It’s like China is just that one country (aside from the Khmer Rouge) that every ML (aside from Dengists like us) agrees to hate on.

Fellow Traveler and leftypol uploaded videos criticizing them, the Shining Path hung up literal dogs to protest them, Maoists go all insane saying that it’s some red fash social-imperialist nation because (insert nato propaganda here). And Hoxhaists claim that China was never socialist and that the only socialist nation ever was USSR before Khrushchev and almighty holy Albania.

What is it that makes China so controversial even among MLs? I get that it’s not perfect and every AES state has their Ls, but jesus.

  • queermunist she/her
    591·
    10 months ago

    Gotta be honest, I was one of those MLs before the pandemic.

    Seeing China take COVID seriously while every other capitalist nation left us to die really drove the lesson home, and now I understand that politics are still in command despite the apparent liberalization of the economy. Using capitalist development and investment (i.e. getting the capitalists to sell us the rope) is extremely dangerous but it seems China has somehow made it work despite all my doubts. I was wrong.

    • miz@lemmygrad.ml
      19·
      10 months ago

      you might like this essay

      What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]

      This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.

      from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

      also recommended:

      https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

      • queermunist she/her
        8·
        10 months ago

        I think the reason social democrats and anarchists tend to “vaguely pay respects while completely underappreciating” Marx is because they don’t read theory. They don’t know why anything happens the way it does. The pandemic also started the point when I began actually reading, so that might also be what lead to my deeper and more nuanced understanding of China.