Remember folks: China is communist in the same way that North Korea is democratic and the Nazis were socialist.
It’s just a smokescreen.
A core tenant of socialism is a democratized workplace, being able to vote for your wage and company policy, like an Engineer choosing when to launch the rocket instead of some MBS degree.
Last time I checked I dont think factory workers in China that make all our shit can do that.
Which is also why socialism will never work. Humans are piss poor at evaluating the common good and making decisions collectively (see also: the last US election.)
And ceos are somehow significantly worse and consistently (and in many industries), almost exclusively make decisions directly opposing the common good including intentionally leading the world forward into societal and ecological collapse and quadrupling down on that stance… Because it makes them more quarterly profit. I guess we just have to let AI do it.
Eh, there’s a notional aspiration to socialism at least, which is more than can be said about the US sphere of countries.
In practice though? Yeah, China is hyper-captialist, without much of the social security present in wealthier countries.
Why Leftist get a hard-on for the former USSR, Russia and China, or frankly any country, is beyond me.
There are positive and negative outcomes in line or against socialist ideals everywhere (I think people are too black and white about China in both directions personally)
I just do not understand simping for any country, just because they are “socialist”.
IMO this is why it takes an additional axis to define a government, not just left/right but also free/authoritarian. You can find examples of all combinations. Left wing and repressive? Cuba. Left leaning and free? Sweden. Right wing and repressive? Russia, Saudi Arabia, whatever. Right leaning and free (mostly)? USA.
Obviously, there’s a gradient within these axes, but it’s strange to see people cheering on a country that matches their preferred left or right wing ideology if they’re super repressive.
I think Saudi Arabia is the perfect example of why even that model isn’t even enough. I mean sure they are a monarchy and quite self-focused but not really in a nationalistic way. To be fair I don’t know much about their domestic politics. To put them into the same corner as Russia, eh dunno.
I couldn’t ask for clearer evidence than not accepting Saudi Arabia as authoritarian to demonstrate that “free vs authoritarian” are just propaganda terms and that how “free” a country allegedly is is really just a function of how aligned it is with the US.
In what universe is Saudi Arabia more free than Cuba?
I think some aspects of freedom are to some extent objectively observable, eg, is freedom of speech or religion observed? These can exist independently of US alignment - there are many countries in the global south that can qualify as free or partially free.
Mhm. I wonder, which objective metrics led you to list the US as more free than Cuba?
Cuba’s family code is one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in the world concerning LGBT rights and gender equality, meanwhile, there are parts of the US where you can get arrested for using the bathroom, or for merely failing to rat out trans kids to the cops. The US performs mass surveillance on all citizens and has the most sophisticated spy network in the world, it has used extrajudicial, indefinite detention without trial (in addition to having the highest incarceration rate in the world), along with torture (ironically, on illegally occupied Cuban soil). The US has kangaroo courts where children as young as six have to represent themselves in court with no right to an attorney, against threat of deportation. The police are equipped with military-grade equipment designed to fight insurgents, with the police budgets of individual cities exceeding that of the militaries of many countries: Cuba’s military spending is several times less than the police budget of Phoenix, AZ.
Does any of that factor into your analysis?
Cuba’s one-party communist state outlaws political pluralism, bans independent media, suppresses dissent, and severely restricts basic civil liberties.
Cuba lacks basic freedom of speech or freedom of the press, to say the absolute least. Typical tankie whatabout-ism. In fact, you’re proving the point of the person I originally replied to in this thread!
China has a Socialist Market Economy, it hasn’t reached Communism of course but at the same time the Public Sector covers over half of the economy, and is gradually folding the Private Sector into it with the degree to which it develops. This is the process Marx and Engels described a Socialist State would take. From Principles of Communism:
Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?
Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.
The backbone of the PRC is central planning and public ownership, Marx is regularly taught in class, and Marxism-Leninism continues to be the dominant and guiding ideology. They are ideologically Communist, and it is rather silly to protest otherwise simply because they haven’t immediately siezed all property, which would be anti-Marxist as the PRC is still underdeveloped.
The purpose of Marxian analysis of Capitalism is the insight that markets naturally centralize and develop complicated methods of planning. You can’t just will these into existence, and markets provide a quick way of creating them. Once they have sufficiently developed, markets cease to be the best tool to use, and public ownership and central planning becomes more efficient. Given that the PRC is Marxist, it stands to reason it is useful to analyze them with a Marxist lense. I have yet to see a genuine Marxist take on why the PRC is not Socialist, only liberals paying lip service to Marx yet vulgurizing him into a Utopian Idealist, and not a Materialist.
You can call their economy whatever you want, doesn’t stop them from being a dictatorship.
That’s moving the goalposts though, isn’t it? I was responding to the claim that the PRC isn’t at all Communist, which is false regardless of your opinion of it being “good” or “bad” whether overall or in comparison to the US.
Further, I am not sure why you describe it to be a dictatorship, even Mao was forced to step down after the tremendous struggles during the Cultural Revolution. Xi is an elected official, and there are 8 political parties besides the CPC that actively contribute to the decision making progress of the PRC, the CPC is merely the largest at 96 million members out of 1.4 billion people.
In order to accurately judge the merit or lack thereof of the PRC, you have to actually take a real look at what it looks like, question why Beijing has an over 95% approval rate, and see what the living conditions look like for the people that actually live there. If you perpetuate sloganeering because it is convenient, then actual, systemic problems you could be criticizing go under the radar.
You are banned from /c/hexbear
“oppressive govts that use socialism to hide their atrocities” => welcome to European politics.
All of those ‘Socialist’ governments in the EU, with the highest quality of life, highest quality of happiness, and some of the least wealth disparity in the world, are committing atrocities against their own people?
Some of these governments probably commit atrocities in countries other than their own, but that would be because of Capitalistic and Imperialistic policies, not Socialistic ones.
What you’re missing there is that the Europe you describe is only a small sub-set of countries. The rest are committing atrocities against their own people in the form of continuously increasing the number of people living close to poverty and by enacting policies that ended up making majority of the youngest generations unable to buy/rent homes and/or eventually have children.
“NOOOOOOO you have to pick one of the two teams or you’re a RADICAL CENTRIST!!!”
Not really the point, but that’s a funny little oxymoron; to be a radical anything you’d need to be actually committed to something so much that you want to do actual ground work to further a cause.
Radical centrism:
^needs ^more ^jpeg, ^I ^know
You could’ve gone with Radial centrism though
Now hang on. If you pretend the two teams are the same and refuse to pick a side because neither is perfect so it doesn’t matter, you are an enabler of fascism.
You can support a team while acknowledging their flaws. Refusing to play because the better team isn’t perfect is either naive or malicious.
Once you talk about “both teams”, you imply there are only two instead of supporting those who to this day resist all states
If you’re talking about a presidential election, there are two teams. The rest of the time, you should work on your own team, but when the big race is happening, there are only two viable contenders.
The meme is about US imperialism versus (supposedly) Chinese imperialism. And the election is over, not every meme is about that anymore.
The US is the biggest source of imperialism in the world. We don’t have to always follow that up with “butwhatabout” to distract from that, which is what the US media machine does by running stories all the time to manufacture consent for its own imperialism.
I’d say that Russia is the biggest source of suffering caused by imperialism in the world right now ( just going by the death toll of the Ukraine war ) . Is saying that a ‘distraction’ from American imperialism?
Gaza is happening because of US imperialism. Biden said that’s what Israel does in the region very clearly.
Gaza absolutely dwarfs Ukraine in terms of suffering caused by imperialism.
Honestly, this is why I increasingly believe that people who say things like the OP don’t actually believe American Imperialism is bad, they’re just doing whataboutism to defend it.
The data for Ukraine is so contested that it’s hard to put a number on it, but it’s probably higher than the Israel Palestine conflict, and at least comparable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli–Palestinian_conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Casualties
If you’re going to try to cite a claim, please don’t just drop the Wikipedia pages on the subjects. In fact, don’t cite Wikipedia at all.
Complicated subjects like this have dozens of citations which often contradict eachother. The great thing about wikipedia is that it shows multiple sources and where they came from. This is a far higher standard of evidence than just cherry-picking one source that agrees with me and pretending that it’s definitive. Meanwhile the only thing you’ve cited is your imagination.
Yeah, but you don’t actually check any it the citations, nobody who cites Wikipedia does.
You didn’t even say which part of the Wikipedia articles you were citing
People that are being literally killed, tortured, displaced, bombed, denied their identity, starved, raped, genocided right now by China/Russia/North Korea, looking for any support, any help from anyone willing to give it
A Leftist American: US is the biggest source of imperialism in the world and you’re not being oppressed by the US, so you’re not real. Have a good day. takes a privileged slurp from the huge cup of Starbucks and closes his Macbook
Nice caricature, but it has nothing to do with my post. Pointing out that the US is the biggest source of imperialism doesn’t mean no one else is doing bad things, but thanks for proving my point. Fuck Starbucks and Apple, by the way.
The whole point of the OP is that being against US imperialism doesn’t mean you have to be very purposefully silent about yhe atrocities committed by the US geopolitical rivals because they are US enemies therefore good.
It’s a very prevalent thing about US lefties, if you’re not aware, I’m telling it to you, as a Ukrainian lefty myself. I agree, fuck Apple and Starbucks (never had one and heard from friends it’s shit). Also fuck Russia for killing a bunch of my friends and fuck those US “leftists” like Chomsky, who suck Russian dicks.
One problem I see is that people feel like they have to work in absolutes or match their opinions 100% with everything within a group. How the grouping forms is not always clear, but apparently if one is associated with that grouping, they feel the need to defend everything in that grouping and attacking everything that isn’t.
There is some discussion to be had in the role of the US using proxies to undermine global rivals, but that does not justify Russia invading Ukraine, nothing does. Absolutely, fuck Russia.
Thank you.
I just don’t like the pushback against this meme, when all it says is “Yes, US imperailism is bad, it doesn’t mean that Stalin did nothing wrong”, but for some reason people push back with “US imperialism is bad FULLSTOP, shut up about everything else”. Which is exactly how Nortb Korea-glorifying tankies behave. I may have lumped your comment in with those, sorry for that.
Whataboutusm is a russian invention and is 9 times out of ten usad to excuse russia agressions.
Trying to change the subject was not invented by anyone in particular, but the US likes to slap that label onto everything that directs criticism at them. For example, the US has the highest prison population per capita but will preemptively scream about enemy countries imprisoning people with countless stories in the media. Calling out the hypocrisy is countered with accusations of “whataboutism” but that’s not whataboutism, it’s simply pointing out hypocrisy since it’s the same subject.
Really though, the level of imperialism apologizing I’ve seen has been pretty humorous on this platform. Like people will say with a straight face that we need to support our client state Israel to secure our regional interests. It’s the same song and dance from the concert of Europe giving guns to the corrupt African client kings so they can murder the other guy’s corrupt African client kings. All for the noble civilizing influence of the state. But this time it’ll turn out different. Just like it was different every other fucking time an empire ideologically justified it’s imperialism. Because this one time is exceptional, unlike all the other instances of exceptionalism. Furthermore, I consider Carthage to need to be destroyed
Really though, the level of imperialism apologizing I’ve seen has been pretty humorous on this platform. Like people will say with a straight face that we need to support our client state Israel to secure our regional interests.
Is this being federated from some platform other than Lemmy? Because I have literally never seen someone support that position here.
This is just like how I can praise so many things about China, push back against anti-China US propaganda, and still not pretend it isn’t an authoritarian regime where Xi made himself essentially life time president now.
Speaking of that, are there any left leaning subs that aren’t delusional?
where Xi made himself essentially life time president now.
What? When?
authoritarian regime
Both of these terms are obfuscstory propaganda that mean a person hasn’t placed enough scrutiny on what they have internalized. That might sound like I am simply attacking you, but I mean this as a way of answering your (combative) question: you want a space where people have some basic ideas about cold war propaganda but where they retain a significant amount of chauvinist framibgs from that propaganda. You can find like-minded people wherever left education arrests itself, which is why you won’t find it in organizations or spaces that require reading on these topics.
To explain my response, I’ll go over the two words.
Authoritarian. This word is poisoned beyond clear meaning. Every state is authoritarian, so what is the meaning of calling a particular state authoritarian? Every revolution is authoritarian, so do you also criticize them as such and seek out anti-revolutionary spaces? In reality, I know that this term is just thrown around in chauvinist contexts as a dog whistle. In this context it just means “bad” and “the enemy”. It’s the liberal version of, “they hate us for our freedoms”.
Regime. This term is synonymous with givernment or state, but just colors it as, again, “bad”. Venezuela must always be described as being led by a regime, not a government. As a target of imperialist propaganda, it must be implicitly propagandized as illegitimate and bad. Think of someone saying, “the Biden regime”. How often do you hear that phrase? If you’ve heard it, it was a socialist trying to make this point and even the playing field.
If you remove the propaganda aspects, your framing becomes, “still not pretend it isn’t a government”. Becomes less spicy, doesn’t it? Despite having no differences in meaning outside of implying it is bad.
Finally, Xi didn’t make himself president for life, he must be regularly reelected. The government itself removed term limits in the normal way: with a vote. Imperialist media calls this “president for life” because they are chauvinists. When the US had no term limits, was every president “president for life”? Aren’t term limits antidemocratic, i.e. more authoritarian?
In short: please do some self-criticism on this internalized chauvinism and you will find it easier to find comrades. You are currently in an incoherent position and that means you’d only find comeradery among the incoherent snd incurious. Be around people that challenge you based on their reading and knowledge.
go make one, id join ;3
assuming you arent a delussional leftist yourself, unaware of your own delusions…
I would be willing to try and do that :) What would be interesting to you? A general leftist non-liberal non-authoritarian apologist community? @[email protected] @[email protected]
souns good to me :3 btw im only gonna lurk sowwy in advance
imperialism against imperialists is good
I’d say US imperialism is many magnitudes worse than any other governments, except for the brutality of Israel. Who else has more than 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. But sure Russia, Iran, China, North-Korea, Venezuela bad.
Facts gets downvotes here!
Fools get downvotes here. When the US launches a violent offensive directly on a neighboring independent country with the intent of destroying its people and conquering its land, which NK and Russia are currently trying to do, maybe you’ll have a point.
Let’s just summarize the argument made here using actual facts:
Everyone says Russia is so bad for bombing children’s hospitals and rest homes and apartment buildings, but look at the US’s military budget!"
It’s pathetic.
Fools get downvotes here. When the US launches a violent offensive directly on a neighboring independent country with the intent of destroying its people and conquering its land, which NK and Russia are currently trying to do, maybe you’ll have a point.
“Neighbor” is doing all of the work here, as the US had pushed its frontiers far away from itself for about a century. Of course the US has actually invaded:
- Canada
- Mexico
- Cuba
- Guatemala
- Puerto Rico
- Haiti
- Hawaii
- Grenada
[More but I don’t feel like compiling the full list]
And some of those in the last half century or so!
Of course, if you remove the morally meaningless qualifier of “neighbor”, your point goes entirely out the window. I think this is obvious to everyone, including you, so really the question is why the need to lie to yourself about US imperialism? Why downplay it in bad faith?
Ignores the point of my comment
Hyperfocuses on one tiny detail
.ml username
What a shock.
“Neighbor” was never an important detail, and only someone struggling to string together some type of deflection from the point would focus so deeply on it. The point, as is abundantly clear to anyone with a couple of braincells to rub together, is that these countries are doing that now, as in at this moment, and are targeting civilians, which the person in responding to gladly ignored with their “but no, everyone says Russia is bad” bullshit.
And you have the gall to accuse me of making a bad faith argument. Once again, pathetic.
“Neighbor” was never an important detail, and only someone struggling to string together some type of deflection from the point would focus so deeply on it.
Neighbor is the only qualifier that makes your claim arguably true for, say, 30-40 years. You included it yourself, I didn’t make you so it. If you get rid of the term “neigbor”, you are simply wrong.
Instead of running away from it and trying to blame me for noticing, you could just acceot where I am correct and try to synthesize.
You will get into conflicts and be consistently wrong if this is how you respond to correction.
The point, as is abundantly clear to anyone with a couple of braincells to rub together, is that these countries are doing that now, as in at this moment, and are targeting civilians, which the person in responding to gladly ignored with their “but no, everyone says Russia is bad” bullshit.
That applies to several countries, including US-backed Israel and the US-backed reactionaries in Syria, which is why the term “neighbor” does so much work. And in providing that obfuscatory defense, you are doing the thing you claim others are doing, which is excusing and minimizing war and death on civilians.
And you have the gall to accuse me of making a bad faith argument. Once again, pathetic.
It requires very little gall. You are putting on quite the display at the moment with the flurry of insults and deflections.
Who else has more than 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
And yet Russia still managed to launch a war with casualties on par with Iraq. Sorry sunshine, if you’re a global power, you’ve got a body count in the millions. Period.
if you’re a global power, you’ve got a body count in the millions.
Very true. But is this an inherent trait of the world, or is there some path forward that would change or mitigate this fact?
Except US is biggest imperialist & no one intelligent is supporting Russia just cause “America Bad” Typical RadLib Let’s hear your complains about Socialism (He’s gonna call me a Tankie & ban me huh😂)
Oh, you reminded me to check out Yanis Varoufakis’s latest videos!
He talks of imperialism and the differences between China and the USA.
Thanks for the meme!
For those interested: https://lemmy.world/post/23027760
Subscribed.
Wait, are you saying “both sides bad?” “Both sides are the same?” Am I hearing this right?
Look, if either Xi Jinping or Donald Trump is going to emerge as leader of a global hegemon, then any and all criticism of Xi Jinping is the exact same as being a Trump supporter. When are we going to do something about all these secret Trump supporters pretending to be leftists?
At least, that’s what I’d say if I accepted the absurd logic of lesser evilism the liberals were constantly berating everyone with.
No, they are saying one side being bad doesn’t make “the other side” perfect or immune to criticism
The US participating in the Palestinian genicide does not excuse Russia invading Ukraine. The US invading Iraq does not excuse nationalists in India attacking Muslims
It is not the same thing, and western imperialism doesnt make non-western imperialism ok. Even if it is a lot worse
Right, and what I’m saying is that by that very same logic, Trump supporting the Palestinian genocide doesn’t justify the democrats supporting the Palestinian genocide - they should not be considered immune to criticism either, and when people criticize them, they should not be assumed to be supporting the other side.
Right, so I was replying to you trying to make the meme into a " both sides bad" or “both sides are the same”-argument, pointing out how it is not
I find your answer to my reply irrelevant to the point I was making
It’s not saying that both sides are bad? You sure about that one, chief?
What’s it saying about US imperialism? Good or bad?
What’s it saying about countries the US opposes? Good or bad?
Nothing is as black and white as it is in your head.
Grow up 🫶
Non sequitor. Where did I say anything was black and white?
Silence, imperialist.
No u.
Both sides can be bad in different ways. Just because both sides are considered bad, doesn’t mean they are the same.
Correct, whether it’s about countries or parties.
