Chapotraphouse

I've been reading the comments and damn, what kind of a mess of an org are you in? Total fucking hodgepodge of incoherent ideologizing.

Not that I think telling a group of 9 European socialists "read these 2 books" would help here, but a while back I decided to read Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer because I had so many questions about how China could rely on a market economy for decades and remain a socialist project, or else how they could maintain the trajectories they've maintained without being a socialist project, and I was sick of getting longwinded non-answers from sources outside China. It not only answered all of my questions except for their international strategy (which could be read clearly between the lines imo, in light of their sovereignty-focused foreign policy), but it also expanded my understanding of dialectics.

Then Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill came out, providing a materialist analysis of the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption in the context of a global war waged by the US-led West against communism. It gives concrete examples of how psychological war accompanies material war, and how the US in particular has relied on psychological war to an outstanding degree since its founding as a settler-colonial oligarchy which took exceptional measures against democracy while advancing a narrative that it is exceptionally democratic. It traces that line through to the US framing its imperialist campaign against self-determination as protecting the world's freedom from imperial domination.

That background and more is used to firmly plant the feet of the book's focus on a material base, oriented directly against the idealism of "anti-anti-imperialist" Western Marxist traditions. It goes on to extensively detail the organizational and funding structures of the clandestine bourgeois/state campaign to ideologically "turn the world upside down", including monopolizing Marxist discourse in the West and beyond with myriad pseudomarxist positions that all happen to Freely agree that the only thing worse than capitalism is actually-existing socialism.

In the context of that global campaign, I feel much more certain about what I initially thought I could read between the lines of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: that a main pillar of China's international strategy is to use material means to turn the world right-side up. No matter how certain I am that the values produced by capitalism are misanthropic, and that the floor of economic security matters infinitely more than the ceiling of excessive consumption, that certainty exists in the material vacuum of abstract philosophy. Capitalist values, on the other hand, have been projected onto the world with the full material force of global hegemony, such that they have been made tactically important to the strategic goal of building socialism. It is not enough to act on sound principles; those principles must constantly be dialectically applied to the conditions of an interconnected and everchanging world.

It's not simply that China is "better than us at capitalism," as I often hear. Instead, China is demonstrating that socialism is more capable than capitalism of fulfilling even the warped values imposed on the world by capitalists. Of course material security for everyone remains of the utmost importance, but China has never abandoned that. In fact, it's the core of their model for human rights - a model they've been incomparably more honest, consistent, and successful in enacting than the West has with its abstract model. I used to wonder how China could focus on building something instead of fighting fires as the world burned, but now I see they were building a firebreak.

Just make this argument:

1. China is by most metrics better than India.

2. China shares many characteristics with India (large Asian country that was victimized by Western imperialism)

3. 2 means that whatever minor difference between the two countries can explain 1.

Then the question becomes what singular difference between the two country causes one country to have achieved so much while another country continues to struggle. It boils down to either their economic system or their culture.

Arguing that China is capitalist means that it's the culture that makes the real difference since India is also capitalist. Chinese capitalists are apparently big-brained heirs of a 5000 year old civilization while Indian capitalists are pea-brained cow worshipers.

Either the Chinese economic system is supreme versus the Indian economic system or the Chinese people themselves are supreme versus Indian people. I am not a loser Han chauvinist, so I would make the argument that it is the economic system (ie socialism) that makes the difference.

My response to "China isn't socialist" is just "then I guess I like what they're doing more." I only give a shit about socialism because I tend to think it could make life better, but if something else is doing that instead, I'm choosing whatever that is. When these types are mad at us, they call us pejoratives like "dogmatic", but we're the ones picking movements for what they've actually done, rather than some sort of brand recognition or ideological purity.

Basically, the chauvinist left's whole angle amounts to "that's not real socialism, real socialism is when you suck ass and fail without actually helping anybody or improving anything."

I guess real socialism is like liberalism, but even more whiny and even less effectual.

China's improving material conditions will do the heavy lifting for us. Life in the West will continue to get worse, life in China will continue to get better, and eventually people will shift their positions to align with that new material reality.

Ironically, politically disengaged Westerners might be easier to convince than Western """socialists""" because they're not as ideological.

I always default to "capitalism requires the capitalists to be the ones in charge, if they're not in charge and the working class party is repressing them then it's clearly a socialist transitionary state, whatever measures they are taking to succeed and survive during that transition are a product of the conditions that exist".

Socialism begins at the revolution creating a dotp and does not end until that dotp ends. Everything from the moment of its creation is transitionary socialism, whether they're implementing markets or other measures is all part of surviving the existing global conditions during that transition.

If they won't even accept Cuba is socialist then to these people there is literally no socialism anywhere in the world. It is the easiest socialist state to support.

The student org I had considered joining were pro-ukraine. I tried explaining euromaidan and one member accused me of being a pro Putin shill and linked me to their newspaper article written in February 2022 (incredible).

The kicker was when that same member said all countries are imperialist except North Korea and Cuba. They stopped responding to me after I stated that the DPRK directly aided Russia and is in full support of the SMO.

Trotskyism cannot even be called derivative of Marxism.

Average western left org tbh

This is infuriating

Typical tripe from those who have no idea how to actually build and maintain a real political movement, instead simply using their ideology to build up their own superiority and ego. Literally liberalism.

Trotskyism is a disease

Questions based on static definitions (is X of type Y) are undialectical and a waste of time. Ultraleftists and western Marxists don’t understand dialectics and that’s why they suck at applying Marxism.

Check out this 1864 draft of Capital. Marx ponders two categories, the commodity and money, not as fixed things but as a dynamical objects which emerged in undeveloped forms and underwent a series of evolutions before they acquired all of the features capital required of them. Marx explicitly acknowledges money as a category predating capitalism. He traces how capital appropriated both commodities and money and made them into something new, just as capitalism took labor power — an obviously precapitalist category — and created out of it the proletarian working class which we have today. Nowhere in this excerpt does Marx ask such inane questions as “is this a commodity?”