Update: they have ascertained that Parabola was Wisconcom lmao. In that light, if correct, it’s more of a wrecker doing what he does than the project failing. We still don’t have a lot of info though. They’ve written about it here: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub
Earlier today, the new rendition of Leftypedia finally imploded. Going off the block list, it’s a real mess.
Leftypedia was brought back from its last incarnation in early 2023. If you remember (or not), it had issues with Wisconcom then who latched onto it. The problem is because they had no active admins and couldn’t find them, they couldn’t ban him indefinitely.
Eventually, they did find new admins who kicked the project back into gear, or at least they tried to.
Earlier today though, it seems there has been a split and one of the admins (Parabola) basically banned all the others as well as several other users. Where it gets weird is that another admin (Aussig) then banned Parabola, but didn’t undo the bans Parabola issued. Aussig also banned me and Forte’s account, which we used back when Wisconcom was on there, for “ideological deviations”, but Aussig calls themselves a Marxist-Leninist on their user page.
From what I understand there was a split between the different tendencies. So anyway that’s how the “left unity” wiki is going lol sorry but this is funny.
China is plainly revisionist since the Deng reforms, it went from a uniquely (sometimes chaotically) democratic ML state to a capitalist state run with some amount of propriety and discipline (perhaps owing to both its Marxist immediate past and its Confucian past before that) and that unusually “adult” behavior for such a powerful country I think contributes to confusion, because people expect capitalist states to be rotten from skin to core like the US or Occupied Korea or something.
I still think, mainly for reasons already expressed, that China is the biggest historically progressive force in the world right now (the most progressive force among established countries is Cuba, of course), the average westerner knows nothing but lies about it, etc.
But I basically think every AES state is revisionist in some respect – Vietnam is similar to China here, Cuba is on the road to joining them, the DPRK has reactionary nationalism, Laos is just a fucking mess – but I still support them all, not just on anti-imperial grounds but also because this isn’t all-or-nothing, you can be revisionist in some respects and correct in others, and even massive revisionists in this backward word can still be historically progressive forces.
This isn’t me mindlessly lionizing Mao either, I think he was (by the end of his life) a left deviationist who nonetheless failed to pull the trigger on Deng, but his ideas were definitely more sincere in their aspirations Marxism over economism or however you’d like to characterize Deng.
It might be nice to have better discussions on these topics, but I’m not going to pretend its a George Orwell 1909043 wrongthink issue, I mostly come here for the news aggregation and comments thereon, not to refine the new vanguard.
China is not a capitalist state, because the capitalists have not gotten control of the state, though the possibility of them getting control should not be ignored.
It certainly is not a liberal capitalist state as such, though the bourgeoisie represent a real force as you imply, but there is also capitalism in state industries when they are run for profit, which currently is the bulk of China’s economy.
Are any of the state run industries actually run for profit? Because if so, I wonder why, because I can think of no reason why they’d need to make a profit. The Chinese state can and does print as much of its sovereign fiat money as it pleases. They might run some things “for profit” as a form of taxation. The purpose of taxation at the sovereign state level is not to accumulate money but to destroy money, removing it from the economy.
I never really thought about what if any foreign currency-denominated profits the Chinese state might be trying to make. I guess I just assumed that all state industry is for domestic use.
The rightly-praised train system is not for-profit, but they make a killing on oil, for example.
I’m not an economist, I can’t really tell you why that’s what they do, but I’m pretty confident they do it.
I’m not an economist either but this one isn’t that hard to figure out. A socialist state won’t require all its SOEs to operate that way but it also obviously won’t object if some of them do make a profit, since that can be used to offset some of the losses of the unprofitable SOEs.
This has always been a part of how socialist economies work. Even the USSR had some form of this iirc. The idea was that consumer goods industries were more “naturally” profitable and could be used to prop up the essential but less profitable heavy industries. (I’m simplifying here as i don’t necessarily want to get into a whole discussion about the Kosygin reforms.)
This is a core idea of economic planning, that one part of the economy can balance and support another for the good of society rather than forcing every element of the economy to function as its own isolated entity competing against all others.
This is one of the features that distinguish economic planning from liberal market economies which require each individual enterprise to turn a profit (and ideally more so than it’s competitors if it wants to survive long term).
I’ll preface this with IANAE either, but I have been following Michael Hudson for the last few years.
I don’t think it’s strictly necessary for the profitable SOEs to prop up the unprofitable ones. In principle anyway (and if one ignores international trade), all of the SOEs could be run at a loss. The state creates Yuan out of thin air to pay for things. The prices they set for SOE goods & services don’t necessarily have to reflect the costs at all. This allows them great flexibility in using prices to influence the consumption of each good & service. The only real limit is to not print too much money too quickly without destroying some of it through pricing/taxation.
Edit to add: In practice you can’t completely unmoor prices from costs. For instance, if you do that without also imposing rationing, you’ll get gray market arbitrage.
While it’s true that money is created out of thin air, you’re missing that it is backed by production. The limit to printing money is related to production growth. While is technically true monetary problems can be managed through taxation, it is the wrong policy to make. Increasing/creating taxes only leads to social unrest, no one likes paying more taxes.
The biggest challenge for economists is to accurately project production growth, something they havent been able to do.
Yes, production growth/shrinkage is another factor. In the case of SOEs, this is another case where the state has enormous control compared to in capitalist states, especially neoliberal ones that avoid SOEs like the plague.
Calling AES as revisionists is wrong, they’re developing their productive forces and are using the tools they seem fit to do it.
The main thesis of historical materialism is that production is the chief determinant force in the development of society. In order to reach a higher stage of development, the productive forces and the relations of production must be developed accordingly. Capitalism historical task, as marx pointed out, is to develop the productive forces, so these countries use capitalism to develop their productive forces.
The key difference between AES and other states is the role of the goverment, AES are held accountable by the people not the capitalists. We could argue about the degree of consolidation of power, the efficiency of their tasks, and many other things, but calling them revisionists? That’s just silly.
If we took as granted the claim that they are truly democratic rather than bureaucratic or some other antidemocratic form of government, including ones with populist paint like the liberal democracies we are so familiar with. What evidence do you have that they are democratically controlled? High approval ratings don’t cut it, kings can also be popular. I look at Xi’s speeches and, contrary to what we like to get out of his claims about democracy, most of his speeches are notoriously filled with pablum and dogmatism (mostly “Deng was right” a thousand different ways), not at all the way that you address an engaged populace that you have the slightest degree of intellectual respect for, much less one that has been given an effective Marxist education. You can make a very good argument for Cuba being democratic by pointing to various types of civic engagement, but I’m not confident that you can make the same claim about China.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems like the term “revisionist” becomes all but meaningless when you apply it in this way, like a sort of “no true scotsman” style analysis. I’m not sure I understand what your expectation is for AES states.
That there would be some amount of revisionism is precisely my expectation of AES states. It’s not like I said they weren’t socialist – and from a practical standpoint we can say pretty confidently that they all are, most especially the DPRK and Cuba.
“Revisionist” is basically shorthand for “deviating in some way from fundamental Marxist principles” which is a subset of “erroneous from a Marxist perspective”.
“No true scotsman” isn’t just a vibe, it’s a specific type of fallacy. If I say that “No X is Y” and you say “I know John, he’s an X and he is Y” and I reply "He’s not really X then, because no true X is Y," I am performing the fallacy in its most archetypal form. Basically, it is asserting that no member of a group has some (usually negative) trait and, when confronted with a counterexample, saying that the presence of the trait in that example means the example wasn’t really a member of the group.
Dumb college kids do indeed do “no true scotsman” all the time when reactionaries say “reds killed trillions” and they say “but that wasn’t real communism, man” to preserve their ignorant idealization without really understanding either Marxist theory or the actual evidence around AES history.
I don’t have anything that I’m trying to disavow, and in fact am making claims of various kinds against these states (though I might have been unfair to Cuba, admittedly) without any interest in protecting some group of “true scotsman”.
I can try to get into more detail on this another time (I need to wind down for sleep) but I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that when you point at basically all states thought of as AES (maybe I missed one?) and call them revisionist in one form or another, it can end up sounding exactly like the “that wasn’t real communism” trope or in another way, end up sounding like “that was real communism and see how it sucks and fails actually in practice.” I’m trying to word this carefully because it could go in the other direction too if presented thoughtlessly, where it sounds like I’m saying that criticisms of AES projects are bad (criticism is important). The point that I hang on is, making sure we’re not de-legitimizing the theory and practice as a whole by being unfairly dismissive of how closely practice aligns with the goal, where it is on the developing path. And also just making sure we are clear on tactics vs. corruption mindset. That to use a rough war analogy, sometimes you have to retreat in order to regroup, but that doesn’t mean your army has taken a step backward in its ideological goals. Retreating has the risk of leading to giving up and compromising on what you intend, but the one doesn’t automatically follow from the other. So making sure in the weeds of it, we are clear on when something is dangerous compromising on an ideological center and when something is a more complicated tactical development that undoubtedly contains some risk of losing the ideological center, but still has that center and has a specific plan in mind for how to develop past the “retreating” into an advance.
Edit: wording
deleted by creator
I suppose then the question is if it’s just a very-disciplined capitalist power or a socialist one, because Xi is doing a great job of maintaining and developing the state, but I don’t think anything he is doing is incompatible with just being a responsible capitalist politician running a tight ship.
Yeah, I just wanted to make it clear that it’s not a “the authoritarian mods are silencing me” issue and just that I don’t feel like arguing about this most of the time, though I decided to here.
A capitalist state without a bourgeoise class in control? Maybe do not lose yourself in abstract stuff when you do not have the basics down…
You can split hairs and say that it’s a bureaucratic state, but all you’d be doing is splitting hairs. It’s still fundamentally oriented around commodities being sold for profit, a common definition of capitalism.
Sorry, a Dictatorship of the Prolatriat is not “splitting hairs”. Without a bourgeoisie holding state power it flatout can not be capitalism.
You’re sidestepping most of what I said. If the ruling class is not the proletariat but in fact a smaller group that controls the MoP, and does commodity production to pursue maximized profits, paying the broader population wages, etc., then it’s still capitalism whether the nominal position of the MoP is the monopolistic control of private entities or of state entities, in the case of the state not being controlled by the people. It’s only a DotP if it’s actually a democratic state.
deleted by creator