• CEO_of_TrainGang [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    But I thought China evil state capitalists who no care about gommulism 😱😱😱

    • ap1 [any,undecided]
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      4 years ago

      this is still regulated capitalism, the us gov is trying to break up facebook so its not like this is even much better

      • CEO_of_TrainGang [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        The US government can “try” whatever it likes. What they end up actually doing is what matters. Call me when the government actually breaks up Facebook

        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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          4 years ago

          Yeah, the Facebook comparison is a near-perfect one, and I guess we're about to see which government is more serious about taking on capital. I know who my money's on.

          • Civility [none/use name]
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            4 years ago

            I mean, the US government never actually wanted to break up the social media conglomerates.

            That was just a bargaining position they held until social media companies stopped resisting getting fully folded into the intelligence apparatus.

            • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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              4 years ago

              The U.S. government isn't a monolithic entity (at least when it comes to domestic policy, and especially when it comes to antitrust regulation). State AGs can bring antitrust cases, for example, and it's a big stretch to say every single one of them is on board with every single U.S. monopoly just continuing on untouched. Even if the relevant decision makers don't actually care about corporate power one way or the other, careerists are always out there looking for a way to make a name for themselves.

              Some parts of the government do want to enforce antitrust laws; they're just the minority, and they're hampered by so much of the government being too old to comprehend the extent of what tech companies are doing. You're absolutely right, though, that there are a lot of insincere threats made with the intent of gaining cooperation with law enforcement and the intelligence state.

          • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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            4 years ago

            basic anti-trust

            decent anti-trust

            We have to see how this pans out before we classify it. It may go well beyond simply breaking up Alibaba into smaller companies.

        • ap1 [any,undecided]
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          4 years ago

          they are following the same process here, Ant Group is yet to be broken up as well. They are the same stage in terms of "orders", and the campaigns against the tech giants have been going on for comparable periods.

      • CEO_of_TrainGang [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        The fact that China is willing and able to wield power over their capitalist class literally is evidence that they are a dictatorship of the proletariat. Does that mean they’re guaranteed to build communism at some point? I guess not but that wasn’t even my contention

        And for as much as I’m being told “capitalist countries do stuff like this too” the only example I’ve heard so far is the US government threatening to break up Facebook, which I’ll believe when I see. Like someone else said, if we’re taking bets about which country is more likely to reign in capital, I know who I’m betting on

        when it comes to China people on here are willing to take every single slither of evidence they can to justify their own preconceptions

        I think you’re assuming a bit too much about my beliefs based on my low effort shitpost lmao

        • OgdenTO [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          The only example I know of that is kind of similar is xerox. In 1975 they were forced to share their entire ip portfolio with competitors, and for a company that developed a lot of ip this was significant. Much of it went to foreign (Japanese and korean) companies and formed the basis of the first OLEDs. Xerox now is still attempting to recover from that and not doing well.

          Imagine the government making one of its most successful companies share all of its trade secrets with foreign competitors.

        • read_freire [they/them]
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          4 years ago

          Breaking up Bell is the actual example

          *The counter example isn't Jack Ma it's the billionaires they've executed

          • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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            4 years ago

            The AT&T antitrust case started in 1974 and ended in 1982 -- back before neoliberal economics became the dominant system in the U.S., i.e., back when we occasionally offered limited resistance to capital.

            The most recent big antitrust case is Microsoft, which was decided in 2001. Notably, Microsoft didn't even get broken up, and we allowed the big tech giants of today to come to power in that case's immediate aftermath.

            • read_freire [they/them]
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              4 years ago

              Yeah, that's why I said bell and not microsoft, ms wasn't trust-busted. No disagreement in your analysis either, just that celebrating china for shit noted shitheads nixon, carter and reagan were doing feels like another example of the overton window shifting.

              The subreddit reeducated my propaganda-addled brain by talking about capital punishment for billionaires and marx as required secondary and tertiary education.

              Critical support for China and critical support for teddy roosevelt's trust busting I guess.

              • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                4 years ago

                celebrating china for shit noted shitheads nixon, carter and reagan were doing feels like another example of the overton window shifting

                I don't see much issue with celebrating a step in the right direction. No one is calling this communism, or even socialism; it's basically just being held up as an example of China keeping capital under control. That's evidence in support of the idea that China intends to keep progressing towards socialism, even if by itself it doesn't prove that contention. And if self-identified communists are credibly opposed to capital, I think they deserve a presumption that they know better how to manage the path than anyone here.

                  • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
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                    4 years ago

                    I should have been more specific: self-identifying communists, running a self-identifying communist country, whose actions show they are willing to take on capital in serious ways, likely know more about how to best run that country than we do.

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        There's no one obvious thing that one can point to as a litmus test for whether a society is socialist (or working towards socialism).

        You are right that breaking up powerful corporations is not determinative of socialism because liberal states do it to. However, I would argue that it is indicative of working towards socialism, taken together with numerous other pro-socialist policies. The same can be said of policies like redistribution, universal Healthcare, or state owned enterprises, which all exist in liberal states to one extent or another.

        To put it another way, I cannot claim that the animal in front of me is a dog only because it has 4 legs because cats also have 4 legs. However, if it has 4 legs, wags it's tail, and barks? Probably a dog.