this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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Eh, there's a notional aspiration to socialism at least, which is more than can be said about the US sphere of countries.
In practice though? Yeah, China is hyper-captialist, without much of the social security present in wealthier countries.
Why Leftist get a hard-on for the former USSR, Russia and China, or frankly any country, is beyond me.
There are positive and negative outcomes in line or against socialist ideals everywhere (I think people are too black and white about China in both directions personally)
I just do not understand simping for any country, just because they are "socialist".
That notional aspiration to socialism is basically the ideological smokescreen. It was much more effective in the Cold War era, but it condenses down to: "Suffer through our version of (state) capitalism and exploitative labour for our capital accumulation" - be it by state institutions or even state-sponsored billionaires - "and at the end of it, we promise, there will be communism."
But that "communism" then tends to be like nuclear fusion - always 20 years away.
My money is on fusion before proper socialism.
There is always someone willing to twist the rules and game the system to get more money and power than everyone else. The 1% have always existed and so have the worker class. It will always shake out to that.
Even just as a technicality, the 1% have not always existed, most tribal societies did not have class divisions like that. Both anthropological studies of existing tribal societies show examples of that, and the archaeological record, too, lays out it was common.
And I understand feeling like that, but it is a pretty weak argument, tbh. It is even hard to engage with, because it's basically starting at a completely different outset of concepts and understanding. Firstly, it reduces socialism to only systems of perfect equality of power - when even Marx acknowledged that this is not only impossible but also undesirable.
Then it just packs all kinds of class arrangements into "The 1%" and "the worker class". Was European feudalism like that? Ancient palace economies? Tribal gift economies? Pre-historic tribal arrangements? The Incan/Andean planned economy? Each with their own complexities, class relations and all showing that the basic idea - humanity evolving along it's material capabilities and necessities - hold true.
Lastly, related to the idea that proper socialism would mean perfect equality of power - sure, corruption in some way has probably always existed. People will also always murder each other in some way. Using that as an argument to say it is impossible to establish a system that minimises murders is how your reasoning sounds to me.
And the system is always what limits or enables the way this corruption and gaming the system plays out. How much property and/or power can be concentrated? Capitalism concentrates vastly more wealth and capital than the systems before it, both for good (e.g. the development of productive forces has enabled many things) and ill. Just because perfection may not be possible, does not mean a system without exchange of value and capital accumulation is impossible (has existed before for sure, yes, even for more complex economies than a small tribe), and it does not mean it has to exist in a way that is more barbarous than the current state of affairs.
Utopia is literally "no place" for a reason, and anything less than a utopia will be deemed "not proper socialism" (like literally every place that has ever tried some flavor of communism/socialism) so my money is on fusion as fusion is more likely than utopia.
The USSR at least outwardly promoted socialist values like solidarity and being kind to your fellow people. They fucked up pretty bad in practice, but at least they made an attempt.
I think in both cases (modern China, and the USSR), there is a genuine feeling/desire towards the ideals.
In both cases though, it is co-opted for propaganda purposes, and falls pretty flat when inequality is off the charts.
Which is a shame, if you have socialist beliefs
I wish them the best though, and hope they figure things out to bring outcomes more in line with the ideals.
IMO this is why it takes an additional axis to define a government, not just left/right but also free/authoritarian. You can find examples of all combinations. Left wing and repressive? Cuba. Left leaning and free? Sweden. Right wing and repressive? Russia, Saudi Arabia, whatever. Right leaning and free (mostly)? USA.
Obviously, there’s a gradient within these axes, but it’s strange to see people cheering on a country that matches their preferred left or right wing ideology if they’re super repressive.
This is why we need to reeducate people and stop using the traditional left-right spectrum and start using the axis spectrum
Even the axis spectrum is unproductive, ideologies and frameworks cannot be distilled into single data points on a map, no matter how many axes you add.
The axis spectrum has proven to be very efficient imo. A lot of the politics we talk about are mainly composed of social and economic elements which the axis spectrum portrays well.
How in the world has it "proven to be very efficient"? Did you run laboratory tests?
The thing is, Left vs Right is already a measure of authoritarian vs Democratic.
The original use of the terms comes from the French Revolution. There was a vote on if the King should have an absolute veto over laws passed by the assembly. Those who said no sat to the left of the Speakers podium. Those who said yes sat on the right.
The reason why left and right were applied to economic policy was because Marx described Communism as a form of extreme Democracy. Whereas Capitalism concentrates power into the hands of a select few.
It's still a measure of where the power rests. In the hands of the people or the hands of the state/leader.
You can break it down to dozens of categories, but it's all authoritarian vs Democratic in the end.
As a note, Lenin style single party "communism" is about as far from Marx's ideal as you can get.
Dictators and Kings are all the enemies of the people.