CPI has 650k members, CPI(M) has 100k members.
CPC is the largest Communist Party in the world.
CPC has almost 100 million members. Are they China campists, Marxist-Leninists, or both?
I’d argue that of the international Communist movement, the majority of party members are Chinese.
Campist is a difficult word, given its association with board collapse on Leftypol.
Moreover, you make it difficult for me to try to argue for a more balanced and critical take on China (i.e, avoiding over-idealization that will lead to disapointment on encountering realities), because this aligns with the general Western anti-China take too much.
I support a common-sense level of paranoia. As long as you don’t do something illegal or too threatening, you’re fine.
I don’t think people here are on the verge of crossing the line, whereas on Leftypol you had former posts discussing guns, as well as NAFO glowtrap posts discussing drone terrorism.
TBH, I just think it’s best to assume everything is a glowop and try to focus on useful praxis and useful theory. Even if things aren’t glowops now, if you get enough visibility, security agencies will come after you.
It’s three fabs. Intel, meanwhile, is falling apart.
The important thing, imo, is that the US doesn’t achieve full chip independence before 2030, which allows a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue (i.e, Chinese customs blockade redirecting Taiwanese shipping and passenger traffic to China). I don’t see American reshoring settling the issue early, even though Intel is likely to get automated fabs up by 2028.
I’m probably going to repost a finished version soon, but I’ll leave this comment.
I’m basically trying to import/export socialism with Chinese characteristics to Western contexts.
The only real difference is that we generally do not have control, and are insurgents until we control enough of the economy. And adventurism around the 33% scale becomes viable: i.e, aggressive means to destabilize competitors, like forced unionization, industrial espionage, and financial warfare (hope you liked your CDS in 2008!)
I’d like to put out a fuller response, but I’d rather have fully posted the OP.
I think Hazan put out a similar idea for how he’d want to build the ACP, but I think he’s oversimplified things and hasn’t identified the flaws, even at a minimum stage. I think the ACP, in general, is not qualified for his business plan of having party cells operate as enterprises, and it’ll rapidly go down the sink for that reason.
As for your criticism concerning capitalist opposition, the simple way to do it is simply to publicly list the POE / industrial cooperatives (but not the party itself) once the business is viable, taking care to maintain worker / party control, but allow the bourgeoisie to buy stakes.
It’s Dengist insofar as that’s how Deng and China succeeded; capitalists will sell you the rope that will hang them, if they think it’ll make them a quick buck. If, say, Blackrock and/or Goldman own a 30% stake, you essentially have cover from elements of the capitalist system, because they want to protect their investment.
As an addendum, part of the idea is simply to have a lopsided incentives structure (in at least some of the firms within Red Zaibatsu) such that the business HAS to be Marxist in order to function. To cut to the chase, the level of labor discipline and pay is such that you won’t work at a Red Zaibatsu-held firm unless you were ideologically committed, and if these firms somehow lose their Marxist character, it simply no longer makes sense to work at such a company.
It’s what I’d bring up as to how Huawei works (Huawei is abusive insofar as its prospective long-term employees are expected to sign a strivers’ contract pledging dedication to the firm, which includes being assignable across the planet as the company sees fit, and working extremely long hours. Note that Huawei is still a worker’s cooperative with profit sharing).
The ideological commitment to socialism, in my view, is the competitive advantage that allows “vanguard-type” (not all Party-held firms are vanguard-type) firms to defeat their capitalist competitors, and if you destroy the system of worker and party ownership while capitalists are invested, well, you just forced Goldman / Blackrock to take a huge haircut on their investment, because the company is no longer competitive. That protects the Party-owned economy from the wider capitalist system.
Less outrage, more shades of Diem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngo_Dinh_Diem , who persecuted Buddhists.
Zelenskyy’s approval rating, likewise, is starting to go down the tubes.
Iirc my math was for 3x overbuilding on solar and using massive battery banks, although the 4 cents per kwh figure assumes 1.5x overbuilding and enough batteries to capture all of a summer day’s generation.
Fission and solar are actually enemies because the extreme intermittency of solar overloads the grid in the summer, and provides no energy at night. Coal and natgas have fast generation spoolup, whereas nuclear takes too long, hence solar forces nuclear off the grid.
Ultimately, solar is here. At present prices, in China, at least, panels with battery can compete with natgas and coal for total generation.
With further reduction in battery prices (40 USD is the marginal cost of batteries), and multi-junction carbon or carbon silicon, we probably can get solar + batt to completely replace all existing fossil fuels, as well as limit fission and fusion to baseload or strategically crucial power supplies.
Sounds like they got kicked out and decided to write a kvetch column. Beijing seems more interested in using social media to present a view to the world, instead of a hostile Western press.
Solar + batt in China is currently cheaper than coal and natgas.
Solar is a 100% mature technology that promises to provide further cost savings over existing technologies, and has reasonable odds of reaching the 1 cent per kWh point, where solar is competitive with fusion.
Fission can’t scale to that point; the main point of fission is that it can produce reactors for warships and submarines, as well as uranium for fission, boosted fission, and thermonuclear weapons.
Nukes generate waste, have small meltdown odds (thus medium or larger meltdown odds the more you deploy them), and also the technology chain can be modified for uranium enrichment.
Solar and wind are also popular because their generation can be decentralized, but this is less of a concern for MLs who favor planning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-process_people's_democracy
Wikipedia can’t be cited, but you can always steal its sources.
Whole process people’s democracy
https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202403/03/content_WS65e47e91c6d0868f4e8e494c.html https://archive.is/FNP6x#selection-423.0-426.0
IIRC, the Chinese were exploring similar processes to the Singaporeans, who also have a one-party state (except theirs is a cross between social democracy and fascism, as opposed to a cross between classic AES and social democracy). This employs the use of polling, surveys, and focus groups to constantly investigate what the people want, and put it into consideration for policy decisions.
Another buzz word in China is the mass line, so if you don’t have time or can’t extend the scope to compare and contrast different countries’ definitions of democracy, you can simply explore how the notion of democracy has evolved in China from Sun Yatsen (Sun Yixian) to Xi Jinping, and how China, mostly, lives up to its own definition of democracy.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_65.htm
As the other poster says, define democracy.
Exploring Communist, read: statist, notions of what democracy is as well as what Western notions of democracy is, especially in the context of multiculturalism is at least an interesting angle.
The United States is democratic by its own definition, and China isn’t democratic by American definitions. China is democratic by its own definition, and the United States isn’t democratic by Chinese definitions (look up bourgeois democracy).
This is a more interesting angle than simply arguing that China is a democracy by Western definitions, and if you have time, you can also consider Iran.
Hey ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆, thanks for bringing up organic solar cells.
I’m 100% for a total solar / wind transition, i.e, the energy consumption of the world is completely swapped to low-cost solar panels / wind turbines, backed by low-cost lithium or sodium batteries (preferably solid state).
However, the problem right now is that the Chinese have sufficient production capacity for 4% replacement (given lifespans of 25 years before a panel drops to 80% output) of 60% of planetary energy demand, and we are stuck at the 10 cents per watt module level (which translates to 20 cents per installed unit of capacity in China itself, not including UHV lines, but installed prices skyrocket overseas).
This means that Swanson’s Law effectively breaks down as China can no longer expand production to further lower prices, and China’s currency is about 45% (188% PPP GDP vs nominal GDP) undervalued.
The problem is then that with solar being stuck as it is, we need newer solar technologies to continue the price decline (the American EIA projects frackgas, in the United States, to drop to a price of 1.6 cents per kWh LCOE, from a current 3.8 cent price).
The technology that most people in the West favor is perovskites, usually lead-based perovskites, since China doesn’t have a supply chain built up for it, and lead-based perovskites can be extremely cheap.
But the problem with perovskites is that, ummm, it’s lead-based, degrades rapidly, and you are almost guaranteed that perovskite panels will begin leeching lead into groundwater, especially since a solarized world will have massive panel deployments (you can’t guarantee that none of them will crack, same as how mass-deployed nuclear is unsafe for the same reasons).
Organic solar cells, purportedly “4th generation” solar cells, offer an alternative, although currently efficiencies are far lower than perovskites, and this is not just a factor of technology development, but a fundamental limitation of the technology (band-gap is at the wrong point for Sol’s insolation).
Hopefully, organic solar cells, given their exceptional cost advantage (they’re essentially plastics), can mature and eventually prevent the dominance of perovskites.
Warning: link filled with very offensive material (regarding Gaza)
https://leftychan.net/b/res/154243.html
What’s the use of leftychan if it’s just as bad as leftypol?
Sigh, and apparently a NAFO troll recently killed himself, ex-infantry (not sure if he had MOS changed to psyops afterwards). The rumor was that he was sexually accosting an underage girl, got reported, and well…
But I can’t find any substantiation or investigation of the rumor, and I can’t ask on Leftypol because it’s no longer under friendly control (now we’re getting people calling materialist dialectics stupid).
Would have been a fun scoop though if he was still working professionally, had his designation changed to psyops, AND was sexually harassing minors.
Not going through the WSJ comments, but it’s obvious how the problems with China’s approach will be dealt with should push come to shove after you’ve gone through the article.
China is a Communist state running a capitalist simulacra. The highest stage of capitalism is imperialism, and the highest stage of simulated capitalism is simulated imperialism.
If the trade barriers come up, for a lot of goods, China can effectively just increase military spending (currently at 1.3% of GDP official, or 1.7% according to SIPRI, compare 3%, 3.3%, and 6.8%, depending on who you trust, in the United States) to absorb excess capacity.
The problem with a lot of our concerns (genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the mutual slaughter in Ukraine) is that the Chinese, in both cases, can get off their asses and intervene more aggressively. But they don’t, because they have trade ties with the West and still need to grow their economy. If a new Iron Curtain were to form, however, there’d be nothing stopping them from taking a harsh anti-Western position geopolitically.
Simulated imperialism essentially comes down to the anti-Western bloc having sufficient power to say: stop, this is stupid, or stop, this is obscene, and the West actually has to sit down and listen because it no longer has monopoly control of the world’s hard and financial power.
A second factor is capital goods (commodities used for production) exports. If China is cut off from the West through direct trade, there are a bunch of non-aligned countries that can import low-cost Chinese capital goods, then export the results to Western consumers at lower prices than if the West were to sell the capital goods themselves.
Where these two things essentially combine is in greentech: this isn’t often mentioned in Western media, but the cost of Chinese battery storage is down to 5.6 cents per watt, or an effective cost of 2-3 cents per kWh generated. Chinese solar installed costs, at the largest scales, is currently about 20 cents per watt, which translates to half a cent or 1 cent per kWh of raw electricity.
Or, in other words, batt + solar is cheaper than frackgas or coal for new power generation. This essentially comes down to a neoconservative excuse to force countries off American frackgas or Western nuclear and make them buy solar + batt.
You have to produce in China to keep costs down, but you can’t sell effectively in China due to state-mandated hypercompetition driving everyone to zero profit.
Turns out Communists are better at capitalism than capitalists are.
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