Communism looks good on paper

and looks even better in the real world

  • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Your entire argument rests on idealism. You treat ideas like communism and capitalism as abstract moral propositions to be judged in a vacuum. This is precisely the error historical materialism was developed to correct. Systems do not emerge from the minds of philosophers. They arise from the material conditions of production, from the way human societies organize labor to meet their needs. To ask which system you would “put your life in the hands of” as if choosing from a menu ignores that history is not a matter of choice but of struggle grounded in concrete reality.

    Let’s begin with the base and superstructure. The economic base, the mode of production, determines the political and ideological superstructure. You claim the issue is concentration of power, as if power floats freely above society. But power is not an independent variable. It is rooted in ownership and control of the means of production. Under capitalism, private ownership necessarily concentrates power in the hands of those who own capital. This is the logical outcome of a system where production is organized for profit rather than human need. You cannot have capitalism without class antagonism because the extraction of surplus value requires a class that owns and a class that sells its labor. To wish for capitalism without exploitation is to wish for a square circle.

    China’s path must be understood through the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. Socialism presupposes a high development of productive forces. A society emerging from semi-feudalism, shattered by colonialism and war, cannot leap directly into advanced communism. The socialist transitionary period is a scientific recognition that the relations of production must correspond to the level of productive forces. China develops its economy under the leadership of a proletarian state. This allows for the accumulation of social wealth under public direction. Market mechanisms are employed, but they are subordinated to strategic planning and social goals.

    Your characterization of capitalism as a “true ideal” if only it were built on human rights reveals a profound misunderstanding of the system’s inner logic. Capital is not a neutral tool. It is a social relation that compels accumulation. The imperative of endless expansion is not optional. A capitalist firm that does not maximize profit is eliminated by competition. This structural compulsion drives the exploitation of labor, the plunder of nature, and the imperialist domination of the global south. Human rights discourse, while valuable, cannot tame a system whose very metabolism requires inequality. The “immovable foundation” you imagine is impossible because capital constantly revolutionizes production, uproots communities, and commodifies every aspect of life to survive.

    On the question of China’s policies, a materialist analysis refuses moralistic abstraction. The one child policy was a response to a specific historical conjuncture. In the late 1970s, China faced the real prospect that rapid population growth would outstrip agricultural and industrial capacity, undermining the very basis for development. This was not an arbitrary choice. It was a harsh measure taken under conditions of scarcity. A proper approach acknowledges the genuine harms while understanding the pressures that produced the policy. It also recognizes that the policy was adjusted as conditions changed. This is materialism in practice. Ideas are evaluated by their correspondence to reality, not by their conformity to an external moral standard.

    Your claims about illiteracy and COVID are not just inaccurate. They serve an ideological function. China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and achieved near universal literacy through massive public investment in education. This is a historical achievement without parallel. Zero COVID was a public health strategy that prioritized the preservation of life, particularly the lives of the elderly and vulnerable. The outcome was among the lowest per capita death rates in the world. You dismiss this as tyranny while accepting a Western approach that sacrificed the vulnerable to maintain market “normalcy”. The long term disability caused by long COVID is a social catastrophe you ignore because it does not fit your narrative. A society that protects its weakest members is not tyrannical. It is humane.

    The orientalism in your comment is also unmistakable. The image of “piles of discarded fetuses reaching skyscraper height” is not analysis. It is a trope drawn from a long tradition of Western propaganda that depicts Asian societies as inherently cruel, irrational, and disposable. This rhetoric dehumanizes an entire population to justify hostility. You speak of free thought, sex, and religion as if these are abstract rights detached from material conditions. But for the majority of humanity, freedom is first and foremost freedom from want, from disease, from premature death. China has delivered these substantive freedoms on a scale the West has not matched. Your focus on formal liberties while ignoring material outcomes reflects a privileged position that takes survival for granted.

    Finally, your conclusion that distributed power is the only answer is correct in principle but empty without class analysis. Power is not distributed by wishing it so. It is redistributed through struggle against the structures that concentrate it. The US Constitution, for all its rhetorical brilliance, was designed to protect property interests. Its evolution into a system of concentrated corporate power is not an accident. It is the logical result of a state that serves capital. True democracy requires social ownership of the economy. It requires that the producers control what they produce and how it is distributed. This is not a utopian dream. It is the necessary next step in human development, visible in the experiments and advances of socialist construction around the world.

    To judge China by the standards of liberal idealism is to miss the point entirely. History moves through contradiction. Socialism in the primary stage contains contradictions. It utilizes market forms while building the foundations for their eventual transcendence. This is dialectics. The task should not be to condemn an actually existing socialist project for not yet being perfect. The task should be to understand its trajectory, learn from its successes and errors, and advance the struggle for a world where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. That world will not arrive by wishing. It will be built through the material practice of millions, guided by the science of socialism, rooted in the concrete conditions of their time and place.

      • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        I would like to hear his rebuttal to some of the points I raise but unfortunately I just don’t think it’s likely he will respond.

    • StonksDiff13@lemmy.todayBanned from community
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      2 days ago

      Of course it’s based on idealism. The correct path to progress is to think of the ideal, then compare it to the current situation, identify what is missing, then close the gap.

      So many commenters on here are caught up in comparing which is better: China or the US?

      That is a waste of time and mirrors the ridiculous two party propaganda that wastes away American politics.

      The truth is both systems are terrible.

      COVID was barely more lethal than the common flu so both countries completely overreacted. Your idea of humanity being the reason they used militarized forces to bolt people’s doors in is a joke. China historically overreacts with their concentrated power as proven time and time again. Once of which resulted in the potential LARGEST loss of human life in all of history. How many did Mao “accidentally” kill in the name of creating a humane world? 30 million? 50?

      The idea of fetuses pulling as high as skyscrapers has nothing to do with propaganda or justifying criticism. These are real facts with the number of abortion being 10 million per year. No country comes close to this number. It will factually create a skyscraper every single year.

      I actually lived in China and the US in my lifetime. Believe me there are plenty of positives about that society that are far better than the US. But overall comparing the two existing systems… they both suck.

      Lastly, the reason an ideal capitalistic structure can exist is because of technology. The point you have failed to cover (despite using AI to generate your arguments) is that humans are failed aspect of capitalism.

      There is no comparing the competitive dominance of this system for the last 100 years. With barely a fraction of the same populous of China, the US sits comfortably with no potential military threat and is now leading the AI race. It’s a fools game to pretend that progress is not worthy of consideration in the best system. But to prevent the absolute abortion of human rights, it needs an infallible system to enact the foundation which I previously described. Some obvious choices are: corporations must have regulated profits to own housing and housing must have a cap on ownership by corporations, healthcare must be universal and promote preventative measures rather than for-profit reactive measures, centralized postal service is one of the greatest examples of a non profit system that has worked for Americans for a very very long time to save them millions and create jobs.

      AI could be the answer to enforcing these in a way that cannot be overturned by the interests of politicians and corporations finding common goals to destroy morality.

      • laziestflagellant [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 hours ago

        I know this user is banned but I’m still losing it over the ‘you wrote your comment with Ai’ accusation

        buddy is so out of depth that the concept of a commie dropping an essay of their own accord is an impossibility instead of the least surprising thing to happen when you’re arguing online with a communist lmao

      • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Your definition of idealism is so wrong its incredible, it really shows how little knowledge of political economy you truly have (if you quantified it it would likely be negative). Idealism posits that consciousness determines existence. You do exactly this by imagining a perfect system in your head and demanding reality conform to it. Historical materialism understands that systems emerge from material conditions and class struggle. You cannot design morality into a system built on exploitation. Your claim that both China and the US suck is not insight. It is third way centrism that protects the status quo by refusing to analyze class character. Equating a state focused on poverty alleviation with one focused on profit maximization is a political choice to ignore reality.

        COVID was not the flu. Millions died and hundreds of thousands suffer permanent disability. You trivialize this mass death to protect your worldview. You dodge the core argument that Western capitalist countries left millions to die. Zero COVID was the correct material response to preserve life. It lasted longer because Western nations refused to cooperate and instead hoarded vaccines while preaching liberty. You call it tyranny I call it protecting the vulnerable. The western strategy was to let the virus burn through the workforce to keep markets open. That is the logic of capital. Your defense of that outcome shows where your priorities lie.

        The Mao era famine propaganda you recycle is again showing the kind of person you truly are. The Great Leap Forward had policy errors but the famine was largely exacerbated by natural disasters and external pressure. It was the last famine China ever had. Since then China lifted over 900 million people from poverty, all but eradicated illiteracy, built infrastructure from the coast to rural villages including roads, electricity, and clinics. You ignore this massive material gain to fixate on decontextualized body counts. You are a fascist drunk on propaganda.

        Your abortion argument is blatant orientalism. Raw numbers mean nothing without population context. Ten million abortions in a population of 1.4 billion is a rate of roughly 28 per 1000. That ranks China 66th in the world. There are no skyscrapers of fetuses. That imagery is dehumanizing trash designed to paint Asian society as barbaric. You claim you lived in China but your “insights” are just Western media talking points. You sound like a disgruntled sexpat sexpest who never understood the society he lived in (if you’re not just outright lying). Maybe you just resent it now that you’re no longer glorified here.

        Ideal capitalism does not exist. The Western safety net you crave is built on pillaging the periphery through violence and imperialism. You cannot have regulated profits and universal care under a system driven by accumulation. Capital will always find a way to bypass rules to survive competition. Your solution to let AI enforce morality is techno fascist logic. It assumes humans are the problem and algorithms are the savior. Also I did not use AI to write this. Your arguments are the ones that sound like generated propaganda. But I still decided to engage in the hopes maybe you were simply misguided, I see now that misguided is the wrong phrase you clearly purposefully seek out reactionary talking points.

        The US is dominant only because it emerged from World War II intact and assumed leadership of Western imperialism. It spent decades extracting wealth from the Global South. Even with that head start they are losing ground to China in multiple sectors. You talk about military threats but ignore the budget. The US spends more than the next ten nations combined. Comparing the US and China is not irrelevant (even though I didn’t do that in my original comment) they both embody the current most advanced forms of their respective systems.

        Your rhetoric exposes a deep seated chauvinism and you are spouting fascist logic. You speak of distributed power while proposing an infallible AI enforcer to override human agency. Your imagery of fetus skyscrapers relies on old tropes of Asian barbarism to dehumanize a population. This is orientalism pure and simple. You claim to hate power concentration while defending a system that concentrates wealth in historically unprecedented levels. Your third way Nazi dog whistles serve only to protect Western hegemony. You have a surface level understanding of political economy. You fetishize technology and ignore relations of production. You are just an a fucking idiot who barely grasps the material world. Stop parroting orientalist lies and learn what materialism actually means. Maybe then you can start to actually understand the world.

        Racist fashie pig.

        • StonksDiff13@lemmy.todayBanned from community
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          1 day ago

          I was actually really excited to reply to you because I can explain where our miscommunication is occurring. But then I skipped ahead and saw that you have devolved into an emotional wreck incapable of controlling yourself. This is textbook form of running away and painting someone you truly don’t know the first thing about with extreme, and I do mean extreme broad brush insults as well as… name calling? I just feel sorry for you now. This will be last message to you because I simply don’t continue with people who abandoned reason in the face of challenge. Best of luck to you.

          • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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            1 day ago

            You are not leaving because “I am emotional”. You are leaving because your arguments were dismantled and you have no response that wouldn’t embarrass yourself further. Claiming I am an emotional wreck is the oldest deflection in the book. It is what people do when they cannot engage with substance. You never addressed a single point about productive forces, class character, or the material basis of policy. You just recycled orientalist tropes and techno-utopian fantasies. Now that those have been exposed you retreat behind a facade of moral superiority.

            You call it name calling. I call it accurate characterization. Your fetus skyscraper imagery is dehumanizing propaganda. Your dismissal of 900 million lifted from poverty is chauvinism. Your proposal for an infallible AI morals enforcer is fascist. These are not insults. They are accurate descriptions of what you actually wrote. If the truth feels like an attack that is a problem with your position not my delivery.

            You say you do not continue with people who abandon reason. Yet you are the one who refused to engage with historical materialism. You are the one who reduced complex historical processes to body count propaganda. You are the one who claimed capitalism could be moral if only we designed it better. That is not reason. That is idealism, a fairytale concocted in your mind to make you feel better.

            Do not pretend this is about civility. You were comfortable spouting orientalist lies and fascist dog whistles until someone actually pushed back. Now you want to exit with a sanctimonious farewell. That is cowardice. If you truly believed in distributed power and reasoned debate you would stay and engage. But you cannot. Because your position collapses under materialist analysis.

            Go ahead and block me. It will not change the fact that your arguments were refuted point by point. It will not erase the orientalism in your rhetoric. It will not make your techno-fascist solutions any more viable. You are not rising above. You are running away. And everyone who reads this thread will see which one of us actually engaged with substance and which one retreated when challenged.

            Bye bye piggie.