Classless society when?
When the foundations for classes are erased, through full public ownership in a global Socialist economy. Industry has to advance to that level.
And that can only happen when capitalism stops being the dominant global ideology.
Of course! Hence why Imperialism is the primary contradiction, and why the US Empire’s latest trend of nakedly tearing out its own foundations in favor of short-term profits is likely going to be a major topic in future history books.
exactly right
Not gonna lie, china felt like the enemy a few months ago. Now they feel like the sane alternative to being allies with the us. Not saying they are the good guy, but certainly better than the us is.
China = USSR USA = N@Z Germany
Starting to look this way
I think the key difference is that Xi has a very strong vision for China and is actually practicing what he preaches; enriching the nation rather than enriching himself. Like a strict father, head of the family.
While the debacle that is the US government is all about enriching themselves and their associates rather than the nation. Like goblins in a mine.
Like a strict father
Is politics just the spectrum of daddy issues an individual might have?
Very Confucian
That’s less a consequence of specific individuals in power and more the systems at play that lead to differences between those in power. “Great Man Theory” largely takes away from actual Materialist analysis.
I think I would extend it thus:
In America, the rich controls the government - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside). In China, the government controls the rich - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside).
…and with a bonus few:
In Russia, the top of the government controls the rich who control the rest of the government - to screw anyone they can get away with screwing while waving the “just remember we have nukes” flag. In Europe, the leaders keep flip-flopping about who they should be screwing so they just take turns footgunning while announcing “I meant to do that”, and then slapping each other on the wrists for appearances. In the UK, the rich and the government take turns visiting the pawnshop with anything that isn’t screwed down, then acting shocked when swathes of the government end up effectively owned by other governments.
Completely vibes-centric analysis. If the Chinese government were screwing the population, how come every western polling org agrees that the government has at the very, very least 86% approval rates, far above any EU nation, let alone the US?
I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
Firstly my comment was clearly the comment-equivalent of a shitpost to express generalised disdain for the morally bankrupt hypocritical preschool-behaviour of almost all centralised human power-structures on the global stage, so its slightly disturbing that your threshold for considering something as “analysis” sits that low.
I’m not sure why you are trying to defend China by comparing it to EU & US for me. I lampooned them too. I am an equal-opportunity cynic.
I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
Did you notice I used the word “extend”? …and mentioned several major countries? I think your mistake is in assuming I am either an AI bot or an intellectually equivalent human “bot” with the naive agenda of waving one team’s flag by trashing all the other flags, and hoping to be on the “winning side” of a zero-sum argument. I am old & cynical enough, especially having actually lived and worked in almost all of the mentioned countries, to have very slowly and very bitterly developed justified disillusionment with the suit-and-tie pantomime masquerading as “leadership” pretty much everywhere on the planet, and know there is no “winning side” for humans the way things are on this planet. If Russia gets more airtime in my tirade at the moment then I’d just say they (who am I kidding, “he”) needs to stop making it so damn easy by generating a virtual firehouse of cruelty purely to make line go up.
I refuse to cheerlead for any nation-state until the world becomes a very different place. Until then I only cheerlead for every single person on their path to growing up, stopping obsessively treating the very administration of people’s lives like a football match, getting off the cruel->“fake nice” spectrum, and getting on the “actual kindness” and “mutual respect” bandwagon. But lately I’ll admit I find myself doing that cheerleading rather halfheartedly and dispiritedly.
Bonus evidence of Chinese government screwing everyone in the country.
Here’s the report explaining how a typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty
Fascists
Vs
Communists
I dont think China counts as Communist, kinda like how the USSR was state socialist. Although personally I would call China mixed economy state socialism.
I don’t think China really counts as Fascist.
FYI
again
Wish we had the communists.
It’s really about what’s more important to you and where you set your priorities. Or maybe it’s actually about being short-sighted or far-sighted.
The US seems to believe that having “rich” people and a poor-rich divide will somehow foster or speed up technological development. I would say that is an almost religious belief. I don’t really agree with it too much personally, and also i don’t like how they approach their population as “wave slaves” who are threatened with starvation and homelessness if they don’t work; but also i’m not gonna interfere with US internal affairs.
I really do think that all the “corporation” things are short-sighted, and it is wise to take the “long-run” perspective and ask what will be in a 1000 years, in a billion years.
I do think that being a bully like the US is is short-sighted, an in fact disadvantageous in the long run, because it makes people distrust them, and that’s a thing that puts you in a disadvantageous position in general.
I mean, it’s a really competitively efficient system. We outpaced the rest of the world on a lot of things for a while there. We even have the 1% self-exploiting with highly specialized skills, 3X as likely to work more than 50hrs a week. All gas, no brakes.
The competition = efficient / spurs invention is mostly a myth.
The peak period of US inventions, was from ~ 1930-1980, when it was forced (by the USSR’s rapid growth) to adopt a similar public-planning model, and allocate a ton of resources to public projects. This article gets into it.
There’s also the book, The people’s republic of wal-mart, which isn’t the best, but it does contain one good argument: companies like Wal-mart and Amazon are many times the size of the GDP of even many countries, and they don’t compete internally, and use full-scale planning, with information provided at every level. It shows a few cases where companies tried to emulate the “compete = win” by splitting their company into many competing divisions, and of course the companies quickly imploded because of the massive waste of resources.
Another good book on this is CJ Chivers - The Gun. It compares the history around the development of the AK-47 (which was collectively designed and had input from many state-level entities), vs the M16’s development, and how these two different development models affected their success.
I’m really interested in those books, thanks for citing them.
But peak period? You’re missing the whole information age. In AI alone, we lead the world.
And competition from the USSR is competition, too. You’re right that top-down planning is ideal for a lot of things, so the definition of ‘competitively’ I most intended was more like ‘stronger than other countries.’In AI alone, we lead the world.
*Deep Seek has entered the chat.*
“can i run the government?”
yes, just place your head through this hole and we’ll pull the big lever that makes you god-king
I’m not living in USA but I think people got exactly what they voted for, didn’t they?
Now the question of it being an educated vote and people being equipped to navigate modern media with modern disinformation techniques is another subject.
I mean, the electorate is definitely unqualified to pick their own leaders, but that’s what decades of gutting education funding with absolutely no public pushback gets you. An unqualified electorate elects unqualified representatives.
I mean, if you count the (registered) non-voters, which I think is more than fair considering the fact that Harris and Trump only represent a fraction of the (electorally viable) politics expressed in the US, Trump only scrapes about 46%.
The American political system has been designed to disenfranchise as many people as possible. Some ways are overt, like disenfranchising and deregistering black, ethnic, and imprisoned citizens (the latter don’t even count towards that 54%!). How about the ways democrats and republicans explicitly outlawed “third” parties such as PSL, Greens, Libertarians on some state ballots?
Less overt ways are how most of the American electoral process is carried out during the working week, with zero affordance to workers to vote unless by post (inherently less secure) or by the altruism of their bosses. Disabled and elderly people are simply ignored if they wish to vote in person.
Then the final way Americans are disenfranchised is the simple act of alienation of the political class from the working class. No matter who won in November, most of these crises would be playing out in some form.
Elon may accelerate some of the rot, but oligarchs have had direct control of the American political system for its whole existence. American bombs would still be raining across the middle east, the Ukrainian war would be unjustly spilling blood in the name of empire, abortion would still be illegal across most of the US, and the govt would do nothing to challenge spirally costs of living for workers.
Not really. The people get only two choices of candidates who are selected by campaign popularity. Those candidates have to raise the money for it by themselves, which means making truthful private campaign promises to their donors while making false promises to the public.
That’s fair. In France law requires transparency on how you fund your campaign and sets a limit. We often have candidates who bend the rules but justice at least make it harder.
Ofc it’s hard to compare our two countries, the US is a fking continent.
If france is anything like the UK, I’m sure there are many ways for the capitalist class to exert influence over their choice of candidate.
In France our main concern is about “Bolorisation”, which is about two billionaires owning most of the mainstream medias (including Vincent Bolloré, hence the name). We still have major independant papers but they hardly choose what’s on the public debate.
Yeah that’s what I meant by my initial message, there people still have access to somewhat reliable source of information, mostly thanks to publicly owned TV and radio, but it’s very very very fragile right now. Education to media and information would be critical to navigate this mess, but we suck at this.
brilliant insight. merci beaucoup mon ami!
And both governments are disgusting
i disagree :)
Hi tankie!
Not a fan of the Uyghurs, eh?
What’s disgusting about China’s government?
the dictatorship of capital vs the dictatorship of the proletariat
Just the fact that financial crimes over a certain amount are punishable by death in China (and people have actually been executed for them) says a lot. It’s a law that literally applies only to the rich because a normal person would never even get to glimpse the amount of money required for execution to be on the table.
George Carlin skit about executing corrupt bankers on live TV
He was right, too. A few bankers and politicians get the wall and, what do you know, suddenly being very rich is good enough for a bunch of these corrupt fucks.
Nobody deserves the death penalty. It’s just cruelty with no benefit for the society. Studies show, time after time, that it has little to no deterrent effect. Its only purposes are either narrow-minded vengeance or preventing a person from being freed once the current government fails.
That said, I’m all for confiscating all wealth from anyone worth over a billion dollars and placing them under arrest until they can effectively demonstrate they are no longer a parasite on the society.
tbh you can’t exile people anymore and getting staggering rich requires sustained campaigns of oppressive violence and exploitation.
It’s self defence, you’re talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.
These aren’t like people with FAS trying to do anger management courses because their brains got damaged. They’re unrepentant, remorseless, and cruel. They had the resources to do literally anything to demonstrate contrition and chose not to every single day.
It’s self defence, you’re talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.
It’s definitionally not self-defense to kill someone who’s already in handcuffs. I don’t care if they are straight up evil, no living being deserves to be murdered once they present no actual danger.
If you have a way to rehabilitate them don’t hold back.
That’s kinda irrelevant to murdering someone. But yeah, if you make your prisons places that fix people rather than places for punishment (provide prisoners the ability to learn actually useful skills and put them to use, and offer therapy) I think that even some of the worst parasites, murderers, etc can eventually become useful members of society (see the Scandinavian prison model for how this can be applied quite successfully).
Scandanavia doesn’t rehab billionaires lmao.
Yeah sure, Scandinavian countries are capitalist and thus billionaires are treated as demigods. We still observe that their prison system has better outcomes for everyone involved (convicts & society) compared to US/Chinese system of “prisons as punishment only” and learn from it.
Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of. I don’t care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they’re not worth the manpower required to get them there.
Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won’t do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.
If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you’d see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn’t be worth an arm and a leg.
Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of.
Sure. Confiscate everything they have, confiscate everything their family has, put them in prison. There is little difference in deterrence between that and the death penalty.
I don’t care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they’re not worth the manpower required to get them there.
Whether you care or not is irrelevant when we’re talking about a human life.
Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won’t do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.
Sure. Imprisonment is definitionally violence.
If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you’d see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn’t be worth an arm and a leg.
Or, uh, if this shit was properly regulated in the first place there wouldn’t be as many parasites getting wealthy on it, and there would be no price gouging. Look at the rest of the “developed” world, insulin is basically free there, and 0 executions were needed to get there (unless we’re counting the threat of proletariat revolution, but then the US also had that). Those who would still abuse the system could be imprisoned to stop them from doing so.
What usually happens in China is that, if the accused cooperates, their death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. Otherwise they are indeed executed.
That’s a bit better, I guess? But then China still executes the most people in the world every year, most of them not even billionaires. How many of them are innocent working-class people framed for something they didn’t do? (Hint: historically that percentage is alarmingly high if you look at other countries). Fuck that shit, countries should abolish executions after their socialist revolution succeeds.
The fact that rich people are routinely executed in China is one of the clearest indications that dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved. And this is precisely why China terrifies the west so much.
dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved.
I think it’s a strong indicator that the political class hasn’t been completely bought (yet) but it doesn’t at all look like a dictatorship of the proletariat even a little bit.
Do tell how Chinese system doesn’t look like a dictatorship of the proletariat even a little bit this ought to be good.
That Australian number seems inflated by property. People bought houses 40 years ago for a handshake and a nod and now the houses are “worth” 2 million dollars or whatever. But if you sell your house you need to buy another one and they come in 2 sizes: million dollar family home or million dollar shoebox studio in the city.
So it’s monopoly money.
China has a really high population so the total count numbers are going to seem high.
The second column tells you that it’s a whopping 0.6% of China’s population while every other country is between 2.7% and 8.5%. Guess which country is the 8.5%
yes i know, i was well aware of that when posting it.
Without an educated, informed population and effective, constantly maintained checks and balances on those in power, the end results of either communism or capitalism are going to be exactly the same.
There is no end but the present, which is the summit of time itself
you’re right actually, guess who said this
What is the working-class movement without socialism?—A ship without a compass which will reach the other shore in any case, but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass.
All these things happen far more naturally under communism because systemic pressures favor these things.
What do you mean by “these things”?
I mean that communist system demonstrably results in far better education, and stronger checks and balances than capitalism. Communist countries focus on building infrastructure such as schools and housing, and make education free for everyone. Meanwhile, public ownership of the means of production means wealth isn’t concentrated in the hands of the few. This precludes the problem such as oligarchs owning media and then manipulating public opinion in their own interest. Hope that clears things up for you.
It does, thanks. And I agree. I don’t claim to know what the perfect system is, but I believe it would be some form of democratic socialism with some sort of magical built-in safeguard against wars of misinformation of the type we’re seeing now.
I don’t think anybody knows what a perfect system is, and there simply might not be one. Any system will have a set of trade offs in the end. What we can do though is look at what sort of selection pressures different types of systems create, and try to tune the rules in a way where individual interest aligns with the common interest. It’s going to be a process of trying things, seeing how they work, and iterating. Most people can now see the problems that capitalist relations create, and socialism is a way to address these problems. It’s also worth noting that socialism is inherently democratic in nature.
What about the intermediate results?
What about them?
Even if the ends are the same, how it reaches there and how long it takes to reach there are also concerns
Power and wealth control governments … every government.
Once humanity figures out how to provide more equitable power and wealth to every person everywhere, then we might be able to evolve beyond jungle rules.
In the meantime, it doesn’t matter what you want to call it … communism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, whatever … as long as we allow unlimited wealth and power to flow to small groups of people, any system will always end up with the same results.
Inequality absolutely needs to be eliminated to have a truly equitable society. That said though, it’s pretty clear that China does have a dictatorship of the proletariat in place. If it didn’t then same things we see happening in capitalist societies would be happening there as well.
I don’t support the CCP, but I do think about these things. How do you create an open system like a democracy that leverages some of the benefits of capitalism, while also insuring economic inequality is minimized and every citizens basic needs are met, without gradually seeing the rich gain influence in that system over time, corroding the protections that make it work? I think as long as the system is open, the rich will use their power to gradually gain advantage and then destroy the system itself. I think the only real shot at it would be for wealth to be seriously capped. Like, no one person can have more than 100% more wealth than the bottom 1%. Anything above that should be taxed away. Also, corporations are not people and corporations should not have shareholders that are not workers.
The PRC largely keeps their bourgeoisie in line by holding almost all of Heavy Industry and large firms in the Public Sector. The owner of a rubber ball factory has far less influence over the economy than the Rubber Factory. In the PRC, banking, energy, steel, infrastructure, and many more critical industries the Private Sector must rely on are held in Public hands. That’s the basis of SWCC.
Time will tell if this was the “correct” choice, but so far the gamble appears to be paying off. There’s a long way to go, but the path forward is open and not closed.
Honestly I’m not the biggest fan of everything in China but these are the types of problems the Chinese government seems to try to figure out a lot more than our governments do.
Strengths and weaknesses. Each country has some. Often the net makes them worse than other countries, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have better aspects
Meh. Most countries round the world seem to suffer from the same problems to me. Sometimes the jack boot on your neck presses down more. Sometimes less.
