Yeah. Certain things are unavoidable if you want to have tourism as a major source of income. The real question is whether it was worth it to open up to tourism, and i think that the locals themselves have answered in the affirmative. They are the ones who keep opening up more and more tourism related enterprises because it is making them money and helping the entire region to develop. Of course it would also be a mistake to have your economy center solely around tourism, but luckily this is definitely not happening in Xinjiang. It has numerous other industries that are just as big or even bigger, such as agriculture, mining, energy sector related industries, and even some important high tech industries in the city of Urumqi.

I sincerely hope your suggestion never gets implemented because it would have catastrophic results for Chinese society. If universities looked exclusively at grades in one or two subjects for their entrance qualifications, it would disincentivize students from learning anything but the subject they want to later go into (which will most likely be that which makes the most money, so some subjects will become severely neglected by most students). This would be a disaster for society as it will create an entire generation which lacks the broad knowledge and understanding of the world to be responsible citizens later. You will have created a bunch of politically, historically and culturally illiterate STEM nerds who are going to make very poor and dangerous decisions about the future of their country. In the West, STEM students are among the most reactionary, misanthropic and poorly informed in their world views. (The only groups with even higher tendency for reactionary views are economists and lawyers.) A good system should foster a broad general education in its students. There is plenty of time to specialize later once the basis for being a well-rounded human being has been laid.

Also, that would not reduce the hyper-competitiveness of the system anyway, as you would still have many students competing for a limited number of spots at universities. They would just compete on more specialized knowledge. The only real solutions to decrease competition are either to create more capacity by building more universities, or to increase the value of non-university work qualifications such as vocational training, and then equalizing the pay levels between intellectual and manual labor.

For sure. In this video they do a pretty good debunking of that trope/accusation.

I don’t want to in any way marginalize the struggles that you and people in your country are going through which are real and painful and i am very sorry you have to experience them. We have been following news about natural disasters in your country here for a while and you have all our sympathies. I just want to offer some perspective:

While your country is not quite part of the imperial core despite its membership in an imperialist organization, it is also not fully a global south country. Rather it is one of very few that are in between, on the semi-periphery. That comes with certain advantages and freedoms that neither imperial core countries nor global south countries have.

On the one hand you are insulated from direct violence perpetrated by the imperial core, on the other hand you still have more national autonomy and freedom of alignment than full imperial vassals do. As a result your country has been sort of straddling both worlds for some time. Not always to the advantage of its people, and sometimes to the detriment of global south countries around you, but nevertheless this should give you some hope.

Because it means that you have the potential as the imperialist bloc weakens to seek alignment with the rising multipolar world instead, which can greatly improve material conditions in your country even without a full socialist revolution. You also have a strong enough military to protect your independence and not become a victim of imperialist aggression when you do choose to leave their camp.

It will take some time to build the social consciousness in the people necessary for real revolutionary changes, but i believe that will come in time as it becomes clear that continuing to bet on the declining imperialist camp is no longer advantageous and a realignment with more progressive global forces is in the interest of both the working class and the national bourgeoisie. What matters now is getting rid of the compradors and the opportunists.

It is not something that will happen overnight but if progressive and independence-minded political forces in your country can build up real organization and a political base, then the global situation will undoubtedly, sooner or later, provide a catalyst (some major crisis that will make continuing status quo impossible and mobilize the masses) for real change.

When I took a break after daily use I did get a hankering for a day or two

You feel the same way whenever you stop doing anything that had become a habit you enjoyed, whether it’s an activity or something you consume. If you enjoy eating chocolate every day and suddenly you stop, of course you’re gonna get cravings for a while, but that doesn’t mean it’s addictive in a physical chemical sense.

This is a russophobic and paranoid lib hit piece against anti-war activists trying to tie them into some grand conspiracy web of association with an irrelevant and long dead marginal figure in American politics. None of these people are comrades but they are also by far less damaging than your average Democrat or Republican imperialist warmonger Nazi sympathizer. This piece transparently attempts to smear any and all voices who are speaking out against the insanity and delusion of the mainstream pro-Ukraine propaganda narrative. It is also an old and extremely irrelevant article at this point because none of the fearmongering predictions about Gabbard or Patel playing some kind of anti-war role in the administration have played out. The author can rest easy knowing that peace in Ukraine has been successfully prevented and these dangerous anti-war views have been successfully neutralized.

Anyway, if i were you i would delete this post since it is such an outdated piece of propaganda with little to no bearing on what is happening at present. It’s not even interesting or funny enough to be in SRS.

It’s a double win. You deprive the empire of a worker and you abscond with their money. Everyone who studies in the US should do this.

Baltic politicians reading this:

“We should antagonize Russia even more.”

US oil production isn’t even enough to supply the US’s own domestic market. The US is a net importer. Russia is the biggest net exporter still unaffected by the blockade. Ukraine’s attacks are pinpricks.

In actual fact it is notoriously difficult to disable railroad tracks for long periods of time. They are quite resilient to bombing and very easy, quick and cheap to fix. Both Russia and Ukraine have experienced this.

Bridges are of course harder to fix but they are also not easy to destroy, as, again, both Russia and Ukraine found out. It takes either numerous repeated strikes or really large bombs/missiles, but as long as Iran continues to make their airspace too dangerous for the US/Israel to freely operate, they will have to use weaker and more expensive standoff munitions which they do not have unlimited quantities of.

And of course, there is also the simple reality that if the US does go for extensive infrastructure strikes, Iran will retaliate in kind against the Gulf states and Israel, which is why the US has not gone there yet. Maybe they will, but then the closure of the strait of Hormuz will seem like a minor problem compared to the long term loss of productive capacity and logistics that Iran can inflict. At that point no one is getting any oil or gas out of the region anymore.

What i find most disgusting and obscene is when they gleefully celebrate Russians dying while claiming to support Ukrainians. Because what that actually means is they celebrate Ukrainians dying. They don’t care that for every Russian who dies there are at least five or more Ukrainians who die. To them that is a price worth paying to satisfy their hatred of Russians.

It would be just as disgusting if we were to celebrate Ukrainian soldiers dying, and not only because we feel horrible for those poor people who were violently conscripted and forced to die for the Nazi regime. No one who supports Russia is glad that forcefully conscripted Ukrainians are dying. We find it awful and tragic and incredibly sad, because it’s literally a fratricidal war.

And the same applies to all those videos and posts you see gloating about how “Russia is stalled” or “Russia is advancing too slowly”, because that also comes at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives. That isn’t something to celebrate, it’s something to be appalled by. It won’t change the eventual outcome, it just drags it out.

It makes absolutely no sense, if you actually want the best for Ukraine, to be glad that the war is being prolonged. Every day that this goes on more of Ukraine is ruined and more of its people die or leave forever. And for what? To hurt Russia and to give a kleptocratic fascist regime more time to personally enrich themselves at the cost of their own people’s lives.

They already have, along with other Sahel Alliance States (AES). Not too long ago Nigeria was threatening to invade Niger on behalf of the neocolonial puppet organization ECOWAS, and they were dissuaded by the combined military power of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso.

alongside the twisting of every strength the same figure has into sharp points to criticize.

This part is especially insidious because it pushes aspiring revolutionaries to self-sabotage and choose ineffectual weakness over strength because they have been tricked into believing that strength is morally reprehensible.

Every time that anti-communists throw accusations of “authoritarianism” at communists and at socialist states they do so in order to dissuade aspiring communists from emulating strategies that are exceptionally dangerous to capital because they have a track record of success. The more successful a socialist state is, the more its methods must be denounced as authoritarian and dictatorial. Ideological laxity, opportunism, revisionism are instead praised under the guise of “democracy” and “freedom of speech”.

Socialists must not fall for this tactic and must not accept the framing pushed onto them by reactionaries, we must not apologize for or be quick to disavow the actions of socialist states under public pressure as soon as some shallow accusations are leveled at them and say things like “if we were in charge, we would be much better, we would not do all those terrible things”, because that is already in itself an ideological retreat, a concession and capitulation to anti-communist narratives.

Yes, sometimes being “dictatorial” is exactly what is needed.

“You are dictatorial.” My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people’s democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.

Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship”

Mindless unity and unprincipled compromise is not for the best:

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

And we must ask everyone who talks about unity: unity with whom? With the liquidators? If so, we have nothing to do with each other.

Vladimir Lenin, “Unity”

Anti-communists will always seek to use liberal ideological-rhetorical weapons to deceive people:

He who recognises the class struggle must also recognise that in a bourgeois republic, even in the freest and most democratic bourgeois republic, “freedom” and “equality” never were, and never could be, anything but an expression of the equality and freedom of the commodity owners, the equality and freedom of capital. Marx, in all of his writings and especially in his Capital (which you all recognise in words ), made this clear thousands of times; […]

Under the bourgeois system (i.e., as long as private property in land and in the means of production persists) and under bourgeois democracy, “freedom and equality” remain purely formal, signifying in practice wage-slavery for the workers (who are formally free and equal) and the undivided rule of capital, the oppression of labour by capital.

Vladimir Lenin, “Deception of the People with Slogans of Freedom and Equality”

This is the ML position on anarchism:

The point is that Marxism and anarchism are built up on entirely different principles, in spite of the fact that both come into the arena of the struggle under the flag of socialism. The cornerstone of anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the masses, the collective body. According to the tenets of anarchism, the emancipation of the masses is impossible until the individual is emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: “Everything for the individual.” The cornerstone of Marxism, however, is the masses, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the individual. That is to say, according to the tenets of Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible until the masses are emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: “Everything for the masses.”

Clearly, we have here two principles, one negating the other, and not merely disagreements on tactics.

— Anarchism Or Socialism?

Lenin waged fierce ideological struggles against all manner of leftist strains that he considered to be wrong. He would 100% be accused of being sectarian today. But Lenin says (and Stalin agrees) that it was precisely that ideological struggle and refusal of the Bolsheviks to compromise on their Marxist principles or fall to opportunism that honed the Bolshevik line, steeled their party discipline, and let the Bolsheviks succeed where other more ideologically lax socialists in Europe failed.

The thing which actually pisses me off on Trots is that they regard every existing socialist experience a failure and a degeneration. For me this is about throwing reality in the garbage while claiming some sort of ideal Marxism (or Leninism) that only exist in their heads. This kind of thinking just makes a socialism revolution impossible and when you propagandize other working people who aren’t Marxists with this rhetoric, the logical conclusion that many people take is “Hey, if revolution never worked before, why the hell will it work in the future?”. So, basically this ends up being a defeatist discourse that even makes Trots themselves fight a lot and abandon their previous parties to now create a new party with the right line because every other line is Stalinist/degeneration.

I completely agree.

Take the U.S. as an example. I don’t know nearly enough about the U.S. and Imperial Russia in the 1910s to fully compare their domestic surveillance and repression capabilities. But it seems reasonable to infer that that the U.S. – no lengthy war on its front porch; a more modern country; a long history of repressing sizeable black, indigenous, and immigrant communities; recent colonial counterintelligence experience in the Phillipines and elsewhere – was in a much stronger position to bring the hammer down on leftists at the end of the decade. They did, they never let up, and the weight of the internal security state only increased.

Maybe that’s why the left never got off the ground in the U.S.: they got beat by a stronger state than the Bolsheviks faced, then kept getting punched when they were down.

I actually think it was the opposite. The surveillance and repression apparatus was much more developed in Tsarist Russia than it was in the US at that time. Tsarist Russia had a lot of experience in surveiling and uncovering revolutionary cells, and they were far more brutal in their repressions than the US was (toward its settler population at least). At that time the US the state was fairly weak compared to European states, and the emptiness and sparse population of most of the US made it hard to police.

I think the real explanation lies in two factors: one is instability and the other is ability to externalize societal contradictions. Revolutions don’t happen simply because conditions are bad (people can actually endure a lot of hardship so long as there is a feeling of stability), they happen when there is a drastic upheaval, a disruption in the status quo that makes continuing “business as usual” all but impossible. For Russia that upheaval was WWI. The US on the other hand was virtually untouched by the conflict. Therefore there was no catalyst for revolution in the US.

The US had already experienced that instability decades earlier with the civil war, in the aftermath of which there was actually a period (Reconstruction) when there was genuine revolutionary potential for possibly the only time in the history of the US. They eventually managed to dissipate that revolutionary energy by externalizing the contradictions through westward settler expansion domestically and imperial conquest abroad. Racism of course also played a big role in preventing working class solidarity but racism alone would not have been enough.

So i think the US is not that interesting of a case study because you can fairly easily understand why the conditions throughout its history have generally not been suitable for revolution and why the ruling class there has been able to diffuse dangerous contradictions through outward expansion and inward growth (though now that seems to have finally reached a limit, so it will be interesting to see what happens going forward). The more interesting case in my opinion is Europe, and specifically the losing powers of WWI.

We look now at Germany, Italy, etc. and say, “well they didn’t have a revolution so obviously the same theory doesn’t work”, but actually virtually all of the losing powers (Italy switched sides to the winners, but it was nonetheless badly affected) experienced some kind of revolutionary upheaval.

In Germany there was the Bavarian Soviet and the Spartacist Uprising, and it took the betrayal of the SPD and their enlisting of proto-fascist paramilitaries to crush the revolution. In the Rheinland there was even foreign occupation. In Italy also there was a period of almost constant unrest until the fascist seizure of power, which was of course the reaction of the national bourgeoisie to the threat of revolution. The Austrohungarian empire dissolved and there was “Red Vienna”. Hungary also came very close to having a revolution which had to be crushed with outside help. And finally the Ottoman empire dissolved and had a bourgeois revolution under Attatürk.

Why did the winning powers of WWI in Europe, Britain and France, despite also experiencing great instability and social upheaval, not go through the same kind of period where revolutions almost succeeded? It wasn’t because their mechanisms of repression domestically were better than those of, say, Germany or Italy. It was because they were able to externalize the contradictions in their society through their still intact empires. As one of the architects of the British empire openly admitted, the Empire was not a vanity project, it was a necessity if the ruling class wanted to prevent the workers from rising up against them!

What lessons we can take from this? Well one is that generally revolutions need a catalyst, some kind of crisis usually brought about through external factors to act as the “spark”. Even the Haitian revolution came in the wake of the French revolution opening up a window of opportunity. The other lesson is that it is still possible for the ruling class to suppress revolutions if they manage to resolve, even temporarily, some of the contradictions by externalizing them, or if the revolutionary forces are not sufficiently organized and are unprepared to mobilize the people and seize power when the time comes.

In Russia the Bolsheviks were disciplined, organized and ready, having spent years building up connections with the working class base and winning credibility. Germany did not have a Bolshevik party. They had the spontaneous energy from the masses but the revolutionary organizations were too weak to lead the masses decisively. The masses put their trust in opportunist Social Democrats who were long embedded in the working class movement. In the end the German socdems fulfilled the same counter-revolutionary function as the Italian fascists (this is why we call social democracy objectively the moderate wing of fascism).

Very well stated. I hope OP takes the time to think about the arguments you have presented here.

😢…😭

If you believe that national liberation is impossible nowadays, or that, even if successful, national liberation would not help to bring worker liberation closer (even though the primary contradiction today is imperialism), and that changes in material conditions of the core proletariat caused by national liberation in the periphery do not make revolution more likely, then what do you have left but the wishful thinking that “maybe somehow we can say the right things to convince people to develop class consciousness”? Apart from the fact that it is not very materialist, it is also a very bleak outlook that will lead to quick demoralization of revolutionaries when that class consciousness fails to materialize despite their efforts.