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I think that’s why it’s misleading to speak of... - argumate

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I think that’s why it’s misleading to speak of “socialist experiments”: it implies a degree of repeatability that simply isn’t there, you only industrialise once, you only abolish feudalism once, you...

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I think that’s why it’s misleading to speak of “socialist experiments”: it implies a degree of repeatability that simply isn’t there, you only industrialise once, you only abolish feudalism once, you only deal with the rise of the internet once, and so on, and at every stage it’s just power struggles all the way down and different power struggles each time, trying to analyse Mao’s policies independently of the specific challenges that Mao himself was facing is always going to be of limited use. you can imagine an immortal being who was keeping an eye on the Great Qing and the Tokugawa Shogunate and then got distracted for a few centuries before looking back today, what would they see? - both empires have modernised, industrialised, and globalised - the power of the aristocracy is gone but the palaces are still there - megalopolises studded with high rise buildings, birthrates falling below replacement level, an increasingly ageing population - life expectancy way up, no wars for decades and so on, and at some point they might dig into the history books and find out that as Japan modernised it briefly had a fascist government that tried to take over all of Asia (!) but quirks of geopolitics led to it keeping its emperor in name even after defeat, while China flirted with collectivism for a few decades before moving on and the emperor was reduced to an ordinary citizen, but the quirks of ideology seem fairly minor compared to the broad sweep of history (the rule of thumb is that everything Japan does China will also do but twice as fast and twice as big, whether it’s industrialisation or foreign investment or the real estate bubble!) so there’s this paradox where history seems inevitable, which does suggest fundamental rules at play, but those rules are too low level (physics, biology, economics) to be relevant to politics, where the only real issues are who you’re going to ally with and who you’re going to shoot, obviously the most contingent of questions. as a result “should we copy Mao?” only makes sense if you’re facing Nationalist attack and wondering whether you should flee to Yan'an or whatever, or more realistically using Mao as a kind of religious totem to inspire other unrelated political activity along what you hope are similar lines. anyway luckily none of this actually matters.

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I think that’s why it’s misleading to speak of “socialist experiments”: it implies a degree of repeatability that simply isn’t there, you only industrialise once, you only abolish feudalism once, you only deal with the rise of the internet once, and so on, and at every stage it’s just power struggles all the way down and different power struggles each time, trying to analyse Mao’s policies independently of the specific challenges that Mao himself was facing is always going to be of limited use. you can imagine an immortal being who was keeping an eye on the Great Qing and the Tokugawa Shogunate and then got distracted for a few centuries before looking back today, what would they see? - both empires have modernised, industrialised, and globalised - the power of the aristocracy is gone but the palaces are still there - megalopolises studded with high rise buildings, birthrates falling below replacement level, an increasingly ageing population - life expectancy way up, no wars for decades and so on, and at some point they might dig into the history books and find out that as Japan modernised it briefly had a fascist government that tried to take over all of Asia (!) but quirks of geopolitics led to it keeping its emperor in name even after defeat, while China flirted with collectivism for a few decades before moving on and the emperor was reduced to an ordinary citizen, but the quirks of ideology seem fairly minor compared to the broad sweep of history (the rule of thumb is that everything Japan does China will also do but twice as fast and twice as big, whether it’s industrialisation or foreign investment or the real estate bubble!) so there’s this paradox where history seems inevitable, which does suggest fundamental rules at play, but those rules are too low level (physics, biology, economics) to be relevant to politics, where the only real issues are who you’re going to ally with and who you’re going to shoot, obviously the most contingent of questions. as a result “should we copy Mao?” only makes sense if you’re facing Nationalist attack and wondering whether you should flee to Yan'an or whatever, or more realistically using Mao as a kind of religious totem to inspire other unrelated political activity along what you hope are similar lines. anyway luckily none of this actually matters.

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