On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
Well IMHO both USSR and China shows how gaining workers control and keeping it, or moreso making significant headway towards communism, is just much more complicated. Representative worker ownership of the means of production through the state doesn’t have a compelling track record. I think it’s dishonest, reactionary and anti intellectual to laugh off arguments like that of comrade spood from the screenshot above.
Edit: checked out my claim on calorie intake and discovered it was dubious. Removed, but letting the main argument stay.
The USSR was eventually compromised, so it technically failed in that sense, but how is China an example of failing to retain worker control? If you’re claiming that capitalists control China’s government, I’d challenge you to provide some evidence
Lack of press freedom, organization freedom, social credit system, great firewall of China, over 2000 work hours pr year (France has 1500), severely low scores in democracy rankings. This doesn’t smell much like worker control, more like authoritarianism. But then again, I’m very much from the West. Happy to be educated on my shortcomings in understanding 👍
Compared to what country? What exactly are workers not allowed to say or write in China that is allowed in the West?
Compared to what country? There are hundreds of protests every day across China
You mean the “system” that’s been debunked many times by various Western capitalist media outlets?
Maintaining Internet sovereignty from the imperial core and having workers in control of the government are not mutually exclusive
Citation needed
Whose rankings, and why do you consider them relevant?
The burden of proof is on you, since you are making extraordinary claims. No matter, here:
https://rsf.org/en/ranking china nr 173
https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:50002:0::NO:50002:P50002_COMPLAINT_TEXT_ID:4341007 one of many cases. Are you allowed to start a union in China? Doesn’t seem like it.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/FreedomOfInformationChina/great-firewall-technical-perspective/index.html Re firewall - information blockade and surveillance != Worker control nor sovereign internet.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9049298 One of thousands scholarly articles on this. Next youre gonna tell me IEEE is revisionist?
https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours 2200 working hours pr year is ridiculous!
You’re not really convincing me that China is a good example of worker control. Let me ask you something:
Talking to liberals like this is just a massive waste of time and energy. “Why is China ranked low on democracy indices made in the largest carceral state in the world?” Same old talking points regarding social credit. All these “thousands” of articles cite one Chinese source and the rest is a circlejerk of western authors. No news of any person being targeted or denied credit because of this. No real world ramifications documented. Just yellow peril fearmongering about how the sinister Chinese are watching your every move. Please don’t come back here.
Who hurt you? Your info seems false - this is the top result if you Google Scholar search “social credit system china”. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/223109/1/Econsoc-NL-21-1-04.pdf . You’re saying Max Planck Institute is just western circlejerk and none of the sources cited are Chinese? I can’t see the need to be so incredibly hostile to someone who might have just as much or more praxis behind them than yourself. If none of the available results from regular internet searches are correct, then don’t you have a responsibility to educate rather than push people away? Or perhaps you are in love with being an enlightened minority?
Your imperialist mouthpiece sources only confirm one thing: Imperialists HATE china. This confirms that china is on the correct track.
The firewall? Imperialists hate it.
Workers in charge? Imperialists hate it.
Real democracy? Imperialists hate it.
State-owned enterprises? The usa MIC hates it.
The “international organizations”? Owned by usa or its lackeys.
Citation needed.
an excellent graph
Which extraordinary claims have I made, exactly? That China isn’t a horrible dystopia? The burden of proof isn’t on me here, but I’ll bite:
RSF, the organization that receives significant funding from the NED (an offshoot of the CIA) and various other imperialist organizations? Frankly, even if we ignore that part, why should anyone care about some tier list that doesn’t even include justifications?
Exactly which part of this page claims that creating a union is illegal in China?
That certainly is an opinion a person can have. My view is that there is no intrinsic connection between the two.
From the article: “Data and algorithms for China’s social credit system (SCS) are a topic of great current interest. Nonetheless, few details regarding China’s SCS have been officially released. What is clear, however, is that China’s social credit system uses broader criteria than Western systems to rank and rate entities. The system is expected to operate through a wider range of mechanisms at the public and private spheres in order to assess the trustworthiness of individuals, businesses, and professional sectors with a goal to reward good behaviors and punish bad behaviors. A full implementation SCS is expected to have wide-ranging impacts on the lives of individuals and organizations than Western-style credit systems. The SCS can be considered an instrument of an overarching ideology that simply reflects the interests of the CCP leaders.”
In other words, a bunch of assumptions. Truly an incredible scholarly article.
Being a large journal doesn’t mean the research is credible, particularly not for an organization based in the imperial core.
From the page: “Annual hours are based on estimates of weekly working hours and weeks worked.”
More guesswork, then. Do you have an actual primary source for this claim, or just opaque analyses from petit bourgeois Westerners?
Comments on post-edit questions:
Feel free to look at this, it’s a very useful source if you’re actually interested in learning
Both of these things have yet to be proven. There’s no complete freedom of speech, including press freedom, in any country that has ever existed. I’d challenge you to find me the equivalent of Julian Assange who’s being tortured in China right now.
If you mean the Communist Party of China, they’re elected by the proletariat using a bottom-up structure (everyone votes in local elections, the elected representatives vote in higher-level elections, etc.). See the link I mentioned above.
These “international organizations” aren’t very international considering they’re based in Western countries and controlled by Western capitalists. I give zero credibility to claims made without any evidence, especially if they’re working for a fascist or imperialist cause.
I have yet to see any evidence that the social credit system exists, so there’s no point in commenting on that.
The firewall is very good and should be implemented by any country that takes its sovereignty seriously, considering the role of various Amerikan social media companies in coups and colour revolutions around the world; those who can read other languages and want to access foreign servers are fully capable of doing so with a VPN. I have yet to see an example of it having a negative impact on workers’ ability to influence the government for any domestic issues.
I hope you’re actually asking in good faith; if so, you’ll have a look at the GitHub page I linked. If you’re going to avoid it and post more citation-free articles from bourgeois media outlets, I don’t personally have the patience to keep replying
Thank you for the thorough reply. As stated earlier, I am open to learn, and do respect your time and effort. It is much appreciated, and my one and only goal for posting here was to check out whether serious discussions on communism could occur here. In contrast to the contribution of m53, you give me faith in that. My background is from a western communist party, where some of us read Marx extensively. I like the writings of Lenin a lot, most of them I devoured on a beach holiday in Greece at the ripe old age of 17. Some twenty years later I have had a tendency towards eurocommunism and more libertarian Marxist writers, like Zizek and Harvey. So you know where I’m coming from, and that I hope for comradely debate.
I was sad to learn about NEDs tentacles stretching into RSF, but not surprised. Although, after accusing me of lacking citations (not media outlets mind you), your own answers are not bogged down in sources either. A lazy debattant might read their Wikipedia entry and accept that it was sub 1% of their total budget, back in the early 2000s. I know I’m asking a lot, but do you know if they compromised truly? Any sources? I’m asking both because I know journalists who are engaged with the organization, and am wary to people dismissing facts they don’t like as burgoise slander (in generally sceptical to all claims of desinformation). Having read a little bit of Latin American history, I am not unfamiliar with the massive propaganda apparatus of American capital.
Thanks for the Dessalines GitHub link. A lot of info! I will have to read and research a bit further before I reply. A first reaction is that much of this is social media, not really scholarly articles. But I’ll get back to you after having read up!
Michael Parenti quote.
Above, you seemed to suggest that you agree with the need for material analysis over idealism. You seem to be saying the same here, by saying what MLs already agree with: that state power in the USSR and China was/is complicated.
But then you say:
You responded to GrainEater about that, but I’ll add here that revolutionary states run by Marxist Leninists are the only ones to have made any headway at all. The track record is at least 5-nil against all other revolutionary ideologies and that’s only counting self-proclaimed ML AES states that still exist. These are Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, DPRK. A materialist analysis of these states may lead you to change your mind.
This isn’t counting the massive, overwhelmingly positive contribution to humanity made by the USSR in it’s short existence. Defeating Nazi Germany. Ending Feudalism in Russia and elsewhere. Supporting third world liberation movements and helping to ‘end’ colonialism. Raising the living standards of it’s inhabitants. Providing an impetus for western social democracies to implement a welfare state (how fast these have deteriorated since the Berlin Wall fell!).
The problem with Spood’s comment is that it doesn’t really make sense. Do they mean the workers need to control the state that controls the means of production? If so, there’s little or no disagreement.
Or that the workers need to control the means of production directly? If so, what does that mean? Does this mean worker co-ops? Or something else? If co-ops or something else, it’s not Marxism. Plus, what happens to the logic of capital without a central authority, i.e. a state, to organise these units of workers? How do workers abolish the relations of capital (markets, competition, etc) if all they own is their own workplace? If they own more than the place they work, what structure are they using that isn’t a state by another name?
If it is the latter (direct control), then it could instead mean simply that communism will only be achieved when the workers control the means of production. This is (1) a trite tautology with which no ML will disagree, and (2) either (a) only one side of the story or (b) anti-dialectical, and (3) not mutually exclusive with the workers controlling the means if production through the state.
As Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, communism is the process of overturning capitalism.
From a dialectical perspective, which treats the world as interrelated contradictory processes rather than static things, a communist revelation must be a contradictory process. One can’t claim to be an historical materialist and then refuse to treat revolution – the focus of all revolutionaries – in an anti-dialectical way. To reduce communism and revolution as a status that can pop into existence is to deny that these are, again, interrelated, contradictory processes.
Communism is not just the end goal or the ‘end’ end goal. Communism is the next stage of human social development, which will happen over a period of time. After that, humans will have to resolve other contradictions and society will develop further. Or not. Maybe humans are doomed to strive for communism forever. (Not my view.)
Either way, communism is both the name for the struggle and the goal that revolutionaries are struggling for. If this is what Spood means when they say that communists should never stop striving, every ML would likely agree.
If that’s not what they mean, they seem to be making an empty left-communist slogan that means we either go straight to 23rd century communism in one fell swoop or don’t bother trying.
Slogan-making like that is anti-intellectual for relying on models that don’t account for the fact that reactionaries are armed to the teeth, violent, and merciless. Thus also dishonest by claiming knowledge that excludes salient facts. And reactionary for suggesting a path that will inevitably lead to failure and for criticising the revolutionaries who are actually doing revolution rather than waiting for a fairy godmother to wave the magic revolution wand.
In sum, it’s idealist and anti-Marxist to reject the concept of and need for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
An enlightening answer, thought provoking, thanks. I still feel there are problems with your analysis, as it so easily glosses over the bureaucracy, the imperialism (e.g. origin of tankies), lack of democracy/press/individual freedom, exploitative economies, and several other issues that have/are still plaguing these countries. Assembly line production of pointless gadgets and bombs still sucks whether you’re in China or elsewhere. And I think such labor should be rebelled against, but I worry you might hit me over the head with some theory, and tell me to pipe down, because its all for the good of the cause, historical development, or whatever. Political pluralism, freedom of speech and the protection of civil liberties seems to be a lower priority somehow in the ML interpretation forwarded here. What do you think?
It seems attempts to bring any of these up here is doomed to face strict denial and stupid ridicule, see just how quickly OurWorldInData got stamped as guesswork although it’s clearly a synthesis of a lot scholarly work (which again doesn’t bode well for a society one might wish this community was fostering). I was trying to point out in what comrade spood was saying that there is a need to further develop the strategy towards communism, because the ML approaches, that I admit has made headway, also bring with them problems that to me at least appear endemic. It’s so easy to blame external enemies for those things, but does it bring us any closer to bettering a revolutionary strategy or adapting it to the current conditions? Despite the attacks, and so on…
Anyways, it’s getting late, I’m afraid this reply is not doing your answer justice, but I’ll end on thanking you again for the attempt at education of me and anyone else who might stumble upon this. Gn