Glory to the martyrs. Rest in peace, Nasrallah.

Mega mega mega THREAD

Dessalines has a large compilation of Frequently asked questions, including an article on workplace democracy.

But really, going point by point is probably worthless

I agree. Each point could be an entire conversation in and of themselves. I am not trying to dismiss your concerns or the points you raise.

I guess what I’m most curious about is, concretely, what actually separates China from a capitalist system?

The class that’s in power. Is the US Socialist because it has a state-run Post Office? No. The PRC is led by the CPC, which has a bottom-up and top-down organizational structure via the mass line. It has a market economy that it carefully manages, prunes, and allows to develop to the point of “harvesting,” where it increases ownership.

Surely it’s not just proportion of SOEs, or fucking Bismark was a socialist.

Correct, it would be anti-dialectical to purely look at snapshots of ownership and not trajectories and class dynamics.

The dictatorship of the proletariat" is going to be your answer, but I ask, “What separates China’s ‘DotP’ from a liberal democracy?” Surely, it’s not just their anti-corruption measures or then Deng really did destroy socialism and I guess Xi re-established it.

The practice of Whole Process People’s Democracy is a large factor, but it’s ultimately the sum of its parts. The CPC is a DotP, what separates it is who is in power, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. We see the effects of this in privitization vs nationalization, large infrastructure projects or private contracts, an improvement in real wages and democracy for workers or restrictions.

So far, it appears that, especially in the last decade or so, these trends have been rapidly moving in the favor and direction of the Working Class, not the Bourgeoisie.

I don’t know, it just looks to me like a state where the power is held by public businesses rather than private ones in order to keep its sovereignty. To be clear, I’d like to see it otherwise, I get no satisfaction from what I say and it was nice cheering for the emerging dominant power thinking that it was not merely historically progressive but actually represented major progress in world socialism, but ultimately I realized that it was mainly what I wanted to believe and soon came to see Deng as being just a massively more competent Khrushchev, who had the refinement in his approach to praise Mao while in practice being everything that Mao had warned China he was for many years.

China is an incredibly complex system, and I won’t say your concerns aren’t valid. I recommend reading The Long Game and its Contradictions and China Has Billionaires.

It seems perverse to me to say that Deng “gave China what it needed” by depriving countless millions of people of their needs.

It seems bad-faith to interpret my comment as such. What would you have had the PRC do? Poverty has been dramatically decreased to outright eliminated in the PRC in no small part thanks to Deng’s strategy of inviting foreign Capital. The productive forces developed dramatically, pruned and managed by the CPC. It is not a reach to say that had the PRC continued with the Gang of Four’s line that “it is better to be poor under Socialism than rich under Capitalism,” the PRC may not have been able to reach its current standards, metrics, and level of influence, or would have risked outright war with the West had the West not been so thoroughly captured industrially.

I have no interest in the broader conversational context, mostly because I think it’s hopeless to try to talk about, at least for me.

Then disengage, comrade. Don’t smear my comments with bad-faith interpretations. The CPC has openly stated numerous times that Dengism was Marxism-Leninism applied to the time of Deng, and has served its purpose, so that now Xi Jinping Thought can represent Marxism-Leninism applied to modern conditions. Deng served a vital role, and while he made miscalculations and errors, he did so in reaction to the miscalculations and errors of Mao and the Gang of Four. Just as we know that Mao and the Gang of Four served their purposes as well, and applied Marxism-Leninism to their conditions, liberating China and achieving mass equality and a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and a doubling in life expectancy and an end to famine.

No Marxist in history has been perfect, all have made errors in judgement, we must learn and appreciate what worked and analyze how they fit into the broader Socialist trend.

So beautifully rotund… and it squats!!!

Fuck, and I cannot stress this enough, the absolute steaming pile of shit that is the NYT rag.

I like to let the mods flounder on themselves and convince libs that I’m in the right. Let them do my battles for me.

Yes, this is also true, hence why the CPC is moving more towards the left, as they reverted too far to the right. You test, readjust, and test again, and readjust again. This is the path of dialectical materialist knowledge.

Deng gave China what it needed at the time, which the Gang of Four did not. Undeniably, there is a bourgeois class, but the CPC appears to be retaining control, and metrics are improving. We can’t erase Deng’s achievements for miscalculating, just like we can’t erase Mao’s achievements for miscalculating.

Overall, though, it’s important to recognize that this was in response to an absurd claim that China is “Communist in name only” and that the presence of a stock market and billionaires means the system is Capitalist. By that same logic, the US is Socialist, because it has a Post Office.

Yep. It’s peak liberalism, they keep rules to selectively enforce yet pretend they are tolerant.

Some are amazing zingers, the Soviet America vignette is amazing and occupies my thoughts

All of them are going to Stein, who is both on the ballot and can’t be uncounted due to Georgia’s 20 state rule. This doesn’t help the dems, just damage their rep among liberals sympathetic to Socialism.

Death to the entity.

I hate admitting it, but same

Though exposure to Marxist-Leninists was the biggest factor in making the leap

Thanks! I try my best, even though I’m not nearly as well read as I’d like to be, but I think I have enough of an understanding to do more good than bad in a room of liberals, haha.

Jesus Christ, that’s worse than I even thought.

Guess those comrades will move to Jill Stein.