News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Neither Russia nor China are communist anymore. Russia is run by corrupt capitalists and has been since the 1980s, and the only thing Communist about China is the name of the totalitarian party that runs its government, which consists of a mix of state-funded and private capitalist enterprise.
China is very much a socialist economy
Really? The workers control the means of production? From here, it looks like state capitalism augmented by inconsistently regulated private enterprise (which sometimes leads to the entrepreneurs disappearing when they've neglected to grease the correct set of Party palms).
More than 60% of the Chinese economy is state owned and controlled, and as of I think a year ago they democratized Chinese company structures by mandating assemblies of employee representatives. The state having majority control and direction of the Chinese economy and market is the primary complaint of western trade partners, I don't know why people are always surprised by this.
I get that people really do not like the authoritarian aspects of the Chinese government, but state-controlled economies are pretty much the exact intent behind 'worker-controlled means of production' in marxism.
Socialism isn't just when the government does things. In between workers and the state needs to be a free and functioning democracy.
Yes, that famous part of Das Capital where marx coins the term "democracy of the proletariat"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat
Yup.
You act like that's different than a democracy, please define why.
A 'dictatorship of the proletariat' has elements of democracy, but it is explicitly not the same as a liberal democracy (nor is it really the same as a straight-out dictatorship). It's possible that some people prefer the Trotsky version of socialist states (one where multiple socialist parties might compete for power), but the ML single-party version is still very much within marxist theory.
The Chinese political system is democratic, just not in the same ways a western democracy might be. Western liberals seem to either not know (?) how the Chinese system works, or miss-understand what 'democracy' means as it pertains to Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Either way, @explodicle@sh.itjust.works seems to be operating under a liberal-democratic understanding of democracy, but that's really not a given in marxist theory.
Then: it's obviously not democratic, that's why they call it a dictatorship
Now: well it's just not democratic in a way you liberals would understand
There's a reason why Marx coined a term referencing 'dictatorship' that included elements like 'direct democracy'. He sought to exclude the capital class entirely from it, and so referred to it as dictatorship 'of the working class'. Marx specifically saw liberal democracy as one designed for the borurgeoisie, and so using that as a basis of comparison for a socialist project is counter-productive
When liberals accuse China of being a 'dictatorship', they're pointing to the parts of China's democracy that differ from western democracy that specifically have to do with the inclusion of the capital class. Even a single-party state can be of the working-class and have direct-democracy, as is China's.
You're free to disapprove of China's system of government (I have scruples about it myself), you simply can't reasonably argue they are a dictatorship by any modern standards(at least, in no other way than in Marx's own use of the term).
Far from 'approving' of their system of governance, though, their state-controlled economy is definitionally socialist.