Comradeship // Freechat
Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
Personally, I'm glad you're asking questions and being upfront about your uncertainty.
I'll let others give the details on Xinjiang but I'll say, briefly, that China's work in eradicating terrorism and improving the standard of living for Uighur Muslims and others in the region are commendable. Not only should this be defended, it should be praised and used as a model elsewhere.
The answer as to whether I/we agree on that definition depends on a class analysis and also relates to your question about authoritarianism, which I'll answer first.
The class war broke out a couple of thousand years ago. It has been authoritarian since the beginning. Under the current system, dissent will be met by armed police and military force, made lawful by legislation and supported by the judiciary; the bourgeoisie will deploy this force at the first sign of any threat to its power. Peaceful protestors against fossil fuels, wars, and the regression of women's health rights will be locked in prison, for example.
Given these observations, the only options are: (i) ending authoritarianism (which is one of the ultimate goals of communism); and (ii) continuing authoritarianism in (a) the same form (which means continuing with capitalism) or (b) a different form (which Marxists think of as necessary in the transition away from capitalism).
If we then change the question to, 'Do you accept that socialists must be authoritarian?' Yes: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm. If the workers gain control of the means of production, the only way they will maintain control is by exercising a similar kind of legislative, executive, and judicial authority as is currently wielded by bourgeois states. I also can't see how it's possible to gain control of those means in the first place, except by being authoritarian.
Back to the definition of 'tankie'. First thing to note is that I've never called myself a tankie except in jest. I have no idea what critics mean by it unless it's a pejorative term for a Marxist. In which case, the definition, 'Defending the use of force against civilians expressing disagreement over their government’s decisions peacefully' is just absurd.
If tankie is simply shorthand for 'Marxist', then it refers to 'historical materialists'. Historical materialism is a way of looking at the world that treats everything as a process, a relation, as historically contingent. We can go into this if you wish.
That's not to say I don't have anything in response to:
Defending the use of force against civilians expressing disagreement over their government’s decisions peacefully?
But my response is to ask a few questions:
- Are there examples of liberal democracies using 'force against civilians expressing disagreement over their government’s decisions peacefully'?
- If so, does this make liberals (who by definition support liberal democracies) 'tankies'?
- What is meant by 'peacefully'?
- What is meant by 'government'?
- What is meant by 'use of force'?
- What is meant by 'civilians'?
- What is meant by 'disagreement'?
- What is meant by 'defending'?
- What is meant by 'expressing'?
I doubt very much that (m)any Marxists would support bourgeois states' use of force against peaceful anti-war and climate change activists. But the same people might support a socialist state suppressing pro-war, pro-fossil fuel, or pro-capitalist activists who are known to be supported by a foreign imperialist state's secret service.
Much of it comes down to class position. Marxists understand history as class struggle. It doesn't make much sense for a Marxist to treat individuals separate from a class analysis. So the individual 'peaceful' 'civilian' 'expressing' 'disagreement' is actually entwined in a much larger class struggle and is part of one class or another, which changes the dynamic of the question.
Feel free to come back with further questions.
The main reason why I'm so vehemently against the Uyghur genocide narrative is that it's plainly meant to turn the people of the US against China in preparation for a war. You're telling me that the country responsible for a million+ dead Muslim civilians in Iraq gives half a shit about Muslims in China? C'mon. That's obviously bullshit and there must be some other reason why we're going on about it.
Looking into it more the reasons are to destabilize the region to impede the Belt and Road Initiative and to prepare for war with China. I just don't think the US should be involved in the region, full stop, and therefore I am opposed to the US narrative on happenings in Xinjiang. There's no need for overanalysis or splitting hairs on the definition of genocide here.
In every case when a state is saying something you must ask, why are they saying that?
As for use of force against civilian protestors: If these protestors are foreign agents of the US, they should of course be cracked down on so long as doing so doesn't grow popular support for the movement. The US and the "international community" commits acts of color revolution and sabotage at every opportunity and socialist states must defend themselves against these acts or face collapse. Genuine protests with the will of the common people behind them should be listened to and taken into account in policymaking.
Personally I don't believe the amount of devastation you can cause should be the measure of how well your system works. If that was the play then they should have put me in charge of cloud deployment and database administration at my last job lol
They weren't as successful in the long term because they didn't successfully defend the revolution, but I'd point to Burkina Faso as an example of what becomes possible after a revolution. China also saw a meteoric rise in life expectancy during Mao's time in power and I'd consider it a success story overall.
Defending against accusations of genocide? Yes. Although the phrasing can sound odd because it is largely a fabricated narrative. I think most here would support China's actions as a deradicalization program against religious extremism, especially compared to the US solution in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq.
Tankie is really just used as an insult against "communists I don't like." It's not like it has any theoretical depth. It has an etymology related to the definition they gave you but that only has so much influence on its use.
Class war is the ongoing state of things. Like infation and rent hikes. If a revoluton broke out, of course it would be authoritarian. And the resulting state would probably take an extremely cautious siege socialism approach if it wanted to survive, so yes it would probably be authoritarian. But choosing to not be authoritarian is really just willfully ceding power to the previous ruling class who are not going to give up their position peacefully, even after a revolution. Think about the media narrative and war hawk stances against Cuba, the DPRK, the PRC. Now imagine that but applied to a newly founded socialist republic.
Whether authoritarianism is bad or good depends primarily on the result. An authority that focuses on serving the people, building infrastructure, and putting food in people's stomachs is very different from an authority that focuses on scapegoating the people.
Of course there is, although the extent of it will depend on how good workers have it before the revolution. If a revolution accomplished degrowth in the US, for example, workers would have to suddenly live with a lot less than before, especially if they were in the labor aristocracy. Revolutions are also by their nature disruptive and you can expect to see disruptions in all kinds of supply chains and the food supply, and possibly some extent of purges of the old bureaucracy and reeducation of the people in order to defend the revolution from the counterrevolution. After some time this evens out and typically the one famine that occurred after the revolution is the last famine in that country, climate change notwithstanding. And not too long after a successful revolution depending on conditions workers will have better access to things they actually need like housing, food, healthcare, steady employment, public health, education, ability to live if disabled, and public transit at the possible cost of luxury goods, amenities, and little treats.
Not to disagree – because I agree – but I want to unpick the degrowth point a little.
Would workers necessarily feel the impact of degrowth negatively? Most things produced under capitalism is pointless, easily-broken, tat (how many versions of sink drainers and spectacles cases do we really need?). It's all marketed hard to create demand.
Stopping the production of that tat would surely lead to job losses but without the advertising would people really miss the goods? If Apple and Microsoft weren't allowed to make their machines redundant via software updates and they stopped manufacturing desire for the latest model, would normal people realise and if they did would they be upset? I'd imagine that most would sigh relief.
There would have to be a shift in employment and the division of labour but that's not necessarily painful if people can e.g. stay indefinitely in the home they currently occupy (or be given a home if homeless/houseless). Expectations would have to be adjusted – I fully agree, but if the bourgeois ideological apparatuses can be stopped, I reckon that most people would adjust quite well and quite quickly.
Just imagine if the number of total working hours halved because we decided to shut down lots of harmful industries, then guaranteed everyone a fair share of those hours, with the guaranteed services that you listed. I suppose the labour aristocracy, as you say, may be pissed off with the change because they already have access to all those services and they've been propagandised to think that they have it all because they're special. Everyone else might be right on board and willing to tell the ex-labour aristocrats to boil their arses.
It's hard to say for sure without a deeper analysis and a real revolution to analyze. It depends on how much is destroyed in the course of revolution, whether the economy collapses or not, and all of that and more is basically a crapshoot. I guess it might not be strictly inevitable because of the inefficient characteristics of our current economy, so thank you for the food for thought.
Very likely, depending on the state and on whether other states have or move towards a revolution at a similar time. When the Soviets seized power in Russia, they were later invaded by over 15 states, including the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. 'Post-revolutionary' conditions will not necessarily deteriorate because the workers are in control (although as bobs-guns points out, there will be logistical issues, etc, to contend with). Conditions will deteriorate because capitalists will fight until the last capitalist or socialist is gone.
I put 'post-revolution' in quotation marks to emphasise a need for care with the notion of revolution. The bourgeois way of thinking treats events as isolated and chronological. First one event happens, then another, then another, and each one finishes neatly just as the next is about to begin. From the perspective of historical materialism (HiMat), this is an error.
HiMat is the application of dialectical materialism (DiMat) to human society. For DiMat, the world is not made of things but of internally contradictory relations and processes. The struggle within these relations drives change. But change is not linear. Change happens linearly until it leaps. Even then, the 'new' has traces of the 'old', just as the 'old' contained the seeds of the 'new'.
From the perspective of HiMat, a revolution takes a long time, as one mode of production slowly transforms into the next mode of production until suddenly the revolution is achieved. I say all this to suggest that the 'post-revolution aftermath' is the process of revolution itself.
There's another way of explaining this. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
If revolution is a process of changing the mode of production, and if communism is the process of abolishing the old mode of production, then communism is the revolution and the post-revolutionary state of things.
To go back to my opening paragraph, we know that capitalists are counter-revolutionary anti-communists who will make things as difficult as possible for the revolutionary communists before and during the revolution. NATO spent however many decades in a Cold War with the USSR before brutally dismantling Soviet society more-or-less overnight.
Today NATO embargoes 'post-revolutionary' Cuba and pre-revolutionary Venezuela while provoking China and banning successful Chinese businesses from the States – this is the cause of the difficult 'aftermath' of a revolution, not the socialist government.
Once the revolution is fully achieved and there are no capitalists (a long time in the future), we can properly use the phrase 'post-revolution', and the disruptive 'aftermath' will be a thing of the past. In the meantime, the task of the socialist/communist government will be to provide for the people. Remember, that while this government must be authoritative, that government is composed of the people.
A rhetorical question: what would your first decisions involve if you were one of the workers who seizes power? Because the point of the revolution is not to put an elite in charge but to put you in charge (collectively, of course).
and that US actions toward its minorities might be similar, does that make whatever China is actually doing worth defending though?
From my point of view, what the USA is doing is not similar, because the USA focuses on punishment and, if that doesn't work, destruction of the offending group. The Chinese approach was to expand (access to) education, provide vocational training, and ease other difficulties the group was experiencing that contributing to the root cause of the terrorism. If the Chinese approach had been similar to the USA's approach, they wouldn't have put money and time and effort in to rehabilitating. Rehabilitation is a much preferred solution than punishment and destruction.
Also, the Chinese approach worked: treating people like humans and working to rehabilitate resolved the terrorism issue.
The UN Human Rights Council in 2019 published a report praising China's handling of the situation, noting how it was human-centered:
We commend China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights by adhering to the people-centered development philosophy and protecting and promoting human rights through development. We also appreciate China’s contributions to the international human rights cause. We take note that terrorism, separatism and religious extremism has caused enormous damage to people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, which has seriously infringed upon human rights, including right to life, health and development. Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers. Now safety and security has returned to Xinjiang and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there are safeguarded. The past three consecutive years has seen not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang and people there enjoy a stronger sense of happiness, fulfillment and security. We note with appreciation that human rights are respected and protected in China in the process of counter-terrorism and deradicalization.
This is from UN Document "A/HRC/41/G/17".
I did read most of that, and it is interesting. First thing I want to address is this statement:
In conclusion, descriptions of detentions in the VETCs in the period between 2017 and 2019 gathered by OHCHR were marked by patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, other violations of the right of persons deprived of their liberty to be treated humanely and with dignity, as well as violations of the right to health.
Yet the statement I linked to was made in 2019. So if they had been gathering data for 2 years, why would they have made the statement I linked? This confuses me. It's not like they discovered the reality, or material conditions changed, since they made the statement; they had had years of data, supposedly. I'm going to set that aside for a moment and try to address the content of the document.
Also, yes I agree entirely that the treatment described in that section is completely unnaceptable. It mentions literal torture methods, unnecessary physical punishment, violation of right to determine or deny medical treatment, etc. None of that is acceptable. That being said, I am curious as to how frequently this happens. Not that any amount is acceptable, but if the rate in this region of these acts is the same as elsewhere in the country, then the framing of the issue needs to change from "targeted genocide" to a critique of the system as a whole. I don't have any data as to the occurrence rate of these acts in this region or outside of it.
Much of the rest of the report leading up to the part you mentioned is really much less bothersome. It mentions use of the surveillance state to catch offending parties. You may think this is invasive or unacceptable but, again, this is not particular to this region and would be a critique of the whole system. There's an attempt to criticize the use of imprisonment for punishment, which seems like a weird stance to take considering...the rest of the world.
In all honesty, I think the more damning part of what you linked would be everything after the part you mention specifically. The remainder of the document portrays traditional "genocidal" actions. I don't know what to do with the document since it does seem bad, but it's such a wild about-face from the reports just a couple years earlier, by the same group no less. More from 2019:
- World Bank Statement on Review of Project in Xinjiang, China by The World Bank was in favor or China's actions
- Resolutions by the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (noting that Islam is predominant amongst Uyghurs) was also in favor
So unless the conditions were so perfectly hidden from many investigative groups until they suddenly weren't, or unless the material conditions changed so much that none of the positive praise would apply anymore, I don't know what to make of the report you've linked.
I was interested in which countries signed which statements, so I made a list of:
2019 States in Support
- Algeria
- Angola
- Bahrain
- Bangladesh
- Belarus
- the Plurinational State of Bolivia
- Burkina Faso
- Burundi
- Cambodia
- Cameroon
- Comoros
- the Congo
- Cuba
- the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
- the Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Djibouti
- Egypt
- Equatorial Guinea
- Eritrea
- Gabon
- the Islamic Republic of Iran
- Iraq
- Kuwait
- the Lao People’s Democratic Republic
- Mozambique
- Myanmar
- Nepal
- Nigeria
- Oman
- Pakistan
- the Philippines
- the Russian Federation
- Saudi Arabia
- Serbia
- Somalia
- South Sudan
- Sri Lanka
- the Sudan
- the Syrian Arab Republic
- Tajikistan
- Togo
- Turkmenistan
- Uganda
- the United Arab Emirates
- Uzbekistan
- the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
- Yemen
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
- the State of Palestine
2022 States in Condemnation
- Albania
- Australia
- Austria
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Canada
- Croatia
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Haiti
- Honduras
- Iceland
- Ireland
- Italy
- Japan
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- the Republic of the Marshall Islands
- Monaco
- Nauru
- the Kingdom of the Netherlands
- New Zealand
- North Macedonia
- Norway
- Palau
- Poland
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- the United Kingdom
- the United States
This looks pretty divided along lines that we see on a lot of other ideological issues as well, but just out of curiousity I also compared this to:
NATO Member States
- Albania
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Canada
- Croatia
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Montenegro
- Netherlands
- North Macedonia
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Turkey
- United Kingdom
- United States
It looks like not a single state switched from Praise to Condemnation, that is, there is no state on the 2022 condemnation that was also on the 2019 praise document. Moreover, not a single NATO member state was on the 2019 praise document, but several are on the 2022 condemnation.
I think this helps reinforce your statement:
In general, I think it’s likely that some of the critics are being disproportionately critical because it’s China, and some of the defenders are so quick to dismiss it for the same reason.
So yeah, unfortunately I'm left to assume that both reports are probably rather partisan. That being said, the 2019 praising was backed by other, third-party investigative souces, such as the ones I linked previously.
Yeah I'm not sure what to make of that. Here is her statement after she visited China, which doesn't say much of anything. Her wikipedia page claims she didn't even sign the report, but their linked citation doesn't actually say that. It is interesting that Chile is not present on either the 2019 or the 2022 report, as I'd expect her opinion to be somewhat reflected/reflective there still.
Starting off with enemy states of western imperialist nations is probably not going to go well. It's better to start with talking about subjects that directly relate to and affects their material interest.
This is all assuming you are talking to someone who isn't a bourgeoisie or materially well off. You can then talk about how their wages aren't improving, and change in the nation isn't for the better for people like him and how no matter who is elected it seems like they don't change anything for the better. This can then get into discussions about class interests (how the proletariat and bourgeoisie obtain wealth and their conflicting interests) and exactly what determines a "democracy" and how the nations they live in aren't "democracies" as they are dictatorships of the bourgeoisie. Get them to understand what capitalism really is and then describe features of communism without the word communism that they may agree with. Materialism vs idealism can also be discussed here. Debunking propaganda against communism and AES nations is gonna take a long time unless they are open-minded and willingly want to get a new perspective.