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
why they gotta do that?
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?
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
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.
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)
God you're an arrogant schmuck.
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.
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.