this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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LOL ๐คฃ
comparing CCP China to California...
Noice ๐๐
What's your point? What is the GDP of California? The population density of the Bay area? California not having any high speed rail is straight up embarrassing. Same thing applies to the eastern corridors in both the states and Canada.
Canada is opting for HFR and claims that the harsh weather and at-grade crossings makes HSR impractical in the near future. It's not the best excuse, but at least VIA's new trains top out at around 200kmh.
Maybe compare California with Spain (4000 km of high speed rails).
I like that better... Spain probably has a full democracy to boot...
And doesn't feel the need to make fake videos about their rail.
No, it's authoritarianism vs democracy. It's a very well-known concept in political science that authoritarian regimes can make decisions and execute on them far faster than democracies. The problem is that autocratic decision making ultimately creates instability by implementing policies and decisions that don't have a broad base of stakeholder support. Why should any citizen support a decision that was made without their input or consent?
It's also a reflection of how much power money still holds even in the US's democratic system. The decision to not build high speed rail in California was heavily influenced by a single billionaire, it wasn't voted on.
America isn't a democracy. It's a democracy of the rich and always has been, the rest us were begrudgingly allowed a vote over centuries but our influence is still very limited
A plutocracy, you might say.
And yet the Titans of Industry tended to support Clinton over Trump: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/10/25/donald-trump-a-billionaire-shunned-by-the-very-rich
In this case I would have preferred the outcome of the billionaire-backed candidate winning.
Do you understand how the Chinese political system works? I'd recommend that you learn a bit more about it from the Chinese perspective because Western generalizations of it miss a lot of details.
I'd recommend that you start from the bottom (how people can join the party and take office, how rural collectives work, how protests influence local policy) and make your way up to the municipal, provincial, and national level.
You'll see how each level has checks and balances to make sure that they make good decisions, and you'll see how the incentive structure rewards "good" decisions. You'll also see where a lot of the corruption comes from (in rural collectives) and why efforts to fix that haven't worked as well as they could.
So same as the US democracy then. All that matters is money and nothing else. Musk did the Hyperloop bullshit just so it would delay the train and people would be more Tesla's.
What a fancy way to avoid acknowledging the hard truth. Western democracies have failed their "stakeholders" by shunning rail in favour of car centric infrastructure. In doing so they have benefited the auto and oil industries at the expense of the health, safety, and quality of life of everyone.
North America's lack of high speed rail is an absolute embarrassment.
That shows your misunderstanding of who the Western governments think the stakeholders really are. It's the auto and oil industries. The governments are serving them just fine
China has also built tons of car infrastructure. Gone are the days where millions of Chinese rode bicycles, dominating the streets. Now, millions of bicycles are second to the mighty Chinese car.
If you know anything about China, you'll know it barely reflects communism. It's largely structured around capitalist goals and the government reflects more of a corporate structure than anything.
Google leans towards standardized/compatible features while Apple leans towards proprietary/incompatible features. Two competing corporate structures can go about things in very different ways.
What capitalist goals are China structured around?
Their 5 year growth plans.
Mainly high tech chips manufacturing, space technology, weapons technology (hypersonic weapons, nuclear weapons, stealth fighters, aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles), high speed rail, and automotive and electric vehicle technology. To name the major ones.
But these goals aren't inherently or exclusively capitalistic in nature, are they? Capitalism and Communism are both described as a means to an end - that is to say they both make prescriptions on how the means of production should be owned and controlled, but they don't make much suggestion as to what production that refers to. So, in theory, there's no reason to believe any of these goals are capitalist or communist in nature, because people have reason to want these things regardless of their preference of economic structure.
It can be shown in practice that these are not capitalist inherently either. The "5 year plan" is actually a trope amongst Socialist/Communist leaders. Stalin had a 5 year plan that sounded very similar to Xi's, and Xi adopted this type of state planning from Mao himself.
China's weapons are manufactured by China North Industries Group Corporation, which is a state owned corporation, not a private company. China's tech chips are manufactured by SMIC, also a state controlled corporation. The high speed railway is being built by the China Railway Corporation, also state run.
I think people get confused by the idea of "exchanging capital" when referring to trade, because it leads them to believe that capitalism means something that profits from capital, but a state can profit from capital just like how a private unit can. Capitalism is NOT the exchange of capital, it's the private ownership of the means of production. If a state (ie: China) participates in trade, that is not an example of capitalism, because the means of trade are not owned by a private unit.
China is a state capitalist country. So was Lenin's and Stalin's USSR.
State capitalism is an oxymoron, if the state controls the means of trade, then it's not private.
That's an interesting point, however it is widely accepted that states can leverage capitalism by allowing quasi-private corporations to operate semi-independently from the government.
And in fact, many of the largest industrial amd infrastructure projects are only possible by state-funded corporations to undertake them.
For example, NASA, the Works Progress Administration, the Bonneville or Hoover Dam projects, and the development of most advanced American weapons platforms. None of these were possible without direct government funding and management.
There is a surprising amount of gray area between straight up socialism and pure capitalism, and in our world pure capitalism is less common than you think.
Perfect Wikipedia:
This interpretation is not about following the definitions of a word to the teet, but rather to understand how systems of control work.
If you have the same property relations of the means of production like in capitalism, but you switch out the boss with a state bureaucrat, you functionally have the same system. But not with the private ownership, but rather with the state ownership: state capitalism.
If you would adjust your definitions of capitalism here, your political understanding would actually grow.
The boss being a state bureaucrat as opposed to a business owner is a massive distinction. Government employee's primary obligation is to their employer: the government, not the business. This dynamic changes things, it's not the same system.
Suggesting that we adjust the definitions of words in order to believe your ideology is... an interesting tactic.
What's the functional difference between the CEO of a Corporation and some surpreme ruler of a state?
You have it the wrong way around. I simply think definitions should have the purpose of understanding the world better. If a definition doesn't correlate with the world that we perceive, they're no use and should be adjusted. That is literally how language works.
I came to the conclusions of my ideology by thinking about the political definitions I have in my model of the world. If the model/the definitions don't fit, I change it/them.
I was referring to private business owners, not the CEO of a corporation. Considering I think of corporations as an opt in state, I guess I would say not much difference at all. The CEO is beholden to the shareholders (like a state is to it's people), as well as the rules and regulations of the state that legitimizes it.
This actually isn't how definitions work, wilful changing of a word to fit a specific narrative is simply dishonest and has no precedence in legitimate etymology at all. I can't stress this enough, you are outright wrong on this is a really bad way. If you are operating on real definitions and things still don't make sense, it tends to mean you're missing something. You can't perfect an ideology just from isolated thinking. What you've done is effectively tried to piece together an incomplete puzzle, then started trimming the pieces and adding extra shit to make them fit.
What you're describing as a "state", is more commonly referred to as a "goverment". (they aren't synonyms)
Yeah. That wasn't what I said, though. I said that if there's a disconnect between the definition and reality, you'd better change it. How are "real definitions" even formed? They aren't god-given! They are a maliable tool for communication.
You're claiming that there are strict definitions of terminologies, like "state", "socialism", "capitalism". And if another (coherent) definition that someone else uses, you claim that they're wrong and insult them ("adding extra shit to make them fit). At the same time, you simply ignore any valid definitions of "state" and use it, when you mean "government". Or you hide your own lack of creativity behind of what you see as rock solid definitions.
But people come into arguments with different perspectives. And there simply is no objective arbiter of definitions. That is why they have to be adjusted for reality. Or at least: be established beforehand.
So, tell me: What are your definitions of: state, capitalism, politics, ideology, socialism, communism, democracy? We clearly have different understandings of these terms and frankly: It's really hard to follow you if understanding of those terms clearly diverge in an argument.
There are many state owned enterprises that have private investors as well.
those are arguably partially privately owned, especially if those investors have influence on decision-making.
You're actually wrong, has China does have official 5-year plans that it develops every 5 years, and they have done so since world War II. So, it is not a trope at all:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China
China is currently undergoing their 14th 5-year plan:
https://www.fujian.gov.cn/english/news/202108/t20210809_5665713.htm#:~:text=China%20will%20focus%20on%20the,innovation%20and%20application%20of%20core
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_five-year_plan_(China)
I didn't say they had no 5 year plan, I said the 5 year plan isn't inherently capitalist
Economic growth and efficiency in the form of a consumer economy, which dovetails with a capitalism-oriented promotion of individual accumulation of private property--this has become a larger part of the Chinese economy not smaller
Along side this, there's been a greater profit motive for developing productivity as well as through market competition.
The communist goals they've gradually abandoned has been things like economic equality, where their income inequality is similar to the US now and represents a highly unequal distribution of resources. Collective ownership is more of a mixed bag. Social justice is also fractured along socioeconomic lines with a high level of labor exploitation of the poorer classes by the wealthy classes. The way these problems manifest are characteristically quite similar to late capitalism in the west. Obviously there are differences and no system is entirely one or the other.