posted in Asklemmy

If there's going to be a second wave of socialist uprisings in the world in the near future, which country do you think is going to become the first second wave people's democracy?

With China’s popularity rising, there has to come a point where a country’s population decides to say:
“We need to follow a Marxist-Leninist model pronto if we want to remain a functioning society, because capitalism isn’t working anymore.”
Which country is gonna say it first?

My guess goes to..

Pakistan

Edited ⁨⁨Sep⁩ ⁨13⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨19:45⁩⁩Page

Replying to @⁨gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml⁩

Latin America is my vote, could happen in Mexico, I would have voted Argentina better Milei, and maybe Venezuela before Trump.

Truthfully though, I think we’re locked in, globally, permanently to Capitalism and right wing ideology into the end of humanity now for deeply complex reasons.

The game changed drastically this year and most people are just not aware how literally impossible it is to change.

Replying to @⁨BellaDonna@mujico.org⁩

well, tbh we’re going back to 2001 after milei’s finished so we’ll probably be so fubar that anything could happen, if the communist party here organizes a bit lol.

but yeah, people don’t realize how deeply embedded the cia is involved in latam. even moderately left wing people are persecuted all across the region in one way or another, if we think about political figures in the pink wave for example.

Replying to @⁨CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca⁩

But people are immigrating over there.
But due to the Soviet Union collapse event, there’s still huge skepticism on how well China is performing and how badly the US is performing right now, despite the fact that China is already ahead, widening the gap at an accelerating pace and with no end in sight.
We’re going to see a turnaround of events in speed, size and scale like we’ve never seen before.

Replying to @⁨folaht@lemmy.ml⁩

Comparing the economies of China and USA is not the same thing as comparing the quality of life for Chinese and US citizens. You are somewhat correct when you say people are immigrating to China, the overwhelming majority going to China are expats. China makes it incredibly difficult to become a permanent resident.

I would say the attractiveness of living in a socialist or even communist country is based on a lack of understanding of what that actually means.

Replying to @⁨impairedimperator@lemmy.zip⁩

communism is the abolition of the state. socialism is the transition to a stateless society by using the bourgeois state against them.

marx himself (and later deng xiaoping, since the subject is the chinese state) believed capitalism and markets were necessary to develop productive forces before communism could happen.

please read marx before throwing names at people. this is the basics of marxism.

Replying to @⁨impairedimperator@lemmy.zip⁩

yes they are. are you expecting the poorest country in the world to develop itself and solve all contradictions in a couple of decades?

i know real life socialism set literal records for developing quick but things still take time. you should know rebuilding a country is not trivial.

please read the philosopher you are telling me you already like, and study more about the ideology he carved.

Replying to @⁨umbrella@lemmy.ml⁩

OK so capitalism and free markets are necessary. You need to have and dominate capitalism to end it. What’s the intermediate governing principle? Communism? That’s kind of a paradox, as we can’t have communism within capitalism, or can we?

As I see it, China looks a lot like a one-party democratic socialist republic using capitalism to exert soft power. I might be wrong though.

Or are you talking about other countries which want to establish communism?

Replying to @⁨helix@feddit.org⁩

the intermediate governing principle is socialism. using it to keep the (global) rich down while we transition away from capitalism, into communism. though this is just the path china choose to walk: play along with global capitalism to develop their industry, yes.

though despite all that went wrong, lenin later showed us that you can indeed skip straight to socialism without capitalism or free markets and have it be even more advanced than what we have now in china.

a new communist revolution would look totally different in 2026, and would take a different character depending on which country it’s happening on because it’s more about people choosing their own path instead of having the empire dictate the washington consensus to them. this is the main thing but is what makes socialism the most difficult to understand by westerners who haven’t lived imperialism.

Replying to @⁨helix@feddit.org⁩

democratic socialism is trying to achieve regular socialism through getting elected and slowly reforming capitalism away through the established capitalist methods laws and institutions, no need to spill blood for a revolution or physically take control away from capitalists.

my continent had a 20 year demsoc wave and all they managed to do was some poverty alleviation within capitalism. capital has a way to buy their way into lobbying and influencing everything and if you don’t take it’s control down straight up it’s always finding a way to pop back up again.

vote for them if you are in the circumstance to have that choice, but know the most they will really do is buy you time with the un-worsened status quo. historically, organizing for the abolition of capitalism tends to be a less unsuccessful method of moving things forward.

Replying to @⁨folaht@lemmy.ml⁩

China’s recent development doesn’t really hinge on Marxist-Leninist models. It went heavy into state capitalism to produce a massive improvement in the economy. I feel like China’s main innovation was to create an investment model that was company agnostic; private companies competed to operate state owned factories rather than the state owning the companies. Corporate governance is more “third way” with loose control over semi-private entities.

Replying to @⁨HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club⁩

Marxist-Leninist model has everything to do with China’s development. You can read this book on the subject which explains how China’s rise is a direct product of Marxist central planning.

The whole idea of state capitalism is a bit of a misnomer. It basically says that even though USSR had state owned enterprise, the internal capitalist relations within it remain largely the same. While that’s true, there is a fundamental difference here. Capitalism is a system where people who own capital hire workers to exploit there labor with the purpose of increasing their capital. The goal of capitalist enterprise is to create wealth for the owners with any social benefits being strictly incidental. On the other hand, the purpose of state enterprise is to provide social value. Workers in state owned companies are producing things that the society needs. They are working for their own benefit and those of others around them. Therefore, the nature of work itself is fundamentally different from actual capitalism.

And this is precisely what socialism is. It’s a transitional stage between a capitalist society and a future communist society where the working class has seized the control of the state, but existing material relations have not yet been abolished.

Also worth noting that the state in China is firmly in control of the commanding heights of the economy.

The actual innovation in China is in combining high level central planning with dynamic allocation. The problem with Soviet economy was that any large system will produce a lot of noise as information travels through it. So, when you do central planning the way USSR was, it becomes very difficult to balance things. You make a plan, the directives travel down to the factories and farms where production happens, there’s delay in the information arriving, mistakes in transcription, and so on. Then the same thing happens on the way back up, so the picture at the top is divergent from the situation on the ground. And that leads to things like overcorrections, and plans based on false data, so the system becomes unbalanced over time. And that’s what we saw happen in USSR. I can highly recommend reading Thinking in Systems for a deeper explanation of the problem.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the idea of central planning itself is wrong. The problem is with trying to do micromanagement at high level which just doesn’t work. And this is the problem China figure out how to solve by using markets as allocators within the centrally planned system. The planners still set five year plans, they still control the commanding heights of the economy, and give overall direction on what types of things should be produced, but the details are left to market mechanisms to work out dynamically at the appropriate level. And this type of a hybrid system is proving to be highly effective.

Replying to @⁨HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club⁩

Nobody claims that China is full communism, not even the Chinese themselves. It’s a socialist state with a communist party in charge. And yes, decentralizing decision making at the lower levels while continuing to do central planning at high level is the key innovation. Your original comment was nonsensical claiming that China has diverged from Marxism-Leninism and that it’s state capitalist. Next, you’ll be telling me that Lenin diverged from Marxism-Leninism when he implemented NEP.

Replying to @⁨yogthos@lemmy.ml⁩

There seems to be this weird Schrodinger’s Cat situation where is both the “this isn’t Communism yet” combined with “no, we are creating this on Communist principles”.

And the talking point for the discussion is about China’s form of “Communism” should be replicated across different countries. My statement that China’s economy currently fits a state capitalist model is still valid because China hasn’t full communist like how the Soviet Union never hit full communist. It is a step on the path.

I feel like the argument right now is that I’m using the word capitalism to describe the current step on the path.

Replying to @⁨HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club⁩

As I’ve already explained to you in the above comment, and you studiously ignored, China is a socialist state. Soviet Union was also a socialist state. There is no Schrodinger’s Cat situation here at all. Your confusion stems from the fact that you don’t understand what socialism actually is. Socialism is the transitional phase when the working class takes power in society, but the existing material relations have not yet been abolished. That’s precisely what we see in China today. That’s the whole difference between the socialist stage of development and communism which no country has achieved, and is unlikely to be possible as long as capitalism remains the dominant ideology in the world.

The argument right now is that you’re just using words in nonsensical fashion because you lack understanding of the subject we’re discussing. You can start educating yourself on the subject by reading this short article. versobooks.com/…/3228-lenin-s-three-theoretical-a…

VersoLenin's Three Theoretical Arguments About the Dictatorship of the ProlThroughout May, our Weekend Reads series will feature selections from books included on our Russian Revolution Reading List (all of which are on sale at 50% off until May 28 at midnight UTC. Click here to activate your discount.)22nd Congress of the Parti communiste française. via l'Humanité. In 1976, the French Commun

Replying to @⁨folaht@lemmy.ml⁩

I hope it won’t be a country, but basically the EU. It’s diverse enough that eventually all people have to cooperate. They already heavily lean into Open Source and many EU laws are quite good.

My issue with the EU is just that there still seem to be a lot of half-incompetent right wing capitalists in power, e.g. Ursula von der Leyen.

The left is shit at marketing… So the communist days may never come.

Replying to @⁨helix@feddit.org⁩

Marketing is for shit-for-brains, is the main problem here. The workers, once exposed to what socialism is in a correct form, become skeptical of exploitation, especially marketing.

Smartening up the deliberately-infantilised workers, who are kept ignorant & pliable on purpose, is the way. Or else you simply believe education is impossible just because education is trash in the “west”.

Replying to @⁨WolfLink@sh.itjust.works⁩

Socialism is a system that via a people’s democracy mostly puts academics and engineers into power.
What you call “democracy” is liberal democracy that mostly puts merchants/marketers and lawyers into power.

A system that puts marketers in power and a system that rewards people for the fruits of their labor according to their ability, are incompatible because the whole job of a marketer/merchants is to profit as much as possible. And the ‘Trias Politica judiciary & law-graduated politicians’ live off of the marketer’s money so they won’t be able to stop their influence on them, unless they can scare them into submission through the fear of socialist revolutions, which they did when the Gilded Age was ending.
That’s not possible anymore. The Soviet Union has fallen, oligarchic marketers of today are born in wealth and went through a process of ‘retire rich early or live your life chasing profit’ elimination round, unlike those in the 1930s and further automation has caused the marketers to have even more monetary power than those during the Gilded Age.

Replying to @⁨folaht@lemmy.ml⁩

China. A second socialist revolution. First, there’s actually precedent for it there. Revolutionaries could call themselves restorationists, promising to fulfill the original revolution’s abandoned mission. Maybe a version that actually empowers workers and builds bottom-up social democracy. Socialism without the authoritarianism. What better country for a socialist revolution than the one that gave us 9-9-6? China is ripe for a socialist revolution.

Replying to @⁨WoodScientist@lemmy.world⁩

Properly define authoritarian before using it as a thought-terminating scare word, & you will come to the conclusion that it is simply used to conjure up stereotypical images about certain peoples & their governments.

How do I know this? Because it is so abstract as to be meaningless without further context, & the further context makes countries like China look like fully-realised communism compared to the coloniser states.

Contradictions & struggle increase under a socialist system; they do not evaporate overnight. It’s not easy, & every Party that has led a socialist state is extremely aware that the struggle for communism gets even harder under socialism, because socialism needs to deal with resurgent bourgeois elements, provide for healthcare, establish & defend all the peoples rights (housing, work according to personal ability, healthy food, clean water).

Most importantly it needs to constantly try to get all the people involved in the political sphere with constant bottom-up appointments and elections for leadership and also deal with constant feedback from below and surveying/referenda. And unlike other systems, socialism involves self-criticism & the Party keeping each other honest, on the path, & meeting planning goals (or else you get Yugoslavia).

Anti-corruption must be an even stronger priority under socialism. The Xi era is markedly better for socialism than the era starting with Deng. The CPC has already been reshuffling & getting rid of corrupt actors/aspirant bourgeoisie in the military & in civilian sectors. The remants of capital in the form of Chinese billionaires live terrified lives for a good reason, & their assets are ultimately on-condition & used to sabotage them (by appropriating & investing in all-China development instead of letting them buy political power). This would not have happened if China’s socialist revolution somehow just reverted to feudalism/early capitalism. Instead, maybe there would be a Brezhnev-like “maintenance era” of stagnation (that was a bit better than Khruschev but still bad, and did not correct the political damage done by the preceding one).

We would not see enormous developmental progress, very high civic engagement, low crime, & imcreasing arts-&-culture exports, & potential world-leader status, nor would we see favourable trade terms with other countries & “pay when you can” loans to those ravaged by colonialism, nor would we see unwillingness to engage in shared pillage exploits (ie. military alliances formed to harass poor nations). All of the above happening at the same time is an unfathomable contradiction in a capitalist country.

The evidence just does not show that the CPC are doing such a bad job cultivating socialism that an ultra-left civil war is necessary to course-correct for Deng. Moreover, another civil war in China is implicitly an endorsement of the imperial order, and I hope you aren’t seriously suggesting the neocolonial capitalist slaver bloc ought to go on unopposed.