I mean… I kinda get it, but nowadays it’s starting to get absurd.
(EDIT: This was supposed to be a “blow air out my nose and get on with my life” meme…)
I mean… I kinda get it, but nowadays it’s starting to get absurd.
(EDIT: This was supposed to be a “blow air out my nose and get on with my life” meme…)
China has become a psudo Capitalist country in its quest for world domination.
Capitalism goes hand in hand with right wing extremism
I think China would have to do a lot more for the avg person before they could be considered socialist or communist again
Socialism isn’t when the government does stuff for the people, it’s when the people take matters into their own hands and do stuff for the good of each other. Even if a state behaves in the most benevolent way possible, it is not socialist unless the workers have collective ownership of the means of production.
By that definition there are no socialist countries.
When people talk about socialism in the real world it doesn’t mean owning the means of production
Only because the very concepts of ownership and the collective-individual dichotomy are necessarily vague and subjective. China considers themselves socialist because they equivocate the people with the state. If the people are collectively represented by the state and the state owns (some of) the means of production, then at least transitively the people own (some of) the means of production.
As an anarchist I don’t believe the state adequately represents the interests of the people, nor do I think it could even if it were radically democratic and egalitarian, though I would still certainly prefer that to the existing status quo. Somewhere a line must be drawn arbitrarily and I prefer to draw it on the other side of authoritarian state control.
Isn’t that kinda the line between socialism and communism? That communism has no state, but that a socialist state can act as a sort of intermediary.
Not that it’s the only socialist model, mind you; a market economy composed entirely of individual private worker co-ops is another model, for example. Then there’s the issue of implementation, whether the people actually democratically control the government.
But ideologically, while not communist, I don’t see how that structure can’t be considered socialist.
It’s not that it can’t be, I just personally don’t consider a state socialist unless it is a functioning democracy that enacts what is at least an approximation of the will of the workers. It becomes obvious this is not the case when a state is hostile towards workers who attempt to organize.
Within the last five years China completely eliminated the worst category of poverty in their borders. I’d say they are currently actively engaged in doing a lot more for the average person than most countries.
You could say the same about every developed nation. It took a bit more for most nations, but these nations had to literally invent concepts like public health and education, welfare and even socialism.
But yeah, every western European country has already eliminated the worst kind of poverty and on average European citizens are better off than Chinese citizens. Working conditions, working hours and safety laws in Europe are much better than the Chinese average.
The US is doing its own thing with extreme capitalism, and I’m against that, but let’s not kid ourselves, China has taken a lot of pages from the US’s economic model
“Developed nation” is a propaganda term designed to make you think that the overexploited nations of the world are on some mythical path that will lead them to a first world quality of life.
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Europe is the beneficiary of hundreds of years of imperialism and accumulation and the ongoing system of global unequal exchange, whereas China is a former victim of said imperialism that has pulled themselves out of the muck with their own workers’ labor. China is better off compared to India, which achieved independence not long afterward but has fallen far behind in every single development index because of their failure to overthrow capital.
European workers didn’t get their rights from being imperialist, they fought hard against the imperialist elites to get where they are now, and China’s elites are being just as imperialist today as any European or American elite has been since forever.
China and India is apples to oranges. There are a myriad of reasons why their paths diverged. There are other East Asian countries that did better than China way before China, while starting from a much more similar point (or even a worse point).
If you can take the Chinese Government for their word. Which I can’t
Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience
Do you take the Chinese citizens at theirs?
Very few governments on this planet have approval numbers this good, and even fewer have numbers this good when it’s a neutral third party conducting the surveys.
I’m sorry but a dictator for life is a dealbreaker.
I’ll admit that a truly dedicated and benevolent dictator could run a good society, there are a few examples in the past too.
But it’s going to collapse once daddy dies like every dictatorship.
What makes you think Xi is a dictator? If your answer is “because that’s the vibe I get from American Government propaganda”, then you should reassess the things you think you know about the world. The truth is that China has a very vibrant and active democracy that is much more responsive to the demands of its people than that of most other nations, and Xi is merely the one currently at the top of that democratic system.