User:RD/9k/The East Is Still Red (Q618)
Main entry
- The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century [1] (Martinez 2023)
Motifs or claims (book reviews)
- When capital has risen above political authority you have a capitalist country (Martinez) [2] -> god this is a double-edged sword. in the Soviet Union this was actually kind of true, because a few capitalists could exist and at any given moment it was possible to restore Bolshevism per-se. but in China it isn't necessarily true because (admittedly much like the Soviet Union) the country is so big it could be not-capitalism and yet have capitalisms inside it. and the capitalisms inside it are capitalism. Marx says that sociophilosophies start at a mode of production so functionally China is actually this weird federation of multiple Chinas containing different sociophilosophies and some of the smaller Chinas are capitalist 'countries'. it's like how you can divide the United States into 50 capitalisms if you want to and say Hawaii is a capitalism and Texas is a capitalism, but perhaps try to claim that because you live in a hypothetical world where California, Nevada, and Arizona consist only of state businesses that the United States is socialist because California looks great right now, so it doesn't matter what Texas looks like. in reality, having a Texas full of capitalists would threaten to break the 'USS' into two countries just like in the United States Civil War, and 10 countries that are all still capitalist could team up with Texas to try to take the rest of the states back just like in West Germany. every capitalist is a potential threat to national borders. every single one. even the blue anarchists, and the orange anarchists that change countries on a whim because they don't like the current "culture". anarchists are capitalists by another name. they'll hate it when you say that. but every one of them that mentions "small businesses" deserves it. only the section of charcoal anarchists that genuinely want to burn down capitalism to build a tribal society might be exempt.
Cuba was socialism, so China is
/ Fidel Castro said that China and Vietnam were socialist countries in 1993, so they must be post-capitalist countries in an era of socialism; this is not to imply that Castro's word determines what socialism is; this is to imply that Castro was a Deng Xiaoping follower in 1993, but that he contributed to creating a socialist country anyway — because Cuba "was socialism", China is socialism [3] [4]- Only when the foundational principles of socialism are abandoned our system would no longer be socialist (Xi Jinping) [5] / Departing from or abandoning Marxism, the party would lose its soul and direction ... we should not waver under any circumstances (Xi Jinping; The Governance of China) / (9k) -> principles? when I listen to this Dengist video enough times that word "principles" really stands out, like it's implying that Deng Xiaoping Thought is partially Idealist or something, and they're using Idealism to decide when there is socialism and when there isn't.
if this is true it makes that channel by professor Feng make a lot more sense because man, every video on there is just full of weird abstract lists of things. you get the impression from him that the CPC really loves lists of 3, 4, or 5 oddly-specific things which in terms of political policy are unfortunately still nowhere near specific enough.
are there uniquely Dengist truth values? are there truth values used by Deng Xiaoping followers that they commonly use to decide whether something is 'not abandoning socialism'? this would certainly sound like it. I'm just not sure what the biggest ones have been. I guess you could use the 'capital above government' thing as one of them. - Dengist truth value / keeps capital below government (generic)
Motifs or claims
Material wealth is socialism
/ Because any Marxist state can only exit the era of socialism (Bolshevism per se) after A) having no exploitation of man by man and B) having great material abundance, any work done to simultaneously create great material wealth and create all the elements of the greater mono-structure that is the culmination of Bolshevism is in fact progress through the era of socialism (Deng Xiaoping 1985)- dialectical relation between ownership and the liberation of the productive forces (Boer) -> this... is this actually a materialist dialectic? it doesn't feel like it. they say "ownership" like it's one thing and then equivocate between two totally different kinds of ownership, and then they don't define "liberation", or really, they don't define "productive forces" either. what am I looking at? I swear I know what productive forces are better than Boer does.
it only gets worse when he says, 'in the Western context, people focus on common ownership of the means of production'. that just sounds weirdly like what he's really saying is, 'in the West, people focus on dictatorship of the proletariat, but they just don't understand'. - China made companies build entire supply chains instead of half of one per country; this is to imply that China's policies create proportionally more proletarians in each round of growth, and prevent the otherwise prevalent practice of capitalists from splitting class contradictions across multiple countries / In order to begin outsourcing to China, companies were required to transfer designs and build spare part factories before they built factories for whole vehicles
- Marx and Engels demonstrated that the state is not an impartial body sitting above society and operating for the common good -> okay but, isn't your book kind of showing that they were wrong about that? "an impartial body sitting above society operating for the common good" is a much better description of the CPC than, for instance, "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". it has skilled workers in it and now apparently their capitalist allies. it's something of an 'all-people's party'. so how is it an organ of class rule?
"it represents China's advanced productive forces ..." — which, in general, include laborers and peasants, and now producers of academic theory. among the latter, it's very easy for people to start churning out stuff that's useless and disconnected from reality. not just in Existentialist circles but even in the sciences you get a bunch of questionable hypotheses so badly constructed they become unfalsifiable. a productive force, in concept, creates something which is used by the larger society or has the power to create something which is needed. but there are at least two things which separate productive forces in a workers' state from an owning class: the ability to accurately observe reality that results from being close to or right on top of the inputs into production, and the ability to produce something each day which is worth paying a wage that thus connects someone into a production structure. you can begin to identify people who are dubiously the proletariat when they either churn out a bunch oftheory totally detached from reality Rothenberg-style, or they work and work on something whose ability to be sold for an exchange value implying use value is in question. in the United States academia has basically not been a productive force any more for the past 10+ years; the professors are not producing workers and the researchers are often 'producing' papers that just get sold to big paper collectors (Elsevier) and never actually seen by anyone else, as opposed to, say, filling up libraries or bookstores, or some other form of publicly-available abundance where the public will be paying back into the productive force by individuals or retail stores buying the products. everything Marx and Lenin say implies that society is gradually supposed to transition out of career academia because it will have found all the important things it needed to that will be applied to build industries and then day-to-day labor for money would just be done elsewhere by unskilled workers that require less training and aren't glued to specific specialized careers. that was a tangent. anyway, I have a suspicion that the CPC doesn't know how to tell what things are actually productive forces and what things are tiny businesses and may just be taking in the kind of people who are tiny businesses that flail and flail trying to produce something but aren't efficient yet. - The fundamental defining characteristic of socialist society is not the percentage of private ownership but the rule of the working class over other classes -> that is. actually correct, technically. but it's missing something. it's missing the recognition that the dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to come from a crimson Social-Philosophical System that is primarily composed of crimson elements; the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie exists because the whole national area is actually covered in connected chunks of bourgeoisie, and it's supposed to work the same way with the proletariat. you know, Trotsky almost understood this — he'd say 'restore the soviets', and practically what that phrase should mean is there are crimson elements in every town and they rule through the soviets. having even one factory that has an owner — each owner counts as some 10-100 people or more in terms of power — is an unnecessary challenge to that overall process of creating crimson chunks (factories, soviets, etc) that determine themselves and link into solely-crimson structures and then send advanced workers to the central party. your worker power will be weak in practice if the country is primarily composed of whole corporations rather than chunks of workers. the CPC will have the ability to move corporations around as it likes but the corporations will still rule over the workers rather than the workers being in charge of them; the CPC is functionally doing the job of the bourgeoisie in this system with only slight changes to that concept such as the country not being sectioned into hostile parties or tiny hostile chunks that constantly try to get rid of each other. calling it 'state capitalism, dictatorship of' is a weak complaint because state businesses don't really mean the workers aren't in charge. but pointing out that the workers aren't in charge does mean that.
Non-unique motifs or claims
primary stage of socialism
(Deng Xiaoping Thought) / primary phase of socialism [6] [7]list of oddly-specific ideals
/ Communist-party-approved listicle -> this really needs to be examined. as much as most of the Ideals the CPC puts out are a lot better than the ones that come out of Liberal-republican authors, I think this may be a serious warning sign of Idealism.
Related
- Fidel Castro turned against China for forsaking the Soviet Union for the U.S. [8] -> this article makes it sound like the Sino-Soviet split had very little to do with theoretical problems and it was more like a greater split in what spatially unique populations were joined together at what moment. though, part of that appearance is going to come from Liberal-republican countries natural bias toward post-structuralist analysis of everything. the second possible implication here is that Castro didn't actually approve of China as much as this book thinks he did and it may have taken him out of context.
The Governance of China
/ (9k)
Ideologies or fields
- DX / Deng Xiaoping Thought