dude i fucking hate them, every time i see jack ma's face on my timeline i want to set that deformed fetus face on fire in front of his children
we think it's a fucking tragedy that china needs a system that allows these disgusting people to exist. it leaves any dignified person with a bad taste in their mouth every time one of these maggots takes a breath.
but assuming that the chinese have to allow them to breathe, which we think just happens to be the case, then what the fuck are they supposed to do? reject reality? act emotionally and risk destroying what they've built?
there will be a time to put these people on the wall, and by god i wish i'm alive then, if only to watch and cheer at every instance of liberals crying over the "genocide". but that time isn't here yet. it just isn't.
regardless of whether you believe in the CPC or not, if they're actual marxists they won't do it right now, unless they go full stupid. and judging by the last 40 years they ain't going fucking stupid.
so for god's sake, argue about the CPC, but over something valid, like how you think they're doing wrong with their MMT, or how they're not doing enough for workers in the tech industry, or how underwhelming their health care system is. but quit the "dwah china has rich people" shit, it's void of meaning¹ :hexbear-shining:
¹ unless you're not a marxist, in that case i completely understand. but marxists aren't supposed to think reality bends to our will, we're supposed to be materialists not idealists
It is annoying that people try to "own the dengists" by pointing out that China has billionaires. As if that isn't an obvious result of having a market economy in a global environment. At least China seems to keep a close eye on them.
we're not trying to own you, we're pointing out the bleeding obvious and you just say something about market socialism as though that justifies things.
You dont need billionaries to grow the economy, even under capitalism.
If anything, billionaires are dangerous as they are individuals with a huge amount of personal power and they could easily weaponise that against workers, should they go against their interest. They also hoarde wealth that could be spent on increasing production and purchasing more commodities.
Not only that but China now has more billionaires than the US, and they are producing billionaires faster than any other country in the world.
You could easily stop this by taxing the hell out of them. But for some reason the CPC isn't doing that. Which leaves me to suspect that Chinese billionaires have more political power there than most people on this site are willing to admit.
Can you explain WHY exactly China needs billionaires to attract foreign capital (besides some vague “that’s how the world works” handwaving)?
Why can’t the party control the factories, the real estate market, the retail chains, the R&D facilities, etc. directly? Do you really think that if the party were to control all of that directly and at the same time still offer the same lucrative manufacturing conditions to western companies, the western bourgeoisie would turn their nose at continuing to profit because of some purist ideological principles?
It would seem way more idealist to hold such positions.
It didn't last for 50 years and create the largest capitalist economy in the world.
you need to at some level play by global capitalist rules and make concessions to that system for it to take the bait/investment
2020 communists are anti-worker and pro-IMF, you should read about the recent Indonesia covid stimulus deregulation law.
Of course, fighting American hegemony and global capitalism is very easy and can be easily done by an impoverished, underdeveloped country with no trading partners. Impoverished countries take IMF loans because they love being enslaved by them. Underdevelopment can be fixed by flipping the development switch and having the peasants magic together some modern industrial tech. I am totally a materialist.
I don't think people are criticizing the countries for taking IMF loans because of COVID, I think people are mostly criticizing the IMF for being incredibly predatory.
You could easily stop this by taxing the hell out of them.
There has been at least some recent progress on that front:
China’s plan to cut taxes in 2019 for the masses has the nation’s super-rich running for cover on concern the government will make up the shortfall by going after the wealthy.
Changes to the tax regime as of Jan. 1 mean authorities will be paying closer attention to assets and investment holdings.
Under the new rules, owners of offshore companies will not only pay taxes on dividends they receive but will also face levies of as much as 20 per cent on corporate profits, from as low as zero previously. In the past, the rich could avoid paying taxes on overseas earnings by acquiring a foreign passport or green card, while keeping their Chinese citizenship. But this won’t work starting in January as the government will tax global income from all holders of “hukou” household registrations — the most encompassing way of identifying a Chinese national — regardless of whether they have any additional nationalities.
Tycoons transferring assets to relatives or third parties could be subject to taxation in the new year, depending on how strictly China enforces rules on gifts, according to Ni at Zhong Lun. The levies could reach as much as 20 per cent of the asset’s appreciated value, according to Ni.
Tax authorities will sharpen their scrutiny of high-net-worth individuals thanks to more modern tools at their disposal, according to Ni.
Further down the road, China is preparing to introduce a property tax law that could go into effect as soon as 2020. Though the tax rate and the details remain unclear, the prospects of the tax has caused people with multiple apartments to worry and made properties a less desirable investment tool, EY’s Mi said.
Chinese capitalists are also excluded from the Central Committee of the CPC just as the capitalist NEPmen were excluded from any real political power in the Soviet Union under their NEP.
Maybe a step in the right direction but don't you think its playing with fire, seeing how the displeasure of the Chinese capitalists at having their profits reduced can lead to outright sabotage and even stronger antagonisms than ever? I mean wouldn't it have been more prudent to have opened their market and their labour force in exactly the same way to the west but without delegating the process to a newly minted capitalist class?
They are perfectly content to let consumerism and shit like 'singles day' proliferate too.
they could easily weaponise that against workers
Or they could transform it into the sort of political power that they hold in the US, and over time further devolve China into unfettered capitalism.
You dont need billionaries to grow the economy, even under capitalism.
growth needs scale and scale means billionaires
besides, if you do plan to expropriate them at some point, as weird as it sounds it's far easier to expropriate a handful of billionaires than a million small business owners. do you not remember the mess that was stalin's collectivization? you think having a small amount of large landowners would have made that job easier or harder?
it's also much more productive as they'll have already set up a large supply chain that you can rely on for the national scale
They also hoarde wealth that could be spent on increasing production
whether they do that or not is dependent on the conditions set for them by whatever government they're under/over
and under the chinese government that money has mostly been turned into reinvestments on the company, they wouldn't have gotten here otherwise would they?
Chinese billionaires have more political power there than most people on this site are willing to admit
"willing to admit" assumes i want the CPC to be communists and therefore i force myself to believe it somehow
this is false. it hasn't even been a year since i've stated dumb stuff like "china hasn't been communist since deng xiaoping's reforms in 78", i changed my mind when i realized i was most likely wrong. hell, on the chapo sub i used to make fun of CPC stans. but i was wrong, and that's what i had to admit
as for the power of chinese billionaires: watch this to get a clue, this woman is definitely not a "pro-CPC deluded tankie", and the yale university is definitely not a "tankie hub", so i hope you won't dismiss it as a source
the video is about imperialism, but there's a particular part in it (don't remember exactly when, but you should watch the whole thing regardless) where she delineates 3 kinds of chinese investment in africa: state companies, large companies like huawei, and smaller private firms
when she mentions huawei, she says she interviewed the CEO and mentions how he said large companies avoid exploitation because the party takes a closer look at them, unlike smaller private firms, which can go under the party and do bad shit freely
and this is huawei we're talking about, by far one of the most important companies in china right now
surely the government tries to negotiate, and surely this must be the most common way to do things, but power ultimately seems to lie in the party's hands; most likely because the party has full control over the financial sector
growth needs scale and scale means billionaires
No, scale means you have big corporations with millions of employees. It does not have to mean you have a small handful of people owning more wealth than the entire GDP of Russia.
besides, if you do plan to expropriate them at some point, as weird as it sounds it’s far easier to expropriate a handful of billionaires than a million small business owners. do you not remember the mess that was stalin’s collectivization? you think having a small amount of large landowners would have made that job easier or harder?
Why let them exist in the first place? I get that China is doing capitalism, but they could at least minimise the worst aspects of it. In this case they could absolutely have prevented a class of billionaries and 100 millionaires from emerging but they didn't.
Also collectivisation in the USSR is a bad example because we are talking about big capitalists instead of rural landowners. In every revolution so far, expropriating industrial capitalists hasn't been a problem for the new state.
whether they do that or not is dependent on the conditions set for them by whatever government they’re under/over and under the chinese government that money has mostly been turned into reinvestments on the company, they wouldn’t have gotten here otherwise would they?
If the CPC expropriated the wealth they wouldn't have to worry about creating the right conditions for billionaires to invest, they would just spend the money. It honestly seems to me like letting independent entities control large amounts of capital creates more potential problems than it solves.
“willing to admit” assumes i want the CPC to be communists and therefore i force myself to believe it somehow. this is false. it hasn’t even been a year since i’ve stated dumb stuff like “china hasn’t been communist since deng xiaoping’s reforms in 78”, i changed my mind when i realized i was most likely wrong. hell, on the chapo sub i used to make fun of CPC stans. but i was wrong, and that’s what i had to admit
"willing to admit" means that a lot of people say that billionaires have no influence on the Chinese government when in fact it is likely that they have at least some influence.
as for the power of chinese billionaires: watch this to get a clue, this woman is definitely not a “pro-CPC deluded tankie”, and the yale university is definitely not a “tankie hub”, so i hope you won’t dismiss it as a source
I'm not going to watch an hour long video right now but thanks for linking it, I will watch it later.
when she mentions huawei, she says she interviewed the CEO and mentions how he said large companies avoid exploitation because the party takes a closer look at them, unlike smaller private firms, which can go under the party and do bad shit freely
What exactly does this have to do with billionaires? You are simply saying that larger companies are easier to monitor than smaller ones, which I agree with. But you can have huge corporations without having billionaires at the helm of them.
No, scale means you have big corporations with millions of employees. It does not have to mean you have a small handful of people owning more wealth than the entire GDP of Russia.
perhaps russia should try to grow a bit :capitalist-laugh:
jokes aside, for my first point (how hard it is for expropriating) i have to point out that i see no difference between having a large amount of small companies owned by various individuals and having a small amount of large companies owned by larger groups of people - in the end, both mean "resistance from more people" at the time of expropriation, which is something i want to avoid as much as possible
for instance, i do believe that the homestead acts played a large part in making america such a rabidly conservative/reactionary/anticommunist country, once you give a huge amount of people petty bourgeois status you get yourself a dangerously large reactionary group
that's why i mentioned the collectivization, and i agree it's easier to expropriate in the case of industry, but that doesn't mean you won't have the same amount of discontent
so that makes this point for how i think it's necessary to have the smallest amount of business owners you can
naturally, a small amount of business owners doesn't mean they have to be billionaires, which leads to my second point:
If the CPC expropriated the wealth they wouldn’t have to worry about creating the right conditions for billionaires to invest, they would just spend the money.
as a quick note, they don't have to expropriate wealth to do any investment as they already use MMT for this - this is how they've financed infrastructure, where capital has usually been pretty shit at doing
the thing is, i agree with marx when he says capitalists are good at one thing, and one thing only: increasing productivity, obviously up to a point where it causes falling rates of profit and makes the profit motive unsustainable/obsolete
so my second point is: i do think these cunts are better than the CPC at doing the reinvestment on their own companies - again, up to a certain point, which places like america have already reached in many sectors (which is why you have aberrations like planned obsolescence - it's just a consequence of "excess productivity" as it relates to profit margins, and one of the reasons why they're migrating to the financial sector and relying on egregious shit like stock buybacks, though buybacks are a bit more complicated than that)
this is what the CPC means by "moderately prosperous" obviously - productive enough that the profit motive is no longer a necessary incentive. but they haven't got there yet, unlike other countries
so, 1) having a small amount of business owners is better, and 2) letting those business owners decide how to use their money is fine up to a certain point (which china hasn't reached yet), which leads to my third point:
letting independent entities control large amounts of capital creates more potential problems than it solves.
the CPC has an extremely tight grip on the financial sector. these guys control a large amount of capital, it's true, and having that capital means the CPC will normally try to negotiate with them rather than outright imposing anything unless their hands are forced (such as in the case of xiao jianhua)
but i think you're overestimating the danger from these guys having a lot of high value assets. it's obviously a tight rope, as is everything, but so far the CPC seems to be using capitalists and not the other way around
so, to sum it up:
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the government doesn't need to tax billionaires to fund any investments, so having billionaires doesn't really mean anything here
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i think at the current stage, and obviously the previous ones, heavy taxes on wealth would be counter-productive, though they've gone far enough that the need for heavy loans like in the 90s isn't there anymore (this is a criticism i have of how the party relates to the billionaires currently - though they have started to move away from this, they took a bit too long and still do it far too much)
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i think you're overstating the power that their asset values give them in china, especially given how tightly controlled their financial sector is, but this is obviously hard to quantify and we'll have to see
Can you explain WHY exactly China needs billionaires to expand its productive base (besides some vague “that’s the only way” handwaving)?
Why can’t the party control the factories, the real estate market, the retail chains, the R&D facilities, etc. directly? Do you really think that if the party were to control all of that directly and at the same time still offer the same lucrative manufacturing conditions to western companies, the western bourgeoisie would turn their nose at continuing to profit because of some purist ideological principles?
It would seem way more idealist to hold such positions.
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You can have just millionaires and not billionaires, it's not like the economy would collapse. Just tax/nationalize anybody's assets above 1 billion dollars.
But why are millionaires okay? Like if it was a growing, hypercompetitive market with no monopolies, would that really be better for workers? Of course you may counter that it need not be competitive, to which I say it will not be growing relative to the west and will be absolutely crushed by the West if it does not abide by capitalist laws of competition - plus I reckon that class of millionaires may get an itching for power, and a governing system which can't just nationalize their shit, even if this project was established and maintained
There's a reason Marx criticized the likes of Proudhon for trying to harmonize the numbers of political economy. There's a reason Marx focused his theories on the class struggle, commodity production, and the value form, not the distribution of money and moderation of markets
What difference do you think it would make if China specifically banned billionaires?
They would have quite a lot more revenue to spend to start off with.
Econonmic inequality would decrease by a lot which we can all agree is a good thing.
And it would prevent them from turning on party and trying to overthrow it should the government do anything that is against their interests.
very well said. I look forward to the day that the four small stars on the chinese flag are no longer necessary
In the original description of the flag by Zeng, the larger star symbolizes the Communist Party of China, and the four smaller stars that surround the big star symbolize the four social classes of China's New Democracy mentioned in Mao's "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship": the working class, the peasantry, the urban petite bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie.
Yeah but like imagine if the cpc has all of those billions instead of random bourgeois fuck sticks. Like seriously idk how you can defend reintroducing class warfare and dystopian levels of wealth inequality.
Yeah but like imagine if the cpc has all of those billions
the CPC has a virtually infinite amount of money from their fiat currency and willingness to use MMT (though i disagree with aspects of their current application of it)
reintroducing class warfare
it never went away
dystopian levels of wealth inequality
what matters to me is that they've been reducing poverty by the hundreds of millions and increasing incomes to the point where they've surpassed my own country
if that wealth inequality is coming from a consolidation of certain industries/companies without negatively affecting incomes, it's actually good for the transition as you're still smoothing it out for workers and dealing with a few business owners is far easier than dealing with a huge amount of petty bourgeois cunts - these would be just as viciously reactionary, but much more numerous
dystopian levels of wealth inequalitywhat matters to me is that they’ve been reducing poverty by the hundreds of millions
This is indistinguishable from what you can read on r/neoliberalism
what i'm saying is that early capitalism has civilizing qualities, violent though it is, and that it is a necessary stage in historical development
that's indistinguishable from what marx said - you can say he was a neoliberal or maybe that neoliberals are marxists, whatever you prefer
but the difference between me and those cunts is that i say countries like america are far past this stage and capitalism is actually being counter-productive for them (as the profit motive in america is actually working backwards given they've already exhausted the dialectical relationship between productivity increases and rates of profit)
edit: btw, it's really weird to be on the other side of these arguments and these formalist comparisons given that i used to make them like 6 months ago or something. knowing that i wasn't convinced by any arguments then, and only really got it after the covid response made me give the CPC the benefit of the doubt and look into it more attentively, i wonder if any of this is worth the effort... i guess it's pretty useless and i should stop the china-posting
You do realise that what you're peddling here is word for word trickle down economics?
what matters to me is that they’ve been reducing poverty by the hundreds of millions and increasing incomes to the point where they’ve surpassed my own country
Yeah there is a very very good argument to be made that china made the right choice with capitalism (although it depends on how much you buy into the metric they use for poverty).
It's still capitalism.
All of you (and me) need to read more Wang Hui.
Also, this month's issue of the Monthly Review is entirely articles about China from Marxist Chinese comrades. We need to be listening to them more than round 75 of "China good?" (It's neither good nor bad, actually)
It’s neither good nor bad, actually
i kind of specifically tried to avoid saying anything was good or bad as reality is a bit more complicated than that
All of you (and me) need to read more Wang Hui.
i'm gonna look for his stuff, what do you recommend?
i've mostly been reading from some brazilian marxists like elias jabbour, as the chinese experiment seems to have a lot of stuff we can borrow from (though, sadly, i agree with mariátegui that we don't really have a true national bourgeoisie in latin american countries, so our road would be different and probably a bit harder)
Anarchists are liberals!
Now let me explain to you why billionaire owners is the most efficient way to industrialize and compete
Moving water around is really really hard without genius entrepreneurs and that's why a bottled water (and health care) mogul deserves to be the richest man in china.
Still find it mind blowing that a country can privatize their water and still claim not be hyper-capitalist.
I hate liberals and their capitalist realism! Oh, China? No, you don't understand, they need a market economy to attract foreign investment and grow their productive forces, and privatizations in the belt and road project are totally necessary because they break US hegemony!
billionaires aren't corporations, the industrial power of a capitalist corporation isn't the same as the insanely excessive personal wealth these people have accumulated
if youre chinese you can reasonably engage with this and criticize it
if you're in the west you shouldn't be supporting or attacking this, all you should be concerned with in the west is preventing a US confrontation
if you're in the west and you insist on talking about domestic chinese policy to random people on the internet you're lost in larp land
all that matters is pushing back on western imperialism, and talking about whether or not its cool to have billionaires on a leftist forum isn't doing that
but what if i'm in the 3rd world trying my best to learn from china in case we have our own revolution later
china needs
needs is a strong word doing a lot of work with absolutely no justification.
risk destroying what they’ve built
What they've built?
how they’re not doing enough for workers in the tech industry, or how underwhelming their health care system
Because it's a capitalist society.
Exactly. This post has essentially admitted that currently, China is capitalist and the only hope of that changing is a miraculous change of heart in the party. Xi seems willing to play ball but the party’s continuing to allow billionaires to proliferate. From this we can gather that Deng is capitalist and Xi is maybe if you look at it in a certain way something leaning towards socialist.
As a
libancomlib I'm critical of any authoritarian measures, I do have concerns regarding their surveillance infrastructure, and their worker rights/working conditions.But I think those are reasonable and valid criticisms, that can't be condensed into "China bad".
I mean I'd wish there would be no billionaires, full stop. That does include Chinese ones. But China at least is on something resembling a path forward away from capitalism, which can't be said about any "western" country, so billionaires there are the bigger issue IMO
i'll just paste an old comment of mine, just ignore the mentions of "dengism" as i was answering another comment then lol
bear in mind as you read this, i say that they have to do it because i have a materialist understanding of societal development. anyone with an idealist (idealist here is not supposed to be a pejorative word, it's just a different conception of reality) understanding will certainly disagree with me, that's why i specified marxists in the end there
anyway:
first let me note that marxism (historical/dialectical materialism) is a methodology, a set of tools for understanding reality, not a set of prescriptions - marx repeatedly insisted on this
and reality is different from country to country, so whatever solutions we find from using those analytical tools must also be different for each of them
marx developed those tools by first analyzing how western european society developed, and he noticed that it transformed alongside the mode of production; and everything, including social relations, seemed to sort of "emanate" from the system we used to produce and distribute resources, instead of the other way around (or at least this system expresses itself in all of these aspects; it doesn't explain everything, it structures the whole, so to speak)
this is the biggest difference between idealist conceptions of history and a materialist one: idealists think society changes itself through changes in ideas, materialists think society changes itself from changes in the mode of production
in this process, marx also realized a new system to produce and distribute resources only took over once it made the previous one obsolete, almost in a sort of "evolutionary" way
and by making it obsolete i mean it's more efficient at producing and distributing things
so feudalism was replaced by capitalism not because a group of people decided it was time to do so, but because of stuff like "focusing on producing surplus to sell it and accumulate capital" (an aspect that wasn't dominant in feudal society) making everything more easily available for everyone
this is why even in the communist manifesto he was already railing on conservative/reactionary conceptions of socialism - for him, you could only overcome capitalism by developing further
and you could only develop further if you took advantage of its contradictions to form a new system that would represent a higher stage of development
lenin, mao, deng, all of these people were actual marxists and all of them reached similar conclusions about their own country, which were behind in terms of development: lenin concluded the USSR still needed the NEP; mao saw their country still had almost 90% of its population in the countryside, and china was extremely poor and unproductive, so he concluded they still needed the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie - as long as they were under the control of the CPC (though he did change his mind later - and it went pretty much objectively bad, except in a few areas); deng saw it was still not working (in 1978, $156 per capita gdp, 82% rural population, etc) and decided to allow foreign capital (the international bourgeoisie) in to accelerate development (because they would bring industries, and also technical knowledge and intellectual property for the chinese to uh... steal)
so, again, calling it dengism is a mistake, it's just marxism; not only that, this didn't come from deng himself, this was the result of huge, long ass debates between party theoreticians that happened throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, especially later on discussing the reasons behind the failures of the cultural revolution and the great leap forward
to sum it up and answer your question:
a) the idea behind marxism, not dengism, is that you can't "will" capitalism away, you need to develop away from it
b) this means that, specifically for china (and the USSR), given their backwardness, they had to accept state capitalism¹ as a way to induce and accelerate this process while keeping conservative forces in check² so they can't do shit once we start moving ahead
¹ some supporters of the CPC's conclusions/actions don't like calling it state capitalism, i have no issue with this - lenin himself called the NEP state capitalism, i really don't care what name we give it as long as we understand what it means
² it's so weird to me that some self-styled marxists are fine with the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat for the transition from socialism to communism, but not for the transition from capitalism to socialism - it's all part of a historical process, and the steps we must take are supposed to be based on our actual material starting point, not our wishes
A really interesting analysis, I'm not a fan of Deng, but you're not wrong on many points, especially that the economic reform was a response to material conditions.
What's your opinion of the internal critics of Deng's reforms such as "little" Deng Liqun?
Also, do you separate Deng's economic policy from his foreign, especially his deepening of the Sino-Soviet split, the somewhat controversial stances on the Cambodian/Vietnam situation and the Angolan war where Deng supported Capitalists against the Soviets?
What’s your opinion of the internal critics of Deng’s reforms such as “little” Deng Liqun?
i don't know deng liqun's works
i've been (very slowly) reading from other critics, and people who support the reforms but disagree with specific parts of it, but i'll abstain from commenting much because i just don't know enough yet
Also, do you separate Deng’s economic policy from his foreign
i tend to separate china's domestic policy from its foreign policy in general, and i definitely criticize the latter far more than the former, even though they're not really imperialists
especially in regards to vietnam and cambodia, as the CPC seems to be just expressing an attitude that is quite common in the general populace
I think we're (mostly) on the same page then. China's definitely not Imperialist despite some shockingly bad takes.
I don't agree with all of Deng's reforms, but I think post-split at least some market change was needed (and we've seen that to lesser or greater degrees in all the surviving AES states save North Korea, which was bailed out by China.)
I do see Xi moving towards some really cool local Cybersyn/Shadow pricing planning experiments and that excites me.
I do see Xi moving towards some really cool local Cybersyn/Shadow pricing planning experiments and that excites me.
yea i thought that was pretty cool!
i also like how he's trying to interfere a lot more on businesses, and how that makes some people very nervous (the whole tone of this article is pretty funny)
bear in mind as you read this, i say that they have to do it because i have a materialist understanding of societal development. anyone with an idealist (idealist here is not supposed to be a pejorative word, it’s just a different conception of reality) understanding will certainly disagree with me, that’s why i specified marxists in the end there
God you're an arrogant schmuck.
² it’s so weird to me that some self-styled marxists are fine with the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat for the transition from socialism to communism, but not for the transition from capitalism to socialism - it’s all part of a historical process, and the steps we must take are supposed to be based on our actual material starting point, not our wishes
What? The dictatorship of the proletariat is the rule of the working class as majority over the minority of the expropriated capitalist class to transition from a bourgeois society to a classless society.
from socialism to communism
I really have no idea what that means, since Marx didn't really distinguish between socialism and communism and used it more interchangeably, except to refer to other (non-communist) socialist tendencies.
Lenin was who did that, by saying "socialism leads into communism", as he understood the lower phase of communism to be "socialism" and the higher phase as "communism", conflating the terminology a bit, but still under a Marxist account. The point is, that Marx distinguished in his Critique of the Gotha program between the lower phase of communism (socialism for Lenin), which still has material incentives to work (but no capital!) and the higher phase of communism, which has free access (think post-scarcity).
The goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to transition to this first phase of communism, any Marxist should agree with that (from capitalism to socialism).
Side note: This is also why it frustrates me when I see people referring to the USSR / PRC / Vietnam / Cuba etc. as "socialist" rather than "a dictatorship of the proletariat", since there is / was still capital and class in these societies.
but assuming that the chinese have to allow them to breathe, which we think just happens to be the case, then what the fuck are they supposed to do? reject reality? act emotionally and risk destroying what they’ve built?
I have no doubt that at least some of the CCP critics would privately have preferred it if China had continued killing sparrows and trying to cast steel in backyard furnaces.
To people like that, socialism is merely an aesthetic that makes them feel special. They want to continue their comfortable white suburban lives while "agitating" for change that they will never lift a finger to build at best, and sell out Orwell-style at worst.
I have no doubt that at least some of the CCP critics would privately have preferred it if China had continued killing sparrows and trying to cast steel in backyard furnaces.
To people like that, socialism is merely an aesthetic that makes them feel special. They want to continue their comfortable white suburban lives while “agitating” for change that they will never lift a finger to build at best, and sell out Orwell-style at worst.
i'll be fair to them here because i used to heavily criticize the CPC up until a few months ago, and it still came from genuinely caring about the chinese (as i care about workers anywhere, especially being from 3rd world where exploitation is so blatant)
my real problem was not that i was a larper, or in it for the aesthetics, but that i was still an idealist without knowing it. i actually did think you could just "replace capitalism" after the revolution, and that the CPC deliberately chose not to and betrayed us. when in reality, as i came to understand what marx meant by materialism, and it started making more sense to me, i realized i had it completely wrong
this is why i specified marxists in the post: i understand it when idealists, or self-styled marxists who actually haven't become materialists, criticize deng's reforms - they have (as i used to) a completely different conception of reality and societal development, so criticizing the CPC really does make perfect sense in that context
Again, I have to stress that my comment only relates to some people.
my real problem was not that i was a larper, or in it for the aesthetics, but that i was still an idealist without knowing it. i actually did think you could just “replace capitalism” after the revolution, and that the CPC deliberately chose not to and betrayed us. when in reality, as i came to understand what marx meant by materialism, and it started making more sense to me, i realized i had it completely wrong
They did and the idealism is denying it in the face of facts.
I don't think you like billionaires, i think you are complicit in a degradation of a revolution.
Can you explain WHY exactly China needs billionaires to expand its productive base (besides some vague "that's the only way" handwaving)?
Why can't the party control the factories, the real estate market, the retail chains, the R&D facilities, etc. directly? Do you really think that if the party were to control all of that directly and at the same time still offer the same lucrative manufacturing conditions to western companies, the western bourgeoisie would turn their nose at continuing to profit because of some purist ideological principles?
It would seem way more idealist to hold such positions.
do CPC critics think CPC stans like billionaires or something?
Yes
Good post :xi-clap:
I too have recently understood what materialism really means, and the difficult choices and situation china is in.
