/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Obviously the aura and the vibes you silly ultra, now don't question China's trade with Israel!

Liberal democracy, social democracy and fascism are all predicated around class collaboration and subverting class interests to national interests

There is no fundamental difference, no.

>>2819078
Does this mean that in a civil war between Social Democrats and Fascists the end result is irrelevant?

>>2819086
Depends. If the historical class party is absent we should generally support the weaker class enemy (fascists in the case of WW2)

The difference is that China actually reigns in their capitalists and Nazi Germany didn't. China actually to be appears in practice what fascism claimed to be in theory, which is a state apparatus that has managed to subordinate the bourgeoisie without eliminating them entirely. This is evident from their actual policies, e.g. actually imposing dire consequences on porkies for corruption, court rulings protecting workers from replacement by AI, controlled demolitions of speculative bubbles, etc. As for the structural reasons for this, it likely has to do with the fact that the PRC already had a planned economy and ML party-state, and then gradually introduced market elements in a controlled manner. This allowed the reemergence of the bourgeoisie as a class, but did not grant them the same levers by which they normally influence the state. By contrast the Nazis took power in an existing bourgeois state and aligned themselves with the big bourgeoisie to keep it.

>>2819088
I agree

>>2819067
What about labor unions in USSR? Seems like all ML states oppress workers.

>>2819092
>if you say something is x it becomes x
Infantile

>>2819094
I disagree. We should critically support western imperialism against fascism as principled leftists.

Based, death to syndicalism larp

Trotsky won

>>2819097
I'm going by what they do, not what they say. It's also not true that workers are not allowed to strike in China. The ACFTU does approve them sometimes, and in practice regularly tolerates wildcat strikes. At worst what they have is no different than the yellow unionism of social democratic countries.

>>2819102
This

Death to all labor unions

>>2819078
So was ww2 then a civil war between social-democrats?

You are fucking deranged.

>>2819092
People egg on you with no substance but you're right. China is a proletarian republic.

>>2819257
Did fascist Italy ever shoot any landowners or industrialists? Did they ever make it illegal to fire workers and replace them with machines?

>>2819291
I'd consider China a degenerated worker's state, like the USSR. Definitely worth supported, but distorted by decades of siege and later partial capitalist restoration.

>>2819301
Nazi Germany shot Jewish bourgeoisie

>>2819354
Because they were Jewish, not because they were bourgeois. China's willingness to use even the death penalty to ensure conformity with party directives is a pretty big indication that capitalists don't enjoy the same power they do in the West. If you wanted to insist on a comparison to a Western counterpart then the obvious example would be social democracy, not fascism.

>illegal to fire workers and replace them with machines?
Non issue since it's the ABCs of Marxism to know that capital resists full automation, and it will never take place under capitalism. The petty bourgeoisie and illiterate libs like you sure like to fearmonger about the status quo changing tho. Meanwhile when we analyse the situation beyond populist nothingburger rhetoric we see China actively maintains a huge reverse army of labor.

Denglib arguments are so childish it's insane

>>2819356
Nah they shot them for the same reason China shot theirs (all 2 of them who got shot) to maintain the interests of the whole bourgeoisie class, that's what all states do including the US.

>CHINA LE BANNED AI
China banned AI as a sufficient reason for layoffs which is redundant since labor laws and work contracts already forbid arbitrary layoffs
Also let's assume this is meant to counter full automation, this is like issuing a law against genociding the proletariat, it's not only redundant but goes against capital's own interests. Purely theatrical bs meant for our simple minded friends to spam everywhere.

>>2819368
The self-abolition of the proletariat is against the interest of capital, but you see ultra, Chinese capital is social, read Ferdinand Lassalle.

>>2819425
Capital is the instruments of labor; or the one which is universally given by all economists.
-Ferdinand Lassalle, What is Capital?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lassalle/works/whatiscapital.htm

>>2819358
You are forgetting that they annihilated all Jews no matter bourgeois or proletariat.

>>2819067
didn't have the balls to post this in /prc/ award

>>2819351
I don’t know who said the top quote but it seems to be generally correct and I don’t know how it implies Stalin was a social democrat

>>2819354
And Jewish proles, actually Jewish probes were over represented because it was harder for them to escape Germany and the haavara agreement was a deal the Nazis made to allow 60,000 Zionist(whom were mostly petty bourgeois) to leave

>>2819092
>China actually reigns in their capitalists
so did socdem keynesians, were they socialist too? fact is the cn rev was a socialist rev but it did not produce socialism before it was betrayed, much like other revs

>>2819457
he will come back and say there were no jewish proles
>>2819450
not highkey

china is everything fascist italy claimed itself to be

>>2819289
>>2819351
>So was ww2 then a civil war between social-democrats?
I subscribe to this theory. WW2 was indeed a civil war between different socialisms. WW1 and great depression was the great capitalist crisis that brought down capitalism as Marx understood it. The great depression basically made the world rely on state subsidies, arbitration, bailouts and guidance for everything, because "just leaving it to market and profit motive to coordinate" would collapse everything. You look at the western liberal states today and realize that they are not minimal laissez-faire systems with profit motive at the helm, but have really heavy public sectors and public services, public-private relationships and state contracts dominate. The social contract is very much: keep the existing power structures in place, make people at the top rich and give the proles enough that they can replenish themselves. It's not about "treats" but any western society would rip itself apart the very second the state steps down from the private sphere that is totally unable to coordinate anything by itself. We live in a kind of parasitic bourgeoisie socialism every one of us and the struggle now is mainly political, not waiting or seeking major change in the mode-of-production.

>>2819301
>Did they ever make it illegal to fire workers and replace them with machines?
should we make it illegal to replace workers with machines? Are we Luddites now? Should socialists strive to the neolib strawman of USSR and China where construction is done with shovels and handtools instead of excavators and other machinery, because former provides work for everybody?

>>2819494
>>2819457
The majority of the Jews killed were petty bourgeoisie. Doesn't make their physical liquidation justifiable, but it sure did serve capital.

its called vanguardism liberal

>>2819505
We are going to rape your asshole

>>2819461
>so did socdem keynesians
They didn't kill any of them, and ultimately the victory of neoliberalism demonstrated that they never dislodged the bourgeoisie as the most powerful class.
>were they socialist too?
Yes, in the sense that they saw themselves as engaging in a form of socialist construction. People seem to forget that most social democrats (in theory) aspired to the abolition of capitalism prior to the 1980s. There are many obvious parallels between 20th century social democracy and modern China. However the most important one is that they were both societies in which the capitalist class did not enjoy complete control of the state. In the social democratic context, this was because the workers successfully built a power base both within and outside of the state through electoral politics and labour action. The labour movement was capable of wrestling some economic and political power from capital, and creating a situation where the capitalists couldn't simply ignore them. These remained bourgeois states, but not states in which the bourgeoisie could act freely without labour having a lot to say about it. China has arrived at an interesting mirror image of this relationship, but coming at it from the opposite direction. The PRC is founded as a worker's state, and gradually allows the bourgeoisie to reemerge and establish a strong power base, but without the party relinquishing full control of the state to them. This produces a similar relationship to that which existed under social democracy, but with the roles reversed. People really need to stop thinking of class struggle and the class character of a state as being a binary. In reality it's a question of hegemony, and where different classes sit within it. It's entirely possible for the ruled to strongly influence the ruler without overturning the social order. This means that the proletariat can amass considerable power in a bourgeois state (social democracy), and also that the bourgeoisie can amass considerable power in a proletarian state (Socialism with Chinese characteristics). This can happen without the class character of the state actually being fully supplanted.

>>2819538
>should we make it illegal to replace workers with machines? Are we Luddites now?
China isn't engaging in Luddism. On the contrary they're currently a world leader in AI research. Rather they aren't allowing capitalists to recklessly implement this technology to increase profits in the short term while causing economic and social chaos in the long term. Chinese companies aren't banned from using AI. It's just that if they want to replace a worker with AI, they need a better reason than "it's cheaper." They also either need to give them a new job, or pay for them to he retained.

>>2819461
Socdem Keynesians have ceased to exist, in case you weren't paying attention to the last 50 years of history. They were tolerated by the bourgeoisie in the post-war era and then got removed from power and now even "social democrat" parties in Europe are privatizing, deregulating, and selling out to porky. Social Democracy is dead. Half the problem in engaging with "anti Dengists" is that they absolutely refuse to acknowledge this and pretend that the modern "welfare states" like France, Denmark, Sweden, etc. haven't suffered massive cuts and austerity and privatizations, while China is moving towards greater state control and social spending, thereby undercutting the "China is just doing socdem!" argument.

>>2819744
They scrapped the iron rice bowl

>>2819748
The Iron Rice Bowl only guaranteed employment for 30 million workers out of a billion. It benefited nothing other than pure nepotism and family connections based on whether someone was lucky enough to work for a state owned enterprise or not, and it severely damaged the efficiency of state owned enterprises and also the government itself since no one could ever be fired and they were basically guaranteed that job for life. I would support an introduction of a job guarantee as a future reform but the iron rice bowl was clearly not that. Seriously look at all the western research publications bemoaning the destruction of China's "iron rice bowl" they all pinpoint job losses to around 30 million while China back in the 90s already had over a billion people. Absolutely insane that Western academics hoodwinked the entire left into thinking 30 million people being fired meant that everyone lost a job. If 30 million people being fired was a tragedy then what the hell were the other 970 million people doing? They didn't have that "iron rice bowl" either.

>>2819092
“The destruction of the labour movement in the following months convinced many businessmen that they were right to back the new regime. But as time went on, businessmen found that the regime had its own objectives that increasingly diverged from their own. Chief of these was the ever more frenetic drive to rearm and prepare for war. Initially, business was happy to accommodate itself to this objective, which brought it renewed and then increased orders. Even consumer goods producers benefited from the armaments-driven economic recovery. But within a few years, as the regime’s demands began to outstrip German industry’s capacity to fulfil them, industrialists’ doubts began to grow. Few industrialists’ reactions to this process were as sharp as those of the steel boss Fritz Thyssen, whose support of the Nazi Party before 1933 was as extreme as the extent of his disillusion with the movement six years later. In 1939 Thyssen bitterly condemned the state’s direction of the economy and prophesied that the Nazis would soon start shooting industrialists who did not fulfill the conditions prescribed by the Four-Year Plan, just as their equivalents were shot in Soviet Russia. He fled abroad after the outbreak of the war, his property was confiscated by the Gestapo, and he was subsequently arrested in France and put into a concentration camp.”

— Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich In Power

debate addict thread

>>2819839
>>2819744
actual good args

>>2819092
>The difference is that China actually reigns in their capitalists
He really believes it!

>>2820140
>In February 1945, Thyssen was sent to Dachau concentration camp. He was comparatively well-treated and transferred to Tyrol in late-April 1945 together with other prominent inmates, where the SS left the prisoners behind. He was liberated by the 42nd Infantry Division and 45th Infantry Division on 5 May 1945.[15]
So he defected in wartime and was sent to the Nazi equivalent of Club Fed, treated well, and left behind to be rescued by the Allies. Meanwhile in China, porkies are shot on corruption charges in even in peacetime. You can't possibly think these are equivalent. In Nazi Germany, even treason during a war wasn't enough to warrant a death sentence if you were a member of the big bourgeoisie. In China, being a capitalist doesn't shield you from a far harsher sentence for a far less severe crime.
>>2820162
Gotta love how almost every response is just "nuh uh" without any supporting counterargument.

>>2820187
China "reigns in" their capitalists when they go against the state/party, not when they exploit their workers. But then again exploitation of the proletariat is the sort of thing that doesn't bother you.

>>2820190
>China "reigns in" their capitalists when they go against the state/party, not when they exploit their workers
That in and of itself is an indicator that China isn't a bourgeois state, and that the bourgeoisie is not the ruling class. This has obvious implications for socialism in that country and its world-historical significance.
>But then again exploitation of the proletariat is the sort of thing that doesn't bother you.
Of course exploitation of workers is a bad thing, which is why it's encouraging that the Chinese state seems to be the only country in the world that could potentially put an end to it without a violent revolution.

>>2820187
You didn't even point out the most hilarious part, which is that his "prophecy" of the Nazis shooting industrialists never happened and the industrialists were happy about the slave labor thrown into their factories for higher profits. The Nuremberg Trials literally had multiple german industrialists put on trial because they were all complicit and then in the end the Americans realized that if they were punished the West German economy would inplode so they were all let off (Krupp Trial, IG Farben Trial, Flick Trial).

>>2820199
People are so desperate to to prove that China is bad that they end up downplaying how shitty and beholden to capital the Nazis were.

>>2820206
Additional proofs of US AES status
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

>>2820206
>>2820209
>Bourgeois states famously never harm bourgeoisie individuals to preserve the whole class
Yes, bourgeois states sometimes harm individual members of the bourgeoisie to preserve the whole class. However, what they don't do is kill them, or disappear them for weeks only for them to re-emerge and recant all their previous criticisms of a new policy. When members of the bourgeoisie in bourgeois states break the law, or behave in ways contrary to the interests of the class as a whole, they are treated with extreme leniency even for the most heinous crimes. Even if you want to deny all the signs and insist that China remains a bourgeois state, it would still represent the highest and most advanced form of this. Some may dismiss the significance of that, but one of Marx's most insightful and important observations was that no social order ever disappears until it exhausts all possible avenues for development. This means that China is still playing a progressive role in world history by pioneering a more advanced form of capitalism that will one say exhaust its potential for development, leaving socialism as the only path forward. Lenin, Marx, and Engels all made similar comments on the development of monopoly capitalism, arguing that it was a progressive and necessary development relative to the dispersal of production among countless small firms. Engels called this process the material basis for socialism. No matter how you look at it, China remains the most progressive of all major countries in the world and a net positive. Comparisons to fascism betray a fundamental misunderstanding of historical materialism, nevermind the ignorance in the huge difference in class relations in those two societies.

>Yes, bourgeois states sometimes harm individual members of the bourgeoisie to preserve the whole class.
>Yes China being socialist hinged on this pathetic excuse of argument that I'm going to backpaddle on
Glad we agree 👍

>>2820226
I'm not moving any goalposts and I haven't backpedalled on anything. I'm arguing that the way China treats capitalists that step out of line goes way beyond what is typical of bourgeois states, indicating that they are not the ruling class. The mere fact that countries like the US will sometimes discipline members of the bourgeoisie doesn't defeat this argument when you consider the significant differences in how and why they do it when compared to China.

>>2820228
In South korea the top bourg that represented the economic elite were arrested. The kci would torture chaebol families if they didn't do what the state wanted. Was sk socialist

China disappears members of the bourgeoisie, this is unprecedented development in the mode of production… if we exclude Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Eritrea, the United States, Nazi Germany, Ba'athist Iraq…

>>2820233
>>2820231
You're gonna actually need to provide sources on those.

>>2820190
Proof?

>>2820234
I will get you the sources

>>2820241
I'm very interested to read about them. I should also clarify that I'm not saying that executing porkies makes you socialist, or even that China's economy as it is presently constituted can be called socialist. Rather I'm saying that there are numerous indicators that point to it not being a state ruled by the bourgeoisie, such as harsh treatment of bourgeois criminals, favourable disposition towards labour by the courts, state dominance in the economy, the lack of traditional vectors of bourgeois influence in the state, and an outward ideological commitment to Marxism. Some of these indicators have been present in other bourgeois states, but I don't know any example in which they all were. China to me looks to essentially be a degenerated worker's state dominated by bureaucracy in much the same way as the USSR.

TJND

>>2820206
antitrust is petty bourgeois reformism and kicks the can down the road for a future generation to deal with again when monopoly re-emerges. it resets competition. leninism nationalizes monopolies under the proletarian dictatorship and abolishes the anarchy of production.


Lenin:

<For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

• Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, Section Titled: Can We Go Forward If We Fear To Advance Towards Socialism?, 1917
  

<State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country. I can imagine with what noble indignation some people will recoil from these words. What! The transition to state capitalism in the Soviet Socialist Republic would be a step forward? Isn’t this the betrayal of socialism? We must deal with this point in greater detail. Firstly, we must examine the nature of the transition from capitalism to socialism that gives us the right and the grounds to call our country a Socialist Republic of Soviets. Secondly, we must expose the error of those who fail to see the petty-bourgeois economic conditions and the petty-bourgeois element as the principal enemy of socialism in our country. Thirdly, we must fully understand the economic implications of the distinction between the Soviet state and the bourgeois state. Let us examine these three points. No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Soviet Socialist Republic implies the determination of the Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the existing economic system is recognized as a socialist order. But what does the word “transition” mean? Does it not mean, as applied to an economy, that the present system contains elements, particles, fragments of both capitalism and socialism? Everyone will admit that it does. But not all who admit this take the trouble to consider what elements actually constitute the various socio-economic structures that exist in Russia at the present time. And this is the crux of the question. The question arises: What elements predominate? Clearly, in a small-peasant country, the petty-bourgeois element predominates and it must predominate, for the great majority—those working the land—are small commodity producers. The shell of state capitalism (grain monopoly, state-controlled entrepreneurs and traders, bourgeois co-operators) is pierced now in one place, now in another by profiteers, the chief object of profiteering being grain. It is in this field that the main struggle is being waged. Between what elements is this struggle being waged if we are to speak in terms of economic categories such as “state capitalism”? […] It is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against state capitalism and socialism. The petty bourgeoisie oppose every kind of state interference, accounting and control, whether it be state-capitalist or state-socialist. This is an unquestionable fact of reality whose misunderstanding lies at the root of many economic mistakes. The profiteer, the commercial racketeer, the disrupter of monopoly—these are our principal “internal” enemies, the enemies of the economic measures of the Soviet power. […] The petty bourgeois who hoards his thousands is an enemy of state capitalism. He wants to employ these thousands just for himself, against the poor, in opposition to any kind of state control. And the sum total of these thousands, amounting to many thousands of millions, forms the base for profiteering, which undermines our socialist construction. Let us assume that a certain number of workers produce in a few days values equal to 1,000. Let us then assume that 200 of this total vanishes owing to petty profiteering, various kinds of embezzlement and the evasion by the small proprietors of Soviet decrees and regulations. Every politically conscious worker will say that if better order and organization could be obtained at the price of 300 out of the 1,000 he would willingly give 300 instead of 200, for it will be quite easy under the Soviet power to reduce this “tribute” later on to, say, 100 or 50, once order and organization are established and the petty-bourgeois disruption of state monopoly is completely overcome.

• Lenin, The Tax in Kind, May 1921

>>2820197
>the Chinese state seems to be the only country in the world that could potentially put an end to it without a violent revolution.
America will force it to happen anyway sadly

>>2820475
>leninism
No such thing
>anarchy of production
Can only be ended by abolishing commodity production

Lenin died admitting the failure of the NEP and the bourgeoisie directing production in the USSR