Thanks for confirming

I say with more empathy than you can know that your perspective is entirely cope for being socially maladapted. You don’t know how intelligent most people are. You don’t know how much empathy they actually have. You’re just like a channer writing monologues online about how “normies” don’t have internal monologues [citation needed!] and therefore are “NPCs”. Society has hurt you and you’ve grown estranged from it, and in bitter loneliness you tell yourself stories of their inferiority (which, not coincidentally, implies your superiority) in order to sooth yourself. But you aren’t superior and they are not the wretched creatures you have portrayed them as in their absence.

It seems to me unlikely that you will be able to outgrow this mindset without confronting it directly, which is why I am broaching the subject so directly. My access to a device to write these things is irregular, but I strongly encourage you to a) try talking to more people and b) actually read Mao.

…We must also arouse the political consciousness of the entire people so that they may willingly and gladly fight together with us for victory. We should fire the whole people with the conviction that China belongs not to the reactionaries but to the Chinese people. There is an ancient Chinese fable called “The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains.” It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, “How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains.” The Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them anyway?” Having refuted the Wise Old Man’s wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we too, will touch God’s heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these mountains be cleared away?"

https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm#foolish

Devil’s advocate for a sec… if elections can be “bought” because people are so apathetic or lazy that they need literally millions of dollars worth of advertising to convince them to vote, then maybe electoral democracy can’t work?

Dig in just a bit deeper here: These are people who live in New York, a state notorious for being unfailingly Democrat and also unfailingly conservative in its governance. The fact that some people have become disillusioned with elections that, their whole lives, have probably demonstrated very little change, is understandable and not a symptom of the average person somehow being simply inadequate for very basic tasks.

Maybe Mao was right about a cultural revolution

Mao was a radical democrat (lowercase d) and both the successes and failures of the Cultural Revolution are connected to that. Though there was direction from the top, ultimately the events that I assume you are referring to, like the Four Olds Campaign, were carried out on a grassroots basis by young activists, sometimes constructively and sometimes not. It was in many respects a battle of the progressive elements of society against the reactionary elements, one that the reactionary elements ultimately won by holding out until Their Guy took over the country, since the progressive or would-be-progressive forces were too disorganized in themselves to succeed at anything but being a force of chaos that gave reactionaries a solid causus belli for police crackdown.

At scale this was not at all Mao dictating his socialism to the common people and then beating it into them when they resisted (though some of his followers certainly did, and this mostly failed).

The Cultural Revolution is a very fraught topic, but you are doing Mao a disservice by essentially accusing him of “commandism”, an error that he was very much against.

Commandism is wrong in any type of work, because in overstepping the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of voluntary mass action it reflects the disease of impetuosity. Our comrades must not assume that everything they themselves understand is understood by the masses. Whether the masses understand it and are ready to take action can be discovered only by going into their midst and making investigations. If we do so, we can avoid commandism. Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness. Our comrades must not assume that the masses have no understanding of what they themselves do not yet understand. It often happens that the masses outstrip us and are eager to advance a step when our comrades are still tailing behind certain backward elements, for instead of acting as leaders of the masses such comrades reflect the views of these backward elements and, moreover, mistake them for those of the broad masses. In a word, every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people. Every comrade must be helped to understand that as long as we rely on the people, believe firmly in the inexhaustible creative power of the masses and hence trust and identify ourselves with them, no enemy can crush us while we can crush every enemy and overcome every difficulty.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm

You’ll probably find it about as fast as me, depending on how much wading you will tolerate. I swear this used to be more available, I saw the video of him saying it! Apparently the program he said it on was called CQC and is not airing anymore, but that article is understandably more concerned with his cartoonish racism and homophobia.

I think this is it? It’s not subtitled, though

I don’t think they were his chickens, so he might have been killing them.

Just to be clear, I’m not kidding. He was on TV at one point talking about how he and his friends all fucked hens because (according to him) that’s just what you do when you grow up on a farm. I wonder if he crippled his immune system with that shit.

Not true, Bolsonaro fucked chickens

You’re sidestepping most of what I said. If the ruling class is not the proletariat but in fact a smaller group that controls the MoP, and does commodity production to pursue maximized profits, paying the broader population wages, etc., then it’s still capitalism whether the nominal position of the MoP is the monopolistic control of private entities or of state entities, in the case of the state not being controlled by the people. It’s only a DotP if it’s actually a democratic state.

The key difference between AES and other states is the role of the goverment, AES are held accountable by the people not the capitalists. We could argue about the degree of consolidation of power, the efficiency of their tasks, and many other things, but calling them revisionists? That’s just silly.

If we took as granted the claim that they are truly democratic rather than bureaucratic or some other antidemocratic form of government, including ones with populist paint like the liberal democracies we are so familiar with. What evidence do you have that they are democratically controlled? High approval ratings don’t cut it, kings can also be popular. I look at Xi’s speeches and, contrary to what we like to get out of his claims about democracy, most of his speeches are notoriously filled with pablum and dogmatism (mostly “Deng was right” a thousand different ways), not at all the way that you address an engaged populace that you have the slightest degree of intellectual respect for, much less one that has been given an effective Marxist education. You can make a very good argument for Cuba being democratic by pointing to various types of civic engagement, but I’m not confident that you can make the same claim about China.

You can split hairs and say that it’s a bureaucratic state, but all you’d be doing is splitting hairs. It’s still fundamentally oriented around commodities being sold for profit, a common definition of capitalism.

Deng was definitely playing with fire, though as you suggest the PRC was much more in control of the burn than the other capitalist powers. Had I come into communism about 5-10 years earlier than I did my position would be much closer to yours. However, it seems to me the Xi administration has been doing a good job cutting the excesses and purging capitalist roaders. They have a lot more work to do, but they seem best equipped to fight the class struggle, both domestically and internationally, of any country.

I suppose then the question is if it’s just a very-disciplined capitalist power or a socialist one, because Xi is doing a great job of maintaining and developing the state, but I don’t think anything he is doing is incompatible with just being a responsible capitalist politician running a tight ship.

There’s should never be shame about ruthless criticism of all that exists.

Yeah, I just wanted to make it clear that it’s not a “the authoritarian mods are silencing me” issue and just that I don’t feel like arguing about this most of the time, though I decided to here.

The rightly-praised train system is not for-profit, but they make a killing on oil, for example.

I’m not an economist, I can’t really tell you why that’s what they do, but I’m pretty confident they do it.

That there would be some amount of revisionism is precisely my expectation of AES states. It’s not like I said they weren’t socialist – and from a practical standpoint we can say pretty confidently that they all are, most especially the DPRK and Cuba.

“Revisionist” is basically shorthand for “deviating in some way from fundamental Marxist principles” which is a subset of “erroneous from a Marxist perspective”.

“No true scotsman” isn’t just a vibe, it’s a specific type of fallacy. If I say that “No X is Y” and you say “I know John, he’s an X and he is Y” and I reply "He’s not really X then, because no true X is Y," I am performing the fallacy in its most archetypal form. Basically, it is asserting that no member of a group has some (usually negative) trait and, when confronted with a counterexample, saying that the presence of the trait in that example means the example wasn’t really a member of the group.

Dumb college kids do indeed do “no true scotsman” all the time when reactionaries say “reds killed trillions” and they say “but that wasn’t real communism, man” to preserve their ignorant idealization without really understanding either Marxist theory or the actual evidence around AES history.

I don’t have anything that I’m trying to disavow, and in fact am making claims of various kinds against these states (though I might have been unfair to Cuba, admittedly) without any interest in protecting some group of “true scotsman”.

It certainly is not a liberal capitalist state as such, though the bourgeoisie represent a real force as you imply, but there is also capitalism in state industries when they are run for profit, which currently is the bulk of China’s economy.

China is plainly revisionist since the Deng reforms, it went from a uniquely (sometimes chaotically) democratic ML state to a capitalist state run with some amount of propriety and discipline (perhaps owing to both its Marxist immediate past and its Confucian past before that) and that unusually “adult” behavior for such a powerful country I think contributes to confusion, because people expect capitalist states to be rotten from skin to core like the US or Occupied Korea or something.

I still think, mainly for reasons already expressed, that China is the biggest historically progressive force in the world right now (the most progressive force among established countries is Cuba, of course), the average westerner knows nothing but lies about it, etc.

But I basically think every AES state is revisionist in some respect – Vietnam is similar to China here, Cuba is on the road to joining them, the DPRK has reactionary nationalism, Laos is just a fucking mess – but I still support them all, not just on anti-imperial grounds but also because this isn’t all-or-nothing, you can be revisionist in some respects and correct in others, and even massive revisionists in this backward word can still be historically progressive forces.

This isn’t me mindlessly lionizing Mao either, I think he was (by the end of his life) a left deviationist who nonetheless failed to pull the trigger on Deng, but his ideas were definitely more sincere in their aspirations Marxism over economism or however you’d like to characterize Deng.

It might be nice to have better discussions on these topics, but I’m not going to pretend its a George Orwell 1909043 wrongthink issue, I mostly come here for the news aggregation and comments thereon, not to refine the new vanguard.

Are quips like this really what it has come to?

What sense of “Maoist” do you mean here? Like Shining Path or just anti-Deng?

Strictly speaking, the most common sentiment in GZD and HB is highly revisionist. I don’t really mind since it’s still progressive and splitting over that would be absurd, but their claim of deviation makes enough sense to be comprehended if they’re a hardliner in the vein of either Mao or Hoxha.

Something can be aggressively decontextualized and still not sugar-coated

One is a country, one is an individual, to say that any individual is more important to the war than the United States is the literal definition of Great Man Theory (i.e. childish nonsense).

This is without getting into other considerations like how Netanyahu is a scapegoat for faux-progressives who want to deflect away from how this genocide has enthusiastic support from many powerful institutions within Israel. It is an Israeli project much more than Netanyahu’s personal project.

P.S. Assassinating Putin wouldn’t end the war in Ukraine either (nor would assassinating Zelensky or Biden)