On 2021-01-16 16:53, Joseph Rabie wrote:
Le 16 janv. 2021 à 11:24, Dmytri Kleiner <[email protected]> a
écrit :
Judging China is not a part of his strategy, and should not be,
because it's a bad strategy. We should trust the Chinese workers to
resolve their contradictions, and focus on our own rather than
allowing our elite to propagandize into thinking they are our enemies.
My layman's understanding of Communism is that one of its essential
markers is the collective ownership of the means of production.
China's reversion to a market economy suggests that Communism in that
country has for all intents and purposes failed.
Instead of judging china according your layman's understanding of
doctrine, you should recognize the outcomes, especially those of human
development and popular approval of government policies, and figure out
how you can achieve these in your own country.
It's very unlikely a doctrinaire analysis will help, and any attempt to
do so becomes very technical and context specific very quickly, so it's
best to forget this mirage.
You can't do "a China" in your country. You can, however, work to
improve the conditions of people in your country, while working against
the aggression of your country abroad.
For those (as myself) who consider Capitalism a dead end, trying to
understand why Communism could not perdure in a country such as China
(or the USSR, or the Eastern Bloc) is of interest.
Communism is an ends, not a means, it must be achieved, and it can not
be "tried" or just "done." This is the first thing to understand, and
rest assured the Chinese workers do understand this. China has a
Communist party, but it does not "have Communism" and can not.
We do not move toward such ends by implementing some sort of
plug-and-play doctrine that checks a list of idealist checkboxes.
Communism can not be installed and fix everything like a software
upgrade.
We move forward by way of a mobilized and militant working class
identifying it's principle contradictions and using it's class power to
overcome them, and iteratively moving on to the next contradiction.
This is a dialogical process, I've made many citations towards work that
has elaborated on this, most accessible and applicable in a western
context is Freire and McAlevey, the process is broadly called
dialectical materialism, which is a fancy way of saying "problems and
loops."
If you want to understand problems and loops from the Chinese
perspective, Mao's On Practice and On Contradiction are key, if you
prefer something that wont trigger the PTSD all westerns have from
decades of propagandist brainwashing, then you can find a lot of the key
concepts in business management literature, old-school like Eliyahu
Goldratt "The Goal", which explains the "Theory of Constraints" from a
business point view, but of course is bounded by the same logic of Mao's
On Contradiction, and W. Edwards Deming's "The New Economics" which
explains iterative cycles and statistical management, along the lines of
Mao's On Practice. If you want something more tech-conference hipster,
then these same ideas, completely devoid of any political content, can
be found in the agile and design literature of people like Jeff Gothelf.
--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
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