Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us
He/him or they/them, doesn't matter too much
Marxist-Leninist ☭
Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don't know where to start? Check out my Read Theory, Darn it! introductory reading list!
India is lagging far behind China, the reason China developed so rapidly is due to their socialist market economy. By having strong central planning, and public ownership of the large firms and key industries, while allowing limited private and foreign capital for secondary and small/medium industries. As a consequence of this structure, it is neither imperialist nor driven to imperialism. These other countries you speak of cannot replicate China's success without adopting socialism anyways, which prevents the drive to imperialism.
How so? Finance capital doesn't shift that quickly, nor does industrial capacity.
I think one thing that would help, is looking into cultural hegemony. The tools have changed, so too has how hegemony functions.
None of those 3 countries have the finance capital required to replace the US Empire. What makes the US Empire unique is its total hegemony. Europe comes close financially, but doesn't have the hard power to keep that going when the US Empire falls.
I agree that for users it's pretty obvious because of that, but for those not on .ml it can seem a bit jarring. There's a split identity between the de jure "FOSS/Privacy" focus .ml is supposed to be for, and the de facto "widely federated communist instance."
No? I do org work IRL for the purpose of establishing socialism. Being happy that the empire is losing its iron grip on the world doesn't mean I try to make things worse to do so.
It's like you're intentionally taking the most bad-faith reading possible.
Yes, generally. I can be more specific and say "western progressive/Marxist" beef, ie beef between western progressives and Marxists, but that beef is also just generally the liberal/leftist beef.
I'm not really looking for a fight, either, nor an argument. I generally value productive dialogue, but often that gets shut down by people that don't want that, so it spirals into arguments. See this "exchange" as an example.
People don't support Trump "because he threatens US Hegemony." Celebrating the decline in hegemony is not the same as supporting Trump or the damage the empire deals.
People don't want literal genocide on Statesians. What people want is the end of the US Empire, including the state, ideally via socialist revolution. I also want the end of Israel as a state, and I want Russia to have a socialist revolution. It's important to read into what people are actually meaning by their words, and not take it to mean that they want to kill you personally, unless you're fighting to uphold imperialism.
I myself am a Statesian, and have no intention on dying.
I pay dues to the org I work with, I don't think it's sad at all to want the working classes to finally be liberated, and work towards that goal.
The PRC isn't imperialist, though. For example, BRI isn't imperialist, because it results in mutual development. Where the west goes in and plunders and underdevelops the global south, countries in BRI see rising wages and industrialization, escaping the endless trap of imperialism. Does China benefit too? Absolutely. Is it imperialism? No. Here are some good articles:
Instead, Imperialism is characterized by the following:
-The presence of monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.
-The merging of bank capital with industrial capital into finance capital controlled by a financial oligarchy.
-The export of capital as distinguished from the simple export of commodities.
-The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations (cartels) and multinational corporations.
-The domination and exploitation of other countries by militaristic imperialist powers, now through neocolonialism.
-The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers.
The global north, Europe and the US included, uses this export of capital to super-exploit foreign labor for super-profits. It also engages in unequal exchange, where the global south is prevented from moving up the value chain in production, allowing the global north to charge monopoly prices for commodities produced in the same labor hours.
The point I am making isn’t simply about land conquering, but an ongoing process of shifting surplus value and resources from the imperialized to the core. Finance capital is the primary mechanism by which this functions.
As for Tibet, Tibet was a feudal slave society backed by the CIA. The PLA liberated Tibet.
Two exerpts from Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth:
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” [12]
Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeatedremoved, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. [18]
As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed. [20]
The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery. [21]
The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
Selection two, shorter: (CW sexual violence and mutilation)
The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. [22]
Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” [23] Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. [24]
In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who wasremovedd and then had her nose sliced away. [25]
-Dr. Michael Parenti
Tibet is no longer under such a tortured regime, and has since seen skyrocketing quality of life metrics like life expectancy, industrialization, and more. The west uses the narrative of "oppression" as though the working classes of Tibet want to return to such brutal conditions, but in reality it's the former aristocracy and the Dalai Lama that wish to return to their positions as a ruling class.
I don't actually disagree with making it clear that Lemmy.ml is communist-friendly.
I know perfectly well what Marx is talking about. Socialist states, as they exist in real life, are that dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. Until all production and distribution is collectivized globally, there will not be the grand stage of communism, and instead we are in the radical transformation between capitalism and communism called socialism.
Critique of the Gotha Programme is also quite helpful:
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
The transition between capitalism and communism is long, messy, queer, gradual, protracted, bumpy, and involves working out many contradictions.
Amazing.
Communists control the world's largest economy by PPP, so I'd say you should at least learn a bit more about what we have to say. I recommend starting with the subject of dialectical materialism. Maurice Cornforth's Materialism and the Dialectical Method is a good intro! It especially helps explain some of the problems I have with your arguments relying on idealism.
Will do!
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Another fun quote, though not from the manifesto:
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
I already have done so, though.
Correcting misconceptions and debunking claims isn't "defending a cult," it's having a sense of respect for truth.
I'm against the death penalty in most circumstances, but in the case of China it's largely for corrupt CEOs and sexual assaulters. I'd prefer more of a focus on rehabilitation, but I'm not going to say the PRC is executing people willy-nilly.