ferristriangle

US citizens don't lack access to those things because of a lack of budget. The threat of homelessness, hunger, and health insecurity are all forms of worker discipline. The barrier to solving those things is ideological, not budgetary.

It's also based on this false mythology that the US (and I'm sure other countries) have crafted around their involvement in World War 2. There's this popular notion based on the idea where "if we simply knew what was going on we would have stepped in sooner, and all the atrocities that were occurring were simply too hidden from the public view for us to do anything about until it was too late!" And the logic that follows from that mythology is that if we want to stop atrocities like the Holocaust from happening again we have to take every accusation seriously, because brushing it off could risk another Holocaust happening under our noses without us knowing about it! And this allows atrocity propaganda to get away with providing shockingly little evidence to support its accusations, because not meeting an appropriate burden of proof can just be explained away by the "clandestine" nature of genocide. That it's all happening behind closed doors, hidden away from the public. The proof of conspiracy is locked away in secret archives, but a collection of anecdotes is all you should need! If you don't believe the first hand accounts we are publishing about our ~~targets~~ enemy states, then you're going to allow another Holocaust to happen!

But this understanding of genocide is completely ahistorical. Genocide does not happen in quiet, behind closed doors. Most people are actually quite opposed to their neighbors being discriminated against and eventually either run out of their homes or murdered, and most attempts to do so at any kind of scale would be met with social backlash and resistance. To get a society to the point where even the early stages of genocide are possible, you need to whip up segments of the population into a bloodthirsty fervor. You need to agitate in public with loud speakers and megaphones, rallying people against the "subhuman removed" who are weighing like a cancer on the moral and righteous citizenry who is beset by a plague of undesirables. You need to boldly proclaim what your agenda is, and whip up enough of a critical mass of supporters to your cause that protesting against it becomes dangerous and risky because violent fascists will meet you in the streets to oppose those protests. Only then is it even logistically feasible to carry out even the initial stages of a genocide, and the entire process up to that point was required to be incredibly public. And at every stage afterwards genocide leaves behind incredibly damning evidence that incredibly apparent even on a cursory investigation. Starting with the mass refuge crisis that inevitably occurs as people attempt to flee from a campaign of mass persecution, down to the massive logistical networks required to carry out a campaign of mass death in the final stages.

The Holocaust did not happen in secret, it was well understood what was going on even with the standards of reporting and intelligence gathering of the times. This idea that we simply didn't know comes from a desire to whitewash how complicit our country was with the Nazi regime. There was no debate on if the Holocaust was happening, we had transcripts of Hitler's speeches and translations of the things he published, we had reports on the nazi rallies and the speeches given there, we had boats filled with refugees begging for asylum that were turned away from our doorstep. The public debate at the time was not, "Well gosh, we would certainly intervene if we knew what was going on, but the evidence is just so wishy-washy and we don't want to be rash and jump to conclusions." Instead, the debate was around whether or not eugenics and ethnic cleansing was good, with a significant portion of the public whole-heartedly endorsing Hitler's policies and actions. Especially in the Jim Crow south and in other places of the country where the eugenics movement had a strong foothold and significant political sway due in part to endowments from organizations like the Rockefeller foundation and the Carnegie Institute who promoted Eugenics and race science as legitimate fields of academic study which you could get a degree in from American Universities as part of their mission to fund education. In fact, Hitler cites the American Eugenics Movement directly in Mein Kampf, crediting it with giving him the the "scientific basis" for nazi race laws like the Nuremberg codes. And of course, American corporations gave tremendous economic support, and those corporations had major business and financial interests tied up with supporting the nazis.

America was not unaware, America was complicit. Many of the policies implemented by Hitler are things that the American Eugenics movement had been trying to either pass into law or expand into other parts of the country for years. Many of the race laws in Jim Crow states were even harsher than what could be found in the Nuremberg codes, and eugenicist policies of forced sterilization had even started becoming state law in places like California. This idea that we simply didn't know better is a comforting thought that allows people to pretend their country was the good guys, and they would have stepped off the sidelines sooner had we simply known better. And now we must remain hypervigilant for the slightest hint of impropriety.

And propaganda about Soviet states and other socialist projects fits this worldview quite well. This style of propaganda is full of stories about doublethink and brainwashing the public so that they don't question the party while a secret conspiracy goes on under their noses as people are disappeared in secret.

In reality what a real ongoing genocide looks like is what is happening on the southern US border. Sure, reporters are often denied access to the inside of the migrant detention facilities on the border and other internment style camps, so some specific details about the process are somewhat obscured from public view. But the actual facts of what is occurring on the border is not the subject of public debate. Everyone knows that migrants are being locked up, families are being separated, women are being forcibly sterilized in these facilities against their consent, migrants are being horribly mistreated to the point of torture, adequate nutrition and health care is often not available to the people being detained resulting in many deaths. The public debate around this issue is not centered around what is happening in these facilities, it's centered around whether the people being locked up and horrifically mistreated deserve it. With one side of that debate enthusiastically endorsing that cruelty, whipped up into a vitriolic fervor fueled by a constant stream of hate media broadcast by Fox News and various other tv, radio, and internet based hate media outlets. One side of that debate is celebrating how the illegals who are a plight and a burden on the good, hard-working American patriots are getting what's coming to them, and that it serves them right for trying to come here and drag down the country. One side is claiming that Mexico is sending over theirremoveds, their drug dealers, and their murders, that these people are subhuman criminal scum, and that anyone who opposes these detention facilities are enemies of Law and Order and are traitors to this country and are traitors to all the true patriots who defend our borders.

You don't have to dig beneath the surface to uncover some secret hidden conspiracy. Genocide is very loud and very public because it needs to be. It needs the consent and support of at least some portion of the public to be carried out, it needs these policies to be contentious so that the public fights among itself and resistance is difficult to organize.

When these libs raise concerns about being a genocide denier/apologist it comes from this idea that genocide is this secretive act, and if we don't take even the most flimsy accusations seriously we risk being complicit in another atrocity. That the consequences of not taking accusations of genocide seriously are just too horrific to think about, and anyone who doesn't feel the same way must themselves be complicit. But what this train of thought misses is that the consequences for supporting unfounded accusations is equally disastrous, and to illustrate that point we have decades of brutally interventionist US foreign policy which has repeatedly fabricated atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for the slaughter of millions at the hands of a globe spanning military empire, with even more deaths being caused by countries under US sanctions being starved of resources as an act of non-combatant warfare. A false positive is just as disastrous as a false negative. But when you actually study history and understand the reasonable burden of proof you would expect investigators and reporters to be able to meet, you can feel more comfortable raising the standards of evidence you're willing to accept to substantiate accusations of atrocity instead of naively buying into every accusation that you're presented with and find yourself unwittingly in support of horrific foreign policy and militarism again and again and again.

For /c/capitalismindecay, the most that you need to do is accept the principle that the Axis was worse than the U.S.S.R., which sounds obvious and trivial to us but can be surprisingly difficult for some people.

Problem is you are fighting against stuff like the Double Genocide Theory, which was literal nazi propaganda made to muddy the water and "both sides" the actual Holocaust, and even though that propaganda wasn't even remotely credible when it was published it has since been reheated and served up as Cold War propaganda that was repeated so often that it's just "common sense" at this point.

And part of what makes atrocity propaganda so effective is that once people buy into it it is filled with thought-terminating clichés that are built in which makes challenging that narrative difficult.

Back in the early xbox days when open world destructible environments were still novel, there were quite a few games where just running around and breaking shit was a core part of the gameplay. I'm thinking of games like "Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction." After a while, destructible environments just became just became a bullet point on a lot of games, usually scaled back and refined so that you still had areas with sensible level design after things were broken. But I can't recall any games where destruction was a core part of the experience being made in a long time.

So I'd love to see a game like Ultimate Destruction made to modern standards with modern physics and such. I know Red Faction: Guerilla is known for having destructible environments with very complex physics that required you to think about how a building was constructed and which supports were load bearing if you wanted to topple a building over, and that is certainly the kind of attention to detail I'd want, but it still doesn't scratch the same itch. The environment is certainly very destructible, but your tools for destroying the environment are much more limited and the game play is much more focused on the combat with the destructible environment offering an option for how you can approach combat.

"Break things apart sandboxes" probably aren't made anymore because it's not actually that engaging, and I only liked it because I was a dumb kid, but I would love to see a break the world with outrageous power style of game made to modern standards.

Part 3, Why does this context matter for talking about Xinjiang?

First, genocide is a powerful word with a lot of political weight behind it. Being able to declare something as a genocide is a powerful rhetorical tool, and is useful for manufacturing consent for war and other kinds of economic/political interventions. That's the basis of atrocity propaganda as a tool for manipulating public opinion. Accusations of genocide and similar atrocity propaganda techniques are incredibly difficult to brush off regardless of how much evidence there is to substantiate those accusations, because any rebuttal to those accusations has a wide range of built-in "thought terminating clichés" that can be used to shut down dissent. Clichés like, "you're just a genocide denier," "why are you defending an authoritarian regime?" "but what if you're wrong and we just let another holocaust happen under our noses!"

But as we've seen above, the official definition of genocide rejects the academic and historical context of genocide, and instead chose to define genocide in a political way. Specifically in a way that the UN nations who would otherwise be guilty of genocide could not be convicted, but that could still be used to prosecute their enemies. We see this play out all of the time not just with genocide, but in regards to human rights in general. Citations Needed has an excellent episode titled "The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex" That talks about the history of Human Rights groups and international courts almost exclusively weaponizing Human Rights violations as ways to penalize mainly formerly colonized nations in the global south, and are almost never used to punish the plethora of Human Rights abuses that occur in Western nations.

What this politicization of genocide creates is a warped conversation where events will try to be twisted in a way that can allow events to be classified as a genocide on a technicality for political purposes. That's why you see a focus on coverage of Xinjiang focusing on things like increased access to contraceptives, because that could be twisted to fit the UN definition of "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."

But with the broader, more holistic, more academic definition of genocide, and with an analysis of the techniques of the historical genocides that definition was meant to encompass, we can get a better idea of this kind of genocide and see how the situation in China compares. First, and probably most importantly, would be the vocational schools.

What we know about these schools is that they were started in response a rash of extremist terrorist attacks in the region carried out by the East Turkmenistan Separatist movement. Many of those who were radicalized are people who were native to Xinjiang, left the region and fought on behalf of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and then returned home to Xinjiang still radicalized after ISIS was dissolved.

The stated purpose of these vocational schools is to offer populations at risk of radicalization, those who have already expressed radicalized intents, those who have participated in extremist movements such as ISIS and the East Turkmenistan Separatist movement, and those who have been convicted of crimes related to the above categories. The vocational schools have a focus on creating economic and political opportunities through job training, Mandarin language education, and with an overall focus on deradicalization and countering the narratives that are used in radicalization.

These schools are used as the primary evidence that China is carrying out a genocide in secret, with comparisons made to concentration camps and indigenous schools. But these arguments fall apart when interrogated. In historical genocides that we can compare to, concentration camps are at best a way to force a group into a status as a second class citizen, systematically remove them from higher levels of participation in government, social practice, and economic activity. At worse, they are used as part of a wider program of mass extermination. Not only do we not see these kinds of outcomes as a result of the Xinjiang vocational schools, we see exactly the opposite of what you would expect from a genocide. Those who attend the vocational schools end up with higher levels of social, political, and economic participation. They have expanded opportunities for employment and political participation, and social participation is developed through broader policies that invest in building places of worship, cultural centers, and general public development.

Similarly, comparisons to indigenous schools in colonial empires also fall flat. The kind of cultural destruction and forced assimilation carried out by indigenous schools requires at least a generation of grooming children from the moment that they reach school age until they reach adulthood, and only makes sense in a broader context of cultural suppression. The vocational schools, on the other hand, are adult education, the classes are offered in their native languages, and there's no broader cultural suppression to suggest that "deradicalization" is actually some kind of euphemism for cultural destruction and forced assimilation. And far from being a generations long effort attempting to systematically destroy any association or connection you have with your heritage, these vocational schools were only in operation for roughly 2-3 years, with any given person attending for around a year on average, and with the last classes finishing up in late 2019.

And that idea about broader policy is the really damning bit. Genocide, cultural or otherwise, has never been a single isolated policy. You never just have concentration camps, you have an entire legal and social framework designed around promoting one national group over others. Yet in China you don't see that pattern anywhere else. There are 55 recognized national groups that are all guaranteed proportional representation in government at both the local and national level. Cultural sites, places of worship, and the like aren't being destroyed, on the contrary public funding is used to help build places of worship and preserve cultural landmarks. Native languages aren't suppressed and scrubbed from public life, on the contrary public spaces are accessible by native language speakers, public signage is multi-lingual, government services are available in your native language, including the right to an education in your native language. Economic opportunities and wealth isn't being stripped away from any of these groups, on the contrary their economic livelihood is constantly being invested in.

There is no other policy that could establish the pattern of genocide that any other historical genocide has exhibited, and therefore nothing to suggest that Xinjiang schools are actually part of a genocide as opposed to the stated goals of deradicalization through education. There isn't even the argument that this is a stepping stone that will lead to further repression, because the program has already concluded and is considered to be a success, having ended in 2019 after the rate of terrorist attacks and extremist inspired violence dropped to zero. If this were actually some form of brutal repression instead of the education and job training it is claimed to be, then you would expect to see an increase in radicalization and extremist inspired violence in response to fierce government repression, but we end up seeing precisely the opposite.

The only reason left for alleging that there is a genocide, cultural or otherwise, or that there is a pattern of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, is that those allegations help to advance US foreign policy interests in the same way that "Saddam has WMDs" did.

And you will even have state department officials admit to this in certain company, it's not like they're exactly shy about their intentions. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson gave a speech that lends credence to this idea that separatist violence and extremism has been cultivated and instigated by the US specifically as a way to destabilize China as part of the strategic objectives of the US military, and weaponizing the response to extremist violence in the media in order to control the narrative is a natural extension of this kind of warmongering.

We have a definition of genocide which makes almost no reference to cultural destruction, despite Lemkin considering cultural destruction as being a core component of his definition of genocide. He describes his involvement with drafting the UN convention in his autobiography:

"I defended [cultural genocide] successfully through two drafts. It meant the destruction of the cultural patter of a group, such as the language, the traditions, the monuments, archives, libraries, churches. In brief: the shrines of the soul of a nation. But there was not enough support for this idea in the Committee (...) So with a heavy heart I decided not to press for it."

Part 2, why does this matter?

A lot of this conversation about how do you define genocide and what technically counts as genocide feels a lot like pedantry. "We know that genocide is bad, we don't need to split hairs to call something bad."

But this history is very important, and it's important to understand both the crime of genocide, as well as all of the things that genocide encompasses, as well as understanding the motivation for why many nations would want to have a narrower definition for genocide in order to discuss how that shapes the narrative around genocide and our understanding of genocide.

So lets take a look at what crimes are being effectively buried and hidden from being prosecuted as a genocide that otherwise should be considered a genocide based off of the original, academic formulation.

America is chock full of these examples, as well as the colonial empires of the British, French, Spanish, Germans, and so on.

In no particular order, from America we have biological warfare against Native Americans, events like the trail of tears, systematically forcing native populations into "reservations," indigenous schools designed to "Americanize" native children, paying settlers to go out and murder nearby native populations and paying for every scalp delivered. A lot of these actions would fall under the "official" definition of genocide, where members of the group were deliberately killed or physically destroyed, but those things happened "way in the past." However, the isolation of large parts of the remaining native population into reservations which are basically slums with little to no access to economic development should absolutely be considered an ongoing act of genocide. Similarly, you have the apartheid that is American Black Codes and American Jim Crow that legally enshrined a segregated and second class status to black Americans that was ongoing and would continue for sometime afterward when the UN genocide convention was being drafted.

Some examples that were given by representatives that were a part of drafting the resolution:

Sweden noted that its forced conversion of the Lapps to Christianity might lay it open to accusations of cultural genocide.

Brazil warned that 'some minorities might have used it as an excuse for opposing perfectly normal assimilation in new countries.' (New countries in this context meaning settler colonial states)

South Africa endorsed the remarks of New Zealand, insisting upon 'the danger latent in the provisions of article III where primitive or backward groups were concerned.'

Source: "Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes," William Schabas

And then we have what is somewhat of a low hanging fruit when talking about the history of colonial regimes, which basically conducted themselves exactly in line with Lemkin's definition of genocide. You militarily occupy a region, claim authority over the region as your colony, implement your own government and legal system that has two tiers for colonizers and the colonized, and impose that rule against the colonized and in exclusion to their own legal and social customs. And indigenous schools were a large part of enforcing this colonial rule on a social level as they were institutions that tried to scrub out any native identity and culture and enforce the colonial nation's culture as the correct culture.

And lets take a moment to really interrogate what indigenous schools do, and why they're relevant when talking about genocide, especially when using Lemkin's definition. Indigenous schools at their core are an institution of forced assimilation. They take children and punish them for using their native language, punish them for wearing native styles of clothing, punish them for eating their traditional cultural dishes, and create an environment that creates deep shame for expressing any kind of cultural heritage. It's a systematic process that forcibly takes an entire generation and tries to destroy any association they have with their parent's culture, and in its place you teach them the colonizer's language, the colonizer's style of dress, the colonizer's style of worship, the colonizer's values, the colonizer's mode of economic organization, the colonizer's legal structure, and so on.

As a side note, this is also where the conception of cultural appropriation comes from. On its face, sharing music, styles of dress, cuisine, ideas of spirituality, and so on across cultures isn't some nefarious thing. What makes something cultural appropriation is when you have this greater context of colonization and forced assimilation, where these national groups have their heritage forcibly torn away from them, ridiculed, and used as a signifier of "backwardness," "savagery," and marks them as a second class citizen, only for members of the dominant group to take that same heritage and commodify it as exotic novelties.

I don't have to take the CCP at their word.

I have the benefit of hindsight, and I can observe the incredible gains that this plan of action has won for the working class whose interests the party claims to represent. I can see that the party consistently meets or exceeds the stated developmental and economic goals that they commit to in each of their publicly available 5-year plans. This combination of consistently fulfilling their promises, and committing to 5-year plans that consistently advance the interests of the working class, would lead me to conclude that the CCP is an organization that is committed to representing the interests of the working class, and is doing the best they can with the set of options available to them.

As for where you draw the line, that always depends on the material conditions you are molding your theory of change to, and what is required to address those conditions. If, for example, America turned socialist tomorrow, I would never endorse a plan of Chinese market socialism for this new socialist states of America, because you wouldn't be able to make a case for what needs are being met and what contradictions are being resolved in exchange for permitting private enterprise. America isn't going to imperialize itself, so you can't make the case for shared economic development acting as a deterrent to aggression. And America is already a highly developed economy, there's no need to attract foreign investment to help build up your productive forces. You can just follow the standard playbook of "seizing the means of production," because that theory of change was written with the highly developed western economies like America in mind.

Also, I would argue that capitalists are the ones making a "deal with the devil," in this case, and not China.

To explain this idea, let's step back into the realm of theory and ask why would we expect this theory of market socialism to work. I've already laid out the case for why the CCP, as a representative of the interests of the working class, would find value in sitting down at the negotiating table to make some compromises with capital. But what is the motivation of capital to play along?

Well, if we trust Marx, and we trust that the labor theory of value holds true, then we know that capital is worthless without labor. A capitalist who owns all sorts of equipment and machinery and other inputs of production, but who has no labor, in reality only has piles of lifeless junk, which on average can only be resold for the same price he paid for it, and in all likelihood will actually depreciate in value over time, either through the ravages of time and weather, through costs affiliated with maintenance and storage, or through the forward progression of technology rendering his current tools and equipment obsolete. The only way to increase the value of these inputs of production is to have them be brought to life by the application of labor, and transformed into new use values and exchange values.

So, at the end of the day, even though the capitalist tries everything in his power to increase his leverage and power over labor, he will always be subservient to labor in the end. All of his property is worthless without labor, and will tend to continue to lose value until he can offload it. If conditions existed where the capitalist enjoyed none of the leverage that he does today, then he would gladly pay labor the full value that it contributes and take no profits for himself, simply so that he could rid himself of his investment at cost rather than hemorrhaging money due to holding onto a depreciating asset.

But, unfortunately, capital currently does hold leverage over labor. Most of that leverage comes in the form of the industrial reserve army of labor. The idea here being that if I can buy and sell labor as a commodity on the labor market, and there is a surplus of labor that is desperate for work and willing to work for scraps, then that's the price that wages will tend to be depressed towards. After all, why would I pay you a fair wage when there's someone else starving on the street who's willing to work for pennies?

So when China began the reform and opening up period, their leverage was tied to the labor conditions in the global labor market, and specifically tied to the conditions of other global south and previously colonized countries. When you're trying to attract foreign investment, the same idea of the industrial reserve army applies, but on a national scale. "Why would I open a factory here when I can hire cheaper labor in Malaysia or Indonesia or the Philippines?"

As a result of this lack of bargaining power and a desperate need for investment, this often meant accepting sweatshop conditions and poverty wages.

However, a capitalist roader would've stopped here. You have private control of markets and production, you have super profits driven by hyper exploitation, all the capitalist aligned people are happy.

But this is obviously not where the CCP stopped. They continually built up the leverage of the working class, and continually applied more and more leverage on behalf of the working class, pushing through mandatory pay increases and improved labor conditions, constantly developing public enterprise alongside private enterprise and in competition with private enterprise, which then exerts more pressure and creates more leverage, as well as using revenue from taxing these private enterprises to build up public infrastructure that massively improved quality of life outside of work too.

One of the downsides of relying on investment from capital is that your hands are largely tied by how much leverage you have, and how desperately you need that investment. But what I consistently see out of the CCP is the transformation of self sufficiency into new leverage over capital, and the use of that leverage to consistently improve wages and labor conditions.

It's basically like if your whole country was one big union, but when the company collapses or leaves for cheaper labor markets under this pressure, you can just nationalize that work place and keep running it as a public enterprise.

And you can see this same logic applied to their current day foreign policy and investment strategy with the development aid they give to Africa and the infrastructure being built up with the belt and road initiative. China is deeply aware how intertwined the bargaining power of labor in the global south is with the rest of the world, and that hyper-exploitation is made possible by virtue of how desperate and struggling these nations are, and how capitalism uses that as leverage. So China has a policy of aiding the economic development of these nations, regardless of political affiliation. The idea being that ruling classes are fickle and ephemeral, but real, material development will bring about lasting change.

The reason that this is a "deal with the devil" for capital is that while they are getting short term profits out of the deal now, their leverage over huge segments of the labor market is being eroded in the process, which shifts the balance of power between labor and capital to where capital is the weaker of the two, and exploits the fact that capital will always need labor, but labor won't always need capital.

The Sino-Soviet split and the subsequent falling out is pretty unanimously regarded as a tragedy and misguided, not as some sort of necessary evil where the ends justify the means.

But also, foreign policy is a very different beast from domestic policy, especially considering the time period and development of China at the time. You have a brand new state, which was still 80%-90% agrarian, with very little to speak of in terms of sophisticated foreign intelligence agencies, working with a lot of imperfect and incomplete information with regard to current foreign affairs. You end up with foreign policy decisions that are fueled by spite and bad blood, rather than a rational accounting of the facts.

And none of that context is meant to be used to justify those mistakes or rationalize any of the harm that was done as a result. Those actions should be condemned, and they are condemned by most everyone who is pro-China.

But the idea that the Sino-Soviet split is evidence that China abandoned socialism and embraced capitalism has to ignore a lot of context in order to present that conclusion.

However, it presents a compelling narrative when paired with the Deng market reforms and China opening up their markets to private enterprises, so let's take a bit of look at the rationale for this policy.

When discussing China, it's important to note that the communist cliche of "seize the means of production" could never apply to China. This is due to the fact that China was just emerging from a century of colonial rule, where all their labor and natural resources were robbed at gunpoint and used to develop the colonial powers rather than their homeland. There were no means of production to seize, all that capital was locked away behind the doors of global trade. They were left with a country of roughly 90% peasant farmers, most of whom were working the land with hand tools. Developing advanced productive forces capable of providing for everyone will be an arduous task no matter what. So let's look at the options available and see the rationale behind each.

First would be to pursue socialist development in alliance with the Soviet bloc, getting access to a valuable trading partner and material assistance for developing your economy. Unfortunately, that bridge was burned so this one gets thrown into the honorable mentions/alternative history pile.

Second, you could attempt to build up advanced productive forces out of sticks and stones. And the whole time you're doing so, you'll also have to fight off the imperialist aggression that's directed toward every socialist project in the Cold War era, extending into today. This might be doable, but it would require tremendous amounts of toil.

Which brings us back to seizing the means of production. If you don't want to start from nothing, you need some mechanism of exchange to gives you access to the capital that your working class built.

You could make an argument that they'd be morally justified in using their military to take back some of that stolen wealth by force as a form of reparations, but challenging a superior military power in such a way is a recipe for failure and incredible suffering.

Which leaves us with the market reforms. The main issue with the market reforms is that you reintroduce all of the contradictions of private enterprise, namely exploitation, uneven development, inequality, and so on. But you get some important benefits in exchange. For one, you gain access to important investments in labor saving tools and machinery. Which means that even though you're introducing exploitation, you're reducing toil by a far greater degree. The second primary benefit is that the market reforms act as a powerful deterrent to imperialist aggression and allows for peaceful development during the epoch of imperialism. This is due to the fact that by tying your economic livelihoods together, you create a kind of "economic mutually assured destruction."

This is fully consistent with principles of socialist development, in my opinion. It's a case of pick the best out of a bad set of options, but when accounting for the full context and conditions they were responding to this is the plan that seems to advance the interests of the masses in the most effective way available. And as these conditions change, as China has become more self sufficient and less reliant on foreign investment we see this strategy continue to change in order to best benefit the masses. Reduced reliance on investment and the sunk cost of existing investments is transformed into leverage that constantly puts pressure on private enterprise to increase wages, with an average increase of 17% each year for a total increase of 400% in the past 30 years. As capital starts getting priced out of Chinese labor markets and private enterprises start going out of business or move to more favorable labor markets, the state simply takes over and manages the business as a public enterprise instead.

That's not "capitalist roading" no matter what the ultra-leftists might tell you.

My feeling is that it is important to uphold the legacy of the first worker state ever attempted on this scale. Of course mistakes were made, many of them horrendous, but the more I try to understand this period of history the more I come away with the impression that the people fighting for the liberation of mankind from the shackles of capitalism, and the brutality of imperialism and colonialism were people who were honestly fighting for a better world and were responsible for trying to craft completely new organizations and relations of production, with very little in the way of blueprints on how to do so, all while facing some of the most fierce repression from an alliance of liberal capitalist military super powers that history has to offer.

Of course mistakes are going to be made in those conditions, and we should do our best to learn from those mistakes so that we don't repeat them. But millions of lives were improved tremendously as a result of these efforts. Both inside and outside of the Soviet Union. Average life expectancies increased by decades because of these new kinds of organization, and for the first time in history workers were guaranteed rights like healthcare, sick leave, vacations, a 40 hour work week, workplace safety standards, disability benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. This was an incredibly powerful precedent, and showed the world that you could have an economy organized around advancing the interests of the working class, and also become an economic super power while doing so.

My dad is alive because of this precedent. Before the Soviet Union was established, workers rights were abysmal. At the turn of the century it was common to have 12-14 hour work days, 6-7 days a week. Child labor was common, and often necessary to provide for a family. People were worked to the bone until their bodies were crippled, and once they could no longer work they simply lost their job and was thrown out on the street to die. Or if they were lucky they had a family that could take care of them who end up falling deeper and deeper in debt in the process due to the burden of caretaking combined with the loss in income.

It was only because of the precedent that the Soviet Union set that labor rights organizers were ever able to win concessions from the capitalist ruling class. A ruling class who was suddenly terrified that their workers could see what was possible and attempt to emulate the Soviet Union and revolt against the exploiters. This terror finally made them willing to concede to establishing all of the workers rights we take for granted today, and without programs that came out of this like social security disability benefits, when my dad got crippled on the job he would've just been left to die.

There's so much casual cruelty and brutality that is just inherent to how capitalism is structured, and it's difficult to overstate just how monumentally important the Soviet Union was at the time in fighting for the rights of workers around the globe. It's hard to look back on this history and see a timeline littered with mistakes and horrible crimes, the ever present capitalist encirclement, threat of bombing and destruction and invasion by the capitalist powers, relentless propaganda and subterfuge and sabotage and sanction and embargo and blockade, and on top of the unrelenting pressure of these external contradictions you have the pressure of internal contradictions, institutions of military power and coercion, secret police, bureaucracies that were plagued with opportunists and careerism, and so on. And it difficult to synthesize all of this history and understand which parts were mistakes on their part, which parts were victories on behalf of their enemies, which parts were "necessary evils" to combat both the casual and active cruelty of capitalism and Czarism, what failures or victories may have resulted from doing things differently, and so on. In other words, to separate which things are mistakes that we need to learn from, and which things are slander from a capitalist class who desperately wants us to believe that "the cure is worse than the disease," so that no one ever attempts to emulate the soviet union and establish a world that has no need for them.

But I can't help but conclude that the project that the Soviet Union set out on was an important step forward in advancing humanity past the predatory stage of development. And that there is still value in upholding the victories they were able to achieve, on both a national and international scale, and regarding them as the beacons of hope of a future without capitalism that they rightfully deserve, even though it is plagued by a complicated history. The terror that the idea of the Soviet Union still inspires in our enemies to this day is proof of that value, and it feels difficult to let go of that.