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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • If we are to understand that the Chinese socialism is a process which inherently must navigate through flaws and imperfections of the material conditions it is dealt, then surely we much acknowledge the same of the western struggle.

    We are, and we are analyzing the situation materially and historically in hope to arrive at a real understanding of the internal contradictions of either system. Historically, as you say, the capitalists use their privilege to exploit the rest of the world. When the crisis revolving around the internal contradictions become to great, they decay into fascism.

    📍This is where we currently are with respect to the stages of the western capitalist cycle.

    In reality there is nothing about the enshrinement of individual rights which requires or implies capitalism or imperialism, other than historical snapshot these things have been attached to.

    Well no. Conversely the enshrinement of individual rights requires the absence of capitalism and imperialism, in favour of socialism. I am not saying that communism with Chinese characteristics is the only way to attain this, that would be stupid and contrasting our understanding of material reality.

    I agree that the West is not only as much, but even more powerless to change its own capitalist mode of production due to the material reality. This is even more favouring the line of China in paving a new path for the betterment of all. Give the west a bit deepening of state of crisis, and it will be sure for all we are going to need it.


  • First of all, the advance of the bourgeois class cannot be separated from the industrial technological revolution in a historical materialist context.

    With regards to

    The dictatorship of the proletariat was a philosophical construct. Not a literalism. Industrialization has improved the material condition of every society that has been through it. It has nothing to do with left or right etc.

    note that (quoting Wikipedia)

    In philosophy, a construct is an object which is ideal, that is, an object of the mind or of thought, meaning that its existence may be said to depend upon a subject’s mind.

    You are making a reductionist claim that the form is only ideal, which is untrue. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not ideal, it is material and can be analyzed as such, whether or not you agree on its ideal form.

    The crux of your argument is that the industrial revolution and the bourgeois revolution has developed the productive forces, i.e. capital, and thus improved the material conditions of many people as a result. Even Marx agreed on this issue in the 1800s, remarking the absence of novelty of this idea. What you conveniently ignore is the exploitation that this development has inflicted upon every citizen outside the imperial core.

    The nonsensical wording of

    the petite bourgeoisie has always benefited more

    than the proper haute bourgeoisie, is self explanatory for anyone understanding what the word “petite” means.

    That

    expansion or growth can never be infinite. Once that slows the proletariat is always the first victim of the bourgeoisie

    is also not novel to any socialist worth their salt. However, this is more of a nod in the opposite direction of what you think, towards western countries currently undergoing a state of crisis.


  • I am not quite sure I agree that proclaiming a resolution to class struggle by taking political control over the means of production is sufficient to resolve internal contradictions. The statement regarding “basic political rights” however seem to imply that this in particular is ensured in liberal democracies, on which I definitely categorically disagree.

    I spend one third of my life at work, one third sleeping and one third making myself ready for either. At work I have no “basic political rights”, not because I live in China, but because there is no democratic control over the mode of production in my liberal democracy.

    I think that freedom ultimately necessitates equity, at the very least with regards to opportunities in life. In western countries, you pretty much only have the option to live subservient to the capitalist class. The political freedoms are hollow as long as political power is controlled by capital.

    So what am I saying? That I believe a socialist society is the only one that can give any basic rights, and that in turn one must rephrase the question whether China has attained socialism to whether they are working to attain it. Then the situation of current worker’s rights become a question of whom their work serves.

    To the victor goes the spoils, after all. Bear this in mind when you relativize the material conditions of Chinese workers to that of western ones, who historically directly benefitted on the exploitation of the former.


  • I think the argument is rather that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletariat taking political control over capital. The tankies, so to speak, recognize that this does not resolve all internal contradictions of society nor instantly improve the material conditions of said society.

    What you might agree on is that:

    1. The current world order is capitalist.
    2. China was an extremely poor country that has improved the material conditions for their populace tremendously in a short time span.

    Does this mean that worker’s rights are unimportant? No. However, I believe the political leadership prioritizes the development of productive forces over worker’s rights at this stage of development.

    I also want to highlight the question of who benefits from this labour. If the proletariat is the class that benefits from their own work and the government has their popular support, is this really the red fash, authoritarian exploitation that the other comments and western media assume it to be?

    This is just my flawed understanding, of course. There are probably many who can give better answers. Looking at the comment section at time of writing, I am not sure such an effort is deserved.







  • Nice writeup and a fun read! Never thought I would encounter a fellow NixOS and FoundryVTT user in the wild, but I realize the Venn diagram of these kinds of users do have more overlap than I thought.

    With regards to your point about Foundry needing more power than a cheap VPS: I have it working fine on an Oracle cloud free tier VPS (unfortunately not the ARM-cores). That being said, it does want a little more power.

    I am not running it with NixOS though. I am renting a temporary space, so I do not own or want to do too much locally right now, and Oracle OCI was only sort of working with NixOS. I did manage to install it with nixos-infect, but think I messed up the SSH with my reverse proxy and had no way to fall back to a previous version, which begs the question how would you?

    You linked to “NixOS friendly hosters”, do those give you access to boot options to recover from such a case? Since I did not have that option I determined the risk of failure too great for setting up NixOS on that particular VPS provider.

    I also note that you use the nix-foundryvtt module and was wondering how your experience with it was. Does your sops define your login to the website such that it fetches the package automatically or do you have to manually install them?




  • I used Solus for years, it was actually my first long time Linux distro, and I have fond memories from that time and deep appreciation of the project. Note that I say used, because I have moved on (to EndeavourOS and later NixOS).

    The reason why I moved on is the same as why I would recommend against Solus: the project have lost a lot of its core contributors. At the time I left there were no package updates for quite some time (used to be weekly).

    I am not quite sure Solus really got a future. There are talks about converging it with AerynOS, former SerpentOS, which is innovative but still experimental software built by the original team, i.e. those that left Solus in the first place. Though they are really proficient in making the software, I do not think they have the same skillset for securing longevity through contributions.

    In the end you should not care too much what people think. You will get the popular options for the intersection of Lemmy and Linux users, but popular is not always good nor what is right for you. Just try stuff and be ready to move a little through rigorous backups, you do have backups?




  • No, it means only people with good pensions can retire early. Incidentally, this is by design those with high wages since these are the basis of earning pension. However, the ones that may actually need to retire early due to the stress of hard menial labor are not in this group of high earners.

    In effect we will see people at offices doing easy work close their pcs and have an office retirement party at an age of 65 that poor Olga of 70 years (or more) will have to clean up.