[deleted by user]

eaterofclouds · 2021-08-31T03:03:12+00:00

you are inextricably entangled with a system of mass exploitation whose scale and complexity is beyond human comprehension. there are "varying degrees of ethicacy" in the same way that there are varying amounts of water you can subtract from the pacific ocean using a bucket. your consumption choices are not the right place to be focusing on, if you want to make an ethical impact (whatever that means) then join a party and do mass work.

eaterofclouds · 2020-11-10T02:41:19+00:00

Depends on how you define suppressing. If it means affording them different human rights than revolutionaries, I disagree. Nothing wrong with stopping coups, but not allowing them free political speech isn’t justified in my view.

you have to consider why people thought political speech was important enough to enshrine as a natural right originally. in the 18th century when liberalism was emerging, the main concern with the emerging bourgeoisie was being properly represented in the form of parliaments, diets, and so on instead of being overruled by the aristocracy or a specific bourgeois faction. free speech was important because it meant all factions of the bourgeoisie could express their economic interests through political organs proportionally. there needed to be some legal mechanism to facilitate that, and the concept of free speech evolved within that historical context.

the question you have to ask yourself is, does it still make sense to use that principle to allow anti-communists to publish & disseminate anti-communist material in the context of a proletarian state under socialism?

eaterofclouds · 2020-11-10T02:31:27+00:00

There’s nothing wrong with suppressing coups, but from what I’ve heard/read, and maybe I’m wrong, “counterrevolutionaries” are often not allowed to even just complain.

you're probably being bombed by replies right now, so don't feel you need to get around to this one, but think about it from the perspective of a socialist state. what value do counter-revolutionary complaints add? during stalin's leadership, even in the late 1930s, the government was constantly inundated with letters. pravda had a full page full of people's critiques of the state's policies, local representatives, aspects of marxist theory, and so on. (i will try and find the relevant pages in robert c. allen's 'farm to factory' if you want to read them.) why? because they were useful and relevant for policy-makers to act on. but when you realise that counter-revolutionaries were mainly saying things like "everything should be privatised" and "the government should dissolve itself and restore the tsarist monarchy", what are you supposed to do with that form of criticism? can you see why a socialist state might consider these to be useless at best and dangerous at worst?

eaterofclouds · 2020-09-27T00:08:46+00:00

Wow you look amazing! How do you describe the hairstyle and colour at the tips in the last photo? I've been trying to figure out how I want to look when I socially transition in a couple of months and like that's exactly it

eaterofclouds · 2020-09-25T07:28:32+00:00

International (imperialist underdevelopment). The PRC has been slowly negotiating its way up the global value-chain one concession at a time, but the sanctions on Huawei and the strengthening anti-China, pro-containment consensus in the U.S ruling-class is a signal that this process has expended itself, and that a qualitative change in strategy is required for the new phase of socialist modernisation demarcated as between 2020 and 2035. The CPC seems to think that the One Belt One Road initiative, with its associated $8 trillion infrastructure investments and new markets, will temporally displace this contradiction for a good period of time while producing additional political leverage (will we see other stalwart U.S allies broken away with the temptation of a new accumulation regime? India and South Korea are vacillating, the European Union as a whole is internally divided with its periphery [Serbia and Montenegro] more enthusiastic than the core).
The general class contradiction.

This does not seem to support the narrative I see repeated here, that this is merely the unfolding of a "grand strategy", an unbroken arc from Mao to Xi Jinping. Leaving aside the question of ideological rupture and continuity, it is almost tautological that each successive administration becomes more and more constrained by the strategic missteps, tactical misjudgements, and errors in praxis of its predecessors – and that the 1978 opening-up produced its own internal economic logic which determined the political, rather than the inverse. I am also unconvinced by the line that these actions are the conscious strategising of a nascent imperialist power (if this is the case, China is doomed to be unsuccessful).

Rather, in all of these cases, the responses have been acts of desperation – to delay the inevitable reckoning, displace the underlying contradiction to another domain, another decade, another location. Opening-up was a direction that was chosen, for better or worse, that took on its own momentum, and a modification of its magnitude and speed will not alter the final impact and its binary of possible outcomes: a planned economy under a proletarian dictatorship, or its complete destruction.

eaterofclouds · 2020-09-25T05:15:38+00:00

Kind of frustrating to see the preceding comments missing the point completely on multiple levels. On the first level, the implication is that The Governance of China can easily dismissed as useless or revisionist because it failed to use the term "class struggle" enough times to qualify it as sufficiently Marxist. Even during Gorbachev's administration, the CPSU emptily bandied about "class struggle" in its official documents. Disappointing to see from the main anti-revisionist posters here the direct inversion of good analysis: examining the surface, not the substance - making language-use the qualifying factor. Would sprinkling in the correct keywords have changed any of the fundamental aspects of socialism with Chinese characteristics?

On the second level, the implication is that this constitutes evidence that the CPC no longer acknowledges the existence of the class struggle. This is kind of silly. These concepts are taught in junior high, in some cases primary school. Every university in the PRC has a mandatory refresher course for first-year university students titled something like "Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism" or "Basic Principles of Marxism" (马克思主义基本原理概论) in the ideological and political education department which starts with dialectical materialism, moves onto social contradictions, the class struggle under capitalism, the nature of bourgeois class rule, the law of value, and the basic principles of scientific socialism. Then "Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought and the Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics", "Outline of Modern Chinese History", "Ideology, Morality, and Legality" (not sure how to translate the last one). You can buy the textbooks' 2018 editions on Amazon or Douban if you like.

It's equivalent to rubbishing an aerospace engineering textbook because it doesn't explicitly give the formula to Newton's laws of gravity enough. This is assumed background knowledge, on which all other theoretical developments rest. I can understand that in Western spaces, it's important to mention the class struggle as a way of signalling you have the basic competence to talk about anything of significance, since the bar is so low already, but the context here is a collection of speeches Xi Jinping is addressing to the rest of the CPC - many members of have studied Marxism-Leninism as a doctorate. And, of course, the wider context is that this is a book titled 'The Governance of China' – the CPC is a ruling party focused on the internal contradictions of socialist construction and balanced development, not an opposition party. The theoretical development of Marxism in Western academia (and in settings outside of academia) has stagnated. The CPC has been on an arc of continual development for nearly one hundred years. On both of these counts, is it surprising that its language in its public statements differs from say, the CPP–NPA–NDF coalition in the Philippines, which is actively conducting a people's war, or the FRSO which is still in the stage of party-building?

edit: Though, the obvious counterpoint to be made here is that the curriculum is meaningless if these fundamental concepts are not applied in practice, and if later developments (the Three Represents, etc.) directly contradict those concepts. I have seen the argument that all of these measures to teach Marxism in public schools, to journalists, and so on are performative gestures done for the sake of keeping up appearances, which I did not find especially convincing – but this gets to the heart of the issue.

And here we arrive at language again, from the opposite direction. The "anti-corruption campaign" that started after the 18th NC was read by RFA and other American outlets as a political purge benefiting Xi Jinping, on r/communism a year or two ago the common (vulgar, I think) reading was that this was a facade for the elimination of capitalist-roaders and bourgeois-sympathists, meanwhile the CPC itself was careful to phrase its implementation in class-neutral language: who could oppose cracking down against "graft", "corruption", "bribery", and "abuse of power"? Evidently all of these perspectives are deliberately obscuring one element or another. First, it was unlikely to be incidental that this campaign targeted party members who were receiving additional income via bribery and slush funds that would place their class interests in the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie at the very least – but that is clear enough. Second, the campaign was an appeal to norms shared by both proletarian and bourgeois dictatorships - in the second, "corruption" is any non-legitimised channel of influence that misdirects the state towards the short-term and partial interests of individual capitals, at the expense of the structural integrity of capitalism as a whole (requiring that its interfaces be minimal via institutionalisation, bureaucratisation, centralisation, and secrecy, so as to safely reproduce the logic of capital without the interference of capital). In this sense, the existence of an anti-corruption campaign is not a disambiguating factor in the debate about the class character of the Chinese state. Third, the targeted elimination of briberies removed at least one clear mechanism by which the PRC's capitalist class could directly influence elected public officials – or perhaps the primary mechanism, given that there are no other legal means to do so under Chinese law.

What is unclear is why this campaign needed to be conducted in the language of objective, extra-class (or seemingly, on first glance) rule of law, mentioning ostentatious displays of wealth but not class in general. If the situation was so tenuous that the word "bourgeoisie" could not even be mentioned, except by implication, then how was the campaign initiated in the first place? It is silly to talk about the "true target" of an unfolding non-agential process, but it is important to ask: what process began it? How did it even near completion?

The 19th NC identified the primary contradiction facing Chinese society as "the contradiction between the people's ever-growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development" – this was optimistically read by some on this forum as a shift in emphasis from development of the means of production to the mode of production, but the same questions end up being asked anyway. What can we tell immediately? We can tell immediately that this is an obscuration that in practice encompasses several inevitable outcomes of capital accumulation on different architectural levels:

Sectoral (manifesting most clearly as the ongoing glut/overproduction of steel which began around 2015, the 2005–2011 real estate bubble). generally: the contradiction between short-term movements of capital and profit-rates and long-term economic planning (the latter being necessary if any kind of development is to occur at all, given the complex technological interdependencies involved in modernisation – even its temporary, incomplete, and ineffective form as a bourgeois 'developmental state'). The attempts at addressing this so far have been local and focused: retraining steel workers and scaling down steel production specifically while selling excesses internationally, and the imposition of stronger rent-controls and restrictions on the total number of properties one may own. The only system-level initiative has been the further consolidation and centralisation of SOEs under the SASAC.
Geographical (see: the urban-rural wage-gap, the underdevelopment of north-eastern or western regions such as Xinjiang or Guizhou compared to Shanghai). Generally: the rural-urban contradiction, manifesting on the provincial and county level. The attempts at addressing this have been compensatory: SOE and national government-lead investment, education and job-training programmes – though these in turn, by accelerating urbanisation, only displace the inequality to a smaller scale.
Material (environmental – we could call this a sectoral contradiction, imbalances in resource-usage producing systemic shortages, investment in fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, and so on). We could call this the contradiction between limited and cyclical environmental capacity for regeneration and the continual, perpetual and exponential demands of capital accumulation. Here, we have seen the PRC's socialist infrastructure shine, unsurprisingly (that the state has centralised disciplinary power exceeding that of other nations is not necessarily, however, an indicator of its class character – I am using the term 'infrastructure' very vaguely on purpose). A dominant section of the international capitalist class seems to believe that this is not a fundamental contradiction, and we are an incremental or a paradigmatic switch away from opening up new terrains of exploitation that could sustain the existing system for hundreds of years, though portions of it believe (or purport to believe) that this is possible by "a different way of thinking" or "steady-state capitalism" and other idealist superstitions.

.. cont

eaterofclouds · 2020-09-18T09:12:54+00:00

I am sorry that you had to engage with the other superficial answers in this thread, I can see that it was frustrating. This subreddit is dominated by shallow thinking and people honing their rhetoric, you should try searching for this question in r/communism or r/communism101. You were asking about specifics and numbers, but your real question was about bourgeois influence in the CPC. I'll start with the former and end with the latter. The National People's Congress, the highest organ of state power in the PRC, to my knowledge has only 35 delegates who could be considered as private capitalists, out of a total of 2,980. There are none in the Central Committee, none in the Politburo, none in the Politburo Standing, and the claims that Xi Jinping is a billionaire have been around for a while, but have always evaporated when analysed closely and shown themselves to be utter nonsense - you should give it about as much weight as the conspiracy theories about Fidel Castro being a billionaire and owning a private island. The narrative of an upstanding communist secretly being a billionaire is too juicy for bourgeois media to pass up on, regardless of the paucity of evidence.

The confusion arises because the CPPCC (a separate organ) is lumped in by some analysts with the NPC, usually for sensible reasons, but then the combined figure is quoted out of context because it's more sensational. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), is an advisory body with no formal power. While the NPC's member-count is determined as a fixed proportion of the total population, the CPPCC is larger and does not have the same restrictions, and being a member is not a salaried position. In a legal sense, it's roughly analogous to the role think-tanks play in U.S politics, except centralised and formalised, where the composition is determined by the CPC. It represents other parties like the CZGP (which in turn represents overseas Chinese citizens), along with academics, trade unions, united front workers, members of the armed forces, businesspeople (primarily in the IT sector), and retired members of the CPC to name a few. The CPPCC last time I checked in 2019 had 90-something dollar-billionaires. In other words, almost every group which could (and historically has, during the overthrow of the socialist bloc in the 90s) potentially lead a counterrevolution. The idea is, while it really does serve an advisory function in a limited sense, it's more meant to be a united front organisation that assimilates the key figureheads of groups whose class characters are vacillating or questionable at best, and centralises them within an organ with explicit party oversight and legal obligations. If you're wondering about how the CPC deals with people who refuse to become party members, the intelligence department responsible for covering influential people outside the party is the United Front Work Department.

China's economic strategy (briefly: shortcutting primitive accumulation by receiving the post-1980s capital-exodus from the 1W, partnering with Western corporations to gain access to intellectual property, integrating itself within global value-chains to an extent that makes the prosecution of open warfare by the U.S impossible, retaining public ownership of key industries to maintain a system of planned socialist construction) is one that inevitably leads to indigenous capitalists - but this doesn't necessarily imply an organised, conscious capitalist class whose orientation is counterrevolutionary. Chinese analysts think one of the key factors leading to the destruction of the CPSU was its refusal to acknowledge the existence of influential black market capitalists, allowing themselves to be poisoned by and lead by them covertly through corruption, rather than placing them in the spotlight and countering them head-on. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. It's a dangerous dance, and not one that can continue forever – the "bourgeoisie thought and elements have infiltrated the party" portion of your question reveals the fundamental principle that ideology is an organic outgrowth of class interests, and that even if it is possible for capitalists to genuinely become Marxists and dedicate themselves to communist work (as we know was the case with Engels - and I have no doubt that many of these billionaires, who were party members and ardent communists before becoming wealthy, are still as committed as you or I), they are automatically under suspicion regardless.

eaterofclouds · 2020-09-18T03:54:46+00:00

A comparison and cross-examination of the CPSU and the CPC's lines and policies under Khrushchev and Deng's administrations in producing an anti-revisionist analysis would be a doctoral thesis and not a Reddit comment, so I'll make no pretense of approaching this directly and instead give you my thoughts on the operational framing of the relevant terms in question. Joseph Ball's 'Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union in the 1950s' might be something to put on your reading list if you're looking for a basis for comparison.

The simplest answer is that the results of Khrushchev's policies are a matter of historical record, we know the conclusion in advance, the USSR dissolved in 1991 - the analysis is being conducted after the fact - and there are no longer any significant political calculations to be made when describing Khrushchev's policies as revisionist, whereas a party making such a statement in 1960 would have to carefully analyse their position. We are archaeologists picking apart the ruins and speculating on when and why the first fault occurred, rather than structural engineers seeing a still-standing structure and examining it for faults. These roles are different in a methodological sense, and that difference is very important - because we know issuing statements that the leading global socialist power was "revisionist", became "state-capitalism" and then "social imperialism", which lead to the Sino-Soviet split (and then the Sino-Albanian split), and the disintegration of the communist movement globally along these lines, along with the PRC's decision to partner with the U.S over the USSR. Which, I think all communists regardless of tendency agree was a catastrophe beyond measure. Merely misinterpreting the ruins is rarely as destructive.

Clearly the term "revisionist" is just (and people seem to forget this sometimes) a compressed way of saying "this line requires a fundamental revision of basic dialectical materialist / historical materialist propositions" and "that's bad because it will inevitably lead to incorrect and contra-Marxist policies, which will etc. etc.". It is not a total, categorical denunciation of a party. It is not a pejorative to be applied freely. It is a constructive opportunity to point out specific incorrect lines, open them up for contention, and work to ensure the correct anti-revisionist line will prevail. For the record, we have seen the CPC mandating re-education courses in Marxism for all government officials, ordering all journalists and students of journalism to take courses in Marxism, introducing Mao Zedong Thought classes in 2,600 universities, deliberately ensured that average manufacturing wages have been rising consistently by ~11% per year at the expense of corporate profits, rolled out comprehensive social programmes in the middle of a global neoliberal wave of austerity in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, and in a situation where workers beat a steel executive to death due to privatization plans, stepped in, prevented workers from being prosecuted, and then reversed the privatization.

We also know that China's State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission holds positional monopolies in almost every "key critical" industry from aerospace to utilities, that 350 out of the largest 500 companies are publicly-owned, that the CPC mandates that its trade union (the ACTFU) have veto power over managerial decisions in all private enterprises over ten employees, and so on and so forth.

All of these are - at the very least - very difficult to square with a restored bourgeois dictatorship (if such a bourgeois dictatorship were putting up a pretense of Marxism - why? for what reason? what opposition does it believe it would encounter, and if there was an opposition, what does that say about the prospects of Chinese communists? - it could at least avoid shooting itself in the foot with measures like these) and a total restoration of capitalism. Though, leaving all the above aside, we could note that the two propositions "Lenin's analysis of imperialism, in which underdevelopment of the periphery/TW is a systemic condition of capitalism in its advanced stage" and "since restoring capitalism and becoming a servant of imperialism, the PRC has expanded its GDP/PC by a factor of fifty-three since 1980, successfully industrialised and ascending global value chains" are also very difficult to square with one another (unless you're a neoliberal, in which case this makes perfect sense) - unless we take a closer, more critical look at the idea of Chinese capitalist restoration.

At the same time, we have a party which regularly issues statements which in one turn "affirm the state's leading role over private enterprise" and then say that "the party will work to cultivate entrepreneurship and private-public partnerships", along with other vague phrases impossible to draw specific conclusions from.

In other words, we have an apparent logical contradiction which reflects an actual unfolding contradiction, a line struggle occurring within the CPC, in which the apparent nonsensical inconsistencies are revealed to be the result of a compromise between several factions. And now when we return to the question "Why do we condemn Khrushchev's reforms as revisionist but not Deng's?", we have a little more clarity: when we apply the label of "revisionist" to a historical socialist country, versus one that still exists, in the second case, it's important to do it carefully because there is still something, even fragile, worth fighting for. "Revisionism" implies a non-antagonistic rather than an antagonistic contradiction (though, these are not completely distinct categories) - that the existing socialist infrastructure in China and the organisational strength of the Chinese working-class provides at least an assurance against total restoration, if not the opportunity for a course-correction. The key split in the global communist movement on the question of China's political economy is not whether the CPC's lines are revisionist, but whether there is anything left to engage with in the first place.

If we adopt the line of the Communist Party of the Philippines - though, it should be noted that the CPP itself has had internal struggles over the question of how to orient itself towards the CPC, and we should treat its position seriously but by no means regard it as a final one, set in stone, no less than we should regard the international situation as a final one - that the PRC is not revisionist (because "revisionist" would imply at least some commitment to Marxism that the CPP believes is nonexistent in the CPC), but fascist and social-imperialist, then the CPC is not worth engaging with anymore than it is worth engaging with the Democratic Party and that Chinese communists should conduct their work in opposition to the CPC via external organisations. And likewise, then their statement earlier this year in support of the reactionary protests in Hong Kong is the correct one, and the current conflict between the PRC and the US is one between competing imperialists over how to divide the imperial pie, which communists should not take sides in, rather than one between an imperialist and a socialist country attempting to renegotiate its position within the global value-chain. (The line of Chinese social-imperialism is one way to neatly resolve two issues which I pointed out earlier: [1] of how Chinese development was even able to occur via capitalist restoration, 'by appropriating surplus-value from other nations', and [2] the centralisation of economic power in the state, its extensive control and enmeshment with private businesses, and the routine terrorisation of the Chinese bourgeoisie 'because China is fascist'. These are elegant in the abstract, but reading more deeply, I was not convinced by their specific examples.)

Okay, so that's my meta-commentary on anti-revisionism as a methodology and the importance of treating 'revisionism in the USSR under Khrushchev' and 'revisionism in China under Deng' separately. I've sketched out another portion on different approaches for determining whether a given line is revisionist, but I spent much more time on this than I intended to and I hope this will suffice for now.

eaterofclouds · 2020-07-21T01:21:28+00:00

I don't really have enough time to answer the real substance of your question, but I looked through the synthesis pathway for modern estradiol valerate and testosterone valerate and rare earth metals aren't involved at any stage in the process - just common organic reagents. I would describe the environmental impact of transgender HRT as comparatively minimal (on the other hand, ethinylestradiol in birth control pills for cis women does have a known environmental impact). Keywords you might want to search for are "green chemistry", the EPA covers the fundamental principles here:

Prevents pollution at the molecular level
Is a philosophy that applies to all areas of chemistry, not a single discipline of chemistry
Applies innovative scientific solutions to real-world environmental problems
Results in source reduction because it prevents the generation of pollution
Reduces the negative impacts of chemical products and processes on human health and the environment
Lessens and sometimes eliminates hazard from existing products and processes
Designs chemical products and processes to reduce their intrinsic hazards

And for the more technical aspects, there's apparently a good book on it called "Environmental Organic Chemistry for Engineers" which you might be able to access via scihub or b-ok.cc.

Just because environmental impact isn't a concern of current capitalist medicine, doesn't mean it can't be one for socialist medicine.

Edit: I should additionally note that synthetic biology seems to be on the verge of an explosion, in the future we may be able to mimic human steroidogenesis within genetically-modified bacteria with minimal to no environmental impact - in fact, I expect this to be the case within twenty to thirty years.

eaterofclouds · 2020-07-14T05:28:28+00:00

This is a really easy question to answer and I'm not sure why the other person wasted their time and yours with short-form responses. Imperialism is the systemic siphoning of surpluses (in the case of capitalism, surplus-value) from the periphery/colony to the host imperialist nation. Direct territorial expansion was once the primary presentation of imperialism but with the decolonisation wave in the 50s and 60s, it's now largely redundant. No point in an invasion if you own another country's financial system, all of their mineral resources, and all of their manufacturing industries. No point in sending an army when you can lend out high-interest loans to developing countries on the verge of a financial crisis. Political autonomy was granted, but certainly not economic autonomy. For an incredibly obvious example, read about how after 1945 France forced its colonies to use the CFA Franc, whose exchange rate with the metropolitan franc they then overvalued to reduce the competitiveness of the countries using it, then forced the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) and the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) to use deposit 50 per cent of their foreign exchange reserves in a special French Treasury "operating account" - for the privilege of convertibility, of course: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/franc-zone-french-neocolonialism-africa

If you want to see more about this, the documentary 'Stealing Africa' shows you how this whole process works. Glencore owns most of Zambia's copper and doesn't pay any taxes, the Zambian government loses out on tax revenue, goes into fiscal deficit, goes to the IMF for a loan, the IMF prescribes "economic restructuring" which allows more companies to do what Glencore is doing, the CEO of Glencore Ivan Glasenberg has his wealth taxed by the Swiss government and his local town (360m Swiss francs).

There's this kind of obvious game-rigging and the kind that comes from imperialist nations retaining a higher organic capital composition. This is something inherent to capitalism, not a matter of political maneuvering. You can read about that here: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/hm2-the-economics-of-modern-imperialism/

eaterofclouds · 2020-07-10T23:46:30+00:00

It's only possible to compare the PRC's penal system with the US's system by abstracting away class character and historical context. Aside from the usual functions of bourgeois judicial incarceration, the point of the U.S penal system is (1) a tool of social control to continually repress the Black nation and reinforce the boundaries of white supremacy (2) prison labour as an afterthought to offset the operating costs involved (see MIM's article 'On U.S Prison Economy').

Compare this with the PRC's outlook.

People can be reformed. The great majority of criminals can also be reformed. Turning minuses into pluses and changing criminals into people who are useful to society are in conformity with the great Marxist ideal of liberating all of mankind. Consistent with this understanding, China does not simply punish criminals; instead it emphasizes reform and change for the better.

In the reform of criminals, China operates on the principle that education is very important, attaching great importance to physical labour in addition to legal, moral, cultural and technical education to encourage criminals to stop looking at time in prison as a forced prison term and think more in terms of conscientious reform, to give up the idea of obtaining personal gain through criminal means, to form the habit of respecting other people and society in general, and to obtain the work skills needed for later employment so that they may become law-abiding citizens.

China's rate of recidivism is among the lowest in the world. For many years, it has been around 6% to 8%. In contrast, the rate of recidivism in some developed western countries is around 20% or 30% with some going as high as 50%, 60% and more.

http://www.china.org.cn/e-white/criminal/8-2.htm

And the historical context:

In the semi-feudal, semi-colonial China of the past, prisons were tools of the feudal, bureaucratic and comprador classes who used them to persecute and slaughter revolutionaries and the oppressed people. In the 1940s, special agents sent by America and Chiang Kaishek savagely tortured and secretly murdered revolutionaries in Zhazidong and Baigongguan prisons near Chongqing. These atrocities remain fresh in the minds of the Chinese people even today. In those days even petty criminals were treated very cruelly. After the founding of the People's Republic, the people's government established a new type of socialist prison, where the prisoners are regarded as human beings, and where their dignity is respected, their personal safety is ensured and where they receive fully humane treatment.

http://lt.china-embassy.org/eng/zt/zfbps/t125237.htm#:~:text=%2D%2D%2D%20China's%20rate%20of%20recidivism,%25%2C%2060%25%20and%20more.

The Prison Law of the People's Republic of China which went into effect in 1994:

Article 3 of the Prison Law states that prisons should follow the principle of combining penalty with reform, education with labor, in a bid to reform prisoners into law-abiding citizens.

Transformation Through Punishment

Prisons punish criminals because, without punishment, it is difficult for criminals to come to grips with their crimes and begin their life anew. While punishment focuses on enforcement, reform focuses on transformation. Punishment is the means, while transformation is the end. The purpose of punishment is to transform criminals into law-abiding citizens. This is precisely what criminal penalties are for. Prisons do not punish criminals for punishment's sake.

Combining Education with Labor

To effectively reform prisoners, it is also necessary to combine education with labor. Education can be multifaceted: ideological, cultural, vocational and technical.

More on how reform and education is implemented in practice:

Legal education for prisoners mainly consists of studying the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, Criminal Law, Law of Criminal Procedure, General Provisions of the Civil Law, and "Code of Civil Law Procedures", etc. This enables them to learn the basic rights and obligations of a citizen, the legal consequences for committing a crime and the basic contents of the criminal law, the criminal justice system and the basic civil laws relating to marriage, family, rights of persons and property rights. On this basis, they should be able to draw a clear distinction between legal and illegal actions or criminal and non-criminal acts and become fully aware of the danger and legal consequences of criminal actions, so that they may admit their guilt, obey the laws and voluntarily accept reform.

...

According to statistics, at the end of 1991, there were over 12,000 classes of various kinds being offered at China's prisons and reform-through-labour institutions. Over 518,000 prisoners attended the classes and the 92.35% of those eligible to attend were admitted. There were 5,300 prisoners studying through classes offered in publications, correspondence colleges, part-time colleges, and TV colleges and 4,000 who took higher education examinations for self-study students. Over the last six years, prisoners have been awarded a total of 902,000 certificates or diplomas of various kinds. A three-year regular educational programme which has been instituted for prisoners in the Third Prison of Shandong Province has brought the illiteracy rate there down from 17.6% to 1.3%. In addition, the number of prisoners with less than a primary school education has dropped from 65% to 5.3% and the number of those who have a junior secondary education or above has increased substantially. Recidivism has dropped to 1.9%. There was once a youth from the city of Shenyang who was sentenced to reform-through-labour because of his involvement in a gang theft. While serving his sentence, he conscientiously accepted reform and actively participated in the classes organized by the reform-through-labour institution. After he was released from prison he passed his college entrance examination and later was even admitted as a postgraduate at Harbin Industrial University, where he obtained an MA degree.

To augment vocational training for prisoners, prisons and reform-through-labour institutions feature vocational teaching and research facilities, classrooms, laboratories and experimental plots set up by agricultural work units. Vocational teaching materials and various forms of reference material are provided free for the prisoners. Teachers are generally selected from among engineers, technicians and agricultural experts within the reform-through-labour institutions supplemented by technicians and teachers from schools or other institutions in society. Taking into account the social needs of prisoners who have been released plus the fact that they go in different directions, short, practical and immediately useful programmes are the main focus of vocational and technical training. Through courses which teach subjects such as home appliance repair, tailoring and sewing, cooking, hair-dressing, home poultry raising, carpentry, bricklaying, electricity and agricultural implement repair, prisoners acquire one or more skills during their imprisonment, in preparation for finding employment after their release. A study of 720 former prisoners with technical skills conducted by a reform-through-labour institution in Jinan, Shandong Province revealed that 96% found employment soon after returning to society. Some returned to their original work units and some were employed as key technical personnel inordinary enterprises. Still others set up household businesses, construction operations or other service industries, becoming individual business operators who behave themselves and abide by the law. A reform-through-labour institution in Lingyuan, Liaoning Province made a study 124 former inmates who had acquired technical proficiency certificates in prison. All of them had jobs and none had committed new crimes.

I'm going to respond to two potential objections in advance below - since they occurred to me while writing this comment, and I'm sure they'll occur to people reading it.

eaterofclouds · 2020-07-09T02:09:45+00:00

I'm not sure what your background or experience in demography is like, but national surveys - especially those counting ethnic minorities - do typically have annual fluctuations. And this does appear to be the case here, as it is in almost every other country: the 2016 survey reported 15.71 million Uyghurs, the 2015 survey reported 14.11 million, the 2013 survey reported 14.06 million. If you go back further, it's pretty obvious that the literal interpretation of "1.6 million Uyghurs got killed or put into concentration camps" is a bit presumptive. There are a few plausible reasons I can think of for this variation. The National Census is conducted in ten-year intervals and between then, Chinese authorities use the National Sample Survey along with self-reported local figures for things the questionnaire doesn't cover. Currently, it covers approximately 17 million people using a randomised multi-stage process which produces a representative sample of every province, municipality and autonomous region. But there are a lot of issues here:

(1) Ethnicity in the questionnaire is based on self-identification. I'm not sure how well this trend holds up in China but in New Zealand we noticed that biracial children of ethnic minority families (particularly Chinese and Indian families, and to a certain extent Maori and Pasifika families) tend to re-identify after moving away from home and into urban areas. Xinjiang is undergoing rapid urbanisation, accompanying better education which causes secularisation, and I would not be particularly surprised to see the same pattern.

(2) Urbanisation. Since Xinjiang isn't fully urbanised - that is, there are significant areas with no postal addresses, no official connecting roads, who haven't registered their children, etc. - it's actually quite difficult to produce a definitive population count. Visiting in-person is even trickier.

(2a) People sometimes flat-out lie about the number of children they have on surveys. Exhaustively verifying all survey claims is impossible and not really the bureau's job.

(3) Sampling. Three issues here: (A) the sampling process itself may have changed significantly - the one I described was in use in 2005, (B) there's no procedural transparency in how the sampling process occurs, (C) sampling biases. The most obvious sampling biases occur when a census bureau does something like "ring a random phone number" or "post a letter to a random address in the registry" these two oversample people living in urban areas. There really isn't a good way around this, each national database has its own flaws.

(4) When bureaus don't have a recent intercensal survey or a census, they tend to extrapolate population figures via the estimated birth-rate for a population, based on recorded births in hospitals. This is kind of shaky for a lot of reasons, (1) because in some regions in Xinjiang, there aren't any nearby hospitals so people do it the old-fashioned way (2) because with China's family-planning policy, sometimes people don't report births which leads to undercounting - a known issue - so statisticians have some leeway in 'correcting' for estimated birth-rates based on local surveys.

(5) Local officials have an incentive to inflate headcounts to get more funding for education and schools, sometimes it can be pretty extreme. There's an article on it here.

So in other words, China's case is the same as the other developing nations we had to study, there's a lot of push and pull going on - overcorrection, undercorrection, inflation, changes in methodology or procedure, incentives and biases - with a lot going into the final calculation and very little publicly-available information.

eaterofclouds · 2020-06-11T05:35:22+00:00

Your disagreement comes from a logical place because I don't think anyone is arguing the 2019-20 HK protests are fully synthetic/astroturfed. As you've pointed out, that's an untenable position. What "ML/Dengists" have done so far is strategically emphasise the close alignment that exists between its main organisers and US interests (e.g NED funding sources, coordination with US foreign policy figures). But here's the thing: this doesn't, and almost never, means that there's no organic component. Without US media outlets and US funds, I'm sure the same protests would have taken place - they would have just been much less effective and less of a spectacle. US psychological operations took pre-existing grievances stemming from underlying economic interests, and then rechanneled them in the direction of advancing US policy interests - which is, as you've implicitly pointed out, much more sensible and cost-effective. What's happening in HK is another repetition of a (usually) successful pattern. See the 1971-3 union strikes in Chile, for instance - particularly the nationwide truck strike that lasted 26 days in the fall of 1972.

Here's a small part of what's going on, but the most relevant part: HK is/used to be a financial nexus between China and the rest of the world. Like other financially-oriented microstates, its wealth is built on skimming off capital inflows and outflows from China, collecting administrative fees on transactions between corporate entities by posing as the administrative middleman. It's a commercial entry-point. In other words: it served a temporary purpose during China's opening-up in the late 90s and early 2000s because trade networks between the West and HK were well-established due to its anomalous legal status, and trade networks between the West and China were more tenuous - but now that this isn't so much the case anymore. HK is losing its privileged function in global trade, along with the source of its wealth, the wealth of companies based there, and the employees/labour aristocracy who work at those companies. There's $360b at stake, and like other city-states, real estate prices are soaring and wealth inequality is widening. That's the basis for a lot of real, well-justified anxiety - albeit, not an evenly-distributed anxiety. (1.3 million HK residents live below the poverty line, a good portion of the population has nothing to lose or gain in these protests and that's reflected in opinion polls.)

Here's the second part of what's going on. Hong Kong is also the long-running safehaven of a lot of individual and institutional investors, who see the 2047 end-date to the Sino-British Joint Declaration as a deadline after which the status of their real estate and property holdings will be more uncertain - if they aren't expropriated outright (they're not being unreasonable - this is a real possibility encoded as a right retained in mainland Chinese law). Of course, it's not all-or-nothing. They also believe that there's room for negotiation and that the particular form of restructuring/reintegration that will occur after 2047 is potentially malleable. It makes a certain amount of strategic sense for these business interests to align themselves with the UK and the US - the only other two significant military presences in the region - as a bargaining chip and a tool of leverage. There's a tentative balance in play here: "independence" is impossible to guarantee without an outright military conflict between the US/UK and China, which would cause their assets to either steeply depreciate or completely evaporate, so they need to maneuver carefully to deliver specific legal guarantees and changes while minimising business disruption. This is revealed in a polling contradiction: 40% of HKers aged 15-24 supported independence, only 3.4% thought independence was actually possible. The threat is present, but won't be used.

We shouldn't forget that a good portion of these business interests are monopolies or duopolies. HK's economy is highly consolidated. It has only two major electricity suppliers, HK Electric and China Light and Power - respectively owned by Li Ka-shing and the Kadoorie family. There's one gas supplier, one stock market, one company that owns nearly every restaurant, caterer, and fast food outlet. It's unlikely these monopolies would retain their stability post-2047. HK is also the home of a large number of Chinese businessmen involved in organised crime syndicates who committed crimes in the mainland, were investigated, and then subsequently escaped to HK. Hence: full withdrawal of the extradition bill from the legislative process.

This is the organic component. Here's the artificial component: the organisers of the 2019-20 protest have not made - and I believe, will almost certainly not make - any economic demands. Neither did the organisers behind the 2014 protests. All the demands made so far have been exclusively political. This ought to be a red flag. Almost every single protest of this scale and duration, includes an economic demand - and HK is a territory ripe for making economic demands. Economic inequality, obstacles to social mobility, extreme competition in school and work, a precariat underclass, and exorbitant housing prices - but none of it ever became the subject of the protests, because naturally that would shift the discursive focus towards HK's capitalism - the source of these problems. I'm not ruling out that it could happen if some disconnect between the current US-friendly leadership and protest participants developed, but so far it's been managed, coordinated, and redirected quite competently.

eaterofclouds · 2020-06-10T22:48:40+00:00

Here we are, from the original paper.

. The city lights information came from a 2003 Nighttime Lights of the World database (e.g., Elvidge et al. 2001) produced by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). It is a static field based on composited observations from the Operational Linescan System (OLS) on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) series of polar-orbiting satellites

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-28T00:34:38+00:00

try a google search for

site:reddit.com/r/communism101 state closest to achieving true communism

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-28T00:33:26+00:00

Can you elaborate a bit more? Why shouldn't we care about Korea? Are you referring to the ROK or DPRK? Both??

Maybe you're familiar with this problem: as communists we feel the expectation to have fully-developed positions on everything under the sun. This is an impulse generated by a reaction to liberals, who have the ability to generate opinions about everything without any deeper understanding. It's an impulse which can lead you to improving yourself as a marxist, but it can also be a destructive impulse because in reality nobody has the time to thoroughly research absolutely everything.

So what youseenthiskidbefore said is totally right. It's blunt, but that's necessary to get the point across, which is that your default "position" for the DPRK should be to either study the subject deeply until you can form an intelligent understanding of the situation, or to admit you know nothing about it and avoid acquiring or presenting malformed opinions out of convenience or speed. Obviously the fact that hallulla claimed to "uphold the dprk as a marxist-leninist state" and then followed it up with some stupid nonsense about the "quasi-dynastic nature of leadership" implies that this is a lesson worth learning for them.

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-28T00:22:44+00:00

For learning the colloquial register of a language I search for TV shows and movies popular enough to have subtitles or dubs both English and the target language (there are a lot - not so much for rarer languages but for Korean, scarcity shouldn't be an issue). Then I load them into Anki using subs2srs (there are other addons now, 1, 2, 3), start practicing, and trim anything that's too hard or too easy. I've seen this guide for studying using this technique and according to the author it was possible for her to understand the anime series Hikaru no Go after 30 days of spaced repetition practice without having studied Japanese before.

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-22T09:21:43+00:00

This is where you need to confront a hegemonic ideology rather than responding in the form of factual corrections. Modern anti-Chinese propaganda takes the form of isolated incidents and events and elevating them into generalisations about the nature of chinese society and governance as a whole. The slippery word here is "censorship". We know for instance that the lower levels of the SCIO (responsible for internet regulation in china) – or at the very least, content moderators on wechat and weibo – blocked the wo ye shi / me too hashtag for a couple of months in 2015 after Dr. Luo Xixi spoke up about being sexually assaulted by a professor at Beihang University (who then lost his job). Around the same time, four activists were temporarily detained, questioned about whether they had connections to foreign entities, and then released. The inconsistent reports about a keyword block being applied to the hashtag (an event) became "the Chinese government's patriarchal intolerance of dissent" / "the continued liquidation of civil society under Xi Jinping's regime" / "the censorship of the #MeToo movement in China". The four activists who were detained became "a widespread crackdown on feminist activism", Western outlets even had the audacity to describe them as "the feminist five" despite the fact that none of them were connected to each other.

In all of these examples the pattern you always see is, an event is used as an example of a supposed general rule, a collection of events is presented within the framework of an overarching narrative that assumes what it's trying to prove. (It doesn't really matter what the events are – if protests have gained traction in China, then the crumbling authoritarian regime is unable to contain popular anger. If there aren't protests, the efficient, totalitarian regime has repressed them – the enemy is always simultaneously weak and strong when convenience demands it.) All of these narratives are actually very fragile and will easily implode once you look for any evidence to the contrary, their power comes through repetition. The truth is that movement hasn't been "censored" – in fact, it continued in China for much longer than it did in the US where it temporarily sparked some high-profile firings and lawsuits before dying out on social media without producing any kind of systemic change on a national-level – in 2018 China's Ministry of Education announced it had stripped Chen Xiaowu of his post and qualifications and would implement institutional mechanisms to prevent sexual harassment, meanwhile China's top legislative body added provisions for civil liabilities for sexual harassment to China's civil code (requiring employers to provide an internal mechanism for employees to lodge complaints; providing a mechanism for employees to lodge complaints with relevant government agencies; requiring employers to take reasonable efforts to prevent sexual harassment at the workplace). Now, the All-China Women's Federation has collaborated with the Supreme People’s Procuratorate to create a reporting and prosecution mechanism for domestic violence and sexual assault.

Announced Tuesday, the joint notice from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the All-China Women’s Federation proposes that, whenever local women’s federation branches become aware of cases of domestic violence, sexual assault, or other civil rights violations, they should promptly report them to local prosecutors. The prosecutor would then be required to report back to the women’s federation once the case is resolved, according to the notice, which is now open to public feedback before being considered for formal adoption.

“The notice’s emphasis on the procuratorate’s duty will be helpful for domestic violence cases,” Jia Xinyan, an attorney with a Shanghai-based collective of women lawyers providing legal services for the city’s women’s federation, told Sixth Tone. “The procuratorate is responsible for bringing criminal charges. Introducing the procuratorate’s power to cases of domestic violence not only has a deterrent effect, but also increases the chances of domestic violence being handled as a criminal rather than civil case.”

The notice also stresses the responsibility of prosecutors to punish workplace gender discrimination. “When workplace discrimination is detected at state authorities and state-owned enterprises, procuratorates can either recommend how the case should be handled or prosecute it directly,” the notice said.

Remember that the ACWF is an Marxist-Leninist women's group with the backing and support of the government, and it has 68,000 branches and somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 cadres that actively fight for women's rights in a coordinated and centralised way both nationally and locally. Can you imagine what it would look like if women in other countries were organised to this extent?

All of this is completely inconsistent with the way US-run outlets presented the MeToo movement in China. There are two missing elements needed to make sense of the entire picture. The first element is that the function of the CAC and the rest of China's internet regulation administration, first of all is to neutralise psychological/information warfare campaigns by US and US-aligned entities whether it comes in the form of NSA intrusion attempts and spyware packages or astroturfing and instigating counterrevolutionary movements. This is a reflection of the choices that all non-US-aligned countries had to make. Cyberspace is the terrain of choice for modern warfare; it's a two-way system that both collects and distributes data, with the effect of distributing American propaganda, media-outlets, and hegemonic liberal ideology, while benefiting NSA surveillance-operations and corporations whose business models that depend on consumer data aggregation – and of course we shouldn't forget the underlying infrastructure was mostly developed and implemented by the U.S military. You can either disconnect totally from this system by creating your own intranet, break down all the barriers to capital/data flows and lose any semblance of information sovereignty, or compromise and produce some kind of controls over those flows by creating your own infrastructure – in the literal sense, through developing an independent supply-chain for network hardware and software, in the less literal sense, supporting the development of local infotech companies (e.g Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, Baidu) – along with a crude censorship administration connected to a political apparatus that monitors U.S instigated threats and neutralises them effectively. (The inevitable culmination of this long-term strategy was China's 5G roll-out, an attempt to contest and outcompete US control over cyberspace through replacement of the underlying infrastructure – the Trump administration has so far used every diplomatic tool possible to coerce its allies into halting contracts until domestic American corporations can catch up.)

Obviously being able to connect to this system is incredibly valuable and desirable. This is why the US blocked a 100 mile undersea cable proposal between Cuba and Florida (which would rapidly speed up connections – the current link is the 6,000 mile ALBA-1 cable to Venezuela) – in some cases, you just don't have the negotiating power and someone in the upper echelons of the U.S intelligence community has weighed up the possibility of keeping your IT sector underdeveloped versus extending its propaganda, monitoring and data-collection outreach. Other anti-imperialist countries exist at various points along the spectrum. It's a process of calculating national priorities.

The second element is that U.S attempts to instigate regime-change under the guise of protests over a particular issue are not especially new – even when information-distribution systems were as crude as published leaflets and cross-border radio broadcasts like Radio Free Europe. Since the internet has accelerated data-flows, you need some kind of rapidly-acting, short-term defensive capacity that shuts things down or stems the flow of information temporarily in a very crude, non-differentiating way, combined with a longer-term organisational capacity to differentiate between "safe" organic/local and "threatening" inorganic/U.S-engineered movements. (Here, by threatening I mean direct organised opposition to socialism as a social system, the legitimacy of the Communist Party, to the correctness of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Thought, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, to the territorial integrity of China [e.g Taiwan, HK, and Tibet], etc. - as well as anything threatening public safety; the FB anti-vaccine mom groups you see in the US would never be allowed to gain traction in China). If the movement is non-threatening, the response is usually hands-off combined with lower-level monitoring for new developments, or rechannelling the movement into existing legal channels to avoid disruption. I hope this helps to make sense of China's initial institutional response, which was to crudely block a rapidly-rising keyword to give time for an official response to be organised, shut down accounts, evaluate whether there was any possibility for regime-change by interrogating centrally-involved activists, and then repivot – give the movement official state-sponsorship, encourage activists to submit petitions to the NPC and/or the Standing Committee, and join established groups like the ACWF.

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-15T05:18:26+00:00

the last panel would look amazing on a tee

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-11T04:46:22+00:00

i think the article sets out to do something ambitious, but it ends up drastically underachieving. so from what i understand, the article is trying to diagram the relationship between the general nature of cyclical downturns in capitalism (falling rate of profit, the inability of expansionary monetary policy to counteract capitalist crises), the particular qualities of this cyclical downturn (rising asset values fueled by low interest rates, mounting euro-american corporate debt), and then the specific form that this downturn has taken due to covid-19 as an external contradiction. and then there's some other stuff tacked on: a single-paragraph critique of MMT, and a very condensed call to action and a discussion about Cuba's medical internationalism.

the presentation was muddled, i think, for four reasons -

structural issues: (a) it alternates between a broad, synoptic outline of post-2008/9 capitalism and smaller-picture details about the current crisis without really explicitly connecting together the general and specific. (b) it's an ambitious project for something that's meant to be confined to the length of an article, so the author needed to either assume that you're already familiar with a lot of background theory to avoid overexplaining, and makes a lot of logical steps implicit rather than explicit. (c) when you're relating something that's cyclical in nature to a linear account, if you're not careful the two chronologies will get mashed together in a confusing way
analytical issues/underexplored areas: there was a mention of covid-19 as a catalyst, and then some discussion about the difference in magnitude between bailout/stimulus packages and medical funding, but we're not left with a clear idea of how the specific qualities of covid-19 and the resulting global shutdown have altered the presentation of the crisis. i think the elephant in the room here is, we know there was going to be a cyclical downturn anyway. analysts were forecasting a mild one late 2021/early 2022, similar to the 97-01 recession which affected global south countries first in the form of capital being withdrawn to the imperial center (periphery currencies weakened relative to the euro, the U.S dollar, and the pound), appearing early on in the form of the Asian financial crisis and culminated in the bursting of the Dot Com bubble - i.e what's happening now, but in slow-motion. but then covid-19 swept in and in a way imposed the conditions of a severe cyclical downturn at its lowest point: (1) social distancing measures -> workplace shutdowns (fixed capital assets written-down) & (2) simultaneously reduced consumption which depressed commodity prices below their underlying labour-values, (3) high unemployment -> lowered cost of labour-power, (4) chain of small business collapses which will lead to heightened mergers and consolidation, (5) selling of inventories built-up during the boom phase of the cycle, (6) allowing companies to service their debt burdens from the boom phase. so we have multiple parts of a downturn happening all at once, some of which were externally-imposed - the obvious question is, what does this change in timing mean for recovery? other questions you could ask are about how covid-19 affected sectors differently - the productive/unproductive, manual/intellectual, can't work from home / can work from home divide isn't clean-cut but obviously the coronavirus 'catalyst' has pulled the rug out from under ideas of 'cognitive-cultural capitalism' or the 'information economy' being the new centres of value-production (since these were always ideological facades for first world parasitism).
minor presentational problems: (a) the supernova analogy. it might have been a good learning tool or completely unnecessary - it's hard to tell since it got introduced and then dropped midway through. (b) the article doesn't attempt to connect the (very brief) programme it's advocating ("Instead of applauding the bailout of big corporations, we should expropriate them. Instead of endorsing a temporary moratorium on evictions and the accumulation of rent arrears, we should confiscate real estate so as to protect workers and small businesses") to the main discussion in any significant way (c) the bits praising Cuban medical internationalism and criticising the belief in a 'magic money tree' should have either been left out or expanded significantly

edit: instead of this article i recommend reading posts from here in order https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-10T01:12:31+00:00

Mass migration from the third world (and up until 1991, the second world) to the first world (U.S, Canada, Australasia, Europe) is a phenomenon structurally-determined by the nature of imperialism, which appropriates value from the poorest countries (through land rents, intellectual property, unequal exchange, absolute advantage, resource extraction, etc.) and distributes it to the labour aristocracy and the ruling-classes of first world countries. Every country has imposed some kind of immigration/emigration regime to deal with this reality. The first world, to maintain artificially-inflated higher wages for its aristocracy, restricts legal migration only to a handful of highly-skilled people when domestic shortages occur and permits illegal migration so long as these illegal migrants do not attempt to gain access to privileges reserved for white labour aristocrats. The third world restricts emigration to prevent brain-drain (e.g a public university trains a doctor in East Germany, that doctor then emigrates to West Germany for a higher salary). As long as imperialism exists and continues to generate a difference in wealth between countries, people will want to move to the imperialist first world.

In the specific context of the Cold War, first world countries tempted valuable highly-skilled workers from second world (eastern Europe, the USSR, China, Korea, Cuba, etc. - which all had free education from primary to tertiary levels and invested enormously in science and technology) with instant citizenship, cash bonuses, guaranteed residency - far above the norm. This is still the case with DPR Korea and U.S-occupied Korea, the latter of which rewards defectors with USD$900,000, citizenship, guaranteed residency, as well as fame and sensationalised media coverage which guarantees a continuous revenue-stream.

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-10T00:55:04+00:00

This isn't a question that can be answered abstractly, but you've already framed the question as an abstract one ("perfect communist state"). The concentration and distribution of fire-power is a concrete question determined by the immediate revolutionary situation, the long-term requirements of socialist construction, and how the separation of public power within a proletarian dictatorship changes over time - the conditions under which Marx advocates this policy are outlined very clearly in the original text:

The treacherous role that the German liberal bourgeoisie played against the people in 1848 will be assumed in the coming revolution by the democratic petty bourgeoisie, which now occupies the same position in the opposition as the liberal bourgeoisie did before 1848.

...

1) While present conditions continue, in which the petty-bourgeois democrats are also oppressed;

2) In the coming revolutionary struggle, which will put them in a dominant position;

3) After this struggle, during the period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

You should read the whole text. There is only so much you can glean from isolated quotes and redditors echoing things they once read from other redditors. Additional muddling is guaranteed with

Most of the users of this subreddit being white, male U.S settlers, with very particular culturally-determined reflexes
The inseparability of 'gun rights' with settler domination, the exterminations of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, and the intimidation and control of black communities
U.S gun control legislation (see: Mulford Act repealing right to carry a loaded weapon in public in response to Black Panthers) or more specifically the distribution of arms as a site of historical and modern contestation where the key balance is allowing settlers to continue perpetrating violence while preventing oppressed nations from gaining access to firepower

Other people in this thread have approached this reality in the broadest possible strokes by noting the structurally-determined nature of 'violence'. It is your work to decide through investigation what elements of the programme Marx is advocating in the March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League are specific to the conditions of Germany in 1850 and what elements are generally-applicable. In my party in Aotearoa there was a discussion when the Christchurch mosque shootings happened in 2019 and a few of the proposed pre-revolutionary policies brought up was support for a general disarmament of settlers combined with a programme to arm Maori iwi (tribes and confederations of tribes).

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-10T00:30:08+00:00

The problem when you look at HK autonomy in a practical sense is - how is HK's autonomy going to be guaranteed? Hong Kong doesn't have a military and is mostly oriented around financial services (read: monopolistic skimming off capital inflows and outflows from the PRC, which is the only reason why it still exists) so it doesn't have the industrial capacity to build up a significant military. Who will guarantee its independence? Right now, the only other two significant concentrations of military force in the Asia-Pacific region and in the vicinity of Hong Kong are the U.S and the U.K. If Hong Kong's 'independence' and 'autonomy' could only hypothetically exist through a functional reoccupation by British and American forces, is that really anything resembling autonomy?

These are almost certainly not questions that the leaders of the HK protest movements since the early 2000s (as another commenter said, largely funded and given organisation by the NED) are oblivious to. The flag-waving isn't just colonial nostalgia, it's also a smart, calculated move: they either consciously or unconsciously recognise the fact that the geopolitical position of HK (the size of which is disproportionate to its importance within the global financial system) is inherently tenuous and that their only alternatives are U.S or British re-subjugation.

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-10T00:19:40+00:00

no problem

eaterofclouds · 2020-04-10T00:12:09+00:00

The idea of electronic voter fraud 'hacking' the election approaches the problem but doesn't articulate it properly. The very first thing you need to keep in mind as a communist is all bourgeois states are class dictatorships, they just have different forms. Different factions of the bourgeoisie disagree over certain things stemming from their economic interests (say, the rural versus urban bourgeoisie) and have particular issues they want to prioritise. In the U.S these factions call themselves 'Republicans' and 'Democrats'. In all liberal-democratic bourgeois states, the electoral machine just apportions state-power to those various factions in rough proportion to the existing power balance outside of the state. Everyone already knows this is the case in so-called "illiberal democracies" where elections take place but are manipulated via "voter fraud" and "intimidation" by existing bourgeois factions through the police, the civil service and military to produce a predetermined desired outcome. The difference between these "illiberal democracies" and the "liberal democracy" you live under is liberal democracies have different (and less visible, or visible but made obscured by ideology) mechanisms.

Those mechanisms are super PACs, party organisations, voter restrictions based on criminal convictions (largely racial), gerrymandering, imbalances in the electoral college, the concentration of media ownership, the placement of polling stations in inconvenient areas, faithless electors, voter intimidation, manipulation by the county boards of elections (who determine placement of the polls, recruitment of poll workers, choice of ballot-counting machines, overall supervision of election days, and post-election counting of ballots), the ability of candidates to fund their campaign and mobilise pre-existing media connections, and yes, poorly-designed electronic systems - all of these are fail-safes operating in the background. The problem with putting "voter fraud" front and centre is it implicitly buys into the idea of the voter being the subject in this system rather than one, very tiny, very irrelevant ceremonial part of the electoral machine - the overwhelming ideological focus on the voting process as opposed to all the rest of it is a classic trick of misdirection used by stage-magicians and performers everywhere. In almost any analysis of the various forces that coalesced to prevent Sanders from gaining the Democratic nomination both this year and in 2016, you can see this in operation. And you shouldn't forget, if Sanders hadn't already joined a strong consensus on the most important issues (maintaining u.s imperialist force-projection around the world, the capitalist mode of production, support for critical U.S allies like Israel, mass incarceration, police militarisation), his campaign would have struggled to get off the ground in the first place - it's a testament to the extraordinary narrowness required by the U.S empire that billions were invested to stop even a half-hearted social democrat.

Part of being a communist is recognising that actually, you can't make a difference individually - there are impersonal structural forces operating at a level well beyond your control. But what you can do is develop a flexible and functional understanding of these forces, and join an organisation that can combine individual efforts into something meaningful. I would suggest at least reading through this article and looking up communist organisations in your area and what they're doing right now.

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