The image AI generated. Look at the lady in the back of the image who’s in front of one of the doors.

Also the OP of the image said it’s “an ai generated image on a rage bait post”: https://xcancel.com/salmanso_/status/2004089534167093564

I do not believe that continuing marketization of the Chinese economy nor keeping business relations with Israel are necessary or even beneficial towards the end of international socialism’s victory over capitalism.

Most of this thread was casting doubt on China “developing socialism” so I don’t think coming in here saying it was “without a doubt” doing that makes sense.

That’s part of the beautiful poetic irony of this image. Look at the mural behind the carboard cutout and flags. It’s celebrating the Chinese space program. That’s something that one could very easily interpet as celebrating the country’s advanced technology and industry.

Duplicate post

This image was already posted in this comm merely 12 hours ago and has had a very active comments section: https://hexbear.net/post/7138604

They could have vetoed the US “peace” plan at the security council.

They could have cut all business relations with the Zionist Entity.

Maybe they could have even twisted Putin’s arm and made him choose between Zionism and continued access to Chinese markets!

Who knows? Perhaps they could have even “ruined Christmas” for the western consumer economies by holding up exports and saying “The presents will stop until the genocide stops. If the people in Bethlehem and the rest of Palestine can’t celebrate Christmas in peace then no trinkets for you.”

There are lots of levers to pull when you are the world’s largest export economy!

But “national development” takes priority over proletarian internationalism. No wonder internationalism is left to ideology grounded in the likes of Islam when the world’s largest “socialist” state continues to show every time it matters that they will do realpolitik for the sake of their capital rather than accept potential economic challenges. Making Chinese middle class incomes continue to grow so they can afford to become car-brained is more important.

I think its important to emphasis that Deng said “The Soviet Union […] is now stronger than the United States and Western Europe combined”, as in China really saw the USSR as a greater threat than the US. Outside of moral arguments, I still believe the decisions taken given incomplete information were the logically correct actions in China’s interests.

Bolded emphasis mine

Yeah, so that’s how the cookie crumbles, huh? Proletarian internationalism sacrificed on the altar of national “self-interest”. No wonder they continue to do business with the genocidal Zionist Entity today. It echoes this support of genociders in the past in service of “China’s interests”.

Stalin, despite at times having also done things that arguably made him one that was throwing stones in a glass house, really seems to have hit the nail on the head when in 1949 he said:

As far as I know in the CPC there is a thin layer of the proletariat and the nationalist sentiments are very strong and if you will not conduct genuinely Marxist-Leninist class policies and not conduct struggle against bourgeois nationalism, the nationalists will strangle you. Then not only will socialist construction be terminated, China may become a dangerous toy in the hands of American imperialists.

Source: https://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv16n1/china.htm

[Vietnam] openly trampled underfoot all norms of international relations, flagrantly invaded Kampuchea and frantically intensified their anti-China campaign

Holy shit. Yeah that state in the middle of a genocide backed by China and the US really needed to be protected from Vietnam /sarcasm

Imagine trying to justify one of China’s biggest international L’s like that. I’ve seen a lot of stuff on this site but never someone defending Chinese support of Pol fucking Pot and arguing against Vietnam’s intervention. I had already logged off but when I saw this I did a double-take.

A quid pro quo arrangement with other sections of international capital.

Get down to business, all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them. Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. Since we must necessarily learn quickly, any slackness in this respect is a serious crime. And we must undergo this training, this severe, stern and sometimes even cruel training, because we have no other way out.

You must remember that our Soviet land is impoverished after many years of trial and suffering, and has no socialist France or socialist England as neighbours which could help us with their highly developed technology and their highly developed industry. Bear that in mind! We must remember that at present all their highly developed technology and their highly developed industry belong to the capitalists, who are fighting us.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm

China has highly developed technology and industry. The conditions for why the NEP was considered necessary are not applicable under these circumstances.

“…the best is about to come”

The UN Security Council adopted a resolution on Monday [17 November 2025] that endorses a peace plan for Gaza put forward by United States President Donald Trump and a temporary international force in the enclave following two years of war.

Resolution 2803 (2025) received 13 votes in favour, and none against, with permanent members China and Russia abstaining.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166391

Edit: Fixed alt-text for image

A lot of people on this site using large amounts of hopium to imagine socialism is being built despite evidence pointing towards the capitalist roaders taking control of the country after Mao. Now we have people trying to pretend 5D chess is being played by the Politburo while they continue to abandon any proletarian internationalism, see for example their continued business with the Zionist Entity as one of its largest trading partners and that UN Security Council vote on the US “peace” plan that they abstained from rather than vetoing.

Also, we’re supposed to believe that they’ll transition to a more socialist economy in a few decades time because productive forces need to be built up. Somehow socialism was viable as a revolutionary force in the early 20th century, but now the largest economy on the planet, whose productive capacity easily outstrips the whole world pre-World War I and whose current population is 75% of the world population in 1914, somehow needs a few more decades of a mega-sized New Economic Policy before more expansive socialization of production. (I will remind people that capitalist states can also take control of the commanding heights of production in order to help keep their economy going, such as the nationalisations done in Britain after World War II.) Chances are China will have a lot of internal conflict if another sizeable part of the world has a revolution and is socialising production faster than them because it undermines the capitalist roaders’ excuses.

Ultimately, imo, people waste their time here too often putting hope into China to bring about socialism. Do try to get to know fellow proles in other parts of the world including China, but you should spend much more time focusing on trying to organize where you are. The best thing to advocate regarding China is a policy of non-antagonism: everything I’ve written does not mean America & allies should be confrontational with them.

Sorry for replying late, but I think there is a misinterpretation of terms here stemming from differing definitions of “independent” which I wouldn’t fault you for.

The 17 March 1991 preservation referendum did in fact have an additional question on the Ukrainian SSR ballot about being a sovereign state within the union, which amounted to remaining in the USSR but on the condition that Ukrainian SSR laws would supersede laws of the overall USSR. The voters also overwhelmingly voted yes for it.

The 1 December 1991 referendum, however, was for secession from the union since the declaration of independence in question stated “only the Constitution and laws of Ukraine are valid on the territory of Ukraine.” The secessionist declaration of independence was put forward in response to the attempted August Coup, and had an even larger yes vote percentage than the ballot question I was discussing in the previous paragraph.

As it is, with all this discussion we’re getting into the weeds with legalist proceduralism. Fundamentally, the vestiges of proletarian rule were being destroyed in the member states of the USSR. The successor states were and still are crafted by bourgeois forces overwhelmingly, with their politics primarily being the contest of different bourgeois and petty bourgeois factions. I don’t know enough to say how legitimate the vote counts in 1991 referendums even were really, given the bourgeois banditry that was rotting both the USSR and the CPSU. At this point in time we’re left dealing with the consequences of the international bourgeoisie and those within the USSR who wanted to be bourgeoisie seizing the opportunity they saw, with some help from nationalist discontent along the way. For communists, delving deeper into this question of referendums would just affirm, in potentially different ways, the non-insight that the bourgeoisie are willing to break the law if they think they can get away with it. We’d be better off investigating more systemically the collapse overall rather than over-focusing on the legal maneuvers constructed to veil its bourgeois core, and I think that’s also what you’re getting at with your emphasis on population attitudes, demographics, etc. instead of the legality. I think we’re largely on the same page regarding this.

Edit: Fixed alt-text

I think a ‘How we got here’ that mentions the referendum on preserving the USSR and calls the dissolution “illegal and undemocratic” but alao doesn’t mention the subsequent Ukrainian referendum on gaining independence is poorly done. This is what I was warning about in my other comment becase one is working backward from a conclusion. Everything in this post can be true but still not paint an accurate enough picture of the situation because of what it might be omitting, and the omission early on in the post throws the rest of it into doubt.

I’ll focus on the referendum part because that’s early on and an easy example. (Apologies in advance for playing Devil’s Advocate for a bit.)

It can both be true that the USSR was illegally dissolved and that Ukraine left the USSR legally.

Citizens of the Ukrainian SSR voted overwhelmingly (except in Crimea, but there it was still a majority) to declare independence from the USSR on 1 December 1991. The referendum on preservation was earlier that year in March. Even if the dissolution of the USSR on 26 December 1991 was illegal, that’s not relevant. If you exercise your legal right to leave an organization and then a few weeks later the organization illegally self-dissolves that has no bearing on you.

The wordiness of the preservation referendum question arguably makes the whole resolution contingent. It’s not hard to say “The citizens of the Ukrainian SSR saw in the months after the preservation referendum that the USSR wasn’t heading in the direction laid out in the language of the referendum, so they voted to leave.”

The two referendums don’t necessarily contradict each other. Mentioning one without addressing the other is cherry-picking and lying by omission. (At best it’s a regurgitation of a point made about the fall of the USSR without knowing the specific bearing that has on Ukraine in particular, jn which case someone is speaking more confidently about the history than they have any right to.)

We need to do better than this.

If you’re having trouble justifying your views, you should be trying to investigate the premeses and evidence to challenge and elaborate your own understanding. Starting with a conclusion you like and then asking for reasons to justify it is intellectually impoverished; leave that kind of investigation to the talking heads on the payroll of various countries’ state departments.

By doing a proper investigation, you’ll have a much better understanding and be able to approach the conversation in a way that’s tailored to your audience. Your views may even change, and that’s not a bad thing!

(As an aside, in the left-Lemmyverse “Ukraine bad” positions can range everywhere from “The Ukrainian government is corrupt and throwing its citizenry into a meatgrinder” all the way to “Ukraine is a fake country composed of Nazis that should be wholly annexed into Russia”. I’ve seen this whole spectrum over the past few years on Hexbear and Lemmygrad.)

For good places to start with interrogating liberal “pro-Ukraine” support, I have some decent articles I can point you towards:

• Here’s an article from last year that interrogates the war’s justifications (I’ll note that this article is also critical of Russian war justifications): https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/11/ukraine-will-be-a-war-without-victors/
• Another more recent article which attempts to tackle the question “[W]hat to say to an idealistic leftwing friend who has become wracked by the idea of flying to Kyiv and fighting the good fight in Ukraine?”: https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/why-you-shouldnt-fight-in-ukraine

Very insightful writeup. Thank you.

I know some of us have been concerned about some of the post-primary developments in the Mamdani campaign. Do you have any thoughts on or insights into that?

I think Garrett Camfferman’s letter published in Cosmonaut at the end of July provided a good overview of a lot of the concerning developments that happened in the first month after the primary: A Disappointing Month—Mamdani After the Primary

We had a thread here discussing Camfferman’s letter a few weeks ago: https://hexbear.net/post/5715480

They already necroposted replies to me in old threads (1, 2) after I pushed back on comments they made in a /c/marxism thread: https://hexbear.net/post/5849684

To me he sounds opportunist with his continual references to expanding the “socialist” market economy (which walks and talks like capitalist commodity production). If he is a Marxist, why is he not openly criticizing these bourgeois economists in China that @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net mentioned and emphasizing a return to broader study of Marxist political economy?

Reform and Opening up Is Always Ongoing and Will Never End

Reform and opening up is a long-term and arduous cause, and people need to work on it generation after generation. We should carry out reform to improve the socialist market economy of China, and adhere to the basic state policy of opening up to the outside world. We must further reform in key sectors with greater political courage and vision, and forge ahead steadily in the direction determined by the Party’s 18th National Congress.

On the Governance of China, p. 87 of the English Translation

The “Invisible Hand” and the “Visible Hand”

We should let the market play the decisive role in allocating resources, while allowing the government to better perform its functions. This is a theoretical and practical issue of great importance. A correct and precise understanding of this issue is very important to further the reform and promote the sound and orderly development of the socialist market economy. We should make good use of the roles of both the market, the “invisible” hand, and the government, the “visible” hand. The market and the government should complement and coordinate with each other to promote sustained and sound social and economic development.

Ibid., p. 134

Revolutionize Energy Production and Consumption

…

Fourth, we must revolutionize the energy market. We will proceed with reform, restore energy’s status as a commodity, build a system of workable competition, and put in place a mechanism in which energy prices are largely driven by the market. In addition, we will change the way that the government supervises the energy industry, and establish and improve the legal framework for energy development.

Ibid., p. 149

(I credit this essay with making me aware of these statements: Against Dengism by The Red Spectre.)