ferristriangle [he/him]
For legal reasons this is a parody account
My feeling is that it is important to uphold the legacy of the first worker state ever attempted on this scale. Of course mistakes were made, many of them horrendous, but the more I try to understand this period of history the more I come away with the impression that the people fighting for the liberation of mankind from the shackles of capitalism, and the brutality of imperialism and colonialism were people who were honestly fighting for a better world and were responsible for trying to craft completely new organizations and relations of production, with very little in the way of blueprints on how to do so, all while facing some of the most fierce repression from an alliance of liberal capitalist military super powers that history has to offer.
Of course mistakes are going to be made in those conditions, and we should do our best to learn from those mistakes so that we don’t repeat them. But millions of lives were improved tremendously as a result of these efforts. Both inside and outside of the Soviet Union. Average life expectancies increased by decades because of these new kinds of organization, and for the first time in history workers were guaranteed rights like healthcare, sick leave, vacations, a 40 hour work week, workplace safety standards, disability benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. This was an incredibly powerful precedent, and showed the world that you could have an economy organized around advancing the interests of the working class, and also become an economic super power while doing so.
My dad is alive because of this precedent. Before the Soviet Union was established, workers rights were abysmal. At the turn of the century it was common to have 12-14 hour work days, 6-7 days a week. Child labor was common, and often necessary to provide for a family. People were worked to the bone until their bodies were crippled, and once they could no longer work they simply lost their job and was thrown out on the street to die. Or if they were lucky they had a family that could take care of them who end up falling deeper and deeper in debt in the process due to the burden of caretaking combined with the loss in income.
It was only because of the precedent that the Soviet Union set that labor rights organizers were ever able to win concessions from the capitalist ruling class. A ruling class who was suddenly terrified that their workers could see what was possible and attempt to emulate the Soviet Union and revolt against the exploiters. This terror finally made them willing to concede to establishing all of the workers rights we take for granted today, and without programs that came out of this like social security disability benefits, when my dad got crippled on the job he would’ve just been left to die.
There’s so much casual cruelty and brutality that is just inherent to how capitalism is structured, and it’s difficult to overstate just how monumentally important the Soviet Union was at the time in fighting for the rights of workers around the globe. It’s hard to look back on this history and see a timeline littered with mistakes and horrible crimes, the ever present capitalist encirclement, threat of bombing and destruction and invasion by the capitalist powers, relentless propaganda and subterfuge and sabotage and sanction and embargo and blockade, and on top of the unrelenting pressure of these external contradictions you have the pressure of internal contradictions, institutions of military power and coercion, secret police, bureaucracies that were plagued with opportunists and careerism, and so on. And it difficult to synthesize all of this history and understand which parts were mistakes on their part, which parts were victories on behalf of their enemies, which parts were “necessary evils” to combat both the casual and active cruelty of capitalism and Czarism, what failures or victories may have resulted from doing things differently, and so on. In other words, to separate which things are mistakes that we need to learn from, and which things are slander from a capitalist class who desperately wants us to believe that “the cure is worse than the disease,” so that no one ever attempts to emulate the soviet union and establish a world that has no need for them.
But I can’t help but conclude that the project that the Soviet Union set out on was an important step forward in advancing humanity past the predatory stage of development. And that there is still value in upholding the victories they were able to achieve, on both a national and international scale, and regarding them as the beacons of hope of a future without capitalism that they rightfully deserve, even though it is plagued by a complicated history. The terror that the idea of the Soviet Union still inspires in our enemies to this day is proof of that value, and it feels difficult to let go of that.
The Sino-Soviet split and the subsequent falling out is pretty unanimously regarded as a tragedy and misguided, not as some sort of necessary evil where the ends justify the means.
But also, foreign policy is a very different beast from domestic policy, especially considering the time period and development of China at the time. You have a brand new state, which was still 80%-90% agrarian, with very little to speak of in terms of sophisticated foreign intelligence agencies, working with a lot of imperfect and incomplete information with regard to current foreign affairs. You end up with foreign policy decisions that are fueled by spite and bad blood, rather than a rational accounting of the facts.
And none of that context is meant to be used to justify those mistakes or rationalize any of the harm that was done as a result. Those actions should be condemned, and they are condemned by most everyone who is pro-China.
But the idea that the Sino-Soviet split is evidence that China abandoned socialism and embraced capitalism has to ignore a lot of context in order to present that conclusion.
However, it presents a compelling narrative when paired with the Deng market reforms and China opening up their markets to private enterprises, so let’s take a bit of look at the rationale for this policy.
When discussing China, it’s important to note that the communist cliche of “seize the means of production” could never apply to China. This is due to the fact that China was just emerging from a century of colonial rule, where all their labor and natural resources were robbed at gunpoint and used to develop the colonial powers rather than their homeland. There were no means of production to seize, all that capital was locked away behind the doors of global trade. They were left with a country of roughly 90% peasant farmers, most of whom were working the land with hand tools. Developing advanced productive forces capable of providing for everyone will be an arduous task no matter what. So let’s look at the options available and see the rationale behind each.
First would be to pursue socialist development in alliance with the Soviet bloc, getting access to a valuable trading partner and material assistance for developing your economy. Unfortunately, that bridge was burned so this one gets thrown into the honorable mentions/alternative history pile.
Second, you could attempt to build up advanced productive forces out of sticks and stones. And the whole time you’re doing so, you’ll also have to fight off the imperialist aggression that’s directed toward every socialist project in the Cold War era, extending into today. This might be doable, but it would require tremendous amounts of toil.
Which brings us back to seizing the means of production. If you don’t want to start from nothing, you need some mechanism of exchange to gives you access to the capital that your working class built.
You could make an argument that they’d be morally justified in using their military to take back some of that stolen wealth by force as a form of reparations, but challenging a superior military power in such a way is a recipe for failure and incredible suffering.
Which leaves us with the market reforms. The main issue with the market reforms is that you reintroduce all of the contradictions of private enterprise, namely exploitation, uneven development, inequality, and so on. But you get some important benefits in exchange. For one, you gain access to important investments in labor saving tools and machinery. Which means that even though you’re introducing exploitation, you’re reducing toil by a far greater degree. The second primary benefit is that the market reforms act as a powerful deterrent to imperialist aggression and allows for peaceful development during the epoch of imperialism. This is due to the fact that by tying your economic livelihoods together, you create a kind of “economic mutually assured destruction.”
This is fully consistent with principles of socialist development, in my opinion. It’s a case of pick the best out of a bad set of options, but when accounting for the full context and conditions they were responding to this is the plan that seems to advance the interests of the masses in the most effective way available. And as these conditions change, as China has become more self sufficient and less reliant on foreign investment we see this strategy continue to change in order to best benefit the masses. Reduced reliance on investment and the sunk cost of existing investments is transformed into leverage that constantly puts pressure on private enterprise to increase wages, with an average increase of 17% each year for a total increase of 400% in the past 30 years. As capital starts getting priced out of Chinese labor markets and private enterprises start going out of business or move to more favorable labor markets, the state simply takes over and manages the business as a public enterprise instead.
That’s not “capitalist roading” no matter what the ultra-leftists might tell you.
I don’t have to take the CCP at their word.
I have the benefit of hindsight, and I can observe the incredible gains that this plan of action has won for the working class whose interests the party claims to represent. I can see that the party consistently meets or exceeds the stated developmental and economic goals that they commit to in each of their publicly available 5-year plans. This combination of consistently fulfilling their promises, and committing to 5-year plans that consistently advance the interests of the working class, would lead me to conclude that the CCP is an organization that is committed to representing the interests of the working class, and is doing the best they can with the set of options available to them.
As for where you draw the line, that always depends on the material conditions you are molding your theory of change to, and what is required to address those conditions. If, for example, America turned socialist tomorrow, I would never endorse a plan of Chinese market socialism for this new socialist states of America, because you wouldn’t be able to make a case for what needs are being met and what contradictions are being resolved in exchange for permitting private enterprise. America isn’t going to imperialize itself, so you can’t make the case for shared economic development acting as a deterrent to aggression. And America is already a highly developed economy, there’s no need to attract foreign investment to help build up your productive forces. You can just follow the standard playbook of “seizing the means of production,” because that theory of change was written with the highly developed western economies like America in mind.
Also, I would argue that capitalists are the ones making a “deal with the devil,” in this case, and not China.
To explain this idea, let’s step back into the realm of theory and ask why would we expect this theory of market socialism to work. I’ve already laid out the case for why the CCP, as a representative of the interests of the working class, would find value in sitting down at the negotiating table to make some compromises with capital. But what is the motivation of capital to play along?
Well, if we trust Marx, and we trust that the labor theory of value holds true, then we know that capital is worthless without labor. A capitalist who owns all sorts of equipment and machinery and other inputs of production, but who has no labor, in reality only has piles of lifeless junk, which on average can only be resold for the same price he paid for it, and in all likelihood will actually depreciate in value over time, either through the ravages of time and weather, through costs affiliated with maintenance and storage, or through the forward progression of technology rendering his current tools and equipment obsolete. The only way to increase the value of these inputs of production is to have them be brought to life by the application of labor, and transformed into new use values and exchange values.
So, at the end of the day, even though the capitalist tries everything in his power to increase his leverage and power over labor, he will always be subservient to labor in the end. All of his property is worthless without labor, and will tend to continue to lose value until he can offload it. If conditions existed where the capitalist enjoyed none of the leverage that he does today, then he would gladly pay labor the full value that it contributes and take no profits for himself, simply so that he could rid himself of his investment at cost rather than hemorrhaging money due to holding onto a depreciating asset.
But, unfortunately, capital currently does hold leverage over labor. Most of that leverage comes in the form of the industrial reserve army of labor. The idea here being that if I can buy and sell labor as a commodity on the labor market, and there is a surplus of labor that is desperate for work and willing to work for scraps, then that’s the price that wages will tend to be depressed towards. After all, why would I pay you a fair wage when there’s someone else starving on the street who’s willing to work for pennies?
So when China began the reform and opening up period, their leverage was tied to the labor conditions in the global labor market, and specifically tied to the conditions of other global south and previously colonized countries. When you’re trying to attract foreign investment, the same idea of the industrial reserve army applies, but on a national scale. “Why would I open a factory here when I can hire cheaper labor in Malaysia or Indonesia or the Philippines?”
As a result of this lack of bargaining power and a desperate need for investment, this often meant accepting sweatshop conditions and poverty wages.
However, a capitalist roader would’ve stopped here. You have private control of markets and production, you have super profits driven by hyper exploitation, all the capitalist aligned people are happy.
But this is obviously not where the CCP stopped. They continually built up the leverage of the working class, and continually applied more and more leverage on behalf of the working class, pushing through mandatory pay increases and improved labor conditions, constantly developing public enterprise alongside private enterprise and in competition with private enterprise, which then exerts more pressure and creates more leverage, as well as using revenue from taxing these private enterprises to build up public infrastructure that massively improved quality of life outside of work too.
One of the downsides of relying on investment from capital is that your hands are largely tied by how much leverage you have, and how desperately you need that investment. But what I consistently see out of the CCP is the transformation of self sufficiency into new leverage over capital, and the use of that leverage to consistently improve wages and labor conditions.
It’s basically like if your whole country was one big union, but when the company collapses or leaves for cheaper labor markets under this pressure, you can just nationalize that work place and keep running it as a public enterprise.
And you can see this same logic applied to their current day foreign policy and investment strategy with the development aid they give to Africa and the infrastructure being built up with the belt and road initiative. China is deeply aware how intertwined the bargaining power of labor in the global south is with the rest of the world, and that hyper-exploitation is made possible by virtue of how desperate and struggling these nations are, and how capitalism uses that as leverage. So China has a policy of aiding the economic development of these nations, regardless of political affiliation. The idea being that ruling classes are fickle and ephemeral, but real, material development will bring about lasting change.
The reason that this is a “deal with the devil” for capital is that while they are getting short term profits out of the deal now, their leverage over huge segments of the labor market is being eroded in the process, which shifts the balance of power between labor and capital to where capital is the weaker of the two, and exploits the fact that capital will always need labor, but labor won’t always need capital.
We have a definition of genocide which makes almost no reference to cultural destruction, despite Lemkin considering cultural destruction as being a core component of his definition of genocide. He describes his involvement with drafting the UN convention in his autobiography:
“I defended [cultural genocide] successfully through two drafts. It meant the destruction of the cultural patter of a group, such as the language, the traditions, the monuments, archives, libraries, churches. In brief: the shrines of the soul of a nation. But there was not enough support for this idea in the Committee (…) So with a heavy heart I decided not to press for it.”
Part 2, why does this matter?
A lot of this conversation about how do you define genocide and what technically counts as genocide feels a lot like pedantry. “We know that genocide is bad, we don’t need to split hairs to call something bad.”
But this history is very important, and it’s important to understand both the crime of genocide, as well as all of the things that genocide encompasses, as well as understanding the motivation for why many nations would want to have a narrower definition for genocide in order to discuss how that shapes the narrative around genocide and our understanding of genocide.
So lets take a look at what crimes are being effectively buried and hidden from being prosecuted as a genocide that otherwise should be considered a genocide based off of the original, academic formulation.
America is chock full of these examples, as well as the colonial empires of the British, French, Spanish, Germans, and so on.
In no particular order, from America we have biological warfare against Native Americans, events like the trail of tears, systematically forcing native populations into “reservations,” indigenous schools designed to “Americanize” native children, paying settlers to go out and murder nearby native populations and paying for every scalp delivered. A lot of these actions would fall under the “official” definition of genocide, where members of the group were deliberately killed or physically destroyed, but those things happened “way in the past.” However, the isolation of large parts of the remaining native population into reservations which are basically slums with little to no access to economic development should absolutely be considered an ongoing act of genocide. Similarly, you have the apartheid that is American Black Codes and American Jim Crow that legally enshrined a segregated and second class status to black Americans that was ongoing and would continue for sometime afterward when the UN genocide convention was being drafted.
Some examples that were given by representatives that were a part of drafting the resolution:
Sweden noted that its forced conversion of the Lapps to Christianity might lay it open to accusations of cultural genocide.
Brazil warned that ‘some minorities might have used it as an excuse for opposing perfectly normal assimilation in new countries.’ (New countries in this context meaning settler colonial states)
South Africa endorsed the remarks of New Zealand, insisting upon ‘the danger latent in the provisions of article III where primitive or backward groups were concerned.’
Source: “Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes,” William Schabas
And then we have what is somewhat of a low hanging fruit when talking about the history of colonial regimes, which basically conducted themselves exactly in line with Lemkin’s definition of genocide. You militarily occupy a region, claim authority over the region as your colony, implement your own government and legal system that has two tiers for colonizers and the colonized, and impose that rule against the colonized and in exclusion to their own legal and social customs. And indigenous schools were a large part of enforcing this colonial rule on a social level as they were institutions that tried to scrub out any native identity and culture and enforce the colonial nation’s culture as the correct culture.
And lets take a moment to really interrogate what indigenous schools do, and why they relevant when talking about genocide, especially when using Lemkin’s definition. Indigenous schools at their core are an institution of forced assimilation. They take children and punish them for using their native language, punish them for wearing native styles of clothing, punish them for eating their traditional cultural dishes, and create an environment that creates deep shame for expressing any kind of cultural heritage. It’s a systematic process that forcibly takes an entire generation and tries to destroy any association they have with their parent’s culture, and in its place you teach them the colonizer’s language, the colonizer’s style of dress, the colonizer’s style of worship, the colonizer’s values, the colonizer’s mode of economic organization, the colonizer’s legal structure, and so on.
As a side note, this is also where the conception of cultural appropriation comes from. On its face, sharing music, styles of dress, cuisine, ideas of spirituality, and so on across cultures isn’t some nefarious thing. What makes something cultural appropriation is when you have this greater context of colonization and forced assimilation, where these national groups have their heritage forcibly torn away from them, ridiculed, and used as a signifier of “backwardness,” “savagery,” and marks them as a second class citizen, only for members of the dominant group to take that same heritage and commodify it as exotic novelties.
The old quote “If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter” comes to mind.
Making something long is easy, just cover every point you might conceivably want to talk about, and read off your first draft.
Making something concise, coherent, engaging, focused, informative, and clear, on the other hand, often takes many revisions.
Sounds like your complaints are more about the audience that certain youtubers attract more so than the youtubers themselves.
but it’s a really common refrain from within the hardcore fanbases of Breadtubers and streamerbros for fans to claim that “they’ve done more for the left than anyone else.”
Like, I agree that this is a believable interaction, but the question I would have to ask is why are we assigning so much weight to the opinions of randos on the internet?
I mean, I certainly understand the frustration that comes from these kinds of interactions. But you also need to keep in mind that people who are nuanced and put a lot of thought into their positions/opinions aren’t the people who are loudly posting their bad takes. The people who are doing that tend to be opinionated and arrogant, and as a result trying to have a discussion with them can be frustrating and feel like you’re talking to a brick wall. But that’s also the majority of opinions and argumentation that you’re going to see being shared, because that kind of axiomatic and simplistic world view is the easiest kind to share. You don’t have to lay out the ground work for why you believe something is true, you just proclaim that it is true and double down when challenged.
The thing is, you shouldn’t be addressing those people directly. If you’re replying to/challenging a person like this, you should be writing your response for the benefit of the audience who will be reading that exchange, and you should be responding with the presumption that the bulk of people are not the arrogant and opinionated person you’re replying to and that they would appreciate being introduced to an opposing viewpoint.
Now, if you’re going to a place such as a dedicated discord or subreddit for a specific content creator, depending on how that community developed it’s possible that all of the reasonable people have left those communities and the only people left are the “true believers,” so to speak. But you have to keep in mind that the people who will join a community and regularly post in that community is usually a tiny fraction of the overall audience for a given content creator. And that can still end up being hundreds or thousands of people jumping into your replies when you criticize their darling content creator, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate any widely held sentiment among an audience more broadly. It just indicates that some randos on the internet have bad takes, and those randos happen to be part of those communities. Whereas the majority of a given audience is probably mostly “normal,” and don’t have their identity invested into their favorite content creator in nearly the same way.
Like, this kind of complaint feels akin to what conservatives like to do where they sift through the discourse™️ in order to find the most cringey arguments that they can scrape off of tumblr, often posts from literal children/teenagers, and then sharing memes with “TRIGGERED” as the caption and pretending that those memes represent “The Left.” Or it feels like the Ben Shapiro special where he picks “debates” with random college freshmen that he can mock and talk over to show how pathetic “The Left” is, instead of finding someone who can put forward the strongest and most well thought out version of a position and debating them on fair terms. Yeah, Ben Shapiro can talk down to people half his age who haven’t fully developed their political beliefs yet and make them look foolish, and yeah, we can pick out random fans of a specific content creator and talk about how bad their takes are. But neither of those things tell us anything meaningful about the larger population, and there isn’t any reason why the opinions of randos should be treated as indicating anything significant or meaningful.
I suppose you could make the argument that in the case of content creators that you get the community that you cultivate, but even in that case the more meaningful criticism would be to break down what a creator is doing that would cultivate an audience like that. The existence of online randos having bad takes is not itself significant or meaningful.
I think it would be helpful to just take a step back and reframe your experience, starting with the understanding that most people are reasonable, reachable, and teachable. And then approach these interactions with the understanding that the people posting inflammatory takes and who immediately become defensive in response to criticism aren’t the people you are trying to reach, but they will be the people you encounter online the most because they are the most likely people to share their opinion and to respond to criticism. Either adapt your response with the understanding that your intended audience is all of the people who will be reading that exchange and that your intended audience is not the person you are responding to specifically, or step away from online discourse altogether and focus your outreach/persuasion on people in your actual life where you can have face-to-face discussions instead of semi-anonymous flame wars.
So “people can be Nazi apologists and that’s ok”
How exactly are you coming to the conclusion that this is the position of the person you’re replying to?
Because in the comment chain that I’m reading @authorinthedark@lemmy.sdf.org is making the very reasonable argument that one editor/user =/= Wikipedia.
The mistake you’re making here is assuming that disagreeing with someone’s reasoning is the same as disagreeing with their conclusion. We are all on board with the conclusion that the user (or users) that are trying to do nazi apologia are bad. What’s being challenged is not whether or not it is good to do nazi apologia, but that in order for this specific event to be considered an example of Wikipedia engaging in nazi apologia as an organization then you need look at the outcome of the appeals process and not simply the fact that an appeal was made. An editor/user tried to white-wash and obscure the subject’s nazi affiliation by making an appeal for deletion, the appeal was denied and Wikipedia kept the article up.
You can still conclude that Wikipedia is systematically biased in numerous ways. That conclusion is not the subject of this discussion. What is being disputed is whether or not this specific incident is a valid component of the reasoning to make a conclusion about Wikipedia one way or the other, and I think it’s apparent to everyone that the answer is “no, it is not.” This incident tells us that there is a user or users that are shitty, but the end result was that Wikipedia as an organization denied their appeal and left the article up.
There are certainly other arguments that can be made which support the conclusion that Wikipedia is full of pro-imperialist bias and the like, but this incident is not a good candidate for supporting that conclusion. But what you seem to be doing is working backwards by assuming, “we all agree that (conclusion) is correct, therefore all arguments supporting (conclusion) must also be correct. And anyone who disputes (argument/reasoning) must also be disputing (conclusion).” But this line of thought is simply wrong. You can use ridiculous logic and land on the correct conclusion by chance. It’s the classic case of “Right answer, wrong equation.” There’s no reason to assume that someone is supporting a conclusion that opposes the the one you support just because they’re pointing out that you used the wrong equation to get there.
