• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2026
  • yukonbolshie@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•If there's going to be a second wave of socialist uprisings in the world in the near future, which country do you think is going to become the first second wave people's democracy?
    6·
    6 days ago

    Properly define authoritarian before using it as a thought-terminating scare word, & you will come to the conclusion that it is simply used to conjure up stereotypical images about certain peoples & their governments.

    How do I know this? Because it is so abstract as to be meaningless without further context, & the further context makes countries like China look like fully-realised communism compared to the coloniser states.

    Contradictions & struggle increase under a socialist system; they do not evaporate overnight. It’s not easy, & every Party that has led a socialist state is extremely aware that the struggle for communism gets even harder under socialism, because socialism needs to deal with resurgent bourgeois elements, provide for healthcare, establish & defend all the peoples rights (housing, work according to personal ability, healthy food, clean water).

    Most importantly it needs to constantly try to get all the people involved in the political sphere with constant bottom-up appointments and elections for leadership and also deal with constant feedback from below and surveying/referenda. And unlike other systems, socialism involves self-criticism & the Party keeping each other honest, on the path, & meeting planning goals (or else you get Yugoslavia).

    Anti-corruption must be an even stronger priority under socialism. The Xi era is markedly better for socialism than the era starting with Deng. The CPC has already been reshuffling & getting rid of corrupt actors/aspirant bourgeoisie in the military & in civilian sectors. The remants of capital in the form of Chinese billionaires live terrified lives for a good reason, & their assets are ultimately on-condition & used to sabotage them (by appropriating & investing in all-China development instead of letting them buy political power). This would not have happened if China’s socialist revolution somehow just reverted to feudalism/early capitalism. Instead, maybe there would be a Brezhnev-like “maintenance era” of stagnation (that was a bit better than Khruschev but still bad, and did not correct the political damage done by the preceding one).

    We would not see enormous developmental progress, very high civic engagement, low crime, & imcreasing arts-&-culture exports, & potential world-leader status, nor would we see favourable trade terms with other countries & “pay when you can” loans to those ravaged by colonialism, nor would we see unwillingness to engage in shared pillage exploits (ie. military alliances formed to harass poor nations). All of the above happening at the same time is an unfathomable contradiction in a capitalist country.

    The evidence just does not show that the CPC are doing such a bad job cultivating socialism that an ultra-left civil war is necessary to course-correct for Deng. Moreover, another civil war in China is implicitly an endorsement of the imperial order, and I hope you aren’t seriously suggesting the neocolonial capitalist slaver bloc ought to go on unopposed.

  • yukonbolshie@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•Discussion: Racial Capitalism vs. Capitalism Defines Race
    11·
    1 month ago

    It is important to highlight that race as it is understood today was simply a substitution for “Christian or non-Christian (enslavable by law)”. This was done because the English realised that the conversion loophole would make their empire of capital fall apart, because it relied on slave labour. This supports the fact that “race” came into being to serve the purpose of capital accumulation, ie. to create an easily-identifiable (here by skin colour) class of people that could be exploited & oppressed with impunity, by justifying that slavery on the basis of a warped interpretation of one Bible story. The Mormons ran with it explicitly (ie. not merely as a convenient meme to socially reproduce among slavers) & Mormonism is foundationally based on black people being accused of the “Curse of Ham” which was the old rationalisation.

    All of this shows how material conditions (a capitalist empire needing a massive labour force for resource theft) led to a need to create a new law that severed black people from other people in a way that was easy to rationalise for religious bourgeois slavers. The old law that privileged the converts had to go. Then, after some time, more rationalisations were layered on in order to further dehumanise the black labourers and slaves, ignoring the reality of enslavement at gunpoint & trying to inculcate in the entire population (black and otherwise) a belief that slavery is the natural state of some people, because those people are overwhelmingly without rights in that empire. So blackness serves two functions, I think, to capital:

    1. to relieve the contradiction of perpetuating inhumanity to humans among the average people of any given “race” (bourgeois slavers do not care but need the people to also not care)
    2. to forestall widespread material analysis of “race”, which could make an entire people totally hostile to slavery & also to capitalism

    It’s very important to note that slavery was not abolished but merely saddled with a minor legal procedure of needing to incarcerate the victims first. The amendment itself is damning. And this can be linked with strong support to the prison-industrial-complex. The rationalisation for slavery is “some people are naturally criminals (to funnel people into prison labour for capital)”. Take note of capital accumulation by for-profit prisons, their owners, those with stakes in their success, & other things like that. As always, focusing on who gains & who loses makes it harder for people to distract with liberal identitarianism.

    Using this, it should be very difficult for the professor to perpetuate liberal “racialisation enforcement” in that class. I recommend the Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne as a potent theoretical weapon against racist, imperialist talking points that try to launder capitalist realism through implicit race realism. It’s a very good book & thoroughly researched.

    If you can’t find a free copy online I will try to find one for you.