• Diva (she/her)@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    I don’t like how they’ve taken a turn toward liberalizing and “opening up” their healthcare industry so vultures like the guy who got today can get even wealthier off of everyone else.

    Maybe there’s some logic to it, but I think it sucks.

    • intresteph@discuss.online
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      20 days ago

      And would you agree that by enabling people to become billionaires makes them quite the opposite of communist? Almost like everyone at the top in every country is the actual problem?

      • Diva (she/her)@lemmy.ml
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        20 days ago

        And would you agree that by enabling people to become billionaires makes them quite the opposite of communist?

        I will say, they have at least as st made a show of keeping a leash on them so far, executing ones for corruption/embezzlement is good, I think these types of things are a continuum, if they allow the capitalists they’re attempting to instrumentalize to actually solidify political power within the country I would agree that anything they reach could never be called communism. That’s why I think it’s sort of a Faustian bargain.

        Almost like everyone at the top in every country is the actual problem?

        This last decade has made me acutely aware of this point, regime change begins at home.

        • intresteph@discuss.online
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          20 days ago

          Those executions are just for show. And change will only happen at the end of a blade… but pointing up, not down to the people. That includes the people of the west.

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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            19 days ago

            How can execution of billionaires be “for show?” Are they supporting billionaires, or killing the ones that step out of line? Which is it?

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                19 days ago

                Is Engels “wumao?”

                Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?

                Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.

                Do you think the PRC can summon more developed productive forces with the swish and flick of a wand? The entire purpose of Scientific Socialism is analyzing that markets and public ownership are both tools, and each is more or less effective at different points in development. Half the PRC’s economy is in the public sector, governing industries like steel, infrastructure, energy, etc, which all place reliance on the public sector from the private sector, which is not as developed and generally governs more complex industries at lower levels of development.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        19 days ago

        No, the CPC’s usage of a Socialist Market Ecnomy is in line with the Marxist stance that markets and public ownership are more effective in different sectors with respect to level of development. Per Engels:

        Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?

        Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.

        The Proletariat wrests Captial by the degree to which it has developed, which is necessarily different in different sectors and industries, and not merely by decree. The goal is full public ownership and central planning, but until that becomes practical across the entire economy, focusing on the principle sectors, ie the steel industry, infrastructure, and so forth that the Private Sector relies on allows humans to have dominance over Capital, and not the reverse. Half of the PRC’s economy is in the Public Sector, and nearly a tenth in the cooperative sector.

        You don’t have to blindly support the PRC, but it absolutely is Socialist.

        • intresteph@discuss.online
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          19 days ago

          Typical Wumao response.

          You can’t have billionaires and be communism. That’s not fair to the people, which is the point.

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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            19 days ago

            In what manner is Engels “wumao?” Marxism is not about “fairness,” or “justice,” but liberation of the working class. It’s about rapidly improving the lives of the Proletariat. The notion that private property can be abolished with one stroke is anti-Marxist, and that means the idea that the bourgeoisie and thus billionaires can be abolished at one stroke is also anti-Marxist. The CPC is increasing control over the Private Sector and gradually wresting Capital from the Bourgeoisie, precisely as Marx and Engels envisioned a Socialist State would.

            You can’t just uncritically label everything you disagree with as “wumao.”

            • intresteph@discuss.online
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              19 days ago

              You can’t liberate the fucking working class when you’re allowing someone to make the billions of dollars that should be going to the working class. China is a fucking hypocritical country and you are programmed by them. Goooodbye Wumao

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                19 days ago

                Can you explain how an American managed to be “programmed” by the PRC despite not speaking any mandarin? Is the PRC that powerful? Again, I point you to Marx:

                The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

                Markets centralize and lay the foundations for public ownership and central planning. You can’t wave a wand and command these internal mechanisms for planning to spring out of thin air.

                • intresteph@discuss.online
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                  19 days ago

                  You can quote whatever you want. You cannot have a communist country where people are not equal.

                  Goodbye Wumao

                  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                    19 days ago

                    Marxism is not about “equality,” and in fact recognizes the very real differences in people as individuals. Marx railed against “equalitarians” his entire life. Is Marx “wumao” too?

                    But one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can work for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity of the worker as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right ot inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by the same standard in so far as they are brought under the same point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers, and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.

                    But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

                    In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but itself life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

                    Critique of the Gotha Programme