Lol, your team always sounds like you just came out of a Davos talk on economic development.

"There is no alternative to [state] capitalism. We can only make the lives of workers better by suborning the needs of workers and rigorously disciplining any labor activity. Structural adjustments are needed before unions and universal healthcare can be allowed."

It's sad how you guys think opposition to U.S. empire excuses lack of labor rights, bans on unionization, and hundreds of billionaires. It displays a real lack of confidence in the socialist mode of production. I think it is entirely possible to be an economic superpower and also socialist. In fact, worker control of the means of production is much more efficient, will result in much more innovation, and is necessary to unlock the working class's full economic potential. Of course the U.S. will interfere with a real socialist state, but they won't win, because socialism is the superior system.

I know China idealists like to think that China is gonna save the world, but you're projecting on to a state whose actions in the last 30+ years have shown no evidence of interest in actually building socialism abroad or at home. Sorry man, but as a materialist, I have to look honestly at the material conditions of the Chinese working class, and not focus on what the leadership has said about what they intend to do in some long distant future.

Replacing U.S. capitalist imperialism (already well past it's 1950s peak), with multipolar Chinese-U.S. capitalist imperialism just doesn't get me excited, sorry.

Lol. These fools see a tiny amount of intra-bourgeoisie infighting in a country they've decided is the "good guy" and all of a sudden it's part of Xi's three dimensional chess gambit to make communism happen by 2080.

The U.S. filed anti-trust suits against Facebook, U.S. actually existing socialism confirmed!

But... but... I was told China was actually existing socialism! I guess it's all okay because Xi Jinping totally intends to take all the money and apply it to create fully-automated communism any day now. It's gonna happen guys. Trust me.

The Looking Glass War is my favorite spy novel ever. The whole plot is premised on a car accident that might or might not have been an assassination, and the series of blunders and mistakes that ensue when leadership assumes it was an assassination. He wrote it after people reacted favorably to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, thinking it made spying seem cool, which was not Le Carre's intention at all. He wrote Looking Glass War to be make it obvious that he thought postwar spying was largely futile, wasteful, pointless and entirely too caught up in ego and memories of WW2.

Naturally, because the book is unremittingly bleak, it got bad reviews at the time and is not often remembered. But Le Carre felt it was one of the more important of his books, as he wrote after the UK went into Iraq:

The superbug of espionage madness is not confined to individual cases. It flourishes in its collective form. It is a homegrown product of the industry as a whole. Is a cure at hand? I doubt it. The most down-to-earth citizens from the real world, appointed to oversee the spooks’ activities, turn to clay in their hands. Faith in spies is mystical, fuelled by fantasy and halfway to religion. They’re a protected species in our national psychology. Our banks and financial services may collapse, our economy may be going through the floor, our road and rail system may be a catastrophe, our Millennium Dome a laughingstock, the cost of fuel, energy, and water rising by the week, but our spies are immune to all of it. Never mind how many times they trip over their cloaks and leave their daggers on the train to Tonbridge, the spies can do no wrong.

It’s the men who are mostly to blame. Were wise women present when the notorious and acutely embarrassing Iraq Dossier, justifying Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war—and better known as the Dodgy Dossier—was composed? If they were, they were outgunned by the men of madness, who didn’t merely plagiarize a five-month-old article dredged from an obscure academic journal; they seriously believed, in their hubris and ignorance of the real world, that they could get away with it. It is slender comfort, but entirely in keeping with the code of reward and punishment dear to our present government, that the dossier’s principal architect should have been promoted to Chief of our Secret Service.

All of which is a tough thing to convey in fiction, or it was for me. I tried it long ago in “The Looking Glass War,” and my readers hated me for it. I tried it again in “The Tailor of Panama,” this time as comedy, and I was more or less forgiven. The trouble is that the reader, like the general public to which he belongs, and in spite of all the evidence telling him that he shouldn’t, wants to believe in his spies: which, come to think of it, is how we went to war in Iraq.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/09/29/the-madness-of-spies

Not a papist Cathedral, alas, episcopal. I would prefer to see the war on Christmas won with calendar reform that eliminates the date itself, as discussed in the League of Nations.

No, pointing back to Catalonia wouldn't be an argument. Luckily Emma Goldman provided hundreds of pages of arguments too, instead of just writing the word Catalonia over and over again. Neat trick!

I get that reading books sucks, but anyone who calls themselves an anarcho-tankie clearly has some studying to do. Or, if you don't care about this stuff, then don't bring up Stalin. But if you say that everything Stalin did was necessary, anarchists are going to bring up Catalonia... and they'll be right to do so.

Read Vision on Fire (PDF) , then come back and tell me about your anarcho-Stalinism. My ancestors built communism on this Earth, only to watch it burn at Stalin's hand.

The trick is, I can be any type of anarchist I want to be, and all you can do is downvote me on chapo dot chat. Pretty sweet!

I've kept my brain a pure temple, untouched by names or knowledge of any streamers or breadtubers. Those posts pass across my glazed eyes without even registering, and I am the better for it.

Interesting. I sort by subscribed, but I am still subscribed to main. I'll try unsubscribing for a few days and see what that looks like.

Haha, I mean I voted to get rid of it, I guess that option didn't win, not sure I was paying attention when the results came in. I guess the better way of phrasing that would be "I believe WE could fix this, if WE voted to get rid of c/main"... I understand it's not entirely ya'll's decision.

I would love to see main posters encouraged to post on an appropriate, specific comm instead, I just don't think it will work so long as there are a lot more upbears available on main. Maybe allow crossposting on two comms, and require any post that's posted on c/main to also be posted somewhere else too? Thereby seeding the currently fallow comms? Anyway, I'm sure this has all be discussed a thousand times by people with a better understanding of the technical difficulties than me.

I didn't read deep into the thread, but it is reddit, so... sounds right.

Counterpoint: 4chan and bunkerchan suck, because they are a circlejerk of a small number of navel-gazing weirdos. I don't want Chapochat to start the revolution, I just want it to get 100,000 users or so so the memes are better.

In the real world, at a meeting of your local left org, it would be exceptional if they did talk about China for even five seconds. That's why this community is fucked long term. Xi Xinposting has no relationship to the actual needs/interests of the working class in the userbase's countries, nor even to the downwardly mobile young men who used to make up the core of the subreddit.

The neoliberal poster is cringe, but the second guy with the +50 upvotes is totally right. This site is getting to be at least half panegyrics to Chinese capitalism, and for that reason I don't think it will ever live up to its potential, which is sad. The fact that so many people on this thread are proud of the Dengist circlejerk they've created shows just how disconnected from reality Cha cha is becoming. Blackwolffeed users WERE reddit chapos, they SHOULD be using this site, but why would they when any deviation from the "China is socialist" line gets you shouted down with 2000 word incoherent text walls? And don't even try to be an anarchist here.

It should be concerning to you that these users think so badly of this site. Don't worry though--I've been here since day one, and I'll still be around making fun of Chinese capitalism 'til I get banned for not hating Chomsky enough or whatever.

I believe the admins could fix this, btw, if they ended c/main and thereby forced team Jack Ma to post on c/sino instead. Then users who weren't into capitalism could unsubscribe from all the Chinese state TV posts.

Lol, I love how basically exactly this topic came up in that r/blackwolffeed post that's currently top of Active and none of the big-brained teenaged pro-China propogandists in the Chapo thread are understanding that the site is doomed if posts making fun of it for being too pro China are getting +50 votes on blackwolffeed. Like, those people were the community on reddit.

If you'd read the article, you'd know they didn't imprison a Bloomberg journalist, they imprisoned a Chinese national working as an assistant in Bloomberg's office. If they imprisoned an American who had the support of the embassy, that would seem much more like fair play to me.

the main Communist parties of basically every country in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe all support China

While (unlike you) I'm not willing to speak broadly about places I don't know much about, I do closely follow the politics of two countries in these regions, and in those two cases the pro-China left factions are a small part of a much larger ecosystem of left groups. I suspect there's some tautology to your thinking here--the only "communist" parties in these areas are the ones that support Chinese capitalism.

My understanding is that the biggest split was during the war against China, over whether or not to support the Nehru government in the war. But the reason why pro-China splitters still have almost no support has more to do with them being associated with Naxalites and the continuing disputes between China and India. It's hard for our Foxconn friends to fathom, because they've convinced themselves China can't do imperialism, but many leftists in India consider China's imperial ambitions in India's smaller neighbors a threat, and are worried that Chinese companies operating in India will try to impose Chinese labor standards and make things even worse for workers in the Indian labor market.

Lol, if it makes you feel better to think that, go for it man. I'd ask you for a citation, but I don't even know how you would go about quantifying this. I can tell you the left in India is pretty anti-China given the historical relationship, so that accounts for about a sixth of the world population right there, but you probably think the only real leftist party in India is four random contrarians from some split of a split so... 🤷‍♀️