Chinese consumption is entirely reliant on the exploitation of low-wage chinese workers to profuce stuff cheaply to then sell to the west and in 30 years time as as china develops their entire consumption will be based upon the exploitation of low wage workers in developing countries like vietnam and ethiopia to produce stuff cheaply so they can sell that stuff back to their own consumers aswell as the west.
Can someone please explain as to in what capacity china is communist other than their flag? No matter how you twist it they're literally just succdems.
But all those wage workers were rural peasants! Now they aren't poor cause they work in cities!
China isn't welfarist enough to be socdem. China correctly understands that communism requires the maximal development of the productive forces. As China's wealth and consumption grows it is true that there will be some outsourcing, but not as much as you expect: a lot of production in China is sufficiently efficient and automated that it will not produce cost-savings to outsource it. For everything else, outsourcing will raise the income of Vietnam, Ethiopia, or where-ever else they outsource to. This outsourcing is exploitative (as the west's outsourcing to China was) but it is
positive sum exploitation, these countries are better off for being exploited for cheap manufacturing labour (which then becomes more expensive and automated as living standards rise) than for being left alone.
Trade is fundamentally good. You do not have to love capitalism, you do not have to love China, but you must learn to love trade. So long as the people of the world are free to trade with one another, it will all be okay in the end.
>>2854578Yes. Subsistence agriculture is an awful existence as far from your stardew valley fantasies as you can imagine. Almost anything is preferable to it. There is a reason that famine outside wartime is basically unknown to even the shittiest of industrialised economies.
All of civilisation is built on agricultural surplus.
>>2854584All this automation will just cause unemployment
>>2854588And then new desires will be thought up and people will be employed again. The postal service bankrupted the medieval page, the railway bankrupted the intercity carriage business, the car caused mass unemployment for horse breeders, sellers, carers, feeders, and so on. The computer eliminated the typesetter, the alarm clock put the knocker-upper to bed, hand-weaving was knocked out by industrialisation, ice cutters were eliminated by refrigerators, switchboard operators were removed by automated switching machines, bank tellers saw mass redundancy not - as you might think - thanks to the ATM, but due to the roll-out of online banking. elevator operators were eliminated by automatic elevators, scribes were eliminated by movable type, bowling alley pin setters, film projectionists, radium girls, town criers, milkmen, human "computers" (women doing calculations), soda jerks, dispatch riders…
And yet the highest unemployment has been in the past hundred or so years has been 25%, during the great depression, a unique series of policy fuckups. Not even a global pandemic that required everyone to be locked up indoors whenever possible could get much better than 15% unemployment, and generally speaking there has been no link whatsoever between overall employment and technological development, because every single time a job was eliminated by automation it cut costs and made life easier in such a way that the opportunity cost (what you have to give up to get it) of some other task went down.
The fact I can convey this message to you now for effectively zero cost is the result of eliminating thousands of redundant jobs. The fact someone else has made a full time job of posting screeds on substack is the result of the same cost-reducing effect.
And yeah, a lot of the new jobs created have been shit like uber-eats driver, and yeah, a lot of them are obvious candidates for automation: but something else will come along, and then that too will be half-automated.
In the last resort there's always caring for the elderly.You cannot have progress without eliminating redundant jobs and creating new ones to meet new desires.
>>2854608maybe read just the tiniest bit of Marx so that you don't post such high school tier liberal turbo garbage.
>>2854835I've forgotten more Marx than you've ever read, you elevator button pushing horse fiddling prick.
>>2854586Anon… YouTube is the sloppiest source out there. Any content creator can just cherry pick shit
I’m not even a China simp but come on
>>2855007Glad if it's actually good, but if it's like honey (completely fake shit made with glucose syrup) then they shouldn't brag about it
>>2854586Who else watching this just to learn how to doompost about the US economy in Chinese?
>>2855132That's one way to cope / postpone dealing with the terminal state of ML
>>2855272>"The book">A meme>Zero proof of cognitive engagement, just low-quality propaganda replyYou can start with this specific book bud:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm>the less developed a nation isMeanwhile China itself, last week:
>China discards 'developing-country' statushttps://apnews.com/article/china-wto-reform-developing-country-special-treatment-20c70ec00d9502189bba87f93521b09f >>2854570What became Marxism-Leninism and Maoism is based on two popular premises:
- That capitalist industrial development which builds and redistributes social wealth is not possible; and
- That same industrial development under a single-party state will automatically lead to communism.
The 20th century has proven both of these things incorrect. Capitalist nations are perfectly capable of developing and providing social welfare under certain conditions, and the only thing 'AES' nations did was adequately prepare their populations for working in capitalist factories once their autarkic developmental regimes collapsed.
>>2855284Gothakritik is utopian slop
when 3rd worldists whine about exploitation, they usually talk of people who are the
least exploited, the
least valuable, the
least developed
>China discards 'developing-country' statusso? why should we be mad that Chinese communists have managed to develop their agrarian shithole country into a world superpower? communism is not christcuckery
>>2855312>why should we be mad that Chinese communists have managed to develop their agrarian shithole country into a world superpower?Cause that isn't communism. Good job on Mao, Deng and Xi in progressing capitalism tho. I'm sure China post-revolution will talk about them like the Roberspierres they were.
>>2855328Don't slander Mao by associating his name with those traitor dogs (who will only ever be remembered as filth)
>>2855272>exploitation is when wages are low or when commodities are cheapExploitation is when you have 539 billionaires and 170 million minimum wage workers like china.
>>2855362Better to have a billion starving peasants on below minimum wage and a few thousand on western middle income salaries?
China is a leninist state, a leninist state is nothing more than a worker co op at the scale of a nation state, thus it’s workers exploiting themselves, not the other businesses that supply their inputs
>>2855328>Cause that isn't communismcommunism is the conditions of the liberation of the working class anon, not some end goal
>>2855362have you read Capital?
>>2855399Then what is the end goal?
>>2855387That would imply workers were the ones actually in charge of marxist leninist states.
>>2855422Pen and paper workers are workers, putting the general secretary in a hard hat and a safety vest does nothing
>>2855400liberation of humanity from class systems, states and capital rule, and eventually labor as much as possible
>>2855452if cheap labor is western capitalists top motivation, why are they still dumping investment in china and not thailand or philippines ?
>>2855464Many companies are alredy moving their factories and setting up factories in vietnam, bangladesha and other south-east asian countries and this trend will only increase in the coming years.
technical expertise infastructure and supply chain already exist there labor cost is not the entire reasona fctories exist in the places they do if that was the case uganda would be the only country in the world with any industry.
>>2855470>technical expertise infastructure and supply chain already exist there labor cost is not the entire reasona fctories exist not really. if that were the case, industry would have never left america. the question of why western capitalists still invest in china despite its expensive labor costs remains unanswered
>>2855387No. I was about to make a thread about this but then stumbled here.
China's agriculture is co-op based. But only its agriculture. Everything else is either dictated by the state or by private capital.
I don't know how many of you have read Engels's The Peasant Question. I don't even know if any of the big revolutionary names have read it. Engels argues that voluntary cooperatives for peasants are an absolutely necessary step for the transition to socialism. He specifically argues against what we've termed forced collectivization. Furthermore, he specifically says, most peasants are natural allies of the movement, not "class enemies" (God forbid the people feeding us were enemies!).
Thinking about what Engels wrote there, the various disasters of the 20th century, what China is doing, modern logistics, etc. I think I've finally cracked the code for scientific socialism. Unfortunately, I suffer from imposter syndrome and terminal ADHD, so the necessary confidence and research to produce a serious pamphlet is holding me back. I just came to this realization today after months of poking at the disasters of agriculture in Actually Existing Socialism and other problems faced by the movement in general ("why no insurrection in the West damn you labor aristokkkrats!!").
My proposal is this: the co-op model isn't just right for agriculture, it's right for everything. And it leads to outright communism, provided a few questions of the state are provided for.
Socialists of today are split into two or three camps blind to the synthesis of each other. These are the "micro-level" advocates of workers' democracy, and "micro-level" advocates of state necessities and cybernetic planning. The former struggle to answer the Proudhonist dilemma of how are they not recreating capitalism, or how can these poor co-ops defend themselves from the onslaught of big capital, the latter struggle to answer the Leninist dilemma of how the state is supposed to wither away, or how to "convert" people to socialism.
Scientific socialism is the understanding that human behavior is not dictated by what is in people's heads, but by what is the source of their comfort. Thus, a scientific socialist approach ties the source of the comfort to the workers themselves. The point is not for workers to suddenly realize they want to help an abstract humanity, the point is for their work to directly benefit their actually existing community they reside in. This is EXACTLY how rural co-ops in China, or co-ops like Mondragon Corporation in Spain, function. Of course, Spain is by no means a workers' state, Mondragon Corporation engages in capitalistic practices like exploiting gig workers and workers abroad without a stake in the co-op, but this is where I get to "a few questions of the state are provided for".
No gig work. Every worker must have a stake.
No bailouts, this was and is the fatal flaw in Yugoslavia and Venezuela. Instead, co-ops that fail are acquired and restructured by more successful co-ops. Workers do not lose jobs, they're just shuffled around, either by the successful co-op, or by a National Labor Reserve, utilized for temporary work needs across industries (gig workers become totally unnecessary).
Co-ops of critical industries such as weapons manufacturing and infrastructure construction do not operate in the open market, the state is the sole "customer".
National plans of development to avoid a blockade trap like Venezuela. When the state plans a big project, this is where the National Labor Reserve is funneled towards.
Co-op to co-op trade. The state takes an active role helping co-ops establish themselves in other countries, building a global network of co-ops that become resilient to big capital pressure.
Two-tier production. This is what China did for agriculture with incredible results. Every co-op has a baseline production quota, based on algorithmic consumption data. The purpose of this production quota is to ensure basic needs of every citizen and national security contingencies are met. Everything above that, the surplus, the co-ops take full. This directly incentivizes co-ops to employ more workers and automate, just to clear their quota faster (and is what happened in rural China).
How is communism achieved? When the final mega-co-op forms, that has absorbed all others, the state becomes unnecessary, and the co-op takes over its administrative functions. Every worker works for and consumes from the same co-op, every worker has a common interest, competition, the market, it's all gone. The workers have literally conquered capitalism.
The dismissal of co-ops is based on the assumption of isolated co-ops operating under capitalism. My proposal fundamentally puts that dismissal to rest.
There are more things to write about. What would the "army" look like? I've answers for those questions too. Of course, open to criticism and refinement.
And to cut through the endless, irrelevant purity testing of the modern left. Questions such as: Do they think Stalin was a good guy? What's their opinion on Kronstadt? Utterly irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the capture of State Power and the implementation of these structural rules. Whether a vanguard party, a mass movement, or a Chavista-style coalition captures the state is secondary; if they implement this structural base, the mode of production will mathematically resolve itself into communism. That's scientific socialism.
>Is this Lassaleanism?No. Lassale wanted to plead with the existing Prussian government, and there was no larger foresight, vision, just "support the co-ops, big man, I'm begging you!".
>>2855472the second photo I recognise is from the 90s. probably all of them are from radio free asia. fact is if you hate poverty so much why are you singling out the country that is doing more to end it at home and abroad than any other country on earth?
>>2855400>Then what is the end goal?whatever the Party says
>>2855472Moving them to cities isn't socialism. It may be good, but it ain't socialism.
>>2855475Industry does still remain in america in a reduced capacity.
>a despite its expensive labor costs remains unanswereThe labor costs in china are nothing compared to the west. And now that theyre rising lots are being taken out of china.
What is this pathetic attempt at a gotcha what are you even trying to prove?
>>2855378Better to have neithet which would be possible under communism which china is not.
>>2855477>co-ops!petty boorj nonsense
>How is communism achieved? When the final mega-co-op formswow it's almost like all means of production have to be centralized in the hands of the state
>>2855507The Peasant Question was written by Friedrich Engels. Neither have you read it, nor have you read much of anything I have, it seems.
Marx's address to the International Working Men's Association
<But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htmMarx was not opposed to co-ops, he only thought they were limited if kept isolated under capitalism, which is exactly why my proposal uses
State Power to ban gig-work, set quotas, force mergers, etc.
>centralized in the hands of the stateThis is State Capitalist worship and it is a historical dead-end. To quote Engels in Anti-Dühring (Part 3: Socialism, Chapter 2)
<But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.Technical conditions. Your centralization scheme requires the workers to rise up against their own workers' state.
My proposal is the actual, scientific mechanism for Engels's "administration of things" transition. When the associated producers themselves coordinate production, the State is rendered obsolete and actually withers. You are defending the very State Capitalism that led the 20th century movement absolutely nowhere.
>>2855328progressing capitalism to its logical end point, at which point it is outmoded as a means of production and will end,
is communism. all attempts to "skip a stage" have at-best resulted in less efficient versions of capitalism that ultimately collapsed back into capitalism.
>>2855452china
was a third world country. communism will arrive, chronologically, when all of those countries are wealthier than china is today.
>>2855496it isn't socialism, but it is necessary for both capitalism, socialism, and any kind of modern civilisation in general. you are looking at a rocket on the launch pad and going "yeah cool, not a moon landing though is it?" - good luck doing a moon landing without one!
>>2855502you confuse an end goal with the means to get there. do you think there's just some "do communism" button nobody pushed that would let you skip this stage and get to the fun part? do you think someone (maybe even deng) just held mao's finger back from pushing it?
>>2855552I am well aware that co-ops can be a useful tool. but they are just that - a tool - towards the goal of full centralization. like every other petty bourgeois socialist you fetishize small scale manufacture. historically we see tha tpetty bourgeois socialists turn into little Hitlers the moment one suggests taking their toys away and making them the property of the collective
>Marx's address to the International Working Men's Associationnothing at all here contradicts what I'm saying. in fact to achieve what Marx says, to do away with the ruling classes, the proletariat must centralize all MoPs into a single global state, a single organ, a single weapon with which to smash any remaining bourgeois states
>State Capitalistoxymoronic Hitlerite whining. Engels is talking about
bourgeois states, not the proletarian state
>Your centralization scheme requires the workers to rise up against their own workers' statesuch an uprising would be reactionary, and would be rightfully beaten down. do not start independent unions. do not agitate outside of the existing political structure. do not engage in oppositional behavior
>When the associated producers themselves coordinate productionmhm. and how is said coordination supposed to take place? is it supposed to.. take place in isolation? in little islands? how are these islands to coordinate production between eachother? because there are only two ways to do so: exchange or planning. it is only through centralization that exchange can be done away with
since you like quoting things so much, allow me to provide this very important bit from the Manifesto:
<The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. you're all morons
Cuba is simply moving towards the tried and true China model. China (and Vietnam) showed and continue to show that is the only form of socialism that will work on the long term, lift millions off poverty and raise the country to global relevance.
I'm actually pretty happy with these reforms, I just wished they'd come sooner.
>>2856145So what if they put all the profits into financial speculation instead ?
>>2854584>but it is positive sum exploitation,dengoids cant even pretend lol
>>2855563>history is a civ gameactual cognitohazard
>>2856286Why should anyone pretend? In a world where lots of miserable things are true, where there are parasitic flies that grow in the eyeballs of starving children and good people die young in freak accidents and the soviet union imploded spectacularly, what benefit comes from denying ugly realities and setting oneself up for failure? You have to face these things head on: you can abolish exploitation by abolishing industrial civilisation entirely and returning to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, or you can abolish it by accepting a medium term increase in exploitation in exchange for the development of the productive forces that will one day render exploitation obsolete.
Fundamentally, it is better to produce a lot of value and have half of it stolen than to produce almost nothing and get to keep all of it. The logical implication of your derision is a demand for
less exploitation but more poverty, however much you might want to couch it in the language of some secret third thing that nobody with access to the levers of state has managed to deliver but that you've nevertheless worked out in the depths of your gut.
>>2856296You have to be pretty stupid to draw that reading from what I'm saying. It's not even accurate to Civ, where every single game contains a big "do communism" button that you can rush. Prerequisites aren't just a civ game thing: you cannot have the lightbulb without electricity and without going through capitalism (or the "primary stage of socialism") the only communism you'll find is long in the past and prefixed "primitive".
Anyway, everyone should study the example of India (which remember, is constitutionally socialist!) versus that of China.
>>2856334Whoever you are I like your style. You put things very well
>>2855472>just say you hate chinese people and you don't see them as humanWestoid challenge: impossible
>I am well aware that co-ops can be a useful tool. but they are just that - a tool - towards the goal of full centralization. like every other petty bourgeois socialist you fetishize small scale manufacture.*
Did you even read my original post, or did you just see the word "co-op" and turn off your brain?
I explicitly argued for forced mergers, state-planned production quotas, algorithmically driven consumption data, and the ultimate formation of a single Mega-Co-op. There are no "isolated islands" or "small-scale manufacture" in my model. The entire point is that the co-ops structurally devour the market and centralize through the associated producers themselves. You are arguing against a Proudhonist strawman because you have no actual counter-argument.
Furthermore, your use of "petty bourgeois" here is completely theoretically incoherent.
Marx makes it explicitly clear that means of production only function as Capital when they are used to extract surplus value from wage-labor. A petty bourgeois proprietor is someone who owns small property, operates anarchically in the market, and exploits wage-laborers.
My model explicitly bans stakeless workers and gig-labor, and subjects the enterprise to state-planned quotas and forced mergers. Without wage-labor, there is no extraction of surplus value. Without the extraction of surplus value, the means of production cease to function as Capital. Calling a cybernetically-planned cooperative of associated producers without wage-labor "petty bourgeois" is Marxist illiteracy.
>how are these islands to coordinate production between eachother? because there are only two ways to do so: exchange or planning.
This was already answered, but you turned off your brain. No "planning" is necessary, or rather, the same method used for coordinating production based on exchange-value, is also the same method used for coordinating production based on use-value: algorithmic data. And when I say same method, I mean, this already exists, in both the logistics between departments of megacorporations, and the logistics of a factory in Shenzhen or wherever updating production based on real-time demand.
>oxymoronic Hitlerite whining. Engels is talking about bourgeois states, not the proletarian state
Calling "State Capitalism" oxymoronic whining means you are calling Lenin a Hitlerite, genius. Have you never read Lenin’s The Tax in Kind? Lenin explicitly defined the Soviet economy as State Capitalism.
The political form of the state is irrelevant to the underlying mode of production.
<But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces.
The capitalistic nature of production is not magically abolished just because a state is painted red. If the producers are alienated from their labor, if they work under the conditions of wage-labor, and the law of value remains, exploitation continues.
Of course, co-ops don't do away with the law of value on their own, and I never claimed they did. What I said is that if they are organized in this fashion, they serve as the necessary stepping stone to structurally rendering the law of value obsolete.
>such an uprising would be reactionary
No, it would be the solution Engels is talking about in that exact same passage to rid the capitalistic nature of production under your centralization scheme.
>since you like quoting things so much, allow me to provide this very important bit from the Manifesto
Quoting the 1848 Manifesto is the ultimate rookie trap. Marx and Engels explicitly corrected and retracted that exact passage following the Paris Commune.
From the 1872 edition's preface:
<The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”
"Section II" is the part you quoted, for reference.
The goal is not to centralize everything into a State and call it communism. THAT is "oxymoronic". The State, regardless of form, is a meta-manager of capital by design structurally. When we speak of a workers' state, we speak of a temporary weapon only tolerated as a necessary evil given present political conditions, neither an end-goal nor something to be admired (God forbid we admire the enforcer of our misery). A workers' state only fulfills the requirement of political power, but it does not in of itself fulfill the requirement of economic power. And why is economic power necessary? Because you do not magically abolish capitalism by legal decree. What appears to a dull mind as trivial "micro-level" Proudhonist navel-gazing about ideals like "justice" and "dignity", has at last been revealed as an absolutely essential component of the war against capitalism: the workers taking charge.
Engels said the State withers. I'm with Engels. And I provide the scientific, structural mechanism for how that actually happens, alongside how workers participate in the building of socialism regardless of what's in their heads. You don't.
>>2856334>Fundamentally, it is better to produce a lot of value and have half of it stolen than to produce almost nothing and get to keep all of it. The logical implication of your derision is a demand for less exploitation but more poverty, however much you might want to couch it in the language of some secret third thing that nobody with access to the levers of state has managed to deliver but that you've nevertheless worked out in the depths of your gut.Your implication that China under Mao was "poverty" is incorrect as is the implication that the people under Soviet Union were poor. The thing you are essentially implying is: markets are a necessary evil, so is wage labour. I disagree. We are long past that point of "developing productive forces", if China insists on that matter it will become another Japan. A society that reached a dead end of capitalist development that masks its own stagnation through hyper-consumerism. Partly its already there.
>>2856439>I explicitly argued for forced mergers, state-planned production quotas, algorithmically driven consumption data, and the ultimate formation of a single Mega-Co-op. There are no "isolated islands" or "small-scale manufacture" in my model. and yet you decide to be oppositional
>through the associated producers themselvesagain you are trying to make a distinction where there is none. because you have swallowed anticommunist propaganda. you whine about muh state capitalism, but said state capitalism is nothing but the merging of all means of production under one single roof, into one single mega co-op, one
and only one organ of class power. that is, the state. you whine about "forced collectivization" only to advocate for forced collectivization in the next breath. again, because you are oppositional
>the same method used for coordinating production based on exchange-value, is also the same method used for coordinating production based on use-value: algorithmic datathere's a big fucking difference between calculation in kind and calculation by value. like yes, both use data. so?
>Lenin explicitly defined the Soviet economy as State CapitalismI have read The Tax in Kind. Lenin is wrong. capitalism depends on the private ownership of the MoPs. was there private property in the USSR? certainly not in the planned sector. in the kolkhozes? maybe. but that's also why there was a push towards further collectivization, towards sovkhozes. still not capitalism either way
we could of course view the entire USSR as just one giant company, that is compelled to deal with the surrounding market. but again this is no different than what you are saying. the state is merely one giant co-op. the reason you're arguing otherwise is because you're oppositional
>The capitalistic nature of production is not magically abolished just because a state is painted reddid the USSR engage in production for the purpose of wertvermehrung? they did not
>The goal is not to centralize everything into a State and call it communismand yet that is precisely what you describe. everything is centralized, and it is indeed the proletarian state
>The State, regardless of form, is a meta-manager of capital by design structurallyno it is not. the state is an instrument of class rule. capital does not exist in a proletarian state, since the purpose of the proletarian state is not wertvermehrung. the bourgeois state and the proletarian state have different
telos>When we speak of a workers' state, we speak of a temporary weapon only tolerated as a necessary evil given present political conditions, neither an end-goal nor something to be admiredit's like you have failed to grasp the absolute basics. when Porky is no more, there is no more any ruling class to combat. the state therefore seizes to be a state, and is now merely government. the struggle towards such a goal is long and difficult, and will almost certainly take centuries. for example, we must see to it that the PRC, Vietnam, Laos, the DPRK, Cuba etc merge into one and only one state. without such merging there will inevitably be competition and war
>>2856471>Lenin is wrong.Fascinating. So when Lenin analyzes the actual material conditions of the Soviet economy and diagnoses it as State Capitalism, he is "wrong". But when you magically decree that it wasn't capitalism because the State had a different
telos (purpose), you are right?
Judging a mode of production by the "intentions" or "telos" of its leaders rather than its material relations is literal textbook
Philosophical Idealism. You have abandoned Historical Materialism completely.
>the bourgeois state and the proletarian state have different telos>without such merging there will inevitably be competition and warThis is the most damning contradiction in your entire post. Think about what you just said. If the "telos" of these states is purely proletarian, why would they inevitably go to war with each other? Communists in a book club don't murder each other. So why would communist
statesmen? Why did the USSR almost nuke China? Why did China and Vietnam go to war?
Because the State
itself operates on bourgeois logic. Regardless of the red flag or the "telos" in the politicians' heads, a State must preserve its own institutions, its borders, and its national economy to secure the tenure of its bureaucrats. Bureaucratic degeneration isn't a bug; it's a structural feature of the State. If you put a communist in charge of a capitalist machine (the State), the machine doesn't magically become communist, it is the communist who is transformed into a "national capitalist".
>capitalism depends on the private ownership of the MoPs. was there private property in the USSR? certainly notWrong again. Marx defines Capital as a
social relation, not merely a legal title of private ownership.
I literally just quoted Engels explaining this to you, but you ignored it:
<The transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces.If the workers do not have democratic control over the surplus, if they still sell their labor-power for a wage, and an alienated bureaucracy directs the accumulation of that surplus, the
capitalist relation remains.
>did the USSR engage in production for the purpose of wertvermehrung? they did notThey absolutely did. How do you think the USSR industrialized in a single decade? They engaged in massive capital accumulation by extracting surplus value from the peasantry and the working class to build heavy industry and compete geopolitically. Evgeny Preobrazhensky literally wrote the book on this which became the basis of the USSR's economic policy. Just because the surplus was directed by a Gosplan bureaucrat instead of a Wall Street banker doesn't mean the law of value magically stopped operating.
>there's a big fucking difference between calculation in kind and calculation by value. like yes, both use data. so?You completely missed the point on algorithms. I am not talking about bureaucratic command planning with guys in suits using abacuses to guess prices, totally defeating the purpose of planning (phasing out the law of value, which prices are a reflection of). I am talking about
cybernetic planning.
The logistics algorithms that megacorporations (like Amazon or Walmart) currently use to track real-time consumption and dictate internal supply chains…
that is calculation in kind masquerading under a capitalist shell. They track physical inventory (use-values) and physical nodes in real time. My proposal rips that existing cybernetic infrastructure out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and hands it to the associated producers to dictate the Baseline Quota.
>you whine about muh state capitalism, but said state capitalism is nothing but the merging of all means of production under one single roof, into one single mega co-op… that is, the state.No, it is not. You fundamentally do not understand the difference between
the State absorbing the Producers and
the Producers absorbing the State.
In your model, a State apparatus manages the Producers, top down. The chain of production itself is fundamentally driven to peak alienation. As Marx wrote, the State is by its nature alienated from society, and as Engels explained, state ownership does not decrease the antagonism, it increases it to its maximum, creating the "technical conditions" for a mass rebellion. Maybe this would be coherent if you were an accelerationist. But you don't sound like one to me.
In my model, the Producers manage production
themselves, bottom up. As the co-ops merge and take over administrative functions, the State doesn't centralize - it literally
withers away, leaving behind Engels's
administration of things. My Mega-Co-op IS that transition mechanism. The State is not and cannot be.
>you whine about "forced collectivization" only to advocate for forced collectivization in the next breath.Because you don't read, you don't understand the difference between expropriating
successful producers and acquiring
failed enterprises.
In The Peasant Question, Engels explicitly warns against forcibly expropriating small peasants who are successfully working their own land. My model uses
forced mergers on FAILED enterprises (the "No Bailouts" rule). When a co-op fails to meet its cybernetically-planned social quota, it is acquired and restructured by a successful one. This destroys the "Soft Budget Constraint" that historically plagued Actually Existing Socialism to fatal ruin, holding producers accountable to society without sending in a standing army (a "special body of armed men" if you will, not very communist) to steal grain from successful producers.
You call me "oppositional", whatever that means, while I have deduced a scientifically grounded roadmap for the transition, while your only strategy is to paint the State red, wait 300 years, and hope the bureaucrats are feeling nice on the fated day. It doesn't need spelling out that this is not science, this is basically secularized religion. And I hope it doesn't need explaining that Marx and Engels were confident in logic, not faith.
>>2856654You are one dense mother fucker.
>>2856460China under Mao
was poverty. You will of course reject GDP as a measurement, but its GDP per person was $165, less than 10% of homes had indoor plumbing, there were no wastewater treatment plants in the country until the 1980s, and its literacy rate was ~60%. That isn't so terrible compared to China up to that point (in literacy in particular, quite an achievement), but it's nothing to write home about. You wouldn't for a second deny that India (around the same level of GDP, 34% literacy, similarly dismal water situation.) was impoverished, why make excuses for China?
To illustrate in goods terms, rather than dollar terms that can be hand-waved away, here are the four goods Chinese people coveted in the 1960-70s:
https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Three%20turns%20and%20one%20sound/1482726> Bicycle , Sewing machine , watch , and radio Do these sound like symbols of prosperity to
you, circa 1976? Are these things coveted by rich people, or by poor ones? Japan's 3 Showa-era treasures in the 1960s were a TV, a Washing Machine and a Fridge! (Incidentally, by the 1980s China's four were the same: television, refrigerator, washing machine , air conditioner.)
You can quibble about exactly where the material poverty line lies, but it's going to take some wriggling to insist that a fridge and a TV are bourgeois luxury, let alone indoor water supply and your entire family being able to read.
The USSR was better off, but still not much to write home about. It's all well and good looking at old photographs of Moscow and thinking about how really, they look fine compared to 1970s Britain and wondering what all the fuss was about, but only around half of the population lived in urban areas circa 1970. A substantial minority lived in underdeveloped rural areas (Less than half of rural homes had indoor plumbing), and it was around this time the USSR had to start artificially propping up living standards by burning hard currency to import grain from the USA(!)
It is always possible China goes the way of Japan, one shouldn't count their chickens, but Japan never masked its stagnation (has anything else been discussed about the economy of Japan since the 90s?) and the major reasons it stagnated are political and institutional, something the CPC has already shown itself to be willing to change entirely in response to chancing circumstances.
>>2856654>Think about what you just said. If the "telos" of these states is purely proletarian, why would they inevitably go to war with each other?I am well aware of this. note that I use the singular. Stalin broke the proletarian state, broke democratic centralism, in 1949 when he said no to Chinese ascension into the USSR. see
https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv16n1/china.htmthe present situation, where we have multiple states, is not tenable. we saw this in Vietnam, and in Soviet plans to nuke China. hence full centralization
>muh bureaucracy>soviet workers had no control!>developing the MoPs is the same thing as making profit>Soviet democracy was actually Blanquism you guiseMarx help me. the retardation is too much. but my special interest is planning so I will address that
>command planning>Gosplan was guys in suits setting prices>top down!this is just "not real planning". or "not real cybernetics" if you will. have you read any actual Soviet planning literature? are you aware how Soviet planning
actually worked, not how anticommunists have made you think it worked? you mention soft budget constraints, so I assume you're at least aware of Kornai
>steal grain from successful producersoh god he's defending kulaks. but also what you're describing is "lemon socialism" which was tried in Yugoslavia. it worked poorly. if we look at agriculture only, then this amounts to the state taking over not the best land, but the worst. why should we do that?
>>2855472also these are from like the 2000's, the current village life is a lot better
>>2856284that's called being america and not planning
>>2859262I think I just lost braincells from looking at that
>>2855007Chinese people are free-market enjoyers
>>2860063
Guess Marx was a fucking retard then wow nevermind boys pack it up
>>2860065Do you mean Adam Smith?
>>2860067>Nevertheless, Marx thought the countervailing tendencies ultimately could not prevent the average rate of profit in industries from falling; the tendency was intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production.[14] In the end, none of the conceivable counteracting factors could stem the tendency toward falling profits from production.Basic Wikipedia search. Took three seconds. You're the only person I've ever heard claim Marx refuted the TRPF in its entirety. He had explanations that differed from other economists, but he ultimately agreed with it as a theory.
>>2855563>progressing capitalism to its logical end point, at which point it is outmoded as a means of production and will end, is communism.No. Nice try
>>2860111whoa you sure are convincing
>>2860099And the key thing that is misunderstood is that it's a tendency, but not a linear destination. Capitalism is perfectly capable of resetting itself through war.
>>2860063
>no evidence
>no deductive reasoning
>no sources
>just "it's wrong cuz it is ok?!?!?!"
>>2863890>American empireSo close yet so far. Going to be opening champagne when you people finally realize capital has no borders. There are no "empires" like Rome or dynastic China. There is no Great Collapse where once the "empire" falls the rules of the game change. That era's long gone. Praxis, and only praxis, meaning people consciously rejecting domination by capital, is the only way out. Everything else is cope.
>>2863894How would that look like ?
>>2863890Unions are reactionary, why would a spcialist state not bust thrm?
>>2863947So is America communist for continuously busting unions?
Have all these years just been communist infighting?
>>2863950It’s historically progressive, not communist. There’s a difference.
>>2863890Brezhnev's anointed successor Gorbachev comprehensively destroyed the USSR, any anti-china cope should start from the fundamental position that the USSR blundered more. Even if China is just a capitalist country run for the enrichment of party crooks, this would still be a huge step up from soviet incompetence and post Soviet misery and cope.
>>2863947>>2863957Quote the part where Marx or Engels call unions reactionary. You are an idiot. They are neither reactionary nor "progressive". They are the default expression of bare minimum labor struggle i.e the fight over wages and working hours, which as Marx notes in Value, Price and Profit, are structurally both inevitable and necessary for capitalism, as in if workers didn't resist poverty and overwork, capitalism would eventually kill its own workforce/reduce them to miserable slaves (from which it cannot draw profit). And even the inevitable part was perhaps optimistic, as in Japan the workforce was overworked for decades leading to actual death from overwork yet I don't remember hearing much revolt about it. And if you think Marx and Engels thought reducing workers to miserable wretches would lead to communist revolution, you are an idiot again. They thought the exact opposite. They explicitly warned of the poorest and antisocial being easily mobilized by reaction. When we look at the Yugoslav wars, civil wars in Africa and the Middle East, we can only conclude that they were absolutely correct. Misery does not equal communist consciousness, it tends to produce the exact opposite of proletarian solidarity in fact.
>>2863924A historical example? The International Workingmen's Association. Its membership did not just include "intellectuals" and "cadres", but actual radicalized workers. The very motto of the IWA was, as requested by Marx himself, that the workers must liberate themselves by their own hands. Marx was highly critical of "savior from above" schemes in his essays and polemics, and history has shown him to be vindicated.
>>2854835But that's what's so funny about Marxists. They imagine themselves huge radicals but they agree with Adam Smith and Locke. When pressed they become capitalism's biggest defenders.
>More arguments over unions
Alright listen up retards:
Unions under capitalism = good, necessary, important.
Unions under socialism = bad, unneeded, reactionary.
Why the difference?
Under socialism:
>You do not need a union since the government is already keeping all important life essentials at a minimum/subsidized price. Everything from housing to food to healthcare to education is affordable to everyone. Anything that a union would agitate for or try to provide on their own initiative under capitalism is already being handled by the state under socialism.
>In a planned economy, if you are a union going on strike you are not going on strike against a private owner withholding wages to suppress you. You are going to strike against the general output and production of everyone else in society as well as the 5 Year Plan, since any wage increase above productivity has to be directly funded out of the general proceeds of everyone else in every other industry since you are all on the same balance sheet as all or most enterprises are owned by the government. The government or DOTP has already "optimized" as much as possible. To list just one example, it may be that wage increases in your industry are being kept to a minimum not for exploitation but because the planning committee has recognized a large inflow of labor in your specific niche and is trying to encourage others to switch jobs to fill short-gaps in other sectors. Therefore going on strike is essentially saying "fuck you" to planning and optimization in general and re-introducing individualism and market anarchy back into a socialized production process.
>"Independent" unions under socialism are oftentimes funded by capitalist states for the express purpose of destabilizing society or building strength for a forcible overthrow of socialist society. This happened in Chile (truck driver's strike to undermine Allende), Poland (Solidarity trade union which successfully overthrow Polish communist rule), East Germany (1953 failed strike by "ex"-Nazi elements attempting to overthrow the GDR), Yugoslavia (The Confederation of Trade Unions of Yugoslavia/SSJ was split along nationalist lines in order to shatter the unity of the state along ethnic/nationalist lines to ensure its demise), and countless other cases in history.
>>2864194You are an idiot.
>>2864058>East Germany (1953 failed strike by "ex"-Nazi Wasn't this a worker strike over increased work quotas? I mean I would strike too if my boss asked me to work 10 hours more for the same wage lol I don't care how socialist he pretends to be
>>2859169I'm busy, so instead of writing a long and boring reply on planning and retreading what has been argued countless times before, let me address something that strangely isn't brought up much, the very nature of capitalistic production with two words: Taylorism and assembly lines. There is no such thing as a socialist economy producing under Taylorist management and using assembly lines. These are LITERAL weapons of bourgeois subjugation. The purpose of Taylorist management BY DESIGN is maximizing extraction of surplus value. The purpose of the assembly line BY DESIGN is maximizing extraction of surplus value. They CANNOT LIBERATE. It doesn't matter how much you "develop" the MoP by advancing Taylorist management and assembly lines, the only thing you are "developing" IS THE CAGE YOU'RE CLAIMING TO ABOLISH.
>>2864957>making the best use of available labor power is bourgeoisok ultra
>>2864984market economies have repeatedly shown themselves superior to vulgar taylorism with a red flag.
>>2864986It's not just that. The very reason why ex-Soviet republics today are kleptocratic shitholes punching far below their weight, despite e.g. possessing vast oil reserves (Russia) or vast fertile lands (Ukraine), is because of the schizophrenic "dual-nature" economy of the late USSR. There was no proper market, but private wealth was nevertheless rapidly accumulated under Gorbachev's reforms which allowed the entrenched bureaucrats and their associates to engage in rampant corruption via arbitrage. When privatization came, because what already existed was Taylorist (one could say literally served on a silver platter for capitalists to take over), all the lumpen-oligarchs needed to do was monopolize and loot it, rather than competing as the traditional bourgeoisie did historically. When there's no competition, even if the market technically exists on paper, it is permanently kept in a retarded state rather than properly developed. Productive investment and innovation stall, real wages hit a low ceiling and stagnate. The population relies on the informal economy and nepotism to get by. The role of the "savior" Putin is not to get rid of the lumpen-oligarchs, but to play a Bonaparte, to pacify the underclasses from revolting and maintain the cartel of the lumpen-oligarchs by punishing the ones who attempt to subvert or escape the cartel. The tragedy is that in the past a Bonaparte would eventually face his own hubris, but as Ukraine's change in leadership shows, one Bonaparte is just replaced by another. The population neither gets to enjoy Western "luxuries" nor develops class consciousness. They are Marx's miserable wretches stuck in a bad loop.
>>2864027> And if you think Marx and Engels thought reducing workers to miserable wretches would lead to communist revolution, you are an idiot again. They thought the exact opposite. They explicitly warned of the poorest and antisocial being easily mobilized by reaction. When we look at the Yugoslav wars, civil wars in Africa and the Middle East, we can only conclude that they were absolutely correct. Misery does not equal communist consciousness, it tends to produce the exact opposite of proletarian solidarity in fact.trvke
>>2854584>China correctly understands that communism requires the maximal development of the productive forcesMao spinning in his grave is China's principal source of "clean" energy. The only emissions are the blood and surplus-value of Chinese workers!
>>2865051VERY good post. Good to see at least one poster on this site has a brain.
>>2865083Love reactions like these btw. They basically always boil down to "oh yeah? If China is capitalist then why can't you cite a source where China calls itself capitalist?" and "statistics coming directly from the Chinese government are no longer valid when people I don't like cite them". Naked anti-intellectualism at work justifying glorified Tumblr fandom around a country.
>>2864986How is market "socialism" incompatible with assembly lines tho
>>2865929basically because assembly lines themselves no longer operate on particularly taylorist lines. vulgar taylorists basically imagine the strawman of "communism will turn you into a cog in a machine" but take it to be a utopia and superior to the status quo, which they imagine to be inefficient, when the reality is that something like the toyota production system works better.
the USSR had some tepid steps in this direction with stuff like the Shchekino Method, collective contract brigades, etc, but this isn't part of the command-and-control aesthetic that draws in vulgar taylorists and in any case most of these attempts flopped because you can't just pluck one good idea and shove it into an economy that doesn't reward and encourage its use. e.g. if you've got a mix of incentives for managers to minimise unemployment at the plant
and maximise labour productivity, you're in trouble!
basically a huge chunk of factory work is no longer unskilled labour and now consists of problem-solving when something gets in the way of the complex machines making the thing on their own. to be glib it is "individualist", it depends on the individual to be more than a cog, to think, make judgements, and generally act autonomously in a fashion completely at odds with the fantasy clock-world of vulgar taylorists.
>>2865051>When there's no competition, even if the market technically exists on paper, it is permanently kept in a retarded state rather than properly developed. Productive investment and innovation stall, real wages hit a low ceiling and stagnate. The population relies on the informal economy and nepotism to get by.Thank you for your review of such an interesting and exotic phenomenon that no one in the rest of the world can relate to, definitely not in western countries. It sure would be bad if capitalism itself resulted in monopoly haha.
>>2865981monopoly is the least of the problems with the ex-soviet republics
>>2866012Re-read the quoted part and think about it for a second.
>>2865981People who read theory and then choose to not use their brains may as well have read no theory. Does it occur to you that the ex-Soviet Taylorist legacy combined with the overnight jump to monopoly may have perhaps created a concrete material divergence from the West with particular consequences? You are falling for the all-too-common trap of substituting study of the real world with abstractions, a trap Marx and Engels bitterly fought (verbatim from The German Ideology, philosophy is to the study of the real world as masturbation is to sex life), a trap that has unfortunately ended up infecting whole generations of "Marxists" without a hint of awareness. When they turn off their brains, they forget that an abstraction is just a reference, not even a map of the territory. If all that physics amounted to was manipulating equations and calling it a day, engineers would have nothing to work with.
>>2866031monopoly is the only one of those problems that really applies to the average western country in any great measure. we cannot describe the market in the west as "kept in a retarded state" on the whole, productive investment and innovation continue at some pace in basically every country but britain, real wages are generally the highest they've ever been anywhere on the planet ever and continue to see moderate improvements, the informal economy is negligible everywhere but like italy and nepotism is substantially lower than basically anywhere else in the world.
that isn't to say that there aren't problems, lots of problems, but you have to be very lazy in your thinking to see the same problems in each case. the partial exception is Britain
which should really be understood as completely and utterly blundering their "neoliberal" reforms and even there, there are well-functioning oddities: UK supermarkets are unusually competitive by international standards for example.
communism isn't a real thing, it's just an idea. people try to reify it into a real thing, but pretty soon capitalism creeps in because the state sucks at making money. the private sector sucks at almost everything, it's terrible at innovation and building infrastructure and maintaining stability and setting and achieving long-term goals and other things that the state does, but it is good at one thing which is maximizing surplus at all costs without being encumbered by any other concerns or by public oversight. a state cannot really compete in a global economy dominated by massive private corporations that can basically do whatever the fuck they want no matter how risky or destructive or unsustainable it may be, in the same way that an army of normal sane humans cannot compete with a horde of suicidal cultist lunatics who will do whatever it takes to win even if it means destroying themselves and the entire world in the process. communism can't really exist and function unless the entire world becomes communists and shuts down all private enterprise globally which is very unlikely to ever happen. this is what marx assumed would happen because he couldn't foresee all the major developments of the 20th century like nuclear weapons forcing all imperial superpowers into a permanent stalemate and the rise of globalization where all these stalemated superpowers would cease going to war with each other and instead focus their efforts on extracting wealth from the poorest countries by exploiting their unguarded resources and cheap labor pool. marx thought things would continue as they had where the various superpowers would continue waging destructive wars with each other and exploiting their own people which would lead to popular revolution all over the world, and things might have seemed like they were going that way until 1945 when the bomb changed everything and ushered in a new world order that is worse than anything marx could have imagined.
>>2866036>Does it occur to you that the ex-Soviet Taylorist legacy combined with the overnight jump to monopoly may have perhaps created a concrete material divergence from the West with particular consequences?Monopoly capitalism is a stage of global capitalist development, you moron. The fact that it was already achieved, including in Russia, was documented by Lenin before the October revolution happened in the first place. These same monopolies operated colonial extraction and industry. Pre-monopoly capitalism existed in the first place because the primitive state of the productive forces themselves didn't allow for consolidation on a vast scale. Once it is possible, the free market itself quickly crowns the winners, and it has been possible since the end of the XIXth century.
>>2866042You haven't described any problem that isn't quite present and growing at an unprecedented rate in Trump's America in your posts. The overall trajectory has been for the west to become more and more like Russia in every single aspect, from cultural and political to the way the economy operates, largely because their exuberant privilege is slowly fading away.
>>2866095You are an idiot. Lenin was describing the emergence of what historians today refer to as New Imperialism, of which Russia was one of the actors. Simultaneously, Lenin called the Russian bourgeoisie politically impotent and Russia a "semi-feudal" backwater. And what does that mean? Coincidentally, historians say Russia was actually losing money. Colonialism acted as a net drain for Russia, and in fact, Russia was a net borrower of foreign capital, it was not expanding with a surplus of its own, and money went into the black hole of expanding the military-bureaucratic apparatus instead of the severely lagging domestic economy. In other words, to say Russian imperialism was basically the same as Western imperialism, is to say a house cat is basically the same as a lion. The taxonomic categorization of the feline family is not a substitute for the real study of what makes house cats different from lions. And furthermore, to treat monopoly capitalism as if the accumulated domestic developments of competition vanish into thin air or become a non-factor in the political implications, is to mistake the abstract category for the concrete reality, to treat a theoretical milestone as if it magically breaks with historical continuity. That's a whole lot of words to say, turn on your brain for once.
>>2866125
toyota uses an assembly line, but there's a big difference between the qualified insanity of time and motion studies to make sure workers move like the most efficient machines possible, vs having some engineers watch the machines and occasionally go "wait, no, stop, that's wrong."
glibly, i would say toyota's factory floor workers are closer to engineers than to the assembly line workers of the 1960s. they're supposed to think and to respond dynamically based on their judgement, not just follow a process mechanically because thinking is handled by a different department.
(or to put it in other terms: the separation of mental skill and mechanical work is now such that 90% of a human's job in production is mental work, while vulgar taylorism pines for humans to mostly be engaged in rote mechanical work.)
your customized production example would be another good way that we've moved beyond the assumptions of the taylorist imagination. tables themselves aren't my area of expertise, but small/mid-sized production runs of a number of goods are now the norm. (e.g. leftypol t-shirts, basically anything you can 3D print, or for that matter print-on-demand board games, books, etc.) instead of a dedicated assembly line making thousands of one type of good, you can have more specialised equipment that makes whatever variants are desired for effectively no additional human effort on the factory floor. (if, indeed, there is a factory and not just some guy's house.)
>>2863890>sources: harvard, wikipedia, credit suisse, forbesLmao
Markets are efficient in a sense yet at the same time produce stuff like corporate speech which either requires 200 autism score to understand and we're profoundly retarded for thinking it lacks substance or is actually complete unhinged gibberish that would get you put in a madhouse back in the day unironically.
Or, is it necessarily the product of markets, or of a parasitic leisure class? If it is the product of a parasitic leisure class, it implies markets are actually being held down in efficiency, which implies the capitalist manifestation of markets is not actually the ultimate possible form of the market.
>>2866118Russia possessed a large and highly concentrated capitalist industry that was already at the monopoly stage. It created the proletariat that was capable of doing the revolution in the first place. The backwards part comes from the fact that it was similar to size to other European countries' while the population was much larger and the rest of it was still largely doing peasant labor. This backwardness doesn't change the fact that it has naturally developed to the monopoly stage and nothing would have rolled the time back to the XIXth century.
In fact, no one has been in the pre-monopoly stage of capitalism since then. Even the poorest and most underdeveloped countries like China were subjected to highly concentrated industry and forced to buy foreign goods. CPC itself started out mostly doing strikes and boycotts in the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou. The difference is that the rest of the population was languishing as peasants. This languishing mass of people wasn't going to create an 1850s market even though we refer to them as backwards because backwards people aren't literally back in time, technology existed that both allowed and necessitated large enterprises in China and Russia too. And this applies especially to the Soviet Union 70 years later, a country that was at the forefront of technological development and industrial production at scale.
>>2865927>how DARE you not take my cherry picked data seriously???Remember: Holodomor myth persists entirely because of people like you demand to treat cherry picked data and fascist lies seriously
>>2866052I think it's more foundational than that. Marx and Engels were mistaken in thinking the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers was the base "species-being". Modern anthropology says egalitarianism was consciously enforced, and without conscious enforcement, humans revert to oppressive chimp-like hierarchies. The thing is, and it's a bit complicated to understand, said conscious enforcement itself arose as a survival strategy due to human sociality. Humans, unlike other primates, or even our closest cousins neanderthals, are not automatically hostile to strangers. If your group is mistreating you, you can leave for another group, thus the group can't afford to mistreat you. Hunter-gatherers had loose networks of these groups that were far larger than Dunbar's number (up to a 1000 or so), meaning from our earliest days we were mingling with strangers. But imagine you're trapped in a Jonestown-esque cult, or a patriarchal multi-generational rural collective, boarding school, nunnery, neanderthal group… Places where you are isolated from contact with strangers. This is exactly where we observe the worst of individual abuse, and it is exactly the reversion to oppressive chimp-like hierarchies.
In other words, competition between groups to not lose members to each other is what makes us "civilized" in the first place. Because contrary to human goodness assumptions, we are extra-social chimps, not the children of heaven.
But there's more. You see, it turns out, modern anthropology says that even in our earliest days, we conceptually understood reciprocity (debt) and comparative value (arbitrage). Trade itself was born from mingling with strangers, and became a means of keeping different groups in good standing, keeping the peace. Of course, we weren't doing capitalism, but the seeds of capitalism were there from the start. What were our neanderthal cousins doing? Treating women like mobile property, as if they were pastoralists. How do we logically deduce this? We know that neanderthal groups didn't intermingle even with neighboring groups for tens of thousands of years. We know neanderthal excavation sites show the men being related to each other, but the women coming from "outside". The conclusion? These women were either kidnapped/captured, or exchanged during tense territorial stand-offs as a means of de-escalation. This slots in exactly with our "isolation creates oppressive chimp-like hierarchies" observation. The women were dominated by the men. A far cry from consciously enforced egalitarianism.
And what are the implications for communism? Inevitable "Stalinism". Not as in some ideology, but as how the USSR actually functioned on a daily basis. At the bottom, a society of strangers, just as in every modern society ever. Trade has to be consciously suppressed 24/7 by a special body of armed men, because when strangers intermingle, trade inevitably emerges. And at the top, a central apparatus has monopolized society itself into a single collective, and there an oppressive chimp-like hierarchy forms.
You know what historical society it ends up accidentally resembling? Sparta. Due to certain historical circumstances, the Spartans were subjected each other to their own terror to "discipline". Simultaneously, the helots were constantly terrorized by Spartans assigned the role of special body of armed men, because left to their own devices, they would have broken away from Sparta.
The conclusion is that the only possible communism is what Marx and Engels called crude or barracks communism, which they opposed on account of failing to liberate the individual from the collective, which for them was the whole point of communism. But what made hunter-gatherers "free" in the first place was competition between collectives for membership, not a collective monopoly.
And the final irony is, Marx and Engels traced the communist idea to François-Noël Babeuf, who specifically idolized ancient Sparta as the blueprint of communism.
>>2854584>all of civilisation is built on agricultural surplus.Well thank god that surely is not in the process of falling apart lol
>>2864058>Everything from housing to food to healthcare to education is affordable to everyone.Not the case in China, so I guess they need unions
>>2869167Sorry what are we supposed to be mad at here?
>>2869193This is truly what being LGBT these days is like
>>2865083>>2866166>Commits genetic fallacy at first sight despite said sources citing CCP figuresOk Chinaboos, but y’all just coping over the fact that China is free-market capitalist and part of the America-led unipolar order.
>>2869209Western maoists just lie
They established their own "foreign language press" because they're the real ml-mzt authority,of course
Moronic larpers
>>2869187drawn by a prevent who drew cartoon porn
>>2869185there is nothing wrong with this tbh. the idea that nationalisation is, in and of itself, a good thing is pure cargo cultism. the british state obviously isn't going to run a steel mill in the interest of the proletariat. "now instead of being owned by the bourgeoisie, it's owned by the hand-puppets of the bourgeoisie!"
although tbh so far as i can tell the loss-making steel mill itself is a dog and the Chinese are just angling to get a high-end compensation payment, since the government hasn't decided how much it's going to pay yet. >>2869346pretending western leftists are "normal guys" is absurd
>>2869374He still got more pussy and cash than you ever will, and all that by just writing ugly-ass edgy comics featuring loads of smut and gore.
That materially proves that he is better than you.
>Can someone please explain as to in what capacity china is communist other than their flag? No matter how you twist it they're literally just succdems.
You hit the correct conclusion - they cannot be considered even a DoTP considering there is zero workers involvement in its governance and zero movement towards abolishing capital relations.
>>2868682>Marxism isn't egalitarianism.You misunderstand what makes hunter-gatherers egalitarian in the first place. For hunter-gatherers, egalitarianism doesn't mean "wealth equality" or "we are all exactly the same". It means
equitable cooperation and the active suppression of would-be chimps. What Marx and Engels called the "free association of producers" is the exact modern equivalent of this principle. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is functionally identical to the hunter-gatherer ethos.
>Capitalism isn't trade.You are trying to separate "innocent trade" from capitalism, but Marxist theory itself rejects this when generalized commodity production is in play. The commodity form irreparably changes trade. Once labor is made abstract and directly comparable to commodities, that is, made a commodity itself, the law of value governed by SNLT (Socially Necessary Labor Time) is inescapable. Generalized trade among strangers in a modern society directly leads to (as Marx argued in his polemic against Proudhon) capitalist dynamics. That is exactly why the USSR had to suppress all trade. The central apparatus couldn't afford to let people exchange freely, because free exchange undermines the state's monopoly.
>Having to enforce rules has always been the default in an organized society.You are missing the causal link and conflating two entirely different things:
bottom-up enforcement and
top-down terror. Consciously enforced egalitarianism in early humans meant the
whole community enforced the rules against would-be chimps. It is not the mere act of policing that creates an oppressive chimp-like hierarchy; it is the
collective monopoly itself. When a central apparatus tries to monopolize a society of strangers into a single, inescapable collective, it destroys the very mechanisms that kept early humans "free": the ability to exit, to mingle, and to freely associate. In other words, the special body of armed men does not cause the chimps; it
arises because the oppressive chimp-like hierarchy needs a tool to violently maintain its collective monopoly. In fact, we observe a similar dynamic among actual chimps, where soldiers patrol borders, murdering outsider males and forcing female adolescent ones (able to bear children) into the group through terror. If the rule is "you are not allowed to freely associate or freely exchange", the producers will not police themselves, anymore than the helots will voluntarily kneel before the Spartans. A special body of armed men becomes a structural necessity for the collective monopoly.
>>2869374maybe a bit odd but infinitely more normal than that poster is
>>2854570>other than their flag?Not even the flag is communist. It’s literally corporatist messaging that include the national bourgeoise.
>>2869584>>2867792Thats the dumbest thing Ive ever read. Stalinism isnt a thing faggot, neither is your quasi capitalism in hunter gatherer societies.
>>2869997>StalinismCrude or barracks communism. Read Marx and Engels.
>quasi capitalismYou don't even know what capitalism is, which is why what I've written is beyond your level of comprehension. A friendly tip is to stop relying on e-celebs, and actually read the primary texts. Come back in 10 or so years. That's how long I've been reading.
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