chickeon posted:sorry about my thread
you made a perfectly functioning thread. its collapse was brought about by reactionary agents of the bourgeoisie.
dank_xiaopeng posted:it's obvious that corruption exists everywhere capitalism does and that first world states' institutional corruption is equivalent to bribery and graft elsewhere. while corruption is equally prevalent, the average citizen's lived experience of that corruption differs.
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.
The problem is not that this is false but that it is tautological. 'corruption' is an Orientalist discourse which shapes the world. Discourse
can create not only knowledge but the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it -Said, 94
Thus our concept of the Orient as 'more corrupt' has both a material effect on it and an ideological effect on the oriental subject.
To put it another way, corruption produces its own problematic. One can argue with liberals about the corruption in America and this is not worthless. However remember that even the most obnoxious liberal John Oliver had a segment about the corruption of municipal violations which are basically bribes that poor people pay outside of any coherent legal system. This is because no amount of reaction will ever question the fundamental discourse of 'legality' as a western capitalist concept and 'corruption' as its lack. Pointing to how the Chinese themselves feel is not a solution, this is identity politics. Instead, Marxists must come up with our own language and find corruption as a certain expression of capitalism rather than something 'more' or 'less'.
babyhueypnewton posted:Marxists must come up with our own language and find corruption as a certain expression of capitalism rather than something 'more' or 'less'.
the idea that there is a "more or less" is something socialists agree exists though. like fascism and liberal capitalism are different. fascism as just a face of liberal capitalism is a trotskyist idea, which is the foundation of their idea that you can't negotiate with sections of the bourgeoisie. the communist parties celebrated the liberation of france and italy even though they were replaced with other bourgeois states, precisely because it implied a return to at least a limited form of legality. this is because they believed in the idea of a democratic culture. even in china today they talk constantly about the importance of "rule by law" (which is also called "socialist legality") as part of building socialist democracy in china. in the soviet union being against "socialist legality" was one of the highest crimes, which is why khrushchev accused stalin of it. the fact that the state is a class dictatorship doesn't make these issues less important, otherwise you spin off into ultraleft land which invariably ends up firmly right-wing in practice.
Keven posted:It's weird reading this thread cause fsad is wrong in how he's thinking about visible vs. invisible corruption in my personal opinion but also he's right because the position he's arguing against is "words are just, like, suggestions man."
this is what they call the dialectic
getfiscal posted:babyhueypnewton posted:Marxists must come up with our own language and find corruption as a certain expression of capitalism rather than something 'more' or 'less'.
the idea that there is a "more or less" is something socialists agree exists though. like fascism and liberal capitalism are different. fascism as just a face of liberal capitalism is a trotskyist idea, which is the foundation of their idea that you can't negotiate with sections of the bourgeoisie. the communist parties celebrated the liberation of france and italy even though they were replaced with other bourgeois states, precisely because it implied a return to at least a limited form of legality. this is because they believed in the idea of a democratic culture. even in china today they talk constantly about the importance of "rule by law" (which is also called "socialist legality") as part of building socialist democracy in china. in the soviet union being against "socialist legality" was one of the highest crimes, which is why khrushchev accused stalin of it. the fact that the state is a class dictatorship doesn't make these issues less important, otherwise you spin off into ultraleft land which invariably ends up firmly right-wing in practice.
you have an obsession with strawmanning people to a ridiculous degree. please don't don't do it again.
babyhueypnewton posted:you have an obsession with strawmanning people to a ridiculous degree.
true.....
Superabound posted:Boy i sure am glad that here, in the good ol' US of A, we dont have to pay people BRIBES in order to get jobs! Now excuse me while i go pay the minimum on my $60,000 student loan debt
hoyl shit..
“The ongoing crisis, including that in the aircraft building industry, is proof they can’t answer the challenges of the future. Nationalization of oligarchs’ property is long due and we hold that a nationwide referendum on the issue would seriously improve the situation,” Gennadiy Zyuganov was quoted as saying by Interfax."
https://www.rt.com/politics/320494-communist-leader-promotes-referendum-on/
getfiscal posted:the people, and the people alone, are the driving force of history, not donald.
that's a ban