Interesting thoughts, and nice talking to you too! Abstraction isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s indeed incredibly easy to have bad abstraction that obfuscates reality.

Nice racism on your part, very western of you. Sorry, but I’m a westerner too, and much of this has already been admitted by western press.

The west admitted to helping the Banderites overthrow the democratically elected president of Ukraine, and said Banderites started ethnically repressing Russians living in Eastern Ukraine.

As for NATO, NATO is an inter-imperialist anti-revolutionary coalition force. It’s “defensive” like the IDF is. The soviets weren’t a threat to Western Europe, and neither is the Russian Federation, yet the imperialists in Europe and the US needed to contain socialism to prevent it from spreading and threatening their super-profits.

It was the west that backed a Banderite coup in 2014, sparking the Ukrainian Civil War. NATO has been encircling Russia for the greater part of a century at this point.

That’s a good point, regarding the abstract nature of Gramsci’s work. It’s similar to Marx and Engels in that sense. Gramsci is a difficult one, like you brought up he’s often used in reactionary and cynical ways, despite being very supportive of existing socialism.

Do you think in war you only attack what you directly plan on taking?

Do you have evidence that Russia hasn’t taken Shesterovka?

Communists have been on Lemmy since the beginning.

Yep! It’s incredible how much he wrote under strict observation.

No problem! Gramsci’s a bit fresh on my mind since I read a good deal of him a few weeks ago.

Yep, Luhansk should have just accepted being targeted by Kiev rather than fighting back after the Banderites took power.

No, I didn’t. You seem awfully content to ignore that Kiev was caught killing thousands of civilians.

I’m aware that the UN report tries to blame Russia for Kiev killing civilians and separatists, but it’s still nice to see them admit that Kiev was massacring civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk. The west coup’d the democratically elected president, and installed a Banderite government. It’s no surprise that they’d be seceded from and that this gov would then try to force these same people they’ve ethnically repressed back into Ukraine.

I’m not really sure what you’re saying, then. You made a point about people living in fear, this just generally isn’t true.

You can both produce more efficiently and without excess without stopping advancement.

To be clear, the comment on false consciousness was separate to Gramsci, as an addendum to his theories of hegemony. I find both are good explanations, not that they are the same.

Not really, we need to advance to make production more green, efficient, and to reduce our impact on the environment.

Despite your gut feelings, the data is understood to be accurate.

Progress doesn’t mean the destruction of the environment. You cannot stop the clock. Progress is necessary to stop the destruction, and to take a more harmonious approach. See how China is combatting desertification, and is rapidly electrifying and adopting solar as the biggest new energy source. This is progress.

As for the state protecting the people, this is progressive. Nay, revolutionary. The people take political power in their own hands, and can radically transform the world and better meet their place in it. The wheel of history is pressed forward.

I fear you’re on a pipeline towards eco-fascism. Not saying you’re an eco-fascist, to be clear, but the combination of trying to stop progress while also adopting prop environmental policies can definitely lead people down that road. It’s not a nice road.

It’s hard to call China communist any more. They’ve embraced the strengths of communism and capitalism, even maybe socialism. Using aspects of each where they’re most effective.

I think you’re misunderstanding capitalism, socialism, and communism. China is and has been under communist leadership since 1949, yet not once has their mode of production been “communist.” Communism is the goal of communist parties, itself a future, global economy where all production and distribution has finally been collectivized, and is run along a common plan to fulfill everyone’s needs. Between capitalism and this future state of being is socialism.

Rewinding backwards, capitalism emerged out of feudalism, and is a mode of production and distribution where private ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and capitalists own the state. It is not an aspect of a system, but a system itself. Capitalism is really good at socializing production, bringing everyone together into one unified system, but as this goes on the contradiction between socialized production and privatized profits grows greater and greater. This results in revolutionary pressure.

Socialism, then, is a mode of production and distribution where public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. China has been socialist since 1949. China did not abandon socialism with the adoption of Reform and Opening Up under Deng Xiaoping, it opened up secondary and underdeveloped industry to foreign investment, while retaining public ownership of the large firms and key industries and working class control of the state. It borrowed the ability of markets to accelerate socialization for the least socialized aspects of the economy, while socializing the social surplus, rather than privatizing it.

This is all in the service of building communism, which has been laid out in a simple diagram by Cheng Enfu:

I hope that highly oversimplified synopsis can help explain how this is entirely within communist theory.

But that long term vision causes them to overlook and dismiss real short term pain and problems. Refusing to publicly acknowledge and correct their mistakes, will eventually be the weakness that brings them down in 50-150 years.

I don’t believe this is accurate. China is a developing country, in developing rapidly there definitely arose new contradictions. There’s now a larger capitalist class, a steeper urban/rural divide, and other problems. However, the CPC is not blind to them. State control over capital is increased as industries develop, the “birdcage” is tightened and capital’s freedom to move is strictly controlled and ever-shrinking. Rural development has been a major focus, to bring the living standards in rural areas closer to that of urban living. This is all being done intelligently, in planned fashion.

There is no such thing as a society devoid of problems. What makes China (and socialist countries in general) special is the ability for humanity to take an active role in shaping the future, scientifically, without capital dominating us.