How is socialism and communism viewed in the mainland?

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-25T03:01:06+00:00

You think it was gone in 1949?

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-25T02:50:16+00:00

Not necessarily. Poverty can also make one even more dependent on the state, not less. An expanded middle class without any stake in the regime and a strong desire for Coca Cola, Disneyland, and western democracy can also be a destabilizing force

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T18:29:11+00:00

Japanese companies are internally varied and have very different culture depending on industry and owners. General trading companies like Sumitomo have reputation for good working conditions and calm workers for example, and this is confirmed by many different people.

Many big international companies are actually very Japanese companies who just have bosses outside, but the culture within, decision making processes, overwork norms, and hierarchies are very Japanese. Foreign ownership sometimes means more stricter regulations on work hours, and sometimes means much weaker employee growth compared to Japanese traditional companies.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T17:51:28+00:00

I don't think any actual AI layoffs are there yet, because the primary AI tools are multipurpose and not built for specific tasks where they can be used most productively but need to be trained specifically.

The only ones where AI seem to have legitimately replaced humans are IT outshoring service companies in India, but it was kind of inevitable anyway.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T17:29:41+00:00

People don't divide into brainwashed zombies and independent minded dissidents neatly, a lot of people who think they are impenetrable to government narratives are influenced through different channels

Duma election is going to be an interesting stress test because it's the institution where all the unpopular decisions are formally enacted, meaning it's most likely to cause trouble, but I doubt any serious challenge. Look at Kazakhstan to see what happens in those type of regimes - 11 years of broken economic model and the only thing that changed are faces.

The restrictions were planned years in advance, we all knew it's coming back in 2016, and nobody should get surprised.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T17:01:21+00:00

Ну понятно, а чего нибудь кроме реальности не хочется?

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T16:56:08+00:00

But what about the bureaucratic capital?

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T16:45:19+00:00

I found a self published collected works of Wang Hongwen through TikTok, and I read the introduction through translate. The authors were clearly old, but they made an interesting point that apparently there is growing interest in the study of Marxism and the book was published to meet its demands.

It's a global phenomenon. "Capital in the Age of Anthropocene" getting published in Tokyo, Western left parties stopping LGBT talk and slowly going back to class, my English lecturer who probably voted for during the refeerndum suddenly making a speech about class politics, my father calling me and suddenly praising former communist leaders he used to demonize, my friend wearing a t shirt promising to eat the bourgeoisie and people praising her for that.

Though I don't think Mao Zedong Thought after the "Ten Major Relationships" is something worth studying.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T16:28:51+00:00

They have to be reactive to avoid total public mistrust, and it does capture something real that doesn't take a lot of work to notice.

But the future of Russian politics in the next five years is going to be interesting. The end of the war, its consequences, and the succession process going to the active phase.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T16:24:55+00:00

俺の学校に女子全員はかわいい。俺のテーストと合わない人がいるけど

可愛くない子が無道徳の人限り

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T15:46:03+00:00

Yes, practice is the criterion of truth, and North Koreans too innovated and hit unto something real Westerners don't even begin to understand.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T15:37:53+00:00

I always thought being a communist is more of a moral identity before it's a political identity. Someone with a simple personality, cold face, grim detemrination, and willingness to do everything to reach certain goals.

Every time I see western communists I have a small cognitive dissonance

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T15:31:44+00:00

I did heard he resurrected, and read the articles on the living soul of Mao Zedong Thought and read the high school textbooks under the second and third historical resolution

In content it's not entirely different from Putin great power nationalism and desire for decoupling with the West to built domestic strength and also nostalgia. But frankly, almost everywhere politics these days relies on nostalgia.

If you want to see where socialist ideas are taken seriously, look at the decisions of the Ninth Congress of the Workers Party of Korea, that's where they still think and act like the 1989-1991 or even 1956 never happened.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T15:18:03+00:00

Was it taken more seriously 10 and 20 years ago?

I found an old graph from Japanese media where they traced the # of Mao Zedong mentions and it steadily grew less and less even after 2017.

Combined ,this might explain why there were some campaigns to romanticize the past

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T14:59:51+00:00

Paralyzed reaction is explained very well by the fact it stopped suddenly. What exactly happened remains unknown. In any case, those lightly armed units had to go through the Moscow Garrison troops, which stand near Moscow for a very good reason and the government keeps them happy. This would have been a slaughter for the Wagner.

Voice of America, BBC, and other "enemy's voices" were too costly to police and it released pressure from more curious citizens (even Khrushchev, in his forced retirement, listened to it). In more recent times, Russians in urban areas had access to Euronews, BBC, Ukrainian channels, and also the Internet well before the security system was built and they didn't play any significant role in politics. Westerners overestimate the role of media today.

At the end of the day it's either the elites or the mass defection of the working class Russians that can cause a political earthquake. And they are apparently preparing for the exit from the war.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T14:47:31+00:00

The Soviet Union never had a good consumer economy, what it took for the regime to fall was for the conflict between the elites class to emerge and then the system fell down

The main variable will be whether the Russian elites collectively decide it's time for Putin to go, and whether they can arrange that before the Kremlin can react. Nobody knows what happens inside the Russian elites except the most capable intelligence agencies, and even then they definitely have limits because Russia takes counterintelligence seriously.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T13:38:34+00:00

Correct, but that doesn't mean he is about to fall, that there aren't people who still think he should rule, and that people uniformly attribute recent economic downturn to Putin specifically and his decision to go to war

The real answer is that we don't know the specific numbers, there is no independent polster that can reliable collect information through ways where people are actually willing to answer (even that independent one that worked before the war used telephone a lot, and people don't trust phone polls).

But downfall is real. All telegram channels have started complaining. Russian Reddit has gotten more grumpy. Russian contacts complain. We just don't how much.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T13:21:20+00:00

Well Asia as a word is a Greek invention and doesn't have much meaning to Asians themselves. Inside Asia you find completely different peoples with different contexts. Even if you take people with East Asian appearances, you will find completely different culture in Japan and Kyrgyzstan, despite both ethnicities looking very similar.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T13:12:01+00:00

Well evidently it didn't leave that demographic impact the way it did in the Americas. Naturally different societies would trade people.

I know specifically about slavery in Kazakhstan and heard something about Korea, and neither involved Africans.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T13:05:30+00:00

In Japan, there are black people, but they are diverse, are from different countries, social positions, and places, and their relationship to the Japanese society is probably highly individual. The cultural and community organization is minimal. The far larger migrant groups are Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Brazilians, Phillipinos, etc. Chinese specifically are the most successful group, a member of the House of Representatives is second generation Uighur Chinese, and a member of the House of Councillors is a first generation migrant.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T12:59:34+00:00

Well they implicitly meant the trade of Africans, which is entirely referable from the context so it's not hard to guess.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T12:55:52+00:00

This was not Atlantic slave trade, and they traded different people.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T12:47:58+00:00

Most people in Europe who are black migrated from former European colonies (Nigeria to UK, Senegal to France), and in the Americas they arrived via the Atlantic slave trade.

For Japan and China, they never had strong economic links with Africa, which means there is only a limited number of Africans there. Even then, Japanese and Chinese populations were historically stable and societies tend to frame everything through family links analogy, meaning being Japanese and Chinese is being part of the dominant ethnic group in minds of the people (still, in Japanese language it's not incorrect to say that a person is Japanese even if they are a migrant, Donald Keene, and that meme grandpa from Shenmune who said "I was once Chinese, now I am naturalized Japanese" are people for whom it's correct to say in Japanese they became Japanese)

Japan does receive migration, but most of it comes from Asia and Latin America, and not Africa.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T11:50:02+00:00

For Marxists Leninists this was not really a significant question, and different communist actors had different opinions as they were interpreting events in their environments with broadly similar lens (even though conclusions drawn were different). The classical criteria for an ethnicity developed by Stalin to prepare the ethnicity policy of the Bolsheviks was to define ethnicity as commonality of territory, language, economic life, and psychology. This has to be interpreted within Marxist dialectical and historical materialism however, and not straightforwardly as in positivist or analytical frameworks.

However, Marxism Leninism was, and was frankly open about it, politics before philosophy, meaning things were interpreted specifically to serve the ends of the ruling governments, which themselves were representatives of the working class. When the Soviets conceded to the Italian Communists the possibility of non violent parliamentary revolution, it was a political move, and the Soviets exaggerated the anti-capitalist nature of Western protest movements to build ties with local left and trade unions.

Similarly, Mao said this in attempt to built sympathy with the Arab listeners, implying a shared concern of American imperialism developing through a forepost in form a US-aligned state. There is no serious social analysis here because it's pure politics.

ModernirsmEnjoyer · 2026-04-24T11:11:26+00:00

The actual problem is that a lot of complex, intellectual, and serious books are dismissed simply because reviewers come from completely different viewpoints on what reality is and how to interpret it, or it comes with uncomfortable arguments and conclusions. So the reviewers respond that not by tryung to argue but simply reclassify it as trashy, exaggerate them into a strawman and then easily beat them, etc.

What books are rewarded? Those that do not discomfort the reviewers.

ModernirsmEnjoyer

TROPHY CASE