Comment on The Fake Xinjiang Allegations Caused me to Lose my Job & Friends
DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 2 years agoI don't have a concrete answer for that I think. I think it's being a socialist party for your own people first and then focussing on other countries. It's sometimes hard to do both, especially when most marxist parties in the west don't have a majority in their governments or simply lack the resources for it. That being said, there are ways to help people in the global south. Supporting activists through Patreon for example or looking for organizations that do groundwork in developing nations. China is helping countries with their Belt and Road initiative.
Also, like you said yourself, there are not that many real, big communist parties in the west. A lot of leftist parties are socdem at best and they don't really have the intention to help the global south.
It's a shame really, but now that you mentioned it I will try to see if things can be done within my party regarding this.
Weyland@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
(Before COVID) if you put in the effort you could literally send a few dozen party members to study in China on the cost of the government without too much hassle (as long as they were below the age of 25). China has a quota for students of Western countries that never gets fulfilled. They literally set aside money that has to be spent on e.g. students from France, but if they only have 10 students from France while they budgeted for 100; guess what happens(ed). Those 10 French students get an inflated scholarship, and literally, get several times the scholarship someone from let's say Madagascar gets.
Want to become a climate activist lawyer? China has an English language degree for that. Want to become a doctor? China has a degree for that. And afterwards, you can speak Chinese and you have the contacts (if you didn't waste your time in university) that you could leverage to get business loans to set up companies abroad. Whether it be in the West or the global south.
Want to know what it takes to organize a political party? The Chinese don't care; they'll let you sit in on meetings and will spend their evenings looking up documents to give you a proper foundation. It was already a meme that the Chinese embassy/consulate would send a copy of the Governance of China to anyone who asked, but that's the thing: that's just the tip.
The CPC is there to help. But outreach has to come from outside. The CPC won't try to meddle in your affairs as that'd go against your right to self-determination. I've met people from Tanzania, Indonesia, Pakistan, Madagascar, Russia, and more who have taken them up on the offer. What's up with these moribund communist chapters in the West that feel like they've already won in the war of ideas and are merely dealt a bad hand? Last I checked none of these groups has set up a socialist publishing house, heck a book print on demand machine is $20k new. Did they and I read the same Marx and Lenin? Last I checked being able to print your own propaganda was pretty fucking important. /rant
DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
Huh that's really cool actually. I'll definitely look into this and see what's possible. My party actually publishes (or helps publish, don't know the specific details really) books on socialist topics, I went to a presentation this week even.
But I agree. A lot of western communist groups lack action. I think some genuinly don't know how to start and some just like the aestethic of being a communist I guess.
Thanks for this information though, I had no idea all this could be done. That's definitely a thing I'm going to bring forward.
Weyland@lemmygrad.ml 2 years ago
I'm probably going to spend my time improving my Chinese and recording some stuff for SWCC to put on YouTube for people to listen to. I'm very out of my depth when it comes to socialist parties in the West. Whenever I hear about them it seems I first have to read a crash course on the many schisms and the antagonist attitudes that specific communist party has against other parties.
I have trouble wrapping my head around all this infighting. The CPC, again, for example, is able to work together with even the most polar opposite ideology and stay amicable and be able to work towards a common purpose with that other party even if that other party has a well-documented history of white terror. Why aren't communist parties able to collaborate when 95%+ of their points align?
TBH, I wish I knew some communist developers. It shouldn't be difficult to create a social action platform that allows for resources to accumulate transnationally. Being able to create a (vague) heat map of communist parties and their member spread would allow social movements to get kickstarted. A communist could be living across the street and I'd never know it. But if you allowed people to register themselves on a website with a non-specific location and then gave them the ability to fill-in the distance they'd be willing to travel to take part in a rally, or whatever, you'd make it much easier to organize across party lines and even tap from the community. I'm not suggesting Communist Tinder, but knowing that there are people within your vicinity that you could ally with or being made familiar with different movements/projects would be helpful, even if merely education.