pcalau12i

don’t mind me i have autism

Many worlds theories are rather strange.

If you take quantum theory at face value without trying to modifying it in any way, then you unequivocally run into the conclusion that ψ is contextual, that is to say, what ψ you assign to a system depends upon your measurement context, your “perspective” so to speak.

This is where the “Wigner’s friend paradox” arises. It’s not really a “paradox” as it really just shows ψ is contextual. If Wigner and his friend place a particle in a superposition of states, his friend says he will measure it, and then Wigner steps out of the room for a moment when he is measuring it, from the friend’s perspective he would reduce ψ to an eigenstate, whereas in Wigner’s perspective ψ would instead remain in a superposition of states but one entangled with the measuring device.

This isn’t really a contradiction because in density matrix form Wigner can apply a perspective transformation and confirm that his friend would indeed perceive an eigenstate with certain probabilities for which one they would perceive given by the Born rule, but it does illustrate the contextual nature of quantum theory.

If you just stop there, you inevitably fall into relational quantum mechanics. Relational quantum mechanics just accepts the contextual nature of ψ and tries to make sense of it within the mathematics itself. Most other “interpretations” really aren’t even interpretations but sort of try to run away from the conclusion, such as significantly modifying the mathematics and even statistical predictions in order to introduce objective collapse or hidden variables in order to either get rid of a contextual ψ or get rid of ψ as something fundamental altogether.

Many Worlds is still technically along these lines because it does add new mathematics explicitly for the purpose of avoiding the conclusion of irreducible contextuality, although it is the most subtle modification and still reproduces the same statistical predictions. If we go back to the Wigner’s friend scenario, Wigner’s friend reduced ψ relative to his own context, but Wigner, who was isolated from the friend and the particle, did not reduce ψ by instead described them as entangled.

So, any time you measure something, you can imagine introducing a third-party that isn’t physically interacting with you or the system, and from that third party’s perspective you would be in an entangled superposition of states. But what about the physical status of the third party themselves? You could introduce a fourth party that would see the system and the third party in an entangled superposition of states. But what about the fourth party? You could introduce a fifth party… so on and so forth.

You have an infinite regress until, at some how (somehow), you end up with Ψ, which is a sort of “view from nowhere,” a perspective that contains every physical object, is isolated from all those physical objects, and is itself not a physical object, so it can contain everything. So from the perspective of this big Ψ, everything always remains in a superposition of states forever, and all the little ψ are only contextual because they are like perspectival slices within Ψ.

You cannot derive Ψ mathematically because there is no way to get from inherently contextual ψ to this preferred nonphysical perspective Ψ, so you cannot know its mathematical properties. There is also no way to define it, because each ψ is an element of Hilbert space and Hilbert space is a constructed space, unlike background spaces like Minkowski space. The latter are defined independently of the objects the contain, whereas the former are defined in terms of the objects they contain. That means for two different physical systems, you will have two different ψ that will be assigned to two different Hilbert spaces. The issue is that you cannot define the Hilbert space that Ψ is part of because it would require knowing everything in the universe.

Hence, Ψ cannot be derived nor defined, so it can only be vaguely postulated, and its mathematical properties also have to be postulated as you cannot derive them from anything. It is just postulated to be this privileged cosmic perspective, a sort of godlike ethereal “view from nowhere,” and then it is postulated to have the same mathematical properties as ψ but that all ψ are also postulated to be subsystems of Ψ. You can then write things down like how a partial trace on Ψ can give you information about any perspective of its subsystems, but only because it was defined to have those properties. It is true by definition.

In a RQM perspective it just takes quantum theory at face value without bothering to introduce a Ψ and just accepts that ψ is contextual. Talking about a non-contextual (absolute) ψ makes about as much sense as talking about non-contextual (absolute) velocity, and talking about a privileged perspective in QM makes about as much sense as talking about a privileged perspective in special relativity. For some reason, people are perfectly happy with accepting the contextual nature of special relativity, but they struggle real hard with the contextual nature of quantum theory, and feel the need to modify it, to the point of convincing themselves that there is a multiverse in order to escape it.

The development process of capitalism does not so much as produce “centralisation” (which is ill defined tbh) but socialisation (the conversion of individual labor to group labor), urbanisation and standardisation.

This is just being a pedant. Just about every Marxist author uses the two interchangeably. We are talking about the whole economy coming under a single common enterprise that operates according to a common plan, and the process of centralization/socialization/consolidation/etc is the gradual transition from scattered and isolated enterprises to larger and larger consolidated enterprises, from small producers to big oligopolies to eventually monopolies.

Furthermore, while it is true that socialist society develops out of capitalist society, revolutions are by definition a breaking point in the mode of production which makes the insistence that socialist societies must be highly centralised backwards logic.

Marxism is not about completely destroying the old society and building a new one from the void left behind. Humans do not have the “free will” to build any kind of society they want. Marxists view the on-the-ground organization of production as determined by the forces of production themselves, not through politics or economic policies. When the feudal system was overthrown in French Revolution, it was not as if the French people just decided to then transition from total feudalism to total capitalism. Feudalism at that point basically didn’t even exist anymore, the industrial revolution had so drastically changed the conditions on the ground that it basically already capitalism and entirely disconnected from the feudal superstructure.

Marx compared it to how when the firearm was invented, battle tactics had to change, because you could not use the same organizational structure with the invention of new tools. Engels once compared it to Darwinian evolution but for the social sciences, not because of the natural selection part, but the gradual change part. The political system is always implemented to reflect an already-existing way of producing things that arose on the ground of its own accord, but as the forces of production develop, the conditions on the ground very gradually change in subtle ways, and after hundreds of years, they will eventually become incredibly disconnected from the political superstructure, leading to instability.

Marx’s argument for socialism is not a moralistic one, it is precisely that centralized production is incompatible with individual ownership, and that the development of the forces of production, very slowly but surely, replaces individual production with centralized production, destroying the foundations of capitalism in the process and developing towards a society that is entirely incompatible with the capitalist superstructure, leading to social and economic instability, with the only way out replacing individual appropriation with socialized appropriation through the expropriation of those enterprises.

The foundations remain the same, the superstructure on top of those foundations change. The idea that the forces of production leads directly to centralization and that post-capitalist society doesn’t have to be centralized is straight-up anti-Marxist idealism. You are just not a Marxist, and that’s fine, if you are an anarchist just be an anarchist and say you are one and don’t try to misrepresent Marxian theory.

We are starting from a dislike of anarchism’s dogma of decentralisation and just working backwards.

Oh wow, all of Marxism is apparently just anarchist hate! Who knew! Marxism debunked! No, it’s because Marxists are just like you: they don’t believe the development of the past society lays the foundations for the future society, they are not historical materialists, but believe humanity has the free will to build whatever society they want, and so they want to destroy the old society completely rather than sublating it, and build a new society out of the ashes left behind. They dream of taking all the large centralized enterprises and “busting them up” so to speak.

• Toward a Contextual Realism (Jocelyn Benoist)
• Helgoland (Carlo Rovelli)
• Dialectics of Nature (Friedrich Engels)
• Dialectical Logic (Evald Ilyenkov)
• Science and Humanism (Erwin Schrodinger)
• Critique of the German Ideology (Coral Marques)
• Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Saul Kripke)

This is a completely US/Euro-centric view of what artists are and it’s fucked up to say. We should not be celebrating more workers getting the short end of the stick, we should be showing them solidarity and showing them the way to organization.

Are artists who work for themselves something that only occurs in the US and Europe? I guess I just live under a rock, genuinely did not know.

Antagonizing them just because you think they are petite-bourgeois is completely counterproductive. Most artists are either just making ends meet

I don’t know what “antagonizing” has to do with anything here, and if you work for yourself you are by definition petty-bourgeois. How successful you are at that isn’t relevant. The point is not about moralizing, I get the impression when you talk about “antagonizing” you are moralizing these terms and acting like “petty-bourgeoisie” is an insult. It’s not. Many members of the petty-bourgeoisie are genuinely good people just trying to make their way in the world. It’s not a moral category.

I am talking about their material interests. A person who works for themselves isn’t as alienated from their labor as someone who works for a big company, and this leads them to also value property rights more because they have more control over what they produce and what is done with what they produce.

or working for big companies like every other worker

If you really are working for a big company where, like all regular workers, you don’t get much say in what you produce or any control over it in the first place, then yes, your position is more inline with a member of the proletariat already, but a person like that would also be more easy to appeal to. They wouldn’t have as much material interests in protecting intellectual property right laws because they are already alienated from what they produce.

In my personal experience (I have no data on this so take it with a grain of salt), petty-bourgeois artists tend to be more difficult to appeal to because even in the cases where they have left-leaning tendencies, they tend to lean more towards things like anarchism where they believe they can still operate as a petty-bourgeois small producer. I remember one anarchist artist who even told me that they would still want community enforcement of copyright under an anarchist society because they were afraid of people copying their art.

Maybe you are right and I am just sheltered and most artists outside of US and Europe work for big companies and the kind of “self-made” artist is more of a western-centric thing. But if that’s the case, you can consider the commentary to be more focused on the west, because it still is worth discussing even if it’s not universally applicable.

This doesn’t mean they will suddenly develop class consciousness.

Of course, people only develop at best union consciousness on their own. You are already seeing increased unionization and union activities from artists in response to AI. For class consciousness, people need to be educated.

They were never a part of the bourgeoisie to begin with, and therefore our interests were already aligned.

Many, at least here in the west where I live, are petty-bourgeois. Not all, but the “self-made” ones tend to be the most vocal against things like AI and they care the most about protecting things like copyright and IP law. If you’re working for a big company, the stuff you draw belongs to the company, and even if it didn’t, it would still have no utility to yourself because it’s designed specifically to be used in company materials, so not only do these property right laws not allow you to keep what you draw, but even if they were removed, you wouldn’t want to keep it, either, because it has no use to you.

That is why the proletariat is more alienated from their labor, and why they have less material interests in trying to maintain these kinds of property right laws. Of course, that doesn’t mean a person of the petty-bourgeois class can’t be appealed to, but it is a bit harder. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue they can be appealed to in the case where they view their ruination and transformation into a member of the proletariat as far more likely than ever succeeding and advancing to become a member of the bourgeois class.

But Marx and Engels also argue that they are typically reactionary because they want to hold back the natural development of the productive forces, such as automation, precisely because it will lead to most of their ruination. This is the major problem with a lot of petty-bourgeois artists, they want to hold back automation in terms of AI because they are afraid it will hurl them into the proletariat. However, as automation continues to progress, eventually it will have gone so far it’s clear there is no going back and they will have to come to grips with this fact, and that’s when they proletariat can start appealing to them.

It was the same thing that Engels recommended to the peasantry. The ruination of the peasantry, like the petty-bourgeoisie, is inevitable with the development of the forces of production, specifically with the development of new productive forces that massively automate and semi-automate many aspects of agriculture. So, the proletariat should never promise to the peasantry to preserve their way of life forever, but rather, they should only promise to the peasantry better conditions during this process of being transformed into members of the proletariat, i.e. Engels specifically argued that collectivizing the peasant farms would allow them to develop into farming enterprises in a way that saves the peasants from losing their farms, which the majority would under the normal course of development.

Similarly, we should not promise to any petty bourgeois worker that we are going to hold back or even ban the development of the forces of production to preserve their way of life, but only that a socialist revolution would provide them better conditions in this transformation process. Yes, as you said, many of these artists are “just making ends meet,” and that’s the normal state of affairs. The petty-bourgeoisie are called petty for a reason, they are not your rich billionaires, most in general are struggling.

As for petty-bourgeois artists, if we simply banned AI, their life would still be shit, because we would just be stopping the development of the productive forces to preserve their already shitty way of life. In a socialist state, however, they would be provided for much more adequately, and so even though they would have to work in a public enterprise and could no longer be a member of the petty-bourgeoisie, they would actually have a much higher and more stable quality of living than “just making ends meet.” They would have financial security and stability, and more access to education and free time to pursue artistry that isn’t tied to making a living.

Marxists should not be in the business of trying to stall the progress of history to save non-proletarian classes, and the artists who work for big corporations who don’t own their art are already proletarianized, so the development of AI doesn’t change much for them.

The centralization of production is the material foundations for socialist society and the core of Marx’s historical materialist argument as to why capitalism is not an eternally sustainable system. If you abandon it then Marxism might as well be thrown in the trash because it would no longer have a materialist argument against capitalism. You could only mount a moralist argument at that point. Unless you are arguing that there is a different historical materialist argument possible that you could make that doesn’t rely on appealing to the laws of the centralization?

(1) Marxists are pro-centralization, not decentralization. We’re not anarchists/libertarians. This is good for us as it lays the foundations for socialist society, while also increasing the contradictions within capitalist society, bringing the socialist revolution closer to fruition.

This centralist tendency of capitalistic development is one of the main bases of the future socialist system, because through the highest concentration of production and exchange, the ground is prepared for a socialized economy conducted on a world-wide scale according to a uniform plan. On the other hand, only through consolidating and centralizing both the state power and the working class as a militant force does it eventually become possible for the proletariat to grasp the state power in order to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat, a socialist revolution.

— Rosa Luxemburg, On the National Question

Communist society is stateless. But if true - and most certainly it is - what really is the difference between anarchists and Marxist communists? Does this difference no longer exist, at least on the question of the future society and the “ultimate goal”? Of course it exists, but is altogether different. It can be briefly defined as the difference between large centralized production and small decentralized production. We communists on the other hand believe that the future society…is large-scale centralized, organized and planned production, tending towards the organization of the entire world economy…Future society will not be born of “nothing”, will not be delivered from the sky by a stork. It grows within the old world and the relationships created by the giant machinery of financial capital. It is clear that the future development of productive forces (any future society is only viable and possible if it develops the productive forces of the already outdated society) can only be achieved by continuing the tendency towards the centralization of the production process, and the improved organization of the “direction of things” replacing the former “direction of men”.

— Nikolai Bukharin, Anarchy and Scientific Communism

The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.

— Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

(2) Much of your discussion just regards how AI is turning artists into an “extension of the machine” and further alienating their labor. But, like, that’s already true for most workers. Petty bourgeois artists will have to fall to the low, low place of the common working man… gasp! The reality is that it is good for us, because a lot of these petty bourgeois artists, precisely because they are “self-made” and not as alienated from their labor as regular workers, tend to have more positive views of property right laws. If more of them become “extensions of the machine” like every proles, then their interests will become more materially aligned with the proles. They would stop seeing art as a superior kind of labor that makes them better and more important than other workers, but would see themselves as equal with the working class and having interests aligned with them.

(3) Your discussion regarding Deepseek is confusing. Yes, the point of AI is to improve productivity, but this is an objectively positive thing and the driving force of history that all Marxists should support. The whole point of revolution is that the previous system becomes a fetter on improving productivity. Whether or not Deepseek was created to improve productivity for capitalist or socialist reasons, either way, improving productivity is a positive thing. It is good to reduce labor costs.

[I]t is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse.

— Marx, Critique of the German Ideology

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

— Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

(4) Clearly, for the proletariat, we “full proletarianization of the arts” is by definition a good thing for the proletarian movement.

I’m 28.

A lot of computer algorithms are inspired by nature. Sometimes when we can’t figure out a problem, we look and see how nature solves it and that inspires new algorithms to solve those problems. One problem computer scientists struggled with for a long time is tasks that are very simple to humans but very complex for computers, such as simply converting spoken works into written text. Everyone’s voice is different, and even those same people may speak in different tones, they may have different background audio, different microphone quality, etc. There are so many variables that writing a giant program to account for them all with a bunch of IF/ELSE statements in computer code is just impossible.

Computer scientists recognized that computers are very rigid logical machines that computer instructions serially like stepping through a logical proof, but brains are very decentralized and massively parallelized computers that process everything simulateously through a network of neurons, whereby its “programming” is determined by the strength of the neural connections between the neurons, that are analogue and not digital and only produce approximate solutions and aren’t as rigorous as a traditional computer.

This led to the birth of the artificial neural network. This is a mathematical construct that describes a system with neurons and configurable strengths of all its neural connections, and from that mathematicians and computer scientists figured out ways that such a neural network could also be “trained,” i.e. to configure its neural pathways automatically to be able to “learn” new things. Since it is mathematical, it is hardware-independent. You could build dedicated hardware to implement it, a silicon brain if you will, but you could also simulate it on a traditional computer in software.

Computer scientists quickly found that applying this construct to problems like speech recognition, they could supply the neural network tons of audio samples and their transcribed text and the neural network would automatically find patterns in it and generalize from it, and when new brand audio is recorded it could transcribe it on its own. Suddenly, problems that at first seemed unsolvable became very solvable, and it started to be implemented in many places, such as language translation software also is based on artificial neural networks.

Recently, people have figured out this same technology can be used to produce digital images. You feed a neural network a huge dataset of images and associated tags that describe it, and it will learn to generalize patterns to associate the images and the tags. Depending upon how you train it, this can go both ways. There are img2txt models called vision models that can look at an image and tell you in written text what the image contains. There are also txt2img models which you can feed it a description of an image and it will generate and image based upon it.

All the technology is ultimately the same between text-to-speech, voice recognition, translation software, vision models, image generators, LLMs (which are txt2txt), etc. They are all fundamentally doing the same thing, just taking a neural network with a large dataset of inputs and outputs and training the neural network so it generalizes patterns from it and thus can produce appropriate responses from brand new data.

A common misconception about AI is that it has access to a giant database and the outputs it produces are just stitched together from that database, kind of like a collage. However, that’s not the case. The neural network is always trained with far more data that can only possibly hope to fit inside the neural network, so it is impossible for it to remember its entire training data (if it could, this would lead to a phenomena known as overfitting which would render it nonfunctional). What actually ends up “distilled” in the neural network is just a big file called the “weights” file which is a list of all the neural connections and their associated strengths.

When the AI model is shipped, it is not shipped with the original dataset and it is impossible for it to reproduce the whole original dataset. All it can reproduce is what it “learned” during the training process.

When the AI produces something, it first has an “input” layer of neurons kind of like sensory neurons, such as, that input may be the text prompt, may be image input, or something else. It then propagates that information through the network, and when it reaches the end, that end set of neurons are “output” layers of neurons which are kind of like motor neurons that are associated with some action, lot plotting a pixel with a particular color value, or writing a specific character.

There is a feature called “temperature” that injects random noise into this “thinking” process, that way if you run the algorithm many times, you will get different results with the same prompt because its thinking is nondeterministic.

Would we call this process of learning “theft”? I think it’s weird to say it is “theft,” personally, it is directly inspired by biological systems learn, of course with some differences to make it more suited to run on a computer but the very broad principle of neural computation is the same. I can look at a bunch of examples on the internet and learn to do something, such as look at a bunch of photos to use as reference to learn to draw. Am I “stealing” those photos when I then draw an original picture of my own? People who claim AI is “stealing” either don’t understand how the technology works or just reach to the moon claiming things like it doesn’t have a soul or whatever so it doesn’t count, or just pointing to differences between AI and humans which are indeed different but aren’t relevant differences.

Of course, this only applies to companies that scrape data that really are just posted publicly so everyone can freely look at, like on Twitter or something. Some companies have been caught scraping data illegally that were never put anywhere publicly, like Meta who got in trouble for scraping libgen, which a lot of stuff on libgen is supposed to be behind a paywall. However, the law already protects people who get their paywalled data illegally scraped as Meta is being sued over this, so it’s already on the side of the content creator here.

Even then, I still wouldn’t consider it “theft.” Theft is when you take something from someone which deprives them of using it. In that case it would be piracy, when you copy someone’s intellectual property for your own use without their permission, but ultimately it doesn’t deprive the original person of the use of it. At best you can say in some cases AI art, and AI technology in general, can based on piracy. But this is definitely not a universal statement. And personally I don’t even like IP laws so I’m not exactly the most anti-piracy person out there lol

does the trump base even care about the economy? they seem to just care about the wokes in their video games or whatever. i even saw a fox news segment saying that the economic crash making you poor or lose your retirement is patriotic because it’s like giving up your wealth for the war effort during WW2.

I just sometimes use bigger platforms because, well, the point of social media is to socialize. It’s not as fun if there’s not many people there.

Personally, I would say state capitalism, in the NEP/Lenin usage, and socialism, are different.

The proletariat seizes power by expropriating the largest enterprises which already have socialized production to use as the basis of socialist society. However, it logically follows that in order for this to lead to the proletariat having a dominant position in the economy, for public enterprises that operate for the interests all people to be the principal aspect of the society, then those large enterprises must have already dominated society prior to their expropriation.

If you nationalize the biggest enterprises in a country where there really are no big enterprises and so industrial big bourgeois capital does not actually dominate society, then you will not end up in a dominate economic position after nationalizing them. You would be nationalizing what is ultimately a secondary, subordinate set of enterprises which play limited role in the economy as a whole.

When Lenin talked about the NEP being capitalist, he said that Russia at the time was overwhelmingly dominated by “petty-bourgeois production.” That means even if he nationalized the biggest enterprises, the dominant aspect of the economy will still be the small enterprises and not the big enterprises, and even those “big” enterprises, he said many were not even currently operational due to the war.

The socialist market economy exists in a country where big enterprise does dominate society so there is actually a material foundations for building a socialist society, but small enterprise still exists in a significant degree, just in a secondary, subordinate position.

Because socialism is based on big industry and big industry did not even predominate yet in 1921 Russia. There could hardly even be said to be “commanding heights of the economy” because even the biggest enterprises played a minor role in the economy. It was a largely peasant country overwhelmingly dominated by small commodity producers and petty-bourgeois enterprises.

The question arises: What elements predominate? Clearly, in a small-peasant country, the petty-bourgeois element predominates and it must predominate, for the great majority—those working the land—are small commodity producers.

It took time for the size of the proletariat to grow and the size of public enterprise to grow enough so that the public sector could actually be meaningfully said to be the mainstay of the economy. Even the little bit of big industry they had, some of it was stalled due to the war.

That’s literally China’s policies. The problem is most westerners are lied to about China’s model and it is just painted it as if Deng Xiaoping was an uber capitalist lover and turned China into a free market economy and that was the end of history.

The reality is that Deng Xiaoping was a classical Marxist so he wanted China to follow the development path of classical Marxism (grasping the large, letting go of the small) and not the revision of Marxism by Stalin (nationalizing everything), because Marxian theory is about formulating a scientific theory of socioeconomic development, so if they want to develop as rapidly as possible they needed to adhere more closely to Marxian economics.

Deng also knew the people would revolt if the country remained poor for very long, so they should hyper-focus on economic development first-of-foremost at all costs for a short period of time. Such a hyper-focus on development he had foresight to predict would lead to a lot of problems: environmental degradation, rising wealth inequality, etc. So he argued that this should be a two-step development model. There would be an initial stage of rapid development, followed by a second stage of shifting to a model that has more of a focus on high quality development to tackle the problems of the previous stage once they’re a lot wealthier.

The first stage went from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, and then they announced they were entering the second phase under Hu Jintao and this has carried onto the Xi Jinping administration. Western media decried Xi an “abandonment of Deng” because western media is just pure propaganda when in reality this was Deng’s vision. China has switched to a model that no longer prioritizes rapid growth but prioritizes high quality growth.

One of the policies for this period has been to tackle the wealth inequality that has arisen during the first period. They have done this through various methods but one major one is huge poverty alleviation initiatives which the wealthy have been required to fund. Tencent for example “donated” an amount worth 3/4th of its whole yearly profits to government poverty alleviation initiatives. China does tax the rich but they have a system of unofficial “taxation” as well where they discretely take over a company through a combination of party cells and becoming a major shareholder with the golden share system and then make that company “donate” its profits back to the state. As a result China’s wealth inequality has been gradually falling since 2010 and they’ve become the #1 funder of green energy initiatives in the entire world.

The reason you don’t see this in western countries is because they are capitalist. Most westerners have an mindset that laws work like magic spells, you can just write down on a piece of paper whatever economic system you want and this is like casting a spell to create that system as if by magic, and so if you just craft the language perfectly to get the perfect spell then you will create the perfect system.

The Chinese understand this is not how reality works, economic systems are real physical machines that continually transform nature into goods and services for human conception, and so whatever laws you write can only meaningfully be implemented in reality if there is a physical basis for them.

The physical basis for political power ultimately rests in production relations, that is to say, ownership and control over the means of production, and thus the ability to appropriate all wealth. The wealth appropriation in countries like the USA is entirely in the hands of the capitalist class, and so they use that immense wealth, and thus political power, to capture the state and subvert it to their own interests, and thus corrupt the state to favor those very same capital interests rather than to control them.

The Chinese understand that if you want the state to remain an independent force that is not captured by the wealth appropriators, then the state must have its own material foundations. That is to say, the state must directly control its own means of production, it must have its own basis in economic production as well, so it can act as an independent economic force and not wholly dependent upon the capitalists for its material existence.

Furthermore, its economic basis must be far larger and thus more economically powerful than any other capitalist. Even if it owns some basis, if that basis is too small it would still become subverted by capitalist oligarchs. The Chinese state directly owns and controls the majority of all its largest enterprises as well as has indirect control of the majority of the minority of those large enterprises it doesn’t directly control. This makes the state itself by far the largest producer of wealth in the whole country, producing 40% of the entire GDP, no singular other enterprise in China even comes close to that.

The absolute enormous control over production allows for the state to control non-state actors and not the other way around. In a capitalist country the non-state actors, these being the wealth bourgeois class who own the large enterprises, instead captures the state and controls it for its own interests and it does not genuinely act as an independent body with its own independent interests, but only as the accumulation of the average interests of the average capitalist.

No law you write that is unfriendly to capitalists under such a system will be sustainable, and often are entirely non-enforceable, because in capitalist societies there is no material basis for them. The US is a great example of this. It’s technically illegal to do insider trading, but everyone in US Congress openly does insider trading, openly talks about it, and the records of them getting rich from insider training is pretty openly public knowledge. But nobody ever gets arrested for it because the law is not enforceable because the material basis of US society is production relations that give control of the commanding heights of the economy to the capitalist class, and so the capitalists just buy off the state for their own interests and there is no meaningfully competing power dynamic against that in US society.

China does tax the rich but they also have an additional system of “voluntary donations.” For example, Tencent “volunteered” to give up an amount that is about 3/4th worth of its yearly profits to social programs.

I say “voluntary” because it’s obviously not very voluntary. China’s government has a party cell inside of Tencent as well as a “golden share” that allows it to act as a major shareholder. It basically has control over the company. These “donations” also go directly to government programs like poverty alleviation and not to a private charity group.

I could afford a wife and kids and am not opposed to it, but I am just too unlikable for that to even matter. Lol

I have the rather controversial opinion that the failure of communist parties doesn’t come down the the failure of crafting the perfect rhetoric or argument in the free marketplace of ideas.

Ultimately facts don’t matter because if a person is raised around thousands of people constantly telling them a lie and one person telling them the truth, they will believe the lie nearly every time. What matters really is how much you can propagate an idea rather than how well crafted that idea is.

How much you can propagate an idea depends upon how much wealth you have to buy and control media institutions, and how much wealth you control depends upon your relations to production. I.e. in capitalist societies capitalists control all wealth and thus control the propagation of ideas, so arguing against them in the “free marketplace of ideas” is ultimately always a losing battle. It is thus pointless to even worry too much about crafting the perfect and most convincing rhetoric.

Control over the means of production translates directly to political influence and power, yet communist parties not in power don’t control any, and thus have no power. Many communist parties just hope one day to get super lucky to take advantage of a crisis and seize power in a single stroke, and when that luck never comes they end up going nowhere.

Here is where my controversial take comes in. If we want a strategy that is more consistently successful it has to rely less on luck meaning there needs to be some sort of way to gradually increase the party’s power consistently without relying on some sort of big jump in power during a crisis. Even if there is a crisis, the party will be more positioned to take advantage of it if it has already gradually built up a base of power.

Yet, if power comes from control over the means of production, this necessarily means the party must make strides to acquire means of production in the interim period before revolution. This leaves us with the inevitable conclusion that communist parties must engage in economics even long prior to coming to power.

The issue however is that to engage in economics in a capitalist society is to participate in it, and most communists at least here in the west see participation as equivalent to an endorsement and thus a betrayal of “communist principles.”

The result of this mentality is that communist parties simply are incapable of gradually increasing their base of power and their only hope is to wait for a crisis for sudden gains, yet even during crises their limited power often makes it difficult to take advantage of the crisis anyways so they rarely gain much of anything and are always stuck in a perpetual cycle of being eternal losers.

Most communist parties just want to go from zero to one-hundred in a single stroke which isn’t impossible but it would require very prestine conditions and all the right social elements to align perfectly. If you want a more consistent strategy of getting communist parties into power you need something that doesn’t rely on such a stroke of luck, any sort of sudden leap in the political power of the party, but is capable of growing it gradually over time. This requires the party to engage in economics and there is simply no way around this conclusion.

You people have good luck with this? I haven’t. I don’t find that you can just “trick” people into believing in socialism by changing the words. The moment if becomes obvious you’re criticizing free markets and the rich and advocating public ownership they will catch on.

Trump flubbed the “peace talks” with the DPRK so I don’t know why people trust him to do it correctly with Russia. Trump also is a major reason for the war because Putin was hoping to be able to negotiate with the Trump administration the first time around but all Trump did the first time around was ramp up sanction on Russia. After Trump left office they gave up negotiations.

I assumed they are just using some sort of algorithm to detect me based on how I use the website. I notice if I only post in subreddits I’ve never frequented before on topics I’ve never talked about before I can seem to avoid the block for a bit, but the moment I start posting again in my usual subreddits it’s like something picks that up and recognizes it’s me and then boots me.