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.

  • 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:

    https://rsf.org/en/ranking

    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?

    https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:50002:0::NO:50002:P50002_COMPLAINT_TEXT_ID:4341007

    Exactly which part of this page claims that creating a union is illegal in China?

    Re firewall - information blockade and surveillance != Worker control nor sovereign internet.

    That certainly is an opinion a person can have. My view is that there is no intrinsic connection between the two.

    https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9049298 One of thousands scholarly articles on this.

    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.

    Next youre gonna tell me IEEE is revisionist?

    Being a large journal doesn’t mean the research is credible, particularly not for an organization based in the imperial core.

    https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours 2200 working hours pr year is ridiculous!

    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:

    What evidence or examples can you provide to support your claim that workers exert significant control over the Chinese state? Are there specific policies, decisions, or instances where workers’ influence is evident?

    Feel free to look at this, it’s a very useful source if you’re actually interested in learning

    How do you reconcile the lack of press freedom and restrictions on organizing independent labor movements with the assertion that workers have control? Do you believe these limitations are inconsequential or have alternative explanations?

    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.

    How would you explain the extensive power and authority of the Chinese Communist Party within the political system, considering your claim that workers are in control? What role does the Party play in shaping policy decisions and governance? Are there any studies, scholarly research, or analyses that specifically support the idea that workers hold significant control over the Chinese state? What are the methodologies and findings of these studies?

    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.

    Can you elaborate on the role of other influential actors, such as the government bureaucracy, state-owned enterprises, and the military, in the Chinese state? How do these entities interact with workers in terms of decision-making and power dynamics?

    How would you account for China’s low rankings in democracy and freedom assessments conducted by international organizations? How do these rankings align with your assertion of workers’ control over the state?

    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.

    What are your thoughts on the social credit system, the Great Firewall of China, and other control mechanisms employed by the government? How do these mechanisms affect workers’ ability to influence state policies and decisions?

    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

    • spacedout
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      1 year ago

      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!