tpaine posted:

This is deeply upsetting to me.

tpaine posted:

daddyholes

this will really speed things up when they shit in my burger

Getting out of a traffic ticket or other minor criminal violation, you're essentially offered the choice of paying a small amount now or a large amount later with possible court appearances which could damage your ability to find a job

this is basically what is going on in the US right now except you don't just lost your ability to find a job, you go to jail.

babyhueypnewton posted:

This is also why it's hilarious that some 'leftists' use the term "state-capitalism" to describe the USSR, Maoist China, and Cuba. Be sure to then ask 'what is the U.S.?' because the answer is always 'state capitalism'. Then ask 'what was the post-Soviet Russian state?' and the answer will probably be 'state capitalism' though they probably see the trap that's been laid. Ask 'what was the N.E.P.?' and obviously the answer is 'state capitalism.' Finally, ask 'has every self-described socialist country, from Cuba to Vietnam to Mozambique, been in reality 'state capitalist?' and then write their name down so you can shoot them when JDPON comes.

i wrote their names down but then when i looked at the paper later all it said was "state capitalist", over and over, on every single line. what the....what the hell is going on here??

elemennop posted:

i can't really speak for china, but i can say a bit about corruption in general and in serbia specifically.

leftists in the west i think, like FSAD pointed out, misunderstand the strength of having a functioning civic and legal structure. the difference between corruption in america and serbia, is that in america corruption has to be hidden and obfuscated, whereas in serbia corruption is, at almost all levels, practiced openly without fear. some examples include:

see, this is really funny, because whats ACTUALLY happening is youre confusing corruption in America "having to be hidden" with it actually just being invisible to you because its an inherent and built-in part of the system itself. The Dirty Foreign Corruption you find so distasteful seems garishly overt by comparison, because it is merely adjunctive. Its like how an armed bank robber seems "worse" than a Wall St. pension-robber, or a street prostitute seems "worse" than a Kardashian.

* i've had relatives that had gone years of working without picking up a paycheck simply because they want to preserve their pension

ive had millions of fellow countrymen go lifetimes without preserving their pension simply because they want to pick up a paycheck

* a couple of years ago, my grandfather fell of his bicycle and hurt himself relatively seriously. with the help of a neighbour he was able to get to a hospital and get treated. a day or so later, a policeman came by and gave him a fine for causing a traffic accident--the traffic accident was falling off a bicycle.

in America, your grandfather would have been killed by that policeman for falling off his bike aggressively lunging headfirst at an officer of the law. But hey, im glad he was about to get to a hospital and get treated. Quick question totally unrelated to this whole "corruption" discussion: how far back did that quick trip to the hospital end up setting him? Sure hope he didnt end up having to pay some doctor an OUTRAGEOUS $50 bribe!

* normally to get a state ID, it can take weeks upon weeks to get it. since my visit in serbia was short at the time, and I needed to get my ID in a matter of days before leaving, a friend of my family got in contact with a friend of his who was a police officer. He pushed us to the head of the line in exchange he got a bottle of cognac.

wow. such draconian citizenship policies. Weeks! Weeks i tell ya! ¡Ay dios mio!

It was not so much, or not only, the privileges of justice, its arbitrariness, its archaic arrogance, its uncontrolled rights that were criticized; but rather the mixture of its weaknesses and excesses, its exaggerations and its loopholes, and above all the very principle of this mixture, the ‘super-power’ of the monarch. The true objective of the reform movement, even in its most general formulations, was not so much to establish a new right to punish based on more equitable principles, as to set up a new ‘economy’ of the power to punish, to assure its better distribution, so that it should be neither too concentrated at certain privileged points, nor too divided between opposing authorities; so that it should be distributed in homogeneous circuits ‘capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body.‘ The reform of criminal law must be read as a strategy for the rearrangement of the power to punish, according to modalities that render it more regular, more effective, more constant and more detailed in its effects; in short, which increase its effect‘s while diminishing its economic cost (that is to say, by dissociating it from the system of property, of buying and selling, of corruption in obtaining not only offices, but the decisions themselves) and its political cost (by disassociating it from the arbitrariness of monarchical power).

-Disciple and Punish, 80-81

'Corruption' as the impairment of morality through money is an inherent feature of capitalism. That you point out China has both 'institutional corruption' and 'personal corruption' misses the point since corruption is capitalism.

The passion of enrichment by contrast with the urge to acquire particular material wealth. i.e. use values such as clothes, jewelry, herds of cattle, etc. becomes possible only when general wealth as such is represented by a specific thing and can thus be retained... Money therefore appears both as the object and the source of the desire for riches

-A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 132

only when capitalism wipes away the desire for things with the desire for money, the infinite 'Sisyphean task' of hoarding, is a concept like corruption possible. thus the slur 'corrupt' is a postmodern one, as it only applies to countries in which money has not become entirely virtual and its power as morality has not yet taken over our being. In China, people still buy use value with money and morality appears directly on the marketplace. this appears distasteful to us in our postmodern era, where the values of the marketplace (and the infinite accumulation of money) is the supreme value, hidden beneath the spectacle.

we need to think of corruption like power. instead of whether it is or is not, we think 'what is it creating?', 'how efficient is is?', 'what is its genealogy?' since like Superabound says, American corruption doesn't appear to us as corrupt because it is so overwhelming. Billions of dollars are spent on elections, far more than anywhere else in the world. This is a bribe, but it is so far removed from our daily lives that it appears normal. This doesn't mean that this is some flaw in liberal democracy, eliminating bribes of this sort would mean that corruption is so ingrained that elections buy themselves. Money is spent on American elections because of negotiating within the bourgeoisie, if no one spent a dime it would still be impossible to elect someone outside of capitalism and this is true corruption.

FSAD posted:

lol only in America does business give money to politicians! You heard it here first!! Such things would never occur in the glorious People's Republic of Russia

Ok big boy...HOW MUCH money do Serbian businesses give to politicians, and WHAT are the global results of this exchange *blows REAL thick cigar smoke in the shape of a really rich cat wearing a top hat into your face*

babyhueypnewton posted:

American corruption doesn't appear to us as corrupt because it is so overwhelming. Billions of dollars are spent on elections, far more than anywhere else in the world.

i think there is a danger in attributing too great powers to the bourgeoisie, though. trotskyists make those sorts of arguments all the time, like when they criticize stalin for aligning with the bourgeois-democratic forces during the anti-fascist struggle. the maoist party in canada now has started suggesting the third period shouldn't have ended which is madness to me. otherwise it was near-consensus in the worker's movement that promoting a democratic culture provided important constraints on the rule of the bourgeoisie. i think a good argument is that some of those constraints do exist in china and that liberal elections wouldn't necessarily improve that. and especially that we don't want our own bourgeois governments meddling in whatever progressive chinese workers decide to do.

HenryKrinkle posted:

can they at least write a letter to the editor

getfiscal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

American corruption doesn't appear to us as corrupt because it is so overwhelming. Billions of dollars are spent on elections, far more than anywhere else in the world.

i think there is a danger in attributing too great powers to the bourgeoisie, though. trotskyists make those sorts of arguments all the time, like when they criticize stalin for aligning with the bourgeois-democratic forces during the anti-fascist struggle. the maoist party in canada now has started suggesting the third period shouldn't have ended which is madness to me.

election time pandering knows no limits. infinite hockey games only sound good in theory