Juice [none/use name]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 27th, 2022

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  • From my perspective, the Chinese project as evolved into something like trying to wrap a great socialist party around a capitalist economy in an effort to mitigate the disastrous consequences of capitalist development and prevent the state from becoming subordinate to market forces. Capitalism always requires a strong state in order to function. Western nations chop up state power so that market forces determine the agenda of imperialism. Socialist or burgeoning socialist nations seem to try to keep the state as strong and centralized as possible, while (somewhat attempting) discouraging the individual accumulation of political power to stave off corruption and consolidation of personal interest. This seems to be one of the main points of failure of this model, but the extent to which the country is successful is the extent to which they are able to persist and project the possibility of socialist society into the future.

    I’m open to critique of this analysis as I’m aware of some assumptions present in my method.


  • these two concepts quite literally contradict each other.

    Contradiction is the engine of history. Marxist analysis begins with contradiction. If you think socialism will be free of contradiction then you aren’t using dialectical analysis, if you think capitalism is free from contradiction then you are completely out of touch. Capitalism is a system that thrives on contradiction.

    I’m not arguing that China is “half socialist, half capitalist,” I’m not qualified to make that determination, but it sounds overly simplistic to me. What I am saying is that two contradictory systems can exist simultaneously and may even be the driver to Chinas incredible and undeniable economic success. At the same time it is a country that is rife with contradictions. Resolving contradiction makes new contradictions. Our goal is not to create a society free of contradiction, this is mathematically impossible. Our goal is to create a more fair, progressive, industrious society where the rewards of work goes to the workers. In order to do this we will have to become adept, as China has, at managing contradiction.



  • Wrt feeling pain, where is the pain? Is it in your hand holding the utensil, or in your head, or all over? I don’t think it is extremely commonplace to feel pain when putting a spoon into something soft, but various sensory experiences, even pretty benign ones can be overwhelming. You might have a sensual aversion to it, or there might be a trauma that crops up related somehow to the experience. If you experience neurons diversity, we can have any number of acute reactions to sensory inputs. I definitely feel a physical sensation like pain brought about by acute anxiety, and I’ve heard others do as well.