On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
That whole thread:
hmm, I wonder who controls the socialist state
No one should control the state because there shouldn’t be a state. If there is a state then there’s oppression.
As an ML I actually agree with you, the state is a weapon and i would like to see it one day outlive it’s usefulness and wither so that communism can be achieved. However, it’s a weapon that you absolutely cannot discard until capitalism has been destroyed, and until then, unilateral disarmament is guaranteed suicide for a revolutionary movement.
As is blind faith in a revolutionary movement’s ability to wield such a weapon in the interest of the proletariat and towards communism. Seems like a lot of people in this thread are forgetting Mao’s critique of the USSR.
"The revisionist Khrushchov clique abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat behind the camouflage of the “state of the whole people”, change the proletarian character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the camouflage of the “party of the entire people” and pave the way for the restoration of capitalism behind that of “full-scale communist construction”. - Mao - marxists.org
But is this not equally true for China today?
It is not.
Just because a state brands itself socialist doesn’t say anything about the level of democracy or workers’ control of it.
sure, but if we were talking about non-socialist states that call themselves socialist, we wouldn’t call them socialist states
Well IMHO both USSR and China shows how gaining workers control and keeping it, or moreso making significant headway towards communism, is just much more complicated. Representative worker ownership of the means of production through the state doesn’t have a compelling track record. I think it’s dishonest, reactionary and anti intellectual to laugh off arguments like that of comrade spood from the screenshot above.
Edit: checked out my claim on calorie intake and discovered it was dubious. Removed, but letting the main argument stay.
The USSR was eventually compromised, so it technically failed in that sense, but how is China an example of failing to retain worker control? If you’re claiming that capitalists control China’s government, I’d challenge you to provide some evidence
Lack of press freedom, organization freedom, social credit system, great firewall of China, over 2000 work hours pr year (France has 1500), severely low scores in democracy rankings. This doesn’t smell much like worker control, more like authoritarianism. But then again, I’m very much from the West. Happy to be educated on my shortcomings in understanding 👍
Compared to what country? What exactly are workers not allowed to say or write in China that is allowed in the West?
Compared to what country? There are hundreds of protests every day across China
You mean the “system” that’s been debunked many times by various Western capitalist media outlets?
Maintaining Internet sovereignty from the imperial core and having workers in control of the government are not mutually exclusive
Citation needed
Whose rankings, and why do you consider them relevant?
The burden of proof is on you, since you are making extraordinary claims. No matter, here:
https://rsf.org/en/ranking china nr 173
https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:50002:0::NO:50002:P50002_COMPLAINT_TEXT_ID:4341007 one of many cases. Are you allowed to start a union in China? Doesn’t seem like it.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/FreedomOfInformationChina/great-firewall-technical-perspective/index.html Re firewall - information blockade and surveillance != Worker control nor sovereign internet.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9049298 One of thousands scholarly articles on this. Next youre gonna tell me IEEE is revisionist?
https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours 2200 working hours pr year is ridiculous!
You’re not really convincing me that China is a good example of worker control. Let me ask you something:
It’s as much analysis as you can expect from the userbase of Tumblr lite.
Tumblr lite, or tumblr alt right?
Let’s be fair to them, at least they aren’t reactionary. Still, unfunny “uwu” memes mixed with Lockheed Left behaviour does not paint a much more enjoyable scene.
Lockheed Left is reactionary though.