(03-25-2021, 03:34 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(03-24-2021, 04:28 PM)Einzige Wrote:(03-22-2021, 04:57 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It has been 173 years since Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Name one nation where capital has been abolished and your version of Marxism has been implemented and established.
A whole three full generations for an entire social logic to work itself out! You've really got me there.
I wouldn't give up yet. If the Chinese Communist Party insists on not listening to the people, something like a proletarian revolution could yet occur. Expecting the result to mesh with the Marxist ideal? Well, maybe you should give up.
The Chinese Communist Party are State capitalists who cannot divest themselves of Marxist rhetoric without losing legitimacy. This can and will bite them in the ass down the line, as they export the very thing that will end up destroying them. This is why they persecute actual Marxists in their territory, e.g.
https://www.ft.com/content/fd087484-2f23...016697f225
Quote: After a series of kidnappings and arrests both on and off China’s most prestigious campuses, a total of 42 people remain in detention, including 21 students and recent graduates, as well as activists, social workers, trade-union staff and Jasic workers. Many have lost contact completely with their families, while relatives have been pressured by police not to speak to the media or to contact lawyers.
The story of the Jasic workers, and the students who supported them and set the issue aflame, highlights a paradox at the heart of modern China. While the country is controlled by a Communist party government that trumpets Marxist rhetoric, its economy has flourished since the 1980s partly thanks to the development of “state capitalism” — a liberalisation that has allowed private markets and mass consumption to thrive within strict parameters set by the state.
Last May, President Xi Jinping gave a speech to mark the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, proclaiming him “the greatest thinker of modern times”, and arguing that the 19th-century German philosopher “pointed out the direction, with scientific theory, toward an ideal society with no oppression or exploitation”. Yet China’s government has turned a blind eye to worker exploitation as the country has become a global economic powerhouse, with income inequality exceeding that in the US.
“The objection of many on China’s new left — not just students — is that China is a socialist country in name but capitalist in reality, and that inequality, pollution and corruption are a consequence of this anomaly,” says Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history at the University of Oxford.
The state’s concerted oppression of young Marxists partly reflects the tension within the Chinese Communist party’s own origin story: that it has not preserved the communist ideals behind its revolutionary success under Chairman Mao. In 1978 the party formally ditched the idea of class struggle, deeming it too divisive, and instead prioritised economic development.
“The students’ commitment to a purer form of Marxism only serves to highlight the CCP’s own drift from its roots,” says Jude Blanchette, author of a forthcoming book on China’s neo-Maoists. “This, crucially, has been why the left in China has always presented more of a challenge to the party leadership than the right.”
I don't even particularly like the Chinese student Left, as they are Maoists and I'm a left-Communist. But you can see the contradictions at play there, working themselves out.