thoughts on these critiques:
- I mean, I don’t think it’s a camp so much so as it is reality. Dengism has pushed forth a disastrous capitalist restoration that every single CPC government has done ever since, workers have been continually disenfranchised and chinese capitalists pop up everywhere and establish businesses that exploit the proletariat
- how can a country be a dotp without its basis of government being soviets they give bourgeois the right to vote and participate in government.
- Beijing has legally and specifically preserved capitalist governance where it can during dengism (Basic Laws in Macau, Hong Kong), but even Hong Kong is being outcapitalisted by the mainland, with Shanghai and even Shenzhen surpassing Hong Kong in terms of commerce and trade, points of great pride for Beijing despite this very clearly not being socialist
- the 1918 russian constitution officially denied political power to the nobility and bourgeoisie anyway, universal right to vote is inherently bourgeois. ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS this is very basic stuff
but socialist states shouldn’t have carte blanche to abuse workers
Scandinavian countries have trade unions; Norway in particular has labour unions that have enough leverage (for now) to help maintain the largest per capita pension fund in the world with one of the highest HDIs in the world. It could be argued amongst the west it has an extensive welfare state. Does all of that make Norway a socialist country or is it still a capitalist country (tip: it’s still a capitalist country)? Would having pro-social projects negate its overall dictatorship by capital?
On the counterside, would elements of capital negate the socialist state? If so, what is your scientific theory of liberation for the global south that supercedes marxism-leninism?
See, here, socialism is scientific. We went with presumptions of your westernism (you are not alone in thinking like this and a lot of us on these threads were liberals before we were MLs) to see where it took us. Armchair socialism never has to truly consider the realities of how to survive the siege by the west; it only needs to romanticise revolution.
Allowing capital mechanisms under the dictatorship of the proleteriat will bring its own contradictions; it does not mean “carte blanche” and those contradictions will have to be resolved but China does not have to stand up against Western “purity” tests.
Further reading, if you are interested:
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8707769/6781575
it’s not about purity, if workers don’t control their workplace they still need mechanisms to assert themselves against their employer collectively. even if there’s no formal structure you can’t completely prevent wildcat strikes, spontaneous walkouts etc. the siege isn’t an excuse to not provide PPE or something that the government might not act quickly enough on.
You’re going to have to convey you at least understand the counter-perspective otherwise you just come across as a chauvinist bigot.
Why the white-mans-burden perpsective? You can’t help yourself? Even if what you say is true (it’s not), it’s a worker’s state and therefore it’s their contradiction to resolve; you’re giving the impression of larping while conveniently dovetailing western hegemonic narratives. Plenty of NGOs that fit this mould crying crocodile tears.
Think what the logical end point of what you are implying; you feel workers’ rights have not been sufficiently addressed and they ultimately do not have an outlet to address this… in a worker’s state. Which means you really don’t think it is one.
Westernism is a disease.
what white-mans-burden? i’m saying workers need to have mechanisms to refuse work under unsafe conditions, dispute management, etc. the details are up to them.
If a state has achieved socialist revolution already, then their foremost task becomes the historic defeat of international capital. After that, may the unions flourish and all employers weep. The proletariat of the USSR enjoyed comforts that they have not known since the triumph of international Capital in the 1990s - turns out their (state controlled) employers were the least of their problems.
and the workers, short of literally self-administering… i’m repeating myself.
I’m a bit tired so I’m not sure I’m following.
I agree that workplace protections and whatnot should be provided by any AES state - and China outperformed every other nation on worker protections during COVID - I think this speaks to the alignment between the DotP and China’s citizenry.
Such a strange thing to say. From where do you think socialist states should receive consequences? Internally or externally?
If internally, then socialist states do not have carte blanche to abuse workers because their citizens hold them accountable.
If externally, then you’re just being chauvinistic
internally, of course, and for acute problems with a particular employer striking may be appropriate in hybrid systems where workplaces aren’t actually socialized yet…
Then, of course, socialist states don’t have carte blanche to abuse workers because they are accountable to their citizens.
if the workers don’t own and control the means of production they still have an adversarial relationship with their employer. it’s not really about how accountable the government is, the NPC isn’t making scheduling decisions at thousands of companies.
You, like the OP, are confused.
Under socialism, workers do not own the means of production the way they would own them in bourgeois society. This is because private ownership of the means of production is abolished under socialism. The means of production become part of the Commons, like a national park. No one owns national parks. They are part of the Commons.
Governments exist to manage the conflict between opposing interests to benefit the ruling class. Under socialism, the ruling class is the workers. Sometimes individual workers or small groups of workers will have an interest that competes with the interests of the working class as a whole. This is normal when the interests of the working class are distributed among a massive population, living in a complex world, where not everyone can see every single aspect of every single issue.
Therefore it is entirely possible for some workers to have an adversarial relationship with the state at some times while simultaneously the working class does NOT have an adversarial relationship with the state. This is because classes and people are different things that have different relationships to different phenomena.
You already know this, but haven’t made this connection yet. The working class can control the means of production while individual workers do not. The working class can control the means of production while no workers in a particular factory have the ability to determine what it produces. The working class can control the means of production while some workers are anti-war and other workers are demanding the maintenance nuclear weapon systems for national security.
Whether the working class controls the means of production is not tested by determining if any particular group of workers can strike without consequences, it is tested by the relationships between the working class and other classes, by the relationship of the classes to the state, by the incentive systems and systems of control that exist in society and how those systems relate to the classes.
ok i was talking about AES
Are you asking specifically about China where the working class controls the state and the state works in the interest of the working class? Because in that AES state, they have a class collaborationist strategy that maintains profit as an incentive subservient to the incentive of building a sustainable working class society.
The purpose of that collaboration is to develop the society while it is besieged by imperialism hell bent on destroying it. In what appears to be a contradiction, the collaboration of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is required for the eventual resolution of the contradiction of class society. This is an example of the dialectics of 1-into-2. The classes are not separate independent entities that engage in conflict and overcome one another. The classes are of the same root - they are all just humans living in society. The resolution of the contradiction of class society is not the wholesale destruction of one class by another but rather the withering away of the distinction between the classes into their undifferentiated social humanity.
and that magically eliminates labor disputes?
A socialist state doesn’t have a reflexive need to abuse its workers, we project that onto them due to our own inability to oust our capitalist ruling class. Have we not observed astronomical gains for the proletariat under historic actually existing socialist states?
I guess I’m sympathetic to unions in mixed socialist economies - but I don’t see the need post-revolution to spark unrest that can be beneficial to international capital.
of course but AES haven’t resolved all the contradictions. if class sizes balloon and the government drags its feet building new schools and training more teachers why shouldn’t they eventually strike if they have to force an issue?
Yes. But the primary contradiction remains to be imperialism. That is the task that cannot be equivocated on. It has primacy to all else - sometimes this means civil society is non-ideal - it’s a similar strategy to war-economy and I don’t aim to glorify that; I naturally would love to see socialism stand on its own merits and operate in good faith with other nations (so long as nations exist). But, the fall of the USSR, if nothing else, should teach us to defend our remaining AES states - each one that falls is comparable to surrenduring a century of working class struggle.
Speaking in good faith with fellow comrades, we can be critical of AES states - but what OP has done in this thread is call into question the validity of China’s DotP, and in so doing, has undermined their popular support - and this is not to be tolerated. Painting China as equivalent to a Dictatorship of the Bourgeosie is something I will not tolerate as it is no better than those who mocked the USSR as a “totalitarian d e g e n e r a t e d worker’s state” - not caring that the fall of that state would cast its working class into a period of acute struggle on such a scale that natural disasters cannot compare. I just really have lost my tolerance for people criticizing post-revolution societies from the perspective of pre-revolution society. Why fixate on other states (and for the love of all that is holy why AES states among them all) while your own capitalist-class still lords over you? I think they deserve your attention more.
i don’t think i was doing that
i only initially commented because
i can imagine situations where such labor activism would be justified within AES. not being the primary contradiction doesn’t mean workers should just roll over or be legally prevented from protecting themselves if other structures fall short in some instance.
OP was painting China as a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie (and then your initial comment operated to reinforce his point).
It being the primary contradiction means those same workers better be ready for the blackest reaction and generations of trauma if they cause the barrier that exists between them and outright capitalist/fascist exploitation to fall.