Oh, also, this will get less problematic as the hot algorithm gets adjusted. Right now every time there’s a comment on a thread, it resets decay until it’s a week old. It’s a recipe for struggle sessions to stay on the front page for days on end.
Sure. But the western bloc isn’t ginning up for a new Cold War with those nations, so hashing out our feelings on them isn’t as pertinent.
I guess we could do the DPRK, but if we start trying to do that I think you’ll start begging to go back to China.
And for some reason everyone forgets about Laos. :’(
I’ve dropped some Laos-facts in the other comment.
DPRK’s really tough, due to the information bottleneck. You’re left almost entirely with RFA and DPRK external propaganda.
Is Laos communist? They must be extremely fucking anti american after the 270 million bombs that got dropped on them.
Yeah, Laos has been happily chilling with an ML govt ever since they kicked out the monarchy, while being bombed to shit by Americans. A whole lot still die each year from the cluster bombs.
They’re pretty small and landlocked, and have a problem with people growing narcotics on the area bordering Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and you-know-where. You-know-where has been subsidising rubber purchases from that area, so as to encourage rubber cultivation to displace narcotics and for resilience against western sanctions on rubber, as has happened previously.
Laos’ goal is to become a land-linked country, with trains to all neighbouring countries. It’s doing so with investment from, again, you-know-where.
And that’s all I really know about Laos. Unfortunately, no one pays it any attention, and it often even gets left off of lists of AES.
Make a China sub, and move all general bullshit threads about China into it. If the thread is about a more specific China thing, leave it where it belongs ('China announces ban on the New York Times' - move it to news, etc.). Let those who wish to engage in endless arguments on the topic enter the China Thunderdome so the rest of us can discuss Garfield dicks in peace.
As a Chinese diaspora, I agree. Let's move all the annoying af bait discussions into a specific community. It's tiring. I left reddit so I can avoid cringe discussions on China by westerners, I don't really want to see more on c/main.
Edit: just so you upvoters know, I'm mostly "china good"
it still has to obey the laws of capital and wherever the god of capital demands blood sacrifice, you must pay for it in order to stay in the game
Seek truth from facts.
China uses the profit motive and production for exchange value where doing so is beneficial. You can think of it like running the economy on autopilot. That means that, yes, the society has not abolished the wage form. But when it needs to, the needs of the people consistently trump the needs of capital.
The best example is the full societal mobilisation against coronavirus, on a scale that no other nation could do.
You also can’t underestimate the significance of all major banks being state owned, with funding allocated to state owned entities on a social, not profitable, basis.
I think the idea is to develop through capitalism in a controlled way. I don't think anyone says that china isn't susceptible to the contradictions of capitalism.
Also, isn't the orthodox ML position that socialism develops out of capitalism?
If anything, that would make Mao the one that wasn't an orthodox ML by trying to skip capitalism with his hair brained great leap forward.
So Lenin thought a peasant society is capable of developing socialism? News to me.
The Chinese dont have the luxury of hoping for a socialist revolution in the west. The west is probably further from than from that now than they were in the early 20th century.
The development of the productive forces of society under the careful watch of a Marxist vanguard party certainly seems pretty ML to me.
Maybe it's all a conspiracy and they are secretly trying to develop along the lines of the United States to stagnate development for the benefit of bourgeoise elites. I don't have a crystal ball though so I don't know what their secret agenda is.
So what's your point? It's impossible to develop socialism from capitalism? Should they go for a lord/serf or master slave dialectic? Do those dialectics miss? Mao tried going straight to socialism and it was a massive disaster. Should they try that again and maybe kill a few more million people?
Seems to me what you are suggesting is that we live in a rigidly deterministic universe where intentionally trying to direct the development of capitalism is impossible.
How many threads are you going to essentially copy paste this in? I though it looked familiar and then you started talking about exploiting traditional family structure in some weird Orientalist way and yep here we are again.
Want to echo the suggestion below for a PRC community. I live for the constant China struggle sesh, but I could understand people wanting to have a bit of distance from it.
Honest question, what's with the yanks tendency to go completly overboard online? This whole China thing feels like /r/atheism euphoria, being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian is getting tiring.
Even if the CCP is doing 70% good, the 30% of oligarchy/corruption/imperialism/only-keeping-the-communism-decorum-while-keeping-workers-rights-down-and-doing-crony-capitalism deserves flak.
China ain't good, the US ain't good, Ba'athism is the only correct take.
Could someone point me towards some sources on how the DPRK, Vietnam and Laos are communist and/or democracies? I have some on China already, but I need to expand my knowledge
They’re not communist—they’re governed by a communist party, and are in various stages of socialist construction.
Their democratic mechanisms differ, and I can’t give a comprehensive explanation of each. To my knowledge, Vietnam’s is the most similar to the west, with a nationwide vote for local representatives in the CPV.
Personally, for me, the important thing for democracy is whether the Government is competently addressing the key concerns and desires of the people.
For the DPRK, the primary contradiction is their people being cleaved in two, and the threat of US imperialism, so the focus is heavily on military prowess, similar to the USSR’s approach pre-WWII.
For Laos, the primary contradiction is that they’re a landlocked country, so the focus is on developing rail links.
For Vietnam, the primary contradiction is being underdeveloped, so they’re following a similar route as China, taking western capital. They’re soon going to face the same issues that China did under Hu Jintao and Xi Jingping, being risk of bourgeois corruption, so we’ll see how they handle that.
