I’ve lived inside the western propagandasphere most of my life, and I’m always surprised at how obscenely xenophobic and dishonest it is. To the point of being an inversion of reality.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I held on to many of these “china bad” media narratives and was reluctant to let go of them when confronted with reality. I can say now how wrong I was and irresponsible it was for me to perpetuate that bullshit. I won’t excuse my old attitudes, but I do recognize that I didn’t invent them either; I just sort of absorbed them.
The closer I look at China, the more my opinion improves. Especially with regard to geopolitics, the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS, renewable energy and infrastructure building. It’s a success story of the process of socialism; they are effectively constraining and directing capital to improve material conditions for the working class. Planning society to meet the needs of its populations works. Building peaceful and productive partnerships around the world works. Of course nothing is perfect and any rapidly industrialized society comes with growing pains, esp given China’s own historical context, but I’ve come to regard China as close to as a model society for our point in time in many ways. And yep… I’ve also been guilty of having stupid ultra-left “iT’S NoT ReaL ComMuNiSm” takes too. I honestly wish I had been raised with a Marxist education in my early life so I could have found a sane way to understand the world much sooner.
As the empire collapses, I think it’s becoming clear to more people that the western media narrative is a bandage over the rotting wound of capitalism; ignoring its own decay and falsely demanding that we believe everywhere else must be somehow worse.
The starting point for the Marxian analysis centers on the existing dominant forces of monopolistic industrial capitalism. Therefore socialist revolution still must move through capitalism by process of subordinating the ruling class to a proletarian state. As Cowbee pointed out, fascism is not a state absent capitalism, but rather mode of capitalism itself. Because of the inherent contradictions, we assume that any capitalist system already produces various quantities of fascism as a mechanism for maintaining superiority of the owner class.