bro kind of forgot to mention that you also have to develop the productive forces, production is the chief determinant force of development of society.
For sure, I notice that a lot of people in the west don’t actually understand the fundamentals of what an economy are. It’s not GDP, or stock markets, money supply, or all the other junk people tend to talk about. What actually matters is resource and labour allocation. You have a certain number of people living in the country, and these people have access to the resources that are available to them. The job of the economy is to manage allocation of labour to transforms the available resources into things people need to live. If the economy isn’t allocating labour in a way that results in people having their needs met, then you start having problems.
Feels like a bit of a bad faith critique, given that this is an extremely short clip with no context.
What he is saying is not wrong, but i do think it’s the wrong answer to the question he was asked.
Not mentioning production on a question about transition to socialism is just a plain bad answer.
It’s not clear to me from the clip that he was asked any question at all. The question he states at the beginning could plausibly be purely rhetorical.
That said, it would not be surprising if he were to stress the struggle against counterrevolution but had little to say about the development of productive forces. Sison is a Maoist, and Mao and his intellectual descendants are much more voluntarists than they are stagists.
Remember the good old days, when the Anglosphere had the productive forces, and all we needed to do was seize them?
Not to dox myself, but I’m less than a century old. I don’t know what it is like to live through those times.
I feel like his answer was shaped by the context of the conversation but yeah I have also come to expect people to not respect the need to bolster industrial and technological capabilites. I don’t know anything about Sison so not talking him specifically.
This is my main problem with global south leftists and self-proclaimed communists, production is largely ignored. The right wing has managed to use this against the left, it is a common talking point throughout latin america that the “right is production and left is parasitism” and rarely does the left confront this narrative.
That’s a good point, do you know how one might phrase or introduce it? I feel like just using the word ‘economy’ makes people think of something nebulous (it’s the invisible hand of the free market, don’t ya know? how does it work? in mYsTeRiOuS wAyS) and the vocabulary I’d use to try to explain or express what the productive forces are also kinda seems out of place.
Almost like he founded a dead end Maoist movement whose greatest accomplishment was banditry in the mountains or something.
The NPA didn’t succeed in the revolution, but they still provide a lot of support to rural population, in healthcare notably. We have to give them that.
I’ve heard a lot of negative things from communist friends in the Philippines about them, though they do provide support to rural populations, they’re no Shining Path.
