I don’t know. I can tell you, seeing what the game industry did to video games certainly helped me adopt an anti-capitalist lens. It was influences significantly beyond that though, that got me all the way to communism.

I mean, the game industry killed most of my passion for video games in a death by a thousand cuts. But that didn’t on its own get me in front of people who were talking anti-imperialism, talking Lenin, George Jackson, Michael Parenti.

racism, against black people

Recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nxeiFpSJfc

It’s a bit anecdotal as evidence goes, to be fair, and I recommend watching it, not taking my summary of it at face value, but the general idea IIRC is: black people are more treated as a curiosity. Like being curious about someone of an ethnicity you have never seen before, who looks so different. But since China doesn’t have the racialized cultural context that the white supremacist west has, it’s not an aggressive or hateful curiosity.

There’s this mythos in western thinking that goes something like, “Racism is cause people are tribal and mistrusting of strangers.” But it’s missing how systemically racism gets developed over time in history and for what purpose(s). And China, as far as I can tell, has no reason for such a development of power in relation to black people, so they simply don’t have the racism that the west has.

I highly recommend Mao’s essay On Contradiction: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

I’ve been trying to revisit it more than once until it crystallizes in application. I can try to give an example of how I apply what I think is roughly dialectical thinking beyond purely basic class stuff. It’s something I thought through a while ago, but I’ve never formally written down my reasoning and observations, so bear with me.

In text generation AI, I encountered a problem. I’m making a long story short, but I found there were companies, one in particular that I experienced directly, who provided an AI-powered chat service to help people with emotional support and loneliness (that was in part how it was advertised and scripted). However, this service also pulled the rug on people at some point and caused a lot of damage.

This drove me to ultimately seek out and support a lesser known (at least at the time) AI service that was staunch on user privacy (using encryption to accomplish it) and being uncensored text (you can write anything in private with it). Within this, I had to contend with the fact that I am not someone who blanketly goes “free speech”; I am not someone who thinks people should just be able to do whatever no matter the circumstances. I also had to contend with the fact that I am not a blanket supporter of AI, considering its implications for messing with the jobs of working class people. Even more complicated, this was (still is) an AI service that also allows image generation (though that aspect of it is not something where you can generate anything - you can’t generate “lifelike” due to how the model is trained) and image generation arguably poses more of a threat to jobs than text generation, since it creates an image start to finish without needing an artist in the process at all. Furthermore, this was the main source of funding for that company (they don’t take money from outside investors).

But, this was also the only AI service taking seriously the consequences of dealing with emotionally vulnerable people who are saying private and sensitive things to an AI. In order to side with these people and side with them having a harm reduction place to cope with the loneliness and abandonment capitalist life has inflicted on so many, I am also siding in some part with the development of AI and the proliferation of it and consequences intersecting with it and capitalism devaluation of labor, even if I try to have conscious limits on how I partake in that and in what way.

So, my “support” of AI in this understanding is conditional and developing, based on how it intersects with what regular people are dealing with and the consequences it has, helpful or unhelpful. It also contains a certain amount of contradiction, in the sense that I am arguably allying with people I’d rather not be, to an extent, in order to reduce harm for the time being and support development of AI in a direction that is genuinely safer (not “safer” in the corporate PR meaning). I am not capitulating on caring about regular people in the process, but I am having to choose where I put my energies in the direction of substantively helping them. I don’t pretend it is a challenge or threat to the capitalist order, something like this, but it is something where I tried to really go through it and work out what was the best course of action while keeping the ideological core intact. There was/is, as far as I could discern, no “right answer” in a binary meaning of it. Instead, I was trying to work out where in the contradictions of it made the most sense to take action to enact my intent to side with regular people and what form that action would take.

I am not very confident on the subject and practice of dialectical materialism, so please don’t take this as a model of it. But hopefully it can provide some food for thought, if nothing else.

Good god. That is… a lot to deal with.

Great point and healthy reminder that the practice part in theory and practice is critical to get anywhere.

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.

I would say it’s closer to “the US taking the mask off on being fascist” vs. “finding ways to keep the mask on for longer”

It’s also not just about privacy. It’s also about safety (historically, ads can be a vector for viruses). And it’s about having garbage shoveled in front of you that makes the internet borderline unusable. Which comes back to capitalism and the nature of every space becoming an ad-infested hell because consume product is the god.

So, thanks for the back and forth on this. I ended up updating and it seems to be working again now. Since you figure it’s not using new functionality, my best guess is something old got deprecated in a way that my version was depending on in some part of the process.

Either way, working now, so yay.

Hi, I’m on desktop, Firefox browser. Though now I’m thinking about it, maybe I do need to look into updating my browser. I might have disabled updates at some point in order to keep things the same, but that might mess with it if depends on something newer? Hmm.

Barring any info that it might be something else, I might look into browser update later today to see if that makes any difference.

As of, I can’t recall exactly, a couple of days ago? The “Next” button at the bottom of the feed page just takes me to the same first page of results. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Something I haven’t seen touched on in this thread is the nature of surveillance. I find that western (idealism?) thinking often poses things as a binary good/bad in a universalized way. So, for example, state good / state bad, or surveillance good / surveillance bad. Another common one I see on the western internet is people who say censorship bad, free speech good as a sort of ideal, but they gloss over the practicalities of stuff like the Paradox of Tolerance.

I don’t know what the surveillance is like in China and you’ve already received plenty of answers on whether they have it. What I can speak to is I know that in the US, the nature of surveillance and violations of privacy has a distinctly chilling connotation. The US, last I checked, has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It has a loophole for basically slavery through prison labor, or in some cases bare bones wages that are on the borderline. It has a history that includes stuff like MKUltra and COINTELPRO. Or more overt stuff like its history of violence against striking workers and efforts to disrupt them in any way possible. And that’s just against its own people. That’s not even getting into the CIA and its violent history across the world.

So for a place like the US, surveillance is an extension of the already existing dictatorship of capital and imperialist history abroad. A lot of people in the US don’t trust their own government and for good reason (though sometimes the actual reasons they land on are out to lunch, compared to the well-documented ones).

What I’m getting at here is, the dynamic of the US informs the nature of surveillance. So I think it’s important to also investigate and take into account what is the nature of surveillance in China. How is it used and for what purposes. What need and intentions has it most developed out of. What kind of accountability processes does it have or enable. I think it’s safe to figure that since not every state has the same conditions or goals, the development of surveillance and its purposes will not be identical, and so the way it impacts the citizens and how they think about surveillance also will not be identical.

Exactly, well said. Some of the worst people/entities in history “worked hard” at doing horrific things. Didn’t make the things they did any less horrific.

Dream chasing under capitalism is similar to buying lottery tickets hoping to win the jackpot. They’ll let a few win big here and there to legitimize the idea of upward mobility, but the reality is, you are not going to be that person. And the “but technically I could be” mentality is what drives people in gambling, just as it does in driving them to believe in the legitimacy of capitalism.

I can try to get into more detail on this another time (I need to wind down for sleep) but I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that when you point at basically all states thought of as AES (maybe I missed one?) and call them revisionist in one form or another, it can end up sounding exactly like the “that wasn’t real communism” trope or in another way, end up sounding like “that was real communism and see how it sucks and fails actually in practice.” I’m trying to word this carefully because it could go in the other direction too if presented thoughtlessly, where it sounds like I’m saying that criticisms of AES projects are bad (criticism is important). The point that I hang on is, making sure we’re not de-legitimizing the theory and practice as a whole by being unfairly dismissive of how closely practice aligns with the goal, where it is on the developing path. And also just making sure we are clear on tactics vs. corruption mindset. That to use a rough war analogy, sometimes you have to retreat in order to regroup, but that doesn’t mean your army has taken a step backward in its ideological goals. Retreating has the risk of leading to giving up and compromising on what you intend, but the one doesn’t automatically follow from the other. So making sure in the weeds of it, we are clear on when something is dangerous compromising on an ideological center and when something is a more complicated tactical development that undoubtedly contains some risk of losing the ideological center, but still has that center and has a specific plan in mind for how to develop past the “retreating” into an advance.

Edit: wording

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems like the term “revisionist” becomes all but meaningless when you apply it in this way, like a sort of “no true scotsman” style analysis. I’m not sure I understand what your expectation is for AES states.

More than that, I think western arrogance just has a hard time admitting to losing in general. That whole capitalistic + supremacy thing of “winning means you have value and losing means you’re worthless.” They can’t simultaneously dehumanize and value their entity as more than conquest. If the western empire cared about human life, it’d also be more secure in how it acts and what it can admit. But then it wouldn’t be doing the violence it has done to so many peoples.

So I guess what I’m driving at here, is I think this sort of duplicitous language comes with the territory.

Insightful read, appreciate it.

referring to the “Leahy Law” that prevents U.S. military assistance from going to foreign units credibly found to have committed major human rights violations.

If that were a legitimate thing, the US would have to cease giving funding to its own forces, much less its proxies.