https://twitter.com/calebmaupin/status/1344166951401254912
It turns out you can just have a thought and inflict it on thousands of strangers without anyone stopping you.
Billionaires: totally cool and good so long as they are Chinese.
You really think the CCP is gonna toss aside global capitalism once they control it? Your faith in Xi and the boys is much stronger than mine.
Eh, I’m in the fence about China overall but I’m not sure I’m totally convinced by the “they’re defo commies cuz if they weren’t they’d just call themselves liberals cuz it’s easier”.
There’s explanations why they’d remain a one party state even if they are no longer genuine in their pursuit of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
1 to claim the legacies of Mao and other communist leaders.
2 being a liberal state would probably require capitulation to other liberal states. China wants to be independent from the west and having a strong military means they have to take an antagonistic stance towards the west.
3 they want to development a PMC (would will also help with point 2). If they embraced western liberal capitalism they’d be expected to keep their working based poor and undereducated. Having a strong centralized state to direct capital production is good for building a middle class.
This would still make them the imperial west’s enemies which I guess is still good but then they’d be doing so under a nationalistic desire to be their own strong capital economy.
I'm sorry but I would not say that is textbook Marxism at all. Nowhere does Marx endorse doing that in a sort of stagist progression that in the end makes private ownership defunct. The relations of production are also not something that can be advanced, they are just descriptive of the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. We should not mix up quantitative gains in productive capacity or living conditions with social relations of production.
If they exist within a state that regularly expropriated and executed them, then they are cool. I don’t know about “good” but perhaps necessary, that’s a call for Chinese Marxists
so billionaires are cool, as long as we kill them, and don't call for their abolition, and this is meant as a serious, non-meme, non-contradictory claim about marxism and how it ought to be practiced....
look, i'm not saying you're flimflamming, but do you see how someone could read this and think "hm, seems a bit post hoc"?
You are aware that Marx, Lenin and every serious Marxist stated that early socialism is a development out of capitalism and will resemble capitalism for the most part right? With the major difference being the dictatorship of the proletariat and movement towards socialism?
The common ultra mistake is believing that currency and markets will be abolished overnight after the revolution.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
BOOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRRRger king.
i see people say this sometimes about him, but what does that refer to?
He's not a Nazbol (nobody is, anybody calling themselves that are either 50 year old Russian punk rock guys or Nazis), but he spoke with Alexander Dugin at a conference against Imperialism or something.
While the nazbol party is technically illegal, their eurasian mysticism and Russian nationalism, and homophobia is present in several adjacent legal parties.
What part of socialism says that billionaires are good and necessary for the transition to communism? Because I must have skipped that book.
I critically support China, but the existence of billionaires is a constant existential threat to the working class character of the cpc and the Chinese state and any "socialist" who says otherwise is full of shit.
Figures. There is room for criticism in all things. Except for Uncle Joe's poetry. I will hear no criticism of those.
This isn't synonymous with the dotp, and it's only necessary to maintain capitalist relations of production like this when the productive forces are too underdeveloped to switch immediately to fully or at least primarily socialist relations of production (some form of planned economy which produces goods directly according to social need). Situations like China, Vietnam, and the USSR during the NEP are examples of this. The dotp is just any state in which the working class is the ruling class and wields state power in their interests.
dictatorship of the proletariat is when the means of production are mostly owned by the bourgeoisie
big brain takes on my chapo?
control of the means of production via the state. the state being controlled by the proletariat.
you can say that in practice the proletariat has to make concessions to the bourgeoisie during some period but having the mops being mostly owned by the bourgeois is not a feature of the dictatorship of the proletariat. the whole point is to shift to workers owning the mops (via the state) and control the state to prevent counterrevolution.
ok so we are mostly mental wanking by now but defining the dotp as a period where the mops are mostly owned by the bourgeoisie seems a bit ass backwrds.
also, even if you have literally nationalised and collectivised all the mops (all the big, beautiful mops, folks) the bourgeoisie may technically not exist anymore but they won't happily accept the new status quo, which is why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary to protect the collectivisation. so in my view the dictatorship of the proletariat would still exist after the bourgeoisie/proletariat are technically no more.
I mean this sort of happened in communist revolutions, at least in China, but not with billionaires or their equivalents.
This is what I call the "megabrain" take
-7DeadlyFetishes
With brains this large, I wonder how the Earth hasn't collapsed into a singularity yet
Caleb Maupin is a fucking skid mark. He’s echoed this anti-anti-billionaire sentiment in his videos multiple times.
Worded like this, he is wrong, but from the sentiment in this thread there is something to it that people miss. From a position of having billionaires, capping their wealth is anti-marxist. it is idealism, the ideal that limiting their wealth is better for morale or something? The marxist move from a position of having billionaires, is to ask what happens if the wealth is capped. immediate capital flight, credit derating, currency collapse. the marxist road here, which i suspect the cpc is on to, is to inact much harder progressive taxation when the structure of the economy makes this cost beneficiary. right now, the structure is too centered on fdi attractibility in manufacturing.
as china moves to financialization and moves manufacturing overseas, this wealth shift is much easier to do, as they will be the ones possessing the relevant capital. if you guys as good baby communist took charge and capped wealth below the billion, you would see a financial collapse and secessionism in the regions with imperialist footholds and interest. the objection to this analysis is that you could say the marxist would never be in that position, so modern china cannot be marxist. but i would say this is from a place of disengagement with the dengist theory. So we dont criticize china for the idealist idocity of having billionaires, we continue to sift in the bipolar contradictions between lamenting the marketization shift/counterrevelution and the fact that what they do now is fucking working well..
the ideal that limiting their wealth is better for morale or something
While the take that it would be idealist is nice and sounds Marxist there is also the concentration of power that goes together with capital. While it doesn't change the system and the capitalists do still have their class conflict with the working class, having more of them with lower wealth means they have a harder time organizing and a harder time to become a class actor (similarly to the separation of workers in different countries).
While any Marxist and Dengist perspective for that matter ought to challenge the system and existence of capital in the current form (by taking over the means of production and holding the power (of the state) to regulate them) and facilitate socialist reforms, develop productive forces and such, just taking away capital isn't Marxist.
Hindering power of capitalists can be Marxist though, just has to be thought through and be implemented from a position of power (and at that points most would just do away with billionaires - e.g. Cuba).
The KPCh is wielding power of the state and billionaires are hit with it. Though Xi's conception of what Marxism is and how a nation ought to be lead (and that of the party / party congress of thousands!) obviously varies from many "justice-Marxists" here.
i guess the epistemic rift between the camps is that one part thinks that the power coupled to capital is real here, while the other thinks the fact that a ML party is in government makes the power of capital meaningless. Im in the former camp, I think the fact that some of the pigs are being fucking executed with impunity speaks volumes here
The goal of a socialist nation isn’t to become the financial centre of the world and outsource manufacturing. That’s literally just late stage capitalism.
Attracting FDI was necessary for rapid development of the productive forces, but the key thing is keeping that capital under the Party’s control. So limiting it to JVs with state entities, embedding party members inside companies, etc.
Another big thing is capital controls. Allow capital to come in, but not leave. That insulates the nation from market fluctuations, and also prevents capital strike. Similarly, the currency is stabilised.
The goal isn’t deindustrialisation. The goal’s full automation of productive forces.
The problem with billionaires in this stage is that they represent a political threat. They can potentially exert control over their capital in such a way that’s not beneficial to society, such as through outsourcing overseas, or creating an opioid epidemic.
They also represent potential misallocation of resources, such as to real estate bubbles, instead of according to human need.
Given the first half of your argument is true, why exactly would capital not flee China to unregulated tax havens (after they've moved from manufacturing)?
the part of financialization that is in the public sector is under complete control. if privatization occurs and they can use tax havens, that is just a loss. so they either account for sufficient capital controls, or concede these outflows as cost-beneficiary collateral. Given the number of officials implicated in the panama papers and the reaction from govt, i think its somewhere between
