Well, considering communism has lifted 800M people out of abject poverty in under a century, while both feudalism and liberalism produced and reproduces that abject poverty, even in the face of industrialization and massive productivity increases, I would say that the problem is class society and the contemporary liberal’s inability to understand history.
They killed far far fewer than the Americans, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, Germans, Portuguese, etc.
The ends don’t justify the means when mass murder is involved.
The fact that we are in a thread that is crying about the retreat of Western “democracy” says otherwise (got my threads mixed up)
In this case the status quo was created and is maintained by mass murder, and attempts to change it are met with mass murder. At a certain point, if you want to fix things, you have to be prepared for the defenders of the status quo to come at you with violence.
They killed far far fewer than the Americans, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, Germans, Portuguese, etc.
Sorry to be this person but…whataboutism - this doesn’t address the actual argument.
There’s a reasonable argument in there, but you need to defend from the position of "would these people have been lifted out of poverty and/or fed through the meat grinder under another system too, even if that system was a western one.
I think this thread is largely actually anarchist leaning which also means you’re up against a different set of arguments than you’re maybe used to? Anarchists are going the be the harshest critics of any ends/means derived argument, more or less definitionally. They don’t really differentiate between Kissinger, Stalin, or Mao committing mass murder for jollies, it’s all abhorrent.
I am used to anarchist arguments. This is a good thread to explain my understanding.
Citing the English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish is not whataboutism (German and Belgian, sure), because all of these countries were actively mass murdering people in China, India, and the rest of Asia for several centuries before Mao showed up. We’re not operating in a vacuum here, where Mao killed millions and before him there was no mass murder based on hierarchy. Mao’s project was explicitly resistance against a multi-century mass murdering international hierarchy that was directly occupying the major population centers in the region, murdering through both direct and indirect violence, and continuing to strengthen their control over the people there.
Mao raised a peasant army to fight back, not only against the hierarchal foreign oppressors but also against the factions within in China who operated under the theory that if they helped the foreign oppressors they would be safe and rich.
We’re not talking about Mao just up and killing people for laughs. We’re talking about Mao ending the hierarchal dominance imposed on the Chinese people by foreign invaders.
As for the means/ends position of anarchism, I have respect for the intuition behind it but find it completely bankrupt in reality. In China, the Europeans were selling opium to Chinese people - means of totally free exchange without dominance. Except the result was addiction, death, and social destruction. The Chinese government decided to ban opium sales and seized the opium that was on their national territory - a completely hierarchical means of dominance. The English decided that they would “defend the freedom of commerce and exchange” and “resisted” the Chinese government by bombarding them with their (at the time) totally unstoppable navy.
Anarchist means/ends is, in the end, indistinguishable from liberalism, which is why anarchism contains both AnComs and AnCaps. Choosing to put ideals over people’s lives is not something I can respect.
You’re right that Mao has to be understood from the perspective of historical imperial rule but I think you’re conflating a lot of different murder into one big “justified” blob. We can recognize the legitimacy of resisting imperialism, landlordism, and the Kuomintang’s repression while questioning the concentration of political authority in the Chinese Communist Party and the violence that came out of it.
I am used to anarchist arguments. This is a good thread to explain my understanding.
I’m not really convinced? This feels like the populist “anarchists just don’t like following rules” take. There are plenty of mechanisms in a non-totalitarian society for rejecting drug abuse or foreign manipulation. Anarchists would typically do this at the community level rather than through a centralized authoritative party apparatus and given the nature of drug use/abuse that methodology also provides a more effective counter given what we know about human psychology.
You’re right that Mao has to be understood from the perspective of historical imperial rule but I think you’re conflating a lot of different murder into one big “justified” blob.
No. I’m not. Even the concept of justification itself is suspect. The process occurred the way it did because of the historical and material context in which it occurred. That includes mistakes, excesses, and abuses. The net result was positive and there were no other alternatives except in the minds of idealists who are examining the process at a remove. This is what the term critical support means. The CPC itself acknowledges the mistakes, excesses, and abuses of Mao as such. There is no need for anyone to say those things were justified, but there is also no need to say that the reason the movement for communism is bad is because there are mistakes, excesses, and abuses.
We can recognize the legitimacy of resisting imperialism, landlordism, and the Kuomintang’s repression while questioning the concentration of political authority in the Chinese Communist Party and the violence that came out of it.
Questioning is healthy. We should question, and we do question. Liberals answer with “and therefore it never should have happened and it should be undone”. Communists answer with “It was bad. Shit happens. We’ll do better next time if the context allows.” What do anarchists answer with? Usually with “communism is horrible and should be abandoned as a movement and resisted with anarchic violence.”
This feels like the populist “anarchists just don’t like following rules” take.
Oh absolutely not. No one likes following rules. The problem with anarchism has nothing to do with their preferences for following rules. It has to do with their position that ideas are more important than material reality. For example:
There are plenty of mechanisms in a non-totalitarian society for rejecting drug abuse or foreign manipulation
No. There aren’t. There are ideas about these mechanisms, but there are no successful implementations of these idea. Communists were the same way for a while. When communism was a theory on paper, it was totally unprepared to deal with reality. But no one actually believed that there were “plenty of mechanisms” for organizing a communist society. In fact, the reason the communist left the realm of theory and actually became a world historical process is because the theory explicitly acknowledged that it did not have the answers and it needed to actually go through the messy and difficult process of actually seizing power and then governing in order to advance its theory. Anarchism is much the same way. It has never actually succeeded outside of small enclaves, much like the communists had the Paris Commune, but it is completely indefensible in the face of actual existing power structures.
To repeat, this is the problem with anarchist thought. You believe that there exist real solutions to real problems that could be employed and yet there is no actual existing proof of such mechanisms and certainly none that have worked at the scale a nation even 25% the size of china. Anarchists are willing to tear down and disrupt actual existing anti-imperialist movements in favor of on-paper ideas about how it’s entirely possible to dismantle imperialism without mistakes, excesses, and abuses. Anarchism is idealist - ideas have primacy over reality.
Anarchists would typically do
There is no such thing as “anarchists would typically do”. There is no typical anarchism because no anarchist society lasts very long and there is no consistency between and among them because the ones that do exist for any amount of time operate at a microscale so that they never actually get the opportunity to face the majority of large-scale power conflict problems. What you mean is that “anarchists would typically theorize” because there are exactly zero anarchists communities that have resisted one of the top 5 European imperialist empires specifically on the axis of drug trafficking backed up by a power asymmetry like what China faced with England at that time, or anything even remotely comparable.
given the nature of drug use/abuse that methodology also provides a more effective counter given what we know about human psychology
For it to be effective, it would need to have an effect, which means it would need to be implemented. Theories are only shown to be more effective when they are put into practice. You are confusing your more parsimonious theory with a theory that has been put into practice and had a real world effect. The Chinese program to eradicate opium addiction took 4 years. The addiction at its peak was 10% of the population, 27% of the male population. That is fucking massive and the Chinese approach resolved it in 4 years.
If anarchists want to claim to have a more effective counter, then they’re going to need to implement their program and show an actual effect at scale and over time while under active imperialist siege.
Economic liberalism has raised nearly that many from abject poverty over time as well. The only thing different is the speed run by cribbing other people’s notes. The problem is once hierarchies become set. Abject poverty returns and becomes inevitable.
The only thing different is the speed run by cribbing other people’s notes.
Fucking hilarious. You can just look at homelessness, cost of living, rent, nutrition - by all measures the difference is organizing society to maximize the benefit to the masses.
The problem is once hierarchies become set. Abject poverty returns and becomes inevitable.
China is the longest running communist-led experiment and I know you anarchists have no problem identifying that China has a strong hierarchy and yet poverty alleviation is still happening at a mass scale. So, your “theory” doesn’t fit the evidence
You are comparing late-stage capitalist Nations to ones that are just starting. It’s an apples to oranges comparison. How has allowing for Millionaires and billionaires maximized the benefit to the masses? Talk about fucking hilarious. The rhetoric is good but China’s Praxis is going to fail just like everyone else who’s tried it. It’s already slowing and calcifying. Younger Generations becoming restless and unaccepting of their governments failures. Just like in the west. It’s not magic.
You are comparing late-stage capitalist Nations to ones that are just starting.
The Bolshevik revolution occurred before the Western “green revolution” in agriculture, and they started from serfdom, and still the Soviets were able to achieve poverty alleviation in 30 years that took liberal democracies almost 150 years achieve. And the outcomes after that were still incredible, with rents costing less than 10% of income and homelessness eradicated, things the West has never achieved.
China started in 1949 having been subjugated by multiple European powers and Japan for over a century, with the Western drug dealers getting over a third of Chinese people hooked on opium. They were literally the poorest country on the planet in 1949 and again, within 50 years had achieved more poverty alleviation than the entire Western world combined had achieved in 200. And they did it without taking over an entire continent and committing a genocide that killed 90% of the original inhabitants.
How has allowing for Millionaires and billionaires maximized the benefit to the masses?
The same way capitalism in the West benefited from allowing millionaires and billionaires - efficient allocation of resources in a complex economy. That’s what capitalism is good at. No one argues against that. Even Marx acknowledged why capitalism emerged and the effectiveness of the system.
The difference is that under a liberal ideology of “fuck you, I got mine” we developed robber barons while labor unions were beaten to death by private and state police and coal miners were bombed from airplanes, whereas under a communist party the profit accrued to the millionaires and billionaires went hand-in-hand with massive poverty alleviation. I mean, it’s quite explicit, well documented, analyzed, and all of Communist theory from the beginning can make sense of it. That you think the existence of private wealth pockets must inherently mean that the people get no benefit is you projecting the history of liberalism onto systems that aren’t as depraved as liberalism.
The rhetoric is good but China’s Praxis is going to fail just like everyone else who’s tried it.
So you admit that it hasn’t failed yet, and that far from being purely rhetoric, it’s actually worked.
It’s already slowing and calcifying.
Economic growth is not an independent nation-state thing. It’s a global economy thing. And China’s growth is 2x - 4x higher than the most powerful economies in the West. You’re basically saying that just because it’s winter, the falling temperatures disprove global warming. China’s growth is still second in the world, with India’s growth leading.
Just like in the west. It’s not magic.
The only magic here is just how effective Western propaganda is at making you disbelieve all th evidence in front of you. It’s not magic that communism outperforms capitalism. It’s not magic that communism focuses on the quality of the life of the masses. It’s not magic that liberalism has failed. Liberalism believes in magic like “if we enshrine moral values into our government, we will thrive and prosper”. Anarchism believes in magic like “hierarchies are evil and produce abject poverty and eliminating hierarchies is both possible and will result in thriving and prosperity”
Poverty in soviet union was alleviated only because everyone not important in the party was poor and poverty is usually defined as your income compared to the average.
China I’m not even going to pretend is a communist country, they’re doing capitalism better than most western countries. Having super cheap labour is pretty great for that as it turns out. The main problem western countries have these days is that everyone wants to be paid a ton of money for their work.
Yeah, that’s also not what happened. The move to incorporate markets was done after substantial poverty alleviation. Markets were created specifically to address exactly what markets are good at: allocation of resources in complex fast moving supply chains. Private ownership of land is still impossible, over 50% of the economy is still directly managed by the state planning systems, every major corporation has the state planning system as a stakeholder at all times, violation of the public trust is still punishable by total liquidation up to and including the death penalty. Markets are useful. Again, no one argues that they aren’t. Again, Marx detailed precisely how and why markets are useful. It’s not a surprise, it’s not a shock, and it’s not a violation of communist theory, it’s a validation of it. China is continuously in a process of active development of a society that is not ruled by capital but is instead ruled by the needs of the masses while still solving incredibly complex coordination/resource allocation problems. In the West, markets cause homelessness and food insecurity because markets are the most important thing (to the point where the imperial hegemon will literally invade your country and everyone else will support them for your crime of not using markets). Under communism, markets are less important than housing abundance and universal access to nutrition.
The expansion of marketization in underdeveloped sectors helped stableize their development, but it was not the driving factor for growth. The commanding heights of China’s economy remain socially owned and largely planned, but this isn’t as efficient for developing industries, which is why China expanded marketization. See GDP growth before and after Reform & Opening Up:
In short, they course-corrected to a more traditionally Marxist understanding of economics, and saw increased stability.
At some point it’s like trying to make money in the stock market between 1990 and 2000. No matter how bad your plays are, you’re still going to make money (industrialization, regardless of ideology). I don’t even think there’s much in the original meme about market economies beyond the mere mention of capitalism but one could also argue those are approaching orthogonal concepts at this point?
Well, considering communism has lifted 800M people out of abject poverty in under a century, while both feudalism and liberalism produced and reproduces that abject poverty, even in the face of industrialization and massive productivity increases, I would say that the problem is class society and the contemporary liberal’s inability to understand history.
And how many did those specific communist regimes like Mao kill?
The ends don’t justify the means when mass murder is involved.
They killed far far fewer than the Americans, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, Germans, Portuguese, etc.
The fact that we are in a thread that is crying about the retreat of Western “democracy” says otherwise(got my threads mixed up)In this case the status quo was created and is maintained by mass murder, and attempts to change it are met with mass murder. At a certain point, if you want to fix things, you have to be prepared for the defenders of the status quo to come at you with violence.
Sorry to be this person but…whataboutism - this doesn’t address the actual argument.
There’s a reasonable argument in there, but you need to defend from the position of "would these people have been lifted out of poverty and/or fed through the meat grinder under another system too, even if that system was a western one.
I think this thread is largely actually anarchist leaning which also means you’re up against a different set of arguments than you’re maybe used to? Anarchists are going the be the harshest critics of any ends/means derived argument, more or less definitionally. They don’t really differentiate between Kissinger, Stalin, or Mao committing mass murder for jollies, it’s all abhorrent.
I am used to anarchist arguments. This is a good thread to explain my understanding.
Citing the English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish is not whataboutism (German and Belgian, sure), because all of these countries were actively mass murdering people in China, India, and the rest of Asia for several centuries before Mao showed up. We’re not operating in a vacuum here, where Mao killed millions and before him there was no mass murder based on hierarchy. Mao’s project was explicitly resistance against a multi-century mass murdering international hierarchy that was directly occupying the major population centers in the region, murdering through both direct and indirect violence, and continuing to strengthen their control over the people there.
Mao raised a peasant army to fight back, not only against the hierarchal foreign oppressors but also against the factions within in China who operated under the theory that if they helped the foreign oppressors they would be safe and rich.
We’re not talking about Mao just up and killing people for laughs. We’re talking about Mao ending the hierarchal dominance imposed on the Chinese people by foreign invaders.
As for the means/ends position of anarchism, I have respect for the intuition behind it but find it completely bankrupt in reality. In China, the Europeans were selling opium to Chinese people - means of totally free exchange without dominance. Except the result was addiction, death, and social destruction. The Chinese government decided to ban opium sales and seized the opium that was on their national territory - a completely hierarchical means of dominance. The English decided that they would “defend the freedom of commerce and exchange” and “resisted” the Chinese government by bombarding them with their (at the time) totally unstoppable navy.
Anarchist means/ends is, in the end, indistinguishable from liberalism, which is why anarchism contains both AnComs and AnCaps. Choosing to put ideals over people’s lives is not something I can respect.
You’re right that Mao has to be understood from the perspective of historical imperial rule but I think you’re conflating a lot of different murder into one big “justified” blob. We can recognize the legitimacy of resisting imperialism, landlordism, and the Kuomintang’s repression while questioning the concentration of political authority in the Chinese Communist Party and the violence that came out of it.
I’m not really convinced? This feels like the populist “anarchists just don’t like following rules” take. There are plenty of mechanisms in a non-totalitarian society for rejecting drug abuse or foreign manipulation. Anarchists would typically do this at the community level rather than through a centralized authoritative party apparatus and given the nature of drug use/abuse that methodology also provides a more effective counter given what we know about human psychology.
No. I’m not. Even the concept of justification itself is suspect. The process occurred the way it did because of the historical and material context in which it occurred. That includes mistakes, excesses, and abuses. The net result was positive and there were no other alternatives except in the minds of idealists who are examining the process at a remove. This is what the term critical support means. The CPC itself acknowledges the mistakes, excesses, and abuses of Mao as such. There is no need for anyone to say those things were justified, but there is also no need to say that the reason the movement for communism is bad is because there are mistakes, excesses, and abuses.
Questioning is healthy. We should question, and we do question. Liberals answer with “and therefore it never should have happened and it should be undone”. Communists answer with “It was bad. Shit happens. We’ll do better next time if the context allows.” What do anarchists answer with? Usually with “communism is horrible and should be abandoned as a movement and resisted with anarchic violence.”
Oh absolutely not. No one likes following rules. The problem with anarchism has nothing to do with their preferences for following rules. It has to do with their position that ideas are more important than material reality. For example:
No. There aren’t. There are ideas about these mechanisms, but there are no successful implementations of these idea. Communists were the same way for a while. When communism was a theory on paper, it was totally unprepared to deal with reality. But no one actually believed that there were “plenty of mechanisms” for organizing a communist society. In fact, the reason the communist left the realm of theory and actually became a world historical process is because the theory explicitly acknowledged that it did not have the answers and it needed to actually go through the messy and difficult process of actually seizing power and then governing in order to advance its theory. Anarchism is much the same way. It has never actually succeeded outside of small enclaves, much like the communists had the Paris Commune, but it is completely indefensible in the face of actual existing power structures.
To repeat, this is the problem with anarchist thought. You believe that there exist real solutions to real problems that could be employed and yet there is no actual existing proof of such mechanisms and certainly none that have worked at the scale a nation even 25% the size of china. Anarchists are willing to tear down and disrupt actual existing anti-imperialist movements in favor of on-paper ideas about how it’s entirely possible to dismantle imperialism without mistakes, excesses, and abuses. Anarchism is idealist - ideas have primacy over reality.
There is no such thing as “anarchists would typically do”. There is no typical anarchism because no anarchist society lasts very long and there is no consistency between and among them because the ones that do exist for any amount of time operate at a microscale so that they never actually get the opportunity to face the majority of large-scale power conflict problems. What you mean is that “anarchists would typically theorize” because there are exactly zero anarchists communities that have resisted one of the top 5 European imperialist empires specifically on the axis of drug trafficking backed up by a power asymmetry like what China faced with England at that time, or anything even remotely comparable.
For it to be effective, it would need to have an effect, which means it would need to be implemented. Theories are only shown to be more effective when they are put into practice. You are confusing your more parsimonious theory with a theory that has been put into practice and had a real world effect. The Chinese program to eradicate opium addiction took 4 years. The addiction at its peak was 10% of the population, 27% of the male population. That is fucking massive and the Chinese approach resolved it in 4 years.
If anarchists want to claim to have a more effective counter, then they’re going to need to implement their program and show an actual effect at scale and over time while under active imperialist siege.
Economic liberalism has raised nearly that many from abject poverty over time as well. The only thing different is the speed run by cribbing other people’s notes. The problem is once hierarchies become set. Abject poverty returns and becomes inevitable.
Fucking hilarious. You can just look at homelessness, cost of living, rent, nutrition - by all measures the difference is organizing society to maximize the benefit to the masses.
China is the longest running communist-led experiment and I know you anarchists have no problem identifying that China has a strong hierarchy and yet poverty alleviation is still happening at a mass scale. So, your “theory” doesn’t fit the evidence
You are comparing late-stage capitalist Nations to ones that are just starting. It’s an apples to oranges comparison. How has allowing for Millionaires and billionaires maximized the benefit to the masses? Talk about fucking hilarious. The rhetoric is good but China’s Praxis is going to fail just like everyone else who’s tried it. It’s already slowing and calcifying. Younger Generations becoming restless and unaccepting of their governments failures. Just like in the west. It’s not magic.
The Bolshevik revolution occurred before the Western “green revolution” in agriculture, and they started from serfdom, and still the Soviets were able to achieve poverty alleviation in 30 years that took liberal democracies almost 150 years achieve. And the outcomes after that were still incredible, with rents costing less than 10% of income and homelessness eradicated, things the West has never achieved.
China started in 1949 having been subjugated by multiple European powers and Japan for over a century, with the Western drug dealers getting over a third of Chinese people hooked on opium. They were literally the poorest country on the planet in 1949 and again, within 50 years had achieved more poverty alleviation than the entire Western world combined had achieved in 200. And they did it without taking over an entire continent and committing a genocide that killed 90% of the original inhabitants.
The same way capitalism in the West benefited from allowing millionaires and billionaires - efficient allocation of resources in a complex economy. That’s what capitalism is good at. No one argues against that. Even Marx acknowledged why capitalism emerged and the effectiveness of the system.
The difference is that under a liberal ideology of “fuck you, I got mine” we developed robber barons while labor unions were beaten to death by private and state police and coal miners were bombed from airplanes, whereas under a communist party the profit accrued to the millionaires and billionaires went hand-in-hand with massive poverty alleviation. I mean, it’s quite explicit, well documented, analyzed, and all of Communist theory from the beginning can make sense of it. That you think the existence of private wealth pockets must inherently mean that the people get no benefit is you projecting the history of liberalism onto systems that aren’t as depraved as liberalism.
So you admit that it hasn’t failed yet, and that far from being purely rhetoric, it’s actually worked.
Economic growth is not an independent nation-state thing. It’s a global economy thing. And China’s growth is 2x - 4x higher than the most powerful economies in the West. You’re basically saying that just because it’s winter, the falling temperatures disprove global warming. China’s growth is still second in the world, with India’s growth leading.
The only magic here is just how effective Western propaganda is at making you disbelieve all th evidence in front of you. It’s not magic that communism outperforms capitalism. It’s not magic that communism focuses on the quality of the life of the masses. It’s not magic that liberalism has failed. Liberalism believes in magic like “if we enshrine moral values into our government, we will thrive and prosper”. Anarchism believes in magic like “hierarchies are evil and produce abject poverty and eliminating hierarchies is both possible and will result in thriving and prosperity”
Poverty in soviet union was alleviated only because everyone not important in the party was poor and poverty is usually defined as your income compared to the average.
China I’m not even going to pretend is a communist country, they’re doing capitalism better than most western countries. Having super cheap labour is pretty great for that as it turns out. The main problem western countries have these days is that everyone wants to be paid a ton of money for their work.
Strange how the economies start schmoving after the adoption of a market economy. What a coincidence!
Yeah, that’s also not what happened. The move to incorporate markets was done after substantial poverty alleviation. Markets were created specifically to address exactly what markets are good at: allocation of resources in complex fast moving supply chains. Private ownership of land is still impossible, over 50% of the economy is still directly managed by the state planning systems, every major corporation has the state planning system as a stakeholder at all times, violation of the public trust is still punishable by total liquidation up to and including the death penalty. Markets are useful. Again, no one argues that they aren’t. Again, Marx detailed precisely how and why markets are useful. It’s not a surprise, it’s not a shock, and it’s not a violation of communist theory, it’s a validation of it. China is continuously in a process of active development of a society that is not ruled by capital but is instead ruled by the needs of the masses while still solving incredibly complex coordination/resource allocation problems. In the West, markets cause homelessness and food insecurity because markets are the most important thing (to the point where the imperial hegemon will literally invade your country and everyone else will support them for your crime of not using markets). Under communism, markets are less important than housing abundance and universal access to nutrition.
The expansion of marketization in underdeveloped sectors helped stableize their development, but it was not the driving factor for growth. The commanding heights of China’s economy remain socially owned and largely planned, but this isn’t as efficient for developing industries, which is why China expanded marketization. See GDP growth before and after Reform & Opening Up:
In short, they course-corrected to a more traditionally Marxist understanding of economics, and saw increased stability.
At some point it’s like trying to make money in the stock market between 1990 and 2000. No matter how bad your plays are, you’re still going to make money (industrialization, regardless of ideology). I don’t even think there’s much in the original meme about market economies beyond the mere mention of capitalism but one could also argue those are approaching orthogonal concepts at this point?