• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      The goal, the policy advisers say, is to increase the share of housing built by the state for low-cost rental or sale under restricted conditions to at least 30% of China’s housing stock, from 5% or so today.

      I’m amazed China’s market had already been 95% privatized.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        China’s whole deal is to let the national bourgoisie to the initial development and then merc them and take it over once it reaches 1st world standards. they had a big job in urbanising a billion people, and they had far less development than the Soviets.

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          7 months ago

          Hell they don’t even need to merc them, capitalist development requires catastrophes, and you just move in to actually clean up the mess and take over ownership. It’s only in backwards ass countries like the U.S. that you bail them out and let them maintain ownership. Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie indeed.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      7 months ago

      lol I love asking people who claim China is capitalist why it consistently produces different outcomes from the actual capitalist countries, I never get an answer

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        Inb4 they hit you with the “Chinese are naturally conditioned to be wage slaves and they like it” and you realize you have to figure out how to escape from this person.

      • Communist
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        7 months ago

        I don’t agree with the premise of this question, aren’t the people who say it is capitalist actually arguing that it is state capitalist, and doesn’t that explain the difference in outcomes?

        • Nimux2@lemmygrad.ml
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          7 months ago

          Because “state capitalism” isn’t a real thing. If capitalists do not control the economy , it’s not capitalism. In capitalist states that isn’t the case, as the state exists first and foremost to serve the interest of capital. So wether capitalists control the economy directly or through the state has negligible impact (Individual interests vs collective class interests).

          On the other hand, no one in their right mind would claim that the Chinese state exists to serve the interests of capital.

          • Communist
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            7 months ago

            You’re missing the very point of the term, the point was never that state capitalism is equivalent/identical to capitalism, the point was that the oppressive force moves from the capitalist class to the state.

            If the state oppresses people and has all the power, then they have effectively replaced the capitalist class, but are going to have much of the same problems because they have much of the same incentive structure.

            Also, I’m unsure if the chinese state exists to serve capital, i don’t think this is an all-or-nothing situation, they have been helping capital a great deal for a long time now, perhaps they won’t in the future, but all we have is the current, and in the current, modern framework, they have billionaires, and don’t seem that different from capitalist nations. Don’t get me wrong, america is worse by basically every single metric, but china isn’t exactly doing communism perfectly, some would say they aren’t even doing socialism at all, considering they haven’t done any of the following:

            1. The workers don’t own the means of production
            2. Currency isn’t abolished
            3. There are still very clear class divisions
            4. They aren’t even vaguely close to withering away the state.

            They can still turn this around by doing literally any of those things, but because they haven’t, I think they fit the definition of state capitalist, currently anyway, we’ll see if things change, this is still much better than an outright capitalist country though, because at least they’re claiming they want to do those things.

            • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml
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              7 months ago

              Your whole point is terrible. Oppression from the state doesn’t define the economic system. I shouldn’t have to explain this.

              The Chinese state hasn’t been helping capital either. It allowed capital to enter parts of the country, monitored it, and when capital investable fucks up, the Chinese state has let said capital either die, or cannibalised it. How can you say they are helping capital in the comments of a news article about how they are letting the whole real estate sector die?

              As for your points of socialism:

              1. Workers do own the means of production in china. Not fully, but they do. Farming cooperatives alone comprise of more than 100 million households. That’s households, not individual workers. State owned enterprises also dominate the economy, and where they don’t, you typically have worker cooperatives (huwae is a worker coop), or private enterprises which have party members in the board. Truly private enterprises in China make up a remarkably small part of the economy.

              2. This point and point 3 are just the result of China being in an early stage of socialism. They have just very recently eradicated extreme poverty. You will start to see the points be addressed in the next few decades.

              3. You can’t wither away the state while in the early stages of socialism, or while the world’s biggest state is looking for any opportunity to destroy you.

              • Communist
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                7 months ago

                You misunderstand my point, I never claimed it was an economic system, it’s a state of affairs, it’s a matter of saying simply the oppressors have moved into the state.

                i reject the notion that the state is equivalent to or represents the workers interests, which makes them being state owned not equivalent to worker ownership as well.

                The source for them fighting for the workers interests seems to be “trust us, we totally will”

                edit: Furthermore I just got home and checked, 60% of the GDP is private businesses, 40% is state owned… that doesn’t seem like a socialist paradise to me. That sounds like state and private ownership over the means of production, and I will repeat, neither the state, nor the capitalists are the workers themselves.

            • Nimux2@lemmygrad.ml
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              7 months ago

              Socialism is literally the period of transition between capitalism and communism. It’s expected to still have currency, classes, and the state. Especially as communism isn’t an internal process. Class divisions doesn’t apply purely to internal divisions, just as the state’s role as wielder of violence for one class cannot be limited internally.

              You don’t wither away the state, that’s not even what “wither away” means grammatically. It’s an organic process that happens depending on way more factors than the will of the ruling class (wether the proletariat or the bourgeoisie). There is no communism button, and there never was.

              Starting to intentionally weaken the state, in a context where class divisons are strong both internally and externally, is probably the best way to get yourself invaded or couped.

              Beside, the workers do own the means of production in China. The communist party represents them exclusively. Last time I checked, out of the 2000 members of China’s national Congress, only 2 could be considered capitalists. Additionally the communist party has cells in every major company, and effectively all of the infrastructure and extraction industry is state-owned. Companies have no choice but to comply to will of the CPC, as the latter could simply prevent them from accessing necessary goods or services, and has demonstrated a willingness to execute rebellious CEOs.

              China is no less socialist than the USSR, though maybe you would call them state capitalist too, in which case I’m afraid we simply do not have the same understanding of socialism.

              Finally, let me end with a few appeals to authority.

              Lenin : Source “Within the limits indicated, however, this is not at all dangerous for socialism as long as transport and large-scale industry remain in the hands of the proletariat. On the contrary, the development of capitalism, controlled and regulated by the proletarian state (i.e., “state” capitalism in this sense of the term), is advantageous and necessary in an extremely devastated and backward small-peasant country (within certain limits, of course), inasmuch as it is capable of hastening the immediate revival of peasant farming. This applies still more to concessions: without denationalising anything, the workers’ state leases certain mines, forest tracts, oilfields, and so forth, to foreign capitalists in order to obtain from them extra equipment and machinery that will enable us to accelerate the restoration of Soviet large-scale industry.”

              “The dictatorship of the proletariat does not signify a cessation of the class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new weapons. This dictatorship is essential as long as classes exist, as long as the bourgeoisie, overthrown in one country, intensifies tenfold its attacks on socialism on an international scale.”

              Engel’s “On Authority”

              "Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

              Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."

              • Communist
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                7 months ago

                State owned =/= worker owned, even if the state claims to represent the workers, I see no evidence that it actually does over the states interests

                to me that means they have accomplished close to nothing in regards to socialism.

                Almost nothing is in the hands of the proletariat, 60% of the GDP is in private businesses, 40% in state-owned businesses, and I reiterate, the state is not the workers, they are two separate entities. I don’t see any reason to believe the states incentive structure is in some way based on the workers, the workers seem to have little to no say in anything.

                I’ve read the full texts of what you’ve linked in the past, and none of that strikes me as “the state should own everything” of course a violent revolution is violent, but in the end, if the state owns everything, the revolution has failed. Maybe someday the state will relinquish ownership, but it has not, and I see no reason to believe it will. The workers have no democratic control over the means of production, they have to hope the states interests align with theirs, and oftentimes it might, but it is not the same as them having control over the means of production, they have no real control over it.

                Can you give me one example of a time where china decided the workers interests were more important than the states interests? This would need to happen EVERY time, not just once, anyway, or you seem to misunderstand what dictatorship of the proletariat means.

                edit: I honestly don’t know if this is a valid source or not, but i’ve been looking into labor rights in china, and what i’m seeing is frankly horrifying.

                https://clb.org.hk/en/content/workers’-rights-and-labour-relations-china

                I can’t find a single source not saying that workers have no right to strike in china. Does that seem like that’s in the interest of the worker to you? They went out of their way to remove it from the constitution.

                • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml
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                  7 months ago

                  The chinese government has often had to make decisions in the past on the basis of pleasing foreign institutions and capital, otherwise, the reform and opening up strategy would have failed. It is only a very recent thing (like the past 4 or so years) that the Chinese economy has become strong enough that it can adopt a more independent path, which we are just beginning to see. And even then, china still doesn’t have things like food sovereignty. It has to tread very carefully.

                  Also your whole “the state does not represent the workers” thing is frankly, idiotic. It betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how either the chinese state or CPC works. The same goes for the historical reasons certain decisions were made.

                  If you really want to see whether or not the chinese state represents the workers. Just consider the fact that it lifted over 800 million people out of extreme poverty in 40 years. Without china in the stats, world poverty actually goes up, as is the natural tendency of capitalism. Also consider the fact that they went out of their way to develop clean energy resources for the whole world. Virtually all or the progress made in the 2010s on solar power and wind power (solar power became nearly 10 times cheaper) was because of the chinese government’s directions. They have gone so far in helping the green energy transition that recently, the Europeans have started to complain that china is overproduction green tech.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      7 months ago

      Basically, investors are going to lose a bunch of money as real-estate companies go under, and the government will take over the industry to make sure projects are completed and workers aren’t losing jobs.