How I feel about capitalist bootlicking from ex-Reddit community
How I feel about capitalist bootlicking from ex-Reddit community
in my experience teenagers are communists, socialists, and anarchists. it’s mostly gen Xers and boomers who love capitalism
The funny thing: both memes are true.. We live in a fkin disgusting world where every system oppresses. People who think capitalism works for the people are equally braindead as the ones claiming China and Russia are communist utopias.
Sure Marxist communism could be great, but it yet has to be archived
Nobody thinks that Russia is communist. However, whatever you want to call China, it's objectively better than what we have in the west. One thing to note though is that 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the Communist party has 95 million members.
China lifted 800 million out of poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it's the most populous country on the planet. People in China also enjoy high social mobility.
Unsurprisingly, government satisfaction in China is extremely high and unmatched by any western democracy:
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resilience-surveying-chinese-public-opinion-through-time
Numerous studies and surveys also show that people who actually live in China feel their country is democratic in a sense of having a government that works in the interest of the majority. In fact, far higher percentage of people living in China feel their system is democratic than those living in US
- https://latana.com/democracy-perception-index/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
Finally, China is the only major country that's actually doing anything meaningful to transition off fossil fuels. Once again, making absolutely stunning progress this year alone.
So, yeah, China might not be an utopia, and they have plenty of problems. However, it is a country where life continues to improve with each and every decade, that doesn't suffer from constant economic crashes the way capitalist shitholes do, and where people are happy and optimistic about the future. Seems like looking at what China is doing and learning from that might be a good start for people in the west.
It’s also fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. People able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
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i think your projecting something here or making a deliberate strawman, read my first sentence again and tell me where I am "able to recognize that [my] own system doesn’t live up to the ideal [i] have in [my] heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system [i] dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden."
don't forget the US-backed Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.. he oversaw a borderline ethnic cleansing campaign against moro muslims in mindanao, had thousands tortured and killed and sometimes had their mutilated bodies strewn on public areas(this is what we call salvaging), created an oligarchy that lives on today and, with his wife and children and billions of public funds, was flown out of the country by orders of Reagan when his regime was toppled by the 1986 revolution.
and now his son, who continues to deny his father's crimes and refuse to return the billions they stole from us, is president.
Thank you! I saw the anti-communist one earlier today and was so sick of seeing the same old iPhone vuvuzela type arguments on here.
The sad part is that people just keep believing these tropes that have been thoroughly debunked at this point, and they just keep regurgitating them completely uncritically. Thankfully, seems that younger people are increasingly starting to question things.
Never seen it, so I don't get it.
The Global South should give capitalism a try one of these decades. It paid off for Asia and Europe...