit for the actions of socialist policies, saying that neoliberal global capitalism actually reduced the poverty - when in fact it was pretty much entirely China.
Proletarianization is necessary component of a move from agrarian pre-capitalism towards socialism. Saying that it’s “not a good thing” just makes you a reactionary luddite - the morality of it is irrelevant. It’s going to happen, and if you resist it you will be undeveloped and easily exploited and conquered by imperialists
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Can’t believe there anti-capitalists here who want pre-capitalist agrarian societies instead of post-capitalist socialist ones. How do they expect to have a democratic proletariat state with no proletariat majority class?
Wonder if the user above supports Pol Pot or anarchiprimitivism
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Aren't we discussing China?
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