
I’m tired of being surrounded by propaganda. Do better.
Tell that to your pedophile rulers
we do
lmao the fuck you do
Once I stop reading “two things can be true at once” whenever your nazi pedophile rulers tell you something bad about the next country they want to destroy maybe I’ll believe you
Americans are protesting in historic numbers regularly. Larger than anything aside from the earth day protests that I am aware of. This narrative that Americans are rolling over and accepting this is false. It’s not being reported.
Of course that’s not enough l, but it’s counterproductive to spread information that contributes to a sense of learned helplessness. Trump is a traitor and a serial child rapist and murder, and all true Americans believe this and are fighting however they can.
You don’t do jack shit
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Leftists have regularly been advocating for organizing:

The problem with liberals is that they still think the democrats are a path to progress, rather than slow death.
Cowbee I like the chart, but respectfully a lot of the rhetoric on ML instances reads closer to trolling than engaging to build a “sympathetic base” , just my 2 cents not worth much more than that ;-)
Lemmy.ml isn’t an org, I’m not trying to suggest that it is. Leftists make memes and shitposts here, but when it comes to actual action, organizing in real life is always recommended.
Yes. Agree. And I would suggest it is counterproductive to the point of being counter-revolutionary.
A simulacrum mocking the landscape it seeks to map
I don’t agree with the idea that shitposting is counter-revolutionary. Seems a bit much.
Every time I see Cowbee in a thread like this, it’s like I walked into a restaurant to see someone trying to explain to somebody else why their friend who just spat in their food is actually a cool dude doing great solidarity because the owners of the restaurant treat their employees poorly.
ML in my experience has very little to do with engaging with leftists and more to do with bashing the “decadent West.” Anytime I see memes.ml pop up in my feed, it’s a 50/50 shot between me finding something funny or something that makes me debate blocking the instance as much as I can at an account level.
I think what you’re describing is the difference between leftists shitposting online and actual real-life practice.
The decadent west
Lol you have not seen a single person say this, you’re just reaching into a grab bag of dialogue tropes you’ve heard in old movies or maybe a Red Alert game. Fucking nobody says “the decadent west” outside of Bond movies from 50 years ago. Quit lying.
I didn’t mean that as a literal quote but as sarcastic air quotes to evoke the exact imagery that you came up with. Although, I have actually seen a Hexbear or (what’s the other one, Beehaw?) user use that phrase. Of course, they also said that only capitalist pigs die in China, so it’s hard to tell if they were serious or if it was full commitment to the bit. That part of Lemmy is fairly indistinguishable from a leftist version of 4chan.
Like I said in another comment, ML has an issue common to many leftist communities in that old saying of “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” And that can manifest as behaving like more moderate leftists (not liberals - actual leftists) may as well be centrists or conservatives, or treating Europe as being just as bad as Trump’s regime. Purity tests and trolling rather than the mutual cooperation that Cowbee posted.
ML in my experience has very little to do with engaging with leftists and more to do with bashing the “decadent West.” Anytime I see memes.ml pop up in my feed, it’s a 50/50 shot between me finding something funny or something that makes me debate blocking the instance as much as I can at an account level.
Meme communities will be like that, right?
Why not block this community and engage with other communities in the instance?
I guess? I don’t think I’ve ever really stayed in a memes community where that’s the case, though on Reddit I was largely in places like egg_irl and traaa, where everything was focused around a shared experience of a minority group.
Besides, it’s not just the memes community, the memes is just where it appears the most blatantly and loudly. As the person above me said, it’s an instance wide thing. ML is nowhere near as bad as Hexbear (or I have yet to see any targeted harassment campaigns against an instance for failing a purity vibe check come from ML, at least) but, as they say, “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” Leftist spaces tend to have a bit of an undercurrent of only being welcoming to the “right kind of leftist.” I used “decadent West” up there very purposefully. There’s a bit of a vibe to ML that’s less “uniting various leftist groups” and more “preaching The Good Word to those poor ignorants” proselytizing.
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Your entire argument is based on the idea that shitposting online is the primary means by which leftists organize. I organize with a communist party in real life, online memes and shitposting are by no means what people advocate as “practice,” it’s just a thing to do in free time. Take a step back and rethink what you believe is going on.
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What on Earth are you talking about? All real communist orgs use online agitation, newsletters, social media, and more. I’m not saying that shitposting is valuable, I’m saying it’s not what I mean by practice. You’re deeply confused.
Everything you consume is propaganda and has an agenda, you just see this as propaganda because it counters the propaganda that’s already internalized and invisible to you
Shitposting isn’t propaganda
This may counter propaganda, but is also clearly propaganda itself.
China executes pedophiles and America elects them and worships at their churches. It’s really not a complicated comparison. There is no gotcha here
Fair, though I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. I’m no fan of the US, but what do you think is the biggest issue plaguing China right now from a humanist perspective?
- Poverty (which they’re alleviating), and the trappings of poverty (like poor labor conditions, corruption, and abuse).
- Environmental degradation (which they are alleviating) and all the trappings that come with it (like greater impact on the poor, bad health outcomes, corruption).
- Threats from state actors (which they are alleviating) and the trappings that come it (like selective repression of dissent, organizing, and collaboration, surveillance and chilling effects, etc)
Maybe both countries should stop executing people given that a non-negligible number of them are entirely innocent. Maybe capital punishment should have been abandoned long before the 21st Century and any country that continues it be a pariah state.
Im not a fan of corporal punishment at all. I don’t think any state should have authority to end any life for any reason. I could wish for an end to state sanctioned murder in one hand and shit in my other. We all know which hand will fill up first
Propaganda is just messaging, there’s nothing inherently evil about it. The question is what message is being propagated.
Absolutely - I did not mean to imply that this is evil propaganda.
Literally anything that causes an idea to spread is propaganda. Advertising, calls for help, gossip, commentary, analysis, storytelling, hell public art or theater or even just public conflict. That’s what the word means, the means of idea propagation.
Absolutely, that’s my point.
So calling anything propaganda is pointless, because everything is propaganda.
Exactly. And saying this meme is counter-propaganda is pointless, since it itself is propaganda.
Ok, sure. It’s exactly as propaganda as anything else
Again, there is no cultural artifact that does not serve a propaganda purpose or espouse a worldview
Indeed - Riverside’s claim that this is not propaganda is therefore false.
It’s not propaganda as we’ve been made to understand it in the west, because that’s a meaningless vibes based category
Hmm, maybe I misunderstood you.
If all cultural artifacts serve a propaganda purpose, but this post is not propaganda, does that mean that this post is not a cultural artifact?
I’m saying we’ve been taught that “propaganda” is just another word for “lies” when the reality is that it covers basically any piece of art, culture or commentary. It’s just any art or information that advances a specific view of the world. As a category it’s hopelessly broad, so it’s better to understand it as a function rather than a thing.
Then you might want to get off the internet and live in the woods
Tempting

Waiting for Liberals to actually have a thought out response to the excellent resources the MLs of this community provide.

Something something square Something something tanks
And don’t forget that China has billionaires!
Yeah and they don’t control the government like in the US but vice-versa.
the worst of crimes
Still waiting…
The tanks that were never fired, unlike in west bank?
the real question: where is the liberal equivalent of @Cowbee@lemmy.ml
Lotta comments from accounts a few days old, or with less than 50 comments in several years. Interesting.
Ngl, the fact that the US lied about masks and had such a clusterfuck response while China listened to the science was a major step in me becoming China-pilled.
They can both be bad.

They aren’t, though. China is a rising socialist state, and the US is a dying, brutal empire run be pedophiles and fascists.
Lol ty
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Public ownership is the principal aspect of China’s economy, and capitalists are held on a tight leash to focus on developing the productive forces. The large firms and key industries in China are publicly owned, it’s only the small and medium firms that are private.
The form of democracy and the mode of production in China ensures that there is a connection between the people and the state. Policies like the mass line are in place to ensure this direct connection remains. This is why over 90% of the Chinese population supports the government, and why they have such strong perceptions around democracy:

The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
China does have billionaires, as you might then protest. China is in the developing stages of socialism. Between capitalism, which is characterized by private ownership being the principle aspect of the economy and the capitalists in control of the state, and communism, characterized by full collectivization of production and distribution devoid of classes, is socialism, where public ownership is principle and the working classes in control. China in particular is working its way out of the initial stages of socialism:

The reason China has billionaires is because China has private property, and the reason it has private property is because of 2 major factors: the world economy is still dominated by the US empire, and because you cannot simply abolish private property at the stroke of a pen. China tried that already. The Gang of Four tried to dogmatically force a publicly owned and planned economy when the infrastructure best suited to that hadn’t been laid out by markets, and as a consequence growth was positive but highly unstable.
Why does it matter that the US Empire controls the world economy? Because as capitalism monopolizes, it is compelled to expand outward in order to fight falling rates of profit by raising absolute profits. The merging of bank and industrial capital into finance capital leads to export of capital, ie outsourcing. This process allows super-exploitation for super-profits, and is known as imperialism.
In the People’s Republic of China, under Mao and later the Gang of Four, growth was overall positive but was unstable. The centrally planned economy had brought great benefits in many areas, but because the productive forces themselves were underdeveloped, economic growth wasn’t steady. There began to be discussion and division in the party, until Deng Xiapoing’s faction pushing for Reform and Opening Up won out, and growth was stabilized:


Deng’s plan was to introduce market reforms, localized around Special Economic Zones, while maintaining full control over the principle aspects of the economy. Limited private capital would be introduced, especially by luring in foreign investors, such as the US, pivoting from more isolationist positions into one fully immersed in the global marketplace. As the small and medium firms grow into large firms, the state exerts more control and subsumes them more into the public sector. This was a gamble, but unlike what happened to the USSR, this was done in a controlled manner that ended up not undermining the socialist system overall.
China’s rapidly improving productive forces and cheap labor ended up being an irresistable match for US financial capital, even though the CPC maintained full sovereignty. This is in stark contrast to how the global north traditionally acts imperialistically, because it relies on financial and millitant dominance of the global south. This is why there is a “love/hate” relationship between the US Empire and PRC, the US wants more freedom for capital movement while the CPC is maintaining dominance.
Fast-forward to today, and the benefits of the CPC’s gamble are paying off. The US Empire is de-industrializing, while China is a productive super-power. The CPC has managed to maintain full control, and while there are neoliberals in China pushing for more liberalization now, the path to exerting more socialization is also open, and the economy is still socialist. It is the job of the CPC to continue building up the productive forces, while gradually winning back more of the benefits the working class enjoyed under the previous era, developing to higher and higher stages of socialism.
In doing this, China has presented itself to the global south as an alternative to the unequal exchange the global north does with the global south, which is accelerating the development of the global south. China is taking a more indirect method of undermining global imperialism than, say, the USSR, but its been remarkably effective at uplifting the global working classes, especially in China but also in the global south.
To call China “imperialist” or “capitalist” is to either invent a fantasy of China or to not understand imperialism, capitalism, or socialism. China isn’t a utopia, it’s a real socialist country.
But they are asian and hence bad -Lemmy libs
Oh how could I forget! I made the classic blunder, not factoring in racism. Thanks!
Lol ty
So to clarify, should I feel guilty about buying the slave labor products on temu? Or are they not actually slave labor. Is child slave labor not really an issue? Deprogram me a bit here.
Slave labor and child labor are illegal in the PRC, same with child slave labor.
Ah so there isn’t documented cases for both, right
There are documented cases of child labor and slave labor in the US, especially in the agricultural system. The prison system in the US is a system of forced slave labor. Over 4 million kids are laboring in the US. The hatred of China is pure projection. Are either of these societies perfect? No, is China particularly bad or worse than the US, definitely not. The US and the western nations in general fuel slavery and child labor world wide in their capitalist empires.
What kind of global imperial superpower doesn’t drop bombs for 35 years in a row? That doesn’t sound like any global imperial superpower I have ever heard of in the last 600 years. If China is a global imperial superpower without doing the whole war crimes thing, I’m almost inclined to say you’ve sold me on global imperialist superpowers being redeemable!
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They can but they aren’t
How?
I’m so tired
That picute of Chinese officals got mad aura, lol

Is that a real photo in the bottom? Fucking incredible if it is.
It is
Democracy is only as good as the voters. The average Chinese is better educated and a better citizen overall than the average USAmerican. Thus the difference in results. My experience with Chinese and USAians confirm this, even if anecdotal. I could have just missed the bad Chinese and was overexposed to bad USAians.
Also bourgeois/liberal democracy is the quintessence of adopting democratic aesthetics, forms, and language without any actual democratic function. No one can vote according to their interests, and no one’s votes actually influence policy.
The reason most modern imperialist states have evolved their own form of liberal democracy is because of how effective it is at mediating domestic capitalist contradictions so they can be externalized.
If the US were somehow a true functional democracy it would have evolved beyond capitalism decades ago.
“To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarianism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
― Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
Democracy is only as good as the voters.
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never lived in one.
Western liberal democracies are structurally flawed, and despite the immense systemic advantage capital already enjoys, capital still needs to manipulate education, religion, and media to persuade people to vote against their own material interests. The result is a political landscape that, in many cases, produces outcomes more dysfunctional than those seen in some modern monarchies or even historic feudal systems—yet with the added disadvantage that many citizens remain unaware of their own diminished political and economic conditions, convinced they live in the freest societies on earth and that everything elsewhere must be worse. Concluding such a system is not truly democratic, or merely a democracy of the bourgeoisie is a valid conclusion, because whether systematic or through manipulation of education, religion and media, they are the only ones who benefit from it, and the majority have no means of getting what they want.
I know you already know this. This comment was meant for any lurker who doesn’t know. The people who think they are one election away from fixing the system if they would only voter harder.
And I know you know I know 😉
I am deeply concerned that this is getting worse, not better. I sincerely hope I’m totally wrong about this, but I see young “educated” Americans more and more being unable to think at all. The kids in university now are liberally using commercial LLMs to finish assignments. People are surrendering their ability to think to private corporations. Imagine in 10 years from now, a man who can’t pay his AI bill can no longer survive on his own. And even if he could, he could only ever do what the corporate model deems acceptable. Just fully giving up agency because agency is friction.
I can’t respond to this email without paying Sam Altman! I can’t wipe my ass without Grok!
I’m drunk. I’m sorry. I hate what is happening, and I am helpless to stop it.
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Do not confuse Technocracy with Socialism. While Chinese Technocracy is Socialist, Technocracy alone can be a massive problem.
Is the lower photo real or AI? It looks like an album cover.
It’s real.
Can we do the revolution now?















