StalinForTime [comrade/them]

Yo are you actually fucking condoning the mass murder of children and throwing them in pits? Anyone who is liking this comment you’re equally fuck in the head and there is nothing communist about you.

You’re completely correct on the presence of brainworms, and Palestinian struggle should be supported not only in principle unequivocally as a struggle against a fascist settler-colonialist state which has been practicing continuous ethnic cleansing of varying speed over the last 80 years, but also in it’s concrete forms.

But it’s important to recognize a contradiction this puts us in, and which is clearly the source of the (abstract, priviledged) moral dilemma that you see many comrades experiencing. Namely, that the only current institutional and organizational forms of potential armed resistance to Israel in the West Bank are through Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are as politically reactionary as you can imagine in the social realm. While I wouldn’t call Islamism fascism simply for clarity so as to not muddy the water by suggesting that the material conditions which have produced fascism in the European, American, Japanese or Indian are the same as those which have produced Islamism (though sometimes they are), it’s not a coincidence that Islamism shares alot of features with fascism.

I hope that this isn’t news to anyone here, but frankly no-one should arrogantly be suggesting that unconditionally supporting Palestinian self-defense should imply that this also means condoning or justifying the torture, killing of unarmed women and children, and sexual violence that Hamas is known to practice.

There are many tragic aspects of the history of modern Israel of historic proportions. Adorno said that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz. What we’ve seen is many genocide survivors and their descendants carry out their own fascistic ethnic cleansing and mass murder. History repeats, first time as tragedy, second time as tragedy, but also as farce. Here as Marxists we see the issue of a political struggle which is now so fucked that resistance to Israeli fascism is unavoidably mediated by this Islamism.

Continued:

I should add the obvious point that’s China’s economic development (including the Mao period, when the population doubled from 300 to 600 million and life expectancy went from the late 20s to around 63) has seen the largest increase in living standards and reductions in poverty in all of human history. They are almost single handedly responsible for any reductions in global poverty since the Neoliberal Counterrevolution

The vast majority of Chinese people seem to have an, overall, very positive view of the achievements of the government, even if the reforms were often violent and there has been labour and radical maoist opposition.

So I’ll say first off that I think many people here are really not responding to your question serious, maturely, or in good faith, and it shows that they are internet warriors whose leftism is an aesthetic and who have no experience of actual politics or really ever reflected on what it takes to change anyone’s point of view in their lives, so I’d recommend ignoring those kind of comments. Some people here are giving the impression that if you have critical views of the government of China (which every socialist of sane mind should do, and they should do to every other political entity, including themselves) then you’re basically spreading hate for the entirely of the population of China, which is really a simplistic way of looking at it, although it is based on the correct observation that, in the West, criticism of the government of China by westerners is barely distinguishable in practice from xenophobia of ‘Yellow Peril’ narratives.

Ofc, all this assumes that you are asking the question in good faith, which I’ll continue to assume in this comment.

With that out the way, I’ll add that I don’t think ‘redpilling’ is really the way you should be approaching the topic. ‘China’ is not a simple entity about which you can just make simple judgements, tempting as they may be. If you want to understand and be able feel confident in your analytical and political judgements on the different aspects, elements, and socio-economic, political and cultural subsystems that make up the society we call China, then there’s no royal road to doing so. ‘Without investigation, no right to an opinion’.

I’ll add my two cents on a couple topics you’ve mentioned:

• Xinjiang and the Uyghurs: first off, while it would be unreasonable to deny that there has long been evidence of discrimination against Uyghurs in China. China does also, indeed, have a massive security and intelligence apparatus (like every other major state). Unfortunately, abuses are inevitable in such a system. The Chinese prison system remains, imo, given the evidence, very much something that can be criticized, although bear in mind that if you partake in these discussions in liberal company in the West then you’ll likely only have the concrete effect of reinforcing your interlocutors sinophobia. There has never, at any point, been any concrete evidence ever produced establishing that there is actual genocide going on in Xinjiang. The claims, their arguments, and supposed sources have been thoroughly debunked. Also, the Chinese state actively engages in cultural conservation/protection programs in Xinjiang. Pretty much all Some Westerner jabbing a camera in someone’s face and being ignored, then editing this with a vague image of a grey, concrete building which they’re not allowed into, and which the western (eg BBC) media then labels ‘torture/gulag centre etc’, is not any kind of objective reporting or evidence. It’s propaganda, pure and simple, based on racist hermeneutics of suspicion. See Qiao Collective articles for debunking: https://www.qiaocollective.com/

As others have noted, the West and above all the US have vested interests here, so you should take what they say with massive grains of salt (although, ofc, propaganda is not actually mostly about telling lies, but about not telling truths, or the way that you communicate and present information). Also, by contrast, we do in fact know as a matter of record that the US has been actively supporting potential neoliberal puppet governments in exile and that it has supported Islamist terrorists (and as much as some people on here like to larp as Hamas or the Iranian government members, even just for the bants, these people are the most rabid forces of reaction in their countries. If anyone doubts this I invite you to actually speak to communists and feminists who are active in these countries).

• On child labour: we can expand this to discussion of wage labor in general; here we have to be honest: the CPC actively made a deal with the devil . I personally think that we both have recognise that this was under pressure from imperialist pressure and the Sino-Soviet split (one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century), and CR traumas, but also a calculated move by factions in the CPC who were objectively reforming (they still took themselves to be communist, and I genuinely think they thought they were engaing in market socialist which would lead to socialism proper). It’s worth noting that Reform and Opening up were not the start of Chinese economic development. This had advanced immensely during the Mao era. Personally, I don’t think they needed to take this route, and that they opened up far too many areas to capitalistic practices (notably, housing and finance).

• On LGBT+ issues, it is true that China has very far to go (including the CPC, which in many respects remans socially conservative), as does literally everywhere else. But this does is often overblown and is used to generalize about and thus demonize the entirety of China and every aspect of the CPC. As always, these are processes that take time. What matters is what the actual, concrete, material tendencies are. I think they are. Young Chinese people, especially in urban areas, seem far more progressive in this regard. Unfortunately this sometimes feeds into perceptions that the urban, often more middle class individuals who are both more politically liberal and more open wrt LGBT are evidence that LGBT people are a western, decadent, liberal imposition, which is ofc absolute fucking nonsense.

• On internet and media censorship, there are areas which make me uneasy, but at the end of the day they have very good reasons to do so. The propaganda-media (which is basically all capitalist media, i.e. almost all of it in the West)

This obviously raises the very complicated question of the nature of the CPC. This is not an easy question to answer. i’m not going to get too into this now because then I would write an essay, but suffice to say that the modern CPC-state parallel structure has an ambivalent relationship to these issues that are not insurmontable in the capitalistic conditions they have decided to tolerate and actively develop. As people have correctly noted, while Chinese development since Reform and Opening Up was influenced by reflection on the NEP in Russia in the 1920s, it is nevertheless not equivalent, because the latter was a form of state capitalism aimed to develop forces of production in order to soon nationalize and move to socialism proper, whereas the current Chinese development path is something more akin to a form of economy which is state-capitalistic, and which aims at far longer, more evolutionary developments into socialism, from what I understand. The current CPC is, indeed, filled with people who genuinely take themselves to be communists and to be engaging in a long-term, civilizational project of socialist construction. At this time, they are betting on using the concrete mechanisms of industrial capitalism to beat the West at its own capitalistic game. They are in it for the long run and are, imo, far more farsighted than the ruling class in the West. Partly this is due to the fact, while there was substantial bourgeois infiltration in the CPC from the 90s, nevertheless the capitalist class is not itself in political power, and this is what makes it ambiguous and difficult to call it capitalism. My personal view is that we’re seeing emerge in China a new form of socio-economic development which requires serious reflection within political economy, because imo it does not seem to be working exactly like other capitalists economies, but nor is it really socialism, even if it aims to develop socialism, and even if it is in fact tending there.

If you want to look at first hand footage of China’s development, I recommend the following documentaries:

• PBS - China in Revolution (CW: this is a very lib take on the history, especially once the Revolution occurs in 1949, so take with a massive grain of salt the interpretations).
• How Yukong Moved the Mountains (one of my personal favorite documentaries).
• West of the Tracks, by Wang Bing (one of the greatest documentaries I have ever watched).
• Behemoth
• Ascendance

Literature (obvs just lib-gen this shit if you cant find free googling):

• Jonathan Spence: Modern China; a decent, if very lib, general overview. Good intro but take with massive grains of sale
• Maurice Meisner: Mao’s China and After, The Deng Xiaoping Era
• Cambridge History of Modern China
• Joan Robinson - The Cultural Revolution in China
• Charles Bettelheim - Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China ; Questions about China after the Death of Mao Tse-tung
• Andrew Walder: China Under Mao ; Inside China’s Cultural Revolution; A Decade of Upheavel (with Dong Guoqiang) ; The Beijing Red Guard Movement
• Dongping Han: The Unknown Cultural Revolution
• William Hinton: A Turning Point in China; The Great Reversal
• Yang Jisheng - The Great Chinese Famine
• https://www.qiaocollective.com/
• Wheelright and McFarlane - The Chinese Road to Socialism - The Economics of the Cultural Revolution
• Mobo Gao - The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution
• Kelly and Esch - Black Like Mao
• Alejandro Russo - Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture
• https://foreignlanguages.press/works-of-maoism/the-great-debate-i-documents-of-the-communist-party-of-china/
• https://foreignlanguages.press/works-of-maoism/the-great-debate-ii-documents-of-the-communist-party-of-china/
• Peter Nolan - China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall
• Isabelle Weber: How China Escaped Shock Therapy
• Wei Weig Zhang - Transforming China
• Pao-Yu Ching: From Victory to Defeat ; Revolution and CounterRevolution
• Yiching Wu: The Cultural Revolution at the Margins
• Alain Badiou: Petrograd and Shanghai
• Moufawad-Paul: A Critique of Maoist Reason
• Xi Jingping: Governance of China
• Blanchette: New Red Guards