How does the World view China these days?

  On 2/24/2021 at 3:37 PM, chenGOD said:

The big difference being of course that, it's not illegal to be unemployed (in Canada, I speak for nowhere else).

Not sure how big that difference is, really, if the state makes sure there's enough jobs that you will never be unemployed anyway. It ends up being an, admittedly ugly, method to outlaw vagabondism. You will note, btw, that there were lots of writers, musicians and other more or less self employed people in the USSR, so it's not like you were forced to go to an office or a factory.

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Also many of those "bullshit jobs" are actually mid-level managers who get paid rather handsomely to do nothing of importance, so it's hard to argue that they are degrading. Excepting perhaps in a spiritual sense, but then one imagines that people who take those jobs are, by and large, devoid of spirituality or a sense of dignity.

What about security guards at places that don't need them? The people that pack your groceries for you? Not to mention social media content creators, "account managers" and other low paid office drones (for which the Russians have coined the fantastic term "office plankton"). There's lots of bullshit jobs below the level of middle management.

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Are you advocating that musicians should do their art for free as a hobby besides their daily work and not distribute it through any channels?

You said people were denied instruments by the government, which isn't true.

"ummm cyanobacteria u evil tankie..... anyways i almost forgot to uphold the status quo today........ laterz"

  On 2/24/2021 at 4:05 PM, rhmilo said:

You said people were denied instruments by the government, which isn't true.

Kind of interested about info on how easy it was to get a synth in USSR. I have to dig this up at some point. I'm sure there are stories from the various synthwave bands that emerged in the 80s in USSR and other communist states.

But can you answer my question if you are advocating that musicians do their art as a hobby besides their daily work and lack means of distribution for the said art?

  On 2/24/2021 at 4:10 PM, zkom said:

But can you answer my question if you are advocating that musicians do their art as a hobby besides their daily work and lack means of distribution for the said art?

What does that have to do with the USSR (which had lots of professional artists) or communism (which to the best of my knowledge doesn’t on principle forbid professional art) or even capitalism ( where only art that sells well can be made professionally anyway)?

But if you must know, if I would advocate a 20 hour work week which would make the  question irrelevant as then you could make music as much as you wanted anyway.

EDIT: which brings us back to the topic of this thread: in China, professional artists were not held in any esteem. A true artist was an amateur.

  On 2/24/2021 at 4:05 PM, rhmilo said:

Not sure how big that difference is, really, if the state makes sure there's enough jobs that you will never be unemployed anyway.

You're not sure on how big a difference between illegal and legal is? The state (in Canada), while surely playing an important role in the ability for companies to create jobs, is not ensuring that there are enough jobs that you will never be unemployed.

  On 2/24/2021 at 4:05 PM, rhmilo said:

What about security guards at places that don't need them? The people that pack your groceries for you? Not to mention social media content creators, "account managers" and other low paid office drones

While I can't speak for wherever you are, grocery packers are a rarity, usually they double as cashiers and grocery packers, but sometimes old people need help with their things. Low paid office staff are often the most important part in an organization. Can't argue with social media content creators, truly dross.

  On 2/24/2021 at 5:18 PM, chenGOD said:

You're not sure on how big a difference between illegal and legal is?

Sorry, I meant to say “if it’s illegal but the government makes sure you can’t break the law (in this case by providing nonsense jobs) it doesn’t matter”.

  On 2/24/2021 at 5:18 PM, chenGOD said:

While I can't speak for wherever you are, grocery packers are a rarity, usually they double as cashiers and grocery packers, but sometimes old people need help with their things.

Here in the Netherlands we don’t have them either but we have welfare and pensions so we don’t need such bullshit jobs. Which kind of illustrates my point.

  On 2/24/2021 at 5:18 PM, chenGOD said:

Low paid office staff are often the most important part in an organization.

In my experience this is an overly romantic view. Lots of low level clerks are just doing busy work - tasks that should just be automated away or pushing paper around that has no useful purpose whatsoever. I know, because I’ve done it.

Speaking of automation: you know why stuff gets made in China? Because hiring someone is often cheaper than to build and maintain a robot to do the same job. Talk about bullshit.

  On 2/24/2021 at 6:00 PM, rhmilo said:

Sorry, I meant to say “if it’s illegal but the government makes sure you can’t break the law (in this case by providing nonsense jobs) it doesn’t matter”.

So are you talking about the Soviet government? If that is the case, then sure, but I still think the idea that you have some choice as to whether or not you want to work a bullshit job or receive welfare vs the "choice" of working some bullshit job or being thrown in jail is a significant difference.

  On 2/24/2021 at 6:00 PM, rhmilo said:

Here in the Netherlands we don’t have them either but we have welfare and pensions so we don’t need such bullshit jobs. Which kind of illustrates my point.

We have welfare and pensions here in Canada as well, but I'm not sure how that relates to old people needing help with packing their groceries?

  On 2/24/2021 at 6:00 PM, rhmilo said:

In my experience this is an overly romantic view. Lots of low level clerks are just doing busy work - tasks that should just be automated away or pushing paper around that has no useful purpose whatsoever. I know, because I’ve done it.

I've done it as well, but there is also a lot of stuff that simply can't be automated away yet and people doing reconciliation etc. is still necessary even if all documentation is electronic, as the variety of ways companies fill out invoices/bills of lading etc. is incredible, and cannot be solved by OCR and machine learning yet.

  On 2/24/2021 at 6:00 PM, rhmilo said:

Speaking of automation: you know why stuff gets made in China? Because hiring someone is often cheaper than to build and maintain a robot to do the same job. Talk about bullshit.

There are still a significant number of tasks where robots simply do not have the manual dexterity to perform the operation.

  On 2/24/2021 at 6:00 PM, rhmilo said:

Speaking of automation: you know why stuff gets made in China? Because hiring someone is often cheaper than to build and maintain a robot to do the same job. Talk about bullshit.

Not at all true.

It depends on the robot complexity.

Plenty of robots are shit at what they are designed to do. I know of several instances where very large European companies have removed automation from the production line and replaced with fleshy alternatives very similar to what the robots replaced a few years before.

Humans are better at many things that robots pretend they can do.

fucking things.

  On 2/24/2021 at 6:23 PM, Grain Bastard said:

Not at all true.

It depends on the robot complexity.

Plenty of robots are shit at what they are designed to do. I know of several instances where very large European companies have removed automation from the production line and replaced with fleshy alternatives very similar to what the robots replaced a few years before.

 

Humans are better at many things that robots pretend they can do.

 

fucking things.

 

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This very much depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If flexibility is a concern, then, yes, humans are better, but for a whole class of problems robots can do the job just as well. Car manufacture, component soldering, microchip manufacturing: all super complicated stuff done by robots. By contrast, assembling trinkets is done by hand - and that really isn’t because robots can’t do that. Instead the reason is it makes no economic sense to design, build and test a robot assembly line for this sort of low value work if cheap unskilled Asian labor exists.

capitalism intentionally reduces technological advancement through the exploitation and underpayment of wage labor. they even admit it. "if you raise minimum wage we'll just automate away your job!" please do

  On 2/24/2021 at 3:32 PM, chenGOD said:

You know that putting someone in their place does not equal oppression, right?

Also, you literally, not figuratively, have no idea what you're talking about with respect to fascism. Basic tenets of fascism economic policy include: the state intervening in class struggle to mediate relations, the idea that productive profit is to be made in support of national interest (as opposed to private profit), and a condemnation of materialism.

the stated goals of fascism and fascism in action are completely different.  all of these things seem somewhat reasonable at first glance except the last one.  fascism in practice is state intervention to mediate class struggle in favor of the bourgeoisie, every time.  fascism is an outgrowth of capitalism temporarily abandoning liberal democracy to reassert its dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

  On 2/24/2021 at 1:52 PM, dingformung said:

 

@cyanobacteria is an American phenomenon.

speaking on behalf of America, I sincerely apologize.

shutup i just want cummunism

Move to Cuba bro

  On 2/24/2021 at 7:43 PM, cyanobacteria said:

shutup i just want cummunism

finally making sense man! cumming > comming

For some reason this was just recommended to me by the youtube algorithm

i'm not a communist but i respect the work of karl marx, and also i appreciate the fact that marx's wikipedia article makes him sound crustpunk af

  On 2/24/2021 at 9:04 PM, Cryptowen said:

i'm not a communist but i respect the work of karl marx, and also i appreciate the fact that marx's wikipedia article makes him sound crustpunk af

https://medium.com/@muetricht/karl-marx-was-the-original-dirtbag-leftist-6ec6319545f3

[quote]

As a husband and a father, Marx is the gentlest and mildest of men in spite of his wild and restless character. Marx lives in one of the worst, and therefore one of the cheapest, quarters of London. He occupies two rooms. One of them looks out on the street — that is the salon. The bedroom is at the back.

There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture to be found in the whole apartment: everything is broken, tattered and torn; there is a thick coat of dust everywhere; everywhere, too, the greatest disorder.

In the middle of the salon stands a large old-fashioned table covered with oil cloth. On it lie his manuscripts, books and newspapers, then the children’s toys, his wife’s mending and patching, together with several cups with chipped rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an ink-pot, glasses, dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash — in a word everything is topsy turvy, and all on the same table. A rag-and-bone man would step back ashamed from such a remarkable collection.

When you enter Marx’s room, smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so badly, that you think for a moment that you are groping about in a cave. Gradually your eyes become accustomed to the fog and you can make out a few objects. Everything is dirty and covered with dust. It is positively dangerous to sit down.

One chair has only three legs. On another chair, which happens to be whole, the children are playing at cooking. This one is offered to the visitor but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away: if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers.

None of this embarrasses Marx or his wife. You are received in the friendliest of fashions; pipes and tobacco and whatever else there might happen to be are offered to you most cordially. Intellectually spirited and agreeable conversation makes amends for the domestic deficiencies, at least in part. One even grows accustomed to the company, and finds this circle interesting, even original. This is the true picture of the family life of the communist chief, Marx.

[/quote]

  On 2/24/2021 at 7:30 PM, cyanobacteria said:

capitalism intentionally reduces technological advancement through the exploitation and underpayment of wage labor.

Which of course explains why foxconn continues to increase automation in their plants.

@rhmilo think more along the lines of garment manufacture, loads of trinkets and small things are produced through factory automation.

  On 2/24/2021 at 7:39 PM, cyanobacteria said:

fascism in practice is state intervention to mediate class struggle in favor of the bourgeoisie,

Fascism in practice has been to mediate all relations to the benefit of the dictator in power (see Mussolini and Trump's fascism-lite). The bourgeoisie may benefit, but may never over-step their place.

Edit: and to bring it back around, the direction that China is heading. 

  On 2/24/2021 at 7:43 PM, cyanobacteria said:

shutup i just want cummunism

Every sane person wants real communism.

I feel like I need to do some in-depth reading on what fascism actually is/was at some point so that I can understand it better on a structural level. It's kind of become a catch-all term for "when the cops are really mean" in popular discourse, which isn't actually a useful way of dealing with it as an ideological threat imo

  On 2/24/2021 at 9:36 PM, chenGOD said:

Fascism in practice has been to mediate all relations to the benefit of the dictator in power (see Mussolini and Trump's fascism-lite). The bourgeoisie may benefit, but may never over-step their place.

mussolini was a creation of the bourgeoisie.  indeed it could be said any individual capitalist must not overstep their boundaries because it is the bourgeois class itself being prioritized

  On 2/24/2021 at 9:50 PM, Cryptowen said:

I feel like I need to do some in-depth reading on what fascism actually is/was at some point so that I can understand it better on a structural level. It's kind of become a catch-all term for "when the cops are really mean" in popular discourse, which isn't actually a useful way of dealing with it as an ideological threat imo

i like this https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/404273.Blackshirts_and_Reds

Zeff is a psyop, guys. The walls have ears.

  On 2/24/2021 at 9:52 PM, Braintree said:

Zeff is a psyop, guys. The walls have ears.

im not a psyop im literaly just some autist