cfgaussian @ cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml

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3 yr. ago

Actually this was the first time i stumbled onto it. There's some great pieces there.

Who the hell is trying to save Imperialism? The only issue is reducing how much damage the falling empire can do on the way down.

Exactly. I don't even think it's something that can be stopped at this point. The systemic reasons for the decline have taken on such an inertia of their own that, even if the drivers of empire truly understood what was happening, they still couldn't do anything about it.

The more they, as the Trump administration is doing, try to salvage the empire by adopting a more "realistic" approach, by retreating to what they see as a less overextended position, the more they accelerate the decline by exacerbating the already existing internal contradictions.

Not that the Biden administration was any better for the empire, as they were behaving even more aggressively, starting wars like the Ukraine proxy war in order to try and cling to their global hegemony. But it's like quicksand, the more you struggle against it the faster you sink.

If they had never started the Ukraine conflict they could probably have sustained the empire for a good few decades longer. Or if they never got into these self-defeating trade wars with China. Or if they didn't give unconditional support to the genocidal Zionist entity. All of these actions that they think will save their primacy actually doom it faster.

Right! Thanks! I knew i'd read it before, it's just been a while.

Great quote! I remember reading it before somewhere. Remind me please, what exactly is the source for this again?

So you prefer a more centralised state that is still beholden to the will of the populace.

China is actually a very decentralized model. Local government is very big in China and plays a huge role in social and economic development, as well as in how things are run on a day to day basis. In a sense it is not all that different to how the US federally delegates power to state and local governments, but i'd say China goes even further.

Local governments frequently compete with one another to outdo each other in development and cultural projects. This is a country of nearly one and a half billion people, with over fifty different minority ethnic groups, languages and cultures. The entire country being centrally run out of Beijing would be simply impossible.

I know it can be difficult to find good in-depth English language information on this subject, and doing this sort of research can be dry and boring at times, but if you really want to understand China i advise you to look into non-Western sources about how China actually works.

It is a very complex society, not perfect by any means, but one that cannot be reduced to the simplistic caricature that is painted of it in Western media.

from what I've seen it's not a state known for complete freedom of speech

Neither is any western "liberal democracy". The last year has shown us this very clearly with how the pro-Palestinian movement has been treated and how aggressively pro-Palestinian speech has been suppressed.

Speech is tolerated only so long as it does not pose a threat to the status quo. You are free to have any opinion you want so long as you don't act on it in a way that threatens the interests of the ruling class.

This is the same in every country, China included. The difference is that in the West the ruling class are the capitalists and imperialists. In a socialist society the ruling class is the working class and it is their interests that the state protects first and foremost.

when you said "liberal democracy" I took it as a democracy where personal freedoms (speech, privacy etc) are respected

I have already addressed the issue of speech. As for privacy, that concept has become a joke in the US with how ubiquitous surveillance is. Corporations and the government work hand in hand to constantly surveil you.

Have we learned nothing from Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA? They have backdoors in nearly all the tech you use and corporations regularly steal your private data. Most of the time they do it for commercial purposes...until the state decides that you pose a threat, and then all that data is used against you.

And Europe isn't far behind. Your privacy has long since been eroded under the pretext of fighting crime and "terrorism". People point out the presence of cameras in China, but do you know for instance that the UK has way more CCTV cameras per person than China does?

But at a more concrete, material level, what "personal freedoms" exactly are the Chinese people lacking? What is it that you think they should be able to do but aren't? I mean:

• They can open a small business if they please.
• They can go on holiday and travel, both inside and outside China.
• They can go out to clubs and restaurants, see a movie, go to a concert... they can do pretty much every recreational activity you can think of.
• They can buy almost any product known to man, because China produces essentially everything.
• They can own their own house (and most of them do, unlike the country where i live) and even a plot of land if they live in a rural area.
• They can form/join social clubs for virtually any interest they have, such as music, sports, dance, etc.
• They can practice their cultural and religious traditions.
• They can express their opinion about how the government is run, and they can even participate in it at various levels if they wish. Anyone can become a party member if they study and pass the tests.

The list goes on. But perhaps even more important than the things they are free to do is what they are free from:

• They have peace and safety. They are free from fearing to walk the streets at night.
• Food is affordable. Housing is affordable. Healthcare is affordable. Higher education is competitive but also quite affordable. These are also forms of freedom: freedom from the kind of crushing economic pressures that so many people in the US and other Western countries now feel.
• Public transportation is modern, extensive and generally affordable, which gives them freedom of mobility without having to own a car to get around. It also increases their economic freedom as greater mobility means more options for work.
• They have a very low crime rate, so they are largely free from gang violence and drug addiction.
• They have a very low, almost non-existent rate of homelessness, thanks to a combination of various policies such as poverty alleviation, government housing initiatives, and the absence of perpetual property taxes.
• There is very little police violence and a high level of trust in society, so they are free from many of the fears that people in other countries constantly live with.
• And they are generally free from the crippling levels of debt that people in the US have. In fact one of the things that western liberal economists regularly complain about is that Chinese people tend to have "too much" savings.

So then what real, material freedoms are they lacking in your opinion?

at least to the point no one really complains about it

People do complain about it. A lot. They are simply ignored because they have no power. University studies have shown that in the US the majority public opinion on a given policy has essentially no bearing on whether or not it is implemented. Instead the adopted policies reflect almost exclusively the will and interests of the donor class, of corporate and financial power.

As a result virtually all western governments have extremely low approval ratings. The US is actually one of the ones with relatively more approval (still very far from a majority) due to the high degree of political polarization of its society. European governments are even less popular. They regularly stay in power for years and years with at best 20-30% approval ratings, or worse.

Not the case in China. In China the government regularly conducts polls and studies to figure out what the population actually wants. And most of the time they listen to them and do their best to implement it. As a result, the central government of China has an incredibly high approval rating, easily over 90%, the highest in the world even according to Western studies.

There is much that can still be improved, and the Chinese people are very vocal and critical when they see problems. It would be very naive to think it is some kind of utopia, but one thing that the majority of Chinese people agree on is that they are on a very positive trajectory. They have hope for a bright future. Can we in the West say the same?

How do y'all talk to libs about how the media is portraying Trump as subservient to Putin?

Ask them why they love war so much. "Finally an American administration is trying to make peace with Russia and this is what you are most upset about?" Whatever the ulterior motive, an end to this proxy war is still a good thing.

And since i live in Europe and have to deal with our own uniquely European brand of deranged, delusional liberals, i usually add: "I wish our own politicians were as interested in peace rather than war. More money for war means less money for your parents' pensions and your children's schools."

Of course we as communists understand the more complex geopolitics at play here. We don't believe that Trump is just doing this because he's some kind of do-gooder peacenik. But there's no need to get into the weeds and start discussing imperial strategy when talking to liberals. They only comprehend the most simplistic of narratives and so you have to keep your responses extremely simple and dumbed down. Nuance is a no-no.

"Peace good, war bad. I don't care about Putin or Trump, i care about stopping the dying. Why do you want people to keep dying?" That is all you need to say to them.

Great response, with clearly a lot of effort put in.

Agreed. No one is infallible and Marxism is not a religious dogma. Correcting mistakes and expanding the theory to fit new material realities is not a crime against Marxism. In fact, not doing so is what would run contrary to the scientific spirit of Marxism.

The term "globalist" is nonsense, there is no such thing, that is why i left that part out. It's a word used by people who are not versed in Marxist theory and don't understand that what they are describing as "globalism" is merely a manifestation of capitalist imperialism as described by Lenin.

I don't care who else this account retweeted, that doesn't change the underlying message of this speech. This "guilt by association"/"attack the messenger" thing is tedious, it's purity-fetishist and it prevents us from taking valuable contributions wherever we find them. If you are secure enough in your own ideological position you shouldn't be bothered by who else is saying the same thing.

The example you picked out is indicative of this; yes Jackson Hinkle and his "patsoc" crowd have a lot of very bad takes. Pointing out the fact that Trump is a Zionist and will act in the interests of Zionists is not one of those bad takes. Does the validity of a point depend on who is making it? And either way it is irrelevant to the topic of this particular post and i don't see a point in bringing it up.

That's undoubtedly correct. When you read what he was saying about FDR during the war, you can clearly see that he was overly optimistic about the potential of the West to take a more progressive path.

A breakdown by age group:

As you can see, we have boomers to thank for putting the decrepit CDU and SPD back in charge who will only continue more of the same failing policies.

Nothing will change in Germany until this generation, that to a large degree refuses to change party allegiance no matter how badly these dinosaur parties fail us, dies out.

And in the meantime their failures will only continue to empower the far right.

The federal government has been trying to go after DKP for a long time now. They tried pulling some legalistic crap to exclude them from running before under the pretext that they didn't jump through whatever bureaucratic hoops. Whatever the reason this time, it is clear that the DKP is in the crosshairs of the bourgeois state, as they and every other Marxist party are anyway under observation by the state as "left-wing extremists". Any party that declares that they want a different economic system than the free market and any other political system than the current bourgeois liberal one gets put on a list and surveilled, and all kinds of bureaucratic and legal barriers get thrown in their way to make life difficult for them.

If we could have a leftist party with the social policies of Die Linke and the foreign policy of BSW, i would be so happy...oh wait, we do have it, it's called the DKP. Only one problem: they weren't allowed on the fucking ballot in this election! So much for "free and fair elections" in this "democracy"...

I'm sure Palestine played a big role in this

I actually don't think so. Die Linke has at best a both-sidesy position on Israel-Palestine. My impression from the people i've talked to is that they don't really think much about foreign policy. It's the progressive economic and social policies of Die Linke that attract younger people. Just like it's not the AfD's stance on Russia or anything as intellectually complex as NATO-EU that attracts people to vote for them, but rather simple things like xenophobia and anti-vax conspiracy theories.

People are primarily worried about the things that personally impact them (or that they think impact them) most immediately. Of course exceptions exist (all of us communists are proof of that), but most people are not as engaged with what is happening in the rest of the world as we are.

That's because it is. See my other comment above: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/6006884

It's more like 70% who have no problem with genocidal ethno-supremacism, because as we have seen over the past year, the SPD, Greens and CDU are all diehard Zionists. The current SPD-Green government is the one that has been actively persecuting pro-Palestinian voices and professing virtually unconditional support for the Zionist project. And CDU will be no different.

Basically yes. Die Linke offers some lip service to the idea of stopping all weapons exports, but they undermine their own position on this by repeating Zionist lies about the Resistance. When you continue to insist that "Israel" has a right to exist and defend itself from the vicious "terrorists" who just out of nowhere and for no other reason than being bloodthirsty savages decided to attack and kill innocent civilians on Oct 7, then you only help the other parties justify continuing to arm the Zionists to commit genocide.

They engage in the same hypocrisy on the subject of the Ukraine conflict by the way: simultaneously claiming to want peace negotiations and an end to weapons deliveries, yet repeating many of the same NATO talking points about Russia and the Ukraine conflict that all the mainstream parties spout.

And because they are too small of a party to have any influence on the actual policies of the government, they can safely pose as being pro-peace because they are never in a position to follow through on that rhetoric with concrete action. Whereas them strengthening the propaganda talking points is something that actually matters because it helps the government to continue the current course. As a small opposition party the most effective thing they could do would be to call out the mainstream on its lies like the BSW does on Nordstream, Ukraine, sanctions, etc. ...But they haven't and they won't.

There are two parts to the European far right. One is the so-called "populist" right (a purposely misleading label, as their "populism" is just a mask for neoliberal and pro-corporate economic policies like tax cuts for the rich), which tends to be pro-Russia in most European countries because of their shared anti-liberal, socially conservative views (though not always... in Poland for instance the right wing is just as Russophobic as the liberal centrists are).

The other are the outright Neonazis who have ties to Ukraine's Neonazi scene and who are anti-Russian because they view the Russians as Asiatic non-Europeans and a threat to their vision of a racially pure Europe. The Ukrainian Neonazi movement has been busy over the past ten years building up connections with their counterparts in the rest of Europe, trafficking weapons and organizing para-military training camps.

They have had substantial resources to establish their networks in Europe thanks to state backing by the Kiev regime, and European governments have tolerated and turned a blind eye to these groups and their activities because of their usefulness against the Russians.

This latter group, from what i can tell, has never had a hugely positive view of Trump (in part also because of his ties to Jewish oligarchs) - though they of course welcomed his normalization of xenophobia and racism - and now if Trump ends up ditching the Ukraine project they may even turn outright hostile toward him.

I think unfortunately that both of these parts of the European right will be strengthened as a result of the Ukraine conflict. The first because it will have been validated in their skepticism toward the Ukraine project, and the second because there will be huge resentment in the Neonazi ranks over what they will perceive as the West's betrayal of their cause.

And that second group is especially concerning, as with the end of the war we will suddenly have a large number of hardcore ideological Nazis, with ample combat experience and severe PTSD, flood into Europe as Ukraine is either taken over by the Russians or is left as an economically devastated rump state where they will be unable to find jobs after the war.

Not to mention that the black market for all kinds of very dangerous weapons, which has already been thriving thanks to the monumental levels of corruption in Ukraine, will become an order of magnitude worse as tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers with no economic prospects and no war to fight anymore try to sell whatever they have left to whoever will buy it. In practice that means organized crime and militant Neonazi networks (these two often have significant overlap in Eastern Europe btw).

I agree. I think this take gives them altogether too much credit. We'll see what happens, but for now my gut instinct is to think that the extent to which the Trump administration is actually embracing "realism" is being overestimated by many commentators. A tiger doesn't change its stripes...not this quickly.

Still...some very interesting things are happening, and we see the US is at least trying to adapt to changing realities...Europe is still hopelessly delusional and will get left further and further behind by every other major player.

I didn't imply they were. But the least someone can do is listen to both sides. Especially when we've been hearing the West's narrative on repeat from every single mainstream media outlet for the last ten years, and always it turns out that it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Another good documentary on the subject: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JM0VYkL_UI4

And of course Oliver Stone's "Ukraine on Fire" if you want to understand where this all started.