And no, I’m not saying don’t vote; I’m saying that there comes a point when voting isn’t going to solve the problem
Yes it is. Industrialization helps everyone who implements it. It has nothing to do with the political ideology. Industrialization is good. The funny thing about you posting that. Is that China is not Marxist leninist or socialist anymore in any meaningful way. There is a new bourgeois-xi class oppressing the proletariat. And frittering away all their hard work on get rich quick schemes for him and his friends before everything implodes.
Marxism-Leninism is not tied to one specific one size fits all economic policy, what’s needed depends on the specific material conditions. China managed to open up and allow bourgeois investment to flow in, without allowing the bourgeoisie to take over the government and do regulatory capture. This was what they needed to do at the time to best advance the condition of the people, and it’s also allowed them to emerge as a major global power, while at the same time having too many economic ties for anyone to really do anything about them, militarily. It’s proving to be an incredibly successful strategy, both geopolitically and domestically.
Tell that to emperor bourgeoi-xi in the forbidden city. And his wealthy oligarch buddies. The bourgeoisie never had to take over. Xi happily joined them, and is planning to out bourgeoisie them. He certainly isn’t proletariat and neither are the business owners in China working with him. But tell yourself what you need to to cope.
Do you feel that one isolated graph justifies everything Mao did though? Like, 15 – 55 million people died in the Great Leap Forward, some 20 – 30 million died due to the Four Pests campaign, and so on and so on, but life expectancy got better so that’s OK? How much of that is even Mao’s doing? He kicked the bucket in the mid 70’s after all
No, Mao did a lot of terrible things which I would not defend. But he also made very significant improvements in the lives of a lot of people, and imo the graph puts a lot of things into perspective. During the enormous failure of the Great Leap Forward, that’s where the line stagnates before continuing upwards. The steep climb afterwards was actually during the Cultural Revolution, the chaos and destruction is far outweighed by the implementation of the Barefoot Doctors program, in which doctors were trained quickly and sent out to the provinces to administer the basics of modern medicine, such as vaccines.
Of course you’re right that it wasn’t all Mao’s doing. While life expectancy drastically increased during the time he was in power, people were still living in conditions of extreme poverty. The reforms in the 80’s beginning with Deng led to 800 million people being lifted out of poverty, which amounted to 3/4 of worldwide poverty reduction. But Westerners, not having experienced anything like the conditions that the communists in China eliminated, generally ignore these accomplishments and disavow the entire project as a total failure.
It’s fair to criticize Mao for sure, but there’s a lot of space in between “idolization” and “incompetent psycho.” If you have any sort of complex or nuanced view on him, however, that means that you’re a tankie.
I don’t think people are generally against nuance (or at least they shouldn’t be) but it’s not like actual tankies – ie. authoritarian communists – have very nuanced views. So yes, of course there’s a whole gradient between “idolization” and “incompetent psycho” and I was being hyperbolic, but especially with Mao I’d argue that he really was fairly incompetent. Likely not an actual psychopath like Stalin seemed to be, but a shining example of competence he wasn’t (Four Pests is just one example). This doesn’t mean that nothing good happened under his rule though.
