• Communist@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    That doesn’t mean that the political dominance of the proletariat was removed

    It was never there, the workers have no democratic control over anything, they have no way to force the state to do anything, they have literally no power whatsoever over the state. They can’t strike, they aren’t even legally allowed to complain since there’s no freedom of speech.

    Nor did the economy stop being directed.

    The economy being directed by someone other than the workers is the very problem.

    Now, you may feel as if a state-managed economy, or state ownership is not socialism, but nobody cares. You literally say “this is meaningless to me”. What are you, the fucking arbiter of socialism? Even Marx himself does not get this privilege.

    It doesn’t matter if nobody cares, the definition of socialism is worker ownership over the means of production, and china doesn’t have that, therefore they are not socialist, it’s really that unbelievably simple. Do you not actually believe in socialism?

    You say that the state is not the workers, and yet, any organization that the workers use to control the economy will not be the same thing as them. This is obvious. it doesn’t matter whether or not the workers control the economy through the state, through unions, through cooperatives, because none of those entities is equivalent to the workers themselves

    What makes them equivalent is democratic control over those things, if the workers can control those things democratically, then they control them. In china, the workers have literally no say whatsoever. They don’t even have the right to strike. The state is not equivalent to the workers because they are wholly separate entities, if it was a union, that would be the workers, because the workers can democratically control a union. Cooperatives would also be socialism, because yet again, that would be the workers controlling things.

    If the workers have no agency whatsoever, then they are not in control. The state is not even comprised of workers.

    It does not. Show me an example of Norway literally letting a sector constituting 20% of its GDP die a painful death because its not useful anymore.

    I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about with this, but it’s not really relevant anyway, socialism is when the workers control the means of production, not when the state does nice things.