• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 19 days ago
cake
Cake day: October 19th, 2024

help-circle







  • Basically he believes China is revisionist and capitalist, and the failures of socialism thus far have been through revisionism (the failure to adhere to core marxist principles). He also doesn’t cover many liberation movements that don’t fully fit the communist/marxist ideal he supports.

    IMO this view obfuscates some of the more material sources for why movements fail, most notably in his viewing the failure of the CPUSA not through its history of settler communism/labor zionism but its failure to adhere to marxist tenets leading up to the open revisionism of CPUSA’s Eric Browder, without seeing why his revisionism was so accepted and popular. This leaves praxis to adhering to a closer marxist orthodoxy that’s quite dogmatist instead of using the dialectical materialist analysis to see that the material basis for a revolution in the USA would be the superexploited native and black peoples that aren’t represented in the CPUSA or even most other communist groups.

    I remember him receiving a question on a stream once about covering the black panthers and he said he preferred not to because he didn’t like the kind of work they did or something to that effect, so he’s kinda got a big blindspot there and I would suggest you try and find some audiobooks of Gerald Horne and Frantz Fanon’s works, would also suggest Assata’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, Kwame Ture’s Black Power, Red Nation Rising just to name a few. Also educating yourself on China through a seperate source I’d recommends Roland Boer’s “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners” if you can find an audiobook “The East is Still Red” is also good, or even just reading the works of Deng/Xi Jinping for yourself, unfortunately a lot of the history and study here is in Chinese lol but I’d avoid S4A’s content on the topic personally.



  • I guess my main point is a western made video that seems to think china abandoned 5 year plans and believes conspiracies like Xi actually has a ton of secret financial assets, as well as not properly historically contextualizing the reform and opening up but opting for the ideological purism that Roland describes that westerners tend to have re:china I don’t think offers much expert insight beyond peddling some myths and “viewing china with western eyes” as roland says. Deng def made rightist mistakes and hurt class struggle on the global front (Vietnam and such) but the reform and opening up era was certainly a good move for China and kept them on the road to socialism, a step made necessary by their “chinese characteristics” and not really comparable to Khrushchev’s declaration of the end of class struggle


  • I really suggest "Socialism With Chinese Characteristics a Guide for Foreigners " on this, the author was the first non-chinese employee at the school for marxism and knows Chinese and has read marx and lenin in their original languages and has a wide knowledge of Chinese socialism. Goes over a lot of the myths this guy seems to be falling for, namely the idea that Deng abandoned class struggle and purposefully took the capitalist road, ruining the project forever. Paired with its historical materialist analysis of China and deep knowledge of party history it offers so much more than any westerner that’s never been to China could offer. I have yet to learn the opinion of maoists in the third world (something that I’d like to learn a lot more about ) but this video was pretty ahistorical and western brained tbh