it’s fucking wild to see people in the imperial core (as The Lorax here has in their bio) criticize China for not standing up enough against the empire. that’s literally our job in the imperial core!
Reminds me of people who (from outside “the left”) criticize it as squashing individual expression and being cult-like. And then one of the first things I see about any “left” space or org is that there’s intense disagreement, if not sectarian splits. Not to say “the left” is unusual in this way. Disagreements and sometimes splits can happen anywhere, regardless of ideology. But it’s also not unusually agreeable to each other.
The unifying ML-style position around China, as far as I can tell, goes something like: imperialism is the primary contradiction, not a lack of local communes, and China is heading up an alternative anti-imperialist world order, while also doing an overall good job as a socialist transition state that is by its people and looks after its people.
This doesn’t mean China can do no wrong. But much of the time, outside criticisms levied at China are poorly constructed and come from a place of alignment with western imperialist interests, rather than alignment with global liberation. Or they come from a place of essentially wishful thinking, wanting China to be the liberation world police that the US never was but pretended to be, without considering the logistics of what that would mean for China’s position in the world, what kind of sacrifice it would require from its people, and the risk it would involve in dealing with an increasingly mask off rabid western empire that still has nukes. None of it’s remotely fair and hasn’t been since before the inception of the Communist Party of China, when it was suffering under feudal conditions. It still has to be worked through logistically, with planning. If people can offer criticisms of China that allege to logistical and planning mistakes that could be course-corrected, that would, I think, be a lot more substantive as criticism than the majority. The problem with ideological criticisms alone is that they have a tendency to assume that a seemingly subpar or undesirable decision is being made due to a lack of ideological interest in something better. Rather than a decision being made due to a belief that the conditions are not yet right for one approach or another, or due to a logistical mistake in analysis. Discerning that difference properly is critical. If we were to judge AES states in the purely ideological way at all times, they would always be failures because they are not instantly going for global communism and sacrificing everything for it. Which leads to ultra left opining about someone else not doing a thing we want, without effecting the desired change.
Are you going to write a novel about how America pulled itself up by its bootstraps in its revolution against Britain next?
Excuse me?
The US built its state through genocide and slavery, and split from Britain in order to cement its independent interests in that realm.
What strange view do you have of China that you think talking about the processes of a socialist state in international politics is remotely the same as talking about the birth of a settler nation (the US) that has been terrorizing and exploiting the world since it became globally powerful? What forum did you think you posted on?
Just look at the post history, lol. Most of what you said went over their head already.
Hmm, I looked. Far as I can tell, their thing is that Russia and China are failing a moral test on Palestine and so are traitors as a whole. If so, I can certainly understand their frustration, but the criticism needs to have more depth than “they [allegedly] could be doing x and they aren’t”.
One of the reasons I try not to say much on China in detail is because I don’t actually know all that much about how it is in the details and so trying to judge properly what it could or couldn’t be doing logistically in this moment would be a wild guess at best. For all I know, there are experienced members of the CPC who think China should be doing more on the Palestine issue and are trying to make it happen. But I don’t know and I never see people citing stuff like that. Instead, people tend to talk about morality in isolation from conditions and it comes across as something like “the foreigner has to be one of perfect victim, perfect savior, or member of the villain squad, there is no inbetween.” I don’t think China is perfect (nor do I think anyone or entity is) and I wish that people who criticized them would go beyond these categories.
China had a big mouth for 2 years and now endorses the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians and supports Israeli colonization of Gaza.
They specifically abstained and did not endorse it in any way
