dimashq posted:

TerraTorment

c'mon you know they don't even remember making this post, let alone having an account on this site. since the fateful day they made this thread they've either decided to start reading words so now they're a nick land accelerationist, or they instead stuck to never reading words and now they work without pay for bernie sanders

cars posted:

I don’t think anyone said it was and it seems condescending to reduce the entire recent history of China to one eternal moment, to me.

i mean, that's the attitude I was mocking, it seems highly reductive to me attempt to paint this poorly-investigated anti-poverty program as something that by virtue of being relatively undefined can be presented as an unalloyed good that wraps around to confirm the metaphysical nature of the chinese state or whatever. if the taobao village thing is reductive - which it is, though they've grown from like a few hundred to over 4000 in the past 4 years - it's also one of the main things the government itself is presenting as symbolic of the anti-poverty effort. seems like maybe we should be a little more critical in our appraisal of a program that seems to be at least somewhat interested extending the reach of private interests and proletarianizing the countryside, which the crude metric of a poverty threshold can't express

Edited by neckwattle (Sept. 21, 2019 04:23:24)

jansenist_drugstore posted:

cars posted:

jansenist_drugstore posted:

cars posted:

cars posted:

close this thread please, it was always a bad idea and I thank the Gamer zoo crew for killing it dead. Thank you and thanks

trakfactri posted:

critical support for xi jingping erotica

filler posted:

I might have broken this thing wide open

thank you for this, it actually makes a lot more sense now

Guyovich posted:

i have had this discussion with many, many chinese people from a variety of backgrounds and opinion, as would be expected, is diverse. some people scoff at the idea china is building socialism, some think it was and could again but has been on the wrong track, others are true believers in socialism with chinese characteristics. i take these conversations as they are, because obviously there are a lot of people who have a lot of thoughts on this question. however, the fact i have and will continue to have this conversation with lots and lots of people and each has a well-defined and supported opinion on the matter tells me a great deal in and of itself. it says socialism and marxism are still widely discussed, even among those who see their mandatory marxist-leninist education as farcical. the ideological apparatus has done its job on them as much as it has the cpc loyalists.

but on a purely visceral level, going to rural villages that were newly built in the anti-poverty campaign and seeing posters of mao and xi up in houses where people who now have electricity, hot water, internet, etc. really puts things in perspective. you don't really have to ask if chinese socialism has worked for them, but if you do their response will be a resounding "yes." which, ok, maybe that's the success of a cynical campaign to maintain the allegiance of the peasant base which won the revolution. but if you're viewing things that way you're no better than the china-watcher types who claim the government is minimizing unemployment for the sake of "social stability" rather than keeping people employed. sometimes things are as simple as they seem.

Getting pumped for the 70th birthday bonanza on Oct. 1, 2019. Like I think I said before, the idea of being hostile to a country I don't know much about seems weird and arrogant to me when most of the criticism towards it that I encounter come from simple-minded anarchists who think a socialist revolution must be an orgasmic end-of-history Big Bang or else you're canceled forever. Seems like these things take longer to play out with China being a compromised survivor of the "first wave" of revolutions. Otherwise you hear from deranged nutjobs writing for Bloomberg about why Beijing is being mean for screwing with operatives from the Ayn Rand School for Tots. What am I supposed to think? I don't know how to run anything. I'm just a poster.

Anyways, when I was talking to my mainlander fast friend from a few weeks ago, I could use Marxist terminology to talk about economics and he knew what I was talking about despite him using a second language to talk to me, and he got what I was saying quicker than these self-described anarchists around my neck of the woods. One thing that I've also liked watching the overseas English-language Chinese T.V. news is how they're sharing more of the revolutionary history these days and not just the typical daily updates on the developing productive forces, since the former has all kinds of interesting lessons and pro-tips. That gets my attention and I just find it interesting. Stick around for the eight suggestions:

drwhat posted:

you don't really have to ask if chinese socialism has worked for them, but if you do their response will be a resounding "yes." which, ok, maybe that's the success of a cynical campaign to maintain the allegiance of the peasant base which won the revolution. but if you're viewing things that way you're no better than the china-watcher types who claim the government is minimizing unemployment for the sake of "social stability" rather than keeping people employed. sometimes things are as simple as they seem.

This touches on the classic propagandizing we saw with the Soviets, Parenti has a really good paragraph on it from Blackshirts & Reds.

"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."

serafiym posted:

i see "china's this, china's that" but i never see "is China alright?" and that speaks volumes.

uuuh some people in this thread are saying china is all right

kamelred posted:

this thread needs to end before the other guy who browses this forum logs in and sees what a mess things are here. twelve posts in a single day is an unacceptably high rate of interest in communism imo

cars is doing his best to return us to the pristine state of primordial nothingness. almost there!!