Hello there! A Polish person learning Chinese here.
I grew up watching Discovery Channel and Discovery Science, roughly between mid 2000s and early 2010s before their turn into reality tv crap (Discovery Science held up a few years longer but even it now runs downright conspiracy theories).
How do Chinese CCTV-9 and especially CCTV-10 compare?
I personally don't think a country that has zero internationalism or class analysis but has a hereditary caste system (the Songbun system), a monarchy with a sacred bloodline and propaganda that invokes supernatural phenomena (including a trope of nature itself rejoicing when Kim Jong Il was born) can even be called leftist in any recognizable shape or form.
IMHO most of them (at least online) aren't really leftists, they're anti-western contrarians who only like Marxism-Leninism because it happened to be the most prominent anti-western ideology available.
The frustrating part is that virtually every leftist sub that doesn't ban them outright has to then deal with a constant flood of them trying to turn the sub into a circlejerk of Stalin-worshippers by taking over the moderation. Even one explicitly anti-ML sub was almost overran by them and only an intervention of Reddit admins saved it.
I can't link to it, anyone can find that sub via Google or my Reddit profile.
The sub requires filling to a Google Forms ideological screening system that captures users' emails - the parallels to Stalin-era USSR are obviously present and they aren't subtle.
I have no idea whether this is legal in the EU under the GDPR - a compliant data collection operation requires informing the user of who is processing their data, what it's used for, how long it's retained, whether it's shared with third parties, and theirr rights regarding deletion. A Reddit mod team running a Google Form almost certainly provided none of this. Data minimization is another issue - GDPR requires collecting only what's necessary for the stated purpose. One's Reddit username is enough to verify posting history, people's email address isn't necessary for that purpose, which makes collecting it potentially illegal.
I had posted there for several months, then I posted a critique of that sub's wiki that calls itself a wiki on Soviet history, yet only has Anti-Revisionist ML works on it, the post got removed for "bad faith" and then I got permabanned. I sent a polite, respectful message to the mods, a mod replied with contempt after doing profile-stalking on me. I pushed back and he muted me.
When you actually ask an average Stalinist apologist about the actual policies of Stalin and their relative advantages and drawbacks (various models of collectivization and their predicted yields and death toll, the achievements and failures of the various Five Year Plans, the relative comparison of Stakhanovism with western scientific management etc.), most won't be able to answer. They just treat Stalin as a symbol.
Actually, none of Stalin's policies can be described as genius level statecraft even by the most generous definition of "genius" possible. Extracting grain from peasants at gunpoint in order to export it and have hard currency for industrialization or torturing people to extract confessions and then shooting them for being "enemies of the people" doesn't count as quality policy either. Zhuge Liang (my namesake) wouldn't be impressed.
They officially subscribe to social darwinism - cult of strength, violence and hierarchy, contempt for the weak - yet they somehow can't handle a single critical comment made using basic facts and rules of logic.
This looks like profound hypocrisy to me.
I mean people prone to binary thinking with strong in-group/out-group bias, intolerance of disagreement, unable to admit mistakes etc. Socdems/Demsocs do have their own dysfunctions but this particular combination is uncommon in them compared to communists or the far right.
The "theory" is simple - as socialism advances, class enemies will fight more ferociously because they will have more to lose.
This creates a logical trap - achieving communism requires defeating class enemies, yet advancing towards communism actually makes class enemies stronger, requiring the state to strengthen indefinitely. It also contradicts what Marx and Lenin said as both predicted class antagonism would go down after the revolution, not up.
What's funny (or not) is that this stupid definition completely sidesteps everything that actually makes Fascism bad - no mention of one party rule, political repression, militarism or even freaking concentration camps - all that matters is that businesses are in the wrong hands.
Also, this "Social Fascism" thing was a only a very specific, short-lived doctrine that was abandoned by the USSR itself in 1935 so people who cite it today are probably learning political science from Memetic University of Reddit rather than actual academic works.
He was the co-creator of council communism (alongside being an astronomer), a movement that has always been in a difficult and awkward position within the global left as it was opposed to both Social Democracy and Marxism-Leninism. It stayed and still stays marginal.
(I am not a Marxist in the doctrinal sense myself BTW).
The CPC has literally no program for class struggle or supporting socialist movements anywhere, Xi Jinping's Thought only mentions these as historical phenomena, not as active policies, when it mentions struggle as a policy, it mentions it in the context of the struggle for national rejuvenation, not class struggle, it's foreign policy is pretty typical great power politics, not anything leftist and "building socialism" means whatever the CPC needs it to mean at a given moment - the entire framework of "the primary stage of socialism" is designed as a theoretical device to indefinitely postpone the transition to actual socialism by claiming "we're not ready for class struggle yet", with that "yet" lasting 45 years by now
IMO the only reason the CPC hasn't abandoned its Marxist aesthetics is because its legitimacy relies on it and doing so would be a political suicide, if they did that, they would stop being the "scientific" vanguard of humanity and start being just regular technocrats with guns who don't want their power to be challenged.
Your thoughts?