I am smoking trees
Gibbonstrength posted:{presses fingers against temples} crow is going to be upset about this thread
lol
This is a bad fuckin thread.
c_man
Gssh
Panopticon
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FSAD posted:The CCP specifically arrests people who request that the government adhere to the constitution of the nation, so claiming that the nation is founded on communist values because they are built into the constitution is kind of a false start. As presumably the only person here who has actually taught in a Chinese university setting I can tell you that politics is seen as a joke even by those who teach it, and the textbooks are made to be deliberately boring to turn people off from the idea of politics in general. Imagine a textbook with no photos except black and white drawings of bearded 19th century communists subtitled with birth and death dates.
The teachers of these courses generally know that this is a joke and give the students lists of a few important facts to memorize for the tests then let them work on other homework, sleep or play with their cell phones during class, no attendance is usually taken. Schools establishing "Schools of Marxism" should be looked at much more as establishing schools of ideological control and nationalism. A common activity in university level "Marxism" classes is watching WWII era movies about fighting the Japanese. When President Xi says the magic words of Marxism and Communism and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics then because all power flows from the font a smart university president blows with the wind, but I'm quite certain that if Xi could jettison the communist message from the party doctrine without repercussions/complete loss of historical raison d'etre and instead adopt all of the aspects of the 1930s Kuomintang party then I'm sure he would.
The CCP adheres far more to the nationalist and ideological rhetoric of something like the New Life Movement -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Life_Movement but essentially it's a mix of reverence for the past glories of the Chinese nation which is magically different from all other human societies, elimination of internal enemies to the state (especially troublesome minorities), uplifting of the moral virtues of the Chinese people, rabid nationalism to regain China's previous position as the center of the world which it held for 5,000 years before it was attacked for no reason at all, and the need for strong leadership for the Chinese people in the form of an authoritarian government because Chinese people can not be trusted to have democracy due to their inherent corruption and family ties. If a lot of this stuff sounds contradictory to you then you're a fucking genius.
Kemal Ataturk said that if he could essentially flip a switch and turn all of the Turks Christian he'd do it, because his goal of modernizing and creating a nation was stymied at multiple turns by his people's insistence on an Islamic identity. The Chinese government has for 70 years insisted that it's a Communist government and that Communism was correct. If they drop that idea then they lose all legitimacy. Ask any Chinese person what Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is and be prepared for a fun ride into either eye rolling or meaningless slogans.
Saying that China is embracing Communism and the Party supports a future transition to Full COmmunism and then throwing out some shitty university's School of Communism webpage is like saying the USA's policy is dictated by Noam Chomsky at premiere American university Massachussetts Institute of Technology.
Everything going on in the CCP now is designed to ferret out the followers of Jiang Zemin as Xi Jinping solidifies his completely authoritarian control over the party. He's circumvented everyone in the Politburo Standing Committee and created 'Working Groups' to take over the functioning of departments of state. Imagine if every department in the US was controlled by a powerful dude who got to treat it as his own personal fiefdom (I'm not being sexist they're all dudes). Then the American president, who previously had to work via cooperation and coercion to get stuff done through these people in charge of the departments in a completely opaque and non-democratic way, decides to create a Secretary of Energy Helper position and takes over the control of the Dept. of Energy. Since he's made clear he will drop people for corruption for not playing ball, you essentially let him do it. Because everyone at every level of Chinese government is corrupt and has practiced malfeasance and cooked the books to get promoted to their current level of power, when you're arresting and ruining people for corruption, then everyone is on the line. This is possible because no one is expected to follow the law in China, because the law doesnt matter. The institutions of state are meaningless. The 'Governor' of Tibet is an ethnic Tibetan, but the CCP Party Secretary of Tibet is where the actual decisions are made. There isn't even a separate track for government/party promotion. If you do a 'good job' as governor of a province you might be promoted to party secretary of that province and have some real power. Same is true of city governments.
When you take the bullshit of Communism in China seriously then you reveal your complete ignorance because not even the Chinese take it seriously, so why do you think you know better than them?
l4fQh8E3eKY
This is the purpose of COmmunism in China now, a bunch of fat rich old men clap for Red Songs then go out to raid the pension fund and use the money to buy houses in Los Angeles ARGH YOURE SO FUCKING STUPID!!! *hits own head with frying pan*
like which one of you morons that upvoted this call yourself marxist? You know what materialism is? Are you a huge fucking idiot? How stupid ARE you. IM gonna KICK your ASS
Urbandale posted:chinese students may find the marxism classes taught at uni to be pretty dull but tsinghuas intro to maoism class was neat imo
mao zedong is really neat!
he is filled with marxist meat!
getfiscal posted:i'm going to learn chinese yolo
Or in your case, yol0
getfiscal posted:i'm going to learn chinese yolo
你活一次
Edited by orchestra_hit ()
Urbandale posted:not really, this is what i was saying earlier. we dont think corruption in the US is a thing because its largely codified. police have civil seizure codes, lobbyists + PACs have laws restraining their action, etc. corruption is pretty formal
thats what im talking about too. fsad was shocked, shocked that the number on his receipt was different from the number that he paid and presumably would have been happier if the number of his receipt was the number he paid. im saying that informal exchanges like that are much more likely in places that dont have long institutional continuity (e.g. communist/anti-imperial revolutions destroying capitalistic/imperial institutions) because the formalization is the result of many layers of subsumption of the mechanisms of distribution and exchange by the dominant mode of production
FSAD posted:The CCP specifically arrests people who request that the government adhere to the constitution of the nation,(CITATION NEEDED) so claiming that the nation is founded on communist values because they are built into the constitution is kind of a false start.(LOGIC DOESNT FOLLOW) As presumably the only person here who has actually taught in a Chinese university setting (NOT A STANDARD OF EVIDENCE) I can tell you that politics is seen as a joke even by those who teach it,(CITATION NEEDED) and the textbooks are made to be deliberately boring to turn people off from the idea of politics in general. Imagine a textbook with no photos except black and white drawings of bearded 19th century communists subtitled with birth and death dates.(NOT A STANDARD OF EVIDENCE)
The teachers of these courses generally know that this is a joke (CITATION NEEDED) and give the students lists of a few important facts to memorize for the tests then let them work on other homework, sleep or play with their cell phones during class, no attendance is usually taken.Schools establishing "Schools of Marxism" should be looked at much more as establishing schools of ideological control and nationalism.(EMPTY BOURGEOIS CLAIM) A common activity in university level "Marxism" classes is watching WWII era movies about fighting the Japanese.(AND?) When President Xi says the magic words of Marxism and Communism and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics then because all power flows from the font a smart university president blows with the wind, but I'm quite certain that if Xi could jettison the communist message from the party doctrine without repercussions/complete loss of historical raison d'etre and instead adopt all of the aspects of the 1930s Kuomintang party then I'm sure he would.(COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY NOT IN ACCORDANCE WITH FACTS)
The CCP adheres far more to the nationalist and ideological rhetoric of something like the New Life Movement -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Life_Movement (CITATION NEEDED)but essentially it's a mix of reverence for the past glories of the Chinese nation which is magically different from all other human societies,CITATION NEEDED elimination of internal enemies to the state (especially troublesome minorities),(CITATION NEEDED) (NOT IN ACCORDANCE WITH AVAILABLE DATA) uplifting of the moral virtues of the Chinese people, rabid nationalism to regain China's previous position as the center of the world which it held for 5,000 years before it was attacked for no reason at all,(CITATION NEEDED) and the need for strong leadership for the Chinese people in the form of an authoritarian government (EMPTY CLAIM) because Chinese people can not be trusted to have democracy due to their inherent corruption and family ties.(CITATION NEEDED) If a lot of this stuff sounds contradictory to you then you're a fucking genius.(CITATION NEEDED)
Kemal Ataturk said that if he could essentially flip a switch and turn all of the Turks Christian he'd do it, because his goal of modernizing and creating a nation was stymied at multiple turns by his people's insistence on an Islamic identity. (BOURGEOIS OBFUSCATION) (CITATION NEEDED) The Chinese government has for 70 years insisted that it's a Communist government and that Communism was correct. If they drop that idea then they lose all legitimacy.(CITATION NEEDED) Ask any Chinese person what Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is and be prepared for a fun ride into either eye rolling or meaningless slogans.(LOGIC DOES NOT FOLLOW) (CITATION NEEDED)
Saying that China is embracing Communism and the Party supports a future transition to Full COmmunism and then throwing out some shitty university's School of Communism webpage is like saying the USA's policy is dictated by Noam Chomsky at premiere American university Massachussetts Institute of Technology.(EMPTY CLAIM) (IRRELEVANT)
Everything going on in the CCP now is designed to ferret out the followers of Jiang Zemin (CITATION NEEDED) as Xi Jinping solidifies his completely authoritarian control over the party.(EMPTY CLAIM) (CITATION NEEDED) (NOT IN ACCORDANCE WITH WIDESPREAD DATA) He's circumvented everyone in the Politburo Standing Committee and created 'Working Groups' to take over the functioning of departments of state.(CITATION NEEDED) (EMPTY BOURGEOIS CONCEPTION OF THE STATE) Imagine if every department in the US was controlled by a powerful dude who got to treat it as his own personal fiefdom (I'm not being sexist they're all dudes).(CITATION NEEDED) (ORIENTAL CLAIM) (EMPTY BOURGEOIS CONCEPTION OF THE STATE) Then the American president, who previously had to work via cooperation and coercion to get stuff done through these people in charge of the departments in a completely opaque and non-democratic way,(CITATION NEEDED) (EMPTY CLAIM) (EMPTY BOURGEOIS CONCEPTION OF THE STATE) decides to create a Secretary of Energy Helper position and takes over the control of the Dept. of Energy. Since he's made clear he will drop people for corruption for not playing ball, you essentially let him do it. Because everyone at every level of Chinese government is corrupt and has practiced malfeasance and cooked the books to get promoted to their current level of power,(CITATION NEEDED) (EMPTY CLAIM) (EMPTY BOURGEOIS CONCEPTION OF THE STATE) when you're arresting and ruining people for corruption, then everyone is on the line.(LOGIC DOES NOT FOLLOW) This is possible because no one is expected to follow the law in China, because the law doesnt matter.(CITATION NEEDED) (EMPTY CLAIM) The institutions of state are meaningless.(EMPTY CLAIM) The 'Governor' of Tibet is an ethnic Tibetan, but the CCP Party Secretary of Tibet is where the actual decisions are made.(CITATION NEEDED) There isn't even a separate track for government/party promotion.(EMPTY CLAIM) If you do a 'good job' as governor of a province you might be promoted to party secretary of that province and have some real power. Same is true of city governments.(EMPTY CLAIM)
When you take the bullshit of Communism in China seriously then you reveal your complete ignorance because not even the Chinese take it seriously,(CITATION NEEDED) (ORIENTAL CLAIM) so why do you think you know better than them?
l4fQh8E3eKY
This is the purpose of COmmunism in China now, a bunch of fat rich old men (CITATION NEEDED) clap for Red Songs then go out to raid the pension fund (CITATION NEEDED) and use the money to buy houses in Los Angeles ARGH YOURE SO FUCKING STUPID!!! *hits own head with frying pan* (CITATION NEEDED)
Panopticon posted:what do you mean by "empty claim", "oriental claim" and "empty bourgeois conception of the state"
what do words mean
Panopticon posted:okay
the state is an instrument of class rule. "establishing schools of ideological control and nationalism"; "a completely opaque and non-democratic way"; "personal fiefdom" are just 'totalitarianism' given new life. Marxists understand that power is always being exercised, the questions are for whom? in what class interest? is the law of value determinate in policy? what international policy does the state have towards imperialism and oppressed peoples? what is the level of bureaucratization?
Individuals have very little role to play against the coercive laws of competition and the falling rate of profit. Sadly, the sentences I highlighted were long used to describe Nazi Germany but have been shown to be useless and the opposite of the truth (the Nazi state was weak and dysfunctional at all levels and was compelled by the logic of imperialism to act the way it did) but still remain common descriptors of communist states because western IR scholarship is so basically Nazi science.
the other political organ that fsad cited as a den of corruption is not even part of the state. it's a consultative conference that includes yao ming and jackie chan as members, where famous chinese people get their pictures taken by the media and give speeches on the importance of eating healthy and saving the rainforest
in western states the corruption takes place behind a screen of formal/legal rules, when it moves outside of that sphere it's seen as an aberration and results in at least some outcry (massive donations to a superpac okay, cash in a briefcase exchanged for favors bad. funding the campaigns of developer-friendly city councilmen fine, giving the zoning board new cars in exchange for a building permit bad). corruption is concentrated at the decision-making and policy level, while the bureaucracy generally speaking operates above the board in its day-to-day work. (try bribing someone at the DMV to give you a license without taking the test, for example) as a result, people tend to have a lot more faith in the reliability/accountability of the institutions they interact with on a regular basis. that doesn't mean they aren't corrupt, just that the corruption is less visible.
in many other countries (i can only speak for panama, but it's in line with other stuff posted here) every interaction the average citizen has with their government involves some sort of exchange of money or other influence for favors. overt bribery of people in positions of public trust is a fact of life, and it's exhausting and demoralizing for citizens. also it has the effect of making government services inaccessible for the poorest. (in panama it was common for people to have pay bribes to get put on public assistance) the corruption extends much further down into the civil service than it does here and as a result people feel the corruption in a much more direct and personal way.
dank_xiaopeng posted:...but that's probably one of the reasons why lots of the newer immigrants my partner and I work with are so frustrated by american bureaucratic rules, lots of em are like "what do you mean i cant get SNAP if i don't have my papers, can't we just, y'know, work something out with the secretary?!" and then over time as they assimilate pretty much all of them comment at some point how much better things are here since the funcionarios here follow the rules and nobody has to pay any propinas. try explaining to an immigrant with a headful of dat american dream that things are just as rigged here, it doesnt go well
yyou have a "partner"? that sounds pretty gay. nice 