my family calls it complaining and so do i despite my therapist’s efforts to get me to stop calling it so; i bet that guy WISHES he could roll his eyes as hard as my family does every time i do it. lol

i suspect that facism is going to force me to move back into the country that my parents immigrated from if trump gets his way and in the same way that incidents like operation wetback deported millions of american citizens.

I mean I would argue saying “party in charge of” is a bit much, while they are the Majority party in total, and the majority party in the coalition, there are 8 parties in the coalition, so its not like they are the only party, instead they are the largest party in the PRC

This one isn’t just staying ignorant, they’re loudly proclaiming their ignorance as if they’re proud of it. Yikes.

I first read it in Warhammer 40000 lore, how nice for libs to be uncritically internalising over the top satirical nazism.

Hey thanks for making the effort. You are clearly more passionate about this than I am. And you clearly consider today’s China a case of “existing socialism”. I do not. And I’m surprised that a number of people still do. Indeed the Trotskyist left and other related currents in the West have always had to deal with the paradox of advocating communism while at the same time opposing most if not all regimes that claimed to be communist. On the other hand more traditional communists - some would call them Stalinists if we’re using labels - who would advocate for regimes that many considered oppressive and were happy to see fall (including everyone who considered such regimes to be a degeneration of the original revolutionary potential). Personally I don’t feel I have a big stake in this. I am more and more thinking that these are experiments that largely failed no matter how you look at it, and hope to see new movements that will update their repertoire, learn from the failings, and succeed better. I am not sure what form or shape such movements will take. But am also not betting on capitalism not leading to the destruction of the world sooner or later. When I sometimes appear to defend China it is because I do not think that western-style capitalism and liberal democracy are the only ways that capitalism can function.

I don’t know of any person called Engles who would be significant in this context, so I can’t tell you if there is one you should know about. The Engels who said what you quoted above, also said - literally in the sentence preceding your quote:

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.

As always, context matters. And I’ll trust the context created by the words and interpretations of respected historians way more than I’ll trust some randos on Lemmy who only excel at selective quoting.

The countries were the German Democratic Republic, where I was born; and Cuba, where I lived from 1985 to 1990.

And what are experiences? By all accounts what I grew up in was normal, because I didn’t know any different. We grew up like any kids really, playing, riding bikes, watching TV, getting up to mischief. I have a lot of good memories from both the GDR and Cuba, and even getting started on them would take me hours.

Sure, we knew about the West. Some of my friends had relatives in the West and occasionally got packages with sweets and other things. We watched Western TV and were exposed to Western toys, comics and music, to a degree. In Cuba there were a lot of Western movies and series on TV. But we also knew that you could get into trouble for being too open about that.

But after it all came down, we learned a lot about what went on. The oppression, the secret police, the lack of basic freedoms.

Once in art class, we were tasked with drawing something we had seen or experienced. Just a short time prior to that, we had gone to see a well known boat lift east of Berlin. The boat that came through the lift was a freight barge flying the West German flag. So that’s what I drew. Only years later my parents told me that they had subsequently been summoned by the school and had to explain that it was nothing more sinister than that - a child drawing a picture of something they had seen.

Another thing that struck me as odd at the time was this. Most of the socialist countries we knew as ‘friendly’ had state-run youth organisations. Ours were called the pioneers. Once there was an afternoon activity with a little quiz, and one of the quiz questions was ‘name three friendly youth organisations’. So I named three that I remembered from my pioneer calendar - and one of them was Finnish. My quiz came back with the correction ‘friendly youth organisations’.

I will always remember and defend the good aspects about the countries I grew up in. By the same token I will always vociferously criticise the bad things, and anyone who wants to try them again.

If China is so great

Are we having a discussion of geopolitics or a schoolyard gossip fight?

then why does it feel the need to dictate over Hong Kong

Why do you have strong opinions about this topic when you clearly do not know any history about China?

China, more specifically the Qing Dynasty, was colonized (mostly by the British) through a series of imperialist ventures thst included the Opium Wars. The result was the designation of Hong Kong, already an existing Chinese city, as a British imperial trade hub where resources and wealth extracted from the rest of the country was traded, as well as later serving as a finsncial hub for the rest of the imperialized region. But, to put it simply, the British stole Hong Kong in 1841-1843.

When China threw off all of its imperial masters in its national liberation fight against the Japanese, it then had a civil war due to the KMT attacking the communists. Obviously, the communists won. As part of this, they reclaimed Hong Kong just a little over 100 years after it was stolen, but using the legal definition that had been imposed by the British, who had given themselves a 100-year lease that ended in 1997.

Hong Kong is a Chinese city that was colonized by the British and is being reintegrated, as yiu would expect from a sovereign country. You claimed elsewhere that you are against Western hegemony, but this is a crystal clear example of anticolonial action and you’re siding with the colonists that write breathless propaganda about how unfair it is that China is governing a Chinese city.

and Taiwan

Again, just basic history. When the communists were reconsolidating their country, they were also expelling KMT forces. At the end, the KMT looted wealth and cultural artifacts and fled to Taiwan, where they set up a military dictatorship and began oppressing the indigenous people there. The PRC was set to invade Taiwan and finish their civil war, but the US set up a blockade and the PRC opted to vow a later return rather than force the Americans out. The first question you should have is why the US was meddling in their civil war.

Both the PRC and the KMT have long held that the civil war has never ended, with the PRC claiming Taiwan and the KMT claiming all of msinlsnd China and also Mongolia. The PRC holds a consistent line of reunification being the end goal.

The US uses Taiwan to harass the PRC and wants to use it to escalate tensions. It may even try to turn it into another Ukraine, doing everything it can to push China over red lines militarily until it finally decides that Taiwan is an intolerable threat just a few miles off its coast and very close to Shenzhen. If that happened, would you yet again go after the target if US imperialism like your masters tell you to, calling it an unprovoked aggression? Would you have new names for people that correctly blame the US for using their proxies as puppets to harass other nations? The US is already trying to derisk from Taiwan by exportinh its chip production facilities but it isn’t going well because the US is so finsncislized that it can’t barely build productive capacity at even 10X the cost of elsewhere.

Does China have gay marriage?

This is another example of why someone would call you a liberal. Pinkwashing imperialist takes. What is your logic on what is permitted to be done to other countries if they don’t have a legal recognition of gay marriage? On what basis do other cultures need to mirror your own preferences in order for them to be free of your chauvinism? Any real county will have reactionary elements, some old, some new. Your country, and you, have reactionary elements.

There is a populsr struggle for gay marriage in China and it is going pretty well. It is mostly jist old people who are against it. You should exoect to see it legalized in the next decade or so. But you will have had nothing to do with thst, as your contribution here is to sneer at the entire country for not doing what this Westerner baby leftist demands.

Incidentally, if the CPC did force through legalized gay marriage and it elicited some negative response, like protests, you can be certain this would be characterized as an authoritarian overreach and how dare they disregard the will of the people. Some “socialists”, huh!?

Trans rights perhaps?

China has better trans rights than your country, most likely. It has less transphobia to begin with, had major out and truly popular trans celebrities before the US did, and provides gender-affirming care of all kinds in a way that is truly accessible for the vast majority of people. Compare this to the US where trans kids are often exiled by their families and given no support, leading to high rates of homelessness, hard drug use, and death.

China does not have the same culture wars as the US, it doesn’t have the same need for capital to create and maintain marginalization to distract from material decline. China is materially advancing and ending extreme poverty.

I’m not saying China is as bad as the West claims it is. I’m just saying it’s not something to get wild about.

But you don’t seem to know anything about China. Why have an opinion at all? Why not hold your tongue until you have done some reading or talked nicely to Chinese people?

It’s a nation state (a far too big one at that), which are by definition tools of oppression.

Sure, but what of it? Do you think we are in a position to have a societu free of oppression, including nation states? With you and whose army?

Socialists must build revolution in the real world, with what is materially in front of us. Tell us how you would, say, end China’s status as a nation state without it just getting immediately recolonized, probably by the country in which you live, work, and to which you contribute.

The nuances of the PRC’s desire for a One China policy largely stem from the Marxist theory of Nations, along with a desire to throw off all western colonizers. Without understanding the depths of the “century of humiliation” you can’t hope to understand the desire for a unified China.

Secondly, the PRC’s process means social change comes slowly, but it has been improving. Notably, Xin Jing, a transgender woman, is one of China’s top celebrities. Change is slow, but is happening at different rates across different sections of the PRC. Social change comes from improvements in productive forces and focusing on people as a priority.

Thirdly, nobody is saying the PRC is Anarchist, but your insistence that everyone agree with you saying the government is by definition a tool of oppression despite 90%+ approval rates stands at direct odds with the people themselves. Like it or not, you must face the reality that it is Marxism that has brought great improvements to China’s conditions, and these improvements are continuing at a rapid pace, and thus has widespread support.

If China is so great then why does it feel the need to dictate over Hong Kong and Taiwan?

It doesn’t. Taiwan and Hong Kong ARE China. If anything the high level of autonomy that China allows reactionary regional governments to have is what should be criticized.

Does China have gay marriage? Trans rights perhaps?

China allows for civil unions for LGBTQ. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1162943.shtml It made civil unions legal across the nation before USA made gay marriage legal in every state. Like all places in the world (some more than others) China has a long way to go on LGBTQ rights. But that’s just it, China is improving along those lines, while the US is rapidly regressing. China is improving with trans rights and has been punishing companies that violate them. So yes, we should absolutely support China in continuing to move in the correct direction.

It’s a nation state (a far too big one at that), which are by definition tools of oppression.

Lol, by whose definition? A state is only as good or bad as the ruling class that wields it. A bourgeois (capitalist) state will always be oppressive. As a socialist state (and China is a socialist state), the CPC uses its power to suppress the constant attempts of the bourgeois to oppress the working class.

again, do some self crit

the point was that many anarchists are indistinguishable from centrists when it comes to actual geopolitical issues, because they have internalized western propaganda about the West’s rivals

propaganda is not just lies (though some of it is actual lies), but emphasis

nothing you’ve written in this thread is a genuine engagement with people who try to refute western propaganda about the west’s rivals, and you’ve written nothing that would indicate that you’re not a liberal who just likes anarchist aesthetics with a vague handwavy criticism of “nation states”

This might be a hard pill to swallow, but Putin is largely popular among Russians for assisting with throwing out the Western Capitalists that bought the various slices of the former USSR after “Shock Doctrine” killed 7 million people with the re-introduction of Capitalism, and the CPC has an over 90% approval rate. Political opposition is largely limited because both governments have more support among their citizenry than Western governments do.

I’m genuinely apologizing because I’m only skimming this as I’m getting sleepy. and it’s a lot to go through. I can tell you took effort so apologies.

No worries, I am not holding you to a schedule. Please take any amount of time to reply. I also won’t take it personally if you don’t reply.

It actually isn’t much effort, I am very fast at writing.

Re: West also bad, at times worse

I know and I agree!

Well that isn’t what I said, though. What I said about the West is that there is addressing the false perception of greater “free speech” in the West, which is, again, largely just chauvinism. You do not enjoy greater speech, you are just such a non-entity in terms of threatening the ruling interests. This is because those ruling interests keep you, along with the wider public, weak, docile, and hating their same enemies.

I am also highlighting the ruling interests, not the government. This is because in these places with allegedly more “free speech”, international capital is dominant and has control over your everyday lives. It controls whether you can house and feed yourself and it censors on a constant basis. Restricting yourself solely to government censorship is a rhetorical trick used by capitalists to pretend that corporate control over life doesn’t count as oppression. Where is the comparison to private censorship, where the “free press” is actually a corporate-censored press? Have you done a comparison between the accuracy of claims from the SCMP and NYT? Just pick Palestine, see how it serves you.

And in the case of China, it is for CCP interests. Holding elections every now and then doesn’t translate to the dictatorship of the proletariat as envisioned.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not specified as anything other than the proletarian class oppressing the bourgeois class because they gained power through revolution. The PRC regularly executes billionaires and uniquely reroutes funds to its people, and its poorest, to build material well-being for all, not just the richest, and certainly not just the higher-ups in the party.

By that logic, US democracy would be a dictatorship of the proletariat as well, since they hold elections every now and then.

The dictatorship of the proletariat does not have any governing structure specified whatsoever. It is something predicted by Marx to have certain attributes that are more about political economics, like using monopoly industry that is already centrally planned and wielding it for the good of the proletarians. Something that China has often done and is the explicit communist logic behind their conveyor belt strategy for requiring companies to have more party and government participation as they grow larger and more monopolistic.

I do not consider america really federal, since there is massive power concentrated at the top. Same for other “federal” states like Germany

Then I have no idea what your meaning is.

Why does it make you suspicious? Do you have legitimate grounds for this? Under the CPC, extreme poverty has been eliminated, and China went from being one of the poorest countries on the planet to a rising superpower in less than a century. When you look at the real, material change in people’s lives in as short a timespan as this, it’s understandable why they have a high approval rate.

Secondly, I don’t know what you’re referring to as “justification for violence and oppression.”

90% support makes the whole thing more suspicious to me than anything.

True democracy is when a president has a 37% approval rating.

Alright I’m just joshing with you, but since you’re an anarchist you do agree with me on the following, right?

• The Western hegemony is dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It suppresses voices that dissent from neoliberal dogmas and the military brinkmanship of NATO. It often violently clamps down grassroots movements like BLM or the Free Palestine protests. The Western parliaments consist of different flavours of neoliberalism, neoconservatism and fascism, and not a real representation of an actual “marketplace of ideas”, just a theatre of so-called politics.

Widespread public support for a government is alien to the mind of the liberal

If the evidence shows few people support the government, you believe it; if the evidence shows many people support the government, that itself is evidence of government threatening its people. This is an unfalsifiable position; you’ve just decided you don’t like the government no matter what the evidence says.

The 90% figure is also from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Do you think they had the wool pulled over their eyes?

90% support makes the whole thing more suspicious to me than anything.

So you don’t want democracy?

What do you want then?

We need to build resilient networks that can slowly replace oppressive centralized power.

hmm, maybe a truly massive party with many cadres around the country? perhaps? maybe?

I advocate for building strong local communities, that are heavily interconnected.

Are you 100% sure there’s nothing like this in China?

so how to do this neat leftcom kind of stuff, without some kind of centralization, when also you simultaneously need to

• modernize your country, literally everything from agriculture, to healthcare and heavy industry and so on
• defend yourself from antagonistic countries
• defend yourself from giant multinational corpos who’d jump at the chance to plunder your resources
• defend yourself from fascist/monarchist elements inside your country

I mean in actual practice in a real historical scenario?

lmao. I unironically believe this though.

The more you concentrate power, the harder it is to keep bad actors from abusing said power.

What makes you think the power over those billion+ people is all “concentrated”? Could it be (gasp!) that the power is largely distributed among those people who overwhelmingly support that government? This is just capitalist-realism-brained misunderstanding of how communist parties work.

Most Americans approve of capitalism. Does that make it good too?

No, but that’s certainly not what makes it bad.

Most Americans approve of capitalism. Does that make it good too?

because “capitalism” and “communism” are loaded words

consider this though:

A year before the presidential election, three-quarters of Americans (76%) believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and the leading Democratic and Republican candidates are viewed broadly unfavorably, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll. Only 23% of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction.

When asked whether things in their country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track, 90 percent of the respondents from China taking part in this Ipsos survey said they were heading in the right direction.

You misunderstood me. I’m saying that the US is an oligarchy as well.

Every capitalist country is an oligarchy. The term is used selectively for Russia, and you have specifically focused on its use re: Russia in this discussion.

the first part is your opinion

My correct opinion. Do you believe you are the first baby leftist I’ve come across that harbors these kinds of views? I am always part of the political education group in any org I am in. We have to root people out who are very confident in their chauvinism and isolate them from the others in some way, as they are very disruptive on top of being wrong. This is also why various baby-leftist-only spaces are so completely useless, they spend their time chasing phantoms and fighting people that do good work. This is also why the feds have historically supported Trotskyists and certain anarchist formations.

and the second part is not true.

It is true, I know where these claims come from. I recognize them.

I’m not being condescending, and I’m being equally patient replying to people who are just trolling

You are repeatedly broad-brushing “tankies” with bullshit and placing yourself in a position to argue with others despite clearly not doing the work of learning about the topic first. A cool guy once said, “no investigation, no right to speak”.

If you have to compare RT to the NYT, that says more than enough

I don’t know what that means.