Lol, we basically said the same thing but you did so far more succinctly.

Since when was socialism “receiving shares from employers?” Socialism is a mode of production and distribution centering public ownership of the means of production, the dominant aspect of China’s economy is the public sector with a working class state. This is socialism.

As for your word salad, tankie is just a pejorative for socialists that support existing socialist states, “Dengism” isn’t a thing, and all states are “authoritarian,” so the important aspect is which class controls the state, not if the state exists or not.

“True socialism” isn’t a thing, socialism is not a religious vow. It’s a material system where public ownership is the principal aspect and the working classes control the state. Receiving shares from employers is a weird, petty bourgeois notion of socialism utterly disconnected from the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. Rather than making everyone a worker-owner of the individual firm they work at, socialism leads towards everyone owning all of production and distribution.

PTB has a decent and growing foothold in Belgium, which is fantastic, but that’s about as good as it gets in bourgeois democracy, and speaks more to the effectiveness of parties like the PTB than the effectiveness of bourgeois democracy.

I’m aware of the brutality of “artisinal mining,” I suggest you reread my comment. I edited it with supporting evidence showing that “artisinal mining” has been falling dramatically as China has gotten involved in developing the DRC’s extraction industries, falling to less than 10% from staggering heights of over 50%.

Further, I suspect you just had an LLM spit out “evidence of corruption in the CPC” or other such line. That wouldn’t make it inherently wrong, but there’s no link to any evidence supporting your statements, and further, class is not the same as income or wealth. The CPC is highly meritocratic, which does result in CPC members having better educational backgrounds, which does have connection to wealth. However, the difference being a measly 25% at most is staggeringly low compared to bourgeois parties that deliberately empower capitalists.

The vast majority of the population supports their government, actually, because they are treated very well. Over 90% of the population supports the CPC. NIRA data’s latest polling found China to be one of the more comprehensively democratic countries in the world as seen by its own population:

The PRC is a socialist state, not a state capitalist state like the Republic of Korea, US Empire, or Singapore. China being socialist has nothing to do with the name of the party in control, and everything to do with the mode of production and distribution in China. Rather than a neoliberal paradise, it’s closer to a nightmare for neoliberals. This editorial from The Guardian explains it quite well, actually:

But Xi’s support for mixing private and public ownership structures was purely pragmatic. It had value, he said in another forum, because it would “improve the socialist market economic structure.” Xi’s assessment is echoed by Michael Collins, one of the CIA’s most senior officials for Asia. “The fundamental end of the Communist party of China under Xi Jinping is all the more to control that society politically and economically,” Collins argued earlier this year. “The economy is being viewed, affected and controlled to achieve a political end.”

…

The party’s overarching aim, though, has remained consistent: to ensure that the private sector, and individual entrepreneurs, do not become rival players in the political system. The party wants economic growth, but not at the expense of tolerating any organised alternative centres of power.

…

“[Capitalists] act as if they are being chased by a bear,” wrote Zhang Lin, a Beijing political commentator, in response to these comments. “They are powerless to control the bear, so they are competing to outrun each other to escape the animal.”

Class is a relation to ownership of the means of production, not a total level of wealth. Allegations of corruption and negligence from the west are common, cheap, and hypocritical. The NPC has a handful of capitalists, and instead is dominated by the working classes, as is the CPC itself.

The working classes do control the state in China. The class breakdown of the NPC is largely proletarian, and anti-corruption campaigns happen regularly under the current Xi Jinping administration. The Hu Jintao era was worse about letting capitalists into the party, but this is a relic of the late 90s and 2000s period.

As for China and extraction operations in the Congo, this is not itself imperialism. For example, the share of “artisanal mining” (a real misnomer, it doesn’t refer to mining by sole proprietors but instead to mining by hand in brutal conditions, with little regard for safety) in the DRC has been falling steadily since 2008, going from 40-53% to 9-11% in 2020. This is evidence of development, not super exploitation for superprofits. Here’s an excerpt from a good article:

Minnon shows that China has been part of the solution, not of the problem. “China has responded to the DRC’s need to have partners who invest in industrialization,” she writes. Western colonists had bled Congo dry through onerous debt, leaving it “weighed down by a burden that prevented it from developing economically. In 2001 industrial production was at a standstill, mining sites deserted.”

When the DRC turned to the World Bank and IMF for help, they insisted on privatizing the mining sector, laying off thousands of mine workers. Hundreds of mines were sold with “dormant mining titles” to foreign companies – “not to produce but to resell them at the right time” for big profits.

The measures didn’t wipe out the mining industry, but they pushed thousands of laid-off mine workers and their families to fend for themselves as artisanal miners, and then sell the minerals to processing companies. That was the situation described in Cobalt Red.

China’s role has been to bring new, large-scale investment on a new basis: combined financing for industrial mining and public infrastructure – roads, railroads, dams, health and education facilities. The result was “After decades of almost non-existent industrial production, the country became and remains the world’s leading producer of cobalt and, by 2023, became the world’s third largest producer of copper.” The new deal “puts an end to the monopoly of certain Western countries and their large companies whose history shows that this exclusivity has not brought development to the country.”

The arrangement has dramatically reduced the role of artisanal mining. “Since the enormous increase in production in the mining sector in Congo, 80% of mining production is done industrially. Sicomines [China-Congolese Mining Co.] has built the most modern factory in the DRC for processing raw copper.” The same is true for cobalt, replacing artisanal mining with organized, industrial production. Industrial mining is a reversal of artisanal mining.

“Resource-for-Infrastructure (RFI) deals like this all over Africa have helped China foster strong relations with several countries,” writes Halim Nazar of India’s Institute for Chinese Studies .

Western competitors are not happy. “The IMF publicly criticized the DRC for taking on too much debt,” Nazar writes. But it has been a “debt-investment” based on real growth.

I’d like to know what you mean by China committing atrocities and buying off politicians.

Democracy is rule by the majority, which really means in practice a country where the working classes are in control. Bourgeois “democracy” guises capitalist control in a cloak of electoralism, obscuring unpopular candidates with positive wins in the realm of capitalist controlled elections.

Socialism is, put simply, a society where the working classes have control of the state, and public ownership is the principal, ie rising and dominant, form of ownership. China has therefore been socialist since the victory of the CPC in 1949 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

Imperialism is, put simply, a form of international economic extraction of surplus value from one country to the other. It isn’t the same as trade between more developed and less developed countries, but in the modern era is a late stage in monopoly capitalism. It’s defined by the following characteristics:

-The presence of monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.

-The merging of bank capital with industrial capital into finance capital controlled by a financial oligarchy.

-The export of capital as distinguished from the simple export of commodities.

-The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations (cartels) and multinational corporations.

-The domination and exploitation of other countries by militaristic imperialist powers, now through neocolonialism.

-The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers.

As the PRC is a socialist country, it’s pretty easy to see that they are not controlled by monopoly finance capital, and that export of capital is not how their economy is driven. We can see the difference and validity of the above explanation in how African countries a part of BRICS and BRI have seen development and growth rather than stagnation and a loss of sovereignty, like they do when under the thumb of imperialist and neocolonial countries like the west.

Latin America will rise! All of this depends on the death of imperialism and neocolonialism.

The rise of the global south and socialist countries like China, and the simultaneous and linked decline of imperialism and neocolonialism.

I didn’t make the meme, I am conveying the intent and explaining the numbers.

They are approval ratings, not electoral results. Bourgeois democracy regularly fails to put popular candidates in power.

Russia has committed war crimes, I never said otherwise. You asked for evidence of Ukraine committing war crimes, and I gave that evidence. I also explained that treating war crimes like a measuring stick is horribly reductive, you’ve deflected beyond the central question of self determination for the Donbass region.

I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. Caping for neofascists like you’re doing isn’t received well here.

The war has been going on for over a decade, history didn’t start in 2022. Ukraine is regularly shelling civilian populations, just the other day they murdered a dozen teenage girls in a shelling attack. The Statesian/Zionist attack on Minab Elementary School comes to mind as a parallel.

Excellent point to make. Pluralism isn’t bad in every case, though it can lead to factionalism of course, but the idea that it’s democratic itself is horribly wrong.

From the thread I linked elsewhere:

• https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/40th-periodic-report-human-rights-situation-ukraine-treatment-prisoners
• https://www.npr.org/2023/01/31/1152743054/human-rights-watch-ukraine-landmines
• CNN coverage of Donbas in 2014 https://xcancel.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296
• UN finds no genocide https://news.yahoo.com/un-commission-fails-evidence-russias-160057021.html
• https://mronline.org/2023/07/30/russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-the-conflict-in-ukraine/
• Stoltenberg admits NATO was in Ukraine since 2014 https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_211698.htm
• https://www.kanekoa.news/p/osce-reports-reveal-ukraine-started
• HRW https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions
• Donbas documentary 2016 https://youtube.com/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs
• clip from the doc https://odysee.com/@justsomeclips:2/trade-union-burning-2014:8
• Ukraine in Donbas https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2022/08/10/what-ive-seen-of-ukraines-war-crimes-against-civilians-in-the-donbass-over-the-years/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2023/09/06/ukraines-arms-supplier-maidan-massacre/
• Poroshenko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHWHqj8g7Bk

Essentially, killing civilians, torturing prisoners, shelling civilian areas, similar tactics to the IDF with respect to the Donbass. Makes sense considering Israel and Ukraine occupy similar roles for western imperialism, both are staunch allies, and both are run by fascists.

We already understand that, the point is that bourgeois democracy is a farce, as it leads to deeply unpopular figures getting elected. Socialist democracy is necessary.

Pluralism has nothing to do with whether or not the will of the people is accurately reflected. One party states often have higher democratic representation because the people can more directly influence policy.

Kiev has committed massive numbers of war crimes. If your point is that committing war crimes should be a measuring stick, and the side with fewer war crimes is correct, then this is horribly reductive. Ukraine was fine with Russia until the west backed a coup in 2014 and empowered neofascists, this is why the whole civil war erupted and transitioned to war with Russia in 2022.

As for popularity, no state has “free media.” The people legitimately support Putin, in general, though the communists have been gaining ground.

As I said, tankie is a pejorative used against people that defend socialist states. Self-described “democratic socialists” are not socialists that have “learned from history,” they are those who have removed themselves from it. Socialism, both in theory and historically, is fundamentally democratic. Demsocs are, in practice, those who claim to support socialism while accepting bourgeois historiography, whining and weeping for the oppressed fascists, landlords, and capitalists that wind up at the short end of existing socialism.

As for the idea of there being no authoritarian socialist states, I mean quite the opposite. There has never been a “non-authoritarian state” in general, as the state itself is a monopoly on violence in the hands of a given class. All slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist states have been authoritarian, but each serves wildly different classes, the socialist state representing working class authority. That’s why the question isn’t “is this state authoritarian or not” and instead is “which class controls this state?”

As for the bit on the Donbass, 14,000 people were killed by Kiev, many civilians. Do these civilians not have a right to their own self-determination, to secede from a neofascist state?

The communists have been on Lemmy since the beginning.