Quote:
If your first instinct as a westerner is to criticize and lecture 3rd world communist movements, instead of learning from their successes, then you have internalized the patronizing arrogance of the colonial system you claim to oppose.
… And a swing and a miss
…no? Pretty spot-on.
Why? What’s your wisdom you’d like to share with us socialists outside of the imperialist countries?
Name one successful communist movement.
I remember watching a documentary about North Korea and one of the guides was talking about how people in NK and Asia more broadly don’t necessarily want to live under the same liberal-democratic capitalist system that the west tries to impress on them.
How arrogant are we to act like we have it all figured out and that countries outside of Europe and North America are backwards shitholes?
There is absolutely a discussion to be had here.
Of course people should be allowed to have their own government setups and authorities. It would be wrong to assume that we in the west have it all figured out.
However there are still questions of fundamental human rights. In many places of the world a woman can legally be raped, it’s the woman’s responsibility to always have a male relative with them. If we were to ask women what they thought about it they would probably say that there is no problem with it, that’s just how it works. These women have been so indoctrinated by it that they don’t question it.
We could also use slavery in America as an example. Many slaves probably accepted the argument that they had a better living standard as slaves, or some other argument that made them accept the status quo. Should Europe just have accepted that that is the way life goes over there?
Where does the line go between fundamental human rights and respecting other ways of life go? Western fundamental rights such as equal rights, right to a trial, right to life, etc. are just that, western.
Meanwhile the success in question: The 3rd world communist countries have managed to more or less industrialize and build up wealth, but under (state) capitalist system with all the bells of whistles which are markets, commodity production, wage labor, etc. In other words, they used capitalism to build up wealth.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually think they had some absolutely amazing policies for the workers like free housing and social benefits, and good on them for building themselves up. However, this has nothing to do with socialism (socialist mode of production in this case) or communism as it was achieved with, and is therefore a win for capitalism - the same system that drove colonialism and the system that had already built up wealth for ‘non-socialist’ feudal/agrarian countries in the 19-20th century.
EDIT: Damn, judging from the amount of upvotes, it genuinely feels like walking into a bar and everyone drawing a gun and pointing at you. This is probably the most antagonistic I’ve been towards ML (or MLM/Dengist/Maoist) ideology and it’s kinda disappointing how there’s no actual non-ML Marxists to be seen here.
What no theory does to you.
No seriously, you need to read on this, you clearly have at best a very simplistic understanding of the subject.
Private property and markets can’t just be abolished immediately after a revolution, it’s not magic. Young socialist systems have to go through a transitional phase during which private property and markets are still allowed under strict oversight of the state.
His does not make them capitalist as the proletariat still has control over this private sector via the socialist state, such as in China where all of the essential industry that is necessary for every other, known as the commanding heights, are fully state owned and the enterprises that are private are required by law to have a party member on their board as well as a “golden share” owned by the state that allow it unchallenged veto power over the board’s decisions among other means of authority over the private sector.
Private property and markets can’t just be abolished immediately after a revolution, it’s not magic. Young socialist systems have to go through a transitional phase during which private property and markets are still allowed under strict oversight of the state.
That makes sense
His does not make them capitalist as the proletariat still has control over this private sector via the socialist state, such as in China where all of the essential industry that is necessary for every other, known as the commanding heights, are fully state owned
Okay… but when will this “transitionary period” finish.
If a “transitionary period” takes more than a decade at what point do we say “they aren’t transitioning” and call it what it is, state owned capitalism.
If a “transitionary period” takes more than a decade at what point do we say “they aren’t transitioning” and call it what it is, state owned capitalism.
I mean, how could we know how much time is needed for the transition? It has never happened yet, we’re still experimenting.
What no theory does to you.
Yeah, if you’re operating within Stalinist ML bubble. Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s inherently “true”, and it can be healthy to read other communist sides/perspectives. Some recommendations would be Marx’s writings, Lenin, Bordiga if you want a lesser known but still respected Leninist who’s critical of ML’s/Stalinism.
No one claims magic here, and it’s true - a transitional DOTP period must happen, but it’s not a license to preserve the capitalist relations indefinitely. The fundamental relations of production that I’ve mentioned must be consciously dismantled over time as a precondition for socialism, that’s what the proletarian dictatorship is literally for. If not, then it’s only a matter of time until the state reverts to bourgeois control disguised as “socialist”.
Nationalizing capital while leaving value production intact leaves capitalism functionally preserved, read Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx where he makes this explicit - converting private to state property without abolishing wage labor/value mediation and calling it Socialism is literally Lassallean nonsense.
Capitalist production is not magically nullified by the presence of a party member or state shareholding either: workers still sell their labor-power, surplus value is still extracted, production is for market sale or in other words, capitalist mode of production prevails at full force. Legal oversight is a managerial form, not an abolition of class relations.
Bordiga lmao
I don’t do shit but hate on communists, and that’s the truly revolutionary stance.
At least his critique is clear and coherent.
If validity of theory was based on what its writers had done, then Marx would be worthless and Urban Guerilla doctrine would be invaluable.
Validity of theory isn’t based on what its writers do, but on what its students do. It’s a social science and without practical application it is absolutely worthless.
Marx, Engels and Lenin have been proven right by the practice of Marxist-Leninists, it isn’t the rule that the best theorists are also revolutionary leaders, but revolutionary leaders by their success prove the worth of the theory they applied to their circumstances.
I’ve never met a Bordiga follower whose achievements amount to more than writing in opposition to AES. You didn’t need to read leftcoms for that.
Dang I didn’t know there were successful communist nations in developing countries.
What do you call Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, the former Burkina Fasso under Sankara, or the former USSR? Do you sincerely believe those countries had a better standard of living for all people, especially workers and peasants, under capitalism? Isn’t the great fall from grace of the USSR proof that the benefits their people had received were indeed the fruits of socialism and not the “rising tide” of global capitalist development (which was actually exacerbating poverty in the global South outside of the socialist countries)?
Maybe it’s just capitalist propaganda but from what I’ve heard, China is a mass surveillance state which doesn’t protect any of the citizens rights for privacy and has lacklustre working environments which is why everything is so cheap to be made there. Cuba is stuck with a poor economy, but I guess that’s all developing nations so i don’t know much other than that. For Vietnam my source is a friend who’s family mostly live in Vietnam, he says people in Vietnam dislike communism but can’t say it out loud. And I don’t know much about Laos or Burkina fasso.
To be clear I do consider myself a leftist and anti capitalist but I don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe really.
China is a mass surveillance state which doesn’t protect any of the citizens rights for privacy and has lacklustre working environments
It is a mass surveillance state, but it’s definitely not any more mass surveillance than any developed country. Maybe one important difference is that in China the government has fewer restrictions for how they will spy on you, but in the US for example the NSA will do blatantly illegal things that aren’t even allowed under the Patriot Act and no one can do anything about it, so the extent to which surveillance is legal or not is irrelevant IMO. I would understand your criticism if China was actually a very repressive country where dissent wasn’t allowed and a huge portion of the population was jailed, but I think the quick response to the anti-lockdown protests and the fact they jail far fewer people than the US (while having 4x the population) means that it’s not a very reasonable criticism. Especially not when you consider the Western countries built up their stability while exploiting others, and China had to go through a hard process of occupation, civil war, and then many mistakes during the Cultural Revolution which still breed resentment at the state, even if things have gotten better.
As for the working environments, you’ll always see the worst of the worst in negative coverage of China (the suicide nets in Foxconn factories, for example, which to my knowledge have been debunked). Still, it is undeniable that China has had pretty bad working conditions. I think the key element to understand why working conditions are poor, yet more than 80% of Chinese people approve of their government, is that Chinese people understand that their government is committed to improving things and they consistently see those improvements. They also have a much more responsive political system that listens to their individual concerns very well, so whatever problems they have are more likely to be dealt with than if they had a situation in a western liberal democracy, where you write a letter to your representative and your representative has been paid off by 3 different lobby groups to ignore your concerns.
Cuba is stuck with a poor economy, but I guess that’s all developing nations so i don’t know much other than that.
That’s a huge understatement. Cuba faces a horrible, economy-stifling blockade from the US that essentially shuts them off from the entire global economy because they can’t access the global banking system or buy a huge number of basic goods. Despite that, they’re a global leader in medicine, have a far better education system than the US at all levels, have sent revolutionaries to assist in decolonizing countries in Africa, and were leaders of the NAM.
And I don’t know much about Laos or Burkina fasso.
Laos is honestly quite similar to Vietnam.
Burkina Fasso had a very successful few years of developing infrastructure and improving living conditions for the people under Sankara. It’s a very tragic story because he was assassinated and replaced by a regime that reversed much of the good he had accomplished. Nowadays, Ibrahim Traore is essentially just playing it back with many of the same ideas Sankara had, and he has been massively popular and successful for it (look no further than the fact his security team have had to stop many assassination attempts already, much like Castro).
To be clear I do consider myself a leftist and anti capitalist but I don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe really.
What has been successful in Europe? Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries were great, but could only exist because of the pressure of the USSR on the capitalist bloc. All the social democracies are only social democracies, they have never put the workers in charge of their own destiny and are therefore not socialist at all.
Ok, first of all you clearly know a lot about this than I do and I would love to learn more, where do you find information related to socialism and socialist nations? Obviously I cannot expect to learn all of this from you.
What has been successful in Europe? First of all many European nations such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have a progressive multi party system which prioritize good urban planning and privacy laws (the latter I am not 100% sure about but believe to be true) And the European union as a whole regularly enforce regulations ensuring fare practices among big companies such as recently they enforced apple to require side loading and meta to remove the consent or pay advertising model. As well as when apple was required to use usb-c on there iphones. This is just my limited knowledge so feel free to prove me wrong and two examples may not be enough evidence.
Also I read your other arguments but I simply don’t have enough knowledge to have anything to say about them, but I very much go by the quote “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and therefore find it difficult to believe that any dictator can be better than a democracy.
Ok, first of all you clearly know a lot about this than I do and I would love to learn more, where do you find information related to socialism and socialist nations? Obviously I cannot expect to learn all of this from you.
I learned a lot of the history from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds and Vijay Prashad’s Darker Nations. You don’t have to read the entire books, they have lots of lectures on YouTube. Here’s Parenti’s Yellow Lecture.
You can also could read China Has Billionaires, it’s a good essay that explains why China is the way it is and why socialists should understand it.
First of all many European nations such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have a progressive multi party system which prioritize good urban planning and privacy laws (the latter I am not 100% sure about but believe to be true) And the European union as a whole regularly enforce regulations ensuring fare practices among big companies such as recently they enforced apple to require side loading and meta to remove the consent or pay advertising model. As well as when apple was required to use usb-c on there iphones. This is just my limited knowledge so feel free to prove me wrong and two examples may not be enough evidence.
Those are good things, but they’re really just regulations. The urban planning is clearly miles ahead of NA, but it’s still comparable to Japan and we could probably all agree Japan is not a socialist country.
The main difference between those countries and a socialist country like Cuba or China is that in Europe, owners of industry, financiers, real estate moguls, and other capitalists have a lot of influence and political power as a function of the capital they own. They move the capital around to where it will make them more money. They will move capital across borders to colonies and neocolonies where labor and resources are cheap. The state responds to their needs.
Meanwhile, in socialist countries, the state takes the capital under its democratic control. In China, for example, the state is growing its control of private companies and steadily implementing more measures to reduce the power of their capitalists. Even when Deng liberalized their economy a great deal, they never stopped regulating the flow of capital, still having strict controls on investments.
“absolute power corrupts absolutely” and therefore find it difficult to believe that any dictator can be better than a democracy.
I think there’s 2 levels to this quote. First, how could power be held non-absolutely? Through a constitutional republic with a balance of powers where each branch of government keeps the others in check? What Marx shows us is that, make the political system how you will, if the state remains a bourgeois state the ruling class will keep using political power to protect the interests of capital. There is no way around that, all regulations will be stripped away as the rate of profit falls and the capitalists go hungry. They’ll descend into fascism if their profits are threatened enough. So ask yourself, doesn’t capital already hold absolute power?
Secondly, if I take it at face value that the way a state is organized makes a big difference and it matters how much control any given individual has (which I think is true, even though it kinda contradicts the previous point that all power is class power) that’s still not a reason to say European and North American democracies are less dictatorial than any socialist democracy. Check the link I put in my first comment to see how China’s system works. The USSR had a similar system with soviets making up the democratic structure, with democratic power over each workplace and each community, which would go up in levels up to the CCCP. People think that these countries aren’t democratic because they’re one party states, but the truth is that they just make their limitations on what ideologies are not allowed to take control explicit, instead of implicit like they are in the liberal democracies.
Yeah that’s so true there are only 2 politics forever and when one lose the other gain that is so true not
How can you possibly read what amounts to “consider the context of your beliefs” and decide to leave this sarcastic, nonsense comment?
My beliefs is that capitalism is an abhorrent apocalyptic cult. The text says I should consider so I considered. I realised I don’t care about fucking bickering about “the other side” because it’s childish. I want to only talk about benefits of policy that is fully opposing capitalism
So what does any of this have to do with the OP? You’re the one bickering and being childish here. You’ve not said anything of substance and simply left a sarcastic comment.
“Successes”?
Most of them are 3rd world countries because of these movements…
The few who succeeded only use “communism” as label but are aggressively balls deep into capitalism like China.
Most of them are 3rd world countries because of these movements…
Lol. Name one country that went from first world to third world because of communist movements.
Easy, South Africa
surely this is a joke
Oh looks, another example of the meme right here.
I dont oppose colonialism. Its anti-colonialism that have created the worst blood thirsty and arrogant country in the world with its Uber capitalistic ideology: The US… Should have the “US” remained into UK colonies, we would have a better and more peaceful world right now. Same could be sayed about Israël and China… Hmmm… I see a pattern here… One common things between these… UK!
I dont oppose colonialism
Oh! So you are just a Western colonist who spread the patronizing arrogance propaganda your “leftist” westerner compatriots are slopping up. The wall is that way, go face it!
Woooosh xD
