• cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    8 months ago

    Then why does a communist party still govern China? Can someone who subscribes to the conspiracy theory that China is just pretending to be socialist please, please answer me this? What is the purpose of continuing this pretense of communism that is drawing the ire and hostility of the capitalist West? Why this elaborate decades long charade?

    If the bourgeoisie rules in China why does it not switch to a liberal bourgeois democracy, like the former Soviet republics and other ex-socialist states did? Or conversely, if pretending to be socialist is somehow in some convoluted way advantageous for the bourgeois class, why do they not do this same game of pretending to be communist in the West?

    Why do the West’s bourgeois states and media demonize communists and communist states while in China, which is supposedly also ruled by the bourgeoisie, they do the opposite? Do you think that Chinese bourgeois for some reason just gain some perverse enjoyment from playing pretend when they wouldn’t need to do so to be in charge?

    Why do they curtail their own profits by allowing such heavy state regulation and such a large state owned sector of the economy? Why do they not adopt the West’s neoliberal model? And why do they punish themselves much more harshly for corruption than would ever occur under liberal democracy? Please make it make sense.

    P.S. mods, if an ultra/lib actually answers me please don’t ban them, i genuinely want to hear their explanation.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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      8 months ago

      Liberals at the same time think Russia is communist while Putin explicitly says they’re as bourgeois as them, and China is capitalist while Xi explicitly speaks about Marxism-leninism.

      • SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        I remember a poll I saw a few years back where a majority of Americans said something along the lines of “communism and dictatorship are the same thing”, and ever since then the way certain people sling around accusations of communism made a lot more sense to me.

        • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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          8 months ago

          I mean a lot of “leftists” dont even know what communism is either. Even some self called marxists dont know what marxism is.

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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        8 months ago

        It’s a good thing that mental gymnastics is not an olympic discipline because western liberals would be taking home the gold every single time. They are very, very confused.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      I’ve heard it phrased several ways, all of which are a little ludicrous:

      • The Chinese public is too brainwashed to know what socialism is
      • The Chinese government pretends to be socialist and that’s good enough for people living in cities, but people in rural areas actually want to revolt (but don’t?)
      • China is so backwards and evil they rewrote the meaning of what socialism is, and the public is too brainwashed to know the difference
      • Inevitable comparison to the Nazis being “national socialists”

      Ultras and liberals don’t come at this from the same angle. Ultras believe socialism only exists when value has been completely removed from the economy. Liberals just use racism and say there’s no way China can be socialist because only white people can do that correctly, like they’ll point to Sweden and Norway or whatever.

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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        8 months ago

        Yep. It always goes back to western chauvinism. They’d rather instead that they are smarter than the 1.4 billion people in China and that those people are a inscrutable orientals than they would like to admit that maybe China is successful socialism.

    • SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Then why does a communist party still govern China?

      The most coherent answer to this is “because the Chinese people still believe in communism, the ruling class must pretend to be communists.” But the more common answer you’ll get from a liberal is “Communism is when you have a dictator and the Chinese are brainwashed into liking having a dictator.”

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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        8 months ago

        So the claim is that the bourgeoisie in China has all the power and wealth and yet are somehow simultaneously hostage to their own population? What a peculiar system China must have where the government is accountable to the wishes of the people. Wish we could have that kind of not-socialism here in the West too.

        On a serious note though, the people of the USSR by and large still believed in communism even into the late 80s yet that didn’t stop the traitorous clique who had managed to infiltrate the party from destroying socialism and openly restoring bourgeois rule. There was considerable resistance to the dissolution of the USSR, to which Yeltsin responded by sending tanks to shell the parliament.

        Does anyone really honestly believe that if enemies of socialism managed to seize power in China they would not seek to dissolve the socialist system as soon as possible and openly declare China as capitalist, then immediately calling on the West to help them stay in power by any means necessary while instituting shock therapy? How does that square with every other counter-revolution that we have ever witnessed?

        Accusations of revisionism at least i would understand…if it was still the 1980s and we didn’t know how the situation would develop in China over the next 40 years. But to actually believe that capitalists having seized power would go on pretending to stil be communists for half a century is frankly incomprehensible and absurd to me.

        How are the Chinese people so powerful and so staunchly communist that their supposedly bourgeois rulers are afraid of them finding out the truth and have to continue larping as commies, yet simultaneously so stupid or gullible that they cannot distinguish between capitalism and socialism? Like, i’m sorry but this shit only makes sense if you’re racist toward Chinese people.