China’s gonna be a phenomenal world leader.

  • CrushKillDestroySwag@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    I mean it’s a better plan than invading the country, killing a million people and putting a bunch of pedophiles in charge, that’s for certain.

  • RNAi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    I get the point. Now, all my aprons come from Pakistan, how are women’s rights doing there? Or India? Or Bangladesh?

    “Better than before women were employed in factories”, OK fine. But this comment should be indistinguishable from r/neoliberal if that place weren’t nazis in denial

  • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    women were involved in the industrial workforce in the west from the beginning, and three waves of feminism were still needed - the work not even over after that. So I don’t really know if i agree with this take.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      11 months ago

      Did a single women’s liberatory movement succeed before development of the industrial capacity and the incentive capital provides to the national bourgeoisie to see things change?

      We must prioritise the prerequisites. Certain material conditions are a necessity to meet before those movements can see success.

      EDIT: The phrasing is a bit racist in this part of the manifesto but still relevant:

      The rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.

      • corgiwithalaptop [any, love/loves]@hexbear.netM
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        11 months ago

        Did a single women’s liberatory movement succeed before development of the industrial capacity and the incentive capital provides to the national bourgeoisie to see things change?

        I finished Graeber’s “History of Everything” not too long ago, and want to say this gets touched on, and the answer is ‘yes.’

        That said, I gave my copy to my dad and would need to go page through it to cite that, so I very well may be wrong. Plus, it would have been centuries ago anyways, so not sure it’s really relevant to your initial question.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          Second this. The situation of Women in the 19th century is very deeply tied to the whole “global European empire of terror” and doesn’t necessarily reflect conditions in other cultures at other times.

          • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            There seems to be a lot of active socialists in my part of the country and historic support for women’s and queer rights, I wonder if it has to do with knowledge of indigenous cultures from my region? Several tribes active here had a matriarchal governance structure, they would have rotating councils of women meet to discuss issues and distribution of resources in what could be described as a socialist system. Nearly all political knowledge in the west is rooted in white imperialist ideologies, my heart aches thinking where we could be today if egalitarian or socialist tribes were allowed to flourish.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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          11 months ago

          That said, I gave my copy to my dad and would need to go page through it to cite that, so I very well may be wrong. Plus, it would have been centuries ago anyways, so not sure it’s really relevant to your initial question.

          I’d be quite interested in what existing power these women had in order to force whatever concessions they achieved. I am betting on it being a quite different scenario, but relying on certain conditions that these women today do not have.

          I’m convinced that a major aspect of the property relationship under capital here is that it almost entirely traps women with no means of helping themselves. Getting them more means will drastically alter their ability to pursue their own movements.

          • corgiwithalaptop [any, love/loves]@hexbear.netM
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            11 months ago

            property relationship under capital

            Yeah, I’m thinking of societies that became matriarchal through some means long long before any sort of European-centric (probably not the right way to but it, but my words are failing me here, apologies) resemblance to economic systems came about. I’m thinking of areas like Mexico, Central America, and South America maybe about 1500 years ago.

            Anyways, it’s a really good book, and I’d absolutely recommend it! It’s just…a LOT. Hard to really remember specific things from it off the top of my head, especially when I’m sleep deprived, but it is well cited if you download an ebook version.

            Feels like I’m rambling now emilie-shrug

      • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        I’m not arguing against what the poster in the image is suggesting doing, I just think they’re too hopeful. I’m making the point that the process they describe will not in and of itself result in “women’s liberation” in Afghanistan.

      • CrimsonSage@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        The development of capitalism coincided with a massive decrease in status of women in the west, and as pointed out waves if feminism have been required to recover that status and then some. The original take is economistic claptrap, we aren’t victims of material circumstance we are agents shaped by it.

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      11 months ago

      That feels like saying “yeah, but unions existed in 1920, so I don’t think I agree that unions were able to win any labor rights.” The poster is proposing a process that will initiate gains in womens rights that can’t be as easily reversed as gains from an external military imposition, not automatic guarantee of immediate equality.

      • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        unions are involved with actively fighting for workers’ rights so I don’t really think that’s a fair comparison. A more apt comparison would be saying a labor shortage will result in increased workers’ rights. The labor shortage in and of itself is not what will give the workers permanent gains, but it puts the workers and unions on the footing necessary to force those concessions from the capitalists.

        Similar here, the process the poster is describing will only result in more women in the workforce, but not in and of itself result in “women’s liberation” in Afghanistan - that involves a political struggle.

        • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          The point of women joining the workforce is so they can then withhold their labor. This is what I understood to be the point of the Chinese comments. Just because they didn’t explicitly spell it out doesn’t mean that’s not what they had in mind. But the basic message is correct. Women have to be part of the workforce in order to even have political leverage.

          • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            that’s what I’m arguing.

            although I disagree that that is what the Chinese comments have in mind. Although, granted, I can’t actually read Chinese, so I need to go off of what the English translation says. But the English translation seems naive and passive, as if all women’s liberation requires is for women to be a part of the workforce. While it’s likely just an offhand comment, language like “There’s really no need to worry…”, “All it takes…”, “They’ll soon realize…”, “no one can stop…” does not make me think they had some deeper idea that they didn’t spell out but that they have a simplified idea about how political change occurs and the necessity of political struggle. The “basic message” you note is nowhere present in what’s written, it’s just your own takeaway because you understand political struggle. But in terms of what’s actually written there’s no language in there that hints at something deeper. Maybe the Chinese is different.

    • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      MY favorite western strategy to instill Western Values™ is to intentionally seek out the most right-wing weirdos in the country, go out of our way to convince them that women’s rights is a Communist plot to lead them to Satan, and supply them with stinger missiles

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Women’s computer camp in the wealthiest corner of the capital.

      Western armed warlords across the rural bulk of the nation.

      Wagging my finger at the Taliban for hating women because my warlords are losing.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    I don’t consider it a coincidence in the slightest that women’s liberation kicked into high gear with women’s employment and education opportunities. Anything else strikes me as cart before the horse.

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    11 months ago

    I don’t know about that. The short-lived communist government of Afghanistan already gave women the rights to enroll in formal education and hold professional jobs, until it was couped by US-backed conservative forces in the name of anti-Soviet communism.

    This kind of argument actually sounds more like what a capitalist would say lol. See we are letting women into the workforce to double the labor force and double our profit! That’s progress!

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      11 months ago

      I don’t know about that. The short-lived communist government of Afghanistan already gave women the rights to enroll in formal education and hold professional jobs, until it was couped by US-backed conservative forces in the name of anti-Soviet communism.

      Yeah but… That failed.

      Not entirely because of women’s liberation obviously… But what do you think will happen if China goes and militarily props up some communists to run Afghanistan? Exactly the same thing that happened with the USSR. Afghanistan doesn’t exist in a vacuum and exterior forces will use all of these things as weapons to overthrow the communists. They would absolutely prop up right wing extremists to kick out communists if that is what China installed. It’s how we got to where we are today in fact. The method needs to be more durable.

      I don’t think doing what failed previously will produce different results. The US would back the fucking Taliban if it meant fucking with China via proxy war.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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          Lmao I think we’d need some extraordinary circumstances to get that to happen. I doubt various capitalists were unaware of the danger of what they were doing when they secretly backed russian communists because they were competing with tsarist russia. They were pushed to it.

          Not impossible though.

    • DyingOfDeBordom [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      See the thing is the communist govt of Afghanistan did an idealism by saying “the women are free now”

      This is doing a materialism because it is first changing the economic conditions underlying society so that the influential bourgeoisie who need more workers are incentivized to push for the ability of women to work. Women being able to work means women having income independent of men or their families.

      It’s deng-stoned time

  • grandepequeno [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    He put it very vulgarly but that’s more or less a point I’ve read from other marxists, that proletarianization MAY bring about mass politics

    • Ildsaye [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Yes, that’s what China did. They also used media control to blanket the nation in antisexist messages from the moment the PRC was established, but chattel marriage customs only really began to break down in areas where factory work was available - the wage work allowed women to be financially independent from their clans for the first time. Even establishing dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t mean immediate freedom from the harsh contradictions of being a developing country.

      • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        no that’s not what China did. simply putting women in textile mills is what the british did, and it took a fucking century to get the vote.

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            11 months ago

            Nah, unlike the two, Deng was vastly better at playing the geopolitical game while those two didn’t come close. It was through Deng that the West lost their manufacturing power, lost their real chance at a successful color revolution in China, and that peaceful reunification with Hong Kong and Taiwan became viable. No amount of whining about Deng being a rightist or capitalist roader will ever change this.

          • robinn_IV@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            What

            How is “Dengism” “basically just” “Bernsteinism” (or do you just mean adherents are similar?)

            • CrimsonSage@hexbear.net
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              It was somewhat sarcasm. Both are basically rightwing deviations of marxism that rely on economic determinism to drive the change toward socialism. That being said dengism actually has a line of cogent praxis toward that goal while Bernstein was basically just “vote labor” until socialism.

              • robinn_IV@hexbear.net
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                11 months ago

                basically rightwing deviations of marxism that rely on economic determinism to drive the change toward socialism

                Marxism does involve “economic ‘determinism’ to drive the change towards socialism”:

                “the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally play the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role. When it is impossible for the productive forces to develop without a change in the relations of production, then the change in the relations of production plays the principal and decisive role.” — Mao Zedong, On Contradiction

                “Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organization which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries)” — V.I. Lenin, The Tax in Kind

                “…in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops” — V.I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism

                At the same time the vanguard party (CPC) still rules, there is still worker’s organization, and, most telling, the Mass Line remains. I fail to see where this “right deviation” comes into play.

          • Lester_Peterson [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            If Dengists were Bernsteinists that’d be an improvement. In this thread they’re indistinguishable from Neoliberal commentators from the Cato Institute writing articles about “the Feminist side of sweatshops” only instead of “basic economics” being the reason why we have to support states that are in direct opposition to working class interests, here its “material conditions” and “contradictions.”

  • The_Walkening [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    I could imagine China using policy demands (similar to what the IMF does, but not evil) in exchange for financing, economic development, but IDK if turning Afghanistan into 18th century England will do much good.