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.
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.