Struggle session engage. Post your pathetic arguments so that I and the other China Good Posters can dismantle them and you can learn.
Key points:
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China is a democracy. It is arguably the most functional and responsive democracy in a major country today. Its citizens consider it more democratic than the citizens of almost any other country do their own.
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China is on a clear path to socialism and economic justice. No nation in history has ever reduced poverty in anything like the way China is doing it.
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The vast majority of people in the PRC support the CPC. This is not due to being brainwashed. Americans are brainwashed and still hate their government.
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Almost everything you hear about China in the West sits on a spectrum between malicious misrepresentation to outright fabrication with no basis in reality.
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China’s ascension to the premiere global power is an extremely good thing for world peace and the global socialist movement. While China does not actively support other socialisms (sadly it’s not as good as the USSR in this regard) it does not do imperialism. China will allow socialisms around the world to flourish simply by not actively crushing them like the US and Europe.
So, China is clearly better than the US, considering that workers in BRI countries complain about price dumping, but countries in the American sphere complain about death squads. That said, we need to listen to workers and socialists who aren’t in power. The NPA says they’re getting shot with Chinese bullets. Workers in China still go on strike. Class struggle still exists in China, even if the state and party buffer it.
Now, call me old fashioned or internationalist, but our loyalty isn’t to socialist states, but to the global working class (and the non working, but still dispossessed.) This means supporting China against the US, but also supporting Chinese workers against their bosses and the cops who back them up.
Now, call me old fashioned or internationalist, but our loyalty isn’t to socialist states, but to the global working class (and the non working, but still dispossessed.) This means supporting China against the US, but also supporting Chinese workers against their bosses and the cops who back them up.
This shit right here. :Needle-inject:
Dude congrats in making the best struggle session on the site, its been like 4 hours and its still in the front page, Mao would be proud :chairman:
Listen, I am the best at struggle sessions. Sincerely. No one can do it as good as me.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
Counterpoint: “good” and “bad” are childish liberal concepts that materialists shouldn’t be using.
Lame and pedantic
Doesn’t mean I’m wrong. This isn’t a comic book movie.
Is socialism good or bad?
Economic systems don’t have any moral content to them dummy, that’s my entire point.
Especially in the context of historical materialism, the outcomes are entirely predecated on contexts in which they are pursued. The outcomes related to socialism are for the betterment of humanity and a more livable natural world, that’s why we should pursue it. But that’s all in the present context. 700 years in the past living under feudalism, the context might be that building industrial capacity under capitalism would be better for humanity. Or 700 years in some glorious future there’s the possibility that socialism is a reactionary position to stop the final implementation of communism.
Is Cuba a joke to you?
Too small. Cuba is even More Good than China, but it doesn’t have the population or economy to be a major player on the world stage.
one billion Cubans
cuba is a superpower change my mind
It’s a superpower in our hearts
Also in the minds of American neocons who rail against expert Cuban advisors demolishing their imperialist efforts throughout Latin America
bro please we have to emargo this tiny island nation with 11 million people to our 340 million bro, they will literally invade us and collapse our government please bro if we don’t starve out their population imagine what they would do please listen to me
Consider this OP- China bad ackchyually, because the US alphabet agencies and MSM told me it was true 😎😎
334 comments
This has been one of the most interesting struggle sessions on China.
I think the conversation on democracy is especially interesting. I personally view Western Democracy as reified, alienating those it claims to represent from the sources of their own domination through the spectacle of choice, kinda like the commodity market. Furthermore I don’t believe that this alienation is due simply to class domination and the commodity, but alienation is necessary for democracy itself and this alienation masks market and class domination. I see the ML line as one who acknowledges the contradictions of such democracy and thus seeks to, instead of expanding democracy to some impossible limit where it actually represents the desires of its people at a local level, work within the realities of democracy to focus on the elimination of domination via conflict with the necessary conditions of said domination. Thus democratic centralism seeks to eliminate domination at a systems level, those huge structural sources of domination left from Capitalist society. This must be the prerequisite for the localized, decentralized democracy we really want, otherwise these forms would simply be subordinated to the logics and gravities of systems of domination not eliminated in proletarian revolution; and thus the need for TDotP. These are fledgling thoughts I wanted to throw out real quick though, not gonna fully endorse some full antidemocratic view (lest you brave radlibs call me Red Fash). I gotta read a lot more, especially on the history on ML states, and discuss much more before I solidify this thought. I also would probably have to clearly define domination. Still I think the limits of democracy should be considered when deciding how we want use such a system, otherwise you risk falling into the argument of inalienable rights bestowed from on high
Tibet
Hey thanks for linking this, I had no idea
No worries, I’m glad some people are getting a new perspective of things.
Did I miss the part where we explained away the Ughur genocide/forced labor camps? I know we’re currently on like our 5th iteration of that here, but that’s not great anywhere.
Yeah, that’s not true.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
https://hexbear.net/post/36003/comment/290676
Edit: is it just me or is the comment link not scrolling down to/highlighting the relevant comment? Anyways if it isn’t just me, you can find a relevant comment in my profile to get to the thread I linked
it does not do imperialism.
Isn’t China building islands in the middle of the South China Sea in order to claim large swaths of it?
https://www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-island-building-south-china-sea-damage-marine-environment-implications-and#:~:text=Summary%3A,of the South China Sea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luTPMHC7zHY&list=PLZLDyYaVeZPC8CAsUrcdrWU1qMg56oGPe (yeah I know USA stupid) https://thediplomat.com/2016/07/why-china-wont-stop-island-building-in-the-south-china-sea/ https://www.rt.com/news/383758-philippines-occupy-spratly-islands/ https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/04/17/chinas-island-fortifications-are-a-challenge-to-international-norms/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vietnam-china-southchinasea-idUSKBN25M0Y5
China was a latecomer in terms of SCS island building. Vietnam did it first. China just did it bigger.
Even if China’s claims to this maritime territory are illegitimate, this doesn’t qualify as imperialism in the Marxist sense:
(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
This is where the tankie dorks go, “If America gets to have bases in the Pacific, then so does China!”
Yeah, but do they need to bully other island nations out of their domestic open waters?
“Hahaha moron, those countries are allied with the US so they deserve to be trampled!”
As the name suggests China actually has shores on the South China Sea and is well within their rights to secure those waters from a global navy that has lost nothing this far away from home.
As the name suggests China actually has shores on the South China Sea
This is so laughably hilarious. I guess because American Somoa or North/South America is in the name, the United States of America gets to lay claim.
“What Latin American coups? You mean the domestic ones?”
You’re being intentionally obtuse.
I wish they would change their stance on Taiwan, though. I live here and don’t want to see my friends and family die in a war or for resisting (which they would certainly do)
But everything else about China is pretty dank yes
Taiwan is more responsible for that than China is
Horrible take to call China the best hope for socialism today when Cuba still exists and is incredibly internationalist for a country of its size and relative wealth.
It played a very meaningful role in the pink tide that sweeped latin america.
Fidel Castro called China the best hope for socialism and the third world so…
In what year…
1994 then 2004, when Dengism was in full swing, by the way. https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/China-Is-Most-Promising-Hope-for-Third-World-Fidel-20171128-0017.html
Cuba has no meaningful power or ability to change the material conditions of the world. In order to be any sort of “hope” you must have the power to actually displace the global capitalist powers.
You’re right in saying Cuba was highly responsible for the pink tide but that was the work of the Cuban revolutionaries who continued to attempt to export revolution after Cuba was made safe. They continued it until they were all gone and there is now no longer much exportation of the revolution because the generation that carried it out just isn’t around anymore. Cuba’s work to export revolution to south america was also largely helped by the support the USSR provided them.
See I think there’s far more potential in a unified left movement coming out of Latin America to challenge American hegemony than anything coming out of China. The level of resentment China has to the existing imperial powers isn’t especially significant in comparison.
The USSR was also far better than contemporary China even with their various internal problems. Contemporary China has far deeper ties with the global elite davos types than they do with the working people of the developing world.
My support for China exists in the support for a far more multipolar world rather than thinking their some kind of magic socialist solution.
You’re stuck in a mindset of achieving the displacement of capitalism via combat and destruction.
China is walking a path that is far closer to Marx’s actual interpretation of how society moved from one historical organisation of society to the next. Each new phase didn’t become the global norm simply because it destroyed the previous one, it became the new global norm because it made the old organisation of society completely obsolete. Their plan is to advance socialist society so significantly that every other society trading with and cooperating with them is pulled along into socialism by virtue of it making capitalism obsolete.
You can only do this from the position of #1 in all areas of development, and so they have embarked upon a method that will allow them to get ahead of the US and to then continue to develop further and further beyond it. Pulling up everyone around them with it.
The low level of resentment you speak about is quite intentional. They don’t want to start wars and conflict, they want to simply develop along so much that all are pulled along with them, that other societies MUST reorganise and advance because they will otherwise fall behind if they do not.
Look I’ve read plenty of translated chinese government documents and I do recognize there are certainly some deep egalitarian beliefs out there, but you see the same sorts of documents come from the more left wing cities in the US.
Xi certainly does represent a path to what you’re talking about, but the guy before him and the Shanghai clique absolutely did not represent that path forward. There’s absolutely good reason to be skeptical that China will do what they claim from a socialist perspective.
ITT: People who (quite rightly) hate Bernie Sanders for being a moderate defend a country with a healthcare and welfare system far behind anything Bernie advocated.
And no, it’s not just because China is a poorer country, plenty of poor countries in Latin America give their citizens much more than China does. Might have something to do with the fact that China’s 1% controls 30% of the country’s wealth, and those billionaires are very well connected to CCP leadership. Just spitballing.
China has universal healthcare and most medical resources are publicly owned. Access to medical resources varies greatly and coverage isn’t perfect in rural areas but you can see a doctor and get a prescription for less than $10 almost everywhere in the country. If you get Covid the state will pay for 100% of your hospital stay and use every available resource to keep you alive, even if it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The US is decades away from that level of coverage.
Every urban Chinese resident was guaranteed housing up to around 2000 and every rural Chinese resident is still guaranteed a plot of arable land. China’s not a social democracy and the way it addresses poverty is fundamentally different from social democracies.
You could drive a dumptruck through these loopholes:
coverage isn’t perfect in rural areas
and
Every urban Chinese resident was guaranteed
Therein lies the failure of China’s safety net: that it does less for rural residents, and almost nothing for the migrant class that are not “resident” of the place where they are actually living. This proviso applies to almost every public service in China, and it functions to exclude a huge percentage of the (actual, existing) urban population, favoring a middle class whose families have long-established residency in the coastal cities.
Surely you must know this, otherwise you wouldn’t have written it in this way, so why the equivocation?
Yes, I recognize that there’s inequality within China and a strong urban-rural divide, that’s a valid criticism but I’m not hearing much of a solution. The current healthcare system is far, far superior to healthcare under the planned economy that dominated the country up until the 90s, so it’s not a reflection of unequal distribution of resources by the market. Both urban and rural healthcare has drastically improved within the last 20 years, market reforms are what made universal healthcare possible.
An urbanized, coastal metropolis like Shanghai is going to have better services than a remote mountainous village in Yunnan. That’s true of every country and economy in the world, it was true of China during the planned economy era and it’s true today. It’s much more helpful to compare current rural healthcare access to rural healthcare access 20 or 50 years ago rather than urban healthcare access today.
Three points.
- Any imperialist designs on China has to be fought tooth and nail.
- China is doing several things well, and worth emulating, like state’s role in economic planning.
- However, I don’t subscribe to all the values of CPC. I admire many things, and I am on reddit forums daily debating the libs on all demonisation of China. But I can’t just offer uncritical support to CPC, because I disagree with some of their values.
There’s no such thing as uncritical support, if you uncritically support anything you are a cultist.
I don’t subscribe to all the values of the CCP either but I recognize that many of them reflect the values of Chinese people and are necessary to enjoy the support of the masses. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with those values but they need to be viewed in that light, as observers we’re unencumbered by the necessities of statecraft
