Oh God, oh shit, I said I wasn't going to do it. I said I wasn't going to start a China struggle session. Already getting flashbacks to the Discord.
But something just doesn't sit right with me and wanted to get some clarification here...
My question is this: why does China ban labor organizing/unions?
Is this yikes/intentional/actually a good thing?
(Yeah, I do know that labor unions are not always unequivocally good and sometimes they act more like middle management than as representatives of the workers... but democratizing the workplace seems like a no-brainer for any socialist project.)
Thoughts?
I mean, I definitely agree more with anarchists than I do with you, Joey. I found your weird anti-BLM rants to reveal (at best) serious ignorance of American race relations or (at worst) just straight-up racism, I think your argument that "independent trade unions cannot be tolerated" is essentially reactionary, I think your takes on "labor aristocracy" are nihilist, demobilizing third-worldist claptrap, and I don't share your unwavering loyalty to Chinese capitalism. More to the point, I have read my Lenin, and come to the conclusion that he was wrong about a lot, as aptly pointed out by contemporary critics like (my fav) Rosa Luxemburg and others like Alexandra Kollontai, Emma Goldman, and even (though he was also wrong about a lot) Trotsky. If Lenin himself could not convince me that state capitalism is a justifiable part of a socialist project, JoeySteel of chapo.chat doesn't stand a chance, sorry bro.
Feels to me like comrade Fear_and_loading pegged you right when they said that a lot of Chapo China stans are contrarians who are acting out to dramatically distance themselves from prevailing liberal norms in their community and engaging in reddit-atheist-style second opinion bias. I'm toward the older end of users here per the surveys we did on the subreddit, and a red diaper baby of red diaper babies. Being a leftist was never a cool, edgy position in my milieu. I come at these issues from a real-world activist angle, where denouncing BLM as "social fascists", or declaring all unions to be "intolerable" (as you have done) is aggressively counterproductive. I encourage you to get out there and engage with the proletariat in the real world--I think this would improve both your politics, and the wall-of-text way in which you present them online.
You can write a wall of text insulting me as you wish it doesn't change the nature of Surplus-value under Socialism. Would you rather have kept your full Surplus value of your labour in Russia in 1927 at the beginning of the five year plan and be sat with effectively the same "full value" of your labour essentially priced at 1927 wages in 1932? Or receive an exponential growth in your wage every year?
First came surplus value from agricultural export, some of which was used to finance the national electrification plan and naturally to provide all citizens with livable wages, and the rest going to purchasing technology licenses and imports, which were then employed to build industrial enterprises, which drew people to the cities, creating surplus value that was then employed to develop urban infrastructure and mechanized agriculture/machine tractor stations, etc, and so forth. As the costs of reinvestment reduced, worker's standard of living rose as surplus value was reallocated more to the workers.
Because I gotta tell you.....I'd rather be sat in a electrified house in an industrial city with wage growth which was almost exponential in 1932 rather than receive the full value of my labour in 1927
Not to mention the first 5 year plan was essential in defeating the nazis but I digress ( Stone, David R. (2006). "The First Five-Year Plan and the Geography of Soviet Defence Industry". Europe-Asia Studies. 57 )
Why did Thomas Sankara do exactly the same in Burkino Faso then? Was he a reactionary also? Listen maybe if US-EU is hit by a meteor we can get our crabs out and no one has to do violent revolution anymore or have a level of authority needed to retain the revolution and everyone and their grandad can start a trade union in "fully automated luxury communism" without fear of CIA infiltration like exactly what happened to Solidarinosc which literally overthrow socialism in poland
In the coming decade the only thing between nations being absolutely destroyed ala Iraq/Afghanistan/Iraq again/Venezuela/Honduras/Ukraine/Syria/Libya/Yemen is going to be Russia and China. They're forced by geopolitical necessity into anti-Imperialist positions. I'm happy for you that this doesn't concern you and your politics can stay pure as snow. I may consider moving my politics to "Push the Communism button and full surplus value now" button
To be honest I think boht Engels who first articulated the labour aristocracy (with the "English are creating a bourgeois state with a bourgeois class and a bourgeois proletariat") and then Lenin with the betrayal of Socialist parties to national chauvinism at World war 1 would be shocked at how deep the labour aristocracy could become. There's a scientific reason for why there is no communist movement in US capable of threatening capitalism but so many shades of opportunism. (and I might be wrong! I'm willing to hear reasons why the US effectively has zero opposition to imperialism and majority support in polls for its imperialist wars of aggression)
If communists came to power in US and say "we're ending imperialism" no more fruit picked by Mexican slave labour, no more chocloate farmed by children in the Ivory Coast, no more prawns fished by burmese slaves, clothes sewn by children in haiti/Bangladesh, fruit picked for pennies in S.America, or coffee from Africa etc.
Instead you're going to earn $200 doing hard labour instead of your cushy office job where you move money from one corp to another. i think most Americans would spit in your face then lynch you. It's why they're so fervently anti communist. The average Amercian knows this. Obviously this can change as US proletarianises its labour aristocracy and there can be solidarity between the blacks who are seeking to enter the labour aristocracy whilst whites are being pushed out of it. But the post you refer to I was giving a class character of BLM as it stands. I wasn't saying this is etched in stone for eternity
I'm sorry that you feel insulted, I don't mean to hurt your feelings. I think I've been pretty clear, though--we just don't agree. There are irreconcilable differences in our views of the world, both ideologically and as it concerns the facts. That's not a problem as far as I'm concerned. I don't expect you or anyone else on the internet to agree with me.
You think the Five Year plan was the best way for the USSR to industrialize. I think the undemocratic and incompetent leadership of Stalinist bureaucrats slowed industrialization and made what should have been an easy victory over Germany a long slog. You cite David R. Stone, I've cited John Erickson. (I also have a deep skepticism of all military historians for reasons I've described here.)
This was a big mistake on Sankara's part that weakened the labor movement and came back to bite him in the ass when capital struck back. Don't understand why you think Thomas Sankara, a guy who was in charge for less than five years, was incapable of mistakes.
At the root of this is the bizarre idea there can only be one empire in the world, likely the result of consuming post-Cold War American pop culture which flattens the Cold War into a simplistic Manichean conflict. People writing during the Cold War well understood that the idea of two superpowers was essentially propaganda that ignored the many regional powers that existed throughout the period--US-USSR combined GDP as a percent of world GDP only briefly hit 40% in 1950, and went down precipitously from there. In my view, Russia is currently a minor imperialist power, China is working on it, and capitalist multipolarity will simply mean a bunch of smaller empires.
A take that reveals deep ignorance of U.S. history. The current wars in the middle east have polled under water for at least 15 years. The Vietnam war spawned a massive anti-war movement. The U.S. joined both world wars years after every other capitalist empire, against the will of warmongering executives, because of popular anti-interventionism. The geographic security of the U.S. has always made it harder for capital to convince the U.S. public to spill American blood, though they usually overcome opposition at least for a time.
[Citation needed] A strange fantasy, where do you come up with this BS? You clearly have no exposure to the American left or its long and storied history. A socialist economy won't involve anyone earning $200 (a day? a week? a month?) to do hard labor, and if you look around at our current world economy and think that's impossible, you really don't understand how inefficient and wasteful capitalism is.
We all saw the posts man, I think they speak for themselves.
This is so bizarre... Most trotsyists admit to the resounding success of the first 5 year plan and point to it being the reason the USSR was able to win world war 2?
Here's Isaac Deutscher, beloved and doting admirer of Trotsky who wrote a trilogy worshipping Trotsky:
Good god why do you think that?
That explains it. Soviet histiography in the 1980s is worst than useless. Since the Soviet archives as well as German histiography have been opened historians have a much more rounded picture of World war 2 and low and behold it's nothing close to what the Nazis officers or Soviet military officers suddenly discovering themselves as geniuses after the wars end in their memoirs and them being hampered by an overzealous Hitler/Stalin sabotaging their work
What does World war 2 and soviet history look like in the last 15 years (let alone the 1980s)?
Stephen Kotkin - The German histiography of the last 15 years has now confirmed the following: The "failed Soviet Counter offensives" were in someway successful. The things Stalin is blamed for at the beginning of the war and then he learned... The counter offensives that looked like suicide missions that ended in catastrophe time after time. The German documents now available now shows that this lunatic counter offensives massively degraded the German Werhmacht army fighting capabilities. All the lost battles and encirclements and this lunatic counter-offensive stuff massively degraded the Werhmacht German fighting capabilities and so all of these lost battles and all of these you must be kidding counter-offensives were critical in slowing the German advance but especially degrading its offensive capability even more quickly. Whenever an army moves it loses a great deal of its offensive capability in winning - it doesn't have the same offensive capability it had at the start - but the Soviets degraded the Germans even more than we understood previously. So what Stalin is blamed for in much of the literature which then gives him credit for learning now on the German side he's actually being given a kind of grudging credit for the way they fought the war. The consequences for the German army of the failed counter offenses by the Soviet Union were very far-reaching in fact much of the Werhmacht as I said earlier was destroyed in the Soviet Union during the first year of fighting
https://youtu.be/1NV-hq2akCQ?t=1725
SK: the lunacy of Stalin's early war command which was shared by his upper officer corps might actually have been crucial for blunting the germans and ultimately for the soviet victory overall https://youtu.be/1NV-hq2akCQ?t=1861
SK - Stalin was correct in not moving troops to the front even though his 2 top commanders Zhukov and Timoshenko urged him to do so. That's because they were idiots that didn't understand blitzkreig. -https://youtu.be/1NV-hq2akCQ?t=744
You should pick up Kotkin. He retains the anticommunism and the anti-stalinism but history looks a lot more like what the Soviets said it did during and just after the war (before Soviet military officers began to discover themselves as geniuses in their memoirs after Stalins death)
The fact I mentioned 2 countries playing a progressive anti-imperialist role is bizarre for you to respond with this. China plays a progressive role in providing loans to 3rd world countries that eats into imperialisms ability to actually debt trap countries. This is fact. "Both sides'ing" China against US or EU imperialism is some real "neither Moscow nor Washington" hours.
It is but that doesn't change the progressive nature of Russian capitalism in the current era when it comes to anti-imperialism. Russia has literally gone to war to defend Syria, the Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Luhansk Peoples Republic from the fascists planted into power in Kiev and the social-fascists in the EU - putting them in the direct cross hairs of Imperialisms scope
Long after the wars are all launched and they have become background noise to the US public. They all supported them by overwhelming majorities at the start
And I 100% stand by everything I wrote in the full context of my post (not the hackneyed creative cropping of my post that some trot uploaded).
I might be wrong - I doubt it though and tbh I dont particularly care it doesn't concern me. I'm not American. I don't have to organise amongst this. And even though I consider the BLM movement be liberal in character I fully support them burning down US cities and looting places which are both good and cool. Here's hoping the content becomes more Marxist and they can start presenting the UN with documents like We Charge Genocide again and demanding territory to secede from the US