A Chinese user who escaped from Reddit, where the censorship is stricter than the strictest website in China, can't believe it

submitted by ChinaDefender from self.Introductions

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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

China is not communist, they are capitalist and have been for decades. They have a market economy rather than a centrally planned one, and private individuals rather than the state own the means of production. That isn't communism

Communism and socialism have nothing to do with religion or these kind of social issues, it is an economic ideology. Many many societies have tried to limit religious freedom that practice all sorts of economic ideologies. Like Great Britain and the whole protestant/catholic thing, the inquisition, the Nazi's, the muslim countries and their Sharia law - fuck they even kill rival muslim ideologies over nearly identical interpretations, just like the Brits did. Religious persecution almost always comes from other religious people, not from atheists

Nations have an incentive to create homogeneity, and ironically, its the most liberal countries that have the most religious freedom, and tend to be OK with this kind of diversity

They think they're better than everyone else and think they should have the right to make "more educated" decisions for everyone.

Religious people would never force their ideology onto someone though right? Maybe say that gay people shouldn't be able to get married or something else that literally dictates the way people ought to live?

[–]Vulptex 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

China is still communist in principle. They found that full Marxism is completely unfeasible, but they have retained its social aspects which includes suppressing religion.

Religious people in the US, until recently, were very strong supporters of religious freedom for the most part. Ironically it was leftist nutjobs threatening their religious freedom that made them turn on religious freedom, thinking it was a mistake to give others the freedom to not believe that allowed them to become such big enemies.

Authoritarians always go full circle. The right now fully subscribes to the leftist worldview, they're simply on the opposite side. Before they had very different outlooks, and many controversies amounted to faulty comparisons or even semantics.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I see some of what you are getting at, and the problem is that we have a very inconsistent definition of what communism is.

The way I see it, communism can mean one of 3 things.

  1. The classical Marxism - I would define this as 'Centralized Authoritarian Communism'

  2. There was a rival Communist theorist to Marx, Peter Kropotkin. He advocated for what I would call 'Decentralized Libertarian Communism' This ideology only shares 2 concepts with Marxism. Public ownership (by direct democracy in small communities, not by representative, not centralized) and lack of markets, because resources are communal. Socially this is the opposite of what most would consider communist ideology. They went with the Marx version of Communism though. Something like Kropotkin's vision was achieved for about 3 years in Spanish Catalonia (George Orwell helped them fight Spain actually) before the Spaniards reconquered them and put them down.

  3. What I would call 'Social Marxism'. This certainly exists, and they seem to have borrowed Marx's rhetorical style, and applied it to social rather than economic issues, although this does not appear to be what Marx advocated or intended (although all the Marxist countries did practice this social oppression, and probably always will, it wasn't part of Marx's work), it does tend to be Authoritarian Left governments going this route, many of which are transitioning from Classic Marxism, so I understand the inclination to conflate this with Marx and Communism, but as an economic theorist this just rankles me a bit to see Communism take on a meaning that has not much to do with economics or capitalism. China is definitely this 3rd thing I'm calling Social Marxism, and no it is not a good thing at all.