tpaine posted:

i actually don't even want to relate to or galvanize the working class, because most of them are trash. i want to end this whole fucking stuttering, cyclical dramedy, todd. are you with me?

From Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said:

"In one of its main narrative strands Kim keeps returning to the idea of a quest, the lama's search for redemption from the Wheel of Life, a complex diagram of which he carries around in his pocket, and Kim's search for a secure place in colonial service. Kipling, I think, does not condescend to the old man's search. He follows him wherever he goes in his wish to be freed from 'the delusions of the Body', and it is surely a part of our engagement in the novel's Eastern dimension, which Kipling renders with little false exoticism, that we
are able to believe in the novelist's respect for this particular pilgrim. Moreover the lama commands attention and esteem from nearly everyone. He is no charlatan, no beggarly impostor, no confidence man. He honours his word to get the money for Kim's education; he meets Kim at the appointed times and
places; he is listened to with veneration and devotion. In an especially nice touch in Chapter 14, Kipling has him tell 'a fantastic piled narrative of bewitchment and miracles' about marvellous events in his native Tibetan mountains, events which the novelist courteously forbears from repeating, as if to say that this old saint has a life of his own that cannot be reproduced in sequential English prose.

And yet, the lama's search and Kim's illness at the end of the novel are resolved together. Readers of many of Kipling's other tales will be familiar with what the critic J. M. S. Tompkins has rightly called 'the theme of healing' and, like those, the narrative of Kim progresses inexorably towards a great crisis.In an unforgettable scene Kim attacks the lama's foreign and defiling assailants, the old man's talisman-like chart is rent, and the two consequently wander through the hills bereft of their calm and health. Kim, of course, waits to be relieved of his charge, the packet of papers he has stolen from the foreign spy.
For his part the lama is unbearably aware of how much longer. he must now wait before he can achieve his spiritual goals. Into this heart-rending situation, Kipling introduces one of the novel's two great fallen women, the Woman of Shamlegh (theother being the old widow of Kulu), abandoned long ago by her
'Kerlistian' sahib, but strong, vital and passionate nonetheless. (There is a recollection incorporated here of one of Kipling's most affecting earlier short stories, 'Without Benefit of Clergy', which treats the predicament of the native woman loved, but never married, by a departed white man.)"

Edited by RedMaistre (Sept. 26, 2015 04:34:30)

tpaine posted:

join with tpaine.

I am on your side. No matter how you look at it, our species is a waste. It has failed to live up to its potential. It embraces evil. It turns against God. I think everyone here knows this to be true.

foreign producers are coming to dominate the Chinese economy. For example, the share of foreign manufacturing affiliates in China’s total manufacturing sales has grown from 2.3 per cent in 1990 to 31.3 per cent in 2000.8 Foreign firms are also increasingly coming to dominate China’s export activity. The percentage of exports produced by these firms grew from 17.4 per cent in 1990 to 55 per cent in 2003.9 According to Stephen Roach, Chief Economist and Director of Global Economic Analysis for Morgan Stanley, ‘Chinese subsidiaries of global multinationals and joint ventures with businesses from the industrialized world’ accounted for ‘fully 65 per cent of the total increase in Chinese exports’ over the period 1994 to mid-2003.10 As a consequence of these trends, the ratio of exports to GDP has also climbed steadily, from 16 per cent in 1990 to 36 per cent in 2003.11 Thus, China’s economic growth has become increasingly dependent on the export activity of these transnational corporations.

The reality is that China and East Asia are being jointly reshaped by a larger transnational corporate restructuring dynamic that also encompasses the more developed capitalist countries in as well as outside the region. This dynamic is promoting both greater trade dependence and the expansion of integrated cross-border production processes, with China serving as a processor of manufactured components imported from neighbouring countries and the final production platform for the region’s increasingly important extra-regional export activity. It is also pitting different nations’ workers against each other to the benefit of transnational capital and its local subordinates in each country, thereby intensifying exploitation and worsening uneven development and overproduction problems.

Over the last decade . . . Chinese industrial firms have spent less than 10 percent of the total cost of imported equipment on indigenizing technology. Indigenization spending at state firms in the sectors in which China is most often cited as a rising power (telecom equipment, electronics, and industrial machinery) is also low (at 8 percent, 6 percent, and 2 percent of the cost of imported equipment, respectively)...By comparison, such spending by industrial firms in OECD countries averaged approximately 33 per cent. And South-Korean and Japanese firms, during their respective periods of rapid industrialisation ‘spent between two and three times the purchase price of foreign equipment on absorbing and indigenizing the technology embodied in the hardware’

http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economies%205430-6430/Hart-Landsberg-China%20and%20Transnational%20Accumulation.pdf

Furthermore, since China is increasingly reliant on imports/exports and global production chains, abroad it is increasingly subject to the law of value and at home increasingly pressured into inter-regional competition. Abroad, the global financial crisis has finally affected China which is the true cause of the recurring property and stock market crises:



https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/chinas-transition-new-leaders-old-policies/

Finally, while the Chinese poverty miracle is impressive compared to the rest of the world (where poverty has increased), this line for Marxists is basically revisionism. Much of this comes from proletarianization, which would have happened under Maoism anyway. The main difference is the marketization of the economy so that what was considered 'poverty' under Maoism (despite social services and socialist communalism which is not considered by bourgeois measurements) is now no longer counted. Thus, while poverty has been reduced, not only has inequality massively increased, it's not clear at all that the destruction of socialist democracy was necessary for this (in the data or theoretically).

The other source of poverty reduction is the agricultural revolution, in which foreign technologies (fertilizer, machinery, etc) led to massive increases in rural productivity. This of course is only possible because of China's opening up, but what's important is that this rate is slowing:

Why, then, was the rate of rural poverty decline comparatively slow after 1996? There appear to be four reasons: slower overall growth; a pattern of growth which focused around industrialization and therefore mainly benefited the non-poor; the failure of agricultural output increases to translate into higher rural incomes; and policy failures, in particular an excessive attention to the geographical dimension of poverty.

-Chris Bramall, Chinese Economic Development p. 511

and most importantly:

The third – and perhaps the most important – problem for the rural sector is that increases in farm output did not lead to increases in real income in the late 1990s. This is of great significance, because many of China’s rural poor are farmers; accordingly, increases in farm income are a sine qua non for big falls in rural poverty. However, as Figure 15.4 shows, per capita net farm income rose very slowly over the decade after 1996. Indeed it fell from 976 yuan in 1997 to only 834 yuan in 2000 and, though it has revived since, its average annual growth rate between 1996 and 2005 was less than 1 per cent a year. By contrast, wage income from employment (mainly in TVEs of one sort or another) increased by nearly 11 per cent per annum and in the process overtook farming as an income source. This slow growth of farm income reflected not so much any failure of production but rather price trends. Between 1995 and 2000, the prices paid for agricultural products fell by over 20 per cent on average, whereas input prices fell by less than 5 per cent, thus imposing a squeeze on net farm incomes that was only partially offset by rise in productivity. The fall in product prices occurred because of overproduction. Grain output reached no less than 512 million tonnes at its peak in 1998 (well up on the figure of 408 million in 1989), but this served only to depress product prices, in turn leading to a decline in grain output to a trough of 431 million tonnes in 2003.

-p. 512

lack of price controls, overproduction, increasing exploitation, increasing gap between rural and urban: if this sounds like capitalism at its most contradictory that's because it is. The Chinese economic miracle was remarkable, but it was predicated on Maoism. Now that that well has dried up, or as David Harvey would say that source of 'accumulation by dispossession' is dried up, China is at the crossroads of socialism or capitalism. I'm not a believer in the fragility of socialism, that Marxism is still the main ideology of China and that the state remains the main source of economic activity are not minor accomplishments. However capitalism has it's own logic and China will have to actively work to restore socialism or else the law of value will decide for it.

Edited by babyhueypnewton (Sept. 26, 2015 06:05:19)

tpaine posted:

i actually don't even want to relate to or galvanize the working class, because most of them are trash. i want to end this whole fucking stuttering, cyclical dramedy, todd. are you with me?

best way to do that would probably be just to get a job at an energy company & u have the added benefit of riding out the last days in a pretty comfortably sized house and a garage with a BMW and maybe an audi

tpaine posted:

lf/wddp/rhizzone people are really bad at actually forming their own arguments, and instead rely on others to do their arguing for them. it's why the place is dead and a microcosm for why real left movements don't work and i'm transphobic or whatever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(psychology)

c_man posted:

no words of support for our definitely-not-a-nazi comerade pope francis for his tremendous show of solidarity with Real Proletarians the world over (no gays allowed)? im sure they had a wonderfully fruitful discussion about how gay people are corrupting the character of real left movements like the US Democratic party towards their Culture of Death and away from their historical purpose of lifting up the working classes.

"No gays allowed" ?

"Pope Francis had a private meeting in Washington, D.C., with a gay couple a day before he met with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who spent time in jail last month for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Yayo Grassi, Francis' longtime friend from Argentina, spoke about the meeting during an interview with CNN. Grassi says that he and his partner, Iwan Bagus, and several others met with the pontiff at the Vatican Embassy on Sept. 23.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports:

"Grassi was a student of the pope when Francis taught in Argentina in the 1960s. He came with his partner. He says the pope has long known that he's gay but has never condemned him."

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/02/445310061/before-the-pope-met-with-kim-davis-he-met-with-a-gay-couple

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/world/europe/pope-francis-kim-davis-meeting.html

cars posted:

i like the op & also think we can maybe close this thread and not make another

as long as we have catholics #onhere venting about nazi liberals and promoting the pope i will remind them that the sickness is inside of them