this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Nah mate. (No I am not going to argue uncharitable interpretations made up to make gotchas)
I accept that you understand tautologies.
Yawn. This shit is the same arguments Capitalists make every day about "the benefits of capitalism."
You are conflating generic progress and science with your chosen system. All that would have happened anyway whether they were State Capitalist as they are, or straight up Capitalist as they're becoming.
And now you are, in order to conflate me with capitalists, yourself regurgitating capitalist propaganda! Remember, I'm not talking about Deng and the "Chinese Miracle" (which I think is a mischaracterization by liberals), I am specifically talking about Mao-era China, where the use of things like agricultural collectives was a major element in the reduction of poverty that liberal economists had no interest in accounting for.
But to consider the progress that China has made merely the inevitable motion of science and capitalism is literally liberal revisionism! Inventions serve mainly to impoverish if the people who own and control those inventions are not the workers! Just look at the cotton gin if you need an easy example, and perhaps see that the Luddites had a point in their angle of economic self-defense (though this should by no means be conflated with primitivism).
People were fed who were not fed before, people could read who could not read before, peasants no longer had to surrender 90% of their harvest to landlords, childhood mortality plummeted. These are things you can say about China under Mao (and, to a more limited extent, later iterations as well) that you cannot say about, for example, nearby India because control is imperative and there is not some nebulous specter of "progress" overhanging the world like we live in a Real Time Strategy title, as much as modern "syndicalists" seem to think so. The people of China stood up while the people of India and many other countries were held down, and your liberal modernism has no way to account for that while preserving your philippics about the dang tankies.
People who were not Chinese got the same progress like the Chinese did at different speeds (earlier or later). So obviously this progress is not a unique Maoist characteristic. It would have happened anyway. I can just as well argue that under an anarchist system, it would have happened better and not devolved into capitalism and the massive capitalist exploitation chinese workers are suffering right now.
There's no revisionism here. We can plainly see that the whole world progressed the same way. It's fucking racist to claim that China wouldn't have done it if it weren't for that one guy
Those who did either did it on the back of the rest of the world and by plundering and colonizing billions (west and western protectorates) with China still managed to catch up with that in half a century or they just havent yet and wont in the forseeable future (most of the third world) and their progress marely amounts to the most generalized side effects of world wide medical and tech progress. China is bringing to 1.5 billion people the progress, QoL and modernity the former group achieved (and then some) without colonizing, imperializing or impovershing any other nation or people and in 1/5th of the time.No one else did that, no one else is doing that. Other than you know, the USSR (relative to era)