I'm no expert on China, but this fits the pattern of them making extreme laws (ie death penalty for corruption) and then selectively enforcing them. Laws are tools for the party to use when it feels it might benefit, not universal rules.
Yes, exactly. These extreme laws are only possible because china has "rule by law" rather than "rule of law." They are not applied very aggressively, only to take down enemies when needed.
China isn't homogenous, enemy is left up to individuals with power to define such. This leads to interesting battles where different factions are using similar laws to fight each other.
Even in democracies, the law is abused by those in power. I distinctly remember one party here in germany, slowing down criminal processes of member of the oppossing parties, so that there trials could be held during the election campaigns.
What's really interesting about this is how unstable it makes the country. Clamp down and eventually you end up in a USSR situation where the government suddenly disintegrates with little real warning because there is no feedback loop to maintain stability.
Things seem ok because everyone ends up walking around pretending things are good even the people enforcing the rules. Untill you get a little spark and suddenly nobody is willing to stop it.
PS: I am not saying it's going to happen, but I expect the odds of complete failure in the next 20 years are well over 5%. And if it does fail things could get insanely ugly.
The xinjiang things are fully justified. Serious problems with terrorism, random knifings, random needle injections, etc. Very bad stuff. As long as china doesn't allow the han population to carry defensive weapons they have no choice but to suppress the murderous muslims there. You want to go to a restaurant or a store? Metal detector and xray machine for your bags. (My wife is originally from there and she has relatives who live there now).
Maybe there are legitimate grudges the "murderous muslims there" have which are not addressed by the state? Like the right to political self-determination.
China is an export driven economy. If a crash were to come, it would be because of a sudden lack of trade (e.g. 2008). Chinese companies are already heavily levered.
China knows better than the west what powers can be exercised on the net.
They've been testing it for a long while and all the old assumptions "the net treats censorship as damage and routes around iT" etc. have been found wanting in China.
As the power of the nation state returns to ascendancy, now with IT firmly under its yoke, I suspect that China will do much better and succeed.
Instead - I think the west is going to end up following China in some format or the other.
Edit - as analogy: the market can remain irrational longmer than you can remain liquid.
Govt can suppress and succeed longer than you expect.
The net does route around censorship; why do you think China keeps passing laws to outlaw VPNs that are already illegal? What the net doesn't handle as well are the armies of paid commentators the state uses to inflate it's preferred opinions.
If you really want to know what happened at Tiananmen in 1989, you can find a way to "jump the wall" and find out. It's just that most users aren't actively looking for alternatives to the propaganda statements, so their opinion on the state will be formed by enthusiastic reporting on the "belt and road" program or some other party-led initiative.
Well... the states continue to control the media now don't they?
And with the new tools, in particular the ability to sock puppet and impersonate human behavior in a context poor environment (you can't physical see the person, so can't make out if they are real or not, or body language and other factors we normally have during interaction).
So wouldn't it be fairer to say that they now have stronger control?
Their government's current history is measured in decades. Future historians may yet measure it in decades. Do not be so quick to praise tyranny. It will last until the economy plateaus. Only then will we see if it is resilient.
You could say that about Europe, the Middle East, South Asia.
If China does undergo civil and political upheaval I don't think it has the social institutions or mechanisms to suddenly switch to enlightened liberal democracy, history matters, but that doesn't mean the Communist Party is guaranteed political control in perpetuity.
Thing about it is, the USSR could have stayed in power if they had been willing to get bloody enough.
If Stalin had been in power (or even Khrushchev) the USSR would not have collapsed. There may have been another holodomor. There may have been another terror. But the government would have survived.
This is a lesson the CCP learned watching events unfold to the north, and they put it to work in 1989. The question is if they still are willing and able to do it. I suspect the answer is 'yes.'
Dictators can't wave a wand and cause such things they need people and institutions to enforce their rule. More importantly they need accurate information information about what is and is not working. So, sure in 1960 in theory they could have changed things and kept the system running, but that's not nessisarily true of say 1985. And I my expectation is they did not really grasp how close to failure they where in 1960.
Doing terrible things is not enough to keep governments operating at scale. The general trend is the opposite where the worst atrocities where commuted by governments that failed shortly afterword.
EX: Cambodian genocide (adjusted for population) was far worse than any similar time period in recorded Chinese or Russian history and it did not help.
(forgive me but this short comment gave me quite a bit to think about :P)
It's definitely necessary to have accurate information to keep things running, but there are certain aspects of the notion of 'accurate information' when it serves an ideological purpose that are pretty unexpected.
For instance, Stalin believed his doctors were part of a conspiracy to kill him, so he would have his doctors and those of all top officials arrested and tortured, to the point of forced confession. The crime was not simply planning to murder, but planning to kill sacred revolutionaries [0].
This example is typical of the Stalinist concept of "objective guilt": it does not matter there wasn't a shred of evidence to the conspiracy. The ideals were used falsely to prove lies as true - not because the ideals were meaningless or because they were there to justifying any whim. But because swifter and harsher punishment would go to the one articulating why it was obvious no one really actually believed the stated rules. That instead they all obeyed unspoken, subjective rules - externally praising Soviet ideals only to avoid causing themselves horrible punishment. That the system they called objective was actually extremely repressive because of its sheer intersubjectivity..
Though upon reflection, it provokes two questions: "Why could the same Stalin who either truly believed his subjective will was the actual manifestation of historical necessity, or merely dictated as if he did, hold office - during some of the 20th's century's more turbulent periods - for as long as 30 years? And why is it that the reimagined "visionary-yet-non-pathological" Soviet Party that followed Stalin - despite its repudiation of his cult of personality - was even less capable of 'making the right mistakes' towards securing its existence?"
Although one may be forced to say a lie, one will hold no illusions as hubristic as 'having made the correct mistakes' in brutal dictatorships - things are shitty. But when you become self-congratulatory, you hold more illusions. If I lack awareness of my tendency to underestimate my (recursive) uncertainty of my uncertainty of my self-evaluations, I would frequently wonder: "Gee! As if by chance - and without any understanding or memory of what they had in common - all these remote events - which I have disastrously underprepared for - just seem to keep happening to me! And with remarkable consistency"!
I'm not sure if or how China's approach will succeed or fail. But China doesn't have the same illusions as the USSR did about revisionism (and its antithesis). And, the Chinese government does have an external system it is both invested in and holds itself accountable to; one that is also a far less uncertain measure of success than any sort of internal affairs department - the entire world economy.
One of the reason the sowjet state collapsed is because they lapsed when it came to surveilance, as in they started to built massive public housing projects, allowing for family to move into theire own flats and thus escape surveilance.
Another lesson seems to be, that historys smallest revolutionary cell can be bribed into neutrality by economic success.
> Another lesson seems to be, that historys smallest revolutionary cell can be bribed into neutrality by economic success.
The counter for this is people getting used to the good life and wanting more. If a government is able to have sustained economic success even in the face of this irresistible force, maybe it deserves to continue ruling.
We have yet to see if the Chinese government will be able to maintain itself as the average Chinese move higher on Maslow's pyramid.
I wish I knew more about Chinese history. They have about 4K years of institutional memory to draw on and they likely are more aware of their history than we are of ours in the West.
Don't mistake institutional and cultural memory, which are not the same thing! A memory in the intellectual elite sense, and a political cultural memory, and a widespread low-cultural set of norms and understandings are also different things. All apart from the institutions of state, or religion, or bureaucracy, or commerce, and so on, which may have traditions and functional memory going back decades or millennia, depending.
It it's quick it will recover fast, it's if it's a grinding situation like Venezuela or Ukraine or Syria, where change occurs but there are still large blocs of people fighting for the government then it gets horrible.
During the short window where Cuba opened up we had a cuban pastor visit our church. The biggest thing that impressed him about the US was that everyone seemed to follow the laws.
These totalitarian societies where the law doesn't apply to anyone in power the people pretty much follow the example and ignore the law themselves.
Make everyone a criminal and the law is worthless.
As long as the economy is good, the party will remain in power. If they lose control of that then you're right. The question then is, what's the probabability of a major prolonged financial crisis in China starting over the next two decades. 5% is not an unreasonable probability.
It just means they can jail or shutdown who they want. Of course they could and have done that before, so really there is no change. Law isn't what paper says, but what the ruling party decides.
> Of course they could and have done that before, so really there is no change.
It's almost never about acquiring new power, they don't need that. It's about enforcing policy through a more specific enlightenment (ie don't do this, this isn't acceptable, etc). In other words, it's encouragement to aggressively keep with the line they've drawn. The party goals are dramatically easier to achieve/uphold if they have lots of lower level hands willingly helping.
>Law isn't what paper says, but what the ruling party decides.
Isn't this up for debate?
On one hand, in SK a Samsung chief and heir and also former President are facing long prison sentences (some of the protests leading up to this were argued to be the largest peaceful protests in history, ever).*
On the other, in the US a convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, never spent a day in jail. He is a billionaire and very close friend of Bill Clinton's.
I am interested in historically how well the rule of law in the US has or has not applied equally to all citizens?
*I personally found it really strange this has gotten so little attention in Western media.
No, he did not spend 13 months in prison. For 13 months he was required to sleep in a special cell, weeknights only. He was free to leave during the day and weekends.
He was often allowed to leave for work release to help the government build a case against Bear Stearns. He definitely had to stay there during the weekends.
According to federal prosecutors, only one of the girls would agree tontesitfy against him and that wasn't enough to get a conviction.
If you read about the case in sources that aren't determined to link the whole thing to a Bill Clinton conspiracy, you'll see it wasn't an open and shut case. It's pretty likely prosecutors agreed to a deal because they thoght he'd walk otherwise.
The local DA convened a grand jury and they thought there was only enough evidence to support fairly minor charges. Maybe he was paying off witnesses, but you need evidence of that.
Freedom of Speech, and Right to Privacy all the way from "here" (pick your own "here") to a dark, cold, chinese prison cell (and not back, nothing escapes from that).
A man from Jieshou county of Anhui province was frustrated by traffic police, who had established a late night checkpoint for drunk driving. In a chat room that he created, he wrote: “Are they nuts? Checking in the rain? [They are] a bunch of assholes who just want money.” As the insulting comments created negative social impact within his circle, the man was detained for five days for picking a quarrel.
At this point, it would seem the cost of running a chat room would be a bit too high if that's the punishment for "negative social impact" for the writer. I would expect the owner to be just as on the hook.
Makes me so happy to live in what is probably the country with the most freedom of speech. The USA may be behind other countries in some things but not freedom of speech!
If you live in a country with such draconian (and increasing) measures, there is only one thing to do:
Use encryption. If only a few people use it, then they are targeted. If merely 10% of people use an encrypted protocol, it may be blocked. But if EVERYONE uses it, it will be computationally infeasible to decrypt everyone's messages. And banning eg TLS or SSH would be very hard to do.
In addition to this, DECENTRALIZE ALL THE THINGS. When there is no single server, there is nothing to shut down. There is no central owner to intimidate. People will have to go back to the bad old days of "tattle tales" and KGB spies among the regular people.
And seriously, if democracy works at all in these countries, all lawful means must be taken to defend what is left of freedom of speech. Who are these people who are actually making these laws, anyway? Every time they break them, it should be publicized.
> The USA may be behind other countries in some things but not freedom of speech!
And that's why it's important to fight those who would introduce Chinese-like censorship to the west in the name of combating "hate speech" or whatever else tickles the moral panic of the day. Efforts like Google's Conversation AI seriously worry me: they have the potential to shape thought the same way that the Chinese approach does.
In a sense, it doesn't really matter whether it's the government or a big corporation that performs automated censorship. Either way, your life can be adversely and drastically altered because some god damn neuron tripped over its activation function and called you a monster.
"In a sense, it doesn't really matter whether it's the government or a big corporation that performs automated censorship."
It does matter. If it's a company doing this, you still are free to run your own servers and say anything you want. If it's the government, you don't have that freedom. You can be jailed, fined, executed, exiled...
> If it's a company doing this, you still are free to run your own servers and say anything you want
The Daily Stormer recently had a different experience. Besides, when your entire life's infrastructure depends on an ecosystem of data services, being suddenly disconnected from that ecosystem is tantamount to banishment. That's definitely the kind of punishment that can discourage speech.
It really can. That's what it is supposed to do. However, some companies don't wish to associate with certain speech. That's as much their right to free speech as anyone else's right to free speech. You can create your own stuff and no one is stopping them. From a government perspective you have free speech. No business has to sponsor your speech if it offends them or hurts their business.
It has everything to do with free speech. It wasn't about being 'disorderly', it was about laughing at a confirmation hearing being considered disorderly.
lawful means must be taken to defend what is left of freedom of speech
...and some may argue, even unlawful means; including one of the founders of the USA:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
It's surprising how extremist that quote sounds today --- ask a random US citizen what they think of it, without revealing its author, and you'd probably receive some pretty disappointing answers.
The USA doesn't have freedom of speech in any meaningful sense. You only have to look at the way peaceful protestors are treated to see that. The Occupy Wall Street protesters were treated horrifically.
As more and more formerly public places are privatised and the veneration of private property as an ideal above all others continues, the USA is simply running out of places where you're even allowed to protest. And that's not even considering so-called 'free speech zones', as if free speech is limited to a fucking place.
Blocking a road is not free speech. Preventing people from going into a building is not free speech. This is just private citizens attempting to restrict the right of movement of other private citizens.
The right to publish any media, no matter how obscene or political, is free speech. And the US has the closest to free speech of any major country.
>Blocking a road is not free speech. Preventing people from going into a building is not free speech. This is just private citizens attempting to restrict the right of movement of other private citizens.
It's a march. It's a protest. Protesting is free speech. Of course it's free speech.
>The right to publish any media, no matter how obscene or political, is free speech. And the US has the closest to free speech of any major country.
No, that's freedom of the press. Freedom of speech is about protesting.
> The right to publish any media, no matter how obscene or political, is free speech. And the US has the closest to free speech of any major country.
When it comes to freedom of the press, Reporters Without Borders rates the US quite poorly - it's down at #43, with the UK at #40. When it comes to anglo cultures, the highest any of the 'five eyes' gets is New Zealand, at #13.
There is a difference between law and implementation.
And in the US, there are states where an atheist is legally barred from being governor. And you can be pretty sure that blaspheming in the nations listed with the best scores will be more acceptable than blaspheming in the religiose US.
As I said, there is a difference between law and implementation.
Also, it's not true that the top-scorers have blasphemy laws - most of them don't have one at all at the moment, and the ones that did were mostly used in the early part of last century (and rarely at that). Even Germany's 'blasphemy' law is actually a 'disturbing the peace' law; you're not going to go to jail for saying 'christ' when you hit your thumb with a hammer.
There really isn't that much difference between US free speech and other western democracies' free speech, despite the first amendment. Yes, it's a little better if it makes it to court, but compared to something like what's going on in China, it really isn't that much different.
However, there's still plenty of limitations on free speech in the US. Look at obscenity laws, for example - nudity is much more acceptable in Europe than in the US. Or if you're a 'freedom of expression' fan rather than just 'freedom of speech', why is sex work still illegal? It's not in plenty of other western democracies.
As a non-American, it just gets tiring hearing the Americans constantly crap on about how much freer they are than everyone else, when there's really not that much difference.
Their bottom up innovation will come to a screeching halt. They will export more young utility focused entrepreneurs fed up and not wanting in to that domineering state whacking their friends. We had a different colonial trajectory, but our own McCarthy era had disastrous cascading outcomes. "Rights to be forgotten" is another peculiar notion popular in some TV propaganda driven Western countries loving makeovers. Keep on rocking in the free world while it lasts.
Don't underestimate the nationalism of young Chinese.
And I very much doubt the CP is going to go after administrators who on-the-whole moderate with a pro-Beijing slant because they took 5 minutes too many to delete a comment.
Making assumptions that all young people hate the CP and would betray their country to the west at first opportunity sounds like one of those classic mistakes the West makes when it projects it's own sensibilities onto the world.
Most outsiders probably do not realize the impact of 24/7 propaganda in every media channel there is. That's what OP is overlooking, and that's ultimately what this action is ultimately about...
You see, even if "young utility focused entrepreneurs" don't like what CCP says, they can pretend they likes it and help spread it. It's called Lying, but people do it all the time. After that, when those entrepreneurs made enough money, they can live outside China and become a citizen of a country they like.
And lying is enough for CCP (or any government I assume) as long as that lie can keep most people loyal to them.
Also, "Young" is just a nature status, it's mean nothing about people's ideology. Lot's of young people joined Nazi in the old days, don't forget that.
>"Rights to be forgotten" is another peculiar notion popular in some TV propaganda driven Western countries loving makeovers. Keep on rocking in the free world while it lasts.
Right to be forgotten isn't peculiar and neither is it at all related to "makeover" TV programmes or freedom.
Right to be forgotten is about have a right to your own information. Collecting information doesn't give you a right to it. Something being publicly available doesn't make it actually public.
There is fair amount of really smart people inside China (in tech scene and otherwise) that probably want out [of the country] but don't know a clear path for doing so, I think efforts should be made to that clear path; to work on companies outside China [where they don't fear for their life if someone made a anti-government comment on their site]. Due to censorship by the national dictatorship such online effort must be done using randomly generated domains (known by word of mouth), hard to censor texts (eg. text inside images that use weird fonts; as intro inside pirated comics/movies/videogames, private messages inside Alibaba and other platform that the Government won't shot down)
There are also a fair amount of really smart people outside of China (in tech scene and otherwise) that want in [to the country].
Almost half the people I've met are trying to go to China to start one thing or another.
I would say over a quarter of my Chinese American friends have moved to China to start a company, while an even larger portion fly back and forth quite often.
Yes, feasible, but what makes large-scale censorship so apparently desirable, or at least so widely desired? The first obvious thought is that there are repressive governments around the world who wish to keep power. And this is true. But it can't be the whole explanation since plenty of relatively free western democracies and businesses are enthusiastically embracing censorship, laws about 'hate speech', and so on.
My guess is that a clue lies in the censorship going on much closer to home, in our own minds. Thoughts which contradict our ideas about who we are and what we should do are suppressed all the time. They fail to reach the light of consciousness. In other words, like the individual mind, it seems the hive mind must eventually develop an ego.
I have noticed that any pattern i see in the large world, I also find reflected in my own mind.
When i've found myself unhappy about some aspect of the broader world beyond my control, i've often been able to find the same pattern reflected in my own mindset, locally.
> There will be false positives and negatives. Lots.
And as usual, the people who appear to be targetted with the laws (the four digital horsemen) will figure out simple workarounds, so the laws really only harm honest people.
Jesus that's so repressive.
And I'm sure the laws are pretty subjective as well or at least not something the average chat admin is fully up to speed with.
Essentially the outcome of this will be to kill chats or send it underground to tor or something.
In Spain, you as a website admin can be found liable for unlawful messages left by your users too. So it's not like this is unexpectedly repressive for me.
Not really, it says: "Conocimiento efectivo por la demandada del contenido de los comentarios alojados por terceras personas en su web. Remisión de fax en el que se advierte de la existencia de estas comunicaciones lesivas al honor del demandante: Al rehusar este fax la demandada incumple su deber de diligencia."
Which translates: "Effective knowledge by the plaintiff of the stored messages by third-parties on his website. Fax receiving in which [the admin] was informed of the lascivious messages to the plaintiff. By refusing the FAX the defendant breaches his duty of diligence"
So this case was about sexual comments against a specific person for which the owner of the site refused to delete such comments; so little to nothing to do with censoring messages against the state.
I don't think it's about anonymous chats, though (AFAIK they're were made illegal in China for some time, just like anonymous commenting). Probably about chats where users know each other. And it doesn't work if there's a snitch among the peers.
For the smaller casual "circle of acquaintances (relatives, friends, coworkers, gaming teammates, etc)" chats, there should be no owner, though - small non-public invite-only communities work perfectly well without administration. This doesn't solve "poster is responsible" but it solves "owner is responsible".
For larger or open chats - yes, the owner should be someone pseudonymous (or just a robot).
Comrades don't need to indoctinate when is way easier for them to just censor by making illegal everything they don't like. Didn't Maduro in Venezuela told its minions a month ago to prosecute twitter users who expressed dissent? He even inspired them to put them 30 years in jail. What we are seeing here is the instantiation of that strategy in internet messages. That doesn't mean that it is not their normal for every other aspect in society. Remember this the next time that The Economist, Time magazine or New York Times tries to talk about "the wonders" of communism.
The Communist Party does not practice communism - it never has.
They are no more communists than the DPRK is democratic.
Communism was co-opted very early on and became just another form of authoritarianism.
The Soviet Communist Party was/is rather like Scientology. At the noob level, in the Pioneers (a lot like US Boy Scouts) it was all about ideals/ideology and honor. At some point, you realized that members got nice perks. More money. Access to stores that carried better food and stuff. And eventually, as you got into higher-level leadership, you started to get that it was all bullshit.
did you ever stop to wonder why every communist state ends up the same? is it possible they misunderstand human motivations and psychology and will always devolve to authoritarianism?
>did you ever stop to wonder why every communist state ends up the same?
Communists have. Anarchists have. I know you're using the question rhetorically, it deserves an answer. Some say that it lies in praxis - the method in which lower-stage Communism is established; some say that it is because of Lenin's praxis, that is, Marxism-Leninism, not Marxism or Communism in general; some say that it is because the state must immediately cease during revolution (this is the position of the anarchists); some say that it is because of poorly maintained democratic models and incorrect transfers of power; some say that it is because of the action of counter-revolutionaries within the party.
It could also be what you said. But I do not think it is nearly as simple as you are making it; arguments have been advanced for the reasons I have mentioned. Where are yours?
I've come to believe that all political systems at greater than community scale end up as kleptocracies. Because power corrupts. And because people are readily manipulated. Especially when so much data is available, and propaganda can be individually targeted.
I used to think that things would improve after the singularity. But Hannu Rajaniemi's novels have disabused me of those fantasies. It could well get worse. The masses become slave minds. Subprograms, basically.
Most systems ended up that way, communist or not. It's more of a human thing really.
We have yet to try communist.
Actually we even have yet to try democracy.
All we manage to do now is a decent amount of freedom, comfort and peace for a lot of people in the same place. It is an achievement, but nowhere close to the terms we like to label our systems with.
It's because utopian projects are at odds with human nature. Attempts to force human nature to conform to the ideals of utopians in power leads to tyranny and misery. We should bear this experience in mind when looking at our own utopian projects. It's easy to mock China's defiance of human nature, but it's much harder to look in the mirror ask whether we've gone too far in our own pursuits of "justice".
>It's because utopian projects are at odds with human nature
This asks the question - what isn't at odds with human nature? Why do you think that utopian projects are necessarily at odds with human nature? Marx and Engels were sociologists, and in fact many modern sociologists are Marxists too. That doesn't mean they're right, but it's some indication that the "human nature" argument needs looking into.
And it has been looked into. Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School, wrote a book called Escape From Freedom in which he details the investigation of the human condition and attempts to identify what human nature is and to what extent it is malleable. The idea that "human nature" is suited to our current mode of production is as he notes a little fallacy stretching back to Freud's time.
The nature of humans is at least in part influenced by their environment. The mode of production we currently see (capitalism) is part of our environment. Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances? Perhaps Marx himself would agree with both you and I here:
"The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."
— Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach, III"
The Frankfurt School is fundamentally post-modernist in its approach, and I reject its ideas that the truth has more to do with domination and less to do with objective reality.
Ultimately, human nature derives from evolutionary biology, which in turn comes from fundamental aspects of game theory. That's why, if we contact aliens, I don't think they'll be as alien as some imagine: their society will be driven by the same fundamental generic imperatives that constrain our own and should be recognizable. We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.
> Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances?
And changed circumstances also arise from changed men, all the way back to homo erectus. Human nature is mutable: genes and culture co-evolve, but with time lags far longer than a few generations that utopian social engineers imagine. Human nature does change over long time scales, but for our purposes, it's immutable.
Might some alternative organization of society do a better job matching our immutable-on-short-time-scales human nature to our technological environment? Sure: it's conceivable. But there's no reason to suppose that the particular forms of societal reorganization that utopians advocate fall into this category.
Historical evidence, on the contrary, suggests that collectivist societies are actually further from the optimum than our present structure, which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice. It's a unique kind of hubris to imagine that you can do better than the distributed choices of billions over centuries.
You're right: sociologists have "looked into" societal reorganization. So have biologists. When we listen to the biologists, we get elegant theories that make sense of both our observations and our failures to remake societies for the better. When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.
>We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.
Nobody doubts this; my point is that our current mode of production has a very strong effect on how we go about our daily lives and the attitudes that it influences; we have overcome "human nature" in many circumstances, but that's irrelevant because it's clear that the way people behave is to do with how they are raised, what kind of attitudes are imbued in them; for Marx labour is not merely something that people do, but it's something that we do which makes us human; thus the changed characterstic of labour, which comes in through the base of society influences the superstructure. I don't know why you seem to be clinging so much to the idea that human nature is as we see it now; Fromm notes for example that "human nature" has changed, such as the arising of the general desire for fame that has only been seen since the 14th century. Yet many would say this is human nature. Do you not think that historical analysis is important here? Socioligists have more of a place to describe exactly what human nature is rather than biologists and the empiricists whose only data is restricted to what they can see here and now. This is too narrow.
>collectivist societies
Communism is the epitome of individualism, the free association of people. All society hitherto is collectivist by definition, man is not an island, he is formed and forms everything around him in the effort to make it non-alienated.
>which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice.
No. Capitalism is no more a natural phenomenon than the Russian revolution's spurred State socialism was. Look at the enclosure in Western Europe and the laws which led up to it, the functioning of the State and how its function has changed. Your idea that we are simply in a natural point which has not been forced in any way, that capitalism is the highest form of development, ignores that history is not linear, and that systems win because people push them. Capitalism comes in to the world 'soaked in blood' as Marx puts it.
>When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.
Analysis of our society does not bad economic planning and/or genocidal killing make. When we listen to sociologists we also get revolutionary Catalonia and universal health care in the civilised countries.
Because communism rests on abolishing property. Practically, you can't abolish ownership without a de-facto authoritarian police state. That follows naturally from the idea of "seizing the means of production" - you can't do that if the capitalist next door pays more money than your cooperatively owned factory where nobody really owns anything, because people will just choose to sell their labour to the highest bidder. So the only option is to make owning things illegal.
In the USSR this is exactly how things worked - you absolutely could not own .. stuff. I mean, you could buy shoes and those were your own shoes, but you couldn't buy, say, a factory. You couldn't buy land to build a factory. Heck, you couldn't buy land, period. You could not choose to live off the land, because all the land belongs to everyone^Wthe state. You worked where you were told (based on education), when you were told, the salary for your position was set in stone, and the fruits of your labour were divided fairly - half to the top members of the party, half again to the middle managers, half again to good friends, and the rest to all the other members of the party (everyone is a member of the party, not being a member of the party is illegal).
This form of government can work and if you remove the corruption element and actually manage it intelligently, it can work incredibly well, and I'll bet you a million dollars there are plenty of people who will love a form of government that removes all choice from their lives.
That said, the form of government, that is probably most close to what Marx envisioned, is maybe direct democracy, with corporations that don't have CEOs, but where decisions are taken again via direct voting (N.B. I might be talking out of my ass here). Those kinds of corporations do exist, but the practice hasn't caught on widely.
When you boil it down, we don't want people to be serfs. The ideal is that everyone captures the full value of their labour, without trampling over the rights of others, and that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy a high standard of living. Getting there requires a really careful balancing act, where you give the people in government just the right amount of power, so that factory owners &c. can't oppress their workers, while at the same time it's not so much as to swing back to an authoritarian system with monarchs and serfs. Currently we call this "democracy" and the economic system "capitalism", but I would like people to not think in magical words and focus on the actual essence of problems and solutions.
I think that a fundamental aspect of that we are yet as individuals within our societies to understand the implications of Nash equilibria (and other significant economic theories).
In any functional communistic society I think that it would need to be taught from a young age in order to provide the populace with a near inate understanding of just how damaging selfish individual motivations can be (when applied on a global scale).
Because so far every communist state has been created by violent revolutionaries side stepping the democratic process. The type of people who join a party that wants to shove the beliefs of 10% down the throats of the 90% are inherently authoritarian. Its no wonder they never become real democracies once they have total power.
I believe is has to do with the competitive winner takes all economic system that these governments evolve within. It breeds distrust, which leads to authoritarianism.
The american colonies were not democratic, they needed a violent revolution to create a democracy. There was no peaceful mechanism for them to take power.
Russia and China were already democracies before the authoritarian parties took over. They could have peacefully taken control in elections if they were able to convince the voters. But instead they disbanded the legislatures and stopped having elections.
"Russia and China were already democracies before the authoritarian parties took over."
Russia was not[0]. One of the key reasons that laid foundations for revolution there was wide discontent of nobles and their arrogance towards common people.
The authoritarians (bolsheviks) didn't like the results (thought the people weren't conscious enough yet to be trusted to be democratic) and disbanded the democratic assembly. Instead they used their own assembly made of up representatives indirectly elected via small local groups where they controlled the voting by force. Which caused a civil war in which the authoritarians won.
The authoritarians were just more organized and better at violence.
An interesting history fact I didn't know -- thank you. But I doubt one election, which results were immediately negated anyway, is enough to call Russia "a democracy". It looks like it was just a (failed) attempt of bolsheviks to get an international legitimacy.
That said, there are modern Communist projects which rely not at all on agrarian population; they believe that education should be tailored to fit the current mode of production; for a view on this, you may be interested in Paul W. Cockshott's Towards a New Socialism in which he elaborates what a society might look like under lower-stage Communism and what methods can be used to get there, and how an economy might be organised.
Communism is nothing about farming or peasantry - this was largely a Leninist invention to apply to the feudal society of pre-revolutionary Russia, and strengthened by Mao Tse-tung in the Chinese revolution. Marx, to my knowledge, had no support for the idea, nor did his contemporaries or predecessors.
And of course it makes sense in context. ('It' being changing an agrarian capitalist society to an agrarian communist society - clearly the natural progression.)
No, NTS applies to cases in which an additional qualifier is added to an object after a claim made by someone in order to disqualify that object from being a Scotsman. In this case, it is not the case - Communists of many stripes, even the some who follow Marxism-Leninism have been critical of the CPC and DPRK. Even the Maoists themselves disavow Chinese Communism after Deng's reforms. Left-communists have always been critical even during the Soviet Union's time. Socialist George Orwell was critical of the Soviet regime. Anarcho-Communist Kropotkin was critical of the Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks were critical of the Bolsheviks, etc. The list goes on.
In short, a great many Communists have not supported the Soviet CP nor the Chinese state, from their inception all the way to now. I've yet to see any evidence of an NTS fallacy.
>Remember this the next time that The Economist, Time magazine or New York Times tries to talk about "the wonders" of communism.
Could it be that, if they talk in favour of it, they have a different idea of Communism to you? Modern Communist academics do, we must investigate the ontology of Communism; a good read on this is from Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. Most modern academic Communists believe that we must search for what happened, how to prevent it and how to move past it, to say nothing of the various splinters and brothers in the Communist family tree - anarchism, Communailsm, democratic Socialism, etc.
If you do reading on Communist literature since about 1950 you'll see they have occupied themselves with this investigation, the very one you are accusing them of ignoring.
Ah yes. India has this law as well. I am part of a whatsapp group from my old school. They decided to make all members administrators. Nice solution except that the person who implemented it is the one who sends most of the crackpot controversial messages. Planning to leave the group, especially since I dont really interact on it.
Of course there is. Here, in India, most people are blind fans of the PM and anything he does is acceptable. that includes the AG stating in the Supreme Court that "Indian citizens have no right to privacy and they are the property of the government of India" and the "bhakts" as they are called still are able to justify that!!
and all it takes to be in this thought prison is to be unlucky to be pushed out of your mothers vagina on that particular plot of land. even if you don't want to have anything with the gov that essentially owns you...
And there was some news that Chinese would start trading crypto coins on telegram and other chat messengers. I believe that will be really hard now, too much risk.
How typical on HN for a Chinese perspective to be downvoted to the bottom of the thread while everyone else flagellates themselves for how "free" the USA is.
Effective 8 October, the following types of content will be prohibited in chat groups on China-based messaging platforms:
1. Sensitive political content 2. Rumors 3...
Holy shit. What is this going to do to the Chinese tech scene? The liability being created here is crazy to consider.
Lets all hope these practices aren't looked at as successful by other governments, I'd hate to see other countries following suit.