(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:china might just be too big to be fully colonized by any western power. and western racism might play a role which makes getting chinese capitalists on board with a U.S. project to overthrow the government more difficult. chinese are often framed by western corporate media as the chinese version of a jewish conspiracy pulling the strings on american politicians, and are responsible for every problem that happens. chinese women are objectified while chinese men are portrayed as asexual. everything the chinese do is disgusting and savage or part of some long-term scheme made by goat-bearded mandarins that is at someone else's expense. they're noticeably not-us and jackie chan would always be typecast as "the cop from hong kong" until he got tired of it and wanted to play different roles: That aspect probably doesn't hurt, but apart from racist ideology, purely in capitalist terms, Chinese capitalists weren't in the position of having to overthrow the state to become capitalists, as their aspiring counterparts were in the USSR, and many of them are probably conscious of the fact that, absent the party, Americans wouldn't be dealing with them as competitors, they'd be doing everything possible to reduce them to dependent compradors, and they have the advantage of having seen what that meant in Russia.
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Jul 9, 2022 03:40
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:i think it's that third-world nationalism and the CPC included the national bourgeoisie into their program because they were also interested in kicking out the imperialists. i think stalin warned that there's a danger of "bourgeois nationalism" subverting the revolution from within. but the bourgeoisie in latin america by contrast were more solidly comprador and were still under the delusion that they had already achieved their independence, but a lot of them identify as white more than really peruvian or bolivian and don't view their own compatriots as the same as them. the latin american left speaks the language of having revolutions to achieve real sovereignty. Yeah, I think we're in agreement there, the Chinese capitalist class as it's developed is predominately a national bourgeoisie, so there's less danger of it being tempted to act as a fifth column. If they felt they were strong enough, and the threat of America was minor enough, they might want to make a play for power in their own right, but helping American capitalists to destroy and subjugate the country to then serve as collaborators is basically out of the question from the point of view of their own economic interests, and on an ideological level.
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Jul 9, 2022 08:13
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:I have nothing to add, but this is good stuff. Thanks. I had one question: Chinese capital is rising and expanding, why settle for managing a share of the American-run world market, (and they can be quite sure that share would be, in per capita terms, much closer to a third world level than a NATO / Japan junior partner level) and negotiating, from a position of weakness, for some percentage of the resulting profits, when they could be competing on an equal footing? I wouldn't argue it's anything intrinsically unique to Chinese capitalists, just they're nearly unique in being in a country that was strong enough, and in an advantageous enough international position (during the later parts of the cold war) to prevent American capitalists from effectively crushing them before they could become effective competitors. EDIT: to put it another way, these kind of interests would in a sense emerge "naturally" in a developing capitalist country, it's just that developing capitalist countries don't generally have any means to resist US imperialism strangling that development. Pomeroy has issued a correction as of 00:45 on Jul 10, 2022 |
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Jul 10, 2022 00:36
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and a drat good call at that
Pomeroy has issued a correction as of 04:30 on Jul 10, 2022 |
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Jul 10, 2022 03:48
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Goast posted:wow they got all of that out of the first chapter huh Disappointed that my first impression of Roderic was spot on. White guilt is worse than meth and opioids put together, and that's coming from a Judeo-Bolshevik.
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Jul 28, 2022 09:50
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apropos to nothing posted:is north korea an example of a socialist society that you would put forward to people in the streets in the us or anywhere else? do you see it as aspirational? if not then yeah why would you call it socialist? does china have a socialist mode of production? it doesnt. doesnt mean you agree that the US should destroy them but the reason the transition happened is cause if you actively put your politics forward to the people in the labor movement then you have to have politics that meet reality. I can and do discuss these things frankly, with these same sorts of people, but I do love the implication that, for instance, your refusal to defend the DPRK is correct because it's more acceptable to liberals. I also love that this focus on the DPRK is exactly the same line of argument as a right wing ex-military family member of mine, asking if my ideal society is identical to Cuba, and bullheadedly refusing to even acknowledge that it was a poor country to begin with, let alone confront the realities of the US blockade.
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Aug 16, 2022 07:56
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apropos to nothing posted:theres a pretty big leap between "socialist parties have to adapt to their environment" and "juche is marxism." if you think that, welp then i dunno what to say, like its actually not really possible i think to have any kind of useful discussion cause its just so beyond the pale imo. but yeah your politics have to fit the conditions, but they also need to be universal enough to not be at odds. like when china and the ussr worked against each other for decades. or like why it would be wrong to advocate for NATO intervention in the war between russia and ukraine in ukraine even though a lot of working class people there have illusions in it as a solution to the crises theyre in. “If someone is interested in what the Cubans’ opinion is on certain questions, he should ask the Koreans. And if someone asks what Korea’s standpoint may be in certain cases, he can safely ask the Cubans about that. Our views are completely identical in everything.” -Raúl Castro
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Aug 16, 2022 08:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's so quaint to still be on the Grover Furr hatetrain in tyool 2023 when that firmly places you in the company of people like Timothy Snyder He's on the right side, and he cites some excellent work, that would not have the exposure it does without him, his bibliographies are invaluable resources if you want to rebut imperialist slanders, but his work, on it's own, has grave weaknesses. It becomes very clear, reading his books, and his interviews / responses to other Communist reviewers, that he has somehow convinced himself that arguing in a more honest, careful way than the slanderers he's responding to, would be unjustifiable moralism. His work is too important to hold back, to hold himself to a higher standard would be an affectation, weakness. So he argues like a liberal. This sucks because (a) liberals suck and (b) liberals get away with arguing dishonestly because they have hegemony. "My extremely tendentious reasoning is no worse than yours" doesn't work as an argument when you are arguing for a point of view that is already thoroughly demonized, against that hegemonic ideology.
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Jul 20, 2023 07:29
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Sunny Side Up posted:i know you're addressing this really spurious anticommunist argument, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, it's not Ultra to say that even if it guarantees a better life than the (enslaving, moloch-worshipping, anti-human) capitalist west, Dengism (or Kruschevism, or Hoxhaism, or whatever) is revisionist and isn't "AES." ideally, a USSR not under siege, not preparing for WWII, would have lit off a cultural revolution to enshrine the gains made after 1917. and also ideally, the cultural revolution in China would have been taken to completion instead of defeated. the project isn't just a better life (which the countries we call "AES" have achieved in a number of ways), it's the decommodification of human relationships (and consequently the end of misery, oppression, exploitation). What does it even me to say something isn't "AES"? That just makes no sense. Even on its own terms, this basically like claiming that Sweden under the Social Democrats wasn't really a capitalist society. EDIT: actually, I think that comparison is almost too charitable, rather it's like claiming Fascist Italy wasn't really capitalist, because Mussolini's many gently caress-ups could be argued to have endangered capitalist interests. Pomeroy has issued a correction as of 22:56 on Jul 30, 2023 |
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Jul 30, 2023 22:51
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Sunny Side Up posted:I honestly can't parse the examples you give of Sweden and Italy. Well, firstly, you seem to be narrowly tailoring this answer to the PRC, while your previous statement seemed to refer to any state that Maoists characterized as revisionist, so I think we should be clear what we're talking about, that is to say, some of the answers to these questions are much more clear cut in the case of say, Korea, than the PRC. That said, I have to basically repeat my question, how are you defining class rule? Does the bourgeoisie rule? If the bourgeoisie does not, what class does? How can one speak of "progression" between the rule of one class and another, as if it is gradual process and not a rupture? Pomeroy has issued a correction as of 04:11 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 03:13
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Sunny Side Up posted:I was answering Pomeroy's question: how are you defining class rule? I really don't see how insisting that something can only be called "actually existing socialism," which I'm sure we would both agree is, by definition, a protracted transitional stage, with its own internal contradictions, once a given level of ideological hegemony is reached, is clearer, or more useful than, say, referring to relatively more or less advanced stages of socialist construction. If perfect hegemony is the standard, did Bourgeois dictatorship first come into existence in the postwar USA? I think it's much clearer, and more useful to be able to say, "revisionist misleadership is endangering socialism, endangering the dictatorship of the proletariat, workers must fight to save them!" VS "Revisionism has, by its mere existence in office, transformed socialism and working class rule into something else, something that we cannot defend as socialist." The only usefulness I can see in the second would be if one were needing a left sounding justification for, say, an alliance with imperialism against a country led by revisionists. Hypothetically. Pomeroy has issued a correction as of 02:15 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Aug 2, 2023 02:03
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Ferrinus posted:the (former) bourgeoisie are useful to a really-existing socialist revolution in two ways: this
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Aug 2, 2023 19:52
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Jesus, that might be the worst thing he ever wrote. Even not being privy to the diplomatic back and forth of the French and British with the Soviets, he had no excuse for not knowing better than this. Spite playing the basest role again, I suppose.
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Aug 25, 2023 05:35
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The Voice of Labor posted:I think taking a closer look at the constitution of the alleged benefiting class, or at least keeping it in mind, is warranted. especially as the analogy between the omelas child and indigenous and black americans is a pretty solid one See, this makes a sort of intuitive sense, it "feels right," but I don't think it's at all supportable in material terms. There seems to be this idea, that there's a definite fixed amount of oppression and suffering, poverty and police terror and so on, that our society is going to produce, and that to the degree these things are intensified for oppressed nations, they are ameliorated for the workers of the oppressor nation, but that isn't born out by history. American police are in fact more brutal towards white workers than police in any other comparable imperialist country, and the historical and current living conditions of white workers are at their worst when and where formal apartheid and racist terrorism were strongest.
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Dec 25, 2023 00:07
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Brecht man, you just can't beat him.
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Mar 11, 2024 21:01
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BillsPhoenix posted:If you told a random American that price gouging wasn't possible... I'm not sure where you're getting this, no one's saying that price gouging isn't possible, just that it isn't the fundamental source of profit. Even in the most basic, abstract sense, stealing, monopolism, out-bargaining, or out-predicting one's rivals, within a market, can be a source of a profit, but by definition they can't be the source of profit in that market in general, because they are zero sum. Pomeroy has issued a correction as of 04:15 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 04:11
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