We discussed those green skyscrapers in university environment class, and as far as I know they didn’t work that well. It was hard to keep the plants alive and when they did grow, they became a breeding ground for pest insects that got into the units where people were living. It’s very much prioritizing looking green over being green.
IMO it’s better to just have efficient but visually boring skyscrapers, and then have dedicated green space around clusters of density (which is what China is mostly doing nowadays). Separating housing and green space make both more effective, easier to manage, and more resiliant.
Also, in case you’re wondering, most Western environment profs are very impressed by what China has done, at least in the university I went to.
Skyscrapers seem a waste and vulnerability compared to the traditional 10 story style brick, or preferably stone, buildings typical in cities before skyscrapers. Some are bigger than 10 stories, and they can be built earthquake safe same as skyscrapers, the first earthquake safe designs of which that I’m aware of happened after the San Francisco area earthquake some time around the turn of the 20th century that leveled the large buildings. But I’m sure there were prior methods probably dating to antiquity in the middle east and elsewhere.
One method was to build a sort of pool over the build area, a solid container, with sand and the like inside, and building on top of that, vibrations would be absorbed by the sand. There are other methods too but they can be employed by both skyscrapers and masonary buildings.
As to size, the city hall building in philadelphia is the larges I believe, a magnificent building, with statues at levels going up with William Penn at the top. Ornate and decorative too, very unlike the brutalist architecture of today’s city leaders. Compare the subway of any european capital city, from moscow to paris, to new york or DC’s subway. Our leaders have no style, all the money for overinflated contrancts, and more money than any, but none for style or art built into it.
I agree, I didn’t want to change the premise too much in my original comment, but ideally you’d do some complicated math to determine the optimal height for your location, building materials, and population density.
I don’t know what that calculation would look like in China because I don’t live there (I’m sure the Chinese engineers are well aware of those calculations though) but in my country it would definitely be a lot closer to the 10 story range, maybe even lower.
Either way, something us in the West absolutely NEED to get used to is prefab buildings that all look the same. A bunch of prefab skyscrapers like China has is still worlds ahead of the logistical nightmare of demanding every single building be custom designed like is so common here. You call it boring, I call it efficient. Having a few reusable designs (usually different heights) to choose from and copy paste building housing, like what China does, is what we need first, IMO, and then we can talk about the optimal heights for those prefab buildings.
Yeah, functionality comes first and we’ve a lack of housing. But we should add some art to that functionality as we go as we are able, but a solid structure reproduced a million times comes first. Waiting on private interests to do it is a fool’s errand it appears. Capital has colluded to keep the housing stock overpriced, with hedge funds and private equity buying a significant percent of all consumer housing, 15 percent just as of 2018, likely higher now.
I’m partial to leaving decorating buildings to the residents who live there. Something like community murals and art projects on the prefab blank canvas that reflect the people and community those buildings foster. IDK, something about a lot of modern ornamentation commercial developers create feel even colder than no ornamentation at all, but that’s just a personal opinion.
Vienna (I think?) is pretty rad.
The alt text says Alterlaa. So yes Vienna
Eh… I’m not sold by this. For me the “punk” aspect is about people taking hopeful actions that go against the grain. Focusing on the authority of any government is a pretty weak sell. Let’s cultivate hope in people!
People don’t just need hope, they need education, safety nets, access to healthcare, job security. Going against the grain won’t magically change any of these things.
In China, the government is run by the people. The people of China collaboratively chart a course for the future, towards a hopeful course of development, based on scientific socialism. In being a socialist country, China is taking actions that go against the grain, focusing on mutual development, industrialization, and prosperity.
In China, they have direct elections for local representatives, which elect further “rungs,” laddering to the top. The top then has mass polling and opinion gathering. This combination of top-down and bottom-up democracy ensures effective results. For more on this, see Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. This system is remarkably effective, resulting in over 90% approval rates.
Is it not punk to radically “abolish the present state of things,” as Marx says, and which the PRC is steadfastly working towards? Hell, Rage Against the Machine has even quoted Mao.
Its insane how Liberals will see a well functioning society and decide they would rather live under the dictatorship of capital
Largely stems from chauvinism that hasn’t been confronted yet. They realize that capitalism is bad, but they still believe that it’s impossible for anyone to be doing better than the west.
chauvanism
BTW it’s “chauvinism”. I don’t mean to be an asshole, I just see this incorrect spelling of this specific word very often. 100% agree with your comment.
Damn you got me lol, thanks! I don’t have auto-correct on my phone (privacy reasons) so I make spelling errors frequently. Thanks!
Love how this has 15 downvotes but not a single reply 💀
I just banned like 6 of them, dead or no-content accounts.
Liberals using bot accounts to try to manipulate public opinion (as they do on reddit and the rest of the western internet), is gonna be one of the bigger problems in the fediverse for the foreseeable future, so we have to stay ahead of it.
At this point they’re just targeting specific ppl like @Cowbee@lemmy.ml, but they’ll eventually start doing it en masse.
Figured that may have been the case, considering it was a reasonable comment getting heavily downvoted in a thread where other pro-PRC comments weren’t as inorganically downvoted.
That’s pretty common, actually. People would rather silently downvote than try to actually engage with academic literature regarding the PRC’s democratic process.
Hexbear stays winning with the removed downvote, which forces you to reply if you disagree with the content
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That looks more like spider punk
Why not just say you’re against solarpunk? Why try to twist solarpunk to be something it’s not?
Have you forgotten all about me:
My problem with Solarpunk is that it’s an aesthetics-first movement. I appreciate solar and believe it to be necessary, I just believe that theory and practice need to form the base of any movement.
Punk has always had an ethos
I’m aware, but Solarpunk specifically, from what I’ve read from the people pushing the movement, tends to lack theoretical and practical basis, closer to early utopianism than a scientific form of socialism.
That’s deliberate.
The lack of a theoretical and practical basis is deliberate, or the idea that Solarpunk lacks such a basis is deliberate? I’m referring to what people that consider themselves in the Solarpunk community and movement have described and recommended to me for reading.
For example, from the Solarpunk Manifesto:
Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”
The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.
Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.
It’s primarily based on aesthetics and finding potential plans for future society, not a practical means for getting there or implementing said plans, despite its insistence on doing so. This is why I say it isn’t really scientific socialism, but utopianism, which has historically resulted in one-off communes that last a good while without actually challenging the status quo or spreading.
Solarpunk in practice borrows from anarchism or Marxism, without fully committing to either, and as such is reduced to its aesthetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
Romanticism emerged as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution raised productivity, but with a cost in culture and closeness-to-nature.
Where things scale and become automated, it is natural for a counter-movement to yearn for a bucolic life close to nature. Solarpunk expresses the same yearning: a desire for a rich local culture close to nature in the modern technological level.
Solarpunk is the fiction, the ideal. What China is doing in this regard is 1 version of an attempt to achieve it, and that’s great! Its not the only path forward and there is room for critique of every attempt.
As an anarchist, I would like less authoritarianism actually. But, as a solarpunk enthusiast and environmentalist, im in favor of this action by China. I believe that actions towards solarpunk and actions against government systems i dont like should be handled separately
How would China have to change their democratic processes, or methods of governance, to turn you around more on how they handle things? I often see people claim China should be less authoritarian, but I rarely see concrete steps they could take to be less-so structurally from those that see China that way.
Im not a scholar on china. I dont know a ton, and I dont know anything with a great degree of confidence. My understanding is that to some degree, they do human rights abuses much like the USA, Russia, UK, India etc. To my understanding, that’s just kind of a thing superpower countries do. I have enough on my hands dealing with the USA and all its problems. I value human dignity as the focal point of what a government should embody. If you can think of things they are doing thay go against that, that’s probably what id starr with. If you think that china is sufficiently defending human dignity without exception, id love to hear about that
I’m certainly not a scholar either, but I do think we can investigate certain statements further. Human rights abuses largely stem from class struggle and latent contradictions in society, opposing identities and possibilities, if that makes sense. Excess is a feature of all systems, and as such investigating what drives conflict and the manner of how it’s resolved requires a class analysis. In other words, it isn’t about size, or ideas of power, but largely resolution of contradictions.
In China, the working classes are in control of the state. However, contradictions exist, like the gap between urban and rural development, the class conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, the contradiction between domestic and foreign capital, between liberalism and communism. These contradictions give rise to excess, which is avoidable suffering. However, unlike dictatorships of capital, China’s socialist system is built to address these contradictions.
Rural development is being prioritized to close the gap, including expanding rail, poverty alleviation programs, and making use of urban industrial production to build up rural areas. The proletariat are in control of the state, and use it to publicly own the commanding heights of industry, keeping the bourgeoisie subservient. Foreign capital is limited in what it can actually own, and technology share is mandatory. Corruption is regularly checked, and corrupt party members expelled from the party and punished.
China, compared to capitalist countries, has a great human rights track record, domestic and foreign. It is flawed, because it is real, and more than capitalist countries its structure allows it to improve over time. This extends to areas like LGBTQIA+ rights, which are increasingly important to younger generations while the more socially conservative older generations are replaced. China systemically has a people-first structure.
Forgive me if this is a confused question, I’m still learning my dialectics, but how does China’s concept of democratic centrism and its insistence that the CCP be the sole governing body mesh with this understanding of contradictions and their resolution? Is the existence of absolute power itself not a restriction that prevents (or could very well prevent) the movement and change that would otherwise happen to resolve the contradictions you mention? Like, fundamentally I just don’t see how dialectical materialism is consistent with unchallenged and unjustified power.
Is the existence of absolute power itself not a restriction
I just don’t see how dialectical materialism is consistent with unchallenged and unjustified power.Well there’s your problem. Did you even read the rest of what Cowbee said in this thread, explaining much of how governance in China actually works? You come here basing your questions around this false assumption of “the existence of absolute power,” when no one in China has absolute power, rather power is vastly more evenly distributed there than in liberal “democracies.”
The fact that there is a single party is not (as western propaganda would have you believe) evidence of “dictatorship,” but instead functions as a bulwark preventing reaction and the destruction of the revolution by capital - something I would hope you would be able to recognize even with a very basic understanding of dialectics. There is no reason the will of the people can’t be enacted via a single party that exists to ensure it is their will and not that of capital that rules, indeed it makes more sense to have a single party when the rule of the people is the goal.
Consider how the approval rating for their government across the population of China, well over a billion people, is above 90%! And now consider the U.S. with it’s “two party” system, where both parties represent the interests only of the political donor class (capital) and the government is largely despised by the population. The power there is concentrated in a small number of ultrawealthy bourgeoisie and it is continuously getting worse, more and more concentrated, while the people of the US are losing more and more of their so-called rights every day.
Yet you frame your questions under this base (and false) assumption of “unchallenged and unjustified power” in China without even considering how power is constantly challenged there (see Cowbee’s explanation further up of the many direct elections in China) and through that challenge, its justification is consistently being reestablished.
Yep, I read the rest. Your comment clarifies some confusion I had about how China is being understood through a dialectical material lens, so thank you for that.
I do feel like you’re missing how a one-party socialist state is still inherently an instance of unjustified power, even if it’s “self-correcting” like China seems to be. Institutional power gives default material, ideological, and epistemological authority to whoever occupies that institution. That authority can be good if it’s truly the will of the proletariat, but the paradox is that because there is default authority given to certain ways of thinking about the world, the peoples’ ability to know whether it is indeed the will of the proletariat is distorted. If, for example, party leadership were to come out and say “accumulation of capital is compatible with socialism, actually”, then even though there would be mechanisms for people to come in and be like “no the fuck it isn’t”, because party leadership occupies a platform of default authority, their statement would be taken as true until challenged otherwise. That is unjustified power.
Epistemologically the only thing we can be sure of with any authoritarian socialist state is that (a) the party occupying the institutional power structure is claiming to represent the will of the proletariat, and (b) there are mechanisms for people to “correct” the institution to better represent the proletariat. Neither of these things are enough to justify the general default authority given to an authoritarian state, imo. Power needs to always be exercised from a place of epistemological humility and with the understanding that you or your organization could very well not be fit to wield it. Institutional power structures are fundamentally just not compatible with this.
I’m not sure I follow your premise. The CPC is the organized segment of the most politically advanced of the working classes, this is certainly a justified amount of power. I don’t see how the proletariat running the state would prevent rural development, LGBTQIA+ rights improving, continuing to gradually collectivize all production and distribution, etc.
Dialectical materialism isn’t “stopped” by anything, can you explain how you believe that would happen?
See my comment above for my thoughts on the first point, and re the second, you’re right- I think I was just confused there lol
Gotcha! I’ll try to respond to your comment here.
I do feel like you’re missing how a one-party socialist state is still inherently an instance of unjustified power, even if it’s “self-correcting” like China seems to be. Institutional power gives default material, ideological, and epistemological authority to whoever occupies that institution.
Minor technical correction, the PRC has 8 political parties in addition to the CPC that collaborate and advise the CPC in special interest areas. More to the point, however, the idea that a multi-party system is necessary for socialism is born from liberal conceptions of democracy. The PRC is a socialist economy, run collaboratively. The state in any given society is representative of a single class above all else, and in the PRC that class is the proletariat. Liberal democracy that focuses on competition over collaboration is poor at achieving long-term progress, while not adding democracy.
That authority can be good if it’s truly the will of the proletariat, but the paradox is that because there is default authority given to certain ways of thinking about the world, the peoples’ ability to know whether it is indeed the will of the proletariat is distorted. If, for example, party leadership were to come out and say “accumulation of capital is compatible with socialism, actually”, then even though there would be mechanisms for people to come in and be like “no the fuck it isn’t”, because party leadership occupies a platform of default authority, their statement would be taken as true until challenged otherwise. That is unjustified power.
It’s possible thst revisionism and liberalism can infect communist parties, but the possibility of this does not translate to them being unjustifiable, which is more of a moral argument than a materialist one.
Epistemologically the only thing we can be sure of with any authoritarian socialist state is that (a) the party occupying the institutional power structure is claiming to represent the will of the proletariat, and (b) there are mechanisms for people to “correct” the institution to better represent the proletariat.
All states are authoritarian, in that all states are mechanisms by which one class wields a monopoly on violence to forward their own class interests. The idea that there is a “non-authoritarian state” is itself flawed. Either way, the PRC’s electoral structure has room for recall elections, and candidates are elected locally and ladder upward indirectly. There is thus a connection from the top to the bottom.
Neither of these things are enough to justify the general default authority given to an authoritarian state, imo. Power needs to always be exercised from a place of epistemological humility and with the understanding that you or your organization could very well not be fit to wield it. Institutional power structures are fundamentally just not compatible with this.
I’m not sure what you’re actually arguing for. A multiparty, liberal form of democracy? That isn’t what the people of China want. Mechanisms for overturning communist rule? Historically very easy to take advantage of by foreign powers. The CPC maintains direct connection to the people via the Mass Line, and conducts constant polling.
Solar punk or solar authoritarianism?
Solar punk is “real” as in, plenty people living off grid on solar, catchment, whatever. China does seem to be making whatever theyre doing become a thing. And its great. Cheap energy probably the most effective path to world peace. If we can get the price to “effectively 0” we can solve just about everything.
Imagine being over the age of 10 and using the word authoritarianism like it means anything.
How would you produce solar panels when living “off grid”? You need a large, integrated economy to be able to produce such complicated hardware. This is why solar punk is fundamentally an elitist ideology. You look down your nose on “authoritarians”, and have a holier-than-thou attitude toward them, but the society you envision is impossible without them.
Solar panels last a long time and in 30 years or so we will have enough to power the world for a century.
What distinguishes “punk” from “authoritarian?” Is it not punk to radically “abolish the present state of things,” as Marx says, and which the PRC is steadfastly working towards? What makes the PRC “authoritarian” in a way that makes it unacceptable?
I’m also unconvinced that energy prices at effectively 0 will solve everything either, class struggle remains, and we will all have to follow in the footsteps of countries like China in overthrowing the bourgeoisie, as they did in 1949.
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In the most abstract sense: Is organisation without authority possible?
In a concrete sense, yes
What appeals to you about that text?
How authority is defined and how Engels actually logically provides an answer to the question whether organization without authority is possible
A short ‘logical’ essay can give any answer in an abstract sense, but that doesn’t discount empirical examples.
Always seemed to me like Engels begs the question, takes “anarchy = chaos” as a starting assumption.
Empirical examples… that you have not provided?
Authoritarian solarpunk. But really it shows the issues of anarchism, works in small scale but is fragile when scaled. The probably most efficient government form would be a dictatorship of the wise.
The probably most efficient government form would be a dictatorship of the wise.
This is just aristocracy with no extra steps, just other name.
You missunderstand then by wise i mean experts in there fields not rich dudes. And the selection process could be democratic aswell.
Oh, so much like China now.
Well china is a lot more efficient and faster. You can criticise other aspects of it ofc.
Solar panels and computer chips need large complex centralized factories, but that is basically 0%of the Land so there’s no problem with having both, as long as you don’t pretend that your solar powered homestead isn’t dependent on inputs like that.
That’s an interesting topic btw - what is the way for any dictatorship to work well for everyone’s benefit in theory? If it’s dictatorship of the wise, would smartest people get put into place with absolute power? Is it an expectation that people currently in power pass power voluntarily to wiser people? Would there be a framework that determines wisest people and it would be decided upon by the popular consensus? Isn’t it technically still a democracy if people trust in the framework/system that governs how smartest people are decided upon?
A democratic process could be used for selection, but you would also need to limit corruption by taking any incentive from the people in power. Like it is not possible for them to gain more than the median all others in a nation have for the rest if their lives. A good incentive to govern with the future in mind, because you only improve your future when you improve everyones. Another the prestige ofc.
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Zenz-maxxing
Gotta love guzzling CIA propaganda uncritically.
They aren’t? Not only is the idea of mass Uyghur slave labor atrocity propaganda akin to claiming that there’s “white genocide” in South Africa, Christian genocide in Nigeria, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but the PRC is an incredibly industrialized country and as such doesn’t have a need for slavery. Slavery in general is a horribly inefficient system fir anything other than agrarian production, which is why the Statesian North liberated the slaves in the south, for more wage-laboring industrial workers.
In the case of Xinjiang, the area is crucial in the Belt and Road Initiative, so the west backed sepratist groups in order to destabilize the region. China responded with vocational programs and de-radicalization efforts, which the west then twisted into claims of “genocide.” Nevermind that the west responds to seperatism with mass violence, and thus re-education programs focused on rehabilitation are far more humane, the tool was used both for outright violence by the west into a useful narrative to feed its own citizens.
The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective’s Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
I also recommend reading the UN report and China’s response to it. These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does.
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn’t going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this.
Not to mention you don’t really need slavery when your minimum wage is like 3 euros an hour and unpaid overtime is the norm anyway, at least in office work
China’s doing this capitalism thing way better than the west. We should really learn from them. For example if the US abolished auto unions and increased manufacturing subsidies, they could lower wages and deliver cars for more competitive prices instead of having to rely solely on tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Purchasing power in China goes much farther, real wages are much higher than 3 euro equivalent, and that’s for minimum wage, not median. High working hours in office work are a problem to work on, yes, but not one with no signs of improvement. The PRC is a socialist economy with heavy union presence. The large firms and key industries are publicly owned, ie public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy. The US Empire can’t compete with China because it hollowed out its own industry in favor of outsourcing it and imperializing the global south.
meanwhile in the real world
typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
None of these things would be happening in China if it was doing capitalism. It would look the way other capitalist shitholes look like today.
“Re-education”, that’s one way to describe what they do in these camps. And please stop deflecting with “the West did way worse” arguments. To me, China is just as bad as the West.
Re-education is also the correct way to describe the vocational schools. I’m not deflecting in mentioning the west, the utility in pointing out how the west deals with extremism is to show that allegations of slave labor and genocide are projection. I understand that you think China is just as bad as the west, the problem is that your reasoning for believing that is based entirely on what the west lies to you about China.
stop deflecting with “the West did way worse” arguments.
It’s not deflection dipshit. Why is the US arming ETIM separatist terrorists? What is the PRC supposed to do when you have radicalized islamists running around killing people in your opinion? Bomb a random country like the US did amrite?
Clueless
Ths is sad
How so?
