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?

  • skollontai [any]
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    4 years ago

    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.

    the nature of Surplus-value under Socialism

    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.)

    Why did Thomas Sankara do exactly the same in Burkino Faso then?

    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.

    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.

    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.

    US effectively has zero opposition to imperialism and majority support in polls for its imperialist wars of aggression

    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.

    i think most Americans would spit in your face then lynch you.

    [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.

    BLM as it stands. I wasn’t saying this is etched in stone for eternity

    We all saw the posts man, I think they speak for themselves.

    • JoeySteel [comrade/them]
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      4 years ago

      You think the Five Year plan was the best way for the USSR to industrialize.

      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:

      The truth was the war could not have been won without the intensive industrialisation of Russia, and of her eastern provinces in particular. Nor could it have been won without the collectivisation of large numbers of farms. The muzhik of 1930, who had never handled a tractor or any other machine would have been of little use in modern war. Collectivised farming, with its machine-tractor statiosn scattered all over the country, had been the peasants 'preparatory school' for mechanised warfare. The rapid raising of the average standard of education had also enabled the Red Army to draw on its considerable reserve of intelligent officers and men. "We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. Either we do it, or they crush us." - So Stalin had spoken exactly ten years before Hitler set out to conquer Russia. His words, when they were recalled now, could not but impress people as a prophecy brilliantly fulfilled, as a most timely call to action. And indeed, a few years delay in the modernisation of Russia might have made all the difference between victory and defeat .

      • Isac Deutscher, Stalin biography

      made what should have been an easy victory over Germany a long slog.

      Good god why do you think that?

      I’ve cited John Erickson

      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)

      At the root of this is the bizarre idea there can only be one empire in the world

      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.

      Russia is currently a minor imperialist power

      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

      The current wars in the middle east have polled under water for at least 15 years.

      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

      We all saw the posts man, I think they speak for themselves.

      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