this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

As more of a maoist i would not say China today is socialist with those billionaires owning stakes in those chinese companies and influencing the state to have this high income inequality there now and not offering everybody a job as they used to under mao etc. . Automation has been going on since the 19th century and has not overthrown capitalism and unemployment is not any worse than it was during the great depression. Things are not any more toxic and untenable than during the gilded age in america. One big change now is that there are forums like reddit and lemmy were people get access to statistics like life expectancy which was not the case in the gilded age were the 99% only would read the biggest newspapers which were controlled by the top 1%.

[–] Eldritch 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As more of a maoist i would not say China today is socialist with those billionaires owning stakes in those chinese companies and influencing the state to have this high income inequality there now and not offering everybody a job as they used to under mao etc.

I agree. I literally called them out to you as degenerating into state capitalism. All authoritarian governmental structures tend to degenerate along similar lines. With all gains pooling at the top never reaching the people that created them. I will acknowledge that I believe that Lenin and Mao had good intention. The problem is the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They failed to understand and account for very basic behaviors of human nature. For all the things that capitalism gets wrong at least they not only understand it but have actually embraced it. Giving up all pretense. That's the real danger of ml governments as opposed to capitalists. Capitalists are raw and naked about their ambition. Which makes it a little easier to recognize their deficiencies and occasionally counteract them. Whereas ml lie to the face of their people that everything they do is in the name of the people.

Unemployment as we measure is a poor measure of anything. And not something to cite. Calling enequality similar to the Gilded Age as not untenable is extremely ignorant. It's after all was one of the driving factors behind The surge of socialism in the United States. Right now the truth is many people are over-employed and still not making enough to afford the basics our societies should be providing. China like all of them is dangling untenably over a precipice. There are plenty in rural areas that the central government has done very little for overall. And a large number of young people growing disillusioned and dissatisfied with the unanswerable government they are being saddled with. All it's going to take is another unplanned hiccup or two. Another couple pandemics. And shit will likely hit the fan all over.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It seems to me that you think that authoritarian goverments on avarage have a higher gini(income inequality) than democratic goverments and i dont think there is a correlation at all about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#/media/File:Economist_Intelligence_Unit_Democracy_Index_2023.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Yes Europe is democratic and has a low gini but then there is South america and the US and south africa that are democratic and have the highest ginis in the world.

[–] Eldritch 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Just to remind you. Left libertarian/anarco communist here. If I defined everything as America and those in its influence define it you would be correct. But America is at best a flawed democracy and at worst something far far worse. Our Behavior internationally has been often imperialist and brutal definitely not democratic.

Post World War II our knee jerk crackdowns on anything much to the left of fascism screams that much. And I think in the long term actually did more to hurt everyone including the United states. It gave so many people much more fuel than they would have had. Simply persisting out of spite to the United states. A lot of the ML countries would have had the wheels fall off sooner if they hadn't been isolated. Even despite Mao ham-fistedly trying his hardest to destroy everything with his incompetence from the start

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago