Cowbee [he/they]
Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us
He/him or they/them, doesn’t matter too much
Marxist-Leninist ☭
Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don’t know where to start? Check out my Read Theory, Darn it! introductory reading list!
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It’s really just theater, both uphold the interests of capital.
Pretty sure both parties are genocidal imperialists.
Centrism, as in what? The center of the Statesian political parties? Then yes, considering both parties are right-wing. The center of two arbitrary points? Depends on the points. “Centrism” is inherently an irrational way to describe political views, being in the center of two points adds no value. If someone says we should kill everyone with glasses, and someone else says we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t kill half of the people with glasses. What centrism does in practice is give people cover to obfuscate their actual views, it isn’t a position by itself.
44·2 days agoIn my experience, the ones that get truly censored are the ones that either are insistent on repeating outright misinformation, or genuinely break the rules via ableism, racism, homophobia, etc. I speak with plenty of people that disagree with me on Lemmy.ml, and they usually only get temp-banned if they do one of those things. Permabanning is more for repeat offenses.
As for it being MLs vs. the world, that really isn’t my experience either. I organize in real life with people that don’t align with me 100% all the time, and when I’m on Hexbear I obviously get along with Maoists, anarchists, etc. as well. The source of major beef between lemmy.world specifically and Lemmy.ml specifically is as I said, western progressive liberal vs. Marxists, or even more generally liberal vs. leftist.
If there’s something you’re interested in discussing, I’m fine to do so, but I don’t normally like engaging in spaces that defederate from Hex and Grad, ie apply a blanket firewall against the majority of Marxists on Lemmy. Discussion in non-Marxist spaces, where the majority of commenters are insulated from Marxists, usually results in the kind of slapfighting you see all over this thread over real conversation.
In spaces that actually allow strong Marxist participation, discussion around Marxism is more intricate, such as this conversation about the subject of “Dengism” I had with someone more critical of China over on Lemmygrad. This is just one example, but it isn’t just a one-sided censorship campaign. I have been permabanned from Political Memes for pointing out the DNC’s participation in the Palestinian genocide, and from every comm PugJesus moderates because they lost an argument in an unrelated comm. I’m banned from Memes of Production for “voting while tankie,” because Deceptichum defended Hungarian Nazis for opposing the soviets. It’s tiring.
All in all, I mean this to say that discussion goes both ways, and it isn’t simply because Lemmy.ml unilaterally censors.
You don’t have to take them purely at their word, you can look at tangential topics, such as crime rates, conviction rates, how the police work, etc to see if the claims match up. Even if they did post the totals, you’d still have people claiming they were made up.
Fair point, yes, though I also included sexual assaulters, who are statistically more likely to be workers.
Yes, those as well. The PRC is strict about drugs and prostitution in general. I wasn’t meaning a full, comprehensive list, but to say that the death penalty is popularly supported there and largely applied for the most serious offences.
It’s definitely a contested subject, and I have the “benefit” of falling squarely into undisputed settler territory so there’s no ambiguity. This is just the perspective I have heard so far on the subject, I know mestizo aren’t indigenous directly but it’s not the same as the sheer obliteration of indigenous populations at mass scale as in Canada and the US. I still support indigenous movements throughout south and latin America, of course, as I do in the US/Canada.
I’m pretty sure they were just taking a knee-jerk reaction deliberately. I could have said I think puppies are cute and they would have accused me of animal abuse.
They publicize lots of the information, even if they keep the total secret, and we know that crime rates in the PRC are very low in general. The police don’t even carry guns most of the time. Is it a perfect system? By no means. Is it a regularly improving, functional system? Yes.
Any evidence of this?
I’m against the death penalty in most circumstances, but in the case of China it’s largely for corrupt CEOs and sexual assaulters. I’d prefer more of a focus on rehabilitation, but I’m not going to say the PRC is executing people willy-nilly.
I agree that for users it’s pretty obvious because of that, but for those not on .ml it can seem a bit jarring. There’s a split identity between the de jure “FOSS/Privacy” focus .ml is supposed to be for, and the de facto “widely federated communist instance.”
Yes, generally. I can be more specific and say “western progressive/Marxist” beef, ie beef between western progressives and Marxists, but that beef is also just generally the liberal/leftist beef.
I’m not really looking for a fight, either, nor an argument. I generally value productive dialogue, but often that gets shut down by people that don’t want that, so it spirals into arguments. See this “exchange” as an example.
The PRC isn’t imperialist, though. For example, BRI isn’t imperialist, because it results in mutual development. Where the west goes in and plunders and underdevelops the global south, countries in BRI see rising wages and industrialization, escaping the endless trap of imperialism. Does China benefit too? Absolutely. Is it imperialism? No. Here are some good articles:
Instead, Imperialism is characterized by the following:
-The presence of monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.
-The merging of bank capital with industrial capital into finance capital controlled by a financial oligarchy.
-The export of capital as distinguished from the simple export of commodities.
-The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations (cartels) and multinational corporations.
-The domination and exploitation of other countries by militaristic imperialist powers, now through neocolonialism.
-The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers.
The global north, Europe and the US included, uses this export of capital to super-exploit foreign labor for super-profits. It also engages in unequal exchange, where the global south is prevented from moving up the value chain in production, allowing the global north to charge monopoly prices for commodities produced in the same labor hours.
The point I am making isn’t simply about land conquering, but an ongoing process of shifting surplus value and resources from the imperialized to the core. Finance capital is the primary mechanism by which this functions.
As for Tibet, Tibet was a feudal slave society backed by the CIA. The PLA liberated Tibet.
Two exerpts from Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth:
CW: descriptions of torture
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” [12]
Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeatedremoved, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. [18]
As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed. [20]
The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery. [21]
The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
Selection two, shorter: (CW sexual violence and mutilation)
The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. [22]
Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” [23] Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. [24]
In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who wasremovedd and then had her nose sliced away. [25]
-Dr. Michael Parenti
Tibet is no longer under such a tortured regime, and has since seen skyrocketing quality of life metrics like life expectancy, industrialization, and more. The west uses the narrative of “oppression” as though the working classes of Tibet want to return to such brutal conditions, but in reality it’s the former aristocracy and the Dalai Lama that wish to return to their positions as a ruling class.
I don’t actually disagree with making it clear that Lemmy.ml is communist-friendly.
I know perfectly well what Marx is talking about. Socialist states, as they exist in real life, are that dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. Until all production and distribution is collectivized globally, there will not be the grand stage of communism, and instead we are in the radical transformation between capitalism and communism called socialism.
Critique of the Gotha Programme is also quite helpful:
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
The transition between capitalism and communism is long, messy, queer, gradual, protracted, bumpy, and involves working out many contradictions.
Sure, so in instances where socialism continues we can tell that it enjoys popular support. The soviet union dissolved, but we have billions living in socialism happily. I’m aware that one can say something and not mean it, but the fact that that’s possible does not mean that it’s always the case. You in particular never make any meaningful points, you cast a silly phrase or two and then act like everyone else is unreasonable.