In my view, starting code from scratch or augmenting existing code with LLMs are equivalent in terms of whether or not they should be eligible for discussion. Both should have a disclosure, and both are worthy of discussing where relevant. If someone uses a bot to advertise a million LLM-started projects or something and overwhelm the community, then this is bad and should be stopped, I suppose.
Disclosure. If LLMs are used in service of open-source projects, then they are relevant, but clearly many in the community feel that to be negative, and therefore there should be a disclosure. Someone can make open source software using closed-source tooling already, so disallowing one form of tooling entirely is letting a moral reaction interfere with how we understand open source.
Linux would have to be removed from discussion, for example, if all LLM-contributed projects were to be disallowed. I don’t see why rules should be made with explicit exceptions in mind, yet excluding Linux cuts out a huge portion of open source discussion.
Professional workers are still proletarian, same with those that are educated. A tiny minority of the CPC are capitalists, or “oligarch class,” and these are prevented from the top levels of the CPC. Further, the entirety of the working class does not need to be members of the CPC for the CPC to be dominated by the working class. You aren’t responding to my actual point here, you’re inventing a new one based off of butchering Marxism.
As for how the commanding heights of the economy are meaningfully publicly owned, this is easily verified on Wikipedia. The CPC also has “Golden shares,” meaning that even private companies are under their control and direction to an influential degree.
As for the “timeline” of socialist construction, they are in the primary stage of socialism. The transition to the next stage of socialism is projected to occur in 2049, but as we get closer it may shift up or back a few years. The idea that capitalists will take control of the CPC “because of human nature” is a ridiculous pseudoscientific claim. Make an argument based on materialism, not vibes, please.
As for science and dialectical materialism, you cannot have a truly scientific approach without a materialist stance and a dialectical outlook. Metaphysics makes errors like rejecting biology, and idealism turns us to the realm of the supernatural, like your previous claims of “human nature” making it inevitable that the CPC will be overrun by capitalists. For someone that allegedly studied science in university, you seem to enjoy idealism and metaphysics.
The Hukou system is not the cause of rising wages, nor is the weaker social safety net than imperialist European countries. These are factors of underdevelopment, not a bad system. European, developed imperialist countries enjoy better safety nets because they are higher developed countries and pilfer the global south of their surplus value. This rejection of economics as a science on your part causes you to make all sorts of ridiculous comparisons, and really calls into question your supposed scientific background. Any scientist would know that comparing developed with developing countries must be contextualized.
As for the lack of independent unions, this does not mean workers have no bargaining power. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions is the largest federation of trade unions in the world. The reason they do not allow independence from this is because they do not want to give capitalists levers to manipulate against the socialist system and promote disunity. You seem to have this ridiculous idea that capitalists will inevitably overtake the CPC, yet you’re also disappointed that the CPC is taking active measures against this!
As for “keeping wages down,” again, this isn’t actually happening. Wages for workers are skyrocketing in China year over year, and have been for decades. You straight up invented a point. Further, they are pivoting from an export-driven model to increased domestic consumption , your information is either outdated or deliberately wrong.
I’m not blind to contradictions within China, I’m fully aware of them. There’s a contradiction between underdeveloped productive forces in the private sector and a need to socialize all production as it develops. This is a critically important contradiction that the CPC is navigating. Tian’anmen Square is a famous site and isn’t censored, what is censored is the western, debunked narrative about 10,000 people being murdered on the square, rather than the actual historical events where ~300 people died in clashes between rioters and the PLA as they advanced to the square.
I think you need to revisit your Marx. For someone that claims that starting with Marx is a good idea, you seem to have utterly butchered any understanding of Marx you could have, such as inventing brand new classes like “educated elites” and “professionals.” You also don’t explain just how economists have “advanced” since Marx, but since you didn’t mention anyone I’ll add Lenin, Walter Rodney, and Cheng Enfu as good examples of economists post-Marx that have carried his analysis to the modern day.
Marx wouldn’t be “sick” at me or China, he’d laugh at you pretending to know anything about his work.
I don’t support the PRC because the CPC calls itself communist, I support it because it has a socialist system. The commanding heights and critical industries in China are overwhelmingly publicly owned, and the state is dominated by the working class through the CPC. Marketization is employed in underdeveloped industries where markets still play a progressive role in accelerating socialization of production and distribution, and as these grow they are folded into the public sector. This is Marxist economics. See Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide for a basic, entry-level explanation that requires no background in Marxist economics. See Cheng Enfu’s handy diagram:
As for having the “fastest growing billionaire class,” China has billionaires because the marketized sector has private property. The acceleration of development speeds up the timeline for collectivizing production and distribution, and the rise of billionaires is the tradeoff. Good thing Marxism isn’t a moralist philosophy that sees private property as a sin, but instead a scientific approach to socialism based on dialectical materialism. The bit about “suppressing worker incomes” is entirely false, worker incomes have been dramatically rising year over year for decades:
I honestly have no clue why you immediately assume I only support China because they call themselves communist. It’s such a bad-faith way to terminate a conversation before it even begins. I support China because of its system, because I am a communist that studies Marxism.
You made a bunch of vague whataboutisms. Do you have an actual point here? My point is that the issues with the US regime will not be ended by removing Trump, this isn’t a matter of 80 years ago but today. Genocides are not “communist tools,” and the majority of those that lived in the USSR and its member states regret its dissolution.
I’m a Statesian, just like you, the primary difference is that I am directing my critique against the system that is actually causing the problems of today, rather than the individual that happens to be in charge of a portion of it at this present moment in time. Changing out the individual will not change the system, and thus will not actually alleviate pressure worldwide. Only changing the system can do that.
We have to seek truth from facts, not simply rely on our gut feelings. That’s why I took issue with your conspiracy theory to begin with, you are agreeing with whatever your bias leads you to believe. I’m aware that I’m biased, which is why I do my best to seek truth from facts, rather than rely on my gut.
Sealioning is a relentless badgering for evidence while maintaining a false adherance to civility. What I did was make an argument, that the problems of the US are systemic, rather than foreign-created.
Jumping to Taiwan, the KMT lost the civil war against the communists, and took over Taiwan, killing tens of thousands that resisted, and imprisoning over 140,000. The only reason the civil war did not result in total communist victory was the US blocking access to Taiwan, protecting the nationalist KMT while they slaughtered the indigenous population, and then the US began treating Taiwan as a military outpost to contain China. Critically, modern Taiwan sees what is happening in Ukraine, and is thawing relations with the mainland because they do not want to end up in the same position.
As for your absurd equation of the Nazis, who tried to bring European-style colonialism to Europe, with the USSR, who supported anti-colonial liberation movements around the globe, this is a form of Holocaust trivialization. US foreign policy has always been genocidal, from the vicious wars on indigenous populations to the brutal colonization of Hawaii and Cuba to the bestial wars on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, to the intense bombing around the world. The US is a genocidal empire, this is not new with Trump, but a continuation of genocidal policy since the inception of the US.
I’m a communist, I don’t support Trump, I oppose the entire genocidal system that he is merely a symptom of.
I never said Katie Zacharia was Chinese-born, I said she’s almost certainly not a Chinese spy, and that even if everyone born in China that was high up in the American gov and system was a spy, it still wouldn’t mean China was responsible for the problems with the US Empire. Those are systemic, and no, that isn’t an “America bad” argument. What it is, is an argument based on the inherent processes of settler-colonialism, capitalism, and the imperialist stage of capitalism.
Second, getting a job in China as a white person is not automatically a “White Monkey” job. You seem to be under the impression that China is infiltrating the US, but espionage is high-skill labor. Katie cannot both be highly unqualified and a Chinese spy, but your claims that she took a “White Monkey” job go directly against that.
Third, I did not say that China has no influence over the US. I said the problems of the US are not caused by China, but instead are due to, again, settler-colonialism, capitalism, and the imperialist stage of capitalism. Democracy is not being “eroded,” it never existed in the first place.
Finally, I am not sealioning you. I am arguing in good faith against your tabloid-level conspiracy theory that seems to be putting the blame of systemic failures on foreign infiltration, with nearly nothing to back it. At the slightest pushback, you immediately accuse me of being bad-faith or a sealion, it’s absurd.
I hate to break it to you but the reason the US Empire is so terrible isn’t because of an evil Chinese communist conspiracy, it’s because the US is a decaying capitalist empire thoroughly dominated by monopoly finance capital and big tech, and began its existence as a genocidal settler-colony (that it still is today). Even if every Chinese-born person in the government and higher up places in the US were all spies, they still would not be responsible for the fact that workers have never held power in the US, it was dominated by capital from the very outset.
These are just the necessary consequences of capitalism. Workers never had a choice in the system, we can only ever express our voice through collective action, like how the Civil Rights Movement was fought. This isn’t a new development, it’s a new stage in deterioration of the imperialist stage in capitalism. The solution is socialism, and the method to establish it is revolution. This has been clear for over a century.
You misunderstand, just because you can describe something does not mean that it’s a useful or accurate description. Debating the correctness and accuracy of how we define systems and structures is core to socioeconomic debate, because without definitions that accurately describe the world and its processes, we are left with fantasy. I explained why your definition was incorrect, and responded to these weaknesses. Nevertheless, I’ll address your points directly.
Moralism is not a base for scientific consensus. I already addressed the inherent failures of this form of argumentation. You even open yourself up for counter by saying “society getting more prosperous is a good thing,” when it is capitalism that is holding back common prosperity by funneling the wealth of society into the hands of a few. We must make our analysis based on materialism, on scientific fact, not the vague idea that stopping wage slavery is wrong because it requires force.
You are taking an incredibly eurocentric and chauvanist claim by saying “no modern economist believes in surplus value.” Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and many more economists vehemontly disagree with you. Some of the most respected economists on the world stage are Chinese, such as Cheng Enfu. At best, your point is purely ignorant, at worst it’s racist. In any case, management of capital is labor, but ownership itself does not create value. All new value comes from labor, be it managerial or not, and the portion of the day workers labor for means beyond their own wages is the surplus that forms the basis of profits.
This is, frankly, naive. The version of capitalism you advocate for is not a real thing, and does not exist. You are moving from the realm of fact to the realm of utopianism. Just because you are uncomfortable with the inevitable consequences of marketization and private property relations does not mean you get to hide by defining them away. It is a simple, proven fact that in the real world, when markets progress, they trend towards monopolization. When they reach the boundaries of the national scale, they seek new markets internationally, which allows them to leverage their advanced position to exploit developing countries. This is capitalism as it actually exists. Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism is a short article going over how this system came to be and evolved in the modern day.
China did not take on “capitalist reforms.” China marketized underdeveloped industries, as the material base of marketization is decentralized production. For industries of a national scale and critical importance, China maintains dominance and planned economy. This is Marxist economics. See Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide for a basic, entry-level explanation that requires no background in Marxist economics. China is a socialist economy, in the primary stage. The US is a capitalist economy as it is dominated by private capital even at the national and international scale. See the aforementioned Cheng Enfu’s handy diagram:
Overall, I’m disappointed. You presented yourself as something of an expert, but you don’t even pretend to entertain essential functions of traditional debate like discussing definitions, you just take the definitions as a given. This is hardly taken seriously even by mainstream liberal economists.
(Side note on Cockshott, massive transphobe, unfortunately. His work on cybernetics is valuable, but his overall Marxist knowledge should be taken with heavy grains of salt due to his fundamentally incorrect understanding of dialectical materlaism).
As a communist, to me this just means that we need to continue educating the working class on a proper and aligned understanding. The biggest strength of the working class is our numbers, and the best way to utilize mass is with unity and direction.
Capitalism is a system where capital owners dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy, socialism is a system where workers dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy. Any confusion of welfare for socialism implies that systems where capitalists are the dominant force is still socialist if it gives welfare, but existing social democracies that follow this model depend on exploiting the global south to prop up this welfare while maintaining capitalist profits.
There’s a lot that’s fundamentally wrong with this comment, but I think I can hit the core pretty narrowly. You cannot disentangle capitalism from the state, the capitalist state is not outside of capitalism but is instead a core function of it. Corporatism and cronyism are not in opposition to capitalism, they are a later stage in capitalist development, as compared to earlier capitalism when markets are highly underdeveloped and instead very decentralized and anarchic.
You also have a deeply moralist analysis, not a materialist, logical analysis. There is nothing inherently good about private property rights, and justifying the theft of surplus value on the basis that it is already common practice and would require violence in the form of revolution to change it is a moralist argument. It is just as easy to say that the everyday violence of theft of surplus value is a violent attack on working people, who create all new value. We must make scientific, materialist arguments, not simply rely on emotional soundbites.
You also ignore imperialism as a function of capitalism as it develops. The expansionist nature of capitalism causes it to dominate developing countries, where a share of the spoils are used to uplift the imperial working class. This is why the poor often get richer in developed capitalist economies, not because capitalism lifts all, but because developed capitalist economies shift their greatest contradictions to the international scale.
When you move on to socialism, you are entirely wrong. For example, the marketization in China is found in their developing industries, where markets do play a progressive role. However, in their developed and critical industries, China uses central planning. This is because planned economies overtake marketization when production advances to the national and international scale. It isn’t a binary planned/market distinction that socialists advocate for, it’s instead looking at the level of development of the productive forces and using the correct method accordingly.
Monopolies are an inevitable result of capitalism, because as technology improves, it requires more input to maintain. We cannot simply break up monopoly without inefficiently destroying productive forces in the process. This is where cronyism and corporatism, as you describe it, come in. Socialism and planned economy solves these problems by using the developed productive forces according to scientific planning, which is far more efficient at this scale (and is why China is doing so much better than capitalist economies).
Even more totally planned economies like the USSR saw some of the most rapid economic growth on the planet. They did not introduce starvation, they took overwhelmingly backward societies and brought them at and beyond their peers in rapid time. Life expectancy doubled between Tsarism and socialism in a matter of decades. Famine, while common in Tsarist Russia, was eliminated by 1935 outside of wartime. GDP growth was extremely rapid, all without running into crisis of overproduction or falling profitability:
You write a lot about what you “oppose” about capitalism, but without a coherent understanding of the totality of the system, you are reduced to unactionable moral platitudes, rather than concrete actions that can be taken. You remove the state from the economy and pretend it can be made to work both in the interests of the people as a whole while also shrinking, despite the fact that capitalists prop up and dominate the state as a co-evolutionary process.
The solution is socialism. Planned economy for developed industry, marketization limited to developing industry, and as all industry develops, transition to full planning to a collective and scientific aim.
It starves many despite producing more than enough for everyone.
Socialism is not welfare, nor is capitalism any form of doing something in favor of a reward. Your metaphor, I feel, does a disservice to understanding each.
Yep! My biggest problem with it is that the language surrounding national minorities is… Dated… But beyond that, it’s an excellent look at the Soviet Union!
Yep, almost done reading this book too!
People confuse private with independence and state with dominance because they don’t see the state as a product and tool of class struggle.
I read works from Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Hudson, etc. Even if they aren’t strictly Marxist-Leninist, many progressives have good analysis that you can sharpen with your own understanding of dialectical materialism.
For starters, I want to point out the farce you’re putting on by both making a mockery of Marxism, and yet acting as though you’re an authority on what Marxists actually believe. As you’ve admitted, you think communism is ridiculous, and as you’ve admitted elsewhere, you yourself are a colonizer that fled Hong Kong once the communists began to further integrate it with the mainland. You’re trying to hide behind your individual role as a colonizer by drawing on Irish history as a colony, a country with a rich history of Marxist thinkers like James Connolly, while simultaneously arguing against China’s socialist system as not being adequately Marxist. It’s a farce.
Regardless of your personal background, however, it’s important to address your claims as they are.
First, class. Not once did I ever say that class is homogenous. Classes are aggregates, of course doctors enjoy greater material benefits than other kinds of workers. The critical importance of them being the same class is that they both share a collective interest as a class, that interest being collectivization of production and distribution. As laborers, both have as an interest rising collectivization and socialization, whereas capitalists, both big and small, oppose this trend. Classes are bimodal, in the modern era proletarian and bourgeois, with each broad class having manifold striations. This does not mean variance within a class is sufficient to be a class of themselves.
The class makeup of the CPC is overwhelmingly proletarian. This is a fact. The types of workers that most occupy the CPC do tend to be more educated, and therefore make more money, it’s true, but this is not a bad thing. Again, as workers, they share the same class interest.
The working poor are not “fed some bullshit,” they are seeing the most rapid climbs in life metrics in history, and the most rapid development of their material wealth. Who cares if some few capitalists get wealthier if the whole of society prospers? If the marketized sector in China became an impediment to progress, this would be a deeply concerning situation, but Marxists are not moralists and do not oppose private property as a sin, but instead as something that plays a specific historic role and phases out of that role. The role of markets is to socialize production, the role of a socialist state is to collectivize socialized production and oppress capitalists from forming a cohesive political bloc.
Your arguments about “human nature” are, frankly, childish and absurd. Again, you make a mockery of yourself, thinking Marx never accounted for incentives. The comical idea of equal pay for everyone is a farce invented by liberals to discredit communists, the actual fact is that socialists suggest that pay be according to the work done until the productive forces are so advanced that it doesn’t matter anymore. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, is a hypothesis of an era where production and distribution is so advanced that anyone, regardless of background, is sufficiently trained to perform any act of labor in society and thus all labor be interchangeable.
You then continue to embarrass yourself by claiming China has been an imperial power for its entire history, ignoring the century of humiliation when it was a colony, and ignoring colonial Hong Kong that you describe as “cool.” Further, you never actually establish that China is imperialist, you just say that Tibet and Xinjiang are part of China as though that’s enough to claim it imperialist. You have a great deal of work to prove imperialism, and annexing territory is not imperialism.
Regarding your discussion of “hard” and “soft” science, you evidently care for neither, considering how confidently you speak on subjects you do not care to learn about. If you want to actually critique Marxism, you should begin by learning what Marxists actually believe. You occupy a stance that despices Marxism and Marxists, while also trying to say Marxists aren’t true Marxists. It’s opportunist doublespeak.
Regarding trade unions, the All China Federation of Trade Unions is extremely effective at supporting worker rights. Time and time again, independent groups under the guise of supporting progressive causes have been CIA fronts designed to foment popular dissent. Independent trade unions therefore stand not against merely their own bosses, but the ACFTU and the unions a part of it.
The “interesting language” I use for Tian’anmen Square is spelling it correctly. Discussion of June 4th is not censored, repeating western atrocity mythos is. I’m not lying here, the ones that are persecuted are the ones that uplift the color revolution as a good thing, despite the fascist background of the CIA-planted leaders of the student movement.
You then drone on about inequality in China, but the central point is that marketization inevitably results in monopoly, and monopoly inevitably makes itself better as a part of planned economy than marketized. Markets prepare the basis of planned economy, so that’s how China is progressing. It isn’t a lengthy period of sacrifice for an eventual 180 pivot to communism, it’s a gradual process of constant improvement that results in higher degrees of socialization:
The absolute bare minimum you could do is read Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: a Concise Guide. It’s 50 pages long, and is the bare minimum you would need to begin to criticize China from a standpoint that understands their system from their perspective.