It’s like China is just that one country (aside from the Khmer Rouge) that every ML (aside from Dengists like us) agrees to hate on.
Fellow Traveler and leftypol uploaded videos criticizing them, the Shining Path hung up literal dogs to protest them, Maoists go all insane saying that it’s some red fash social-imperialist nation because (insert nato propaganda here). And Hoxhaists claim that China was never socialist and that the only socialist nation ever was USSR before Khrushchev and almighty holy Albania.
What is it that makes China so controversial even among MLs? I get that it’s not perfect and every AES state has their Ls, but jesus.
Gotta be honest, I was one of those MLs before the pandemic.
Seeing China take COVID seriously while every other capitalist nation left us to die really drove the lesson home, and now I understand that politics are still in command despite the apparent liberalization of the economy. Using capitalist development and investment (i.e. getting the capitalists to sell us the rope) is extremely dangerous but it seems China has somehow made it work despite all my doubts. I was wrong.
you might like this essay
What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]
This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.
from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
also recommended:
I think the reason social democrats and anarchists tend to “vaguely pay respects while completely underappreciating” Marx is because they don’t read theory. They don’t know why anything happens the way it does. The pandemic also started the point when I began actually reading, so that might also be what lead to my deeper and more nuanced understanding of China.
A big part is China tries to appear respectable to as many people as possible by not intervening and not appearing too anti-capitalist. Their socialism is not rushed and they work against imperialism protractedly and peacefully. This is very different from how the USSR was, and people expect all socialism to be the USSR copy-pasted.
A lot of it is the western left’s fetish for defeat, as Jones Manoel pointed out in that great article, and which Losurdo is really good at highlighting.
Another part is western chauvinism, that communist expertise must come from those in western europe or the US (who’ve never had any victories and so are talking out of turn), and that eastern communists / (insert whatever racialized term like hordes here) can’t comprehend and apply Marxism.
Anarchists are the biggest offenders for both of those.
Another big part is the short-term mindset that’s unable to see the bargain (ie the tradeoff of temporary low wage exploitation for long-term technology and expertise) , for what it really is: a long-term strategy to end colonialism, transfer control of production out of the hands of western capital, and a way out of the low-wage trap every global south nation is suffering under.
The Long Game and Its Contradictions is probably the best introduction to SWCC, and outlines what this strategy entails.
Speaking of He Zhao, it seems he got deplatformed. Does anyone know where I can read his stuff other than archive.org? We might want to set up some backup location on prolewiki for these kinds of deplatformed writers (with their permission of course).
Holy shit crazy seeing Jones Manoel being mentioned here on lemmy. One of our best 🙌
People mention the adaptation of his talk on Animal Farm reasonably often, at least: https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/
Very good to see. Jones Manoel is a true ML leader. I hope to see him in the vanguard of Brazilian revolutionary movement, if we are going to ever get there.
Personally, I see that as a sign the strategy is working. Using market forces to your advantage, as a nominally socialist organization, is inevitably going to draw a lot of criticism from your left. You get two groups: purists who see any sort of market action as an immediate and disqualifying sin; and more principled materialists who understand the rational, but also recognize the risk of being overwhelmed by market forces. It’s nice to say you will strip out private capital in the future, but when will that actually be? When the conditions are right, will it actually happen? Worse, will your organization even be able to recognize those conditions? These are important questions, but we’re not gonna see the answer any time soon.
In the mean time, western leftist doing the fire-&-brimstone preacher act is useful. Capitalists (the smarter, self-aware capitalist…) hear leftist discord over China and interpret that as meaning their oversees investments are safe.
Propaganda is helluva drug. I believe there’s so many layers of brainwash to clean off before most people see the cracks behind CIA lies of China. Though I think people can skip this process of unlearning if they visited China, watch videos of people having a good time in China (and what an absolutely beautiful, majestic country it is, looking like something from a science fiction/fantasy with so many wholesome and wonderful people), or read a non-Western book about China. When I began reading Socialist Reconstruction, my wife was skeptical of how China was being portrayed very positively, but I was slightly more willing to accept the book as being truthful and not “overly-biased” (not that I care about bias, as long as the message is honest). Only recently after, my wife and I began freeing our Western conditioned minds.
I believe people like Fellow Traveler and such should know better by now. Maybe they are being used as controlled opposition, idk.
I definitely agree it would help if these people would visit and see for themselves. However, I think the propaganda point is more complicated than you portray. Many people are convinced US enemies are bad, not because primarily because they are tricked, but because it makes them feel better. They can feel better about their own circumstances in the west if they can say “at least I’m not in (insert enemy country).” This works in a peculiar way on the western left where it may work for them to think “It’s not our fault that we aren’t anywhere near socialism. It’s all China/Deng’s fault for betraying the revolution and bringing new life to capitalism. Now all the real socialism is on it’s back foot.” Those that aren’t total doomers from that thinking may add “maybe we could have an international revolution liberating us and the Chinese people from their chains.” This all ties in with the martyr fetish thing.
Another dynamic is contrarianism. Communists don’t want to believe the CIA/news/etc. The news says China’s an authoritarian socialist hellscape. The western Communist is confused. Are they good but not socialist? Are they still authoritarian but not socialist? Then they think of the other things mentioned in this thread or remember Lenin’s approach to the international situation around WWI and conclude China’s a rival imperialist. “China’s obviously doing capitalism so well that they are beating the old imperialists. They claim it’s socialist and uphold Mao in words because people know socialism is good.” This totally makes sense if you don’t engage in Chinese theory. It also makes sense when some of China’s most ardent English language supporters are clear revisionists. I’m speaking of the “Patriotic Socialists” and those like Micheal Hudson.
