Just to ask, do you believe in countries like Vietnam, Laos, or Cuba, or even Bolivia
If you can't, then even tho you may not a liberal, economically, or culturally, I think you are a liberal at heart, when it comes to foreign policy... aka you tow the U.S state department's line, when it comes to 'good' and 'bad' countries
I'm afraid because of such matters, you might get banned over this
As far as I'm concerned, the community has somewhat of an anti-imperialist or 'anti-western' stance, which then extends to a concept of critical support for global south countries
Critical support, which is public support for an anti-imperialist, if not socialist nation-state, despite one's personal criticism of such (eg. Venezuela, a GLOBAL_SOUTH socdem state, with potential revolutionary energy; remember, it's not necessarily under one party of PSUV than it is, as a popular front)
(You ought to remember Chomsky did support some socialist and socdem states in the Global South, right?)
My question is a litmus test
If you can't sympathize with even one existing socialist state like Cuba, against America, who has committing economic blockades against such countries, then welp...
You can choose lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, midwest.social or any other social media to find other like-minded leftists, who don't necessarily focus on such topics...
You believe it's a one-man dictatorship entirely disconnected from the workers, which IMO requires more proof than the opposite. Believing the reverse is simply easier because of being born an American
I made no such claim, I just asked you why you were so confident you were right, and what evidence you had for your claim, that's not claiming you're wrong.
They need to make money so they can continue to raise the standard of living in their country. Their capitalists don't control their society nor do they have any power to influence the government. How else do you get to socialism without doing socialist things?
Which is why China has raised the standard of living steadily over the last few decades? I mean where else do you think they got the money to build the cities, infrastructure, power plants, etc.? What actually do you know about China beyond "they have capitalists so they're bad"?
would post China Has Billionaires but I am in despair so I feel this person won't read it, and I'm so fucking tired of getting an instantaneous dismissive reply that indicates they didn't even click on the fucking link
EDIT: I wound up posting it in another part of this thread with a couple other links for them to ignore. I wish there was a way to say "hide replies to this post" so I could avoid seeing a handwaving liberal reply three minutes later
EDIT2: guess I'm just going through some shit right now sorry
It's such a good essay, I didn't even need convincing before because the proof was always there but after reading it completely makes sense. Yeah like obviously capitalism bad but the government isn't run by capitalists like they are in the West, it's a matter of transitioning (if you read theory you'd know this), and they are indeed on that path. What's crazy to me is that they'll probably achieve their goals faster as the planning gets better.
posting this here for those who might click on these links and read
Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.
The result of this grim state of affairs is that the oppressed classes understandably become deeply cynical about the entire notion of “politics.” Or, to put it in terms of political tendency, regardless of who they vote for at the booth, they begin to become dyed-in-the-wool Libertarians; “incompetence of government” becomes their main transcendental political truth. This becomes especially apparent when they discuss the choking and overthrow of the government of other peoples, in Venezuela and Syria and Korea. Normally, disillusionment with one’s government would lead to demands for better government, or different government, but Westerners are so ingrained with the idea that theirs is the best government, that instead they reject the very idea of good governance altogether. And so the masses learn to passively embrace the encroachment of private corporations over all aspects of the economy and indeed life in general.
Now consider these excerpts from the aforementioned Guardian article:
For a reliable benchmark about the power of the party in China, you only need to listen to wealthy entrepreneurs hold forth on politics. These otherwise all-powerful CEOs go to abject lengths to praise the party. To take a few companies listed in a single article in the South China Morning Post, Richard Liu of e-commerce group JD.com predicted communism would be realised in his generation and all commercial entities would be nationalised. Xu Jiayin of Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, said that everything the company possessed was given by the party and he was proud to be the party secretary of his company. Liang Wengen of Sany Heavy Industry, which builds earthmovers, went even further, saying his life belonged to the party. [14]
Just as the lack of dignity of American workers isn’t merely superficial, but symptomatic, the same is true of the lack of dignity of Chinese capitalists. The periodic execution of corrupt capitalists and the humiliation of Jack Ma matter. Chauvinistic “Left” intellectuals may dismiss them as performative, but Western capitalists accustomed to impunity understand the threat loud and clear. The dignity or indignity experienced by different classes testifies more to the class character of a state than musings about its leaders’ sincerity.
Don't despair when the lib you're talking to ignores your well thought out response. Instead, look at the people lurking and reading the thread and not commenting, and what they see. They see you provide thoughtful and insightful statements backed up with evidence, only for the lib to either ignore it entirely or just dismiss it with a handwave (and obviously not even reading it). Even if someone agrees with the lib and not you, it still isn't a good look for their "team" to be so smugly and proudly ignorant.
Truly, and it's mind blowing to see people run defence for them, insisting that those that oppose them are the real demons, while claiming that they oppose the powers that be are "just as bad" despite never actually willing to commit to their own claims about what they would do if they were living in the exact situation they claim to despise.
Don't despair when the lib you're talking to ignores your well thought out response.
Said lib has taken to posting about those mean hexbear tankies all over the anti-communist parts of Lemmy (and also for some reason lemmy.ml's anarchism comm). This was never about good faith discussion and all about getting in a pissing contest here then whining about it elsewhere.