alanjjohnstone
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I not only addressed that the residents of Hong Kong possess legitimate complaints on its administration and that their protests were met with repression but I also cited what you described as “genuine” socialists sharing the same view.
Indeed the Chinese government has prevailed with Civil Human Rights Front disbanding.
The pro-democracy Professional Teachers’ Union (PTU), has also been forced to dissolve itself.
Amnesty International commented “Hong Kong’s draconian national security law has triggered an accelerating disappearance of independent civil society groups from the city”
It was a law passed without publicly revealing its text.
Well done, TS, for being an obedient apologist for authoritarianism and totalitarianism. You are a proud supporter of state despotism.
You seek to mislabel real people power as a tool of the anti-Chinese foreign interference but 2019 elections saw the government suffer defeat in a record turn-out of voters. 2020 elections saw pro-democracy candidates disqualified, many arrested. The election has been postponed, supposedly due to the pandemic, an event yourself claimed minimum disruption to China’s economy although many nations have conducted elections. Next week is when they are now due. A sham exercise with pro-democracy candidates excluded.
Hong Kong schools are no longer able to refer to the Tiananmen Sq massacre. History is being re-written and you are a purveyor of such State propaganda. (Did you know that the Beijing garrison couldn’t be trusted to put the protest down with many military commanders refusing to obey orders so the government brought in provincial non-Han, non-Chinese speaking regiments. Xu, the commander of the Beijing military region was to be court-martialed for his refusal)
You keep asserting that the protests were incited and financed by the USA and others. I concede outside powers sought to influence the protests for their own advantage. Such interference is never surprising. (Didn’t Kaiser’s Germany provide a train for Lenin and give the Bolsheviks gold?)
But I dispute that foreign interests motivated the protest movement, controlled it and directed it.
You placed a lot of stock on the survey of public approval of the Chinese government. 70% of Hong Kong residents disapproved of the police treatment of protesters.
A group of international scientists in the Lancet discourage plans to provide COVID vaccine boosters to the general population at “this stage in the pandemic,” arguing instead that existing supplies should be better utilized for providing first vaccinations.
https://www.dw.com/en/covid-scientists-argue-against-booster-shots-in-research-review/a-59170204
There is what was called the secret protocol of the pact, denied to have existed by Stalin but confirmed. Google it.
Was Stalin culpable? He instructed that no reconnaissance nor intelligence gathering should take place and withdrew frontier forces to the interior.
His own spy agencies were ignored by him
No doubt you will dismiss this article as sectarian (and uses Wiki)
Stalinist lies, omissions and half-truths about Operation Barbarossa
However, we have come distracted from my primary concern – is M-L or Xi a strategy to achieve socialism?
You get the last word on 1941
I would like to move on and ask if you understand and accept the Labour Theory of Value and if it applied to Stalin’s Russia and Xi’s China?
I once read in the first days of the German invasion, Stalin was nowhere to be found but was finally located at one of his dachas.
When Stalin saw the cars drive up his first thought was that they had come to execute him.
He could scarcely believe it when it transpired they still wanted him to lead the country.
It was indeed Stalin’s incompetence that contributed to the speed of the German invasion.
In 1939, Britain and France sought the USSR to co-sign an Anglo-French guarantee to protect Poland and Romania from possible German aggression. The Soviets agreed only upon permission from Lithuania, Poland, and Romania to allow the free passage of Soviet troops in the war. However, Poland refused to grant its permission because they justifiably feared that the Soviets wanted to use these as a pretext to take over its territory.
Other than Poland, in 1940, the USSR invaded Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia’s Romanian province and an attempted invasion of Finland. (people tend to forget that Poland itself earlier annexed a part of Czechoslovakia)
Germany and USSR made a commercial agreement whereby the Soviet Union sent critical raw materials and ingredients to Germany to exchange weapons, military technology, civilian and manufacturing machinery. Thereafter, Germany received significant petroleum, grain, rubber, and manganese, all necessary for its war effort.
Erica Payne, of Patriotic Millionaires, an organization that advocates for higher taxes on the wealthy, said in a statement that “America’s billionaires are popping champagne tonight as the House Ways and Means Committee—led by Chair Richie Neal [D-Mass.]—fails the president, fails the country, and fails history.”
Patriotic Millionaires warned that the House Ways and Means Committee’s proposal would leave intact “the preferential treatment the rich receive in the tax code” by maintaining “even some of the code’s most egregious tax loopholes like the stepped-up basis, a tax giveaway to America’s wealthiest families, and the carried interest loophole, which allows fund managers to pretend they are investors with regard to taxes.”
“If this proposal becomes law, working people in America will continue to pay almost twice the tax rate of millionaire investors, heirs to billionaires will continue to inherit enormous amounts of money and property tax-free, and the concentration of wealth and power will continue until this country becomes what it is already fast approaching, a feudal aristocracy,” the Patriotic Millionaires said of the House plan.
“All peasants in China own their own land.”
Correction. They are tenants
All land is either subject to government ownership or collective ownership. In principle, municipal land is subject to government ownership and land outside cities is subject to collective ownership. However, one can obtain the right to use the land. There are two types of land-use rights, the “granted land-use right” and the “allocated land-use right”. The difference is that granted land use rights are limited in time against payment, whereas allocated land use rights are usually given for free and without allocation of time.
In general, rural collectives own agricultural land and the state owns urban land.
Homeownership rates are as you say
Compared to the UK renting a home in the EU is the norm, not the exception. Are they worse off because of this?
Furr was a member of the Progressive Labor Party. Feel free to waste your time reading about it.
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1960-1970/index.htm#plp
If Furr is debunking the many accusations from the right-wing then he may indeed have some validity as these, such as the Black Book, verge on the extreme distortion of facts and low-hanging fruit.
If he is saying Stalin’s policies were not complicit in the famines and the repression, he is wrong.
“Capitalists were forced to improve their workers’ lives because of the existence of the USSR and other socialist states.”
So it was not through class struggle and the trade unions that workers gained a larger share of their surplus value.
It was not because of the higher level of technological development that dropped the cost of living.
Grovver Furr, I had never before heard of. I may not be the most well-read on the Soviet Union but I do have a little bit of knowledge of the main Marxist writers on Soviet history. Why did Furr pass me by? Perhaps Wiki offers the reason why he has never appeared on my radar and why I won’t waste my time with him. (yes, TS, I plead guilty to being closed-minded in my selection of reading)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Furr
[me]”How do we achieve socialism and by which road?”
[TS]And that’s why I am leaning toward Marxism/Leninism. The model works. State power was achieved by many such organisations. Without state power no meaningful progress whatsoever can be made.Many accuse ourselves of promoting an idea that has doesn’t work and our answer is that socialism, as we conceive of it, has never been tried. (and the basis of those who lodge the true scotsman fallacy against us)
Can a similar defence be put up against Leninism and Stalinism and Maoism which it spawned? Has the socialist ideal come closer to being accomplished with the success of the 1917 and 1949 revolutions?
True Scotsman points to the great advances made against poverty both these nations have made and says yes.
Yet it is the same exact argument the proponents of capitalism have made.
My father went to school bare-foot and in rags (I don’t exaggerate), so should I congratulate British capitalism that I didn’t and my generation was materially better off than previous ones?
TS lauds Xi for proclamations to decrease inequality. But his words are almost identical in tone to Biden’s.
We have heard such intentions before.
Sometimes action such as higher taxes on the rich is taken but the fundamental situation is not addressed, which is the ownership of the means of production by a small minority. And that ownership can be by one individual family such as the Waltons, by shareholders buying business stock in corporations such as Warren Buffet or a nationalised or state-owned enterprise as Chinese SOE where either the government bondholder benefits or the state bureaucrats in charge.
When Xi took office, private firms were responsible for about 50% of all investment in China and about 75% of economic output. Xi chose to adjust the percentages. And this is being called a return to “socialism”, as accurate as the Republican Party calling Obamacare “socialism”.
It is all propaganda.
TS contests that state capitalism exists as an economic form. He called it an oxymoron in a previous post. He has not read Lenin who acknowledges its existence. Perhaps TS doesn’t realise individual owners are not required for the existence of private property and privilege – but the Vatican Catholic Church is an example of such an institution.
TS and ourselves differ very much on how we look at the State. Our view is a very traditional, orthodox, conventional Marxist understanding of its role. Since the time of Marx and Engels we have had the emergence of Bismarckian “state-socialism” and the Bolshevik “workers’ state” and the Labourite “welfare state” with the actual class origins of the State being forgotten. These remain despite the outward appearance of those various states.
Marx was not wrong when he described the State as “the executive committee of the ruling class.”
Xi is simply reinforcing what Marx said.
It is capitalism with Chinese characteristics
With over 1,058 billionaires, according to the 2021 Hurun Global Rich List, China now has more ultra-wealthy than any other country on Earth – including capitalist bastion the United States. China’s ultra-rich added an unprecedented $1.5 trillion to their wealth in 2020 at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Zhong Shanshan (3,300 percent/$66 billion gain), Saw his wealth rise an eye-popping 3,300 percent during the pandemic year, from $2 billion to $68 billion. The wealth surge was the result of two of his companies going public in 2020, Nongfu bottled water and Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy.
Zuo Hui (714 percent/$15.9 billion gain), China. Chair of Homelink, China’s largest real estate brokerage company. Wealth increased $15.9 billion, from $2.2 billion to $17.9 billion
Cheng Yixiao (614 percent/$13.5 billion gain), Co-founder of Kuaishou, a video platform based in Beijing. His wealth increased $13.5 billion, from $2.2 billion to $15.7 billion during the pandemic year.
Su Hua (583 percent/$16.9 billion gain), Also a co-founder of video platform and live-streaming app, Kuaishu. Hua’s wealth increased $16.9 billion during the pandemic year, from $2.9 billion to $19.8 billion.
Chan Tan Ching-Fen (540 percent, $8.1 billion gain), Hong Kong. Wealth comes from Hang Lung Group, a large real estate founded by her late husband. Wealth increased $1.5 billion to $9.6 billion, an increase of $8.1 billion over the pandemic year.
You mentioned Gini scale of inequality
2021 China’s is 38.5 sitting between Gabon and Burundi
Xi has a long way to go
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country
MS, back to an earlier question I posed to TS.
There must have been something on our website that spurred him into joining the forum. He may have misinterpreted it but if he recalls what it was that first resonated with him, then we can discuss it deeper.
Otherwise, it is proving to be a fruitless debate.
Over the century we have existed, it may be painful for TS to admit his weaknesses to himself but the Party’s principles have been challenged by many whose scholarship is far stronger and more original than his own, and the Party withstood and rebutted those attacks and subsequent history has shown its analysis to be the correct one.
We rarely had to rectify mistakes because quite truthfully, we have made so few over the passing decades. (Before TS says it, I know a stopped clock is correct twice a day.)
TS came here believing himself to be a teacher, I hope he stays on as a student. I am still learning as I think we all are. TS can widen his own political knowledge if he wishes to seek it.
Perhaps, in the course of things, he might have a lesson for us.
One of the techno-fixes for climate change
China is poised to test a thorium-powered nuclear reactor – “safer” and “greener” than regular uranium reactors
“They’re actual socialists, by the way, not play actors”
How can we rate your political credibility after you have stated the above, TS? It took me a few minutes of investigation to determine that the JCP does not represent your case. (actually, I too was surprised by their critiques)
I appreciate your retraction, however.
And your willingness to continue your conversation with ourselves.
What really interests me is how the world at large can achieve the goals set out by socialists who adhere to the primary position of the Marxists.
How do we achieve socialism and by which road?
Surely you do not still believe that Stalin was on the right path and that Xi’s present road is also the true one for the emancipation of workers from wage slavery?
You can admire the ability of some nations to lift people out of extreme poverty but still hold that it is not a permanent answer to social inequality and workers’ misery.
Marx fully understood that capitalism could be progressive. But he also knew it was transitory and had inherent contradictions within it.
A blow for the war-hawks
Iran has agreed to allow UN nuclear inspectors to install new memory cards into its cameras monitoring the country’s nuclear programme
It makes it less likely European states and the US will table a motion of censure against Iran that would have been passed to the UN security council.
Comrades, ceasefire.
True Scotsman has shown that it is he who is a one-man-band unable to even find a political party he can call home.
His accusations that we being cultists and isolated are the projection of his own personal politics.
He couldn’t indicate any group in the world as reflecting his ideas other than the JCP (“They’re actual socialists, by the way, not play actors”-TS) and he didn’t even know their policies and positions were in total opposition to his own.
Keep your powder dry for the next battle of ideas, comrades.
Making the case for war
Iran is providing foreign fighters with drone training at an airbase near the city of Isfahan, Israel’s defence minister alleged
Tehran was also trying to “transfer know-how that would allow the manufacturing of UAVs in the Gaza Strip”, on Israel’s southern border, Gantz told a conference
