And now, when writing this… Argh. Uyghurs. You absolutely cannot compare it to what Nazis did, but if you compare it to what other fascist countries died then yes, that’s quite some consequence.
I still would not write an equal sign between fascists and tankies, though.
In the end, tankie is a type of a socialist, and one becomes socialist through a will to do good. Being a tankie is some EXTREMELY fucking ill-advised way to do good, because the result is indeed very very bad. But you don’t really become a fascist in order to do good. You become a fascist because you think you are worth more than others.
I think being a tankie is about the goal being more important than the means – all the way to an extent where the means completely obliterate the goal. And being a fascist is about deciding that being limitlessly selfish is okay.
One is at least trying to have a good goal. The other one is just… “Everything for ME and MY TRIBE, all others should DIE!”
But in the end, what’s being done to Uyghurs is just horror. Being thrown into a concentration camp and being subjected to various inhumane experiments is already on a very high level of evil to have to experience.
And now, when writing this… Argh. Uyghurs. You absolutely cannot compare it to what Nazis did, but if you compare it to what other fascist countries died then yes, that’s quite some consequence.
You could also compare it to things “democratic” countries have done. America for one has had decades of segregation based on ethnicity and has had concentration camps for ethnic minorities, not to mention a genocide against indigenous peoples.
If we are using that to tell how much like Nazis a nation is plenty of democratic countries are a lot closer to Nazi Germany than China.
In the end, tankie is a type of a socialist, and one becomes socialist through a will to do good. Being a tankie is some EXTREMELY fucking ill-advised way to do good, because the result is indeed very very bad.
I’m not claiming that China has never done anything that I don’t agree with, however if we are measuring their results, it’s hard to conclude that it’s ill advised. In the last 40 years China has lifted nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty and has done so with out endless cycles of wars.
Meanwhile democratic nations in the West have seen more of their citizens slide into to poverty while killing millions of people in forever wars.
But in the end, what’s being done to Uyghurs is just horror. Being thrown into a concentration camp and being subjected to various inhumane experiments is already on a very high level of evil to have to experience.
Again, I don’t agree with a lot of the CCP policies. That being said, I do think there are some exaggerations when it comes to the Uyghur people, though based on their own information I would say there is a pattern of ethnic prejudice
That being said, even if we use the most inflammatory information from western media and utilize the high estimate of 1.8 million ethnic minorities being put into reeducation camps. That’s less than 1/6th of the Uyghur population in China. Less than the 2 million people currently incarcerated in the US, of those whom nearly 40% are from an ethnic minority who only make up around 10% of the total population.
This is not my attempt of a whataboutism, just trying to illiustrate that unjustifiable national policy is not unique to socialist or democratic capitalist governments.
You could also compare it to things “democratic” countries have done. America for one has had decades of segregation based on ethnicity and has had concentration camps for ethnic minorities, not to mention a genocide against indigenous peoples.
Yes, you can. Generally, any country where an ideology goes over individuals’ well-being tends to do this shit. China does, USA does as well. Not terribly surprising.
1/6 on camps is a LOT. It does fulfill the definition of genocide.
What makes you think that USA is relevant here? I am not from USA. USA is not a part of China, nor the other way around.
This is not my attempt of a whataboutism, just trying to illiustrate that unjustifiable national policy is not unique to socialist or democratic capitalist governments.
Show me a democratic country where this happens. You’re giving me China and USA. And there’s also the Russia.
But is there actually a democratic country where people are handled they way countries such as USA and China do?
What makes you think that USA is relevant here? I am not from USA. USA is not a part of China, nor the other way around.
My point was that any specific economic policy or government style does not necessarily dictate the outcomes of the people it is in charge of. If this is similar to your belief, then I would question why you elected to make a statement that seemed to limit itself to a binary of fascist/“tankies”.
1/6 on camps is a LOT. It does fulfill the definition of genocide.
Again, that is using the most hyperbolic estimate. Also, I do not think temporarily holding a percent of an ethnicity in an internment camp is enough to call something a genocide. It’s definitely not great, and is systemic ethnic prejudice, but I don’t know if that would qualify as a genocide.
The US put 80% of Japanese Americans in interment camps during ww2 and I’ve never heard that referenced as a genocide.
What makes you think that USA is relevant here? I am not from USA. USA is not a part of China, nor the other way around.
I think I explained in the last paragraph of my original argument that it was to provide relevant comparison of similar examples that were not fascist nor “tankies”.
In your claim you said that you shouldn’t be a tankie because it led to bad/evil results. Would you also claim you shouldn’t be a liberal democracy because it leads to bad/evil results?
Show me a democratic country where this happens. You’re giving me China and USA. And there’s also the Russia.
First of all…how is the US not a democratic country? It may not be a great one, but it still has free and fair elections. If the US is not a liberal democracy… What is it?
Secondly, there have been plenty examples of democratic countries having unjustifiable foreign and domestic policies.
Just off the top of my head Canada has a brutal history of suppressing their native inhabitants that endures to the modern age. Both france and the UK also had interment camps during ww2. The UK committed a genocidal famine against ireland and Bengal as a democratic nation. Most of the worst aspects of colonialism were conducted after European powers transitioned out of absolute monarchies into democracies. South Africa and Israel both conducted an apartheid state in modern times, one going further into a genocide of Palestinians.
And more than likely the nation you currently live in has materially or militarily aided the US in one of their unjustifiable wars in the middle East.
No idea of what’s been going on in Canada. POW camps don’t really count. Nor any camps where the goal is not the removal of an ethnicity or nationality from from a region. The question about Israel’s democracy is an interesting one that I need to ponded more!
So your honor, my defense is an appeal to ignorance with a healthy side of “Nu-uh”.
Also, the US is totally not a democratic government, but Israel…
why you elected to make a statement that seemed to limit itself to a binary of fascist/"tankies”.
Because that is the subject we are talking about. We are talking about to what extent tankies are similar to fascists.
Also, I do not think temporarily holding a percent of an ethnicity in an internment camp is enough to call something a genocide.
Temporarily, not. But anything that forces people to have to lose their national or thnic identity is genocide. We are not talking about any temporary internment camps here. (I’m not sure if temporary internment camps based on ethnicity have ever even existed…)
to provide relevant comparison of similar examples that were not fascist nor “tankies”.
If they do not support using a country’s military against its own population nor are fascists, how are they relevant to this discussion that is intentionally limited to those two groups?
First of all……how is the US not a democratic country?
Uh… Read the news maybe? WTF kind of question is this? How is it a democratic country?
Just off the top of my head Canada has a brutal history of suppressing their native inhabitants that endures to the modern age. Both france and the UK also had interment camps during ww2.
No idea of what’s been going on in Canada. POW camps don’t really count. Nor any camps where the goal is not the removal of an ethnicity or nationality from from a region.
The question about Israel’s democracy is an interesting one that I need to ponded more!
Because that is the subject we are talking about. We are talking about to what extent tankies are similar to fascists.
And my rebuttal proves that those qualities are not really unique to fascism nor “tankies” and are therefore redundant. You could have just as easily said governments do governmental things and would have made just as valid as a point.
Temporarily, not. But anything that forces people to have to lose their national or thnic identity is genocide. We are not talking about any temporary internment camps here. (I’m not sure if temporary internment camps based on ethnicity have ever even existed…)
And what proof is there that they are loosing their ethnic or national identity?
Secondly even the most inflammatory citations about the interment camps do not claim they are indefinite, mostly claiming that they are held for 10 months to two years.
Lastly, interning Japanese Americans during ww2 is an example of temporary internment camps based on ethnicity.
If they do not support using a country’s military against its own population nor are fascists, how are they relevant to this discussion that is intentionally limited to those two groups?
I provided several examples of democratic nations using their military against their own citizens. I have also already explained the reason it was relevant was because it disproves your claim.
Uh… Read the news maybe? WTF kind of question is this? How is it a democratic country?
Lol, do you know how a democratic nation is defined? Any country that derives it’s authority through elected representatives is a democratic nation. Just because those democratically elected officials are conducting themselves in a way that you or I do not agree with does not mean it’s not a democracy.
Democracy does not mean “only does good” it’s an organizational hierarchy that reflects the political majority.
No idea of what’s been going on in Canada.
Ahh, so ignorance is your defense…great.
POW camps don’t really count. Nor any camps where the goal is not the removal of an ethnicity or nationality from from a region.
Wut? You do know that one of the main reasons for Nazi concentration camps were for pows…
Is your claim that democratic countries are morally just in any action so long as they aren’t utilized solely for ethnic cleansing? Also… That would preclude the Uyghur internment camps as they are not being removed from China or Xijiang.
Also, I do not think temporarily holding a percent of an ethnicity in an internment camp is enough to call something a genocide.
Do you really want to defend holding any percentage of people in an internment camp based on their ethnicity? And this applies to USA too. Holding anyone on an internment camp is bad enough, but because of ethnicity?! That’s not only racism, that’s fast track to genocide if it’s not already happening
Do you really want to defend holding any percentage of people in an internment camp based on their ethnicity?
Did I say I was defending that… Or did I just say it wasn’t considered a genocide? Pretty sure I started the argument by saying i didn’t agree with all CCP policy, and that the treatment of the Uyghur people would be systemic ethnic prejudice, which is self evidently bad.
Again, my point isn’t to nullify all criticism, just to point out that there seems to be a double standard when people speak about the same crimes carried by both democratic and socialist governments.
Or did I just say it wasn’t considered a genocide?
If part of (be it sixth or less) a cultural minority is put into internment camps, such a big portion of one ethnicity to be criminals in any common means is so unlikely it’s clearly a state approved genocide. You denying it to be one is intentionally downplaying to make the issue seem less important and direct the discussion towards something else. I do not care what is the government structure or whatever it prefers to be called if they’re putting minorities into camps. There’s nothing to be defended in that, be it USA, China, or whoever.
If part of (be it sixth or less) a cultural minority is put into internment camps, such a big portion of one ethnicity to be criminals in any common means is so unlikely it’s clearly a state approved genocide.
By what definition? Labeling all discrimination towards ethnic minorities as bad is something I would readily agree with. However, labeling all types of discrimination as genocide diminishes the definition of genocide and is lessens the actual genocides that have actually occured.
Definitionally genocide requires the intent to partially or fully physically destroy a cultural, ethnic, racial, or religious group. According to the UN internment camps are not inherently genocidal, but can often be a precursor to genocidal actions.
You denying it to be one is intentionally downplaying to make the issue seem less important and direct the discussion towards something else.
Or, I’m just trying to be accurate. I’m also pointing out that there are inconsistencies in the way people lable genocide when it comes to geopolitics.
As far as redirections… I don’t really know what you are implying, I haven’t changed my position on the subject, or attempted to bring in another topic the entire argument.
thrown into a concentration camp and being subjected to various inhumane experiments
Man it’s so cool that red scare propaganda in the current age has a kind of SCP collaborative fiction vibe to it, where you can just Say Shit and riff on it to adjust reality to “your” (the state department’s) specifications.
My experiences with Uyghurs differ from yours. I was backpacking in Kazakstan and China and the repression was easy to notice with bare eyes. The Uyghurs wouldn’t be that scared of a 7-year-old Han-girl if there was no repression.
How was your visit to East Türkestan?
Oh, and Uyghurs are not Arabs, BTW! They are a Turkic nation.
Did you try talking to anyone? Its difficult because google translate doesn’t do Uhygur speech-to-text, but does translate Uhygur as Kazakh kind of.
That’s not to say there’s not serious issues, but it seemed plainly obvious to my bare eyes that the bulk of the claims of genocide are outright fabrications.
Some knew some English, partially I used the rudimentary Turkish I know, partially I used a Mandarin to English translator tool. Mostly I ended up being hosted by people who knew some English.
It ended up being a mix of Turkish, Chinese and English in the end.
And so is the video linked. You can also use your own logic to notice its fallacies. You don’t get just anyone invited to a soccer match. It’s an important situation for propaganda, so you only allow people there who know what truth to say if anyone asks. And what kind of face to show. Ones that know what will happen to them and their relatives if they fall off the line.
I don’t know why you believe the “dude trust me” guy on the video. Nor why I should trust you, dude.
Over 50+ UN member states (mostly Muslim-majority nations) signed a letter (A/HRC/41/G/17) to the UN Human Rights Commission approving of the de-radicalization efforts in Xinjiang.
Welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat’s delegation upon invitation from the People’s Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.
This is like red scare orientalist bingo. You have
-Public events are actually a propagands show for whitey
-Showing face
-Everyone there is only pretending to be happy because Something Bad will happen to their families (how many generations?) if they don’t.
At what point does believing all of these conventient copes to get around having to engage with the concept of an actually popular government start to take on the qualities of a cult’s belief structure?
You were the implying that bad things would happen to the diplomatic observers from the Arab League if they didn’t parrot the required Chinese propaganda.
But yeah, I would imagine that their countries were pressured into this by some kind of a trade deal. Just like a Christian country can help undermine another Christian country for personal profit, a Muslim country can help undermine another Muslim country for personal profit.
I didn’t post a link to any videos dumbass, my source is the verifiable fact that the majority of muslim nations on earth investigated in person and are calling bullshit on us. They have far more credibility than the US and our lackeys and our media, there is no actual evidence to contradict their findings, it’s the same sort of atrocity propaganda we used to justify invading Iraq & Afghanistan.
US is a shithole country. I wouldn’t go there if they paid me to. I do not care of what US is or is not. For your US-centric, well, you: USA and China are two wholly separate countries. US doing something does not mean that China is automatically good/bad as a result of whatever dumb thing the US government decides to do.
And “we” did not justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan. The rally against the war in Iraq was probably the largest rally there has ever been in Finland, for crying out loud!
Finland? Lol fuck off, your protests are worthless and your government is as much a US lackey as the rest of Europe has been for most of a century now. Your info on China is overwhelmingly US sponsored propaganda, your government and media are owned by the same billionaires as the rest of the western world.
I believe at the point they have already become tankies, no good goal exists anymore. They only seem to work to defend what they have already achieved. And that is oppression.
I’m not sure socialism or communism can ever be made to work, but at least Marx and Lenin made it much more difficult to ever get there by demandinfmg we do the opposite of the goals of communism in order to get communism. People who are okay with cleansings and repression will cleanse and repress.
You don’t really go through the chore of reading Capital without really wanting to change the society for better. And because Marx, the death of communism, preferred violence and is convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid), those who read the book until the end, end up forfeiting all good goals and will go for repression.
Tankies are people who used to want good things and fairness. And then they converted from that into tankies.
A strong leader will always lead you into a Russia. Into a quagmire.
Marx… is convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid)
I’m sorry, what? Have you ever actually tried to read Capital? Most of Marx’s works are dense and academic, drawing intellectual traditions that are often unfamiliar to modern readers (classical economics, Hegel, etc). Marx’s way of argumentation isn’t really geared toward the lowest common denominator.
It’s kinda funny how you can’t even keep your criticism straight through a single comment. In one sentence, reading Marx is a “chore” that nobody would want to slog through, in the very next one, Marx is so persuasive, his honeyed words easily sway the minds of any who stumble across them, like the Sirens calling ships to their rocks.
As for “no good goal exists anymore” or “it’s hard to see what good goal tankies ever had” maybe we just like it when this sort of thing happens:
The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.
When you figure out a better way to do that, get back to me.
When you figure out a better way to do that, get back to me.
Here goes:
A similar jump from around 1949 to 1980. In China it seems to have begun around 1930, with WWII causing a dent. In Finland the same had begun around 1880’s. But the development between 1949 and 1980 is very similar, only: without concentration camps! (…since 1918.)
That’s still not as fast of a development, and the conditions aren’t really comparable. China used to be among the poorest countries in the world.
And while their government has not always been ideal, it was undoubtably the best option on the table historically. The corrupt Nationalists didn’t do shit for the people (and pocketed foreign aid). Before that, with no central authority, was the warlord period. Before that was the backwards Qing dynasty. In all the thousands of years of Chinese history, nobody really did anything for the rural people until the communists.
This is nonsense, the only part you got correct is that those who read through Capital generally have an interest in a better world. Neither Marx nor Lenin advocated “doing the opposite” to get to communism, both argued for the establishment of a worker state to gradually collectivize all of the means of production and distribution. Historically, this method has been enormously beneficial for the working classes, while breing quite scary for landlords, capitalists, slavers, and fascists.
I’m also not at all understanding what you mean by Marx being “convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid).” What would an intelligent person, by your estimation, take fault with in Marx?
What would an intelligent person, by your estimation, take fault with in Marx[‘s Capital]?
Capital rests on the argument ~that the fact qualitatively different (in terms of use values) commodities are exchanged for each other in different quantities requires a quality they share in common which only differs in quantity from one commodity to the next, and Marx posits that the only quality this could be is being products of labor. Yet this is very clearly not something that all commodities have in common, and that a thing’s status as a commodity and its ability to be exchanged for other commodities has nothing to do with its being a product of labor. The only way Marx’s argument can be accepted is if you start with the presupposition that commodities are valued by the labor required to produce them.
How this happens that commodities are exchanged at their “value” is a complete mystery by the way, since Marx says it has nothing to do with the conscious considerations of either the buyer or the seller.
Yet this is very clearly not something that all commodities have in common
This is not clear at all. Elaborate, please.
and that a thing’s status as a commodity and its ability to be exchanged for other commodities has nothing to do with its being a product of labor
Why not? Are you saying that the utility of a commodity to someone does not change whether or not it was made with labor? This doesn’t really matter, though, the point of the Law of Value is that commodities are socially produced, and socially distributed, which normalizes their price around their values. Arguments like the “mud pie” don’t apply, because mud pies are neither useful nor difficult to make.
The only way Marx’s argument can be accepted is if you start with the presupposition that commodities are valued by the labor required to produce them.
Incorrect, the exchange-value that price fluctuates around is representative of the value in a commodity. Another way to look at it is that the value of a commodity is the sum of its inputs, which can be reduced to labor and natural resources.
How this happens that commodities are exchanged at their “value” is a complete mystery by the way, since Marx says it has nothing to do with the conscious considerations of either the buyer or the seller.
Marx is correct, though this is no mystery. Commodities are social products, and are socially exchanged. What’s universal to goods bought and sold is that they require natural resources and human labor to create them, thus capitalism in being a social process acts as a price-finder for commodities, all based on inputs and outputs.
All you need for commodity exchange is for people to accept something is yours and be willing to exchange something they own which you desire in return for it. That thing being a product of labor is not necessary. You can own land based on agreement without taking any trouble to cultivate or defend it, and exchange it for other things based on agreement. You can exchange naturally occurring things without rendering them ~crystallizations of social labor.
Marx’s argument is invalid in another way because there are so many qualities commodities share besides being products of labor.
Now, I know that the law of value is supposed to come specifically with highly developed industrial society with large scale social production which makes the abstract real etc etc however the issue is that this then messes with Marx’s argument I went over in the prev comment where he tries to prove the LTV by going over the concept of commodities/commodity exchange as such without regard for this.
Arguments like the “mud pie” don’t apply, because mud pies are neither useful nor difficult to make.
The argument only doesn’t apply for the first reason. There’s no necessity even for Marx that commodities be arbitrarily “difficult” to produce.
Incorrect, the exchange-value that price fluctuates around is representative of the value in a commodity.
How is this a response to what I said?
Another way to look at it is that the value of a commodity is the sum of its inputs, which can be reduced to labor and natural resources.
This is both incorrect (for Marx, value is entirely determined by socially necessary labor time) and doesn’t mean anything (this is like multiplying 3 apples by 7 pears, what does it mean that the value of a commodity can be reduced to labor and natural resources?; with value being determined by labor time you can reduce things to a certain quantity, but then you just add on a qualitatively different thing and you return to the original problem of needing a third equivalent, or a value to unite the components of value).
Marx is correct, though this is no mystery.
You forgot to explain how this actually occurs. You just say that capitalism does it.
What’s universal to goods bought and sold is that they require natural resources and human labor to create them.
You should tell Marx this since expressly says that he thinks the only universal is labor. You both happen to be wrong, though.
All you need for commodity exchange is for people to accept something is yours and be willing to exchange something they own which you desire in return for it. That thing being a product of labor is not necessary. You can own land based on agreement without taking any trouble to cultivate or defend it, and exchange it for other things based on agreement. You can exchange naturally occurring things without rendering them ~crystallizations of social labor.
Yes? Marx talks about natural resources. Land is covered more in volume 3, but nevertheless this is fully accounted for. Natural resources take extraction to refine and produce, and the concept of owning land requires a body to uphold that, the state, and the value of land itself is tied to how productive it can make you. All value comes from labor and natural resources, this is straight from Capital.
Marx’s argument is invalid in another way because there are so many qualities commodities share besides being products of labor.
This does not make his argument invalid, though. What’s common is that the makeup of commodities can be reduced entirely to the labor and raw materials that went into them.
Now, I know that the law of value is supposed to come specifically with highly developed industrial society with large scale social production which makes the abstract real etc etc however the issue is that this then messes with Marx’s argument I went over in the prev comment where he tries to prove the LTV by going over the concept of commodities/commodity exchange as such without regard for this.
No, you never disproved anything.
The argument only doesn’t apply for the first reason. There’s no necessity even for Marx that commodities be arbitrarily “difficult” to produce.
There is, though. A commodity’s value isn’t dependent on how much labor went into that individual commodity, but that commodity as a social product, ie on average. If someone spends 10 hours on a mud pie that takes 2 seconds to create on average, it’ll be just as close to worthless as the rest. Further, labor that is more skilled (harder to socially reproduce) or more compressed than the social average does produce more value. Value is a social characteristic, not an individual one.
How is this a response to what I said?
Because you’re confusing the fact that prices reflect value with the idea that people independently think of that before purchasing.
This is both incorrect (for Marx, value is entirely determined by socially necessary labor time) and doesn’t mean anything (this is like multiplying 3 apples by 7 pears, what does it mean that the value of a commodity can be reduced to labor and natural resources?; with value being determined by labor time you can reduce things to a certain quantity, but then you just add on a qualitatively different thing and you return to the original problem of needing a third equivalent, or a value to unite the components of value).
You’re mixing up Exchange-Value with Use-Value. All use-value comes from labor and natural resources, but natural resources themselves can be reduced to the labor required to gather them and refine them, etc. All socially necessary labor time means is that it takes society on average a certain amount of labor to create something, and natural resources can be themselves reduced to labor. 3 apples and 7 pears both may take the same amount of labor on average to create them, and thus their prices naturally gravitate near the same value.
You forgot to explain how this actually occurs. You just say that capitalism does it.
Through the market. Buying and selling of goods, competition, all of this from the perspective of the capitalist confronts them as input costs and profits. Competition forces prices towards a floor, lack of competition brings in new competitors which then brings the price back to being roughly as profitable as the rest. Capital essentially functions as a control system.
You should tell Marx this since he expressly says that he thinks the only universal is labor. You both happen to be wrong, though.
You should actually read Capital, because Marx quite literally states this.
Use-values like coats, linen, etc., in short, the physical bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour. If we subtract the total amount of useful labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat, the linen, etc., a material substratum is always left. This substratum is furnished by nature without human intervention. When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e. he can only change the form of the materials.[17] Furthermore, even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.[18]
Marx isn’t wrong, and neither am I, it seems you genuinely haven’t opened Capital because this is in the first few pages.
What would an intelligent person, by your estimation, take fault with in Marx?
The dictatorship of the proletariat was a horribly bad idea. It’s a dictatorship. And brings the consequences of a dictatorship with it. I would dare to blame Lenin and also Marx for that crap.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a democratic state for the proletariat, and dictatorship against capitalists, fascists, landlords, and slavers. It’s the socialist equivalent to liberal democracy, which de facto is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
All states are class dictatorships, this means democracy for the ruling class and its absolute rule over the rest.
Also, not sure why you brought up Capital if you’re talking about the DotP, that’s not really in Capital.Capital is a critique of bourgeois Political Economy.
Here and here are two texts on the subject which cover some of the same things as that video (albeit not from a first-hand person-from-the-US-traveling-in-Xinjiang perspective like the video does).
If you think China colonized Xinjiang, well… yeah, they did. But that was 22 centuries ago, a millennium before the [people now known as] Uyghurs had even arrived there. The demographics and ruling empires unsurprisingly changed a few times in the ensuing millennia, but since the Qing dynasty committed the Dzungar genocide there (from 1755–1758, with help of several peoples including Han and Uyghur) it has mostly remained a part of China.
The ancient history is interesting, but more recent events (eg Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups the US has been funding there) are more relevant to the present situation.
I did watch the first three minutes. Everything he shows is true, everything he explains as interpretation is just full of shit.
What specifically is he full of shit about? I recommend watching more than three minutes of it.
I don’t think there’s anything that can only be achieved by that.
But generally in China the CCP is who decides about everything that happens in the country. Being religious is one of the things that are against the official template of how a person should be. Any religion is a problem, but a nation as religious as Uyghurs is considered a problem.
And of course: Just look at the clocks. Any clock in the Uyghur areas is showing the local time, not Beijing time. Only clocks at railway stations, police stations and such show the Beijing time. The people there are far too independent for Beijing’s liking. Or yours.
the CCP is who decides about everything that happens in the country
The CPC has 100 million members, it’s their job to represent the people. This is like saying “the government decides what happens”
Any clock in the Uyghur areas is showing the local time, not Beijing time
I spent 3 months in Xinjiang, I didn’t notice this, but can’t remember the last time I looked at a clock that wasn’t on a phone.
Any religion is a problem
You’re recycling anti-soviet propaganda. China isn’t atheist. For China, they officially support religion, but in practice recognize religious organizations as potential problems due to history, from the boxer rebellion to Fulong gong to ETIM terrorist attacks. They reconcile this by providing funding and official support to religious institutions, but exert pressure (I’m unclear how exactly) to promote less radical factions and don’t provide as many special privileges in areas where there’s risks of extremism, for example there’s religious schools in Xi’an, but not Urumqi. Personally I think the situation with private schools and hukou is a mess that needs to be addressed in a way that doesn’t ration education by income and zip code, but as an outsider, I don’t have the nuanced understanding how to do this in a way that doesn’t impinge on the rights of minorities and helps to preserve their culture, but the Chinese I’ve asked about this seem less concerned about losing aspects of their own unique cultures than having a common language and understanding, which IMO is a god-awful take, discarding the work of millennia of human development.
nation as religious as Uyghurs
How do you measure how religious a group of people are?
The Soviet Union had no colonies. This was always projection on the part of colonial and neocolonial countries for the USSR’s unwavering support for national liberation struggles, which earned them incredible amounts of sanctions.
Do you think the current colonies of the Russia somehow appeared out of thin air? All of the Russia’s current territory has been Soviet territory in the past. All of the Russia’s colonies were of course also Soviet colonies.
What are you referencing when you say current Russian colonies? Pretty much all Russian colonization happened in the 16th century in Siberia and central asia under imperial Russia. The only colonization other than that was in Alaska and in parts of northern California in the 18th century, while still under the imperial regime.
Precisely the colonies that were gradually colonized in the 16th to 20th century.
Just like French and British colonies are still colonies even if they were colonized centuries ago, Russian colonies are still colonies even if they were colonized centuries ago.
The eastern parts of the Russia only really ended up under Russian rule after the Transsiberian railway was built.
Precisely the colonies that were gradually colonized in the 16th to 20th century.
Those were colonized by Imperial Russia… You know the government that the Soviet union overthrew.
Just like French and British colonies are still colonies even if they were colonized centuries ago, Russian colonies are still colonies even if they were colonized centuries ago.
The difference being that the British and French governments were continuations of the same government that took those colonial holdings. Also the colonies taken in the 20th century now belong to the US.
The eastern parts of the Russia only really ended up under Russian rule after the Transsiberian railway was built.
The eastern parts of the Russia only really ended up under Russian rule after the Transsiberian railway was built.
I mean that’s just factually incorrect. The Imperial Russian expansion east started in the late 15th century and had colonies at the pacific by the mid 16th century, and had nearly a million exiles alone heading east by the mid 17th century.
The Trans-Siberian railway wasn’t completed until 1904, the same year of the Russo Japanese war where they had a battle over control of Manchuria with millions of combatants. Nothing you are claiming is historically correct in the slightest.
Modern Russia had no colonies to inherit, it has no colonies. The Soviet Union liberated the Tsar’s colonies and thus modern Russia had none to inherit.
Anti-intellectualism exists anywhere you’re peddling your authoritarian, genocide-denial sophistry, so kindly (or unkindly, I literally don’t give a fuck), fuck off.
Edit to anyone reading this thread: note that (especially in the case of Cowbee) not engaging is the only way to deal with tankies, regardless of how much engagement bait they throw in their comments!
They’re self-admittedly only here to propagandize/whitewash their authoritarian views in the first place, their arguments are based on a completely different set of facts from the reality that you live in, and no matter how reasonable they make themselves sound, they aren’t here to argue in good faith. YOU WILL NOT WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH THEM HERE BECAUSE THEY AREN’T ACTUALLY ENGAGING WITH YOUR POINTS - YOU WILL ONLY MAKE THEIR CAREFULLY SANITIZED POSITIONS SEEM MORE REASONABLE TO OTHERS READING THE THREAD.
“Plugging your ears and running away is the only way to deal with people who have unanswerable critiques of my way of thinking. For your own safety, you must terminate critical thought immediately.”
Dude you would have to waterboard me for six business days to get me to admit to that kind of ideological weakness
What a weird statement. I replied to you saying you reflexively ignored information purely because the person posting it has a Lemmy.ml account, this is just blatant anti intellectualism and forcing yourself into an echo chamber. Not sure what you mean by “authoritarian, genocide-denial sophistry” either.
Edit for your edit:
This is just mental gymnastics to justify your own echo-chamber.
I completely agree.
And now, when writing this… Argh. Uyghurs. You absolutely cannot compare it to what Nazis did, but if you compare it to what other fascist countries died then yes, that’s quite some consequence.
I still would not write an equal sign between fascists and tankies, though.
In the end, tankie is a type of a socialist, and one becomes socialist through a will to do good. Being a tankie is some EXTREMELY fucking ill-advised way to do good, because the result is indeed very very bad. But you don’t really become a fascist in order to do good. You become a fascist because you think you are worth more than others.
I think being a tankie is about the goal being more important than the means – all the way to an extent where the means completely obliterate the goal. And being a fascist is about deciding that being limitlessly selfish is okay. One is at least trying to have a good goal. The other one is just… “Everything for ME and MY TRIBE, all others should DIE!” But in the end, what’s being done to Uyghurs is just horror. Being thrown into a concentration camp and being subjected to various inhumane experiments is already on a very high level of evil to have to experience.
You could also compare it to things “democratic” countries have done. America for one has had decades of segregation based on ethnicity and has had concentration camps for ethnic minorities, not to mention a genocide against indigenous peoples.
If we are using that to tell how much like Nazis a nation is plenty of democratic countries are a lot closer to Nazi Germany than China.
I’m not claiming that China has never done anything that I don’t agree with, however if we are measuring their results, it’s hard to conclude that it’s ill advised. In the last 40 years China has lifted nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty and has done so with out endless cycles of wars.
Meanwhile democratic nations in the West have seen more of their citizens slide into to poverty while killing millions of people in forever wars.
Again, I don’t agree with a lot of the CCP policies. That being said, I do think there are some exaggerations when it comes to the Uyghur people, though based on their own information I would say there is a pattern of ethnic prejudice
That being said, even if we use the most inflammatory information from western media and utilize the high estimate of 1.8 million ethnic minorities being put into reeducation camps. That’s less than 1/6th of the Uyghur population in China. Less than the 2 million people currently incarcerated in the US, of those whom nearly 40% are from an ethnic minority who only make up around 10% of the total population.
This is not my attempt of a whataboutism, just trying to illiustrate that unjustifiable national policy is not unique to socialist or democratic capitalist governments.
Yes, you can. Generally, any country where an ideology goes over individuals’ well-being tends to do this shit. China does, USA does as well. Not terribly surprising.
1/6 on camps is a LOT. It does fulfill the definition of genocide.
What makes you think that USA is relevant here? I am not from USA. USA is not a part of China, nor the other way around.
Show me a democratic country where this happens. You’re giving me China and USA. And there’s also the Russia. But is there actually a democratic country where people are handled they way countries such as USA and China do?
My point was that any specific economic policy or government style does not necessarily dictate the outcomes of the people it is in charge of. If this is similar to your belief, then I would question why you elected to make a statement that seemed to limit itself to a binary of fascist/“tankies”.
Again, that is using the most hyperbolic estimate. Also, I do not think temporarily holding a percent of an ethnicity in an internment camp is enough to call something a genocide. It’s definitely not great, and is systemic ethnic prejudice, but I don’t know if that would qualify as a genocide.
The US put 80% of Japanese Americans in interment camps during ww2 and I’ve never heard that referenced as a genocide.
I think I explained in the last paragraph of my original argument that it was to provide relevant comparison of similar examples that were not fascist nor “tankies”.
In your claim you said that you shouldn’t be a tankie because it led to bad/evil results. Would you also claim you shouldn’t be a liberal democracy because it leads to bad/evil results?
First of all…how is the US not a democratic country? It may not be a great one, but it still has free and fair elections. If the US is not a liberal democracy… What is it?
Secondly, there have been plenty examples of democratic countries having unjustifiable foreign and domestic policies.
Just off the top of my head Canada has a brutal history of suppressing their native inhabitants that endures to the modern age. Both france and the UK also had interment camps during ww2. The UK committed a genocidal famine against ireland and Bengal as a democratic nation. Most of the worst aspects of colonialism were conducted after European powers transitioned out of absolute monarchies into democracies. South Africa and Israel both conducted an apartheid state in modern times, one going further into a genocide of Palestinians.
And more than likely the nation you currently live in has materially or militarily aided the US in one of their unjustifiable wars in the middle East.
Ok, you’re giving me the US, Canada, the UK and France, but can you give me one REALLY democratic country??? /s
His actual response was just as bad
So your honor, my defense is an appeal to ignorance with a healthy side of “Nu-uh”.
Also, the US is totally not a democratic government, but Israel…
Because that is the subject we are talking about. We are talking about to what extent tankies are similar to fascists.
Temporarily, not. But anything that forces people to have to lose their national or thnic identity is genocide. We are not talking about any temporary internment camps here. (I’m not sure if temporary internment camps based on ethnicity have ever even existed…)
If they do not support using a country’s military against its own population nor are fascists, how are they relevant to this discussion that is intentionally limited to those two groups?
Uh… Read the news maybe? WTF kind of question is this? How is it a democratic country?
No idea of what’s been going on in Canada. POW camps don’t really count. Nor any camps where the goal is not the removal of an ethnicity or nationality from from a region.
The question about Israel’s democracy is an interesting one that I need to ponded more!
And my rebuttal proves that those qualities are not really unique to fascism nor “tankies” and are therefore redundant. You could have just as easily said governments do governmental things and would have made just as valid as a point.
And what proof is there that they are loosing their ethnic or national identity?
Secondly even the most inflammatory citations about the interment camps do not claim they are indefinite, mostly claiming that they are held for 10 months to two years.
Lastly, interning Japanese Americans during ww2 is an example of temporary internment camps based on ethnicity.
I provided several examples of democratic nations using their military against their own citizens. I have also already explained the reason it was relevant was because it disproves your claim.
Lol, do you know how a democratic nation is defined? Any country that derives it’s authority through elected representatives is a democratic nation. Just because those democratically elected officials are conducting themselves in a way that you or I do not agree with does not mean it’s not a democracy.
Democracy does not mean “only does good” it’s an organizational hierarchy that reflects the political majority.
Ahh, so ignorance is your defense…great.
Wut? You do know that one of the main reasons for Nazi concentration camps were for pows…
Is your claim that democratic countries are morally just in any action so long as they aren’t utilized solely for ethnic cleansing? Also… That would preclude the Uyghur internment camps as they are not being removed from China or Xijiang.
Do you really want to defend holding any percentage of people in an internment camp based on their ethnicity? And this applies to USA too. Holding anyone on an internment camp is bad enough, but because of ethnicity?! That’s not only racism, that’s fast track to genocide if it’s not already happening
Did I say I was defending that… Or did I just say it wasn’t considered a genocide? Pretty sure I started the argument by saying i didn’t agree with all CCP policy, and that the treatment of the Uyghur people would be systemic ethnic prejudice, which is self evidently bad.
Again, my point isn’t to nullify all criticism, just to point out that there seems to be a double standard when people speak about the same crimes carried by both democratic and socialist governments.
If part of (be it sixth or less) a cultural minority is put into internment camps, such a big portion of one ethnicity to be criminals in any common means is so unlikely it’s clearly a state approved genocide. You denying it to be one is intentionally downplaying to make the issue seem less important and direct the discussion towards something else. I do not care what is the government structure or whatever it prefers to be called if they’re putting minorities into camps. There’s nothing to be defended in that, be it USA, China, or whoever.
By what definition? Labeling all discrimination towards ethnic minorities as bad is something I would readily agree with. However, labeling all types of discrimination as genocide diminishes the definition of genocide and is lessens the actual genocides that have actually occured.
Definitionally genocide requires the intent to partially or fully physically destroy a cultural, ethnic, racial, or religious group. According to the UN internment camps are not inherently genocidal, but can often be a precursor to genocidal actions.
Or, I’m just trying to be accurate. I’m also pointing out that there are inconsistencies in the way people lable genocide when it comes to geopolitics.
As far as redirections… I don’t really know what you are implying, I haven’t changed my position on the subject, or attempted to bring in another topic the entire argument.
Man it’s so cool that red scare propaganda in the current age has a kind of SCP collaborative fiction vibe to it, where you can just Say Shit and riff on it to adjust reality to “your” (the state department’s) specifications.
The vast majority of muslim nations on earth got together to send delegates to investigate in person and they declared the accusations to be baseless.
My experiences with Uyghurs differ from yours. I was backpacking in Kazakstan and China and the repression was easy to notice with bare eyes. The Uyghurs wouldn’t be that scared of a 7-year-old Han-girl if there was no repression.
How was your visit to East Türkestan?
Oh, and Uyghurs are not Arabs, BTW! They are a Turkic nation.
Did you try talking to anyone? Its difficult because google translate doesn’t do Uhygur speech-to-text, but does translate Uhygur as Kazakh kind of.
That’s not to say there’s not serious issues, but it seemed plainly obvious to my bare eyes that the bulk of the claims of genocide are outright fabrications.
Some knew some English, partially I used the rudimentary Turkish I know, partially I used a Mandarin to English translator tool. Mostly I ended up being hosted by people who knew some English.
It ended up being a mix of Turkish, Chinese and English in the end.
Cool story bro.
Oh, and not all Muslims are Arabs, BTW!
Listen, FUCK the IAEA you could see those Iraqi chemical weapons factories with your bare eyes
Where did I get this red fish from?? Got an answer for that??
Hehe, and how many were actually found after Iraq had been succesfully invaded? Correct.
my point was calling you stupid and you agreed with me
Your experiences are worthless, try shutting the fuck up and listening
Well, your source is shit.
And so is the video linked. You can also use your own logic to notice its fallacies. You don’t get just anyone invited to a soccer match. It’s an important situation for propaganda, so you only allow people there who know what truth to say if anyone asks. And what kind of face to show. Ones that know what will happen to them and their relatives if they fall off the line.
I don’t know why you believe the “dude trust me” guy on the video. Nor why I should trust you, dude.
State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China | Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy. (2021)
The World Bank sent a team to investigate in 2019 and found that, “The review did not substantiate the allegations.” (See: World Bank Statement on Review of Project in Xinjiang, China)
Over 50+ UN member states (mostly Muslim-majority nations) signed a letter (A/HRC/41/G/17) to the UN Human Rights Commission approving of the de-radicalization efforts in Xinjiang.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the second largest organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states spread over four continents. The OIC released Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the non-OIC Member States in 2019 which:
Books, Articles, or Essays:
This is like red scare orientalist bingo. You have
-Public events are actually a propagands show for whitey
-Showing face
-Everyone there is only pretending to be happy because Something Bad will happen to their families (how many generations?) if they don’t.
At what point does believing all of these conventient copes to get around having to engage with the concept of an actually popular government start to take on the qualities of a cult’s belief structure?
Man i fucking hate The Interview
Yes, because China is well known to assasinate diplomats and family members of political opponents in dozens of countries around the world…
Please link some reference to this.
You were the implying that bad things would happen to the diplomatic observers from the Arab League if they didn’t parrot the required Chinese propaganda.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that.
But yeah, I would imagine that their countries were pressured into this by some kind of a trade deal. Just like a Christian country can help undermine another Christian country for personal profit, a Muslim country can help undermine another Muslim country for personal profit.
I didn’t post a link to any videos dumbass, my source is the verifiable fact that the majority of muslim nations on earth investigated in person and are calling bullshit on us. They have far more credibility than the US and our lackeys and our media, there is no actual evidence to contradict their findings, it’s the same sort of atrocity propaganda we used to justify invading Iraq & Afghanistan.
US is a shithole country. I wouldn’t go there if they paid me to. I do not care of what US is or is not. For your US-centric, well, you: USA and China are two wholly separate countries. US doing something does not mean that China is automatically good/bad as a result of whatever dumb thing the US government decides to do.
And “we” did not justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan. The rally against the war in Iraq was probably the largest rally there has ever been in Finland, for crying out loud!
Finland? Lol fuck off, your protests are worthless and your government is as much a US lackey as the rest of Europe has been for most of a century now. Your info on China is overwhelmingly US sponsored propaganda, your government and media are owned by the same billionaires as the rest of the western world.
It’s hard to see tankies ever have that good goal. They really really defend the oppression they achieve
I believe at the point they have already become tankies, no good goal exists anymore. They only seem to work to defend what they have already achieved. And that is oppression.
I’m not sure socialism or communism can ever be made to work, but at least Marx and Lenin made it much more difficult to ever get there by demandinfmg we do the opposite of the goals of communism in order to get communism. People who are okay with cleansings and repression will cleanse and repress.
You don’t really go through the chore of reading Capital without really wanting to change the society for better. And because Marx, the death of communism, preferred violence and is convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid), those who read the book until the end, end up forfeiting all good goals and will go for repression.
Tankies are people who used to want good things and fairness. And then they converted from that into tankies.
A strong leader will always lead you into a Russia. Into a quagmire.
I’m sorry, what? Have you ever actually tried to read Capital? Most of Marx’s works are dense and academic, drawing intellectual traditions that are often unfamiliar to modern readers (classical economics, Hegel, etc). Marx’s way of argumentation isn’t really geared toward the lowest common denominator.
It’s kinda funny how you can’t even keep your criticism straight through a single comment. In one sentence, reading Marx is a “chore” that nobody would want to slog through, in the very next one, Marx is so persuasive, his honeyed words easily sway the minds of any who stumble across them, like the Sirens calling ships to their rocks.
As for “no good goal exists anymore” or “it’s hard to see what good goal tankies ever had” maybe we just like it when this sort of thing happens:
The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.
When you figure out a better way to do that, get back to me.
Here goes:
A similar jump from around 1949 to 1980. In China it seems to have begun around 1930, with WWII causing a dent. In Finland the same had begun around 1880’s. But the development between 1949 and 1980 is very similar, only: without concentration camps! (…since 1918.)
Wrong as shit, how are you so ignorant about your own history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Karelian_concentration_camps
That’s still not as fast of a development, and the conditions aren’t really comparable. China used to be among the poorest countries in the world.
And while their government has not always been ideal, it was undoubtably the best option on the table historically. The corrupt Nationalists didn’t do shit for the people (and pocketed foreign aid). Before that, with no central authority, was the warlord period. Before that was the backwards Qing dynasty. In all the thousands of years of Chinese history, nobody really did anything for the rural people until the communists.
This is nonsense, the only part you got correct is that those who read through Capital generally have an interest in a better world. Neither Marx nor Lenin advocated “doing the opposite” to get to communism, both argued for the establishment of a worker state to gradually collectivize all of the means of production and distribution. Historically, this method has been enormously beneficial for the working classes, while breing quite scary for landlords, capitalists, slavers, and fascists.
I’m also not at all understanding what you mean by Marx being “convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid).” What would an intelligent person, by your estimation, take fault with in Marx?
Capital rests on the argument ~that the fact qualitatively different (in terms of use values) commodities are exchanged for each other in different quantities requires a quality they share in common which only differs in quantity from one commodity to the next, and Marx posits that the only quality this could be is being products of labor. Yet this is very clearly not something that all commodities have in common, and that a thing’s status as a commodity and its ability to be exchanged for other commodities has nothing to do with its being a product of labor. The only way Marx’s argument can be accepted is if you start with the presupposition that commodities are valued by the labor required to produce them.
How this happens that commodities are exchanged at their “value” is a complete mystery by the way, since Marx says it has nothing to do with the conscious considerations of either the buyer or the seller.
This is not clear at all. Elaborate, please.
Why not? Are you saying that the utility of a commodity to someone does not change whether or not it was made with labor? This doesn’t really matter, though, the point of the Law of Value is that commodities are socially produced, and socially distributed, which normalizes their price around their values. Arguments like the “mud pie” don’t apply, because mud pies are neither useful nor difficult to make.
Incorrect, the exchange-value that price fluctuates around is representative of the value in a commodity. Another way to look at it is that the value of a commodity is the sum of its inputs, which can be reduced to labor and natural resources.
Marx is correct, though this is no mystery. Commodities are social products, and are socially exchanged. What’s universal to goods bought and sold is that they require natural resources and human labor to create them, thus capitalism in being a social process acts as a price-finder for commodities, all based on inputs and outputs.
All you need for commodity exchange is for people to accept something is yours and be willing to exchange something they own which you desire in return for it. That thing being a product of labor is not necessary. You can own land based on agreement without taking any trouble to cultivate or defend it, and exchange it for other things based on agreement. You can exchange naturally occurring things without rendering them ~crystallizations of social labor.
Marx’s argument is invalid in another way because there are so many qualities commodities share besides being products of labor.
Now, I know that the law of value is supposed to come specifically with highly developed industrial society with large scale social production which makes the abstract real etc etc however the issue is that this then messes with Marx’s argument I went over in the prev comment where he tries to prove the LTV by going over the concept of commodities/commodity exchange as such without regard for this.
The argument only doesn’t apply for the first reason. There’s no necessity even for Marx that commodities be arbitrarily “difficult” to produce.
How is this a response to what I said?
This is both incorrect (for Marx, value is entirely determined by socially necessary labor time) and doesn’t mean anything (this is like multiplying 3 apples by 7 pears, what does it mean that the value of a commodity can be reduced to labor and natural resources?; with value being determined by labor time you can reduce things to a certain quantity, but then you just add on a qualitatively different thing and you return to the original problem of needing a third equivalent, or a value to unite the components of value).
You forgot to explain how this actually occurs. You just say that capitalism does it.
You should tell Marx this since expressly says that he thinks the only universal is labor. You both happen to be wrong, though.
Yes? Marx talks about natural resources. Land is covered more in volume 3, but nevertheless this is fully accounted for. Natural resources take extraction to refine and produce, and the concept of owning land requires a body to uphold that, the state, and the value of land itself is tied to how productive it can make you. All value comes from labor and natural resources, this is straight from Capital.
This does not make his argument invalid, though. What’s common is that the makeup of commodities can be reduced entirely to the labor and raw materials that went into them.
No, you never disproved anything.
There is, though. A commodity’s value isn’t dependent on how much labor went into that individual commodity, but that commodity as a social product, ie on average. If someone spends 10 hours on a mud pie that takes 2 seconds to create on average, it’ll be just as close to worthless as the rest. Further, labor that is more skilled (harder to socially reproduce) or more compressed than the social average does produce more value. Value is a social characteristic, not an individual one.
Because you’re confusing the fact that prices reflect value with the idea that people independently think of that before purchasing.
You’re mixing up Exchange-Value with Use-Value. All use-value comes from labor and natural resources, but natural resources themselves can be reduced to the labor required to gather them and refine them, etc. All socially necessary labor time means is that it takes society on average a certain amount of labor to create something, and natural resources can be themselves reduced to labor. 3 apples and 7 pears both may take the same amount of labor on average to create them, and thus their prices naturally gravitate near the same value.
Through the market. Buying and selling of goods, competition, all of this from the perspective of the capitalist confronts them as input costs and profits. Competition forces prices towards a floor, lack of competition brings in new competitors which then brings the price back to being roughly as profitable as the rest. Capital essentially functions as a control system.
You should actually read Capital, because Marx quite literally states this.
Marx isn’t wrong, and neither am I, it seems you genuinely haven’t opened Capital because this is in the first few pages.
The dictatorship of the proletariat was a horribly bad idea. It’s a dictatorship. And brings the consequences of a dictatorship with it. I would dare to blame Lenin and also Marx for that crap.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a democratic state for the proletariat, and dictatorship against capitalists, fascists, landlords, and slavers. It’s the socialist equivalent to liberal democracy, which de facto is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
All states are class dictatorships, this means democracy for the ruling class and its absolute rule over the rest.
Also, not sure why you brought up Capital if you’re talking about the DotP, that’s not really in Capital. Capital is a critique of bourgeois Political Economy.
i recommend this recent video by Eric Hovagim to learn more about the Uyghur topic (but i guess you’ll probably skip it based on its title?)
Who has time for videos? Reading is much faster.
(I generally skip all video links, nothing personal)
Here and here are two texts on the subject which cover some of the same things as that video (albeit not from a first-hand person-from-the-US-traveling-in-Xinjiang perspective like the video does).
I did watch the first three minutes. Everything he shows is true, everything he explains as interpretation is just full of shit.
“Why?”
Well, for the same reason Soviet Union was doing the same to its colonies. Or why France was doing the same to its.
Blargh, the guy’s eaten the hook with bait and floater.
If you think China colonized Xinjiang, well… yeah, they did. But that was 22 centuries ago, a millennium before the [people now known as] Uyghurs had even arrived there. The demographics and ruling empires unsurprisingly changed a few times in the ensuing millennia, but since the Qing dynasty committed the Dzungar genocide there (from 1755–1758, with help of several peoples including Han and Uyghur) it has mostly remained a part of China.
The ancient history is interesting, but more recent events (eg Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups the US has been funding there) are more relevant to the present situation.
What specifically is he full of shit about? I recommend watching more than three minutes of it.
Ok, can you tell the reason why? What is the thing that China wants that can only be achieved by mass murder and genocide of its working population?
I don’t think there’s anything that can only be achieved by that.
But generally in China the CCP is who decides about everything that happens in the country. Being religious is one of the things that are against the official template of how a person should be. Any religion is a problem, but a nation as religious as Uyghurs is considered a problem.
And of course: Just look at the clocks. Any clock in the Uyghur areas is showing the local time, not Beijing time. Only clocks at railway stations, police stations and such show the Beijing time. The people there are far too independent for Beijing’s liking. Or yours.
The CPC has 100 million members, it’s their job to represent the people. This is like saying “the government decides what happens”
I spent 3 months in Xinjiang, I didn’t notice this, but can’t remember the last time I looked at a clock that wasn’t on a phone.
You’re recycling anti-soviet propaganda. China isn’t atheist. For China, they officially support religion, but in practice recognize religious organizations as potential problems due to history, from the boxer rebellion to Fulong gong to ETIM terrorist attacks. They reconcile this by providing funding and official support to religious institutions, but exert pressure (I’m unclear how exactly) to promote less radical factions and don’t provide as many special privileges in areas where there’s risks of extremism, for example there’s religious schools in Xi’an, but not Urumqi. Personally I think the situation with private schools and hukou is a mess that needs to be addressed in a way that doesn’t ration education by income and zip code, but as an outsider, I don’t have the nuanced understanding how to do this in a way that doesn’t impinge on the rights of minorities and helps to preserve their culture, but the Chinese I’ve asked about this seem less concerned about losing aspects of their own unique cultures than having a common language and understanding, which IMO is a god-awful take, discarding the work of millennia of human development.
How do you measure how religious a group of people are?
The Soviet Union had no colonies. This was always projection on the part of colonial and neocolonial countries for the USSR’s unwavering support for national liberation struggles, which earned them incredible amounts of sanctions.
Do you think the current colonies of the Russia somehow appeared out of thin air? All of the Russia’s current territory has been Soviet territory in the past. All of the Russia’s colonies were of course also Soviet colonies.
What are you referencing when you say current Russian colonies? Pretty much all Russian colonization happened in the 16th century in Siberia and central asia under imperial Russia. The only colonization other than that was in Alaska and in parts of northern California in the 18th century, while still under the imperial regime.
Precisely the colonies that were gradually colonized in the 16th to 20th century.
Just like French and British colonies are still colonies even if they were colonized centuries ago, Russian colonies are still colonies even if they were colonized centuries ago.
The eastern parts of the Russia only really ended up under Russian rule after the Transsiberian railway was built.
Those were colonized by Imperial Russia… You know the government that the Soviet union overthrew.
The difference being that the British and French governments were continuations of the same government that took those colonial holdings. Also the colonies taken in the 20th century now belong to the US.
I mean that’s just factually incorrect. The Imperial Russian expansion east started in the late 15th century and had colonies at the pacific by the mid 16th century, and had nearly a million exiles alone heading east by the mid 17th century.
The Trans-Siberian railway wasn’t completed until 1904, the same year of the Russo Japanese war where they had a battle over control of Manchuria with millions of combatants. Nothing you are claiming is historically correct in the slightest.
Modern Russia had no colonies to inherit, it has no colonies. The Soviet Union liberated the Tsar’s colonies and thus modern Russia had none to inherit.
They are sure trying to re colonize all the old soviet countries though. Give them credit for that at least!
Not really, there’s a major schism due to western plundering of the former Soviet countries and installation of compradors.
Or, in reality, russia is trying to re colonialize these countries. Frame it how you will
That was quite informative, thanks for sharing!
I skipped it based on your instance.
Seems like a stupid thing to do and an even stupider thing to voluntarily admit
Anti-intellectualism truly is on the rise.
The tankies have descended upon the thread I see.
Anti-intellectualism exists anywhere you’re peddling your authoritarian, genocide-denial sophistry, so kindly (or unkindly, I literally don’t give a fuck), fuck off.
Edit to anyone reading this thread: note that (especially in the case of Cowbee) not engaging is the only way to deal with tankies, regardless of how much engagement bait they throw in their comments!
They’re self-admittedly only here to propagandize/whitewash their authoritarian views in the first place, their arguments are based on a completely different set of facts from the reality that you live in, and no matter how reasonable they make themselves sound, they aren’t here to argue in good faith. YOU WILL NOT WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH THEM HERE BECAUSE THEY AREN’T ACTUALLY ENGAGING WITH YOUR POINTS - YOU WILL ONLY MAKE THEIR CAREFULLY SANITIZED POSITIONS SEEM MORE REASONABLE TO OTHERS READING THE THREAD.
So don’t give them the satisfaction.
“Plugging your ears and running away is the only way to deal with people who have unanswerable critiques of my way of thinking. For your own safety, you must terminate critical thought immediately.”
Dude you would have to waterboard me for six business days to get me to admit to that kind of ideological weakness
Tankie chuds fuck off!
Tankie chuds fuck off!
What a weird statement. I replied to you saying you reflexively ignored information purely because the person posting it has a Lemmy.ml account, this is just blatant anti intellectualism and forcing yourself into an echo chamber. Not sure what you mean by “authoritarian, genocide-denial sophistry” either.
Edit for your edit:
This is just mental gymnastics to justify your own echo-chamber.
wHaT a WeIrD sTaTeMeNt
It’s certainly easier to levy a claim against someone than actually back up that claim, I suppose.
Tankie chuds fuck off!