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Polite warning: the graphics are surprisingly hardware-intensive. This froze up my cheapo phone.
It's actually a fully 3d thing going on so yeah it's going to hurt low end hardware.
It’s an intense webpage lol
After revisiting it on a desktop, I was surprised it was possible to even condense it to anything remotely useful on a tiny mobile screen.
That's the sort of stuff web developers used to really pride themselves on-- a page which really adapted to the screen being used, rather than just "Oh, you have a 27" monitor, let's continue to hide menus and secondary info as though you were scrolling on a two-inch Nokia featurephone"
President Xi personally remote desktop'd into your phone to show you.
This is a very useful graphic for anyone looking at starting a party and understanding what to aim for.
What I didn't know was that there was a qualification check for local level delegates. Does this qualification check occur multiple times as someone goes up the chain? It seems useful to have in place to ensure someone isn't just charismatic and able to get voted up based on popularity.
One thing I will say about the layout of this graphic is that the hover-overs are not very obvious, and could be indicated as such. I was asking myself "it would be nice if it said what the responsibilities of this committee were" because it's hidden behind hover overs.
What I didn't know was that there was a qualification check for local level delegates. Does this qualification check occur multiple times as someone goes up the chain? It seems useful to have in place to ensure someone isn't just charismatic and able to get voted up based on popularity.
Do we support restrictions on who people can vote for? I thought we usually regarded that as a bad thing.
I don't see a problem with examinations existing for competency. Without it how do you ensure that the committees are elevating people based on merit?
I don't see it as a restriction on who you can vote for, you can vote for anyone on the committee but they need to be studious enough to pass the qualification check which I assume is like an exam?
I don't see it as a restriction on who you can vote for, you can vote for anyone on the committee
Don't give me that. Ultimately the entire thing is meant to restrict candidates to a whitelist, the only question is whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Saying you can vote for anyone who made the whitelist and therefore the vote is not restricted is silly question-begging and it's below you.
Huh? No? If you have the capability to pass the test you're not being restricted to a whitelist? It's a test, with pass and failure thresholds. Anyone can study to pass a test, particularly if there's no limit to the number of times you can fail it.
The party has an entrance exam to join as a standard member at the lowest level, why wouldn't you have further exams for the more advance levels?
"Just pass the test to get on the whitelist, then the whitelist doesn't impact you"
This is like an alternate version of "meritcratic" academic testing, it's still a barrier to people who don't have the same resources as others, which I would dare to assert that is a bad thing.
I'm sorry but if Xi could go from living in a literal cave sleeping on a rock bed to being party leader I have to disagree that it's presenting a resource-based barrier.
With that said he did fail his first entrance exam into the party multiple times.
Literal bootstrapism. I could present you success stories about poor people getting into Ivy League schools, and you'd rightly say that such stories are masking systemic problems.
What do you propose instead? This exists to prevent what occurred with the party in the USSR which ultimately led to the biggest standard of living disaster in history.
Is that true? Is that how you get people in there who propose that risk is a type of labor? I am pretty sure Xi was involved in things by 2006 as a comparatively petty official, which is not to say that this is his view, but that this shit was allowed in the Party in a relevant timeframe and exams didn't stop it.
I'm sure that politicians being uneducated was a problem in the Soviet Union, but there were people who would at least turn revisionist who were among the Soviet vanguard since before the October Revolution. The problem fundamentally isn't ignorance, or it is somehow that many years of schooling are needed not to trip and fall into being a reactionary. The former means that education won't solve it, the latter is basically an excuse for having a party of the elite who the plebians can't hope to understand the intellectual workings of, who they must sit passively by and approve or disapprove from the short procession of learned individuals who had the privilege to go through all this political grooming.
But that's a counterfactual, I think the main problem wasn't a lack of education a failure to guard against the ability to be a revisionist based on choice rather than mistake. Given that, I think imposing these educational barriers, most of all ones that weren't decided on a direct democratic basis, is just enabling the party to be insular without doing a thing to protect it from intentional revisionism, the much greater threat if we're worried about an autopsy of the Soviet Union.
You make a very interesting point: is it possible to understand Marxism, lead a party, and make a deliberate choice towards revisionism on purpose?
I think the answer is no. Liberalism is self-defeating. It destroys itself. The entire European project is self-destructive. If one doesn't understand that, it's possible to say "I choose to be rich through revisionism", but it is, fundamentally, a mistake. The USSR proved it. The leaders wanted liberalism and most of them lost their shirts or their lives. Only a few made it out rich, and they've been dealing with the fall out for a long time. It's all coming to a head for them now, and they will end up in a situation within the next generation where the choice will be socialism or barbarism.
I think it's possible that the Chinese Marxist education requirements are based on this belief. There is no way to choose liberalism without it being a mistake, and educating people on this is critical. Anyone who chooses to maliciously pursue liberalism is doing it for some motivation - usually "a better life for me and mine" - and the education can and should correctly show that liberalism will guarantee the opposite to occur.
I really think the SU was condemned before Stalin even died. There was a grand window for selling out and dying comfortably, and every head of state after Stalin took it and did just that, all the way up to Yeltsin. Of course, it's very likely that you know things I don't. Did Yeltsin butcher the political class to a degree exceeding even the Ezovshchina? That would make a good case for questioning the small fries knowing the terms of the game.
But honestly, I think your line of reasoning is Enlightenment-style idealism that assumes people are rational actors. Even if there was substantial risk and a strong likelihood of that risk being realized, would there not still be a good number of takers? Everything I know about humanity says that a meaningful segment of the population is easily enticed by great rewards at great risk, especially if it's not a very difficult risk to take (however dangerous it might be). Perhaps I don't know anything, in which case I would appreciate you returning me to Socratic ignorance by telling me so.
Fairly solid lines of exploration. I agree that the death of the USSR was set in motion before Stalin took office. In fact, some regard him taking office as the sign that the death was inevitable. Lenin knew Stalin couldn't take the union to sustainability but there was no one else that could do what was needed. Likely no one other than Stalin at the time could have so successfully defeated the Third Reich. But the union needed to build the socialist experiment beyond the threat of revisionism and Stalin couldn't do that. I often use Stalin's purges as evidence that things were terrible. He purged so many people and was still surrounded by revisionists.
However, I agree that people aren't necessarily rational actors and that educating them isn't enough. That's why the CPC doesn't solely rely on education. Under Xi we have major anti corruption efforts and we have the death sentences of billionaires. There are millions of grassroots organizations of communists. There is a huge domestic propaganda machine. There is a significant effort to link Chinese history with a Marxist future culturally. There are significant counterintelligence efforts up to and including prosecuting and banning cults and their leaders.
The reeducation of Xinjiang is a good example of how effective it is to use education plus propaganda plus material conditions plus physical presence plus cultural autonomy and a few other factors. Terrorist attacks in the region plummeted and the region is safely going through an internal reintegration process that maintains its cultural and political autonomy.
Anyone who would act to move towards revisionism irrationally would need other structures, like a social milieu that agreed with them, a cultural context that allowed them to operate and recruit and organize, etc. The CPC appears to understand this and has established a comprehensive set of systems including language, tradition, culture, medicine, politics, education, voluntarism, employment, and so much more that has made it very difficult for revisionists who are making mistakes to make those mistakes all the way to the point where they have organized a bunch of other people making the same mistake and gotten them into position to steer the systems.
The best evidence we have is history. Stalin was elected only 7 years after the October revolution and, as we've both said, the death of the union was already being written.
Compare that to China which is now in its 75th year. By this time, USSR was well into Gorbachev. There is no evidence that China has even reached the point of equivalence with late Kruschev. China has simply done a significantly better job at managing reaction and revisionism than the USSR did.
Is there still risk? Sure! But for my money, if I were to try and answer what it would like to build the first successful socialist state, complete with resisting North Atlantic imperialism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, climate change, the advent of Internet, etc - I would be hard pressed to describe something better than what China is doing.
Lenin knew Stalin couldn't take the union to sustainability
Are you referring to something more substantial than the supposed Will?
I often use Stalin's purges as evidence that things were terrible. He purged so many people and was still surrounded by revisionists.
I mean, considering we know that Yagoda was part of an opposition bloc, how implausible is it that the guy who replaced him also was some kind of conspiracist? I've never heard of the Yezhochina doing anything good, and it was quite unlike what happened before and after it. Granted, I think Stalin acted with wild negligence, but the hard pivot in policy lining up precisely with there being a new dude overseeing it from an office that was just infiltrated, then pivoting back with his death? Especially since it didn't seem to really answer the revisionism problem?
Idk, the very same testimony implicitly denies that Yezhov was part of their intelligence network, but how many conspiracies were there under Stalin? This sort of thing is very difficult for me to parse. Did Stalin just decide to turn over a new leaf, but accomplish that by framing someone as being another enemy of the state? Was Yezhov really just a fall guy when the former supposed fall guy really was a compradore? Was Yezhov just a personally fucked up and incompetent guy with no (further) conspiracy involved that Stalin and co just let have power he seriously shouldn't have? (along with the aforementioned negligence)
idk, I guess maybe it was the last one
This is really off-topic, but it's an issue that really bugs me. In any case, I guess my original point is that I don't think the Yezhovshchina was really purging all that many revisionists except by incident of killing huge swaths of people. I doubt the veracity of the will, but this certainly makes the case Stalin wasn't really the best leader for "sustainability," at least.
Wait a second, doesn't Trotsky work as a great example of someone well-educated in Marxism who chose to be some bullshit compradore instead, even if he only had mixed success at it?
Anyway, I've seen people argue that the PRC was set down the wrong path by the conciliatory foreign policy of late Mao -- which mirrors Khrushchev's -- and persists in some form to this day. I don't know enough to talk about something like that, and maybe they were just ultras who even dislike Mao.
but that this shit was allowed in the Party in a relevant timeframe and exams didn't stop it.
Yes but how long did it take to get to that point? It took an incredibly large amount of time for the party to become corrupted enough to require the corruption crackdowns, which were essentially purges of this.
The goal is not necessarily to expect this to stop it entirely, but to function as one of many things that reduce or slow it so that other actions can be taken before things are too bad.
I'm sure that politicians being uneducated was a problem in the Soviet Union, but there were people who would at least turn revisionist who were among the Soviet vanguard since before the October Revolution.
Post ww2 the party became a "party of the people" and Kruschev deemed it was of the people because the people were participants. All ideology became muddled. It was a mess. This was because no enforcement of party line, no prevention of those uneducated in marxism was undertaken.
You can not have a marxist party if your members are not marxists.
You must undertake some measure to ensure they are. Either you're doing that through marxism exams or you're doing it through purges, which are just the same as preventing people from rising up that others want to democratically elect is it not?
If you exercise no authority, the party discipline will cease to exist.
You have not proposed alternatives?
Yes but how long did it take to get to that point? It took an incredibly large amount of time for the party to become corrupted enough to require the corruption crackdowns, which were essentially purges of this.
Depending how you count it, it took about 30 years, but really longer because Dengist-types preceded Deng's turn at the reins (they brought him from being in informal exile to toppling the Gang of Four, after all). I wouldn't know where to count to get an accurate estimate, but perhaps it would be 50 years, since the Hundred Flowers campaign's subsequent crackdown probably got rid of a lot of the ones who were festering from even during the Civil War. How old are these measures, anyway? Does this even apply?
Anyway, I think that overwhelmingly the corruption crackdowns were against people who were actually corrupt rather than ideologically compromised, and you happen to mention someone who is the inverse next.
Post ww2 the party became a "party of the people" and Kruschev deemed it was of the people because the people were participants.
It's actually worse than that. He actually said the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was over and they were now running a "Whole People's Party" as in supposedly representing the interests of the entire population, and he used this as cover for beginning the restoration of the bourgeoisie.
All ideology became muddled. It was a mess. This was because no enforcement of party line, no prevention of those uneducated in marxism was undertaken.
I would argue, based on the above and on the history of destalinization, that it was not just muddled but in fact deliberately revisionist. I don't really know where Khrushchev thought he was going with doing that while continuing to fight the west (seems like the perfect opportunity to be a compradore), maybe he just bought into pro-market propaganda. Of course, by the end of his time in office it certainly was also muddled because that's why he got ousted: for being directionless.
But part of my point is that even this dingbat revisionist and what was ultimately his substantial backing were all in the Party prior to the death of Stalin. Others, like Bukharin, were Old Bolsheviks themselves! This was a problem that wasn't started by some freak accident letting Khrushchev through, it was already consuming the Party before Khrushchev did anything and perhaps even before Stalin did.
You have not proposed alternatives?
I'm actually fine with gatekeeping a vanguard party if policy decisions are made by the people, even if that means they wouldn't do something as wise as the vanguard could wish of them. Ironically, Xi writes about just that scenario in a document that I have been looking for for like 2 years called something like "We Must Follow the People into the Fire". This is ironic, in my opinion, but we don't need to get into that and really probably shouldn't. My view is basically that of the primacy of democracy: either you give the people the ability to decide policy or you give them the ability to choose policy deciders (or vote for the people who vote, as I don't have a problem with that part of China's system).
I mean, come on, China's already got compulsory education requirements. If it's so important to have your definition of a good Marxist education, give it to people! Not that this answers the issue, since in many rural places people don't get all that much schooling still, which means this would still put privileged people on top (or further on top) politically.
It's actually worse than that. He actually said the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was over and they were now running a "Whole People's Party" as in supposedly representing the interests of the entire population, and he used this as cover for beginning the restoration of the bourgeoisie.
Yeah that was what I was half-remembering.
But part of my point is that even this dingbat revisionist and what was ultimately his substantial backing were all in the Party prior to the death of Stalin. Others, like Bukharin, were Old Bolsheviks themselves! This was a problem that wasn't started by some freak accident letting Khrushchev through, it was already consuming the Party before Khrushchev did anything and perhaps even before Stalin did.
Yes but I suspect the deaths of ww2 did a number on the extremely well read true believers of communism. Resulting in necessary compromises for the sake of simply having enough bodies to do everything.
I mean, come on, China's already got compulsory education requirements. If it's so important to have your definition of a good Marxist education, give it to people!
Fair point but I feel the examinations still need to be performed by the party. Additionally people need touch ups and re-examination if it's many years later as education really does atrophy over time if it's unused information, I can't remember any maths formulae that I definitely memorised for my exams and my French is atrocious but was alright back when I did exams.
Additionally people need touch ups and re-examination if it's many years later as education really does atrophy over time if it's unused information,
Officials have terms. If they are at the end of their term, do the voters view them as fit to keep going or don't they? If they want to keep going, they probably should prepare, since that's a good way of appearing fit. Further, if there is some precipitous decline or even if it turns out they weren't really prepared, there're recall elections. I wonder if China has those.
Edit: It was "Whole People's State", which rhetorically makes way more sense. I got mixed up.
I'm sure that politicians being uneducated was a problem in the Soviet Union, but there were people who would at least turn revisionist who were among the Soviet vanguard since before the October Revolution. The problem fundamentally isn't ignorance, or it is somehow that many years of schooling are needed not to trip and fall into being a reactionary. The former means that education won't solve it, the latter is basically an excuse for having a party of the elite who the plebians can't hope to understand the intellectual workings of, who they must sit passively by and approve or disapprove from the short procession of learned individuals who had the privilege to go through all this political grooming.
what
Can you define what the vanguard party is please?
Historically, I am referring to the Bolsheviks and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Generally, a vanguard party is the forward segment of the population that is educated on and dedicated to the project of social revolution and agitates and organizes among the general population towards this end, and though it becomes something more administrative when it has control of the state, those two functions remain, as does the need to not (try to) compel the masses into something they don't want to do. There can be no benevolent tyrants, just educators who operate with the popular mandate.
You have to pass tests to become a Party member in the same way you need to pass tests to become a doctor or an engineer or a teacher. What's the problem with that? Are people here against having qualified professionals in important jobs that affect people's lives?
Yes, yes, I am quite familiar with how a petty official needs to often perform legislative bypass surgeries or calculate the drag on a court ruling. Absolute sophistry.
Licensure provides a basis for accountability defined by the government, whose legitimacy is founded on democratic input. Can you spot the contradiction in the government, whose legitimacy is founded on democratic input, handing out licenses that decide who democratic input is permitted to select?
The basis for accountability of an institution that is only legitimized by the popular mandate must also be democracy. The people can decide if their will is being carried out, and if it isn't they can pick someone else (preferably by recall if it's really a problem).
It's great how you left out the teacher example, as if people needing to take tests and get certified in knowledge to practice is only for the elites. Massage therapists need certifications. Drivers need certifications. Why does the job of politician need to be accessible to literally any person at any time just because enough people want it to be so? This is a Communist nation which is designed around Communist, materialist principles, founded in Marxism but applied to the conditions of China. Do you even know what those things mean? Do you have a firm grasp of dialectical materialism? Have you studied and internalized these concepts, the history, the ideology? Would you be able to go out into the world and represent it to people through practicing it?
If so, congratulations, you have done something that is inherently complicated and requiring of a lot of dedication. Most people on this website who claim to follow these things could not pass a test about them; they do not practice it in real life and have never seen it in person. It isn't something that any random person is going to be able to do and understand just because enough people say "sure you can be in charge of making sure our village is administered correctly." You have to be able to send useful information up the chain of people who are experts on these things and more, and be able to understand what comes back down. You have to bid for budgets from these bodies to be able to enact what are often large scale operations, an example of which is in OP's link. Do you think any person can manage these large projects with small teams and limited resources just because they are voted to do so and think "sure why not?" Or do you just assume that whatever is happening in these "petty" offices is catching stray cats?
Licensure provides a basis for accountability defined by the government, whose legitimacy is founded on democratic input. Can you spot the contradiction in the government, whose legitimacy is founded on democratic input, handing out licenses that decide who democratic input is permitted to select? The basis for accountability of an institution that is only legitimized by the popular mandate must also be democracy. The people can decide if their will is being carried out, and if it isn't they can pick someone else (preferably by recall if it's really a problem).
You provided the answer to your own proposition. Recalls are possible, and the different candidates who are eligible to run can try it out. If the metric is the people deciding if their will is being carried out, the 75 years of the people recalling and replacing officials in this exact way and the CPC currently having over a 92% approval rating shows clearly that their design has worked better than any ever seen in the modern day for a functional democracy. Just like I can pick my doctor, who teaches my kid, who I get a massage from, where I get my food from, who builds my house or paints my walls, I'd much prefer to be able to pick my elected officials from a pool of candidates who are qualified to do the job that I am trusting them to do. Every role in society now has standards on how things operate. Most things have certifications. It isn't just some elite thing for life saving doctors and lawyers, the very proposition that this is reasonable is honestly a joke, you should really reflect on this. They need to actually understand how the government works, how economies work, how to talk to and understand civil engineers, agronomists, or any other specialist that is required to operate a functional modern place, or at least be trained in how to get those skills, knowledge, etc rapidly. The CPC clearly gets input from everyone who wants to give it, and these people need to take that and work to develop an actual functional plan to solve everyone's problems- including being able to know what is incorrect and will actually derail the growth of the community.
You might think they are "petty" local offices but their system seems to be working better than any other example we've literally ever had so I'll trust the Chinese people to keep their democracy going, and correct it along the course as they have been doing for longer than anyone here has been alive.
As of June 5, 2021, there were 4.86 million grassroots CPC organizations across the country.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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