thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I don't think I ever claimed any such thing, dear boy. I was referring to an established position that zhao used to argue from a decade and more before you ever showed up here.

Don't let that stop you have a mental frothing spastic rant, though.

1) don't call me dear boy like a condescending racist Rudyard Kipling wannabe.
2) I know Zhao's argument all to well because it's the argument that has been used in Syria for years to own the libs, without realising that the libs are cut from the same cloth as them.
3) I was also long aware of Zhao's pseudo-black athena arguments long before I joined up here.
4) I am brown, these are the sorts of debates I grew up with, so once again, tuck away your cock and have some fucking humility.
5) you have done nothing for muslims apart from occasionally lend a room or donate a bit of money to a charity, and charities in this context are immoral in the long term. a short term palliative.
6) Ableism is really not a good look, Dominic.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
very sympathetic to arguments in the vein of "though the soviet union and comecon countries were/are only social democracies ['at the barrel of a gun'?] their real achievements in terms of human well-being are too flippantly glossed over/dismissed" i'm definitely open to having holes poked in that kind of argument.

I think the Soviet Union, PRC and Cuba were progressive. However they were progressive historically in laying the preconditions for communism. I.E: they were progressive, in accordance with Marx's contention in chapter 15 of Capital that the real revolutionary dynamic in capitalism is the proletarianisation of the agricultural labourer. That is in terms of how I analyse these countries. So undoubtedly there were real achievements, but so were there in 1960s England. The thing is what achievements in these countries do not equate to a mode of production as such and can always be rolled back. What I have an issue is not the left wing of the marxist-leninists in the periphery countries, I have an issue with west centric M-Ls in hysteric fits of calling oh I dunno, Deng a revisionist when he just followed what had to be logically done in the economic domain. It wasn't pure anti-revisionist Mao and bad revisionist Deng, one has to look at the composition of industry, the composition of the peasantry, the composition of the bourgeoisie, but not only on a territorial but an international level.

and one thing i've been getting out of sakai's 'settlers' is that ostensibly 'communist' and 'workers' organisations in the u.s. with european bases pivoted to the middle class with their base and did a great deal to discredit their arguments for a looong time with the internal-colonial proletariat.

I'm sympathetic to Sakai and some third worldist analyses but I always tend to find their arguments about the real segmentation of the proletariat actually lacking, funnily enough. Like one of his academic disciples Zak Cope essentially argues that the entire first world proletariat are basically embourgeoisified through social democracy. Which is a huge stretch and completely goes against the marxist adage that the conflict in the class is between the forces and relations of production. It's more like in the first world that there is a much stronger management bureaucracy (which is salaried bourgeois!) otherwise for the most part social democracy is a thing of the past.

i'm also gonna read and take notes/questions on politzer's 'elementary principles of philosophy' on the recommendation of the rhizzone (though they've come to appreciate there are a few not-insignificant problems with it) in order to clarify/solidify the materialist conception in my own brain. maybe you have a complementary/better recommendation from the 'leftcom' perspective as far as an exposition of materialism?

I don't see left communism as a tendency so I'd rather say critical communism as the movement. Absolutely essential is Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and manual labour: a critique of bourgeois epistemology.
The soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov's Dialectics of the abstract in marx's capital, his essays on logic will really clarify things alongside as well.
The Jamaican feminist Sylvia Winter's essays are also good, though not strictly orthodox marxist.
Cesaire discourse on colonialism.
The Black Panther Russell Maroon Schoatz wrote some very necessary stuff to engage with on questions of organisation, definitely.
https://libcom.org/library/dragon-hydra-historical-study-organizational-methods
Huey Newton on inter-communalism is also good though I find it very much has to be read in a 1970s context.
Bordiga - Aircraft Carrier Imperialism.
https://libcom.org/library/aircraft-carrier-imperialism-amadeo-bordiga

I'm sure if I go digging on the hd in the week I can find a lot more for you.

I hope that helps!
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I don't think I ever claimed any such thing, dear boy. I was referring to an established position that zhao used to argue from a decade and more before you ever showed up here.

Don't let that stop you have a mental frothing spastic rant, though.


Funnily enough, I'm also aware of Zhao outside of dissensus trying to spark flame wars and then quickly backtracking and deleting, or calling everyone outside himself reactionary and racist, (the asian who hated asian music and only listened to white dudebro shit until he had a guilt complex after college!) who'd have thunk?

So don't presume to condescend to me, Dominic.
 
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other_life

bioconfused
hey third im gonna grab these books thank u. i have too much shit to read i should pare back what i have even more
 

zhao

there are no accidents
more or less agree with you zhao but don't you think that the usa and china are economically so interwoven and dependent on each other that war would be disastrous for both?

Of course and absolutely. Which is why China is promoting peaceful cooperation, trade, and mutually beneficial development on a global scale.

But the US empire is waging trade and propaganda war, spreading slanderous lies against the People's Republic, such as "oppression of Muslims", "big brother censorship", and "totalitarianism", in preparation for potential military engagement, kool-aid which Western liberals are eager to drink.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
What I said more than 10 years ago, and maintain today, was that HIV/AIDS is much more complex than is portrayed by the official narrative of medical establishment which is full of inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

The fact that you drag that up to try to discredit me on a wholly unrelated topic is a level of saltiness and grudge holding that is truly impressive. If you are still mad that i was mean to your friend on facebook, he started with the condescension and abuse, and couldn't take a bit of rightful ridicule for being factually wrong. But don't let that get in the way of your double standards lol
 

zhao

there are no accidents
I'm glad Tian An Men square protests were mentioned.

Many socialist states collapsed in the late 80s and early 90s, and become Neo-liberal vassals: Yugoslavia, USSR, etc. The same fate was planned for China, but the CCP was able to defeat the counter-revolution, and has remained truly independent to this day.

Dang Xiao Ping was already very ill by 1989, and his exit created a power vacuum. The CIA already had their man inside the party, Zhao Ziyang, who, if the student protests had spread, would have taken control, opened China to imperialist Neo-liberalism, and that would have spelled the end of socialism not only in China, but basically around the world.

The “National Endowment for Democracy” had been funding the student protestors, whose discontent was based on temporary economic stagnation, since at least 1985, and set up radio stations to disseminate liberal capitalist propaganda among other things. It is the tried and true formula: take an authentic protest movement, fan the flames, derail, and use the ensuing chaos to topple governments resistant to Western hegemony.

The CCP rightly suppresses these pro-"democracy" movements, because they are funded by capitalist forces, with the goal of destabilisation and eventual dissolution of the CCP, so the West can once again reclaim what once belonged to them, and dominate the country like they once did.

But zero evidence of any “massacre” took place in Tian An Men square. And it is important to how this base-less allegation has been used to slander the CPC, the South Korean capitalist massacre of student protestors which killed at least 600 in 1980, for which every evidence exists, is never ever even mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising

From CBS:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

https://frso.org/main-documents/loo...are-the-defeat-of-counter-revolution-in-china

https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the...FB_l3slDC11CQceVeP3W55eT0xvZl6CVyIu-vZ7O0Er2M
 

zhao

there are no accidents
And on the trajectory of modern China since 1979 in relation to Marxism, I leave you all with a series of quotes:

“it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse”.

–– Karl Marx, “The German Ideology”

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

–– Karl Marx, “in the critique of the Gotha Program”

Thanks to OSD — Observatory of Sovereign Development
“For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly”
“The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.“

–– Vladimir Lenin, Can We Go Forward If We Fear To Advance Towards Socialism?

“”We want to do business.” Quite right, business will be done. We are against no one except the domestic and foreign reactionaries who hinder us from doing business. … When we have beaten the internal and external reactionaries by uniting all domestic and international forces, we shall be able to do business with all foreign countries on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

–– Mao Ze Dong, On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship

“So, to build socialism it is necessary to develop the productive forces. Poverty is not socialism. To uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty. True, we are building socialism, but that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved so far is up to the socialist standard. Not until the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately developed countries, shall we be able to say that we have really built socialism and to declare convincingly that it is superior to capitalism. We are advancing towards that goal.”

–– Deng XiaoPing
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you live in one of the foremost imperialist powers garbling marx quotes and taking them out of context. really if you had any sense you'd be doing everything in your ability to fight against German imperialism, as any self-respecting Marxist or Leninist would do. But that would mean you would lose half of your cultural capital. There is a reason why I haveno capital for English politics! our left are handmaidens of British Imperialism.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
even my aunt in purda can competently shoot a gun and ur sat there pontificating like a true imperial descendent about things you only have a proximate connection to as if it's a game of football rather, than you know, doing something practical to bring down the US hegemony. and the most hilarious bit of it all is you're probably buying weed from my Kurdish mates who are sniggering behind your back at how they managed to rip you off.
 

other_life

bioconfused
wasn't yugoslavia already kind of beholden to 'international institutions' ie the IMF a decade or so *before* the collapse of comecon?
 

other_life

bioconfused
zhao i've heard this general argument so many times it's kind of starting to wear thin. which is not to say it's entirely incorrect. just that at this point it feels like bog standard PSL/WWP party line stuff and should be less repetitive, and bc of its simplicity has to be distorting things.
as an example you can say what you like about the situation in xinjiang but the re-education camps are real, it's something communists (and not 'ultras' or 'revisionists' or any of that either, but self-professed marxist-leninists) are discussing and criticising the CCP for national chauvinism over.
here are some of the more insightful posts, on the xinjiang issue specifically:

"their talk of development and lifting the region out of poverty seems more sincere than the talk of their western neoliberal counterparts (theyve been sinking money into infrastructure like the LanXin rail, which serves no other purpose than to connect xinjiang to the rest of china), but the education camps and police state stuff being put in terms of "vocational training" and "enhance their understanding of Chinese (read:Han) history" was a bit creepy. the west is clearly mad in the ass because it does seem to be an effective way to prevent them from fueling local separatist and islamist movements as leverage against china except on the diplomatic level, but at the same time this "integration" work seems to be heavy-handed to an unjustifiable degree... there are are strong elements of racism and chauvinism involved, as RWN explored, and the uneven development in different areas of china doesn't seem to be going away any time soon."

"Not only that, but its hard to overstate how strongly constant police state terror and brutal overreaction played in the decades leading up to both situations. And as far as I can tell, there haven't been many reports of foreign jihadis in Xinjiang, or the extent to which what is being targeted is extremist Islamist or Turkic seperatism. Its hard to imagine that with the disparity between Uyghurs and Han Chinese (the capital of Xinjiang, which is its economic center, and where riots that ended in hundreds killed have occured, is 85% Han) that this can be entirely chalked up to clericalism fostered from abroad.
The recent ramping up of the police state was preceded by a similar move in the 1990s. There were small attempts at seperatism back then too:
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9702/10/china.riots/index.html
When Bush was looking for diplomatic support for the Iraq war, he actually had Uyghur seperatists labelled terrorists.
The religious aspects have always been there, but the pan-Turkic and anti-Han senitments seem to be equally prominent.
There seems to be plenty written on the topic in English, but its largly stuff published by places set up, previously funded or currently funded by the State Department. "Center for Studying Oriental Despotism and Promoting Democracy Amongst the Celestials" and the like
This particular report is interesting, since one could read it from the perspective of possible U.S promotion of extremism in Xinjiang:
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a523195.pdf"

"I mean surely it would involve criticising and condemning han cultural chauvinism among party officials, in the tradition that mao called for, instead of reinforcing it. i don't know how you could argue that han cultural education is a necessary component of any kind of security apparatus among ethnic minorities unless you actually subscribed to such chauvinism."
 
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other_life

bioconfused
"nah dude there is a serious element of racism and profiling on the basis of physical appearances involved. In the carl zha interview he goes into detail about a policy in which hotels have to inform the police whenever Uyghurs check in or out, and other alarming shit they shouldnt be glossed over as just a matter of preventing some AQ affiliate from taking over towns or something. People who look physically turkic of have islamic or turkic names are racially profiled in some pretty nasty ways.
Anyways, one incredibly interesting relationship and comparison is that between the uyghur and the hui, who are the other major muslim population in china. Hui and Han have a history of cooperating in conquering Xinjiang, and Uyghurs have had long-standed ethnic tensions with both groups, sometimes erupting in riots and massacres.
Hui seem to be a "model minority", they are anti-separatist, spread out all over and integrated well with Han chinese. It seems China's trying to craft Uyghurs into that mold, with the national unity stuff, and has resolved to try and demographically and culturally change Xinjiang by promoting Han migration there and through some culture policing and re-education camps. Most importantly (probably) is trying to economically develop the region. And yes, re-education camps are prisons - you aren't allowed to leave them and they have guards. If you wanted to be unduly generous you could compare them to mental wards instead or something."

"you claim to not be arguing for cultural education and internment as an essential component of the security apparatus, but i think you're implying it by this consternation about alternative models.
if it's a nonessential security process, then clearly the alternative model is trivial to identify: literally any other mobilisations the prc uses against insurgency and antisocial behaviour in cases that do not involve a marginalised ethnic minority. the prc is a developed and sophisticated security state, the idea that their hands are tied to han cultural chauvinism by default is giving them extremely little credit"

"you two are arguing in a boring way because in the interests of propriety petrol isn't just flatly saying what he believes without qualification.
the uighur imbroglio is interesting to me because of this question; is it ok to stamp out religion? i think yes, and indoctrination is the only way to do this. but i'm not sure that's entirely what the ccp is doing in xianjing. when they do things like suppress the uighur language, that crosses into destruction of national culture. soviet nationalities policy under stalin emphasized the promotion of national culture and autonomy in particular before the war, and it was very successful in promoting alongside this soviet humanism. there doesn't seem to be anything similar to Сове́тский наро́д in the People's Republic of China, which I think is a real obstacle to socialist internationalism and humanism. han chauvinism seems to really be an ascendant aspect of the ruling ideology.
when i was doing some investigation into the uighur affair, which is really difficult to parse, i came across these archived uighur forums and a lot of the complaints in the poorly translated google rendering were about insufficient resources being allocated to the uighur minority. there was a class component to the complaint, ethnicity and class were intersecting in a way that clearly privileged the han over the uighur. some examples here in links and pictures:

https://web.archive.org/web/2011091...80/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=228208&extra=page=1
https://web.archive.org/web/2011091...80/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=228964&extra=page=1
https://web.archive.org/web/20110913090155/http://www.uighurbiz.net:80/html/2009/0622/13103.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20110731150010/http://www.uighurbiz.net/#

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme...22631332698783785/Han_racism_Uighur_forum.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme...368/Uyghur_Han_Discrimination_forum_class.png

That last picture in particular is illuminating to me and makes me think of Lenin when he talks about the proletariat of Britain being infected with cultural chauvinism.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme..._Colonial_Chauvinism_Settlers_Sakai_pg_52.png

Xianjing strikes me as an example of internal colonization, we see this with the reports of incentives for marriage between ethnicities, which on the face of it isn't objectionable, but when mixed with the chauvinism we see many examples of takes on a sinister turn, Australian settlers attempted a similar project; there's not a lot of hard evidence out there but it strikes me as part of a strategy of homogenization.
I'm reaching further back into the depths of memory, but there was a Sean's Russia Blog Podcast episode with Ronald Suny where Suny talked about how in the Soviet Union there were certain ethnicities associated with certain class roles, and how development policy, particularly in Central Asia, by encouraging local culture and administration and competence sought to break these class tags that ethnicities were saddled with. We see it in a crude form in the US with the conception of the Mexican as itinerant laborer."

"Thank you. Internal colonization is exactly what it is, and I suspect it has less to do with religious extremism as it does ethnically based separatism. This isn't an effort to stamp out extremist cells or shut down particularly wahhabi mosques, whatever hard evidence we have points to it as a large scale pacification campaign against an ethnically turkic region prone to rioting against the dominant ethnicity.
As to the question of what is the alternative to reeducation camps and forced "assimilation" (again, assimilation to a cultural and ethnic group coming to them, not one that they themselves are joining), the answer is usually "listen to their grievances and address them to the best extent you can". There are clear indicators of material inequality and alienation from a distant state that sets limits on religious and cultural practice, while offering little in return but an influx of developers with a different religion, language and ethnicity who by every measurement control the regional economy and government. The tricky part is reconciling the fact that integrating Xinjiang with the rest of China will be better for China in the long run, and depending on how its done, for Xinjiang as well, and the fact that there is a long history of Uyghur demands for self-determination."

and here are threads on the general china question:
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/883/
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14185/
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14547/
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14747/
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
no doubt a lot of the figures in the west are over-inflated, as they engaged in exercises of atrocity mongering against Stalin to cover their own atrocity mongering (in, say, Bengal or Kenya) but Zhao has to prove that there is a significant ISIS terrorist culture in Turkey, which there isn't. and overemphasising a few rag tag isis militants in Turkey distracts from the real terror and embezzlement campaigns being enacted against the east and the Kurdish working class. The Kurdish middle class, on the other hand, is pretty safe.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
tabloid or indi media sources don't equate to fact, no matter how leftist they purport to be, no matter how hard you try to make them accord with fact. I want to see conclusive presence of jihadism in Turkey through rigorous studies and reports that are not warmed over Turkey from 2015, something I have not witnessed whenever I've gone there the past two years. And I live very close to Suruç. All I heard, even from AKP loyalists, was moans about embezzlement, bribery and domineering presence of the turkish army.

And of course, there was some quite ugly racism against Syrians (something that will upset some on here, from the internally colonised proletariat of Kurdish people.) But even the most racist never claimed there was an ISIS presence in the villages or close to the border. Patrick Cockburn is a comfortable journalist living in the UK, not someone who speaks the languages or lives in that area or can parse the shadow puppetry of the minutiae of turkish politics.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I also don't believe China liberated East Turkistan for it's own good, just like the USSR used the central asian republics as a useful repository of mineral extraction.

This doesn't mean all the changes the PRC carried out were all bad, but if we take the emancipation of the working class to be the act of the working classes themselves, you will have to seriously tell me that a proletariat existed in East Turkistan in 1950s and 1960s, which it didn't - and before you start crying foul ultra as you've been known to do, I'm not always against a proletarian vanguard.
 

other_life

bioconfused
in any instance the debate ab whether BRICS is imperialist in the sense lenin defined it feels like a metaphysical one, because they are vying for hegemony with the u.s. and u.k and leveraging their relationship with the european union to do so.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
in any instance the debate ab whether BRICS is imperialist in the sense lenin defined it feels like a metaphysical one, because they are vying for hegemony with the u.s. and u.k and leveraging their relationship with the european union to do so.


To me the central thing here is not whether China or Russia are imperialist, but which state we have to prioritise the collapse of in the proletarian revolution. And that is undisputably the state with the most airpower, namely the US. It is imperative that we coordinate communist efforts to forming a single world communist party that can seize all the choak points of the US on a worldwide scale, and thereby bring the US proletariat into the world revolution. anything else, say, the standard liberal clap trap of all imperialisms being as bad as each other is like saying that capitalism can evolve to such a state where wars between the imperialist powers will never take place, which totally misunderstands the counter-acting tendancy necessary to devalue the organic composition of capital when it reaches a certain fever pitch.

*by communist party* I mean the class party, not necessarily a duplication of the 2nd international social democrat parties.
 
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