The fact that the friend knows this makes me think they are a communist too
You're reading it backwards, the blue is OP. OP asked what kind of communist their friend is.
It’s almost like Marx said there’s going to be a transition period to becoming a fully communist state. Purity testing at its finest right here.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
So why does the parent comment have a bunch of upbears? “Must be the libs” or is it something else?
It's like saying "cancer cures have never been tried". There needs to be political, economic and social development towards a communist state. If capitalism has no conditions for failure neither does communism. It has only so far failed to usurp capitalism.
Semantics, if a country is working towards that end it is still correct English to call them socialist/communist. You could argue that calling them 'socialistic' or 'communistic' might be more accurate but it makes no difference. I know you say it hasn't been tried yet, but since they are trying technically it counts as far as grammar is concerned. Furthermore, when you say it hasn't been tried you sound like a contrarian nerd and you only give support to right wing arguments about communism always failing, which isn't true, in effect reifying capitalism.
seems to me there's a difference; socialist states attempt to achieve a communist world (via the Marxist conception of the withering away of the state)
Doesn't Marx say that the state will wither away due to increasingly developed material conditions and means of production, which are necessary for real liberation?
He does talk about how material conditions need to be developed. Withering away happens once class antagonisms no longer exist, eg when classes no longer exist, which definitely requires some amount of abundance.
Thank you, it's like in the German ideology when he says that the steam engine and spinning Jenny were responsible for the abolition of slavery.
my murky understanding is that it has to do with base and superstructure; the material realities create changes in culture and social relations that then reproduce and influence the material conditions, like a feedback loop. from what I can grasp, the idea is that the "amplitude" of those changes would gradually reduce and the RPMs slow down as socialist policies eliminated material disparities and reshaped those social relations.
does that make any sense? I'm still learning this stuff
EDIT: I don't know if he ever specifically anticipated something like international capital reaction, does anyone else?
Yeah, and by developing industry, manufacturing, production etc they are changing the base/superstructure equation and thus the threshold for liberation/necessity of the state
No Marx and Engels say that a dictatorship of the proletariat to hold down the proletariats adversaries whilst creating the material and spiritual conditions for the withering away of the state once a new generation has been raised in these new conditions without exploitation of man by man
We know from the 20th century experience that this could take hundreds of years given capitalist encirclement, capitalism resilience and the fact the colonial countries are the ones that benefit the most
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx, Critique Of the Gotha Programme
Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.
engels
In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.
Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Engels, Civil war in france
Well they are attempting exactly that, it is the development of productive forces that liberates the people and it is that progress that reduces the scope of the state, you cannot have one without the other. It is a vulgar interpretation to say because they haven't disbanded all polities yesterday that they aren't Marxist or communist.
I think I misinterpeted your first comment and we've been agreeing with each other the whole time. my bad
Obviously not true, the Chinese social credit system is the most famous example of an attempt to replace money
The problem is that people use that as a way to scoff at or disown real socialist projects that very much did succeed at massively improving the lives of hundreds of million of people despite having to build up from the ashes of underdeveloped, wartorn states while under constant attack from the capitalist hegemons.
The correct answer is There is no Uyghur Genocide, and if you say otherwise im sorry but it is concrete fact that you are a liberal. Sorry, And i am being dead serious
As someone who does generally support the Xinjiang programs, I do believe most criticism is valid and caution is always advised with these sorts of things. Xi Jinping has a few choice quotes about modelling his anti-terrorism measures off of the U.S. which I don't imagine Liberals would use as evidence against China but are sketchy as hell to most Communists.
But There Is No Genocide. There is no evidence to support anything to the scale or severity of a genocide. You don't have to support the camps to believe that. As far as I'm aware, no country has officially declared it a genocide; it's just wackos online saying it over and over again until it's treated as truth, with no evidence, because enough people are saying it over and over again.
Like, there almost certainly aren't death camps in Xinjiang but there is almost certainly at the very least mass incarceration and discrimination based on racial profiling. I wouldn't qualify everyone who believes it's a cultural genocide in the same manner as Australia's stolen generation not a communist based solely on that opinion.
I seem to remember the camps officially being closed as of early this year. Whether you believe that or not depends on how much you trust China
Just because there's no genocide doesn't mean it's not comparable to residential schools aimed at bringing broader cultural hegemony to the region.
Is it indeed? There are actually some pretty clear practices that I think one could certainly suggest that the Muslim faith is not 'celebrated' in Xinjiang or in Hui areas in Gansu, Ningxia etc. One thing that comes to mind are the restrictions on fasting amongst students, government officials (including teachers), Party members (which includes a lot of fairly 'normal' people, not just officials). The Arabic script, which Muslims worldwide would be familiar with, is largely discouraged from use in places like Ningxia and Henan, where you have a lot of supposedly Han-ified Muslims known as the Hui. The logic is ultimately that if Muslims live in China, they should be at least somewhat 'Sinicized'. Why this rustles feathers is that even under Mao, where there was certainly a lot of violence against religious institutions (a lot of it justified, of course), there was also a lot of insistence on the necessity for Han people to not pressure ethnic minorities to also necessarily act like the Han. This meant that there were practical limits on Han migration to ethnic minority areas, more employment opportunities in local Party bureaus for minority cadres etc. But following the 80s in particular, a lot of that got tossed out of the window. There is a reason, imo, that violence and separatist tendencies in Xinjiang began in the late 80s - the Han population in Xinjiang had rapidly increased. And it has continued to increase.
There are some elements of cultural erasure that comes with this sort of population manipulation. Yes, Uyghurs learn their language. But the emphasis has changed in some pretty pointed ways. In a lot of 'bilingual' schools, where Uyghur was once more dominant or at least taught in a fair amount of classes, it has become somewhat circumscribed as a specialty subject compared to Mandarin, which has gained more of an outsized importance. Bearing in mind that, one of the core tenents of the early PRC's constitution was that autonomous regions could maintain their own educational standards and policies, and I think it makes sense that people are upset. I would also argue that policies targetting 'fundamentalism' are somewhat misguided in that we have to also understand what the source of fundamentalism is. The Chinese government currently uses the language of 'war' and 'terror' (where did they get that from..) to describe its attitude towards fundamentalism. The argument is that ultimately foreign madrasas and 'Islamicization' has eroded what was previously a secular culture, and poses a threat to China. But in my opinion, as with fundamentalism in the US or Europe or wherever, 'Islamic' terrorism is ultimately caused by socio-economic factors, namely the economic transformation that has happened in Xinjiang since the reform era, coupled with changing demographics. There is a reason that even Hui people, who again are supposedly much more 'Chinese' in their outlook, have also been recently targeted by anti-terror measures. Perhaps fundamentalism is growing, but it is as a consequence to what was a fairly flawed policy of the central government trying to shore up its presence in the periphery in a way that even local officials have grumbled about.
It's a question of if pushing cultural hegemony onto a population is an acceptable thing at all, and to what extent it is okay for indigenous populations to fight against that.
I don't aim to make any one judgement, but even from within a generally leftist world framework there is a legitimate case for the situation there being either a good thing or a bad thing.
When this stuff comes up it's important to not be allowing lies to go through like what Zenz does, furthering jingoistic thinking in the west, but there's definitely a respectful critical policy debate leftists should have about imposition of cultural ideals on indigenous populations.
ICE doesn't run concentration camps and if you think they do you're a liberal, I have a very large brain
why hello there, fellow communist! do you also believe all CIA agitprop?
That was me, a few months ago.
My opinion on China changed in the wake of the covid crisis. Just compare the way they handled it to all the supposed "democratic" countries. And what reinforced is seeing how the people I love and respect are falling for all the propaganda since then.
If they're liberal, then they say they have no problem with Chinese people, only the government. And if they're old...well, I can't repeat what they say. And the rise in all the fucking hate-crimes against Asian people.
I wasn't alive to experience the first cold war. But now that the second one is brewing, I know which side to support (for whatever that's worth.)
To be clear, I still think Soviet aesthetic is damn cool and am not really into (or know much about) Chinese aesthetics.
Some think China is a threat to communism because they believe most of the CCP are basically just capitalist oligarchs now.
CCP could be similar to a "Managerial Class" in having their own class interests; and it seems difficult for some to fathom that pure ideology and purges are enough to keep the CCP from devolving.
See also Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy...I mean it depends how you define communist then. There are a large number of leftists who believe talking about the USSR is a hinderance to communism as well, let alone China. I'm sure a lot of people here wouldn't consider these people "actual commmunists", but whatever
I guess they'd say its a threat to converting people into socialists, which if you cant even get people to become socialist, the fact the US will crush them doesn't matter? Idk dude
ahah but if socialism had never been tried it would sure be harder to make propaganda about it. checkmate china bad ussr bad confirmed
I think if you really wanted it to be a choice you'd pose the first option as "real socialism has never been tried"
I think one thing that is worth posing is putting China's reforms in Xinjiang in a wider comparative framework. I wrote my dissertation on Xinjiang and Kashmir and comparative policy from the 50s onwards. It is worth noting that both places, even if they were treated rather roughly by the central government, had little 'extremism' or 'separatist' tendencies until certain economic shifts in the late 80s and early 90s. This ultimately culminated in a sudden jump in separatist violence, which was then met with mass securitization and surveillance, as well as demographic shifts (Han migration spiked in the 90s, and likewise India's recent constitutional changes are to try and encourage largely Hindu populations in northern India to move to Kashmri). This securitization and central government intervention creates a cycle of resentment and backlashes, and I think coupled with subtle but pretty effective policy changes to try and destabilize the foundations of local culture and ideology (interventions in the way imams are trained, language policy, education policy, the presence of pseudo-military contractors like the bingtuan in Xinjiang etc) there is definitely something akin to cultural and demographic transformation happening along the scale of what China did in the southeast in 50s, or India in its northeastern states in the 60s. Whether you want to term this cultural genocide is entirely up to you, I suppose, but to be honest there are comparisons to be made with how other settler states have operated in the past, ie racial prejudice, Otherization, attacking traditional institutions etc.
And of course, need to remember that the US is hardly a shining figure here, considering that China literally took the War on Terror framework from Bush, who in turn classified major Uyghur groups as terrorist organizations in return for China acquiescing to the US having a major military operation right on its doorstep (Afghanistan). Don't believe American propaganda, but I think we should be critical of some of the Han chauvinism that has been being propped up in certain Chinese governmental circles. Mao and Zhou Enlai warned about this all the time, and I think major aspects of the original promises to minorities have been really broken. Ultimately, I have to also ask - Belgium had a shit ton of radicalized Muslims leave the country to go fight for ISIS. If the Belgian government were to suddenly spend all of its time putting Muslims in special schools and training camps, securitizing Muslim suburbs in Brussels, setting up cameras and police checkpoints on major roads in Muslim neighborhoods, etc....Would we not be at least a little appalled? Even if the end result was some level of greater economic development? What about if the US did this to its own problematic minorities (I suppose it does - prison!)? What methods are we really willing to endorse to destroy so-called 'Islamism' - how can we actually destroy something if we don't want to address its root, material causes ie discontent? The old government in China, despite again its pretty heavy-handed policy at times, understood some aspect of this, or certain notioned towards it. I am not sure the same is true today, and it is made worse by the fact that frankly most Han people have some pretty appallingly chauvinistic views towards ethnic minorities as either needing 'civilizing', or a bunch of moochers who live off the government.
I dunno man. Maybe it's just because I am Muslim, and I have grappled a lot with what causes 'extremism' and how to rectify it, but I do not think hardline policies will be all that effective in the end. It will simply provoke a simmering resentment that is almost guaranteed to boil over at some point.
Tfw everything wrong in the world goes back to the world trade organization and the unprecedented pace of economic change that caused to traditional communities and pending economic collapse.
Also broader issues around islamism is a complicated issue on the left given the way the USSR united with the US against growing islamism in the 80s onwards.
Yes and I think that shift on the part of the USSR was a colossal mistake. But moreover, while I agree that the WTO and frankly the post Bretton Woods international trade regime is to blame in the largest sense, we should also hold to account the choices of local and regional policymakers that made a conscious decision to pursue policies that exacerbated the fault lines that said economic regime created. There was another choice in managing minority relations and the corrosive effect that economic change would have on the periphery, and in fact PRC policy makers debated a lot of this in the 80s and 90s before ultimately taking a much harsher line than they had before.
Are you like a "real capitalism has never been tried" capitalist or a "there was no Former USSR, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Yemeni genocide" capitalist?
Apart from maybe the Paris commune, communism hasn't really existed. Socialist states have but not communism.
Thesis: Real communism has never been tried.
Antithesis: There is no genocide of the Uighurs.
Synthesis: Real genocide of the Uighurs has never been tried.
Uyghur population numbers are in fact increasing, not decreasing. No genocide is taking place.
That doesn't really prove anything fwiw, palestinian numbers are also increasing.
