The official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) likely was at 49.5 in December from last month’s 49.4, according to the median forecast of 24 economists in a poll conducted Dec 22-28. The 50-point mark separates growth from contraction.
It’s so hilarious seeing them just plain state that people aren’t allowed to talk about normal-ass stuff if the government doesn’t like it, and then seeing people online who try to defend them.
Fuck Lenin for turning a philosophy of freedom and cooperation and consensus into just another tool of State/authoritarian power.
bUt It’S nOt PrAcTiCaL oThErWiSe
No, you’re just scared of what it would actually look like. Lots of supposed Communists who are scared of the whole “stateless” part meaning they can’t finagle their way into power, or who just want the revolution as a vehicle to change who is in power (i.e. them).
Lenin’s biggest mistake was thinking this whole “dictatorship of the proletariat” phase was going to be this magical normal period that no human would abuse ever, completely ignoring millennia of human history, human behavior, and the dynamics of power that would make that sort of thing literally impossible. Not only does absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even if a leader was immune to such corruption, dictatorships are never propped up by one single leader. They are precariously installed by groups of people who have other units of power, like the military, to keep the system in place.
One of those powerful people can simply say: “Keep this dictatorship in place or I will torture you and your entire family while spreading propaganda about detestable crimes, until eventually I’ll feed you to the angry mob and prop up a new dictator.”
And that’s it. The real communism dream never happens. Corruption quickly floods the state, and wealth disparity continues unchallenged and unabated. It’s just more hidden, under the guise of a system of equalative poverty for one class of people and gradients of power for another class of people.
Hell, this even happens with failed democracies, like Russia. Everybody gets behind the new system, but without the right kinds of checks and balances, corruption invades and, eventually, it’s a democracy in name only. But, at least democracy never had any notion of a dictatorship built into the philosophy. Democracies are still really hard to keep in place, but communism is a doomed idea from the very start.
Communism is a very doable system, the problem is that people have false expectations of it and what it should look like (largely thanks to Leninism).
Collaborative, democratic consensus, is the normal way that groups of people work. Coercion is not, but that is how majoritarian systems work, and it is how states work. People have been living under Western nation-state and administrative-state systems for so long, within defined borders that denote both behavior and identity, that it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales. The common response is, “but someone will always try to take charge/ seize power”, and that is true, but before the time of the modern state, you could walk away.
Now the state itself has become a self-perpetuating threat to its own citizens (which you can’t leave without subsuming yourself to another state), and majoritarian democracy is just used to maintain the state through the illusion of choices that hold that threat at bay. “Don’t let ‘x’ get in power, because if they do they’ll hurt those of us that are ‘y’.” You can’t fuck off and make a community that doesn’t allow ‘x’, because a state will come along and destroy or seize it.
it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales.
Because it’s already very very hard to scale. It takes only a small group of people to fuck up trust models to such a degree that the whole system falls apart.
If you are not prepared for evil, evil will hold far more power that you and decimate the entire community. Indigenous peoples from every corner of the world have been punished by that hard lesson over and over again.
Scale is half the problem. There is a reason that climate destruction, world-spanning wars, nuclear weapons, etc. all took off the same time that population exploded. You can’t separate scale from technology from destruction. I’m not arguing for de-dev, but the complex, “scalable” systems we’ve built and now rely on are literally either designed to kill us or are inadvertently killing us (emission, plastics, deforestation, PFAS, etc.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m advocating being unprepared for evil? Even in Anarchist systems, which do not have systems of authority, the use of force to counter someone hurting you is well understood.
If your argument is that state systems will scale large enough to destroy non-state systems, I agree, but then you’re just agreeing with what I said about the state setting itself up as a threat that must be participated with in order to counter (i.e. in this case arguing, “if you don’t want the state to consume you, make your own state”). That doesn’t make those other systems bad, it makes states bad. “Might makes right” is not generally considered a very modern or positive way of interacting with each other.
if they're so scared of the truth, the news must be really bad i guess.. and such varied topics as well: real estate, youth unemployment, stagflation, capital fleeing the dictatorship because of fears of asset seizure.. so many problems and nobody can talk about them.. but China is a big place, maybe they can just bury the problems somewhere in a big Chinese hole.. or lock them up in a camp in Xinjiang..
two things are certain: the Chinese people will suffer, and there will be many scapegoats found within the government - people suspected of collaborating with Western spies, for example - to make examples of so that Xi is not at fault..
These local ruinations are just a temporary blip versus China’s hard demographic facts like how over the last 10 years their birth rate has crashed harder than the birth rate of the Jews during the Holocaust.
How come I take the south African government less seriously? Oh yeah, the centralisation of power, the centralisation of wealth, the vast amount of unemployment, poverty and corruption. I mean, who do they think they are? The US?
If any country in the world has a leg to stand on about criticizing an apartheid state like Israel…
South Africa’s government is a mess but most of the people in it lived through apartheid. Regardless of other issues, this is something that they are absolutely qualified to speak on.
You do realise that the elites running South Africa are as white as snow, right? I’m not talking about the mouthpieces that pose as being representative of the people, but those who actually hold the bag, those who are in positions of privelige and power because of apartheid.
This is an issue, where people conflate governments, government bodies, oligarchs and elites in general with the people of a country. People dgaf about common South Africans, or indeed even common Russians or common Palestinians, but the second a branch pipes up like they did something, it’s gold stars and the drawing gets put up on the fridge?
Why? Why does a BRICS country, laden by corruption caused by apartheid, get glorified for opposing apartheid? It makes no goddamn sense. It’s like Putin looking for Nazis in Europe… bro, you didn’t need to cross borders for that.
Well, the government is currently run by the ANC, and the statement was made by them.
Like, yah the ANC is supper corrupt and serving as a mouth piece for those business interests that benefited for apartheid, plenty of criticism to be levied at how they’ve failed to address inequality in the country and let important infrastructure fall apart while rich funks loot the country blind.
But they’re the party who cut their teeth on opposing apartheid and settler colonialism? Like, that’s their whole thing? They’re literally Nelson mandala’s party? If anyone is qualified to be criticizing Israel for their apartheid system and settler colonialism it is them.
I can both hold them in contempt for being shit heads and recognize that they might know what they’re talking about when is comes to criticizing apartheid?
To be fair, they have a very good knowledge of what apartheid states (like Israel) look and act like.
Recognizing that Israel has moved from the “regular” oppression and killing of their sub-citizen population into full-on genocide is something that much of the rest of the world seems to be having trouble with.
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