For a longer history, I highly recommend CGTN's historic journey video series. It's a 20 or so part series (10 hours in all) that was created to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the CPC. It spans the entire history of modern China to the present day, and touches on all the lessons learned. It's very watchable and you'll go through all the important figures, periods, and struggles.
An extremely advanced but thorough book (i'm about 70% done with it), is Jin Huiming's - Marxism and Socialism with Chinese characteristics.
I haven't read these yet, but Edgar Snow's red star over china, and anna louise strong's the rise of the chinese people's communes document different periods while they were happening, and have interviews with many of the leaders above.
Also good to read their source material, including Liu Shaoqi's how to be a good communist, the quotations of Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping's selected works. These are all remarkably readable and insightful.
Why on earth would the PRC or any communist country "abolish production relations". History has shown that the most important task of any country that frees themselves from colonial oppression, is to build industry, and develop production to uplift their people out of poverty.
Ignoring this task and focusing on "abolishing the commodity form" is ultra-left/anarchist nonsense, trying to insert vague ideological statements instead of the objective material reality and tasks at hand. The PRC went through an entire historical period to learn from and reject this nonsense.
And the PRC is absolutely not capitalist: see here.
Get down to business, all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them. Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. Since we must necessarily learn quickly, any slackness in this respect is a serious crime. And we must undergo this training, this severe, stern and sometimes even cruel training, because we have no other way out.
There are fundamental differences between different production systems that we Marxists think are important enough to warrant distinction, even if they're both instances of class societies.
I have a feeling you'd digest something better in video:
Control of language and ideas is a critical part of cultural hegemony:
In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society (the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores) so that their imposed, ruling-class world view becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.
If you live in the USA, you've probably already seen this a dozen times in your lifetime: Anti-unionism becomes "Right to work", colonized peoples become "terrorists", social support becomes "Welfare mothers", immigrants become "illegal aliens", petit bourgeiosie and the working class gets confused into "middle class".
You can call these campaigns to miseducate conspiracies if you like, but they enter the public lexicon via mass inundation from capitalist media and educational institutions.
Do you believe that the average person saying "capitalism is human nature" uses your definition of capitalism? Or that they are just vaguely reference something that they don't really want to argue?
If they're mis-using terms why should they not be corrected? Capitalism isn't "trade" by any acceptable definition. Ppl should be educated and enlightened, not dumbed down to.
Drag hopes their financial system becomes desperate enough, and enough people say it’s about lemmy.ml, that they realise they have little choice but to take lemmy.ml offline.
The goal is becoming clear. Western-supremacist redditors will not tolerate any communist-friendly spaces on the internet that oppose US foreign policy goals. They can shut our communities down and kick them off reddit, but doing the same on the fediverse is proving difficult. Censorship and anti-communist witch-hunting is their life goal.
For the record, I would never wish starvation on anyone, regardless of ideology. No one should have to be in a "desperate financial situation", regardless of who they are and what they believe.
Indigenous societies have largely industrialized in nearly all the world. Take nearly any country (except the USA, Canada, and Australia, western colonial projects), and you'll find ethnic peoples from those areas with an industrial mode of production.
From what I can tell, they're doing the anarchist nostalgic idealization / fetishization of the past. Usually goes along with idealizing poverty, defeat, and religious "self-sacrifice", on the terms that this is more "pure" and moral than the modern day with its modern production methods, science, technology, and gasp ability to feed millions of people with labor-saving technology.
When indigenous peoples do start taking up the mantle and uplifting themselves out of poverty by industrializing (Vietnam, China, DPRK, etc), then these same anarchists denounce them for the "betrayal".
They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.
Nope, not even the tiniest bit. We know how vital lemmy is, and want to secure its long-term future by being entirely sustained by donations. We never at any point reached that goal, and given that nutomic had a new baby, this is more important now than ever.
hemorrhaging donation money
I have no idea what this means. We're paying our daily living expenses so we can comfortably work on lemmy without having to find other work. The costs are food and rent.
this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever.
I'd love to be able to grow our co-op, and add more developers! Donations make that possible too, especially if they exceed 2 average dev salaries (we're a long way off from that).
What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?
It's clear you've never tried, because we've never and would never reject code contributers for petty reasons like "not fitting in". If ppl don't want to work with communists, that's on them. Personally I'd never reject someone for their ideology, especially if what they're doing is FOSS, which serves the common good.
I would like to see this platform expand beyond them,
We don't stop people from forking lemmy and never would, that's entirely their right.
For most of human history (tribal / pre-agricultural societies), markets were rare and mostly unecessary. Small groups of people survived by foraging / hunting for food and sharing it among themselves. Usually elders, or some type of communal decision-making process was how food was distributed. Sharing, not trade, was the distribution system.
You can have some trade in tribal / feudal societies, but it isn't the most common way that goods are distributed.
