ComradeRat

India

Yeah I misread, thanks for pointing it out. I agree that would be bad, but I'm unsure how plausible that situation would be. From what ive read about the period (stuff like Vogels book on Deng), China's labour force was much more attractive to the wests than india (the main things i see mentioned are education, sociopolitical stability and infrastructure), so they wouldnt be able to rely on india in the same way they did china

imperialist pyramid

I appreciate you explaining, but I have heard similar explainations before and still fail to understand how it is different from the core-periphery model. In the former, congo is at the bottom of the imperialist pyramid, in the latter its in the periphery—in both cases its understood as being on the recieving end of imperialism (i.e. capital exported to them etc) as part of the imperialist world-system. Same thing with semipheriphery vs middle of the imperialist pyramid; in both cases its countries that both export capital and have capital exported to them.

It all feels very much like a semantics debate more than any disagreement over reality to me

Millions of excess deaths from what?? Like genuinely baffled, what do you think would cause millions of excess deaths if China held course instead of changing tack? They would be in a better position than either Iran or Cuba, considering chinas supplies of natural resources. Cuba and Iran are both doing pretty damn well, especially considering the sieges both have developed under.

it would have been pushed onto the likes of India

Imo (as I've said elsewhere in the barrage of replies, sorry if i already said it to you) given the dictatorship of the bourgeois and what i've read about mao era china and the transition to markets (stuff like "From Commune to Capitalism" and "The Battle for China's Past") they'd end up more like Cuba than India if they'd held course

their criticisms were sterile and negative stemming from poor analysis

This disagreement is more semantics than substantial, but i'd call that a "poor analysis" and explain what the problems are rather than calling it "ultraleftist" and moving on

imperialist pyramid

unrelated to anything else, but i'm in an org that subscribes to the kke's imperialist pyramid thingy and i still don't understand what the difference is between it and imperial core / periphery lol

Starting from the premise "i'd feel sad if there were no socialist projects" and reasoning backwards from there to declare that XYZ country must be socialist or "there would be no socialist countries [and this would make me sad and defeatist]" is dogshit reasoning, regardless of one's opinion on past and present socialist projects.

as you can see, i was criticising the "if we aren't winning I give up" logic here, not whether any socialist project is socialist or not

I think your second paragraph us very good criticism, thanks for it. In particular i had no idea about irans missiles.

To answer the first paragraph I think without China's supply of labour and resources imperialism probably wouldnt have been able to rebound like it did in the 80s and 90s

Re: ultraleftism, thats an issue of tactics not analysis. Ultraleftism is when you go around campaigning and shouting about how bad china is, helping NATO drive towards their war against China. Ultraleftism is not when you criticise china to other comrades.

Re: sinosoviet split, i dont "blame" china for splitting with the ussr, i "blame" them for joining ranks with the western imperialists against the ussr. I agree with most of chinas criticisms of the ussr (e.g.,revisionism, hegemonism and cancelling economic programmes); i dont think this justified throwing in with the western imperialists

The USSR was working tho. It started suffering economic problems because it moved away from the Stalin-era model. It did so according to Molotov (Molotov Remembers, interviews from the 70s and 80s with him) in large part because of the failure of the partys leadership (including himself at the time) to understand the importance of this struggle against the commodities. The combination of economic issues and lack of a theoretical basis for proactive leadership by the party is what caused the ussr to fall, not

China was also working fine before Deng's economic reforms (much less the more drastic ones under Jiang or Hu). China's economy was growing, the people were educated and increasingly politicised. If China had stayed on its path, it might look something like Cuba or Iran today (i.e. a revolutionary state under siege) it wouldnt have just evaporated from existence for lack of american capital or engineers.

And Cuba still exists today and has made more progress towards overcome the urban-rural divide, healing the ecosystems and abolishing commodities than any other project. Idk why youre acting like it has failed, and like if it failed it would be for any reason at this point besides the imperialist encirclement—they have done literally everything right.

But even if Cuba were invaded and the revolution crushed or if Xi announced tomorrow that China is abandoning marxism this wouldnt be cause to give up. We dont have the luxury of giving up because the market rules the world and will kill us all if its not stopped. We cant just move the goalposts from abolish exploitation to reduce exploitation.

A project failing means you figure out what went wrong and try again, not give up and go home. Marx didnt give up in '49 when the streets of paris ran with workers blood. He didnt shrug his shoulders and give up when the commune was crushed in '71. He analysed those failures for lessons to use in the future. Lenin read those analyses. He didnt surrender when the revolution of 1905 was stamped out. Mao didn't cry it was impossible when the kmt turned on the cpc. They used those failures to figure out how to reach the goal, which, unless we are not both communists, is to end the rule of markets over the world, not just to provide bandaid solutions that will be removed when the rate of profit falls too far).

The point isnt to be a matyr, it is to have a full understanding of what the problem is, how to fix it, and not to give up and move the goalposts from "end exploitation" to "make wage-labourers slightly less exploited"

My view is theyve failed less as a result of fundamental failures of the "AES model" and more as a result them moving away from that model after the 50s and 60s, and (in the case of the USSR particularly) ideological and theoretical failures of the party's leadership resulting in them providing little to no proactive leadership. This last point (ideological and theoretical errors of leadership, including himself when he was stalins right hand man) is talked about a lot by Molotov in Molotov Remembers.

[1] tho tbh this is vague; the USSR and the other Warsaw Pact countries had very different models, and their individual policies varied a lot over time, but i'm assuming by that you mean "state control", correct me if i've inferred wrongly

To be clear, are you saying that communism (as defined by marx, i.e. the abolition of markets and commodities) is impossible so we can only struggle to improve living conditions in societies dominated by commodity production, or am I misreading you?

What made Marxism so important isnt that it thought up ways to improve the conditions of the poor, many utopians have done that. What Marxism did is show, with evidence and painstaking scientific investigation, that unless the capitalist mode of production—commodities, markets, the laws of value—are abolished any improvements in the conditions of the poor will be temporary because the laws of capitalist production will re-assert themselves unless its germ, the commodity form, is fully eradicated from the globe. Anything else is just social democratic reformism that moves the chairs around on a sinking ship

Some people are fine with fighting for communism, even if we havent succeeded so far. Not everyone falls to despair and defeatism if they arent currently winning. Starting from the premise "i'd feel sad if there were no socialist projects" and reasoning backwards from there to declare that XYZ country must be socialist or "there would be no socialist countries [and this would make me sad and defeatist]" is dogshit reasoning, regardless of one's opinion on past and present socialist projects. Marxism is a science, and that means rigorous definitions and analysis, not changing definitions to make ourselves feel better.

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