Thomas_More
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“They must and will be crushed.”
NOT the language of democratic socialism!
In fact, it’s the language of fascism.
The military rallies in Russia, China and North Korea look just as Scotsman describes. So they are Nazis too.
Scotsman sees justification for smashing and blighting the lives of thousands of people with warfare and high explosives by shouting “they are Nazis!”
All nationalists and militarists use WW2 as an excuse, and “Nazi” is a universal epithet for justifying state violence.
F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years, by Mei Zhi.
“China’s first literary dissident’s Kafkaesque journey through the prisons of the Cultural Revolution.Hu Feng, the ‘counterrevolutionary’ leader of a banned literary school, spent twenty-five years in the Chinese Communist Party’s prison system…. ”
Hu Feng, a Marxist who never joined the Communist Party, and who was persecuted by the Mao clique.
Unlike China and the Soviet Union, I see no revolutionary capitalist purpose for the state-capitalist regimes in countries such as Albania, KR Cambodia, Cuba, etc. They just appear to me to be regimes tailored to the whim of tyrants such as Hoxha and Pol Pot, influenced by a personal love affair with Leninism. In what way did their state-capitalism have any revolutionary purpose in the capitalist context?
The same with North Korea. The Kim dynasty’s rule has not furthered capitalist development but hindered it and frozen the north in comparison with the highly developed south.
https://www.wionews.com/world/why-chinas-president-xi-jinping-fears-winnie-the-pooh-313823
Winnie the Pooh banned from China.
Btw, I recommend The Tao of Pooh as a superb book.
Yes Wez, it was Europe which spread capitalism globally.
There is a vast difference between the European travellers of the 13th and 14th centuries in Asia and the conquering Europeans from the 16th c. onwards. The former were humble learners, the latter plunderers and thugs.
As for the Peasant Revolt, it is my understanding that the bourgeoisie was afraid of the peasants and their utopian communism, and pointedly refused to assist them. But this means a new topic.
What if a socialist wants to read a Chinese classic, and wants to understand context etc?
Or are we only to bother with European history, and specifically Britain, industrialism, colonialism, etc?
Are our libraries to only contain the works of Marx and Engels?
Non-Europeans are then to be confirmed in their belief that we’re only interested in the West as the “centre of history” and its history as all that’s important. So you can agree with Marx’s dismissive phrase regarding centuries of Chinese stupidity, from which we saved them!
So entire civilisations are of no importance except to an academic, and have nothing worth our study and reading; nothing to teach us; and we can remain in a reductionist, mechanist materialism, alienating others with our insularism.
And the socialist can agree with Henry Ford that history is bunk.
Alan asked me to summarise the system of Imperial China following the criticism of the Leninist fallacy that the synopsis feudalism begets capitalism is true worldwide, which we know to be false. I have answered his request. If you’re not interested, then don’t read it. Go and read something else.
I shan’t apologise for being a socialist who also has other interests, and whose library is not restricted to Marxism.I always thought what distinguished us from the Leftists, as well as our political differences, was our embracing of humanity and of life as a whole. In other words, we are not politicos, sloganeers, limited people, as Leninists are. They are mere ideologists, but we are universal thinkers, and ought not to be ashamed of our thoughts running freely over all things. Socialism is about freeing us all to be just so, not chaining us to restricted modes of thought approved for relevance by a politburo.
