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this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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The thing is that it’s not even really “socialism” that the Chinese guy is is complaining about here. He’s complaining about the authoritarian aspects of the Mainland Chinese government, which is not the same as socialism. And the fact that the tankie can’t understand that is just… I don’t even know what to do with it at this point.
The CCP's authoritarianism stems in part from their attempt to implement the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The concept itself is pretty weird.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat
But it was never that, from the instant Mao gained any real hold on power in China. He subsumed the entire movement, and fundamentally corrupted it, in much the same way that Stalin did.
you gotta understand something about tankies: they think that's a good thing
Oh, I know. It’s why I tilt at their windmills: to provide the counterpoint, in hopes that more susceptible people will see more than just the dogmatic Socialist Alternative hardliner viewpoint. Genuinely, I think those types do far more damage than they understand, especially in well-educated-median populaces such as Boston, when they bring their fucking Mao + Stalin silk screened Soviet flags to literally any fucking rally. If it pisses me off, as a person who’s very socialist and leaning even more so by the second, then I’m sure it’s alienating FAR more people than it’s calling to the banner.
for sure! that shit pisses me off. for a lot of people those symbols of their oppressors. all those say to them are "pick a genocidal freak and get in line" when what most of us are communicating is "what if we didn't with genocidal freaks all the time?"
You put it way more succinctly than I did lol
How can someone corrupt what was made to be corrupt lol? Lenin and Engle's empowerment of the state against the proletariat could have never ended any other way. It's the same brain rot that right wing Libertarians espouse, just from the other side.
Out of control government, out of control businesses. It's the same picture.
I don't know much about the Chinese revolution/civil war, but it wasn't Stalin that turned Soviet Russia authoritarian; it was like that from the start. Stalin simply consolidated power within the already authoritarian framework of one-party rule. It could've been Zinoviev or Trotsky that came out on top and Soviet Russia would still have been an authoritarian hellhole. It might've been a better authoritarian hellhole or a worse authoritarian hellhole, but none of these guys were advocating for abolishing the Cheka (later the GRU) or holding new elections.
Notably, the dictatorship of the proletariat isn't meant to be an actual dictatorship. Marx saw feudalism as the dictatorship of the aristocracy, capitalism as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so by analogy socialism (or the prelude to it, at least) would be the dictatorship of the proletariat—rule by the people for the people. It's not meant to be a dictatorship in the way we use that term today.
They brag about all the theory they've read. Even as they expose how bad their reading comprehension is. And they think it's a flex.
True, but it prescribes rule by one party (the party of the proletariat) alone. In any possible practice this rule can only be held by a party that claims to represent the proletariat, a claim that may or may not be true at any given time.
Well, not quite - we don't consider it a dictatorship because the proletariat is the largest class by population, but we would recognize it as such if the proletariat were the minority (e.g. in some kind of near-future highly-but-not-fully automated society.)
The dictatorship of the proletariat is just democracy. It's just the people getting to govern themselves instead of a select Elite few. There's really nothing weird about it, the weird thing is thinking that a small closed-knit group of authoritarian Elites can ever implement the dictatorship of the proletariat because by definition they are not the proletariat.
It's not "just democracy" when it explicitly prescribes a one party state.
The democratic part is only within the ruling party, the one that claims to represent the proletariat.