FunkyStuff [he/him]

It’s weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with “that’s not true socialism.” Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn’t would say that, but anyone who’s reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.

Which brings me to my next point: Socialism’s biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It’s the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants’ daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.

protest for the sake of conducting the genocide more effectively is definitely enough reason to cut settlers some slack!

If you’re looking for some in depth discussion BreakThrough News just did a video on the subject.

“Not humanly possible” is a quote from an American swimmer commenting on the Chinese athlete’s performance.

If China tested fewer athletes than the US, you’d call them lax. But they test more than anywhere else and that’s sketchy because it makes this particular metric look better.

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

The nature of the dialectic is for it to continually and fluidly evolve, every now and then contradictions mount to a point of qualitative change and give rise to a new system that resolves the contradictions of the last, but gains new ones. It never ends. Marx only said, capitalism will bring about socialism, which will in turn bring about communism. Everything after that is too far away to really make any concrete statement that isn’t grossly biased by the conditions of our time.

The current situation over in China still allows internet users to easily access services like Facebook or YouTube through VPNs, it was more of a measure of digital protectionism to allow local development of IT companies, online business, etc. If China wants to do similar censorship in response to these measure, they very well could still crack down on VPNs.

Justifying their attacks with claims of superiority, defending the obvious contradictions with equivalence. Classic motte and bailley.

The state is part of the superstructure that is shaped by the economic base, which is in turned maintained by said superstructure. However, changes in the superstructure are never transformative unless they also come with radical change to the mode of production. Billionaires, and the capitalist class as a whole, completely block the path for the workers to seize the means and reshape society towards progress. It doesn’t matter what faffing idiot you put in power in the state, when the economic base keeps operating with the same logic of capitalist extraction.

Yeah, real resistance fighters should take advantage of all the empty space there is in the world’s densest city, so they can fight in a way that’s acceptable to white westerners! If only they were really trying to liberate themselves instead of pursuing their evil terroristic agendas, their movement would be morally unimpeachable and the whole world would recognize their plight. Alas, Israel killed a bunch of kids, which is Hamas’ fault actually, so we have no choice but to glass them. maybe later kiddos!

communism made lemmy so where does that leave us