By design.

One of the purposes of the planned inefficiencies of state services, often the direct consequence of completely economically irrational private-public partnerships and offloading to private firms of public services who will bid for contracts to run state-constructed infastructure on the basis that they will minimize costs (inducing low wages, high turnover rates of workers and low efficiency, surprise suprise). The malignant genius of it is that the inefficiency of the effects of partial and shadow privatization of what should be public services turns people against them and pro privatization because they still perceive it as public.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in the case of tax systems, especially the US tax system, or the US postal service.

Neoliberalism reestablishes profitability by sefl-destructive cost-cutting.

Yeah I mean if we were being more fair we would not only have to trace these genres genealogically through Jazz to blues and gospel, ragtime, and also to Caribbean and Spanish music (especially for alot of rhythmic ideas) and also West African music (blues, pentatonic scales), but also recognize that European classical music also had deep influence on early black american music.

The only country music I’ve ever unironically enjoyed was bluegrass, and that confirms our point. That being said I’m nothing of an aficionado of this stuff so I dont doubt there’s decent stuff I dont know.

But yh white suburbs are really where culture goes to die. It reminds of a comment Pasolini once made, that only the lower classes and the upper classes in history have produced real culture. The middle classes have been cultureless on average.

There is an American culture of world-historical importance. It’s just not the white culture. Black music for instance has unparalleled influence partly because of its quality. White music culture has made no contributions to modern (including popular art) equal to, say, Jazz, Blues, Gospel, RnB, Hip-Hop, detroit techno, chicago house…I could go on. Of course white people in general, especially the bourgeois, have little to no access to or knowedge of these cultures, unless its been given to them through a gentrified, fetishized filter that doesn’t understand the value of these musical traditions. Alternatively they treat is as jokey party music for them to sniff coke to.

Apart from that I agree that the mainstream of American culture is literal proof of the decadence of a civilization.

I’d also say that apart from key land needing to be returned to give to native americans and key minorities, the most important thing is that there is equitable land and housing reform that ensures an equitable distribution and standard of living for everyone in the broader working class, though this doesn’t preclude certain groups being given more immediate priority.

But yeh America is satanic. Literal Mammon worshipers.

If you actually live in America, then I’m guessing you haven’t been poor in America. It’s extremely difficult, without the opiate of capitalist realism and liberal ideology, to believe that you have rights in any real world sense when you are dirt-poor in America.

It’s interesting, in your justification for the supposed superiority of the US, that you are only citing your anecdotal case that you have found your life subjectively better. What actually matters, especially if you’d like to play the game of which country has more democratic policy in the limited sense of in which country were the massive conditions of life most securely guaranteed as per the interests and desires of the populace, then it is very difficult to hand the medal to the US, especially if you have even the slightest knowledge of US economic, social and political history, to say nothing of its imperialist geopolitics. Your justification is a purely selfish, narcisistically egoist one. I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out of a shitty economic situation, but that isn’t really as absolutely relevant as you seem to think at the end of the day when we are discussing whether or not the US’s material effects on the rest of world justify us qualifying it as deeply reactionary, in fact perhaps the main impediment to a progressive future for humanity.

The social, political and economic collapse of the USSR is directly linked, directly caused, by the US (and the West). Capitalistic reforms had already begun under Khruschev, which allowed for the further development of black-market enriched criminal classes who would form the social base of the mafiosi who would start to devore the Russian economy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. The traumatic experience of Russia in the last 30-40 years, with the literal mass death and one of the largest drops in living standards in any modern country’s history (and starting from a period of great development), was the blindingly, unequivocally, undeniable consequence of deeping capitalist reforms and political liberalization during the 80s, notably under Gorbachev. The advice was American. The advisors were American. The model was American. The pressures that had brought the USSR to this point were American. Modern Russia is a creation of America.

If we want to talk about quality of life, then the best time to be a Russia, was without a doubt, the 50s-70s. It is not a coincidence that a very high number of Russians, especially older ones who actually lived in the USSR, and even more so if they lived during the 50s-70s, are deeply nostaghic for it, even if this nostalgia is born out of a sense of relatively greater economic security that they were ensured during this period.

You do not seem to be grasping immuredanchorite’s point though, which is that if we even want to get into a discussion over which of these two political powers is ‘better’, morally or ethnically (to the extent that this even makes sense), you are not going to be able to do so coherently without looking at how the political entity we call the US has acted, and what it’s real, material effects and consequences have been. I.e., not only can you not answer those questions without considering politics (which is literally one of the most incoherent yet common assumptions of liberal ideology), but that you also cannot escape the essential importance of geopolitics. By any geopolitical measure, the US is the most reactionary and viciously imperialist power in the contemporary era.

I’d add that, reactionary as some aspects of the USSR or the PRC have unfortunately been (inevitable, because we are talking about history, not your abstract moral ideal, the purvue of ultra-‘leftists’ and reformists and social democrats everywhere), there is no evidence, at any point in these states’ histories, of genocide in the sense of planned destruction of a racial or ethnic group. You’re also going to have to be clearer about what you mean by ‘atrocity’, though yes, these happened.

Also, you need to make clear what you understand by the term ‘right’, because if you are using it in a liberal sense, you are going to find that communists do not understand it in that way, i.e. in a purely abstract, negative sense. Although even if we did just want to understand it in the latter sense, the existence of money as such as institution is an immense restriction on the negative freedom of the vast majority of people.

Yeh good convo. No beef obviously. Marxism is a part of science and so has to include continuous critique.

My point is simply that the confusion of these questions as if they are the same, when they are trivially not, actually gets in the way of precisely the important objective you’ve cited, namely understanding and taking the correct position on China. If our position does not make sense when explained to people then that it our fault and issue, not their’s. People not being Marxist is just as much, if not more, the fault of us as Marxist to clearly explain and convince that it is their’s.

However I’m still not fully understanding your first point. Breaking down concepts, making clear definition, and thus theoretical conditions, is for the sake of clarity and so that we can actually analyze properly, and is obligatory at the onset of any scientific analysis or inquiry, once we’ve gotten beyond the more intuition stage of concept formation. I’m not disagreeing with you that the answers to those questions, the properties and facts they are making reference to, all have to be taken into account in a holistic way if we are going to give a proper analysis or have a decent understanding of how democratic the Chinese political and socio-economic system is and whether it is moving in that direction. It’s also essential so that we know what conditions would produce these conditions, so that we know whether the socio-economic basis for a deepening of proletarian democracy is developing. But clear analysis of concepts at the very onset is still essential. Even tho this points have ofc, as you say, been analyzed to deathly minutiae ad infinitum by millions of Chinese comrades, I’m not seeing how this makes is irrelevant for those of us outside of China. It is still important for us, in our own position, to have a correct understanding of China as Marxists. Marx wrote much of his work before the conditions of as pure capitalism as he describes in works such as Das Capital were even really there. Marx reflected with scientific ruthlessness and lack of qualms about people’s political correctness ceaselessly. This is why we still read him today and not other analysts of capitalism from the time. Hell, even the Communist Manifesto describes a capitalism which is too purified for the time. But this was not an irrelevant mistake on Marx’s part. It was scientific foresight as to where European societies undergoing the transition to capitalism were headed. We need similar analysis today of China, if we think or hope that China will be a future global revolutionary center.

On the plan for socialist transition being laid out, the CPC most certainly have stated and presented such a plan, although I haven’t seen very detailed data demonstrating that such a plan is seriously being laid out and applied. It seems to be based on a kind of faith in the CPC. The argument that they have continued to massively improve the standard of living since the Reform and Opening up, bringing 800 million people out of poverty is of course correct and a historic achievement. However the same argument is often used by liberals to justify, say, the capitalism of the 50s-70s in which living standards in the West did considerably go up. The difference which might be brought up is the fact that China has done so without using imperialism. However, given that the core issue of imperialism is that it is exploitation (of some of the most extreme kind), and given that China has charged its development in recent decades (and did so in the 50s when Liu Shaoqi was saying things like ‘exploitation can be good!’) with exploitation of its working class and peasantry, citing improvements in living standards is not proof that the intentions of the part-leadership are necessarily geared towards a truly socialist transition. So I don’t think it’s just a philosophical point, but something to be always born in mind so that we suspend judgement until hard evidence is there that the CPC will, so to speak ‘push the big red button’. I’m not going to believe something unless I have actual incontrovertible evidence for it. That doesn’t mean that I know that they won’t. But something it’s just not possible to be confident either way. Another issue is that the current mode of production in China does not function like capitalism as we know it at the macro-level, nor does it operate fully like socialism. Maybe it is a type of transitionary stage (but then we hear the Leninist critique of the reforming, Menshevik notion of non-revolutionary transition to socialism in our heads). In either case, it makes clear to me again that one reason for so much of the theoretical impasse of people outside of China trying to understand it is that we don’t have a fully adequate understanding of the key mechanisms at the macro-level of their mode of production.

Of course I’m happy to be proven wrong on this point. The main issue is that I’ve only just recently started leaning Mandarin, so I cannot read Chinese sources. But if anyone has excellent economic data and analysis to give me on this point i’d be happy to see it.

This is, again, why intentions are important. Political groups with different interest take on different objectives and intentions in the same set of external material conditions, so the fact that the Dengist are in power and not the Maoists, and that the economic base of support for the party and the state is therefore different now in the aftermath of the reforms, is very significant for trying to understand what the intentions of the current CPC leadership actually is.

I personally don’t really understand how saying the truth about China, as far as we can discern it through scientific, Marxist analysis (which in no way contradicts, but rather radically extends, the methods of scientific enquiry of the past, whichever culture they were taken from), amongst ourselves is an issue. We have an political and therefore intellectual duty for our understanding of China to be as clear as possible, and that’s not going to be achieved by saying that certain questions which are relevant to understanding China’s contemporary political system are divisive. I’m not seeing how you and I having this convo is divisive. Furthermore, rigorous critique and debate is of the essence of Marxist methodology. Look at the records of the Bolshevik party until the Stalinist period. Before they were in power they were rigorously critiquing each other (perhaps too viviously) left, right and centre. Lenin was theoretically beefing with everyone all the time. In the 20s, once the Stalinist position was dominant, you can look for instance at economic debates or at the party debates on China. They were theoretically sophisticated and based on the premise that a clear theoretical understanding is essential for policy. Obviously we are not in anything like such a position of power of influence, but we do need to start, as part of a truly Marxist culture, to act and prepare for this, not only because liberal hegemony will not last forever, but because it’s important that in order to convince people of the correctness of our view, that we can do so rigorously and clearly.

I’m not using mediation in a Trotskyist position (not a Trotskyist). I was just checking whether you meant directness in a more philosophical, meta-theoretic sense appropriate to materialist dialectics or whether you were using it in a more colloquial sense. Obviously the latter as you’ve clarified that it has to do the time-aspect and thus the pragmatic importance. I’m also not disagreeing in the slightest that the Trotskyist position of that type, especially today, would be ultraleftism in the pejorative sense.

Those are not strictly speaking counterexamples. I didn’t claim they couldn’t transition back. Capitalist systems have tendencies which lead to socio-economic and political crisis. These, pushed far enough, and without a socialist revolution, tend to culminate in something like fascism in the modern era. But these are just tendencies. Nothing says that these tendencies must absolutely always, in every circumstance, proceed to completion. That’s determines by the other casual factors, the other objective and subjective material conditions. In this case, it was the geopolitical and global economic context.

As a matter of time I’m going to focus on Spain and Portugal in my answer.

The original fascist states also all went back to liberal democracy at the end of WWII. They were crushed by the liberal capitalist states (and ofc by the Soviet Union) which correctly perceived them as geopolitical rivals of the first importance by the mid-late 30s. The other fascist states were also pressured into transition back into the liberal imperialst orbit of the Cold War. In both cases, they were reintegrated as they proved unable to fully complete a world fascist counter-revolution. You are right to bring these up as very interesting cases because they are examples of how you can transition back to liberal capitalist bourgeois democracies. But this does alter the fact that there were serious changes in the political structures of both Portugal and Spain and that the supposed continuity of these transitions are often overstated.

The transition of Spain between the death of Franco in 1975 and 1978 was not as smooth or non-violent as it’s popularly imagined. It was a very violent period. Fascist regimes are inherently inefficient in the long-run from the POV of socio-economic and cultural development. Further, Franco had started to distance himself from a more aggressive fascism once it was clear by 1943 that the fascists would lose WWII into order to transition back, at least in appearance, into a traditionalist, Catholic, authoritarian one-party state. It was still fascistic, but to a lesser degree and I think it had also lost it’s dynamism. This was also reflected in the internal balance of power of the Spanish political regime. The more radical fascists lost influence and the Military and Church gained more influence. Instead of radical fascist mass mobilization and constant radicalizing of the populace, Franco betted on a gradual, partial de-fascicization in which the emphasis would be on technocratic governance and in which the population would be more depoliticized and deradicalized through economic growth and benefits. It remained fascistic in relation to ethnic and national minorities and especially towards the revolutionary left. But in general terms, and notably those of economic governance, it returned to a more conservative and liberal position, rather than outright radical fascist, were the latter implies a far more total, complete level of intervention in all aspects of society. Spain became heavily integrated into the Western European and Atlantic economy. It became an ultra-conservative client state of NATO in everything but name (it was not allowed to become a member). The Partido Popular are the continuation of this more liberalizing-trad-conservative wing of Falangists, wereas Vox are representative of the more radical fascist elements. It is not for nothing that they have been forming coalitions recently. But even if Vox came to power by itself, it is not clear that they would find themselves in a different situation to the Fratelli d’Italia at present, were many reactionary aspects of the country would certainly intensify, notably towards immigrants, Muslims, racial minorities and LGBT folks, but it would be limited because a fascist government, while not immediately inconsistent with fascism, does tend to contravene the liberal principles, as liberals are only one group of pro-capitalists, and there are many political positions which emphasize different forms of capitalism, notably through different governance structures over the economy, firms, capitalists, etc.

Another reason the transition was possible is because there was a recognized incentive to compromise in order to avoid another civil war, the terror of which was still very present in everyone’s minds, and this was made possible because, as noted above, the more radical elements of the falangists had been somewhat sidelined and Franco had also begun a process of deradicalizing his fascist government. Apartheid South Africa was similar in many respects, in terms of reasons for liberal transition, despite the context being extremely different in many ways, most obviously when it comes to the racial dynamics. Interestingly, it’s difficult to imagine Israeli doing that kind of liberal transition at this point. Imo Israel’s future may well be an extremely bloody one…

It’s also worth pointing out that the 70s was a far more radical time than today. There was a lot more pressure from the social-democrat European left that shaped the debates and ideological struggle in 70s Spain, again emphazing a need to transition. Also, Carter moved away somewhat from Nixon’s more active support of these regimes (the US supported their military by being their main weapon’s providers).

The Estado Novo was as strange type of fascism. It was not as aggressive in its foreign policy as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, which attempted to recreate mystical conceptions of their ancient empires in a way that directly conflicted with the interests of the other western imperialist powers. It was also pulled back into the orbit. Neither Franco nor Salazar were idiots when it came to how they needed to geopolitically and economically pivot in order to ensure their survival. Salazar did something very similar to Franco, as described above.

These other fascist states, which were tolerated because they did not pose as serious a threat to the imperial interests of the US, Britain and France, and because they were willing to accommodate these other powers’ interests and cooperate. However they were also undermined by their own inefficiencies, economic and political, and pressure from the external climate of a dynamic post-war trans-Atlantic economy to reintegrate themselves, at least economically, with the liberal powers.

We know that the socio-economic base transforms itself in such a way as to overcome disequilibrating forces that emerge in their social relations, especially once the latter are no longer sufficient to further developing the means of production, especially in a system of like capitalism whose basic functioning is premised on the fact of continued production of profit to incentivize production. But what about the transformations of the superstructure? My point is that as the base structure develops in this manner, it not only does so in conjunction with the the superstructure, but not only transforms the superstructure in order to reach new points of temporary stability. It is not only the base structure that evolves, moving gradually, continually and something revolutionarily into different overall dominant modes of production, but also the superstructure, in particular the political regime, which develops, and not only between base-level modes of production, but also within the same overall type of mode of production. In some cases liberal capitalism becomes fascist capitalism. In some case fascist capitalism can transition to liberal capitalism. In some cases fascist capitalism turns into outright mass-slave economies.

In Iran it is commonly known that the religious elite are, like the Catholic hierarchy but probably more brazenly due to their political dominance in Iran, filled with sexual predators.

It’s a practice, for instance, to engage in ‘temporary marriages’ (which the Iranian religious establishment thinks is justifiable based on tradition) with women (and young girls) at what are in practice brothels, which are then protected by religious law in virtue of being technically temporary marriages.

I’m not absolutely sure what you mean by the first sentence.

It seems pretty clear to me that you’re confusing the fact that the questions have things in common, whether they are about similar topics, or whether one question is relevant to another because implies consequences that determine or influence our answers to the other questions, with the idea that they are the same single question. The fact that China’s government has very high approval by all measures, is not proof that the government is democratically run in a socialist sense. Indeed we know it’s not, because Chinese workers do not have direct control over the means of production. So it’s not sufficient for it to be democratic. However it’s almost definitely a necessary condition, so you would need it, and it is evidence in favor in the weak sense that it does not refute the idea that China is democratic by itself. But there is other evidence not in favor.

But historical materialism is not mystical nonsense where suddenly everything connected or with any property in common in suddenly identical. It’s not a metaphysical calculator you can use to answer every question.

Democratic Centralism is a theory about how a party should be organized. It has no bearing on a linguistic or semantic question. End of. What it implies, which you seem to me to be confusing with the idea that these are the same question, is that the questions practically have to be considered together, or that you can’t answer one without one or more of the others. I completely agree in the latter case. As evidenced by this very discussion, it will be difficult to enter into a discussion where you discuss one but you don’t discuss the others. But they are not the same thing, and saying they are is just a logical error (which dialectical materialism or democratic centralism have nothing to do with) which ends up with us treating China as closer to socialism than it actually is, which is a massive failure on our part as Marxists. For Marxists more than any else, we have a duty to be clear, because the truth is on our side and we are not in power.

Okay but if but now I need to ask the exact same question about the word ‘immediate’. This seems to be a synonym for ‘direct’ here, so it doesn’t necessarily make it more clear to me what it means. In a dialectical context it is difficult to make any sense of the concept of directness or immediately (unless it is meant relatively), due to the omnipresence of mediation. I’m assuming therefore that you don’t mean it in that more philosophical or meta-theoretical sense as used in the Marxist tradition. I’m guessing you just mean that practically it is more important or pressing for China’s interests if it is more direct, in that it should be given priority as an objective.

In that sense I don’t completely disagree with you, but there’s also a difference between not having an aggressive policy towards Israel and actively funding it’s settler-colonial apartheid project. Why is the latter sometimes treated as absolutely and necessarily unjustifiable in some cases but not here?

Like. Just no. Interesting you didn’t actually response to anything tho. If all you can critique in is the time and effort put into some analysis and then make an immature, incoherent and confused comment then kindly don’t interact with me until that changes.

You’re also just using a couple of the superstructural features of fascism. No-one is saying those don’t characterize (partially) fascism. But by this analysis England was fascist by the 18th century, which is obviously absurb. Capitalism has already captured the state in liberalism. Sure. Obviously. This is trivial. But the state itself starts to take on new and, to a point, autonomous power distinct from its dependence on the bourgeoisie, because the fascist state starts to engage in hardcore forms of state capitalism which it directs. The later you go, the less the Nazis gave a fuck about what the German bourgeoisie thought. They were themselves there, in the eyes of the Nazis, to exploit the workers to maximize national production and output. But the Nazis did not govern as the liberal bourgeoisie does based on some amount of consensus and compromise amongst the bourgeois. They did not pursue or decide or craft policy based first and foremost on whether their bourgeois backers would allow them to run for posts again. They were concerned with national power and production, not profit first and foremost. Just as nationalization does not equal socialism, privatization does not equal liberalism, though it does imply a movement closer to pure capitalism. Fascism is both the highest state of imperialism, thus neoliberalism, thus capitalism, as the final solution to its crises, and also its death-knell, because it produces a self-destructive contradiction within itself between the bourgeois class and their interests at large on the one hand, and the fascist state on the other. Every single example of unambiguous fascism confirms this. Just look at Ukraine.

Again, all you are saying is that there is capitalism. But again, capitalism can have several different types of political regimes. You can look at their differences in 2 seconds. End of. At a certain point this is a not a real substantive debate, but a purely semantic one over how the words should be used. But the word fascism was introduced to refer to a set of superstructural characteristics, notably of the political regime, which a new, fuller development of capitalist societies tends to produce in crisis. They are responses to crises of capitalist societies to keep producing sufficient profit to sustain themselves. There is a change in the political structure when this happens, and this substantially intenfies (no matter how present already) the nationalism, racism, xenophobia, active mass state repression, oppression and exploitation. But the difference here can be seen to partly reside in the fact that it allows for this intensification which is not as possible under liberal governments. If you think that a liberal government is identical to a fascist one, then go to Ukraine. The US government, nor the Italian government for instance, are mass jailing and death-pitting anyone and everyone who is a communist, socialist, leftist, anarchist etc, where as this happened in every historical case of fascism, precisely because of the nature of the new structure of governance. They are repressing us, they are jailing us, and they are happy to engage in limited bouts of extrajudicial killing and murder. But this is limited and is also a reason I’m also not saying that the transition from liberalism to fascism may not see fairly continuous. But there are unlimited phenomena where that happens but there is still obviously a transition between two different states. There is continuity between colors but green is not blue or yellow. And, again, on this logic feudalism would be identical to capitalism and fascism, because the transitions might have been continuous. Just like feudalism can contain elements characteristic of capitalism and liberalism at the same time, yet it’s feudalism because it’s what dominants. That’s at the base-level. But the base-level does not fully characterize uniquely a society. Marxism proper have never done this kind of reductionism. At the superstructural level, we need to look in part at the dominant mode of governance. The fascist one is different to the liberal one.

If you read memoirs of what people experienced when Germany when Nazi, when Italy went Fascist, when Japan went fascist, when Spain went fascist, when Chile fell to Pinochet, you realize very quickly that there is a difference.

Macron, Liz Trus, Scholtz, Abe, Gordon Brown… I would go one. None of these people were worshiped. Like no politicians in the UK are worshiped lmao. Although more depraved conservatives still cream themselves over Thatcher. Again, it could possibly happen, but none of these cases have ever amounted to the Hitlerian cult of personality. You’re citing certain similarities and saying that therefore they are the same. But the whole point of having different words to to refer to different concepts because there are differences between the real things in the world we are talking about. The burden is on you to establish that these differences do not exist between the cases which we’re comparing, which you can’t because it’s obviously impossible.

I don’t know how many times this needs to be said but I’ll say it again: Marxism is a univeralist (at least applied to human history and societies) scientific theory and set of revolutionary normative principles of thought and action that emerged in modern Europe as the Proletarian stage of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

If people want to do historical relativism of value based on nationalist considerations, then they’re basically a postmodern fascist whose view is identical to the basis of Dugin’s ideology. Dugin himself thinks that’s he’s synthesized and gone beyond liberal capitalism, communism and fascism here, by identifying the material interests of individual people’s with their national identity. Ofc this is just postmodern strasserism.

There are also several distinct questions here: firstly to what extent the Chinese people have actual democratic control over the CPC and the PRC, which I’d say is little, and which is different to whether or not the policies of the CPC are in their interest (to a great degree, I’d say yes), and is also different to the question of whether or not they have objectively high approval ratings (also genuinely very high compared to any other society that comes to mind).

I agree with you that there is a locality/directness factor that is imporant, but the two examples are not fully analogous because in the one case we are talking about whether Russia’s invasion is understanding from the pov of Russia’s interests, whereas in the other we are not talking about invasion, but about whether China should be supporting fascists. It answers why China might be excused from not intervening in Ukraine more directly but it doesn’t answer why they should be economically supporting Israel. Ofc, perhaps they want economic leverage to eventually pull Israel away from the US orbit based on Irsael’s perception of its own interests. I don’t know. I’m not saying we should unilaterally and unequivocally condemn China on a purely detached ‘moralist’ basis here. The final judgement has to be in terms of whether or not their actions contribute positively or negatively in the long-term to world communist revolution.

The way you’ve phrased it would suggest that China’s interests are those of the realist modern nation-state. These are inevitably part of them, but China is not the nation state. The latter is the state of the society, which is part of but not identical to the society itself. The Chinese working classes interests are ultimately those of a transition to socialism and world-revolution. Your phrasing also suggests that Israel is not in their direct interests. I think you need to make clearer what you mean by direct interest. Do you mean no interest at all if not direct? Or can they still be of indirect interest if not direct? But Israel is a bulwark of American influence in the middle east and key source of black ops and intelligence operations. No-one is better at killing radicals than Israel. It is also in the interest of China as a society, again, to contribute to a world revolutionary situation. How is the Chinese government doing this? If so, is it intentional? If not, then why is this not a problem, given that intentions are our guide to what China’s power structure would do in any future potentially revolutionary situation. If they were not an interest at all, then they wouldn’t be trading and helping the IDF to arm itself.

This is important because communism is not, I repeat not, possible without a world revolution.

I’m saying that the mental manouver justifying the position in one that is common in liberalism. I’m not even necessarily saying it’s wrong. But I’m asking for clarification why it’s justified to make that move when talking and thinking about China, and not about other states. Which states are not reasoning in terms of their materialist position? They all are, more or less, when looked at from a Marxist pov. This is explanation. It’s not justification. Justification in the Marxist revolution is always, first and foremost, what most likely contributes in the long-term to a world-proletarian revolution. This is always the end goal (although the end goal of the revolution is the production of conditions for real fulfilling and ethical life and advancement of the species).

Except that that is a completely logically confused example. By this reasoning feudalism is the same thing as capitalism. Nonsense.

What is common between historically existing fascism and liberalism as political regimes, is the capitalist economic structure that they have existed upon. But this does not uniquely determine the form of the society or the political regime, even if it restricts the range of political regimes which are possible or likely. Otherwise we are engaging in economism and economic determinism and fatalism, which are not Marxist. The difference consists in the real differences in how those political regimes govern, how they organize the economic surplus, how they conduct social policy, how they legislate, and what kind of power relations the executive, legislature and judiciary have to each other. Republican Rome and modern America are both dictatorships of certain classes, but they still had a type of internal hierarchy within the socio-economic and political elite that aimed ensured certain balances of power within their class. Put it this way for example: Israel is highly fascicized society. It is deeply socially and culturally conservative and reactionary. It has been taking steps away from the internal domestic remnants of liberal political structures in order to allow the executive to take control over the legislature. This is a further step towards even more full on fascism.

What is common between 1st and 4th stage cancer is the cancer. What is common between liberal capitalism and historically existing fascism is capitalism (private property, wage labor, commodity production, attendant social relations, etc.), the existence of a state, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism. In the sense fascism continues and intensifies this, but this does not make them the same. It’s honestly insane to me that this point has to be made: different things are not the same, same things are not different. We use the term fascist to distinguish changes The Third Reich’s governance was different in a variety of ways to the Weimar’s Republic’s.

I’d agree that in, say, neoliberalism, there is a particularly strong pull towards fascism, and that you already see these tendencies emerging strongly in neoliberal societies’ politics and social relations, ideology and foreign policy. But saying that because the tendencies that lead to a future society are present in an earlier type of society, makes them the same, would again reduce capitalism to feudalism.

Otherwise this is just obfuscation and mystification that gets in the way of properly analyzing things politically and makes Marxists look ridiculous.

What is the difference between a mistake, and unfortunate necessities? Why are lesser-evil arguments not theoretical mistakes on our part when we make them about China? I’m not disagreeing with what you’ve said about how China rationalizes their policies, but my point is that, as a massive obligation of all Marxists, we need to critically examine it both analytically and normatively.

The intention is important because it’s relevant to understanding how China will act in the future. For instance, if revolutionary situations emerge in the rest of the world, will China actively support them? China has showed little to no interest in the contemporary era in supporting radical movements. I agree that they may be right to do this. There is perhaps a ‘socialism in one country’ calculation which goes beyond the Stalinist one (as Stalinist Russia did continue to support revolutionary movements, tho massively shit the bed in the case of China). Perhaps it is the correct one. But it does introduce the fear that they may never change this position, including in revolutionary scenarios when it would be in the interest of the world proletariat for them to do so.

We can go back to my previous comment to note that it goes further than trade, and depends what they are trading. China is not a group of students. If they boycot Israel or just don’t trade with it, it has a bigger effect, and will not contribue, indirect as it may or may not be, to the active repression of Palestinians in an area that is one of the most important for politicala and ant-colonial struggle in the current world.

I think the issue goes deeper than mistakes. Vulgar marxists often seem to judge things either ‘mistakes’ or ‘determined deterministically by their historical conditions, so stop moralizing about it’ based on their vibes towards the choice in question; mostly because they havent actually properly thought through and analyzed as Marxists the relationship between normative thought and judgement, and explanation in the context of historical materialism (which we can understand to mean here, in a relatively minimal and non-metaphysical sense, as simply a theory of social reality or phenemenon which aims to explain them on the basis of class, and how the latter determines the control and distribution of the economic surplus and other social relations in virtue of how the class relations organize and are influenced by transformations between the classes and between them and the forces of production). So you often see some people act or speak as if any use of normative concepts is ‘idealism’ (whatever they happen to mean here, which often seems to fluctuate incoherently), and cite out of context and reductively the quote where Marx says that communism is not an ideal to be established but a real movement of history. Ofc, even beyond the context, Marxism is not a religious dogma. It is not a cult. It is the proletarian stage of human enlightenment and a continuation of the scientific method in its first real application to the social, hence to itself, which in term influences itself, thus the world, thus itself in term and so on (whereby the mind-bending aspects of dialectics in the social context). Marx himself, and all of us, and any Marxist, when you read about their lives, and first and foremost motivated to political radicalism not based on some metaphysical revelation or scientifc realization of the dialectic of the movements of history (athough perhaps this is the more advanced view which develops later). It is based on the experience of oppression, exploitation, abuse, repression, violence, coercion and alienation, which reflect something not coherent with our own material interests. What matters normatively, in a concrete and experiential sense, are the material consequences that affect the majority of people. Experiences of justice are a part of this. Political thought decisions require necessarily normative (thus ethical or moral) forms of thought, though the latter don’t exhaust the former. But we need to be able to respond when people ask ‘why should we have communism/socialism/anarchism’? And they are going to what normative arguments in terms of how that kind of society will be more beneficial for them and the people they care about. If fascism was a more likely ‘real movement’ of history I would still oppose it and hopefully be willing to die fighting it than to simply say ‘okay well history has spoken’. The reason why there is a movement of history towards the conditions of socialism and communism is because they are, from the point of view of socio-historical evolution of the species, more advanced, efficient, beneficial ways of organizing society. Societies evolve into new forms based on their tensions, instabilities and internal dynamics, and those which have the historical advantage, as capitalism did when it emerged due to its greater powers of production and control, will often take a historical lead. We’ll see if China can do this. But socialism is a normative necessity, not a metaphysical necessity, although the two are linked in virtue of my last comment.

Btw I’m not saying at all that you are doing the above ‘vulgar marxism’, just highlighting it as a relevant topic of discussion. Just to be clear that I’m not attacking you here.

Chinese foreign policy was definitely, I agree, filled with actual mistakes. But if we put in the context of the Cold War and the increasing revisionism of the USSR, the hostility of the latter towards China, and the fact that the interests of the CPC were now tied to those of a nation-state structure, it forces us to realise the difficulty of determining the historically progressive policies when there is an immense temptation to identity those with the more spatially and temporally localized ones of the nation state one happens to control.

Yes I agree with everything you’ve said.

I think it’s worth adding that we also need to be aware that in any multipolar world, preferable as it may, or may not, be, it is perfectly possible that other spheres of influence around the main poles develop imperialist positions. I personally think that Russia has already well displayed this capacity. It’s interests as a nationalist state capitalist power will naturally drive it to an imperialist position in its region of influence, imo.

Sure. As a matter of historicaly development, we know, as Marxists, that liberal capitalist societies, whether they have the formal institutions of representative democracy or not, tend to develop due to the tendencies of economic development the social consequences of the later and the political conjunctures, into fascistic or fascist political regimes and societies. But these are tendencies, they aren’t metaphysical or mathematical necessities. Even if we always saw every liberal democracy transform into outright into fascism, this doesn’t make them the same thing. If you were actually under a fascist government you would quickly realise the difference.

Fascism is partly characterized by it’s ideological and other superstructural features, but this is only a partial understanding. A fuller understanding notes that such states have only emerged in contexts of capitalist decay and crisis and act as a safety valve through which the capitalist class reestablishes political supremacy over the workings classes. However, I would point out that while capitalists are generally key parts of an any fascist state, the relationship between a powerful fascist state and individual enterprises (such as in Nazi Germany) does tip more and more towards the arbitrary power of the central executive government, to the point where they are more eager than capitalists to jeopardize profits for political objectives.

I’m obviously not saying that liberals have not engaged in extreme racism, colonialism, and genocide. Actually, from a historical point of view, they have been the best at it. It also isn’t wrong to say that in many respects fascism is also charaterized by the turning inward, the domestic usage, of the coercive, violent means of political repression which are innovated and developed in colonies. As Aimé Cesaire pointed out, fascism is like imperialism turned inwards. Modern America often treats many people internally in a fascistic way, embodied by the prison-industrial complex, especially if you are a very active, radical activist, or were or are in the past or present a member of a revolutionary group like the Black Panthers, or more generally a poor immigrant, a racial minority interacting with cops, or many other scenarios. The American state, like the British and French states, their political and economic elites, have already partly fascicized, are undergoing the process. But I really don’t think we’re passed the point of the nature of the political regime changing sufficiently to call them all fully fascist states. After Ukraine, the USA is the closest.

This is also why it is so weird and unnecessary to me when people just say that liberal democracy is the same thing as fascism. The fact that two things are linked or that one has tendencies that lead it to transform into, produce, be replaced by the other does not mean that they’re the same. Actually it implies the opposite, otherwise there would be no transformation to begin with. Take the Italian government. It is filled with realy, ideologically convinced fascists. But it does not find itself in a situation where, even as a unified coalition of Mussolini fans, they cannot actually find any means to exert fully fascist politics in defiance of the EU’s neoliberal economic agenda, nor NATO’s political agenda. Meloni does actually use the classic fascist technique of appealing to leftist sounding points. She recently went on Italian television and shit all over Macron and the French for enganging in neocolonialism against Françafrique, explaining the monetary system on tv and how most gold a child will mine in the period will end up in the French central bank. The difference with the Ukrainian government is that the material conditions of Ukraine allow, actually force, the government to fascicize beyond the confines of it’s own ideology and extend this to society more broadly and more radically. There is not even the pretence of liberal democracy in Ukraine amongst actual Ukrainians, let alone the Russophone Ukrainians or Russians of the east.

We have different words for a reason: to refer to different things. In this case, different types of political regimes. A liberal political regime is different to fascist political regime. The transition might be gradual or appear relatively continuous, but so was the emergence of feudalism and capitalism.

Explanation isn’t the same as justification.

Yes, sure. It seems hypocritical to me to say, on the one hand, that there is no political difference between the yankies bombing Yemeni children directly, vs giving the Saudis the bombs to drop, and then on the other hand, say that there is a difference between China supporting fascists who murder children (i.e. Israel or the Apartheid goverment), vs actually murdering those people themselves. I’m not saying that you are defending this, but it strikes me as a weird mental gymnastic were some ‘tankies’ (or whatever term you want to use, no normative judgement intended) will engage in basically some classic liberalism in order to let China off the hook on this front.

We should also mention the Khymer Rouge. Fascist might not be the correct term here, but it was politically equivalent in terms of how destructive, bloody and reactionary it was.

Israel is fascist. There is no excuse, by the nature of fascism, for supporting it. Ever. Yet China is happy to fund both the Israeli army and the West Bank administration.

Again, people can’t have their cake and eat it too. You can’t both say (i) profoundly reactionary as Russia is, Ukraine is more deeply fascicized and that as an immediate consequence of that, there should be a preference for the war ending on Russia’s terms; and (ii) that China may be funding fascists, but this is understandable and justifiable in the context. Okay. So then what are the criteria and conditions here apart from biased vibes to decide when critical support in these extreme cases is justified or not? What’s the line? I know I have my own ideas about this, but it’s often difficult to see what other peoples’ are.

It’s should go without saying that China’s foreign policy, including during the Maoist period, has been by far one of its most reactionary aspects. Once again, the Sino-Soviet split was a historical tragedy and reflects the challenge for communists of avoiding finding themselves in post-revolutionary situations in which their politics becomes nationalist due to them coming to identify their interests with those of the traditional nation state as a matter of reality and pragmatic necessity.

It’s closer to a nationalist oligarcy with the trappings a formal, liberal democracy. Ofc, at the end of the day the U$A is no more democratic in any deepy, normative or radical sense. But the state itself is ideologically more nationalist and has been pushing back against liberal social and economic views. You can see this in the conflicts recently between the executive and the central bank, as the latter has been one of the last convinced bastions of neoliberal economic orthodoxy.

This also has to do with the fact that Russia’s ruling bourgeois class’s interests are more national in nature, as a result of their economic development since 1991, aggressive geopolitics from NATO, and the fact that they were forced by the state into emphasizing national interests once the Putin era began.

Ofc it remains a capitalist shithole.

I’m really not convinced that they would normally prefer to fight fascists on the front lines than to stay in a gulag, uncomfortable as the latter might be.

100% agree. Me presenting it as a choice by a single Commissar for War is more tongue-in-cheek. The answer whether or we should do it is contextual but my point is that there are clear cases which I can imagine in which drafting would be clearly justified, even if of only certain groups.

But responding to a question of whether or not we should do something by saying it would be decided democratically is evading the actual question of what you would put forward or support as appropriate policy in such a scenario. If everyone one responded that way then nothing would be decided.