To many of us, socialism is simply the opposite of capitalism rather than its negation, therefore socialism must be the absence of the most hated features of capitalism in our experiences and opinions.
I have been thinking about this since I read it a couple hours ago. Brilliant insight, thank you for sharing.
I really enjoyed reading Socialism Betrayed. But I did take note of the page or two when they talked about contemporary China. They did kinda say “this sure seems like what the USSR did wrong under Khrushchev only on a much larger scale”. But that book was written in 2004, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for western Marxists to come to that conclusion, albeit incorrectly, at that time. Not to mention the authors did approach it with some humility, not outright saying China was doomed but still pointing out it sure seemed the same as revisionism the USSR in 2004.
This is a very reasonable take.
The US government did not remove Nelson Mandela from their terrorist list until 2008.
Since have some libs who waltzed in here, here’s Qiao Collective’s reading list for the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in case they want to actually try and learn something.
If you “leave it to the free market”, you will just get further sprawl of single family homes; Los Angeles-ifying the rest of the country. Maybe at best sprinkle in some paper mache five-over-ones in there. The US does need more, denser housing, but will never be provided by the free market.
The actual “Chinese” solution would be to take genuinely blighted areas of a place like Detroit, build very dense, affordable public housing, provide tons of services and public transportation, and ensure local residents get priority. It would be a solution everyone would love, better than Americans could possibly imagine, but the idea that this could be done by the free market strains credulity.