I’m astonished at how sensitive the mods must be over there.
Apparently you’re allowed to say whatever baseless slander you like about the eeeeevil tankies but the minute someone says “Hold up a sec, you claim to be anti-authoritarian and yet you support authoritarianism either explicitly or implicitly?” and they have to shut it down immediately.
Regardless, I think I made a pretty solid counterargument to the typical complaint about communism being authoritarian.
Mfers skim read the Wikipedia entry on Hannah Arendt and start thinking they’re justified in slinging accusations about “muh authoritarianism” smh.
You see stupid tankie, material wealth is just a big limited pile of stuff that is just there to take, so less people = more for everyone, easy! 🤡
Libs:
“Chiner killed a bunch of its own people and that’s how they lifted themselves out of extreme poverty!!”
Also libs:
“Chiner is sitting on a demographic timebomb [which is false, btw] which will cause their population to crash and it will tank their economy!!”
Is the demographic timebomb thing not true? Isn’t it happening to S Korea and Japan RN? China is promising but it’s not immune from hard expectations like those two nations and crushing city labor, how will China avoid the demographic timebomb from a Marxist perspective?
“Demographic timebomb” is 90% a capitalist dogwhistle to rob people out of retirement benefits and heap some more austerity like in France for example. In centrally planned socialist economy it won’t be hard, and even the consequences of one child policy will be very possible to mitigate. Hell even capitalist countries don’t collapse because of that, like Japan constantly whines about “demographic crisis” for 2 generations at this point.
There are real problems that need to be dealt with, no? For example in G7 countries the ratio of older to younger people means there will be a larger need for health care professionals and that would take up a larger proportion of the workforce away from say, working on infrastructure.
If I’m understanding you correctly, that’s not really a meaningful problem (it is for capitalists as that decreases certain types of growth and profit) or at least one that can’t be readily solved through central planning?
Also also, is it related to pitting the supposed interests of different age groups against one another rather than cooperatively solving issues that arise?
Sounds like we should look in and see what Cuba is up to, I’m sure it’s nothing but un-freedom and suffering and illness
Yeah, there are some, that’s why i said it was 90% capitalist dogwhistle, not 100%, but again this problem is not fundamental, and it’s mostly related to redistribution - something that capitalism can do, but is usually unwilling, and even if, only by showering the capitalists with tax money which could resolve the problem easier, faster and better if it was being used straight up for the retirement pensions and public works. And that’s for the capitalism, planned economy can plan this even better with big picture in mind.
Yeah.
That too, we currently can see it in the real time, young people are targeted with anti-retirement propaganda (and often even straight up ageist one), while older ones are told the young ones are to blame because they are “lazy and entitled” for not wanting to work for peanuts and have many kids.
Thanks for the response and clarification!
Fuck yeah, thanks for explaining
The demographic timebomb is a threat to the profitability of capitalism, which is predicated on infinite growth. Fewer people means less labor to exploit and less consumers for products, both of which are devastating to the growth of profit.
A socialist society doesn’t much care about profit or growth, so long as the working population can produce enough goods for everyone. China is one of the biggest producers and consumers of industrial automation and robotics, so its entirely possible that by the time the population starts shrinking overall or the working population ages into retirement the productivity of the remaining working population will be more than enough to sustain everyone.
Also more people means the diferens between mpl and averagepl is greater. And it can be argued that the ease of explotation of the workforce is proportional to that.
Aside from how other people have responded to this, which is all really solid stuff, the “demographic timebomb” looks like… China having a median population age almost identical to that of Europe’s by 2050.
How terrifying!
(Also note that the average age of Europe is skewed by certain countries having significantly younger or older populations, so what this will look like in 2050 for individual countries in Europe will be of more interest demographics-wise.)
I wonder if the libs are equally concerned about the “European demographic timebomb”? Maybe Gordon Chang can pivot and start writing about the coming collapse of Europe when his immanent-collapse-of-China grift collapses?
There are still 500 million rural chinise. So the loss of population in cities due to low fertility can be replaced by migration. This gives china a buffer so that they will a demografic crisis latter than even the us.