cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3023016
Took part in an RGS and the head people all push that Maoism is scientifically the best form of Communism. Can anyone explain this view? Also, the group seems to want everyone to hold this view. Isn’t splitting into sub-ideologies hurting the potential for a larger movement?
-a confused newbie.
The fruit represent the next stage of future society, gathering them would be to enjoy the following stages of socialism after the primary one; in China’s case the current moderately prosperous and by 2049 the modern socialist society. The fable is a little simplistic, China had to obtain a certain level of prosperity using Maoist methods (which it did) to make Opening Up possible without subjecting China to slavery at the hands of the Western imperialists, but without Opening Up, China would not have reached anywhere near its current material conditions and geopolitical leverage, and possibly would not have survived the 1989-1991 wave of counterrevolutions. In this little story I therefore maintain that in dealing with imperialists, one must always reach for the nuts
Thanks, I like this explanation a lot.
I agree that this helped China a lot but IMO modern Chinese working life is just as bad as in America. That is not to say that life has not been improved at an insane rate. I hope the low to middle class worker can be less of a slave soon. A lot of my family has zero retirement plan other than betting on government insurance which barely pays half of what one needs to live.
I’m not sure if one should compare Chinese and US working life by focusing on the shop floor. Half of the US lives in luxury and the other half is in misery. For whom there is no retirement plan other than death. And that’s not counting the billions of people outside the US who have to live in even worse misery to prop up the lifestyles of the wealthiest USians. Working life in the US cannot be understood in isolation from what the US is.
Then there is the fact that the US is crumbling. It’s trains and underground and falling apart. It’s workers have to commute for hours a day in a single car that they work to keep running. There might be parts of China that are not as futuristic and well maintained as it’s high speed rail network but the fact that it’s trying to improve infrastructure means people in China have the opportunity for something that most USians and it’s oppressed billions will never have: hope.
Not to mention that the US way of life has depended on genocide and brutality for 400 years. That’s where the wealth in the US comes from; and still it’s working class lives in terrible, precarious conditions. Whatever working conditions are like in China, it’s an improvement on being subjugated by imperialists and on committing genocide and becoming an imperialist itself to improve conditions more rapidly.
Finally, the radical increase in living standards in China is still increasing. The US hit it’s peak decades ago and is now declining. With the transformation of quantity into quality, we can expect conditions in the US to disintegrate in leaps while those in China improve in leaps. In another 10–20 years it won’t even be close.
