Sorry if the title is a bit weird, I’m curious about what made you believe what you do. Mainstream leftism usually doesn’t go any further than trans rights or maybe UBI in some places, at least from what I know, so what made you go beyond that? You can answer generally or talk about a specific belief, just wanna see what caused the more radical opinions in you
I’m particularly curious about what changed your opinions about the USSR and China, most people think they’re awful, but in here they’re really liked and defended, I’ve even seen a lot of posts denying the Tiananmen massacre and the Holodomor and stuff like that, what made you go to such lengths?
r/cth honestly, along with the podcast. someone just engaging critically with me on my ill-considered beliefs (“maduro is a dictator right?”). the failure of bernie 2020 helped too, and then reading a lot about history and some theory
i think being trans probably pushed me towards the left, before i figured that out abt myself i literally couldn’t articulate an actual reason for why i felt drawn towards the left instead of being a typical shitlib like my class and cultural background would dictate.
Going full
def isn’t the default tho, so i attribute the rest to getting an i think above average level of education on american slavery and british colonialism (really a bizarre amount of british history for an american teenager, basically covered the transition from feudalism to capitalism over like 3 years of highschool) early on and then getting exposed to Indigenous ideas and history taking college electives. All that and having a special interest abt the Vietnam War instilled a really strong hatred and disgust towards the colonial/imperial mindset which is what’s pulled me more and more towards being a massive tankie.I did start out on the more libertarian anarchist type side of the left mostly bc that’s what most people around me were, but the more i read and talked abt things like decolonization and whiteness the answers from that school of thought just weren’t satisfying or convincing to me and i really started to distrust the way the (exclusively white) anarchists/libsocs/mainstream leftists around me engaged with what is imo the most important question for the left in this country. Not that every white person is personally culpable and incapable of solidarity but a lot of the engagement from my fellow
lefties feels way too focused on absolution in a way that icks me out and is probably related to a bigger overcorrection away from the whole personal responsibility thing.went off on a tangent kinda but TL;DR trans woman indoctrinated into being a self hating anti-white racist by woke history classes, becomes a turbo tankie
who no longer believes in freedom bc whitey won’t voluntarily do what must be done without reeducationhaving a trans friend pushed me very left too, it definitely makes you realize how… dumb everything is
if I can ask, what’s exactly the difference between a “libertarian anarchist” and a “tankie”? I assume they’re both communists?
libertarian and anarchist were basically synonymous for the beginning of the 20th century, idk if libertarian anarchism is something anyone identifies with except for maybe a few ancaps.
Libertarian socialism is kind of a centrist fusion of anarchism and marxism that’s afaik mostly defined by liking socialism but being against “authoritarianism”.
Tankie started out as a pejorative for a type of Marxist-Leninist, although it’s been getting way less specific in the last couple of years. At this point it’s basically aimed at anyone who refuses to satisfactorily denounce the USSR, China, or basically any geopolitical rival of the US and NATO. i like this explanation a lot: https://redsails.org/tankies/
I mostly consider myself an ML as much as that means anything, but lean into self IDing as a tankie more than i probably should just bc i think sincere internationalism is nonnegotiable for good left politics in the imperial core and the dominant narratives around the people and states that’ll get you called a tankie for opposing are racist as fuck when you get down to it.
tbf some of the anarchists i’ve hung around with would probably get called tankies online for their takes on the DPRK, so it’s not ML exclusive, but i’m kind of doubtful libsoc or any other ideology concerned with “authoritarianism” or “totalitarianism” can get through the propaganda without grappling with the double standards inherent to the concept and coming out the other side significantly different
what’s the difference between a regular marxist and a marxist-leninist?
from what you told me, I assume regular socialists want centralized systems, while “libertarian socialists” want decentralized ones? and anarchists want like, no systems at all?
any Marxist-Leninist should be a Marxist, it’s kind of a squares and rectangles situation. declaring yourself a Marxist-Leninist is to my understanding a statement that Lenin and the ML states after him advanced Marxism through theory and practice and their findings are applicable and necessary to Marxist practice now. Some people go further into being Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, claiming Mao advanced Marxism and learned lessons broadly applicable outside of the context of China.
Saying anarchists want no systems at all is unfair to them i think, although it’s such a decentralized ideology that some anarchists certainly would say that. There’s a fundamental agreement on working towards communism as a classless, stateless society between marxism and anarchism. The fundamental disagreement in my view is that marxism views communism and socialism as the result of proletarian political self consciousness and actualization by becoming aware of their own interests and ultimately taking state power (this is Lenin’s big contribution, and why it’s easy to find anarchists trying to reclaim Marx for anarchism but never Lenin), whereas anarchism has more of a “the classless stateless society was inside us the whole time” thing, where the state and hierarchy are abridging our natural tendency towards communism. You can kinda see this in contemporary anarchist’s affinity for David Graeber, but it goes way back to Kropotkin’s work on mutual aid and probably even older. A lot of popular anarchist arguments point out that people often organize themselves without the threat of violence, e.g. queueing.
i don’t think i could really tell you what libertarian socialists want exactly, i think they’re generally motivated by self interest (wanting health care, to be exploited less, you know the good kind of self interest) so sort of like the marxist class interest thing, but are also suspicious of the discipline and to be honest, repression (of the bourgeois) implied by ML which is where the anarchist influence comes in. Usually manifests in wanting socialist systems that are explicitly democratic, in contrast to the socialist systems that have already been tried, and a really common critique is that those systems were not democratic bc they were too centralized, bc more decentral = more democracy is an ideological proposition that’s just kind of accepted in the west. Arguing over whether the USSR, PRC, and so on was really democratic and what democracy actually means is ofc the usual response.
thanks a lot for the answers
so… do marxists that aren’t marxists leninists do not agree with lenin? or do not see his methods as something that should be repeated or taken into account?
also, you say “more decentral = more democracy is an ideological proposition that’s just kind of accepted in the west” kinda implying you think that’s not true? Can you elaborate on that a bit if you can?
Marxists that aren’t ML might not agree with Lenin, they might agree with Lenin but think his ideas were distorted, they might not be particularly interested in Lenin, they might still be working out their opinion on him. It’s also entirely possible that they’re choosing to id as a Marxist bc that’s less risky in their situation. Talking about tendencies can be a lot like talking abt gender or sexuality; language is a strategy.
i think what people are usually talking about when they talk about wanting democracy is a combination of having input on decisions, and leaders being accountable to democratically decided decisions. Since we’re so thoroughly disempowered under liberal bourgeois democracy it’s very attractive to insist on everyone having a say and having power, but that creates a problem with the second part of democracy, accountability. What good is having the ability to be heard and influence decision making when those decisions aren’t all that binding? And how is accountability supposed to work without some degree of centralization? While our present system certainly does use centralization to disempower us, it’s important to note how the decentralized aspects subvert people’s will too. The United States system is very influenced by a desire to maintain minority rule, and decentralization is a very important tool for accomplishing that by removing powers from ostensibly democratically accountable bodies (supreme court), and granting a certain level of independence to states and abridging the central govts ability to impose on state governments.
I know wanting more accountability to central power is kind of strange, especially coming when i’m a member of a minority group that the majority is allegedly prejudiced against, but i’ve come to the point of having full faith that my interests are the same as the proletariat’s class interests. It’s easy to get caught up in an elitist fear of the masses at first, but i don’t think a true dictatorship of the proletariat has any real reason oppress me in any way that i’d care about, while a dictatorship of the bourgeois would. This is of course rests on the idea that state power itself or certain ways of doing democracy don’t have a class character, which is where anarchists will disagree, but i’d say look up anarchist style consensus decision making and the liberum veto and compare.
I’m not really well read on all this theory, so excuse me if I say something dumb or that you’ve heard a lot of times before, but I still think this conversation is really interesting
The way I’ve thought about it, I think a system of accountability is very important… If I recall correctly even the first liberals, when initially theorizing about a “modern” democratic system, were very explicit in that the people need mechanisms to keep those they voted for accountable, otherwise we’re only really choosing the flavour of a despot. If someone you voted for lied to you you genuinely can’t do anything except suffer the consequences for years and then vote someone else… who may also be lying. Some countries let people make their own referendums but I don’t think it’s enough
I think we could erradicate the risk of being lied to or putting the wrong person into power if there isn’t a position of power they can usurp. I think voting should be done on individual laws and policies and their implementations, and the position of an elected representative should only involve the job of seeing what we voted for get done, nothing more nothing less, and we should be able to at any point remove them if they aren’t doing that
whereas, in a system where we give power and trust to certain positions and just let them do their thing, it feels like change is always at a disadvantage, because we have to keep putting effort to keep the change but they only have to be able to revert it once, see abortion in the USA for example
my communist grandpa lost all his arguments with my lib debatebro dad when i was growing up but then i found cth and it had the right vibes so i went and read lenin and realized that my grandpa had been proven right post 2008 and that i had been groomed to be an anticapitalist sleeper agent since i was 2
also listened to way too much immortal technique for the longest time, agreed with everything he said but could not for the life of me connect the dots until i realized that there were other communists in the core
ALSO in high school i could go to the local bookstore franchise and pick up like three different prints of mein kampf but there were ZERO copies of lenin around
barnes & noble is a fascist propaganda front
Bernie’s 2020 campaign seemed promising, and then he undermined his own aides that criticized Joe Biden’s corruption, refused to acknowledge his dementia, and actively refused to tap into the deeper energy of the movement itself. We basically watched everyone get grifted into financing his campaign, and then he turns around and humiliates all his supporters by surrendering them to Biden’s campaign, handing the DNC a decisive victory and a devastating, demoralizing defeat to all those who still believed in electoralism.
Understanding that I had no horse in this race, I abandoned electoralism, but an ever-increasing hunger for justice continued to fester. I saw that the established political, financial, judicial, educational and informational institutions were all unanimously engaging in the dirtiest tactics imaginable to undermine working class interests and harm its people.
Seeing the use of force used by the state time and time again, endlessly, just blew up the narrative that peaceful transition is possible and that force was an illegitimate means to achieve enforcement of class interests. Thus, anarchism seemed far more appealing so that was my next stop on the political pipeline. I was pissed off, and wanted physical justice for the harm that’s being done to the working class and the planet itself. Having such a limited window to reverse the trend of climate change even further cemented this inevitable radicalization because the threat of extinction calls for more radical praxis than what “democratic socialists” were willing to accept.
After the worst of the anger and venting subsided, I just thought to myself “Well, what the hell. The worst bogeymen the US ever talked about (China, DPRK, Cuba, etc etc) couldn’t possibly be any worse than the shit I have to deal with here. They lied to me about everything else, so let’s go meet the big bad bogeyman that is China”
I watched a few videos from the channel “Living in China” like this one here: CHINA… is it as SAFE as People Say? 中国… 真如人们说的这么安全吗？Unseen China 🇨🇳
My entire foundational understanding of what I believed about the world was completely shattered and turned upside down in real-time during videos like this. I had absolutely no answers and nowhere to look for a better world, and here it was in one of the countries most hated and vilified by the US.
Since I had felt infinitely betrayed by my upbringing in the US, I took the next logical step and investigated the ultimate bogeyman of them all: The Communist Manifesto Audiobook
I was basically finally handed the keys to understanding how all these millions of issues I’ve encountered in my life were connected: class and class conflict
From here, it was impossible to go back and there was nothing the US could ever do or say that would put the blinders back on. I arrived at my final political destination of being a Marxist-Leninist and fully accepted class war as fundamental and revolution as the only possible path forward (yes, that means the use of force).
The rest, is history and here I am after over a year later.
I definitely understand the disilusion in the “mainstream left”, in here there is only like one relevant leftist party and they’re so, so awful. both strategy wise and the few times they actually reached power they just did so many stupid and awful things. now we’re ruled by a literal nazi that is already thinking how to change the constitution hungary style. I hate it here
also hey thanks for the video, that is indeed surprising, i’ve just realized I actually don’t even know how china works politically or economically, so I can’t actually speak much on them. I don’t know how rich the street he is walking on is, in my country on some really rich cities in the north you can also walk by without seeing any danger or homeless people (only on some districts mind you), but if it’s like that in most places in China that is really good
the main things that concern me about China are all the censorship and control of information, and as a programmer when the https://996.icu/#/en_US protests started in many github repos it made me quite angry, especially after some chinese billionaires defended it and nothing else happened, I really don’t think people in control of the lives of so many should even exist
EDIT: wait I just realized, in a lot of places there is no visible homelessness because the police just kicks them out, I’m not sure if that’s the same for China…
the main things that concern me about China are all the censorship and control of information
Facebook Targets Cambodia’s Prime Minister: A Lesson in Securing Information Space
Rule of Law-Internet Court: New Rules for a New Era
Democracy in China
China Says Democracy Is Not A Single Flavor Coca-Cola WorldwideThe Great Firewall of China is meant to keep the US out, not its people in. VPNs are perfectly legal, and the people can decide for themselves if they want to see the Western side of the internet. A lot of the people who do simply go back inside the Great Firewall to shield themselves from all the lies and hysteria of the West. In fact, that’s something we all want. We’re here on Lemmy instead of hostile places like Reddit, right?
China’s censorship of the internet is mainly for things like pornography, and also speech aimed at destabilizing the country’s political legitimacy. The point is to encourage healthy social trends and protect their people from US interference in China’s internal affairs.
The latter I’m talking about issues like Taiwan, which is an island province of China and an inalienable part of its territory. There is only one China, and Taiwan is part of China.
There is only one legitimate government of all of China (Taiwan included), and that is the Communist Party of China headquartered in Beijing of the People’s Republic of China.The US has been trying time and time again to break up countries into smaller pieces using separatism, racism, religious extremism and various other insidious tactics to divide and destroy a people.
This happened in Hong Kong (separatism: 29 defendants in Hong Kong plead guilty to subversion: HK court), it happened in Xinjiang province (religious extremism), and it’s currently happening in Taiwan (separatism).The US wants to break up China into smaller pieces and destroy it because quite frankly, the US cannot possibly compete with the technological and industrial behemoth at this stage in the game. China is taking over the US as the world’s most relevant country for progress in all respects, and the US is doing everything it can to undermine its legitimacy and all of its industry (sanctioning and trying to sabotage China’s semiconductor industry) because it’s trying to save its dying empire.
A well known effort to try and smear China as this totalitarian bogeyman is the infamous “social credit system”. You can see a video about it here: China’s “Social Credit Score System” - Fact or Fiction?
You can watch this video here to learn more about the Taiwan issue: What is Behind the Growing US-China Crisis Over Taiwan?
Even nations around China are being targeted because the US wants to establish more and more military bases and an ever-increasing military presence around its borders to destroy the country.
See this video here: US-backed Terrorism Targets Vietnam & Myanmar in Wider War on ChinaEDIT: wait I just realized, in a lot of places there is no visible homelessness because the police just kicks them out, I’m not sure if that’s the same for China…
Searching for HOMELESS People in China 中国的流浪汉在哪？Unseen China 🇨🇳
Apartment Tour in China | What can $300 a month get you? 🇨🇳
President Xi inspects poverty alleviation achievements in SW China (2019)
The secrets to China’s poverty alleviation success (2023)The US leverages and deliberately causes unemployment to increase employer leverage and decrease worker bargaining power. The homeless are indeed chased around by the cops endlessly, to both punish the poor and also maintain the facade that poverty isn’t as bad as it is in reality (out of sight, out of mind). Homelessness is also basically fatal, especially with the increasing extreme heat causing more and more climate casualties.
China, on the other hand, has been actually helping people directly with tangible results and efforts to reverse and even eradicate the trend of poverty.
China is not only doing this for their own people, but expanding the development to other nations who want to benefit, in a mission to bring the entire world out of poverty in a shared future for humanity.
See this video here: ‘Reality Check’: China’s BRI geopolitical gambit or project of the century?The US empire has no clothes. It deliberately causes and maintains the highest possible levels of poverty not only within the US, but also outside the US in places like Latin America and Africa, because desperate people are much easier to exploit. It has no credibility, and no future on this planet. It will continue to decay and eventually die for the benefit of humanity and all life on this planet.
hey thanks for the long explanation, it’s a lot to respond to so I’ll go bit by bit…
The Great Firewall of China is meant to keep the US out, not its people in. VPNs are perfectly legal, and the people can decide for themselves if they want to see the Western side of the internet. A lot of the people who do simply go back inside the Great Firewall to shield themselves from all the lies and hysteria of the West. In fact, that’s something we all want. We’re here on Lemmy instead of hostile places like Reddit, right?
I don’t know if VPNs are truly legal in China, I always read that they were not. Regardless I don’t think I still agree with doing this, I think better education is a much better solution than information control, because realistically speaking only very few people relative to everyone else will even know what a VPN is. also for me it’s quite the contrary… I like Lemmy because it’s decentralized so the information control is easy to circumvent by design, it’s why I could make an account here when this place was defederated by my previous instance, had this been Reddit I would have had no real way to reach out to here
China’s censorship of the internet is mainly for things like pornography, and also speech aimed at destabilizing the country’s political legitimacy. The point is to encourage healthy social trends and protect their people from US interference in China’s internal affairs.
I would much prefer combatting the misinformation than outright censoring it, especially because we can’t be sure if everything they censor is misinformation, some of it all may be real and just not convenient to them and it would be hard to notice the difference. also censoring porn is pretty regressive to me and doesn’t really solve anything, as proved in Japan…
The latter I’m talking about issues like Taiwan, which is an island province of China and an inalienable part of its territory. There is only one China, and Taiwan is part of China. There is only one legitimate government of all of China (Taiwan included), and that is the Communist Party of China headquartered in Beijing of the People’s Republic of China.
this is probably a really intense issue here but I honestly just don’t really agree… I don’t think a country is entitled to invade land just because it previously held it, that logic would justify Germany invading Poland again. for me demographics and what the people in the land actually want is much more important, and from what I know the Taiwanese very clearly do not want to be a part of China… I think the government should abandon the idea of “being the true China” and just be an independent country, but regardless of that I don’t agree with China being entitled to invading them, especially since doing so would basically mean WW3 for all of us
The US wants to break up China into smaller pieces and destroy it because quite frankly, the US cannot possibly compete with the technological and industrial behemoth at this stage in the game. China is taking over the US as the world’s most relevant country for progress in all respects, and the US is doing everything it can to undermine its legitimacy and all of its industry (sanctioning and trying to sabotage China’s semiconductor industry) because it’s trying to save its dying empire.
I think I totally agree with this, the US is really struggling and dying while China seems to be mostly stable, I don’t know how much of that is good policy and how much is just a lot of repression and surveillance, but geopolitics-wise I don’t really think the US will last much unless things very very heavily change, but their political system doesn’t really allow that
as for the social credit stuff, I am willing to concede it’s way less horrifying than what it sounds like but only because I know the system being described is impossible to implement and fully track with our current level of technology, China is extremely privacy invasive though so it wouldn’t surprise me that they’d want to have such a tight mechanism of surveillance
Even nations around China are being targeted because the US wants to establish more and more military bases and an ever-increasing military presence around its borders to destroy the country.
I have to say, from what I understand it’s the nations themselves that petition US bases because they are enemies of their neighbours and need the protection, of course by doing that they basically surrender themselves to the US so they don’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts at all… but it’s not something done entirely by them
China, on the other hand, has been actually helping people directly with tangible results and efforts to reverse and even eradicate the trend of poverty.
If this is true, it’s genuinely amazing, and I hope it sets the example that it can be done, it seems to be accepted discourse where I live that erradicating homelessness is just impossible or even some people say the homeless don’t deserve it, it’s absolutely infuriating, I’ve always thought there is zero excuse for homeless people to exist in this day and age, it’s one of the worst sins of mankind and it’s genuinely so preventable
censoring porn is pretty regressive to me and doesn’t really solve anything, as proved in Japan
This statement is made in a vacuum without historical context, so I will try my best to provide it.
Japan historically was an imperialist country, and colonized territories in East and Southeast Asia. Most notably China and Korea. The Japanese imperialists committed unspeakable acts against the Chinese and Korean peoples, but most relevant here is forcing the women of the two peoples into sexual slavery. They were called “comfort women”, and were basically forced to service their imperial invaders as if they were their wives and girlfriends. This humiliation was devastating and extremely traumatizing, and Japan has a very grave responsibility to the peoples subjected to it. To this day, Japan hasn’t apologized for their crimes against humanity. History books were re-written deliberately leaving out just how serious the offenses of Japan were in the Second World War.
You may not know much about China right now, which is why you’d say that you don’t think censoring pornography would “really solve anything”, but you should know enough about Japan for what I’m about to say next to make sense. Japan hyper sexualizes its women. Patriarchy is still a big problem in Japan, and women are not treated with the same level of respect as men. Japan also has some of the most horrendously abusive and outright disgusting pornography in existence, not to mention the age of consent in Japan has been 13 years old for a long time. You may not think much of this, but a nation’s use of art reflects the characteristics of the nation itself, which should tell you something about how a lot of Japan sees its women.
Japan has also been under US dictatorship since the end of WWII after they dropped two nukes, one on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki. A blatant flex at the Soviet Union, using Japan’s own civilian population to make that statement. The ruling party in Japan right now is the Liberal Democratic Party, which was created by the US and remains subservient to it. All liberal parties, especially those under US dominance always trend fascist. Thus, the country is hyper-capitalist and worker exploitation is severe. People’s living conditions continue to decay and people get less for their money the longer it goes on. Take a look at all the broom closet and school locker sized apartments in Japan. People don’t have reliable opportunity to escape poverty because the working class have not been in power to develop the country to serve their interests. Thus, naturally, desperate people, especially women, turn to pornography to make faster money because sexual exploitation is immensely profitable.
China, as I have hopefully helped you to understand, has been following the exact opposite trend of Japan. They’ve pulled over 800 million people (more than twice the population of the US) out of poverty with their government’s policies and guidance under the CPC, which is a working class party. People actually have much more plentiful and healthy opportunity to be prosperous because the CPC, with the support of its people, has cultivated the most advanced, most educated and most upwardly mobile society on planet Earth. They did this in no small part to resisting unhealthy social trends like hedonism. Pornography causes addiction, and lowers the quality of cognitive function massively over time. The Chinese people treat pornography just like a drug, and China actually was a victim of opium thanks to the British Empire and other Western powers, which came to be known as a big player in the century of humiliation. China does not tolerate drugs because drugs were forced on and crippled their population. For pornography, it’s the same, in addition to the historical scars and trauma and humiliation of its people being sexually exploited as “comfort women” back then. Because opportunity is so plentiful in China, especially so in the STEM fields, it makes little sense to pursue a career in sexual exploitation. They even dress a lot more conservatively, in a conscious effort to not sexualize their people. Women would rather be engineers and do something productive that helps build up the country than make their living on their backs. Who would’ve thought.
China’s censorship of pornography makes sense, given the historical context provided. Porn isn’t just censored in terms of mosaics, it’s outright banned and illegal in the country. This is why I say history matters and does not expire. They have arguably the healthiest population on Earth, and are by far the most productive given the national conditions of their country.
Like in my other response, I urge you to go back through and watch all the videos I provided you.
Did you patiently watch all the videos I provided in my response? If not, I strongly encourage you to make time to do so as much of what you had trouble grappling with was already addressed therein.
I would like to have constructive conversation, but there are things you just need to see for yourself to really get the full picture, hence providing those video resources. They are all information dense and provide much needed context to why I said the things I said. What we absolutely must understand is that concepts of “independence” and technological competency and literacy do not exist in a vacuum. They are not neutral in the world of geopolitics. History matters and, more importantly, history does not expire. We have a responsibility to know how we got here, so we can make an informed and responsible decision about where to go from here.
I urge you to go back through and watch every video in order, and then re-read the text part of my statement. The videos themselves can also be considered intertwined with the rest of my comment.
hey, I apologize I have indeed not watched much of what you sent, only a little bit of the social credit system video. sadly I’ve been feeling pretty depressive recently so I haven’t had the mood to delve into politics much… but I appreciate your patience with me. i’ll try to come back to this and watch everything when I feel better, thanks a lot
It’s all right, I understand. I know you’re here in good faith and just trying to learn. I checked your profile and its description early on, so I’m doing what I can to accommodate your needs.
When you feel ready and have caught up on everything I provided, I look forward to speaking with you again. In the meantime, take care of yourself
heyo! thank you for your patience, I finally feel better and I’ve watched the videos you linked more deeply. here are my notes sorry for the long ass post
1- Thank you so much for introducing me to Invidious, that’s one more step to completely degoogling :D
2- Regarding the Cambodia video, I definitely agree that social media is very often used by the government to spread rhetoric and manufacture consent, I especially remember reading about the US trying to make a “cuban facebook” to let people organize counter revolutionary activity, which is really awful. not to mention the spying, the selling of your personal data, the profiles they make about you, it’s all awful. I think all social media should be nationalized and made open source by force, and follow decentralized models like Lemmy here
there is one thing that still doesn’t click with me though, and it’s… why wouldn’t chinese social media just do the same thing? China has a very bad reputation of mass surveilance and AFAIK WeChat and TikTok and all of that are closed source. So I don’t really know if they’re any better. They’re obviously not used to try and overthrow governments but it’d be so easy for them to be used to implant views on people I don’t see why we should believe China is not doing it
3- Regarding the three videos about democracy in China, they were quite good! They made me understand it a bit better and it’s genuinely awesome that young people can just petition the government like that, the most we ever get slightly similar to that here in Europe are referendums but most are completely non-binding so governments don’t have to follow them at all and they’re mostly just for show.
I do have one concern though, the three videos come from chinese news agencies - I understand western news agencies are heavily biased and are definitely not going to be honest about their main geopolitical rival, but I don’t see why China’s government wouldn’t have biases about themselves, obviously they’re going to present themselves in as best of a light as possible…
4- I have the same concern about the video about the HK protests but that’s a huge complicated topic I know next to nothing about and I know the CIA does all it can to overthrow governments so I’m more charitable toward that being the case…
5- I did some of my own digging about the social credit system and… yeah. it’s basically just the law. weird how so many people try to paint being punished for drunk driving or stuff like that as draconian or orwellian. I will say as a very privacy minded person I am generally against being tracked or your minor crimes being put on a list kept at all times about you (I know most governments do this too), but yeah it’s not extraordinarily bad or way worse than what we have here…
6- Taiwan is a complicated subject, I did say that I oppose an invasion regardless of geopolitics or history, but if the people actually living in there do want to rejoin with China I fully agree with the reunification… I was surprised an anti-PRC poll regardless showed that 60% of taiwanese people want to unify, I thought it’d be way, way lower than that.
I don’t have much else to say, I really hated when chinese nationalists almost broke one of my (at the time) favorite streamers for saying “the country of taiwan” once, and when a guy playing competitive hearthstone got banned for supporting a protest, etc etc, but I understand those are unrelated incidents
7- As someone whose blood boils when seeing how unjust homelessness is, how so many of us are gaslighted into justifying it, how unnecessary it is in the modern age… what China is doing to stop it is genuinely amazing (if it’s true ofc)
The BBC running wall to wall coverage of the “protests” against the Beijing Olympic torch which were proven to be paid actors and then conveniently skipping the part where they physically attacked a Paralympian in a wheelchair
i was radicalized into being a lib by relentless capitalist propaganda while growing up.
eventually i realized i was putting my faith in an antihumanist death cult and woke up, became deradicalized. now i’m a communist.
Bernie Sanders and working a Real Job pushed me toward democratic socialism, and then I did this thing called “read theory” (actually it was history books, not abstract theory, that made me the most radical)
aren’t most historians or people studying history extremely disproportionately to the left? I’ve seen some people say if reading history doesn’t push you to the left you didn’t understand it
In a word: liberals
They just became so god damned insufferable during the 2020 election that I needed to find something else, then I found
As for my opinion on actually existing socialism, it was learning about their historical context. It’s easy to criticise with 2020 hindsight and the comfort of your chair. I still have criticisms and yes socialist nations should be held a higher standard. And you also have to mind who you are talking to, focusing on the criticisms makes little sense if talking to a lib who is only gonna agree on that.
Working jobs where I had to count the nightly deposit and it was 3x the biweekly pay of the whole staff despite corporate doing diddly squat in the running of the store is what radicalized me. Turns out you pick up the Labor Theory of Value real quick once you’ve lived it.
Likewise, I’m willing to disbelieve the official government position and the mainstream media because they proved themselves untrustworthy. The Iraq War dispelled any illusion I had that these people would tell the truth, and learning about things like the government’s interventions in other countries and in the country’s own social movements for racial equality in the 60s or wealth redistribution in the 2010s made me realize that their interests were directly opposed to my own. Though it wasn’t until I had a proper materialist grounding with a Marxist education that I was able to look objectively and critically at international relations.
yeah I have friends in the US who just to pay their god damn education need to be working like that for years. it’s absolutely horrifying
the way the US lied about all the shit they did in the middle east is absolutely disgusting, and learning that also made me learn what they did in my country, I really share the US hatred in this community, I’m glad it’s so blatant because in moderate left communities everyone still tries to sorta justify it. “we do the right things for the wrong reasons” and that kinda stuff
Personally, I don’t consider myself radical at all. I post on niche internet forums and I read the news critically. Sometimes that means my views are far from the consensus, but I’m still participating in the consensus reality on a daily basis. There’s nothing radical about being terminally online.
Communist family doing communist things for as long as communism has been a thing. My parents raised me with Marxist philosophy in mind.
Not a particularly interesting story compared to everyone else.
Having a family member that defected to the ussr in the 80s and her stories of actually living under communism humanised the USSR to me a lot, I never really saw them as evil when I was a liberal just as a place that existed and then stopped existing. Idk, I’m too tired for a big write up rn but I think the humanisation of the ussr was what meant that I never saw them as this great evil force like many other newly “radicalised” westerners do (and, to a lesser degree did at the time)
Also seeing Corbyn hounded out of power and being coupled by the liberal elements of his own party that would rather throw away the election than risk winning with a “far left” leader
Yeah the only leftist party in the UK with a decent chance of winning replacing their leader for a TERF sucks so much
Just seeing shit go down during covid and BLM and liberals doing nothing but making things worse. Their uncaring-while-pretending-to-care attitude disgusts me to no end. They did nothing to stop the conservatives, and will sacrifice us all on the altar of capitalism just for their meager comforts. So I looked around and saw they hated communists and the soviet union, and dedicated myself to becoming the thing they fear most: a real, unapologetic, communist.
so was it mostly a vengeance thing?
Yeah, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t want to talk about, but pure rage can be useful
I did a sick No Comply off a handrail and my friend turned to me and said, “radical.”
