https://twitter.com/calebmaupin/status/1344166951401254912
It turns out you can just have a thought and inflict it on thousands of strangers without anyone stopping you.
Billionaires: totally cool and good so long as they are Chinese.
You really think the CCP is gonna toss aside global capitalism once they control it? Your faith in Xi and the boys is much stronger than mine.
Eh, I’m in the fence about China overall but I’m not sure I’m totally convinced by the “they’re defo commies cuz if they weren’t they’d just call themselves liberals cuz it’s easier”.
There’s explanations why they’d remain a one party state even if they are no longer genuine in their pursuit of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
1 to claim the legacies of Mao and other communist leaders.
2 being a liberal state would probably require capitulation to other liberal states. China wants to be independent from the west and having a strong military means they have to take an antagonistic stance towards the west.
3 they want to development a PMC (would will also help with point 2). If they embraced western liberal capitalism they’d be expected to keep their working based poor and undereducated. Having a strong centralized state to direct capital production is good for building a middle class.
This would still make them the imperial west’s enemies which I guess is still good but then they’d be doing so under a nationalistic desire to be their own strong capital economy.
I'm sorry but I would not say that is textbook Marxism at all. Nowhere does Marx endorse doing that in a sort of stagist progression that in the end makes private ownership defunct. The relations of production are also not something that can be advanced, they are just descriptive of the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. We should not mix up quantitative gains in productive capacity or living conditions with social relations of production.
No, that particular sort of Two-Stage Marx is one of the most pervasive misreading's. Though Marx and Engels clearly argue that the tech advances necessary for socialism is provided by Capitalism, and the destroyers of the capitalist class is the working class born from the development of capital, there is no two stage formula about highly developing capital in some controlled way. Check out Radhika Desai's work on how Marx's purpose was not to make a stagist argument. I have a recording of talk she did, not sure if the link is still active but I can DM it.
Also what you describe is not the "withering away" of the state. Beyond dealing with whether Lenin's argument is correct (I would partially challenge that it is, it's mixing up Marx's lower stage of communism with some other stuff), and whether Engels coining of the term in the Anti-Duhring is coherent with Marx, what China is doing is definitely not that. I would argue the wage form and the market, private property, the army, the bureaucracy are decidedly already abolished with the establishment of the DotP if we take Marx's position. I mean Marx is very clear in his writing on the commune that the binding of government to capital must be completely severed for there to be a DotP and for the state (at which point the govt is no longer really the state) to go away. I mean Marx says that self government of the workers would be nothing but "a sham and a snare" if the the workshops did not or were not able abolish the market and freely democratically decide production among themselves.
Also one last note on the objective factors argument from earlier, there's a very good quote from Marx's Inferno that deals with it well and so I'll post it here: "The material conditions of socialism are not the objective factors of industrial technology ... but the proletariat’s felt need for large-scale, cooperative production, coordinated on a national or global scale. This can only be a felt need when capitalist development has broken down the laborers’ reserve of individual skills, so as to make their material interdependence obvious and robust, and when the power of the capitalist state has developed to the point where the futility of worker separatism has become equally obvious. Both of these developments have an objective, technological component. Industrial technology helps to realize the first condition; military and bureaucratic technology help to realize the second. But what makes these conditions material to the foundation of socialism is their apprehension by the laboring classes. The material conditions of socialism are the conditions that matter for its feasibility, and these are, for Marx, primarily the motivational—hence “subjective”—conditions of the mass of laborers. Insofar as these motivational conditions have objective, technological preconditions, the link between the two is not so problematic as in Cohen’s construal. Cohen’s subjective conditions are moral and other-regarding, whereas Marx’s are prudential, and, while there is no reason to think that the level of industrial development has any straightforward repercussions for people’s moral commitments, it would be very odd not to think that the level of industrial development has direct and specifiable repercussions for people’s prudential strategies."
Developing the felt need for cooperation is what births socialism, not developing capitalism in any controlled manner or the state improving working conditions (though this is obviously a good thing), and any attempt to do so on the basis that that develops socialism misses the point. For example the independent outbursts of labor struggle in China we see that the state suppress is in fact the very thing that needs to be developed.
I am of the opinion that the DotP is not the state in referring to the institutions that Marx says make up the state towards the end of his life. It is a state of affairs and political organization, but not "the state".
Also I am referring principally to documents Marx wrote late in his life, at which point he has stopped using terms as they meant in the manifesto. The manifesto is too particular to the 1848 revolution. I mean Marx absolutely does support centralization of production in the hands of the proletariat but that's not centralization under the state as he writes later in his life. I do not think that passage contradicts anything I said. I mean the goal of the manifesto is not about what constitutes and establishes socialism. That passage and the 10 planks that are given directly beneath it are demands for society that could be bettered in his time period under capitalism. They aren't well developed. I mean that section specifically is called out in the 1872 preface as the one that needs significant rewrites.
If they exist within a state that regularly expropriated and executed them, then they are cool. I don’t know about “good” but perhaps necessary, that’s a call for Chinese Marxists
so billionaires are cool, as long as we kill them, and don't call for their abolition, and this is meant as a serious, non-meme, non-contradictory claim about marxism and how it ought to be practiced....
look, i'm not saying you're flimflamming, but do you see how someone could read this and think "hm, seems a bit post hoc"?
You are aware that Marx, Lenin and every serious Marxist stated that early socialism is a development out of capitalism and will resemble capitalism for the most part right? With the major difference being the dictatorship of the proletariat and movement towards socialism?
The common ultra mistake is believing that currency and markets will be abolished overnight after the revolution.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
BOOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRRRger king.
i see people say this sometimes about him, but what does that refer to?
He's not a Nazbol (nobody is, anybody calling themselves that are either 50 year old Russian punk rock guys or Nazis), but he spoke with Alexander Dugin at a conference against Imperialism or something.
While the nazbol party is technically illegal, their eurasian mysticism and Russian nationalism, and homophobia is present in several adjacent legal parties.
What part of socialism says that billionaires are good and necessary for the transition to communism? Because I must have skipped that book.
I critically support China, but the existence of billionaires is a constant existential threat to the working class character of the cpc and the Chinese state and any "socialist" who says otherwise is full of shit.
Figures. There is room for criticism in all things. Except for Uncle Joe's poetry. I will hear no criticism of those.
This isn't synonymous with the dotp, and it's only necessary to maintain capitalist relations of production like this when the productive forces are too underdeveloped to switch immediately to fully or at least primarily socialist relations of production (some form of planned economy which produces goods directly according to social need). Situations like China, Vietnam, and the USSR during the NEP are examples of this. The dotp is just any state in which the working class is the ruling class and wields state power in their interests.
dictatorship of the proletariat is when the means of production are mostly owned by the bourgeoisie
big brain takes on my chapo?
control of the means of production via the state. the state being controlled by the proletariat.
you can say that in practice the proletariat has to make concessions to the bourgeoisie during some period but having the mops being mostly owned by the bourgeois is not a feature of the dictatorship of the proletariat. the whole point is to shift to workers owning the mops (via the state) and control the state to prevent counterrevolution.
ok so we are mostly mental wanking by now but defining the dotp as a period where the mops are mostly owned by the bourgeoisie seems a bit ass backwrds.
also, even if you have literally nationalised and collectivised all the mops (all the big, beautiful mops, folks) the bourgeoisie may technically not exist anymore but they won't happily accept the new status quo, which is why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary to protect the collectivisation. so in my view the dictatorship of the proletariat would still exist after the bourgeoisie/proletariat are technically no more.
I mean this sort of happened in communist revolutions, at least in China, but not with billionaires or their equivalents.
This is what I call the "megabrain" take
-7DeadlyFetishes
With brains this large, I wonder how the Earth hasn't collapsed into a singularity yet
Caleb Maupin is a fucking skid mark. He’s echoed this anti-anti-billionaire sentiment in his videos multiple times.
Worded like this, he is wrong, but from the sentiment in this thread there is something to it that people miss. From a position of having billionaires, capping their wealth is anti-marxist. it is idealism, the ideal that limiting their wealth is better for morale or something? The marxist move from a position of having billionaires, is to ask what happens if the wealth is capped. immediate capital flight, credit derating, currency collapse. the marxist road here, which i suspect the cpc is on to, is to inact much harder progressive taxation when the structure of the economy makes this cost beneficiary. right now, the structure is too centered on fdi attractibility in manufacturing.
as china moves to financialization and moves manufacturing overseas, this wealth shift is much easier to do, as they will be the ones possessing the relevant capital. if you guys as good baby communist took charge and capped wealth below the billion, you would see a financial collapse and secessionism in the regions with imperialist footholds and interest. the objection to this analysis is that you could say the marxist would never be in that position, so modern china cannot be marxist. but i would say this is from a place of disengagement with the dengist theory. So we dont criticize china for the idealist idocity of having billionaires, we continue to sift in the bipolar contradictions between lamenting the marketization shift/counterrevelution and the fact that what they do now is fucking working well..
The goal of a socialist nation isn’t to become the financial centre of the world and outsource manufacturing. That’s literally just late stage capitalism.
Attracting FDI was necessary for rapid development of the productive forces, but the key thing is keeping that capital under the Party’s control. So limiting it to JVs with state entities, embedding party members inside companies, etc.
Another big thing is capital controls. Allow capital to come in, but not leave. That insulates the nation from market fluctuations, and also prevents capital strike. Similarly, the currency is stabilised.
The goal isn’t deindustrialisation. The goal’s full automation of productive forces.
The problem with billionaires in this stage is that they represent a political threat. They can potentially exert control over their capital in such a way that’s not beneficial to society, such as through outsourcing overseas, or creating an opioid epidemic.
They also represent potential misallocation of resources, such as to real estate bubbles, instead of according to human need.
the ideal that limiting their wealth is better for morale or something
While the take that it would be idealist is nice and sounds Marxist there is also the concentration of power that goes together with capital. While it doesn't change the system and the capitalists do still have their class conflict with the working class, having more of them with lower wealth means they have a harder time organizing and a harder time to become a class actor (similarly to the separation of workers in different countries).
While any Marxist and Dengist perspective for that matter ought to challenge the system and existence of capital in the current form (by taking over the means of production and holding the power (of the state) to regulate them) and facilitate socialist reforms, develop productive forces and such, just taking away capital isn't Marxist.
Hindering power of capitalists can be Marxist though, just has to be thought through and be implemented from a position of power (and at that points most would just do away with billionaires - e.g. Cuba).
The KPCh is wielding power of the state and billionaires are hit with it. Though Xi's conception of what Marxism is and how a nation ought to be lead (and that of the party / party congress of thousands!) obviously varies from many "justice-Marxists" here.
i guess the epistemic rift between the camps is that one part thinks that the power coupled to capital is real here, while the other thinks the fact that a ML party is in government makes the power of capital meaningless. Im in the former camp, I think the fact that some of the pigs are being fucking executed with impunity speaks volumes here
Given the first half of your argument is true, why exactly would capital not flee China to unregulated tax havens (after they've moved from manufacturing)?
the part of financialization that is in the public sector is under complete control. if privatization occurs and they can use tax havens, that is just a loss. so they either account for sufficient capital controls, or concede these outflows as cost-beneficiary collateral. Given the number of officials implicated in the panama papers and the reaction from govt, i think its somewhere between
