cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8181688
undefined
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
253 points (82.7% liked)
Anarchism
1450 readers
4 users here now
Discuss anarchist praxis and philosophy. Don't take yourselves too seriously.
Other anarchist comms
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And now you are, in order to conflate me with capitalists, yourself regurgitating capitalist propaganda! Remember, I'm not talking about Deng and the "Chinese Miracle" (which I think is a mischaracterization by liberals), I am specifically talking about Mao-era China, where the use of things like agricultural collectives was a major element in the reduction of poverty that liberal economists had no interest in accounting for.
But to consider the progress that China has made merely the inevitable motion of science and capitalism is literally liberal revisionism! Inventions serve mainly to impoverish if the people who own and control those inventions are not the workers! Just look at the cotton gin if you need an easy example, and perhaps see that the Luddites had a point in their angle of economic self-defense (though this should by no means be conflated with primitivism).
People were fed who were not fed before, people could read who could not read before, peasants no longer had to surrender 90% of their harvest to landlords, childhood mortality plummeted. These are things you can say about China under Mao (and, to a more limited extent, later iterations as well) that you cannot say about, for example, nearby India because control is imperative and there is not some nebulous specter of "progress" overhanging the world like we live in a Real Time Strategy title, as much as modern "syndicalists" seem to think so. The people of China stood up while the people of India and many other countries were held down, and your liberal modernism has no way to account for that while preserving your philippics about the dang tankies.
People who were not Chinese got the same progress like the Chinese did at different speeds (earlier or later). So obviously this progress is not a unique Maoist characteristic. It would have happened anyway. I can just as well argue that under an anarchist system, it would have happened better and not devolved into capitalism and the massive capitalist exploitation chinese workers are suffering right now.
There's no revisionism here. We can plainly see that the whole world progressed the same way. It's fucking racist to claim that China wouldn't have done it if it weren't for that one guy
This is such a bizarre claim, since many people in many places (India is the easiest example, but you can look at any third world country) still don't have what China achieved in a couple of decades. Even if your speed characterization wasn't absurd modernism, that doesn't make a speck of difference to the people dying in the meantime, but again societal change is not a linear scalar from "bad" to "good," the specific forms of society matter a great deal and, contrary to what you say, liberal systems demand a brutally exploited underclass. You are literally (however clumsily) making liberal arguments to own the tankies, some fucking "anarchist" you turned out to be.
I can imagine that Lenin is actually just working on dragging heaven down to Earth and he'll be back any second, but like you, I would just be playing pretend based on information that I don't have.
No it fucking didn't, and it still hasn't! Society is not an RTS game, development is a complex and highly-varied thing and imposing this sort of one-dimensional teleology on it is ridiculous. Please, read a single book about history that isn't about owning the tankies.
Rich coming from the guy who posted a squinting Mao . . .
Aside from this being a pathetic, pathetic deflection, look back again at what I actually said and you'll notice that I wasn't attributing things solely to him but merely used him as a marker for time, it was the party and the people who made these advancements, and he certainly helped but he couldn't have killed all those landlords on his own.
You are literally reaching for anything you can to say "tankie bad", it doesn't matter if it's anarchist or neoliberal, and I'm sure you'd have lots of fascist lies to tell me too if I had the stomach to discuss the USSR with you. You still haven't even explained about the "Manchurian communes" or the "intellectuals". I think that I generally know red scare myths better than you do, but I am not familiar with those stories.
And in some other countries it was faster. And China also demands a "demand a brutally exploited underclass.", or do you think that Capitalist systems turned to Chinese workers because they were less exploited?
Lol, it's not liberal arguments mate. I counter the same arguments from libertarians all the time. I am not saying the Chinese would be better with (non-state) Capitalism. I am saying that Maoism isn't necessarily the only way they would have progressed. The only alternative to Maoism, isn't capitalism.
So we agree, that to claim that the Chinese people would have turned necessarily worse if Mao wasn't there, is just fiction.
I think I hit a nerve. Anyway, you're clearly not agreeing that without Mao and Maoism, things would have progressed roughly the same way, so I don't know what you're whining about.
Where and when?
Remember that I am talking about Mao-era China, not post-Reform China. Under Mao, with the notable exception of the period of the Great Famine, the quality of life by every conceivable metric was improving every day on a scale not seen before in the history of the world (yes, including the USSR and company, though the USSR helped China accomplish this).
You are such a moron. You are clearly saying that they would have gotten there just fine with liberalism, because that was typically the system of the countries you are nebulously comparing it against.
It's a difficult question, because you one can trace very specific accomplishments Mao made in developing Party ideology prior to 1949, and those developments were critical to the success of the PRC. There is also the fact that we have observed that right opportunists were just waiting in the wings for him to croak and then swooped in under Deng and caused a catastrophic degree of mass-impoverishment through their forced privatization campaigns.
I think there had to be a Mao or a collective that did the work that he historically actually did prior to 49, but that even if Mao had a heart attack in like 1952, there were other competent Party members who might have filled in his role as head of state and done just fine.
It is conspicuous that you talk in an extremely nebulous way because you know nothing of the history.
That's the thing, you know nothing about Maoism because you are just equating it to "a cult of personality around Mao" instead of a historical permutation of communist ideology that was primarily authored by Mao, just as Leninism is not the worship of Lenin and Marxism is not the worship of Marx.
Without Mao-ism, though it would obviously be called something else had Mao not been the helm of it, there absolutely would be no new China. Without a clear Marxist analysis that guided the Party away from both liberalism and being a satellite of the Soviets, the PRC would not have succeeded as it did. It did not need to be written by nor named after Mao, but Mao did write it and it accordingly was named for him, so that is in large part why he gets credit for it.
The CPC was massive, it is racist of you to claim it was all one guy
Also your meme literally depicts mao as a slanty eyed Asian.
Those who did either did it on the back of the rest of the world and by plundering and colonizing billions (west and western protectorates) with China still managed to catch up with that in half a century or they just havent yet and wont in the forseeable future (most of the third world) and their progress marely amounts to the most generalized side effects of world wide medical and tech progress. China is bringing to 1.5 billion people the progress, QoL and modernity the former group achieved (and then some) without colonizing, imperializing or impovershing any other nation or people and in 1/5th of the time.No one else did that, no one else is doing that. Other than you know, the USSR (relative to era)