[Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

(Thread IKs: dead gay comedy forums)

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

some weird poo poo itt

anyway i'm part of our neighbourhood's tenant organization group that fights landlords and evictions. the deck is completely stacked for landlords in this trash place, someone linked us this vid from an eviction hearing and lmao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bBPCj03zKE

# ¿ May 18, 2021 04:05

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 21:32

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Brain Candy posted:

complete psycho poo poo

the government here is planning to/already has make it illegal to share records of eviction hearings and to fine people 25000 dollars if they do it because the adjudicators have gone full mask off and stopped pretending they're there to do anything than rubber stamp whatever landlords want.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 04:30

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

The framework is also a bad way of viewing the world. If you take as a given that everything is class struggle / material conditions, you get absurd bullshit.

Like take ISIS for example. If Marx�s framework were valid, we would expect ISIS to be secular communists. But they�re not just motivated by class struggle, they actually are insane religious nuts.

?????????

# ¿ May 18, 2021 18:02

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

because establishing an islamic state has nothing to do with responding to material conditions

yeah it does. the rise of isis corresponded directly with the collapse of state power and functional governance in large regions of iraq and syria. isis combined an on the ground movement with the military expertise of ex-baathist military officers and materiel and supply from friendly parties in turkey etc. + funding from oil sales.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 18:11

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

Then class interests can explain any hypothetical, and it stops being useful or meaningful. You�re taking it as a base assumption instead of an observed fact.

i have no idea what you're trying to say. are you asking "why isn't ISIS communist?" if so:

refugees and peoples in wartime have had their societies completely violently destroyed at the behest of, or by, parties like the USA and the kingdom of saudi arabia and are looking for stability, security and food. groups like the taliban or ISIS could provide (or were in the process of providing) governance, in part because of organizational backing by regional partners (for eg. pakistan) who would never in a million years back a secular communist movement. in addition, the communist movement had been thoroughly destroyed in those regions with the aid of anti-communist international members the USA and the kingdom of saudi arabia.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 18:35

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

But instead it would have us say, �I will find the material conditions even if I have to invent them.� For example the explanations that religious fundamentalism is a consequence of imperialism. If you do this, then your theory can explain any hypothetical, and it�s useless and invalid.

religious fundamentalism exists in many places, but it is not necessarily the motive force for resistance everywhere. it is in afghanistan, for example, because communist left forces in the country were physically annihilated with aid from the united states of america. fundamentalist forces had their full support with financial backing from KSA, and on the ground military support and havens from pakistan

# ¿ May 18, 2021 19:03

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

Being totally hosed up by war and poverty in Russia and being totally hosed up by war and poverty in Iraq.

if your argument is that Marxism is a failure because it wouldn't predict similar outcomes from Russia 1917 and Iraq 2013, then every single analytical framework, and indeed all of human thought and rationality, would be a failure

# ¿ May 18, 2021 19:45

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

Then the theory has no predictive power.

this is the most breathtakingly brainless thing i've ever seen.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 20:12

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past

# ¿ May 18, 2021 21:25

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

Marx lays out some stuff and you either agree with it or you don�t, but you can�t predict anything with it or falsify it. You can use it as a lens to analyze history, and you get some wonky results. The laws of motion are made up.

No offense but you guys sound like Biblical literalists or literature analysis people or something, not critical thinkers.

That's true. A real critical thinker would say that russia in 1917 and iraq in 2013 would end up the same way.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 21:30

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

this started funny but ended up pretty tiresome. don't we have a thread ik or something or is it only for enforcing r-word useage

# ¿ May 18, 2021 21:32

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

grieving for Gandalf posted:

drat y'all are still letting that guy be the main character, huh

this forum needs a beecocking feature

# ¿ May 18, 2021 21:52

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

Yeah religious fundamentalists are pretty crazy. Why are you guys pretending this isn�t the case? You�re starting to sound like those whacky lib grad students someone alluded to a while back.

gently caress off freak

# ¿ May 18, 2021 21:54

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

StashAugustine posted:

No beer is kind of a drag but sure whatever

good news

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khamr

There are some Muslim jurists (particularly of the Hanafi school) who take the concept of khamr literally and forbid only grape-based (or date-based) alcoholic beverages, allowing those made with other fruits, grains, or honey. This is, however, a minority opinion.[5][6]

# ¿ May 18, 2021 22:21

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

i remember celot posting back in the day and i don't recall him being a race scientist, either a hacked/bought account or bernie sanders losing broke his brain

# ¿ May 18, 2021 22:47

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Celot posted:

I�ve been here since before LF. What�s with the weird need to pretend religious fundamentalists are sane?

thats easy - cultural marxism and my "grad student sensibilities" have driven me away from the true path of race science and phrenological studies as the motive force of history

# ¿ May 18, 2021 23:00

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

StashAugustine posted:

Iirc theres a legend that a bunch of Kievan Rus were on the verge of converting to Islam until they explained the whole "no booze" thing

now that's materialism

# ¿ May 18, 2021 23:18

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

gradenko_2000 posted:

I''m sorry but did anyone point out within the last 300 posts that there actually was an uprising in Iraq in the form of Abd al-Karim Qasim and the 14 July Revolution motivated by "material conditions" and sought to nationalize key economic resources and industries and establish a republic... except the CIA hosed them over?

like, the reason there aren't any secularists and/or socialists left in the Middle East anymore is that reactionaries shot them all, usually by painting them as being Moscow-stooges first

several times

# ¿ May 19, 2021 04:23

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Centrist Committee posted:

I need a deng reading list

https://redsails.org/deng-and-fallaci/

# ¿ May 21, 2021 15:22

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

he made the correct call. i wonder if the soviets would've continued along their path in the 20s and done some form of "dengism" instead of trying to go it alone with the five year plans if they had access to the same level of capital investment from rich countries looking to sell out their own labour, like china had in the 80s onwards.

# ¿ May 21, 2021 20:25

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Deng: You are not mistaken. At the Congress we will objectively evaluate the merits and the mistakes that characterized the life of Chairman Mao; we will celebrate his merits and recognize that they are of primary importance; and we will admit his mistakes, recognizing that they are of secondary importance. By making public the mistakes that Chairman Mao committed in recent years, we will adopt a realistic attitude. But we will certainly continue to follow Mao Zedong Thought � or, rather, all that which constituted the just part of his life. And, no, it is not only his portrait that remains in Tiananmen Square but also the memory of the man who brought us to victory and who, in essence, founded a country. And this is no small feat. And I�ll repeat: the Communist Party of China and the people of China will always look to him like a symbol � a very precious treasure. Write this down: we will never do to Mao Zedong what Khrushchev did to Stalin at the twentieth Congress of the CPSU.

# ¿ May 21, 2021 20:28

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

The Voice of Labor posted:

gently caress deng

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War

deng was 70% good, 30% sino vietnamese war

# ¿ May 22, 2021 03:03

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

cool interview on life in the DDR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy8CrizjKh4

# ¿ May 25, 2021 02:59

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

tokin opposition posted:

Sectarianism is stupid, neither anarchists nor marxists nor whoever else in that term have the kind of numbers and physical means for any of our differences to actually matter.

there's actually huge numbers of organized communists across the world, many of which are in power in their countries.

anarchist numbers are vanishingly small from a global perspective though

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 16:16

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

tokin opposition posted:

I'm sure the empires tremble at your polycule's might comrade

what?

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 19:21

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Ferrinus posted:

marx suggests paying workers in labor vouchers in critique of the gotha program, but the novelty there isn't that your vouchers reflect work done - money already does that, or at least tends to per the LTV. what makes currency compatible with socialism isn't what it measures but what it buys and the extent to which it can be transferred or pooled

i was listening to a podcast where they tracked work in terms of labour hours spent on some farms in communist hungary, as long as the required outputs kept coming you could for eg., work extra hours during the first few days of the week and then you were done and could take a long weekend to go fishing or whatever. people liked it

# ¿ Jun 18, 2021 16:19

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/Mango_Press_/status/1338864433032884224?s=19

Lausan is literally a NED-funded op, FYI

these guys were also standing in solidarity with juan guaido and couping venezuela lol

# ¿ Jun 18, 2021 16:24

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Serious question: Why all the hate for Deng? Given the outcome, it looks like he was right.

ironically the shittiest part of deng's governance was continuing the mao era foreign policy of continuing collusion with america against the ussr (in afghanistan, against vietnam, etc)

# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 18:45

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

R. Mute posted:

I haven't read the second article, but the first one is laughably bad. it's just so utterly unwilling to delve beyond the surface, digging just deep enough to make the argument that china is clearly socialist but no further.

you're a moron

# ¿ Jun 26, 2021 19:13

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Ferrinus posted:

eh, i wouldn't say so. in practical terms china is basically a social democracy right now, with the unusual distinction of having drawn in most of the capital that sustains its burgeoning social programs from more advanced nations that have historically exploited it rather than weaker nations that it was able to plunder. however i think it's pretty unquestionably under the control of the cpc rather than the bourgeoisie as a class, because if it actually were the bourgeoisie calling the shots there'd be a lot of things the government simply could not do that it's doing now

i wouldn't call it a social democracy because they don't have most of the welfare state elements in place that the post ww2 keynesian states did, its somewhere on a line between that and the USSR but its own unique thing. china isn't a socialist state - it had to make concessions to recover from the wreckage of the GPCR and hijacking the global capitalist apparatus desire to shed themselves of the burden of paying their own labour worked. but it's not a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie either, oligarchs do not call the shots and that's a huge deal, because it represents the last credible threat left.

mila kunis posted:

https://www.ft.com/content/1fe0559f-de6d-490e-b312-abba0181da1f

The vanishing billionaire: how Jack Ma fell foul of Xi Jinping
Alibaba founder�s dramatic rise and fall illustrates China�s wary embrace of tycoons who power economic growth

But it was what Ma said next, setting private enterprise�s interests above those of the Chinese state and challenging financial regulators, that dramatically changed the course of events. In the days that followed, the authorities summoned him to Beijing for a terse dressing-down and unveiled regulations designed to damage a pillar of Ant�s business. His speech had reverberated to the very top of the ruling Chinese Communist party, angering the autocratic Xi.

[...]

As Xi has tightened control over Chinese society, he has reinvigorated state-run companies and brought the country�s oligarchs to heel. Billionaire run-ins with the state over regulatory concerns, corruption or other perceived slights have become so frequent in recent years that a new rule has emerged: lie low. Some, such as Wang Jianlin, founder of real-estate conglomerate Wanda, have fallen silent while shrinking their businesses; others, like Wu Xiaohui of insurance conglomerate Anbang, have ended up in jail, with their empires taken over by the state.

[...]

But the relationship was fragile and China continued to favour state-owned companies with access to loans and licences. Ma saw this first-hand when a local champion in Hangzhou replicated China Pages� business, leaving him with little choice but to sell to this big, state-backed incomer. Ultimately, he found himself powerless and left.

[...]

However, on the very same day, a hapless mid-level official at China�s business regulator decided to take aim at Ma�s domestic influence once again. When the regulator�s report suggested roughly two-thirds of the goods sold on Alibaba�s Taobao platform were counterfeit, Alibaba fired back directly at the person behind the report. �Director Liu Hongliang! You�re breaking the rules, stop being a crooked referee!� tweeted Taobao�s account on Weibo, attributing the statement to one of its merchants.

The business regulator responded with a white paper bashing Alibaba. But then Ma flew to Beijing and met with Liu�s boss, Zhang Mao. The two men agreed that Alibaba would work on stamping out counterfeits and Zhang commended the company�s efforts to safeguard consumer interests. The white paper was withdrawn and the issue melted away. Though public opinion had been largely in the tech tycoon�s corner, the sight of Ma daring to take on the country�s regulators was not to everyone�s taste. �This public challenge was not a step forward for the rule of law,� says Song, the economist. �Actually, it was a demonstration of arrogant capital secure in its backing.�

[...]

China was changing, but Ma appeared not to have realised how much. Empowered by amendments to the constitution that removed term limits on the presidency, Xi had become its most powerful leader in decades. Any form of public dissent was risky and Xi had made a crackdown on high debt levels and financial-sector risk a top priority, as officials worried that a US-style systemic financial crisis could shake the economy and even their hold on power.

[...]

Ant�s size and scale had grown by leaps and bounds since Ma had taken it from Alibaba, and regulators were just beginning to understand its vast scope when the company made public its financial details for the first time in August last year. The very details that made investors so excited � its consumer loan issuance that eclipsed every state-owned bank, its annual payment volume that surpassed China�s GDP � made regulators in Beijing wary. �Ant�s business is inherently risky, we can�t count how many meetings executives have had with officials to get us through to today,� says one employee. Ma�s next step was to prove too risky even for him.

[...]

But he took the fatal step of making the battle public. On stage, Ma challenged the financial norms of the old world, pushing for China to take its own path. �Today�s financial system must be reformed,� he lectured from the podium. �Right now our capacity for �control� grows stronger and stronger, while our capacity to �monitor� is obviously lacking. Innovation doesn�t fear regulation, but it does fear regulation by yesterday�s methods.� Unlike most of his speeches, Ma repeatedly looked down at his notes, suggesting his words were finely calculated. Ma�s personal office is full of former journalists from China�s official news agency Xinhua.

According to people close to the situation, some top officials in Beijing saw the episode as Ma attempting to win the public over to his side and influence policy. The Alibaba-backed news outlet Huxiu reposted an article defending Ma�s speech.

But a few weeks later a vice-chair of the party�s propaganda department gave a speech urging Chinese media to resolutely �guard against . . . the risk of capital manipulating public opinion�. Huxiu, which had also published an editorial warning against excessive punishment of China�s tech groups, was ordered to halt its operations for a month.

[...]

A large portion of the Chinese public has turned against him, eager to see the downfall of the country�s greatest celebrity capitalist. Whereas in the past he was affectionately praised as Daddy Ma or Teacher Ma, comments on Ma�s videos are now along the lines of �Proletariat of the world, come together!� Teacher Ma�s greatest lesson for the legions of Chinese entrepreneurs he�s inspired may be reminding them that the Communist party reigns supreme and that any private business, no matter how strategically important to the country�s future, will be brought to heel if it is perceived to jeopardise the party.

[...]

The country�s tech groups in particular are in for change. Alibaba and Tencent expanded mostly unchecked over the past two decades, growing to control vast swaths of the digital and even physical economy. Last weekend, authorities fined Alibaba a record $2.8bn for abusing its market dominance and ordered the company to �rectify� its behaviour, and regulators quickly followed on Monday by announcing a plan to shrink Ant�s business.

Ma�s rivals have been quick to understand which way the wind is blowing. At China�s annual legislative session last month, Tencent�s Pony Ma proposed tighter regulation of internet businesses such as his own and has had a �voluntary� meeting with antitrust authorities. JD.com called off the IPO of its finance unit and put a compliance officer in charge. Colin Huang of ecommerce juggernaut Pinduoduo exited the company he founded altogether � after giving away a large chunk of shares over the summer in what one friend said was a move designed to keep his name from topping the rich list.

As the Chinese Communist party approaches its 100th birthday this summer, a landmark event, it is cementing its control over private enterprise. The party committees that all private companies must have are being reinvigorated, with their oversight roles growing. State-owned businesses are expanding. �For the past four decades the relationship between the private sector and the Chinese Communist party has been contingent and tenuous, with undulations between control and autonomy,� says Jude Blanchette, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

�We�re in another cycle of control and I expect this one to be enduring.�

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/08/15/xi-jinping-is-trying-to-remake-the-chinese-economy

quote:

The trend reflects China�s new reality. The Communist Party has greater control over all aspects of life, and Mr Xi has greater control over the party. This does not just mean it is a good idea for companies to butter him up. It means that he is in a position to reshape the economy within which they prosper or fail. What is he doing with it?

Nothing good, say critics at home and abroad. He has brought reforms that liberalised the economy to a halt and has smothered market forces, returning to a top-heavy state-dominated growth model which looks distinctly creaky. Private companies have rushed to set up party committees with an increasing say over strategy.

quote:

Yet the basic tension in the SOE sector remains unresolved. Yes, the government has put more emphasis on profitability, but that does not mean decisions get made according to commercial logic. Indeed, under Mr Xi national duty�supporting China�s rise�is more important than ever. And stricter party control is confusing lines of responsibility. An executive with a major state-owned insurance firm says that its party committee now controls all senior personnel appointments and expresses �opinions� on all investments worth more than 20% of net-asset value. Opinion is a euphemism. �It is normally the final decision. No one would go against the party secretary,� he said. �But if something goes bad, the board will be responsible.�

mila kunis posted:

not sure i agree with all of this espescially when he goes off on some weird trotskyite tangents but its an interesting/informative read

https://spectrejournal.com/why-china-isnt-capitalist-despite-the-pink-ferraris/

there�s plenty of capitalism in China today: there�s state capitalism, crony capitalism, gangster capitalism, normal capitalism�China�s got them all. China has more billionaires than the US3; many state-owned industries produce extensively for market, and the majority of the workforce are self-employed or work for private companies. Even so, it�s not a capitalist economy, at least not mainly a capitalist economy. It�s best described as a hybrid bureaucratic collectivist-capitalist economy in which the bureaucratic collectivist state sector is overwhelmingly dominant

China�s Communist Party rulers do not own their economy privately like capitalists. The state owns the bulk of the economy and CCP owns the state�collectively. The market does not organize most production in China. Market reform long ago ground to a halt in China in what Minxin Pei termed a �trapped transition.�4 In forty years of �market reform and opening� China has never missed a Five-Year Plan or failed to set an annual growth target. China remains a mostly state-owned, mostly planned economy. As MIT�s Yasheng Huang put it, �the size of the Chinese private economy, especially its indigenous component, is quite small� and mostly comprised of small businesses and self-employed workers and farmers

[...]

Of the sixty-nine companies from mainland China in the Fortune Global 500 in 2012, only seven were not SOEs [and all of these seven] companies have received significant government assistance and most count government entities among their shareholders.� In key industries, SOEs owned and controlled between 74 and 100 percent of assets. China�s major banks are 100 percent state-owned (there are hundreds of foreign-invested private investment banks but they�re restricted in where they can invest).7 The government also owns 51 percent or more of the thousands of joint-venture export-oriented industries with multinational companies from Audi to Xerox that have powered China�s rise over the last decades. The government has also bought up at a raft of foreign companies including Volvo, Syngenta, Smithfield Farms, Pirelli Tires, and Kuka Robotics, which it runs more or less as state capitalist firms, plus it owns shares in many Western companies including ten percent of Germany�s Daimler (Mercedes Benz).

[...]

Forty-two years after market reforms were introduced, the government still owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy: banking, large-scale mining and manufacturing, heavy industry, metallurgy, shipping, energy generation, petroleum and petrochemicals, heavy construction and equipment, atomic energy, aerospace, telecommunications and internet, vehicles (some in partnership with foreign companies), aircraft manufacture (in partnership with Boeing and Airbus), airlines, railways, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, military production and more

[...]

The Communist Party keeps its domestic capitalists on a short leash. Successful entrepreneurs soon find they need a state �partner,� or the government sets up its own competitors to drive them out of business, or they suffer forced buyouts.15 Worse, those whose names appear on Forbes list of the world�s wealthiest citizens or Rupert Hoogewerf�s Hunrun Rich List risk attracting unwanted government attention; they get arrested or disappear without a trace at �alarming rates.�16 In just one year, 2015, at least thirty-four senior executives of Chinese companies were arrested by the state, including the CEO of Fosun which had acquired Club Med in the same year.17 Chinese call these the sha zhu bang, �pig-killing lists.� As Xi�s anti-corruption campaign gathered force since 2013, tycoons have been taken down left and right.18 In 2015-16, China�s rich funneled more than a trillion U.S. dollars out of the country, mostly via investments in private companies including HNA, Fosun, Dalian Wanda, Anbang and others who bought up hotels (Hilton, Starwood, and others), AMC Entertainment, Legendary Entertainment, Cirque du Soleil, soccer teams and properties around the world � largely to launder their loot and park it in a country where the rule of law would protect their assets.19

Xi, anxious to stanch �hot money� outflows, fearful of government losses on state loans to private companies and determined to prevent the rise of an overmighty class of wealthy capitalists, took the fight to them

[...]

He went after the so-called �grey rhinos� whose highly leveraged companies and �irrational� foreign investments threatened financial stability. CEOs were charged with economic crimes, locked up, their assets and companies seized.21 In June 2017 he took down Anbang�s CEO Wu Xiaohui, the car insurer who married a granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping. Wu got 18 years in prison. His company was nationalized and the state is unloading his properties. In July, Wang Jianlin (Dalian Wanda), the bloviating property developer, entertainment mogul, and Hunrun-list richest man in China who once vowed to �defeat Disney,� was ordered to sell off his theme parks and hotels to pay back state banks. Wang Shi, founder of China Vanke, the nation�s biggest builder/developer, though not charged with any crimes, was forced out and his company taken over by state-owned companies in 2017. In March 2018, Chen Feng, CEO of HNA (an aviation-to-financial services conglomerate based in Hainan), biggest of the big spenders who had amassed trophy assets across six continents taking a 10% share in Deutsche Bank, 25% of Hilton Hotels, tens of billions in Manhattan mansions and buildings, Swiss companies, etc., was ordered him to sell off real estate and other assets �that fall outside Beijing�s policy agenda.� Just this week it was reported that Xiao Jianhua�s multibillion dollar empire had been seized and was being dismantled by the state. Xiao, once a trusted financier to the ruling elite including Xi Jinping�s own family, was kidnapped from a Hong Kong luxury hotel in 2017 never to be heard from since.22 And so it goes. As they say in China �the state advances, the privates retreat� (guo jin min tui).

[...]

, Xi has decapitated China�s aspirant national bourgeoisie, nationalized their companies, demoralized the private sector, his intended aim.23 Xi is a nationalist and neo-Maoist. He�s hostile to capitalists and he doesn�t want government capital, or even private capital, wasted on trifles or funneled out of the country. He wants it concentrated on state industrial policy priorities. Besides, in his push to end poverty in China, bling-encrusted billionaires are embarrassments to his neo-Maoist social leveling.

[...]

Deng abandoned Mao�s autarky, introduced market reforms and threw open the economy to Western investment. But from the start he was crystal clear that reform did not mean counter-revolution. There would be no privatization, no restoration of capitalism. In the 1980s-90s, Deng and his comrades were shocked and horrified by Gorbachev�s privatizations that precipitated the collapse of the CPSU and they determined to avoid that error.

[...]

There is no end of �capitalist things� in China today. But there has been no wholesale privatization of state assets to oligarchs as in Russia.

[...]

Yet China�s state-owned �corporations� are not profit maximizers per se like, say, Singapore�s state-capitalist Temasek and similar sovereign wealth funds. They�re happy to make money when they can. But they�re not obliged to. Many have been effectively bankrupt for decades but the government won�t let its �zombies� fail so rolls over their loans in perpetuity. In forty years of market reform, not a single significant SOE has been permitted to go bankrupt. Their existence and purpose is dictated by the Plan not the market. Thus when the head of a major state-owned conglomerate was removed for embracing market economics a bit too enthusiastically, a Beijing University expert on China�s state enterprises remarked:

There�s a system in place, not just one person. The party�s appointee draws his position from patronage� and the task is to engage with state leaders and safeguard government assets, not to maximize profits

[...]

Lastly, the market has not replaced planning in the state controlled economy either. Back in the 1990s Western market-enthusiast China experts predicted that China was �growing out of the plan.�32 But this never happened. While leaders hinted that someday they would �let the market allocate resources� they never got around to this, beyond the margins. And they could not do so because to overtake the US, they need to build those state-owned �champions�; so they need to steer resources into developing key industries and plan the overall economy. Thus, as the annual U.S. Congressional Economic and Security Review reported in November 2015:

Soviet-style, top-down planning remains a hallmark of China�s economic and political system. Five-Year Plans (FYP) continue to guide China�s economic policy by outlining the Chinese government�s priorities and signaling to central and local officials and industries the areas for future government support. The FYPs are followed by a cascade of sub-plans at the national, ministerial, provincial, and county level that attempt to translate these priorities into region- or industry-specific targets, policy strategies, and evaluation mechanisms

# ¿ Jun 26, 2021 19:41

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

i sense a great disturbance in the force...the sound of a few dozen online ultraleftists sarcastically crying out "socialism is when the government own things...state capitalism much??" while the CCP continues to take china forward

# ¿ Jun 26, 2021 19:43

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

https://twitter.com/Karl_Was_Right/status/1409201142819553283

sussed

# ¿ Jun 28, 2021 10:11

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

euphronius posted:

I wasn�t aware the Czar literally banned vodka in 1916.

that�s incredibly stupid

(from the recent mike Duncan episode).

it made me the that a lot of the conditions for revolution in 1916 ish are not present here in America at all. yet

some of the reasons Duncan listed iirc

- inflation and scarcity
- food problems with peasants just keeping grain rather than selling it
- women sitting and talking in bread lines 40 hours a week
- nationalist fervor against the czarina
- HE LITERALLY BANNED VODKA
- I may be forgetting some

duncan is citing people like richard pipes and orlando figes as his primary sources (he described figes as the best work on the revolution) which makes me extremely leery of what that podcast is gonna turn into once the bolsheviks really start winning. kudos to all the geniuses claiming covering all those revolutions radicalized him away from liberalism

# ¿ Jun 29, 2021 05:23

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

dead gay comedy forums posted:

the Fall of Rome podcast guy (patrick wyman) has a phd and it shows in the good way

I dunno if he is an actual Marxist but he squares the material conditions and socio-economic circumstances of the Roman Empire during it's late stages as fundamental to understand the whole thing. The migrations, the plagues, the concentration of capital in the hands of patricians who become ever-so-more insular and unwilling to contribute with the imperial maintenance, who suddenly see themselves lacking resources provided by the empire (because turns out to get the fancy eastern products you want in northern Gaul you need to pay for roads in Pontus)... it's good stuff

i'll check it out, thanks for the rec. real dearth of historical materialist stuff out there (at least in audio form)

# ¿ Jun 29, 2021 17:05

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

exmarx posted:

it's pretty funny. iirc one of the guests says that every single woman who went to the countryside was forced into sex work.

the gpcr deserves a lot of poo poo but that dont seem correct

# ¿ Jun 29, 2021 21:06

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Dreddout posted:

If you're an American leftist you absolutely should read about what didn't work in the past in your country. Otherwise you're just going to repeat their mistakes to worse results.

Suffice to say

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbD1XDhKr8U

hes turkish

# ¿ Jul 12, 2021 18:30

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

crossposting from the eurasia thread

mila kunis posted:

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/adam-toozes-chartbook-28-china-in

One of the most intriguing things I read whilst researching the piece, was the World Bank�s report on China�s Socialist Economic Development from 1983. What is so fascinating is that this was the first time that the World Bank had the chance to do an in-depth analysis of China�s development under Communism. The report asks all the questions one might be tempted to ask at that point. Where was China at after the end of Maoism? What distinguished it from other low-income Asian giants like India or Pakistan or Indonesia.

[...]

In the early 1950s, Communist China and India at independence were in a broadly similar place. Both were barely above subsistence. India�s per capita GDP was slightly ahead, as was its level of industrialization.

[...]

If the starting point in the early 1950s, was one of poverty and underdevelopment. Three decades later, what kind of society had the Communist regime made?

[...]

Strikingly, though income had doubled relative to 1950 and though population had practically doubled too, China had not urbanized. In 1949 the city and town population had accounted for 10.6% of the population. The urban share peaked at 15.4% in 1957. After that the share declined to 12 and 13 percent in the 1970s. That compared to more than 20 percent in India. The low urban share was all the more striking because in terms of the weight of its economy, China was considerably more industrialized than its low income peers.

China had industrialized without urbanizing. This is confirmed by other material indicators such as China�s electricity consumption, which surged.

In terms of per capita energy consumption, by the 1970s China was already well ahead of other low-income countries. In 1979, per capita its energy consumption in China was three times that India. China had a huge coal industry. It was also, it is all too easily forgotten, a major producer and exporter of oil.

[...]

Industrializing without urbanizing was remarkable, but it was not the unevenness of China�s development that most impressed the World Bank investigators. What struck them was that the Communist regime had laid the foundations for growth by delivering basic services to its population.

"China's most remarkable achievement during the past three decades", the Bank remarked, was to have made "low-income groups far better off in terms of basic needs than their counterparts in most other poor countries". As a result, the most basic indicator of human well-being, life expectancy had surged in China from 36 in 1950 to 64 in 1979. In 1979 China, the most populous country on the planet and one of the poorest, had an average life expectancy that put in the higher tier of middle-income countries. In Shanghai China�s richest province, average life expectancy in the late 1970s was 72 years, no more than a year behind that in the UK at the time. Overall life expectancy, at 64 years was in the words of the World Bank "outstandingly high for a country at China's per capita income level".

[...]

Life expectancy reflects an entire complex of factors, but the World Bank did not hesitate in its interpretation. In its view it was due to the fact that unlike other low-income countries - notably India since independence - the Communist regime in China had secured a basic provision of food, health care and education for practically everyone.

[...]

China�s superior nutritional level reflected the more advanced state of its agriculture. Reduced to a common denominator of grain-equivalents the World Bank estimated that China�s agricultural production per capita was 27 percent higher than that of India in 1979. The endowment of Chinese agriculture with farm machinery and the use of fertilizer was far greater than in India. Yields per hectare were higher, as was historically the case.

The World Bank�s statistics painted the picture of a Chinese agricultural economy that used a high intensity of industrial inputs to produce superior yields per hectare compared to most low-income countries.

[...]

It was not high spending on rural development, that secured the far better outcomes for the mass of China�s population but the comprehensive organization of social services and the priority given to food distribution, education and health .

[...]

Whereas the cities of other poor countries were places of extreme inequality, China�s cities in the Mao and immediate post-Mao era were places of relative equality. In China, the gini measure of inequality was lower in the city than in the countryside, in India the reverse was true.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2021 15:33

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

indigi posted:

you�re right, better things aren�t possible

thank you, china's life expectancy should be 180 years by now. but it isn't, all thanks to the accursed deng xiaoping

mila kunis has issued a correction as of 20:41 on Jul 26, 2021

# ¿ Jul 26, 2021 20:37

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 21:32

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

dead gay comedy forums posted:

I am rather surprised with the numbers from Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Lithuania for real. thought be would be far more rejection (maybe there is more now? idk)

Russia there is weird, but things were better there in 2009 too, so the disillusionment hasn't happened in full yet. would it be fair to consider if responders were being pution-cautious too? (by saying things were better under communism they would be criticizing the current govt)

Poland did pretty well from Germany selling out their own labor to outsource to them (similar to China), but maybe the gains were uneven across the population?

# ¿ Jul 27, 2021 18:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

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