/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!
Without revolution, things stay the same. Risk death on your feet or live on your knees.
Sometimes you can get lucky and avoid revolution, and we should always strive for those peaceful alternatives, but sometimes there’s no other choice.
It’s called revolutionary optimism.
I’m right where I need to be.
Yes, their decision helps their government stay stable and in control and it puts Western-backed counter-revolutionaries at a disadvantage. They have to do this or, again, they’re going to have to deal with political violence as people get radicalized by Western governments and billionaires.
I generally agree with China’s firewall, of course I’m not going to criticize it that much. I like it when my enemies are silenced, because I’m not a liberal and I don’t believe my enemies should have a right to speak. 😊
The world isn’t roses and sunshine, after all.
That’s a specific incident, I don’t think it shows some kind of widespread colonialism from China. This doesn’t compare to Belgium at all, their colonial behavior was well documented and systematic.
As for China’s firewall and their regulation of criticism, they have to protect themselves from propaganda that gets endlessly pumped out by Western billionaires and governments. There’s a material reason for these laws, they aren’t just evil totalitarians that hate freedom.
This sometimes results in people getting caught in the crossfire, and that’s not good, but what else can China do? If they just allow endless Western meddling they’ll have unrest and terrorism as people get radicalized by billionaires, far right factions, and the US State Department.
Oh yeah, after Congo got independence from Belgium. Their purchasing power reduced to not even 10% of what it was at 1960 at the time of 1979.
Yes, and that was revenge. Countries were punished for winning independence.
But these railroads and trains are still being used today.
Those railroads are just supply lines that ship from resource extraction points to seaports. The railroads don’t connect cities or provide infrastructure for actual people or act as part of the supply chain for internal production. They were built to be purely extractive. That’s not real development, that’s underdevelopment. The railroads ship out cobalt and ground nuts and the people of the DRC are deprived of access for their own civilian or industrial uses.
Colonizers did not develop Africa. This is a lie spread by colonizers to hide their crimes against humanity.
In Congo, any Belgian was forcibly deported and many were murdered.
Yeah, because Belgians raped and tortured and murdered so many Congolese people. The sick shit colonizers did in Africa rivals the Nazis.
The west developed China.
No no no, China developed itself by fooling the West (into selling them the rope, get it?) because the West never develops anything by choice.
Look, if revolution can be avoided that’s great! Venezuela managed to do it and they’d be doing quite well if it weren’t for imperialist meddling from the US. I’m not saying that revolution is the only option, only that the abolition of capitalism must be the end goal. I say “end goal” because it’s not realistic to just abolish markets and commodity production and wage labor instantly and expect it to work. The abolition of capitalism will take time.
But if your goal is to keep capitalism alive forever you are not a leftist. Deal with it.
You should read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, capitalism didn’t help them at all. They were intentionally deprived of industrial and intellectual property that would allow them to build up their own means of production – underdeveloped by capitalism — and intentionally kept at a lower stage of development to superexploit the workers and extract superprofits.
Flag independence and so-called decolonization didn’t mean freedom to develop either, now under neocolonialism the same underdevelopment takes place. Libya and Syria are just more examples of the same neocolonial agenda, to underdevelop nations and force them to be subservient to the imperial core. Those weren’t revolutions, they were Western dirty wars: coup the government, pour in weapons to fuel whatever terrorist groups are willing to work with the West, sanction the people to make the economy scream, etc. etc.
So, no, capitalism wasn’t the best way to develop any of those countries.
The reason China needed to use capitalism to develop was solely to fool the West into doing business. There’s a saying attributed to Lenin; “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” That’s all China has done. Not only did the capitalists sell them the rope, the capitalists also sold them the rope factories and outsourced every step of rope production.
China was never capitalist. They’re communists wearing the flayed skin of capitalism to trick it into lowering its guard.
Capitalism also isn’t developing the imperial core anymore. We have reached a stage of deindustrialization, where now instead of building up infrastructure and production capacity we’re letting capital strip the wiring from the walls to maximize cost cutting without actually developing anything. There is some development that still happens thanks to government grants and public institutions, but now neoliberalism is cutting those too to “save money”. Thanks to rampant privatization and austerity everything is worse.
And of course there’s no popular support for a communist revolution here in the West, this is the imperial core. We grew fat and rich off of the superprofits from imperialism, revolution would mean a redistribution of wealth from the imperial core to the periphery. That means Europe and Canada and the US will have to pay repairations for what they have done to the world. I don’t expect that to be popular here!
In both Cuba and the DPRK they’ve been under a brutal siege war from the United States since the revolution, don’t pretend like they struggle for no reason. There are certainly problems, but they can be laid firmly at the feet of the US empire and its proxies.
But the US won’t be around forever and BRICS is opening the world economy to them. They endured a near century of humiliation and its finally coming to an end, I’m excited to see how they develop without a US boot on their necks! Aren’t you?
As for China, I was skeptical about the Dengist reforms. It’s like you said, they boosted private sector development and investment. The created billionaires. They allowed for heightened exploitation of workers. They suppressed Maoists.
They proved politics are still in command with Zero COVID, though. Ever since China’s heroic pandemic response I am optimistic that the private sector is subordinate. They’re willing and able to tell their billionaires “no” and force them to obey.
See, the purpose of the Dengist reforms was to develop China’s economy as fast as possible while avoiding Western retaliation, like what happens to every other communist country that becomes the subject of endless siege and proxy warfare, and it worked. Unlike under capitalism where the anarchy of the market dictates production, China has its productive capacity firmly under the control of the government. They still issue marching orders to the private sector and they centrally plan their development.
China is now a world leader in technological innovation and is critical to the global supply chain as a key node of production. As much as Trump wants to do a trade war he’s more likely to hurt the US than to actually hurt China. China is still dominated by the capitalist mode of production, like you said, but since the Party remains in command they’ll be able to abolish the market entirely without fear of Western retaliation. Capitalism is just a stage of development, after all.
Also, don’t ignore Vietnam. They have been on a similar trajectory as China, developing their economy and integrating themselves into the supply chain, and now they’re growing closer with China with every new idiot tariff imposed by Trump.
I find that “”“social democrats”“” are just pessimists. You think revolution never works and communism always fails, and so you retreat into reformism and liberalism. I still have revolutionary optimism, though, which means I don’t even need to win this argument. I’m certain that you’ll see that I’m right soon enough. ☺️
Do you want to abolish capitalism? Not just reform it, but completely abolish it.
That’s the bare minimum.
I’m constantly arguing with liberals, the whole reason I’m on .ml and not one of the defederated instances is because I want to talk to y’all instead of stay in an echo chamber of people that agree with me.
Also liberals aren’t leftists 😘
Hardly an echo chamber, then. Echos don’t argue, they just repeat the same stuff back.
Then why do we keep arguing with each other?
But when instances become instruments of propaganda for NATO/US/EU and ban people who expose such propaganda, that’s fine.
I tolerate the toxicity of .world and other liberal instances, but maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should just join lemmygrad so I never have to get attacked again for disagreeing with the liberal consensus and be treated like an enemy. I’d probably hit myself less.
But I don’t think we are enemies. I think that, too, is propaganda.
There’s a difference, I think, between instances moderating as they wish and blocking entire instances. That should really be the last resort.
Just let mods be mods, there’s no need to turn this into some kind of Lemmy civil war and start unpersoning your enemies.
This sectarian shit really sucks.
Doesn’t really come across as “civil and nice” to me, but okay.
So I have had similar experiences with liberal instances. Why is it okay for my comments to be removed and for me to get banned for acknowledging that NATO encirclement of Russia exists or that the Euromaidan was a coup or that the US/NATO sabotaged ceasefire negotiations early in the conflict or that the goal of the war is to kill as many Russians as possible?
I accept being treated like this, because I understand that when I’m in lemmy.world or other liberal instances I am going to be speaking out against the liberal consensus. It’s their instance, they can moderate how they like and I accept that.
So when I see lemmy.ml doing the same thing to liberals it’s hard for me to see the problem.
Please link to a specific example and don’t dump a gish gallop of stuff on me that I have to sift through myself. What I see is a lot of complaining about Rule #1 which specifically says to be civil and nice, and people being banned for not being civil or nice. Nothing unreasonable about it.
In my experience the only nastiness I face are from people who attack me for being a “”“tankie”“”
Lemmygrad’s moderation if quite strict so I can understand why liberals wouldn’t be interested, and hexbear doesn’t shy away from personal attacks on liberals, but lemmy.ml seems very reasonable to me.
Heaven forbid you encounter any opinions you disagree with.
lol a few days after he did that speech he voted against blocking $8.8 billion in arms sales to Israel 🤡
People are being sent to concentration camps.