People these days know that capitalism sucks. Communism and socialism aren't the dirty words they used to be. It no longer works to try to convince people that socialism isn't good. The new propaganda strategy is to convince people that any viable form of socialism "isn't real socialism." Hence the belief in "state-capitalism." For the same reason, people now call communists "tankies" instead of commies.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
41 points (97.7% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
1008 readers
2 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
For the same reason, people now call communists “tankies” instead of commies.
Fast forward 10 years and communists parties are gonna rebrand to tankie parties. Hell, the rebranding of communism already happened twice so it's not even that /s
LET'S GO TANKISM /s
tankie parties
Aw hell naw 😭😩🤢🤮
I’m sorry but if I have to be a part of an org that calls itself that, then I’m going to become a hermit.
Bad thing = Communism. Good Thing = State-capitalism.
Very simply, they don't want to acknowledge any socialist successes, so they have to find a way to rebrand any country's success as being due to capitalism.
If you think about some other terms liberals use, it's not surprising at all, they always have the problem of confusing the tool with the wielder.
Also of course by calling socialism that, they reinforce their own ideological purity as the keepers of the "true socialism" - that's for the westolefto. As for openly antisocialist libs, they think it's a gotcha.
Communism is when the state does stuff.
Decades of lies spread against communist countries, painting them as a totalitarian surveillance state. Like, when’s the last time your vote counted? Hell, when’s the last time there was a candidate that actually represented you? I’m not even gonna start on the TLA’s.
What is TLA’s?
Three letter agencies
Projection and political illiteracy
Not not really. China's economy is currently a state monopoly capitalist one, which is a socialist market economy. State monopoly capitalism is the correct term, but liberals use it to denounce the socialist system and say "look, capitalism always wins!" without any analysis of how it works
I talked with a communist the other day, who was advertising for a communist newspaper he, I'm guessing, works for. Well he asked me if I am organised, to which I said yes and we started talking. At some point I said smth positive abt China and he was like: "uh.. So China is socialist to you?". That's when I took a deep breath and started having a discussion with him.
I stated that there are only like 24 capitalists in the bottom part of the Party, which consists of thousands of people. I also said that the government is known to support workers on strike. But he in turn argued that the Chinese gov may support strikers, but since it's "state-capitalism" they still have to bend in the direction of the companies, cuz of the profits and so on. He also said that their economy is sure to collapse soon. I just thought abt the metric shitload of videos that comes out every year claiming China's economy will collapse any second now My guy cited the fact that Evergrande, a company that according to him makes up a rly big part of their economy, filed for bankrupcy in the US or so.
Well quite frankly I was standing there, I'd say a pretty good understanding of China, but I couldn't outright refute his claims or present a compelling counterargument. So I've been looking forward to talking with any comrade abt that so that I could learn abt how to deal with this in the future, and to learn abt valid counter arguments as well.
I think political convictions aren't normally swayed by debate. You can dispute individual claims all day but beliefs are more than the sum of their parts. I mean, even if you debunk every single justification he has, that doesn't mean he'll stop believing that China is capitalist. No, he'll probably just invent new reasons instead. So rather than asking why he believes it, you should ask why the idea is compelling to him.
Part of the reason is surely because his job depends on it. But besides that, what about China does he take issue with? That they do business with the US? That their capitalist class still exists? That they're unlike western "socialists"?
"I think political convictions aren't normally swayed by debate. "
If I could tattoo that part on my brain to remind me every time I get in a dumb debate about this shit I would have a happier life I think. Great point
Fr. Sankara and Mao would've probably added a few caveats to their teachings if they had to deal with the fortified ignorance of westerners
The rationale there is that you're still using capitalist mechanics, but instead of the capital being owned by private individuals, it's in the hands of the state. However, the key difference in my view is with the respective incentives created by both approaches.
When the capital is in the hands of private individuals then they're able to use this capital for direct personal benefit. This creates incentives for exploitation of the workers by capitalists in order to get the best return on their labour. The primary goal of labour becomes producing value for capitalists with any other benefits being strictly incidental.
On the other hand, when the capital is owned by the state then nobody is directly profiting from the labour, and the only incentive is to reinvest the capital back into developing the productive forces of the country.
The one valid criticism we can make of state owned industry is in terms of labour organization where it often follows top down corporate structure. However, that is obviously not an inherent problem associated with having state run industry.
I think a good illustration of this is Jack Ma and Ant group, vs Bezos and Amazon (or corporate America in general). Both in their interactions with consumers, and with their governments.
Western governments bend over backwards to help their corporations fleece consumers. Their antitrust operations are pathetic.
Meanwhile in China, the government has helped Alipay and Wechatpay become the de-facto cash currency infrastructure because it's a quality of life improvement for people. But as soon as Ant Group started to step out of line (where being 'out of line' is not putting public interests first) the government broke it. No kid gloves, no appeasement.
Whenever I'm using Alibaba apps the ads are fucking annoying. But when the ad says 'we think you'd be interested in this' it rarely misses because its algorithms are genuinely looking to sell me things I want to buy. In the Amazon app the algorithm is looking to sell me things it wants me to buy. Same with douyin and facebook/ig promoting shit at me. Douyin is eerily accurate because it's looking for what I want to see while fb is weighing what I want to see against products and politics its sponsors & handlers want to show me.
SWCC's implementation of capitalism can look very similar to actual capitalism on the surface, but the heavy regulation and policing of the profit motive is transformative on a very fundamental level. The difference is most noticable crossing the Hong Kong-Shenzhen boundary, where the unfettered Western-liberal capitalism is still quite pronounced on the HK side. Fortunately that's changing, albeit slowly.
Looking at how capitalists are treated in China is a very good indication of what class holds power in society. This is another point a lot of people don't seem to understand about ML theory, the key goal is to ensure that working class holds power and forms the government that represents the interests of the working majority. We recognize that there will necessarily be a transition period where capitalist relations persist. Thinking otherwise is naive and leads to impractical idealism.
Never saw something like that, but it's probably because they have no idea what both of these terms mean
Because using words is hard when you don't have a clue as to what they mean.
Because they think the "capitalism" part proves it's not socialist. Every so often a Marxist term gets noticed by libs, then adopted and diluted by their surface level understanding until it becomes functionally meaningless. See also: tankies.
Did Marx use the term Tankies?
Marx through his dialectical materialism powers actually invented tanks in the 1800's.
Words are easy to use.
Books are hard to read though.