The modern, affluent new China. Incomprehensible to many Western minds.Why does the CPC want to remove the expression that the President and Vice-President of the People’s Republic of China “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms” from the country’s Constitution?
Why is China lifting the two-term limit for Xi? The answer can be found by reading the amendment itself (and remembering a little history):
It really is a shame, and it is tiring, but it is actually nothing new: there is now total disarray amongst those countless ‘progressive’ and ‘semi-left’ Western intellectuals, publications, movements and political parties.
Cowardice, bloated egos, lack of discipline and intellectual pettiness are often to blame, but that is not all.
Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn’t know where north or south is. If you don’t eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you’re lost in a forest, not knowing anything.
— Fidel Castro
He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.
– President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.
Common objections to socialist planning from below
In my last article, “Do You Socialists Have Any Plans? Why We Need Socialist Architects“, I argued that the only way 21st century socialism is going to get any traction with working class people is to not only have a socialist vision, but also to have feasible plans which suggest transitions in between the current capitalist crisis and our ultimate vision.
The world is in ruins. It is literally burning, covered by slums, by refugee camps, and its great majority is ‘controlled by markets’, as was the dream and design of individuals such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Führers like Kissinger and Brzezinski sacrificed tens of millions of human lives all over our planet, just to prevent nations from trying to fulfill their spontaneous socialist, and even, God forbid, Communist dreams and aspirations.
This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini
Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as
From Jakarta and Yogyakarta — It was once again a hot, muggy day in Jakarta. The air was full of pollutants, epic traffic jams blocking entire center of the city. Biasa, as locals would say, or in a lax translation, ‘business as usual’.
It is September 29th, 2017, Friday, just one day before the most sinister anniversary in the entire Southeast Asia.
