chat

The essay is nothing more than a polemic in an ever-expanding pile of polemics. I think people fall into a trap of trying to find the best argued polemic when as a science, the principle criterion should be first and foremost how well the science can predict phenomena. "China is capitalist" means that you can say "a capitalist state responds to A, B, and C with X, Y, and Z, and since China is a capitalist state facing A, B, and C, it will respond with X, Y, and Z." Ditto for "China is socialist," "China is fascist," "China is authoritarian," or whatever other label you want to stick to China.

Polemics will often have arguments in the form "China responded to A, B, and C with X, Y, and Z, and since a state that responds to A, B, and C with X, Y, and Z is [adjective], China is [adjective]," but they almost always do it after the fact. It's no different from some astrologist pulling something out of their ass to explain why a relationship failed. You know, the asspull explanation would've been a lot more helpful before the relationship happened. Curious how their actual predictions seem to always either be wrong or be vague enough that they can wiggle their way out of getting called out for being wrong.

Fundamentally, people do not take the idea of the immortal science as a science seriously. The thing about science, the only reason why people even care about science in the first place, is its ability to explain and predict phenomena. Predicting phenomena is key. It's why meteorology replaced killing birds and divining predictions based on their mangled corpses or sticking sticks in the grounds and somehow predicting weather with them. The reason why people value astronomy over astrology is the science of astronomy can be used to predict solar ellipses, used to predict when the number of solar flares will go up, and so on. Meanwhile, astrology doesn't predict anything. It may offer some kind of explanation of human behavior, but it certainly can't predict how people would behave. At best, it offers explanation to explain shit after it had already happened. Virtually all polemics are of this character.

Well it criticizes PSL for not being connected to the proletariat without actually defining who constitutes that elusive class in the US, so I would be more interested in reading the author's definition of that before proceeding.

Where does the Central derive its legitimacy from? [...] Not from any connection to the proletariat, as they are professional activists leading an organization of mostly students and young people drawn from all classes.

Then you have the criticism about PSL not achieving recognition & material support from the AES states it valorizes. Sure. I think the question of whether receiving that support would even be a good thing, tactically, is pretty open for debate.