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
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.