AES- Actually-Existing Socialism
Edit: Dictatorship of the Proletariat + Predominant, collective ownership and control of the economy = AES?
AES- Actually-Existing Socialism
Edit: Dictatorship of the Proletariat + Predominant, collective ownership and control of the economy = AES?
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How would we treat the ‘pseudo’ AES, which include China, Vietnam, and such? As allies for only critical support or merely counter-revolutionaries?
I think if you phrase the question as “why has China experienced so much economic growth relative to other Asian countries like India or Indonesia?” you wouldn’t come to the conclusion that China is capitalist because the obvious subsequent question would be why did capitalism with Chinese characteristics take over while capitalism with Indian characteristics and capitalism with Indonesian characteristics haven’t taken off. And I haven’t heard any answer that didn’t just boiled down to “Chinese capitalists are just big-brained while the other capitalists are dum-dums.”
They may not be socialist, but they are not capitalist either. For example, I would argue the PRC is not capitalist because the country hasn’t experienced a real boom/bust cycle in its 70+ years of existence. Notice that a bust cycle is different from any economic downturn like the GLF or Vietnam hitting an economic downturn because the Soviet Union collapsed and they still were heavily sanctioned. People don’t emphasize this, but all other things equal, a socialist society should be able to more effectively and efficiently use the collective labor-hours of their society than a capitalist society.
Take something like the reserve army of labor, something that is inherent in all capitalist societies due to the inherent logic of capitalism but not inherent in socialist societies. A capitalist society can never reach full employment but a socialist society can. Because the capitalist society can’t reach full employment, the workers there would have to work longer hours to make up for the reserve army of labor that could be employed but aren’t. Longer hours means burnout, wear-and-tear of the body, greater chance of disease due to suppressed immune system and stress, and so on, which has a cumulative effect on how productive that society is. And by productive, I don’t mean line go up GDP or just mindlessly producing commodities without caring about whether those commodities are socially necessary. I mean things like literacy rates, average child height (low height means children are suffering from malnutrition), miles of rail, whether a society is food sufficient, and so on.
On a micro level, no, I don’t think a Chinese worker is fundamentally experiencing a society that is a whole lot different from a US worker. But just because this is true on a micro level doesn’t means that it’s true on a macro level. The question is how do you make sense of a society where on a micro level it’s not a whole lot different from a capitalist society but on a macro level it’s completely different?
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I don’t really disagree with your points (although the 4 Asian tigers have definitely peaked and are experiencing some degree of stagnation and recession at least for the case of HK and Taiwan) but it goes back to my main point that the PRC isn’t capitalist. Whether the PRC is socialist or not is whether you think “the PRC is neither capitalist nor socialist” is a copout answer or whether you think you can have a non-capitalist, non-socialist, and non-feudal mode of production.
It’s hard for me to not see AES as a nascent stage of socialism in the same way I see Italian city-states of the Renaissance as a nascent stage of capitalism. Like AES of today with regards with socialism, Italian city-states aren’t archetypal capitalist societies. They lack a proletarian and bourgeois class for one, and they have the trappings of feudal societies. But if you analyze them on a macro level, those Italian city-states don’t really behave like feudal states. For one, actually existing feudalism like the Tang dynasty or the Carolingian empire derive their power from the land they control and the peasantry who work on that land. The peasantry can be utilized through corvee labor to work on public infrastructure projects or to form the bulk of a feudal army. The Italian city-states, on the other hand, are tiny in comparison, but despite their size, they punch well above their weight if they were just feudal societies. They derive their power more from being at an advantageous location of important trade routes, ruled by powerful merchant families rather than feudal lords. Unlike feudal societies but very similar to capitalist societies, the Italian city-states tried to solve many societal problems by simply throwing money at it. This is how they became (over)reliant on mercenary armies that would constantly betray them for the ever higher bidder. On an ideological level, the Italian city-states embraced Renaissance humanism, which is fundamentally anti-feudal and has various components that survives in liberalism. It doesn’t make sense for an anti-feudal ideology to spring forth from a feudal base but perfectly reasonable if it’s a nascent capitalist base which gave rise to an anti-feudal ideology.
If you traveled back in time to 1523, nobody would believe that Renaissance Italy would be the birth of a completely different mode of production. After all, Renaissance Italy weren’t the first polities to leverage their advantageous location to get rich through trade. It’s only through 500 more years of hindsight that people could see what would blossom in the Dutch Republic and Industrial Revolution England had its origins in those Italian city-states.
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Do you know why hexbear supports China so much?
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I would also suggest that some of the support is in the form of challenging questionable and sometimes outright racist/xenophobic Western narratives on China. Red Scare propaganda is real, and has existed for generations, so regardless of whether China is good or bad, you would be an idiot to simply take the US State Department’s position as legitimate. All of that is completely aside from whether or not China is worth supporting for reasons A, B, or C above.
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Pretty much all of the above for me. B with the qualifier that I just think the leadership is not as cartoonishly evil/stupid as the Western ruling class and the systems being put in place and claims being made by the state have a path to socialism. It’s not like the USA, where nothing is taught about socialism during education unless you go out of your way during university. I do think 1917 was the last truly realistic chance, which didn’t pan out mostly due to momentum (capitalist wealth stolen from other nations for decades/centuries and reinvested in the destruction of revolutions). It’s just that not all hope is lost.
The ruling class of the West seems to be a mix of (1) too stupid to realize their class will eventually bring about the Fourth Reich and very possibly end the world and (2) smart enough to approximately realize it but mostly stupid enough to not be interested in addressing it as anything other than individuals with NZ bunkers/WALL-E ambitions.
Also I just saw your handle and if you deal with that wanted to recommend benzoyl peroxide. I dealt with that (diagnosed) for a couple of years before finding this dermatology clinic’s report from the 80s. Cleared it up in a couple weeks.
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Just anecdotally, I worked for a short period of time in China, and was simply stunned by the level of public investment that was occurring. There is so much we could do if we had the political power to do anything. Also, my colleagues were pretty open about their collective sigh of relief that the nightmare their parents went through was long over, their anxiety that it could return, and their enthusiasm for the current path. Of course this was a rather nonrandom sample of tech workers, so there is that. My opinion is that I have no idea if China will end up being AES, but at least it represents an intention to do so, and an alternative to the dominant system.
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Yes. The end of the Maoist era was pretty horrible for a lot of people.
I think one major aspect is that even if their leadership was 100% cynically lying about their intention to build socialism in China, they’ve still been a tremendously less evil superpower than any of their peers.
Here in the US, we started with white supremacist genocides and have continued that tradition up to the present. Domestically we run a perpetual military counterinsurgency campaign against our population, and internationally we drop countless bombs on countries we “aren’t” at war with while we coup their elected leaders and train torturers and death squads for our puppet regimes. Western international “development” programs have been nakedly exploitative and repressive, while Chinese international development programs have instead been mutually beneficial
All of this happens in public view, and the worst allegations anyone can make up against China always both pale in comparison to what the US admits to doing and get retracted after a few months of our Reputable Journalistic Institutions lying about them
Our leaders are clearly trying to scapegoat our problems onto China. As things get worse they will get more and more aggressive to China. I don’t want a war with China. I want us to actually deal with our problems at home.
China may merely be a lesser of two evils. But it makes no sense in doing my rulers work for them by letting people become more sinophobic.
My personal answer always is, imagine China is really as evil as our propaganda portrays them to be. I have real, super reliable evidence that the US is just as bad or worse. What can I do about China? Absolutely nothing. What can I do about the US? Also not a whole lot to be honest, but when the working class organizes and we have collective power, it obviously behooves us to smash the state that sits over us, and cooperate with its enemies to do so as long as that doesn’t compromise our values (which might require questioning if that propaganda was really true in the first place).
Do we? I have yet to see billions of Hexbear user’s money invested into China, yet USA’s, EU’s billionaires do. Seems that those capitalists are supporting China much more than Hexbear is supporting China.