Research

Quotes from this article:

Indeed, if there’s one thing anarchists are known for among the general public, it’s having a leg in several artistic, musical, and philosophical subcultures.

This is definitely true. It's also part of why we shape radically different spaces for so many things (even schools, when we're trying to break out of the state-mandated spheres).

One of the main sources of this relative distrust between those involved in cultural-ideological struggle and those involved in political-economic struggle – and perhaps the absence of more significant gains we might get from better cooperation between the two fronts – lies, I believe, in the lack of an adequate means of conceptualising how they interrelate.

I definitely agree with this, especially as anarchists in both camps need to recognise that they need each other. I often feel frustrated because I get trapped by one or the other, and I just want to work on things that do both. We need to be building the on-the-ground networks, and that doesn't happen when we're dismissing political-economic or cultural-ideological needs.

Automation of toil is widespread, 3D-printing and micro-manufacturing replaces alienating mass production, and labour as a practice is artisan-ised, emulating William Morris’s dream of work being made into play. It’s a world of decentralised and confederated eco-communities, using technology for human-centric and eco-centric ends rather than for accumulating power and profit – mending the metabolic rift between first nature (the natural world) and second nature (human culture) – and where social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and disability are considered horror stories from the past “oil age”.

This is something that I love about solarpunk stories.

What’s rarer is using culture as a whole to grow libertarian consciousness on a mass scale. That is what we need to try to do more of in the future, and that’s what solarpunk may have the potential to catalyse.

I agree with this, and something like solarpunk would be more accessible to people currently teaching topics like literature and science (in traditionally organised schools). It would at least be something to provide to students as food-for-thought, which could promote people to engage in other similar texts (as a whole, not just written works) or creators.

Quotes from the introduction:

With the largest navy, the most advanced technology, and unprecedented agricultural productivity, the Ming Dynasty remained the most extensive and powerful political structure in the world. In every way it matched and surpassed Europe, and the question of China’s “failed” transition to capitalism (known as “Needham’s Paradox”) would become a sort of initiatory riddle for future scholars of the region. [Galeote] Pereira had arrived in the midst of the Ming’s deterioration, caused in part by the Portuguese and Spanish silver industries and the new trade networks of which he was himself a product.

“China” was very much a product of the Occidental imagination. The people Pereira asked had trouble even understanding the question of what “country” they were from, as there were no clear indigenous correlates to the concept. Ultimately they explained that there was one ruler, but many countries, which still used their ancient names. The combination of these countries composed the “Great Ming,” but each retained much of its local specificity.

Today, in a crisis-stricken global economy, China is again defined by its exceptions. Its staggering ascent seems to promise an almost messianic escape from decades of declining growth: the mirage of a new America, complete with a “Chinese Dream” and the moral zeal of its Puritanical CCP-Confucianism. For the Western economist, this takes the form of a steady-handed Sino-Keynesianism, as new infrastructure projects are initiated by more charitable global financial institutions such as the China Development Bank, promising the salvation of the world’s final far-flung hinterlands. In the official discourse of the Chinese state, this represents nothing more than the slow transition to communism, with a long layover in the stage of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” wherein capitalist mechanisms are used to develop the productive forces until general wealth is possible.

Instead, the socialist developmental regime designates the breakdown of any mode of production and the disappearance of the abstract mechanisms (whether tributary, filial, or marketized) that govern modes of production as such. Under these conditions, only strong state-led strategies of development were capable of driving development of the productive forces. The bureaucracy grew because the bourgeoisie couldn’t. Given China’s poverty and position relative to the long arc of capitalist expansion, only the “big push” industrialization programs of a strong state, paired with resilient local configurations of power, were capable of successfully constructing an industrial system. But the construction of an industrial system is not the same as the successful transition to a new mode of production.

Even at the height of its diversity, however, this project was ultimately defined by a particular communist horizon that had emerged from the combination of the European workers’ movement and the region’s own history of millenarian peasant revolts. Today, this communist horizon no longer exists. There is no point in “taking sides” on these historical matters, simply because there is no symmetry between then and now—the material conditions (rapid industrial expansion, large non-capitalist periphery, etc.) that structured this earlier communist horizon are absent, even if the fundamental crises of capitalism remain. There is no question of whether communists today will face the same problems—they won’t. Instead, there remains only the question of how communism and communist strategy can be conceived without this horizon.

Beyond this, the geography of Russian influence was uneven. Outside the northeastern industrial heartland, Chinese production was more strongly shaped by other systems of enterprise management, economic planning and state administration. If the Chinese took Russia as one model, they also inherited numerous others—from the imperial era, the Nationalist regime of the Republican period, the Japanese, and the Western enterprises in coastal cities. All of these influences were combined in conscious attempts to create a distinctly “Chinese” nation, complete with a unified national economy. The result was a far more decentralized, uneven system than is visible in the era’s propaganda.

The result, we hope, is a picture of socialist China as it actually was, neither a totalitarian wasteland nor the kingdom of heaven. The nation we illustrate below was not “Mao’s China” in any meaning of the phrase. It was a project constructed by millions of people, and its ultimate (though not historically determined) result is the China we see today—a China that holds the global economy together at its disintegrating roots. A China that, we hope, will also finally be undone by more millions of Chinese people, alongside billions of others destroying their thousand nations and, with them, this monstrous economy that yokes each to all and all to none.

Quotes from Part I: Precedents:

Development in the imperial era does not begin with the stasis of a so-called “traditional China.” The imperial state, often in competition with members of the landowning elite, periodically intervened in rural society, each time reshaping its social character. In one of the last significant interventions (inaugurating the late imperial period), the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) attempted to create an independent peasantry in order to eliminate rivals vying for control over the rural surplus product and to stabilize society. In order to do this, peasants were given land, although not as equitably as originally intended. At this time, as in much of the region’s history, peasants were not just farmers: they farmed but also produced handicraft items, in particular silk or cotton cloth. And the Ming state, as with earlier ruling dynasties, encouraged this dual production by requiring tax payments in grain, cloth and labor.

Earlier in the Ming, most rural households had not produced commodities for sale on markets, but had instead produced a variety of goods for subsistence and then sold a small surplus to the rural gentry, who would then re-sell those products as commodities. But with increased commercialization and specialization, more households began to focus on commodity production without abandoning subsistence production for their family units: a situation of commercialization without development. Over time many began to satisfy their reproductive needs through market purchases as well, with areas that produced higher-end goods buying food through regional markets from more peripheral areas. And it was the rural gentry that controlled those markets.

Not that it's identical (in circumstance), but this seems to be coming back in some (possibly more negative) ways for people in rural places to make money. As described in Blockchain Chicken Farm, rural people are engaging in practices to help keep up with their needs while also producing things deemed commodities (including food) that are then sent to the cities (as sales through Alibaba or other companies).

In some ways, it seems like they're re-using historical structures but adding some technology to them as "progress." (But it reminds me of the shoe-maker in a small village described in the book talking about how the current model is ruining their lives and that it's not possible to keep doing what they're doing.)

Tea producers, for example, suffered from the 1880s onward once the British tea plantations in South Asia were producing in full swing. In the cotton textile industry, spinners of yarn had a hard time competing with foreign, machine-spun yarns. In contrast, the cheap imports of such yarn initially allowed cloth weavers to do well, and only over time did they, too, have increasing trouble on the new market. Foreign-owned industrial weaving facilities along the coast—mostly built since the turn of the century—began to cut into the handicraft market. Sourcing much of its yarn from abroad, the industry led in part to the initial disintegration of the rural-urban continuum.

This bit is interesting when you consider how a lot of European and North American economics texts talk about China today and how their "cheap products" have "cut into" the markets for what's being done. So it's interesting to see that industrial yarn development (often foreign-owned) was cutting into the traditional market here. Perhaps it would do us well to recognise the many ways Europe (and North America) interrupted lives through colonialism and imperialism.

During this new phase, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, hereafter GMD) that had taken over much of China by the end of the 1920s attempted to complete the capitalist transition and build a national economy by creating a stronger link between industrial facilities in the coastal cities and the raw materials produced in rural China. By the early 1930s, factions of the GMD consciously looked to an Italian Fascist model of economic independence and productivism to reintegrate the rural and urban spheres. This implied strong government control over internal markets and state-private cooperation in industrialization. Yet these policies were sidelined by administrative weakness, GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek’s focus on military development, and the subsequent Japanese invasion of the Chinese coast in 1937 that inaugurated World War Two in Asia.

Note: The GMD mentioned here is the same thing as the KMT (Kuomintang).

Considering their later actions in Taiwan, a lot of this is unsurprising.

By the time of the Japanese invasion, the GMD found its main opposition in the form of a peasant army mobilized by a reinvented Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But the CCP itself had begun decades earlier, born out of the same tumultuous intellectual milieu as the GMD itself, both of which began as largely urban affairs. The CCP’s 1921 founding congress was originally intended to take place in Shanghai. Disrupted by police, the meeting was moved north to Jiaxing, where twelve delegates founded the CCP as a branch of the Communist International. As this early CCP grew, it remained a mostly urban project, staffed by intellectuals and skilled industrial workers. Six years after its founding, it was again in Shanghai that this first incarnation of the CCP came to its violent end. In a Russian-backed alliance with the GMD, revolutionaries seized control over most of China’s key cities in a series of worker-staffed insurrections. After victory was secured with the success of the 1927 Shanghai Insurrection, the GMD turned against the communists, arresting a thousand CCP members and leaders of local trade unions, officially executing some three hundred and disappearing thousands more.

The only surviving fragments of the CCP were its rural bases among the peasantry.

Alongside the gang boss and labor contractor there were also guild masters and secret societies. Though often initially founded under the Qing as rebel organizations of one kind or another, under the Nationalists the guild and secret society took on the character of criminal rackets. Each also helped to shape the forms of labor deployment that would develop in this early period of capitalist integration. Guilds deemphasized the art of the craft in favor of seeking lucrative contracts. They “became fledgling capitalist construction companies whose managers, the guild masters, hired people for wages that were quickly returned to the guild in the form of membership fees […] Brutality in enforcing the guild’s monopoly over hiring and construction was common.”

Secret societies, outlawed under the Qing, had helped staff the 1911 Republican revolution and, in return, were permitted to operate openly for the first time. This fundamentally transformed the function of the secret society and ended the period in which they could be understood as “primitive revolutionaries.” Some “remained faithful to their ‘social bandit’ origins” and joined the Communist Party. But the rest became run-of-the-mill reactionaries...

The influence of such groups grew in the vacuum created by the destruction of the communist labor unions and Party cells after 1927. The result was a city in which labor contractors, the gang boss system, the guilds and the secret societies all formed a complex mesh of labor deployment defined by both the dependence on the wage and the threat of direct violence common in colonial regimes of accumulation.

In this sense, the conditions of CCP politics mirrored that of the GMD, with its focus on national unity, although the CCP was better able to bridge the contradiction between these two politics with the concept of “the people.” A focus on national unity was incomplete and one sided. “The people,” by contrast, was defined neither solely by national citizenship nor by one’s class. Instead, one’s subjective stance towards the revolution placed one within or outside of “the people.” Thus even the national bourgeoisie (Chinese capitalists who did not collaborate directly with foreign powers) and patriotic rich peasants and landlords could become members of “the people,” so long as they threw their weight (and resources) behind the revolution. This focus on subjectivity would remain a strong component of CCP politics from that time on.

Faced with a labor shortage toward the beginning of the 1940s, the Japanese soon turned to more coercive means of recruitment. This included forcing students, prisoners, vagrants and the floating population of unemployed or casual workers into largely unpaid and compulsory labor service, all formalized by the April 1940 National Army Law which sought universal conscription into the military and industrial development projects. Those not pulled into the army itself were sent to the national labor corps “between the ages of twenty and twenty-three [to] work in military construction, essential industries or local production.” The brutality of this labor regime is not to be underestimated, and has been quite fairly compared to the European holocaust in the scale and scope of its devastation.

Throughout this period, then, attempts to rationalize and modernize labor deployment through the implementation of Taylorist methods and the use of hourly wages co-existed with and were ultimately superseded by regimes that relied, in the last instance, on the threat of violence, whether this be at the hand of the gang-boss or through the revival of systems of corveé labor and “tributary” methods of production and trade. This bore degrees of similarity to various forms of pre-capitalist accumulation seen throughout Eurasia, and authors writing on the Manchurian labor system have sloppily referred to it as “feudal.” More importantly, these “feudal” aspects of the labor regime are often portrayed as being in tension with the properly “rational,” Taylorist system of labor deployment through the wage relation.

But this opposition is not so clear. Despite its allegedly “feudal” elements, the Japanese industrialization of the Chinese mainland can well be seen as the initiation of a transition to an explicitly capitalist mode of production dominated by value production. Rather than seeing the build-up of the Japanese wartime complex (or its German, Italian or American counterparts) as driven by simple military madness, we must understand these military expansions as necessities of accumulation posed by states facing limits to their growth and mired in a crisis of value production. The Japanese colonization of the mainland was a response to a crisis of global capitalism. In one sense, this can be understood as a process of “primitive accumulation,” but only if we sever the term from its connotations of an expanding commercial capitalism, circa the European gestation of the capitalist mode of production in its Genoese, Dutch or British sequences.

The Japanese scaling-up of the gang-boss system and the implementation of forced labor were not, then, in any way a form of backsliding into pre-capitalist modes of production. They were instead a capitalist logic of production taken to its extreme—literally a last-ditch effort to preserve the capitalist social relations that ensured the continued accumulation of value on the East Asian mainland. Compounding growth rates, the increasing circulation of commodities across the domestic market and the beginning of the urban demographic transition all followed, alongside the mass proletarianization of ex-peasant migrants. These forms of labor deployment were in fact the ultimate complement to the Taylorist “rationalization” campaigns, because, in the face of labor shortage and military defeats, it was only these forms of labor deployment that worked, or, more accurately: got people working.

The GMD was utterly unable to manage this vast new bureaucracy. Incapable of reining in inflation, the dire economic trends initiated under the Japanese continued under the Nationalists, who were ill-suited to restart the project of imperial expansion begun by their predecessors. The middle class that had started to form prior to the invasion was now all but liquidated. A new bureaucratic warlordism arose alongside and within the collapsing GMD, creating nearly perfect conditions for the growth of the communist armies in the countryside.

As the GMD began to cede territory to the CCP in the Civil War, this Japanese-built state-industrial structure was the most intact component of non-agricultural production that the communists inherited. Manchuria was conquered early on with substantial military assistance from Russia, which gave significant amounts of ammunition, artillery, tanks and aircraft to the communist army while also assisting in the reconstruction of the Manchurian railroad system. But this assistance also came at significant cost, as Stalin ordered Russian troops to partner with the GMD and loot Manchurian factories in order to recuperate the USSR’s own war-strained industry.

The decisions confronted there, more than anywhere else, cut to the root of the communist project. If the Party were to simply seize the industrial infrastructure built by the Japanese, they risked reigniting the brutal expansionary process for which these industries were built and reconstructing the bureaucracy necessary to keep them running. Even if the Party devolved direct control of these industries to the remaining workers trained to run them, this would have done nothing to solve the structural problems inherent in how these large-scale factories functioned, nor the challenge posed by their geographical concentration. The gang-boss hierarchy could be filled with elected representatives, but this would have simply replaced a more Darwinian bureaucracy with a democratic one.

The problem was how, precisely, to utilize the productive capacity of this inherited infrastructure while simultaneously transforming society’s relations of production—a transformation that can only occur at a scale much larger than the individual enterprise, and which is in no way produced by a linear agglomeration of small changes made in individual workers’ relationships to individual workplaces, though these are obviously important and occur at every stage in the process. It was only in confronting this larger problem, then, that the Party’s own theories of industrial organization would become relevant. These top-down theories, meanwhile, were often paired with the bottom-up activity of workers in these industries, whose own opinions on these questions contributed to the overall heterogeneity of the communist project, which was by no means reducible to the CCP. The next three decades would be marked by struggles over the transformation and expansion of this industrial inheritance, with the Party absorbing many of these heterogeneous positions in the securing of its strategic hegemony—a hegemony premised on the potentials of production.

The socialist era was indeed a time of transition, in which a “national economy” was gradually sewn together out of disparate economic sub-regions and various methods of labor deployment. But the most fundamental characteristic of this “national economy”—the one feature that could be said to span city and countryside, determining the relationship between the two—was the implementation of the grain standard and the net funneling of resources from countryside to city. > In other words, the lynchpin of the entire development project was the widening of the urban rural divide, despite the increase of the country’s total social wealth.

In reality, capitalism has not been the only mode of production that saw major processes of urbanization. Nevertheless, it is often simply assumed that the abolition of capitalism entails the abolition of the city and the explosion of industry into a “garden city” of fields, factories and workshops,” in which population itself must be roughly equalized across inhabited territory. Marx and Engels’ own work exacerbates this confusion. The “more equitable distribution of population over town and country” is one of the ten measures advanced in the Communist Manifesto. Though this can be understood as a response to the particular rural-urban inequalities that had arisen in Europe at the time, it is then made ahistorical in The Origin of the Family, where Engels claims the city as a basic “characteristic of civilization,” and thereby an origin-point for all early class structures.

It's actually interesting how frequently this is misunderstood and overlooked; there have been numerous cities that were built without capitalism as their mode of production/economics (such as Cahokia) because the cities were not sufficiently "urbanised" by Eurocentric values. I'm glad this was included.

The situation changed, however, upon the completion of the Civil War. In the later-liberated southern port cities, many owners and managers remained present, leveraging precious technical skills and access to foreign credit in exchange for favorable treatment by the Party. More importantly, victory in the war meant that the communists had seized several of the country’s largest urban areas precisely when the wartime stimulus to these cities’ industries was faltering and the US-backed economic blockade had just begun. The number of workers and wartime refugees skyrocketed, but many of the industries in the coastal cities had been bombed by the Japanese or sabotaged by the retreating GMD. In Guangzhou alone, “it was reported in December 1949 that less than a quarter of the city’s enterprises were operating at full capacity, while nearly a third of the entire workforce was unemployed.”

Nonetheless, attempts at agrarian forms of socialism were not without precedent, as anarchists, republicans and communists alike had advocated and even attempted to build such egalitarian rural projects in the past, particularly in the New Village, Rural Reconstruction and Village Cooperation movements of the early 20th century. Some, such as the Tolstoyan anarchist Liu Shipei, envisioned the end goal of any egalitarian project in China to be anti-modern in character, returning the country to its agrarian heritage. Many of the CCP’s earliest members had emerged from the anarchist movement and retained more than a little fidelity to decentralized models of development that mixed industrial and agricultural activity and thereby encouraged out-migration from urban cores.

Would this be linked to what happened with the labour education movement in Shanghai (which had an anarchist tone)?

Name: Liu Shipei

The restructuring of the economy was coordinated by three main actors. First, there was the military, “which sent representatives (who were also Party members) to individual factories where they claimed the authority of the new government.” But these military representatives were not particularly familiar with industrial production and, therefore, had to rely on the hierarchy of technicians and administrators already in place. Secondly, there was the urban wing of the CCP itself, many members of which were skilled workers. Nonetheless, the Party’s urban wing was small and accustomed to operating within a rigid command hierarchy necessitated by secrecy. Whereas the rural Party’s experience mediating between simultaneous social conflicts and administering large swaths of production had made it a flexible and adaptable organization, the urban Party’s experience had been far more limited.

Finally, there were “the skilled, literate workers who, with the blessings of the Communist Party, were quickly promoted to positions of leadership in the factories by the trade unions.” But these workers were sparse, due to widespread illiteracy among both urban residents and the majority of CCP cadre: “In Shanghai alone […] the illiteracy rate for all employees, including clerks and white-collar workers, was estimated at 46 percent.” Meanwhile, “among blue-collar factory workers, this figure was much higher, probably near the 80 percent figure for industrial personnel in the whole country.” By contrast, “in 1949 almost all of the students in Chinese universities and higher level technical schools were from the urban middle and upper middle classes.” And these students were no longer simply elites educated in the Confucian classics. Instead, “well over half (63 percent) of the members of this group who were university and technical school graduates in 1949 had majored in subjects that were essential for industrialization.”

The Party’s response was to launch a recruitment drive, hoping to bolster its ranks with loyal intellectuals and skilled technicians. The risk of careerism and corruption was clearly noted, but these were considered necessary evils that could later be uprooted. Meanwhile, new unions were formed alongside the new Party organs, intended to simultaneously rationalize production and provide workers with some oversight over the new, less trustworthy Party recruits. At first, the Party had attempted to weed out former gang-bosses, GMD-union thugs and secret society members from its restructured industrial system, but this proved to be nearly impossible and the attempt only further stalled the recuperation of industry. Local cadre were instructed to open recruitment in the new unions, hoping that workers’ own political perceptiveness combined with state-sponsored reform campaigns would be sufficient to prevent these lower-tier elites from regaining power.

Many urban workers had felt disappointed or betrayed by the continuation of capitalism in the port cities, and the early 1950s saw a slow increase in industrial agitation. The new state responded to this dissatisfaction in several ways. First, concessions were given to many workers. Wages increased and most urbanites’ livelihoods were significantly improved—not necessarily a difficult task, since peace alone was an improvement on two decades of war and occupation. Second, new mass organizations were created, including new unions and a national Labor Board, in an attempt to provide less economically disruptive means to solve workplace grievances.[78] Though these new organizations often proved clunky and unresponsive, they were still initially seen as an important tool for the reorganization of industry and for the devolution of more power to workers.

Many anarchists had hoped to strengthen these local forms of resistance into an egalitarian revolutionary movement aimed at expanding the potentials of statelessness already present in Chinese village culture. These attempts, however, were systematic failures. Several of the most prominent anarchists in China, including Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Ji and Zhang Jingjiang, ultimately joined and had leading roles within the Nationalist Party, sitting on its central committee and forming close relationships with Chiang Kai-Shek and other members of the GMD’s right-wing. Those that retained their belief in an egalitarian and essentially communist revolution, faced with the failures of anarchism, flocked to the newly-founded CCP.

On top of this, the CCP had itself been reformatted by its years in the Chinese countryside. Previously, the leading minds of the Party, such as Chen Duxiu and Wang Ming, had been unambiguously internationalist, and had leveled critiques against rising nationalist trends within the Party itself. Many of the Party’s rank-and-file were, in this period, laborers and trade unionists in the port cities, their everyday lives marked by cosmopolitan contact with workers, technicians and revolutionaries of various leanings from all over the world—but especially Europe and the colonies of Southeast Asia.

Quotes from Part II: Development:

But what scholars often classify as the “Soviet Model” actually covers two alternating tendencies in industrial organization and enterprise management, the first influenced by High Stalinist methods of mass mobilization campaigns alongside “crash production drives and close supervision by Party committees,” and the second more in line with the USSR’s five-year plans of the 1930s, a method of organization “encapsulated in one-man management” which “in effect imposed a strict hierarchical and bureaucratic order over enterprises that was antithetical to the mobilizational impulses of High Stalinism.”

At the same time, the elimination of the handicrafts industry and the market networks that had undergirded relations between city and countryside ensured that most of China’s industrial activity was now urban, and that the population would be more strictly concentrated in urban industries or dispersed across the agricultural collectives being created at this time. Most importantly: the divide between urban and rural was now becoming a clear geographic divide between grain-producing and grain-consuming regions, with the grain-consumers as the primary targets of industrialization.

The easiest solution to this problem, adopted as a local fix by enterprises across the country, was the practice of “replacement (dingti),” in which the enterprise would hire relatives and children of current employees into the same work unit. Because of the constraints on hiring, “the Chinese government inadvertently promoted an intensely localistic practice of work-unit occupational inheritance.” In so doing, the CCP revived the family unit as an integral source of social privilege, fusing it to the danwei and thereby to the state itself. Families that had poor placement or little clout in their enterprises held little bargaining power and therefore saw their family members deported to far-off cities (often in the interior) by the demands of national labor allocation. This created a financial and emotional stress that further prevented such families from ascending the distributional hierarchy.

Again, this reminds me of things that were written about in Blockchain Chicken Farm, where the author discusses how there were still elements and places that utilised the same system of children working in (and taking over) their parents' positions but that this was becoming less common among those who saw new industries.

The collective dining halls and the huge size of communes made it almost impossible for peasants to see how their labor affected their own subsistence. The accounting and workpoints systems had basically broken down. As crop yields dropped in 1959, food began to run out in the dining halls and peasants stayed home to conserve energy. Collective control over labor disintegrated. Most free dining halls only lasted three months, and in the fall of 1958 even commune cadres’ salaries were stopped. Meals in the dining halls that continued to exist in 1959 had to be purchased with meal tickets given out according to work. By the spring of 1959, the Central Committee tried to push the communes back into a system of remuneration according to labor: “The principle of distribution according to labor means calculating payment according to the amount of labor one does. The more work done, the more one will earn.” And summer harvests were to be distributed with 60 to 70% according to labor.

Cadre lost control of the rural population, which took matters into its own hands by stealing from communal stores, scavenging for food, eating the green shoots of plants before grain could ripen and fleeing the countryside. Resistance was punished, in turn, with violence and the withholding of food rations, potentially a death sentence at the time. In the wake of famine, rebuilding state institutions and Party power in the countryside would prove a very difficult task.

The uncontrollable flood of migrants into the cities over the course of the 1950s—first pursuing jobs in the new industries and then fleeing the famine in the countryside—provided the impetus to use hukou records to fix people in their home villages. This was achieved through the apportioning of state benefits according to one’s registration status—effectively preventing rural out-migrants from obtaining jobs in the city. Through the urban danwei system, urban hukou holders would be provided a quota of grain at a state-subsidized price, while rural hukou holders were required to produce grain and would not receive state rations, instead receiving rights to a plot of land, or a direct portion of co-operative, then collective, agricultural output.

Workers in such joint-owned enterprises, then, not only found themselves lacking the privileges of their counterparts in state-owned heavy industry, but also saw the benefits they had wrested from factory owners over the past decade gradually stripped away. Under “joint ownership,” they increasingly lost their opportunities to participate in management, witnessing the evisceration of the democratic institutions that had been built within the enterprise as a counter-power to that of private owners. Many of these private owners, alongside the management personnel they had employed, were simply transferred to positions of authority within the new industrial structure, making the obliteration of workers’ own institutions all the more insulting. Maybe more importantly, the sheer numbers of managers, supervisors and other administrative personnel skyrocketed, composing “more than a third of total employees in Shanghai’s joint enterprises.” This increase in administrative personnel was made necessary by the scale of consolidation and the chaotic character of the port cities’ pre-existing industrial infrastructure. Nonetheless, the practice appeared purely unproductive from the standpoint of most rank-and-file workers, instigating further resentment.

In late 1956 and early 1957, sensing the unrest and frightened by recent revolts against Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe, the CCP sponsored a wide-ranging “policy of (limited) liberalization and democratization and increased scope for criticism of the Party,” in what was known as the “Hundred Flowers” campaign. In standard portrayals of the period, Mao calls for criticism of the Party, and students and intellectuals follow suit. Once the movement gets out of hand, with heavy critiques leveled at the Party and comparisons being made to the rebellion in Hungary, the Party initiates the Anti-Rightist campaign later in 1957 to reign in the movement and punish those who had spoken too harshly of the leadership. There is often an ambiguity in these accounts about whether or not the Hundred Flowers’ movement had been a sort of trick to draw the Party leadership’s potential enemies out into the light. But, whether a trick or an earnest attempt at reform, most of these accounts are consistent in their portrayal of the movement as a largely top-down affair, primarily involving students and intellectuals.

This connects well to what's happening today (in terms of the lessons learned about "liberal democracy." Give people something that masquerades as a "responsive" and "participatory" system, and it helps cool down the issues of repression.

That is, for people who aren't repressed.

In reality, the Hundred Flowers campaign was a response to the extreme social conflicts that had arisen over the course of the First Five-Year Plan. It merely recognized dynamics already reaching a boiling point across Chinese society and concealed them beneath the complaints of students and intellectuals—figures who could easily be dismissed as vestiges of the old society. Directly acknowledging the antagonism that existed among urban workers would have, in effect, raised the question of whether the Party had lost the mandate of the working class. This also entailed that, after the fact, workers had to be “written out of the Hundred Flowers story as protestors, being present only as defenders of the Party during the anti-rightist campaign.” But the reality was quite different.

It's interesting how intellectuals are often used in this manner by authoritarians.

In some cases, this intra-enterprise division took on extreme forms and strikes were crushed by more privileged workers themselves, with no need for directives from the central government. During a dispute at the Shanghai Fertilizer Company in May 1957, 41 temporary workers who had been promised regular status but had then been abruptly laid off attacked union officials, demanding to be re-instated as regular workers. After nearly beating the union director and vice-director to death, the union, youth league and permanent workers vowed to solve the conflict themselves, and the permanent workers “even stockpiled weapons in preparation for killing the temporary workers.” Before this could happen, however, the municipal authorities stepped in and arrested the temporary worker leaders.

Given the dangers posed by open worker revolt, the Party not only sided with the more privileged members of the industrial workforce—i.e., older permanent workers with urban-based families employed in heavy industries—but also sought, initially, to reform systems of industrial and political management. As early as the fall of 1956, the upper echelons of the Party had realized that the strike wave, still in its infancy, was rooted in deeper conflicts that were themselves engendered by national industrial policy. Events in Eastern Europe further verified these fears. At the Eight Party Congress the Soviet Model influenced by the five-year plans of the 1930s, with “one-man management” at its core, was rejected in favor of the alternate Soviet Model, based on High Stalinist principles, which favored mass mobilization, workers’ participation, and direct supervision and management by Party committees instead of technocratic leadership by factory directors and engineers.

Though endorsed at high levels and rendered into socialist mythology via historical comparisons with the USSR, the mobilizational policies that resulted were often more the product of local, practical solutions to factory and city-scale conflicts and, in many instances, would ultimately exceed what central authorities considered acceptable concessions to the workers. In many factories, workers’ congresses were founded, “consisting of directly elected representatives who could be recalled by workers at any time,” a form of organization that was pushed for by then-chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), Lai Ruoyu, who “identified democratization of management as the feature which distinguished socialist enterprises from capitalist ones.”

In terms of repression, workers suffered far more than students or intellectuals. Though the crackdown on strikes was concurrent with the Anti-Rightist campaign, workers were denied the political status of “rightists.” Instead, they were given the classification of “bad elements,” implying a simple criminality rather than any sort of principled political opposition. This was no difference of semantics: “workers, and some union officials, were in fact imprisoned and sent to labour camps in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers movement, and some were executed.” When high-ranking ACFTU officials such as Lai Ruoyu, Li Xiuren and Gao Yuan stood behind the workers, even going so far as to advocate for independent unions, the result was vilification, dismissal, and a general purge of the ACFTU.

It is untenable, then, to simply attribute the failure of the strike wave to the state’s repressive measures. For the most part, the state simply did not have to intervene. Divisions within the workforce—particularly along lines of seniority and regular versus temporary status—were often sufficient to prevent the strikers’ demands from galvanizing wider support. The striking workers were often the minority in their own enterprises, and their demands were just as often violently opposed by other workers, as in the example of the Shanghai Fertilizer company.

The Party would soon leverage this fact, portraying strikers as “bad elements” with non-proletarian family backgrounds attempting to trick other workers into participation in an anti-communist conspiracy. Despite the exaggeration of this propaganda, the kernel of truth here was simply that a significant bulk of the national industrial workforce was sufficiently satisfied with their positions to be wary of losing them. This was especially true among the older workers, who not only held higher wages and received more benefits, but also remembered the abysmal conditions of work prior to the revolution.

The result was that no mode of production fully cohered during the socialist developmental regime—and it is precisely because of this that the state itself, increasingly fused with the Party (and, ultimately, the military) played the mechanical role of ordering production, distribution and growth. In some cases this entailed mimicking patterns seen in the transition to capitalism, in other cases importing practices, technicians and entire factories from the USSR, and in still others replicating or reinventing forms of labor deployment, infrastructural development and cultural mobilization that bore significant resemblance to practices found in the region’s history.

At the same time, because these methods of accumulation were mechanical, the state tended to ossify into a stiff bureaucracy if any one policy or method was in place for too long. At each point, new practices were adopted not out of ideological attachment or as neutral tools in factional battles, but most often as a bricolage of makeshift responses to an accumulation of myriad local crises. Throughout the socialist era, each policy shift was also a method of re-oiling ossified state mechanisms through modification and reinvention. In extreme cases, these shifts were accompanied by large-scale purges and re-staffing.

But this decentralization also caused new forms of competitive chaos, as different segments of local hierarchies competed for control over the new powers devolved to cities and provinces. In some cities, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, the municipal Party committees effectively took direct control over much of the cities’ heavy industry, despite Party directives dictating that these industries be administered by the central planning authorities. Meanwhile, the decentralized enterprises (accounting for more than 85% of all employment in Shanghai) were effectively given over to “direct control by municipal Party committees,” which meant that “enjoying as they did ties with local Party officials, enterprise Party committees gained control over production tasks.” Down to the most basic units of urban life, the policy was to “guarantee the absolute leadership of the Party in industrial production.” Decentralization, then, actually represented a stronger fusion of Party and state, as the tasks of everyday production as well as setting output targets and reporting final production numbers were all roundly handed over to Party committees rather than technicians and managers.

An extreme example of this can be seen in the practice of several factories in Guangzhou, which adopted “an anarchical policy of ‘non-management’ (wuren guanli).” This policy entailed that enterprises “practiced the ‘Eight Selfs’ (ba zi), in which workers arranged their own plans, output quotas, technology, blueprints, operations, inputs of semiprocessed goods, quality inspection, and accounting.” The practice became so extreme that banks “distributed cash to any worker who came in with purchase orders. Employees who knew the enterprise’s bank account number could withdraw funds to procure whatever items they needed for their factories.” Yet, even with the near-complete abolition of enterprise-level management and with workers collectively agreeing upon their own production quotas, all evidence suggests that these quasi-syndicalist factories suffered the same output speculation as factories that retained more traditional management structures. The ultimate effect of the production crisis was not blunted in Guangzhou.

Quotes from Part III: Ossification:

Quotes from this article:

Travelling only at night, the corpse drivers would ring bells to warn off the living, since the sight of the dead migrants was thought to bring bad luck. Though itself somewhat apocryphal, new myths grew out of the practice, as the hopping corpses were transformed into jiangshi, vampire-like creatures driven to feed on the life force of others. Their own blood siphoned out of them by the docks and factories, these migrant workers were transformed into monsters befitting a new reality—one of crumbling empires, civil wars and the insatiable expansion of commodities.

Transporting corpses over a thousand li was not remembrance, then, but a strange sort of survival. The stiff-limbed dead walked from their factories, traversed countries torn by war, famine and other unnamable sufferings to finally settle amongst their kin in the dust of their homeland, a rural world that had only just caught sight of its approaching oblivion.

Today, China itself has become such a wandering specter. The rural world is dying, yet hundreds of millions of workers still seem stuck between their peasant past and a future that fails to arrive. Two decades of staggering economic growth built on a series of credit bubbles have left a legacy of “development” defined by wastelands of apartment complexes sitting next to half-empty factory cities, each year filled with fewer workers and more unmanned machines. While the elite children of the country’s financial and administrative centers collect sports cars and foreign degrees, the children of today’s migrants are guaranteed little more than the fleeting chance to become yet another corpse crushed to pulp in the factory.

A lot of this is reminding me of Blockchain Chicken Farm and the depictions of rural life among the techno-optimist framework.

As growth rates dwindle, the country seems nonetheless driven ahead by an undead, mechanical momentum. Workers are laid off with nowhere to return. Ruralites give up their land in exchange for a fraction of the condos built on them, soon losing their value to an inflating currency. Entire landscapes are poisoned by decades of rapid industrial expansion, while urban centers succumb to man-made landslides, earthquakes and chemical explosions. Riots and strikes proliferate, but fail to cohere into anything larger. The working class has been dismantled. Nothing is left today but dead generations united in their separation, shambling through the fire and the dust.

Quotes from this essay:

And the more troubling question is: Who is going to clean up this mess? How did gay marriage become “the issue” in Maine and how did so many LGBTA folks get duped into making this campaign their top priority, emotionally, financially and otherwise, by the shallow rhetoric of equality?

This is something we still need to deal with. Even after federal marriage equality took place during the Obama administration, so many people (including liberals in the LGBTQIA+ community want to ignore that we still are not free. We did not get liberation because we could enter into a state-sanctioned structure that protected a few but not many, leaving so many people behind.

Gays and lesbians of all ages are obsessing over gay marriage as if it's going to cure AIDS, stop anti‐queer/anti‐trans violence, provide all uninsured queers with health care, and reform racist immigration policies. Unfortunately, marriage does little more than consolidate even more power in the hands of already privileged gay couples engaged in middle class hetero‐mimicry.

Two things:

1. This is still happening to some extent because people are really pushing this as the end-all-be-all of queer liberation, when it's not even liberating in the first place. And, as we've seen in other arenas, it's so fucking easy to smash them and have these rights removed with barely a fight (by the people who claim constantly to "do what's best" for us).

2. This kind of fight still happens in places where same-sex marriage is under attack or straight out banned. We still see people pushing for the most minimal of changes and obsessing over them to our detriment. It's infuriating.

Let’s be clear: The national gay marriage campaign is NOT a social justice movement. Gay marriage reinforces the for‐profit medical industrial complex by tying access to health care to employment and relational status. Gay marriage does not challenge patent laws that keep poor/working class poz folks from accessing life‐extending medications. Gay marriage reinforces the nuclear family as the primary support structure for youth even though nuclear families are largely responsible for queer teen homelessness, depression and suicide. Gay marriage does not challenge economic systems set up to champion people over property and profit. Gay marriage reinforces racist immigration laws by only allowing productive, “good”, soon‐to‐be‐wed, non‐citizens in while ignoring the rights of migrant workers. Gay marriage simply has nothing to do with social justice.

Note: 'Poz' is a reference to HIV+ people. (This is something I had to look up because it was not part of my vocabulary.)

Fucking hard agree, though. And this is still the case.

Comments on the sections: "An Opportunistic National Strategy" and "Following the Money"

This is a huge problem, and I don't think enough people saw through it as it was happening. This ties into issues with the Non-Profit Industrial Complex; they get to help set the stage as tools of governments, and that's a huge issue. Instead of focusing on all the problems above, which would've helped far more people (including queer people)? We got stuck on goddamned marriage equality and everything tied to belongings, wealth, and ownership.

I also feel like we haven't done enough to actually check into where the money is coming from and has gone; there are so many things I didn't know because they weren't happening in my community, and there wasn't a queer community for me to safely be a part of (where I lived).

And I'm starting to wonder how much of that lack of community was caused by same-sex marriage campaigns soaking up cash, spending it, and ignoring on-the-ground needs of people in a range of places.

In a state with a tanking economy, this kind of reckless spending on a single issue campaign that isn’t even a top priority for most LGBT folks is blatant and unrestrained classism at its worst.

Some suggest that gay marriage is part of a progress narrative and that it is a step in the right direction towards more expansive social justice issues. This largely ignores a critique of power. Once privilege is doled out to middle class gay couples, are they going to continue on to fight against racist immigration policies, for universal health care, for comprehensive queer/trans inclusive sex education, or to free queers unjustly imprisoned during rabidly homophobic sex‐abuse witch hunts? Doubtful is an overstatement. It's more likely they will be enjoying summer vacations at an expensive bed and breakfast in Ogunquit while the rest of us are still trying to access basic rights like health care and freedom of movement. Let’s be real: Privilege breeds complacency.

And this has absolutely happened middle-class and wealthier queer people, especially white queer people, have absolutely ducked out of any kind of push for change. They're largely fine with assimilating, as evidenced by constant battles like "Should cops be at Pride?" (No) or "It's okay if corporations are at Pride" (No). They got what little benefited them, and the rest of us can get fucked (globally).

There really is a hierarchy in queer spaces, and it's got to go.

If we are to imagine queer futures that don't replicate the same violence and oppression many of us experience on an everyday basis as queer and trans folks, we must challenge the middle class neo‐liberal war machine known as the national gay marriage campaign. We must fight the rhetoric of equality and inclusion in systems of domination like marriage and the military, and stop believing that our participation in those institutions is more important than questioning those institutions legitimacy all together. We need to call out the national marriage campaign as opportunistic and parasitic. We must challenge their money mongering tactics to assure our local, truly community based LGBT organizations aren’t left financially high and dry while offering the few essential services to the most marginalized of our community.

Quotes from this essay:

Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it.

I'd also venture to say that sometimes love can be harmed by marriage, as people may feel constrained by the social expectations of the institution. The very act of being married requires that a lot of people figure out their relationship to their potential spouse and how the state will view their relationship. There's a lot that is tied up in marriage, especially as the result of settler-colonialism.

I feel like this video by The Liberal Cook outlines a lot of the modern issues with state interference in relationships.

On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage.

The elements of 'settler-colonialism' are why I somewhat disagree with the paragraph this comes from. I don't think it's false; I don't think it's impossible. I do agree that, to some extent, it comes from the "adjustment to the inevitable."

Arranged marriages are not part of my culture, so this is not an area that I'm comfortable with speaking on and how this might be different today.

But I am confused by this: "... the spontaneity, the intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage must prove degrading to both the woman and the man."

Why must love be spontaneous and intense? It's not even always beautiful, but I certainly don't understand why it must be spontaneous or intense. This certainly doesn't speak to the range of relationships or love that exist within the world.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, how ever, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.” Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.

It's interesting in how some of these have changed (in places where 'names' were lost, we're now seeing an uptick in women keeping their names or hyphenating -- minor point), but there are aspects where these things haven't changed that much.

I'm also curious about "condemns her to complete uselessness." Which class of women was she speaking about? In 1911, a lot of lower-class women were working as maids and in textiles; they were doing piecework and taking care of families.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end.

Again, this is an interesting point because of which communities still seem to have retained this messaging. Thinking back to my time growing up (with everyone assuming I was a girl), it was very clear to me that I should "get married" and "have children." These messages are still everywhere, even as we're saying that it's okay not to, but some communities receive them more frequently.

Though, this phenomenon seems to be slowly decreasing in urban areas.

It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact.

This feels like an interesting area to look into, and I may have to. But I do feel that a lot of relationships (especially within the Western context) have this issue. Sex is still somewhat difficult to discuss, as are needs within a relationship. It's difficult to talk about these things when you've been taught otherwise for so long.

If, on rare occasions young people allow themselves the luxury of romance they are taken in care by the elders, drilled and pounded until they become “sensible.”

Though the conversations about what is "sensible" have changed somewhat, this still happens! (Also threats. I got a lot of threats about what would happen if I ever "turned up pregnant," and I suspect that didn't help a single iota in my relationship to sex.)

The important and only God of practical American life: Can the man make a living? Can he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage.

Again, I think it's clear that we need to ask which class of women is Goldman talking about or to. It's not to say that poor people didn't enter into marriage for economic reasons in the early 1900s, but it was definitely more likely that families of wealth had to consider that.

It's much like now. Poor people who want to get married are less often considering the financial status of each other (unless, for whatever reason, it impacts their ability to live a better life -- such as how disabled people can sometimes lose their benefits when marrying someone) because they generally have a better understanding of precarity and its impacts.

Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women wage-workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man.

Aha, here we go. I'd love to see numbers on how women viewed work (permanence) in the early 1900s to compare across decades until now.

The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. “Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home.” Has she not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.

This bit is something that I'd actually like to explore more, especially considering unions initially did not want to include women (as well as non-white people, particularly Black people). If the union didn't want to let you in, your outlook on joining them might be negative because they excluded you.

Early unions that included women were often run by women. (Wikipedia overview.)

Silk Stockings and Socialism actually discusses the history of the textile unions, which was among the first to start organising women in large numbers (because other than the top jobs, like knitters, most of the workers were women and girls -- think of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire and how many girls and women died there).

It's amazing what happens when you spend time listening to and supporting people.

But the child, how is it to be protected, if not for marriage? After all, is not that the most important consideration? The sham, the hypocrisy of it! Marriage protecting the child, yet thousands of children destitute and homeless. Marriage protecting the child, yet orphan asylums and reformatories over crowded, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeping busy in rescuing the little victims from “loving” parents, to place them under more loving care, the Gerry Society. Oh, the mockery of it!

Children are actually an aspect of the nuclear family and marriage that I'd love to see discussed more because of how often they are entirely excluded (until someone needs to "protect" them from something). It really hurts their liberation from the whole system.

The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine, --- and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman.

I do think we need to go back to thinking about what the purpose of all the "birth rates are falling" news stories are. These questions asked are particularly poignant in that light.

Our pseudo-moralists have yet to learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in freedom has awakened in the breast of woman. Rather would she forego forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death.

On a list of things that sound strikingly familiar over 100 years later.

Quotes are from the named essay in the book Queering Anarchism.

In 2009 I was helplessly kicking and screaming while the national campaigns for gay marriage descended on my mostly poor, mostly rural home state of Maine. Now, in the aftermath of the nauseatingly class-elitist failed campaign, gay and lesbian organizations, and the professional activists that prop them up, remain resiliently resistant to critically questioning what we, as queer and trans subjects, are seeking to be equal to in the first place. Do we really want full inclusion in the institution of marriage, a social contract that explicitly limits the ways in which we can organize our erotic and emotional lives? Furthermore, do we really want to reinforce a social institution where our immediate needs and access to collective benefits are contingent on this singular articulation of partnership? Or have many of us allowed ourselves to be convinced by some vague notion of equality, with all its empty promises,* that gay marriage is a battle worth fighting for?

All of these questions still need to be addressed and considered. Furthermore:

*The promise of health care, freedom of movement across nation state borders, the inheritance of property, etc. These promises only apply if one or both of the people entering into a marriage agreement have a considerable amount of wealth/property/assets, professional employment, and citizenship status. For many, this is not the case and therefore many will not gain materially from marriage.

Empiricism aside, the so-called healthy and privatized familial structures through which the institution of marriage seeks to minimize violence cannot be emulated if we, as a radical queer and trans community, are to confront the violence within our own community and families (chosen or otherwise).

In addition to the affective discourse outlined above, a more analytic approach is being deployed in tandem. This rhetoric relies on a certain brand of rugged American individualism that has spawned gay and lesbian organizations that invoke a rights-based discourse in their attempt at achieving what they contend is full equality. It is here we find numerous LGB and sometimes T activists in a rage over their 1,138 rights that federally recognized marriage will bring them, but are denied. These state benefits and privileges, as outlined in the Defense of Marriage Act, are overwhelmingly about the transfer of money and property (including children, as the only way marriage allows us to think about them is like property). The almost exclusive emphasis on property rights highlights that marriage has little to do with love, but with benefits and privileges as doled out by the state to those who adhere to a specific set of moral values determined by the church.

Gay marriage organizations are mobilizing this rights-based discourse focused on “equal” access to state benefits and privileges in tandem with highly effective love rhetoric to win over public opinion by appealing to socialized emotional responses while simultaneously making a more strategic/analytic argument for gay marriage. This two-pronged approach has successfully dragged many LGBT activists into its blinding double discourse by effectively motivating the engagement of many queer and trans folks who would be better off putting their energy elsewhere. What if we, as a queer and trans social justice movement, focused on achieving access to many of marriage’s forbidden fruits (i.e., healthcare, freedom of movement across nation-state borders, etc.) for all people, not just citizen couples, gay, straight, or otherwise?

This neoliberal fantasy of the nuclear family as the only provider of emotional and economic safety is being recovered and deployed by the contemporary gay rights movement. In a bizarre twist in history, gays and lesbians are turning their backs on the kinds of radical new configurations of “family” that have liberated straight people.

The question remains then: How do we, as radical queer and trans folks, push back against the emerging hegemony of rainbow-flavored neoliberalism and the funneling of our energy into narrow campaigns that only reinforce the hierarchical systems and institutions we fundamentally oppose? How do we reconcile the contradiction of our anger and fervent criticism of so called equality when presently many of our material lives depend on accessing resources through the very subject of our critique? Although I do not have concrete solutions to offer, I believe we must create more space and time to have these vital conversations, be more open and public about our critique of marriage, build coalitions with others who stand little to gain from marriage, imagine other worlds together, and dream up new ways of meeting our material and affective needs.

Quotes are from the book Queering Anarchism.

What gets labeled “normal” will affect what gets labeled “abnormal.” If there are shifts in one sphere, the other sphere will shift with it. Queer, then, is what is at odds with the normal and lines up with the category of “abnormal.” Since the normal can change, so can the abnormal, the queer. This is why queer is called a positionality—what is deemed queer is not fixed, it is contextual and related to what is called normal. The reason the term “queer,” in this sense, isn’t restricted to “gay” or “lesbian” is because many sexual practices are considered abnormal—some that aren’t primarily based on gender (for instance, particular ways of having sex—like BDSM—or particular ways of fashioning or arranging sexual relationships—like nonmonogamy or sex work). The normal sexuality, in our own society, isn’t just “hetero,” it is a particular form of heterosexuality—a heterosexuality that has a goal of a happily married couple in a permanent relationship, abiding by the plethora of norms that make up what is referred to as “heteronormativity”—a very specific type of heterosexuality that reinforces the dominance of the ascribed set of norms: cohabitation, procreation, marriage, monogamous coupling, etc.

This doesn’t mean that all of these sexual and gender practices are experienced in the same way or oppressed to the same degree. That too is context-specific and also related to other identities that people might be assigned or the class position that they might inhabit. Rather, it is strategic for all people marginalized and oppressed by heteropatriarchy to organize and struggle together. And that means we need a lens through which to examine a variety of marginalized sexual and gender practices. That does not mean that heteropatriarchy treats all deviants the same. It means that there is no scarcity of liberation and that if liberation, in the final instance, is going to be meaningful, it must include us all.

Further, along with the socially constructed nature of sexuality and gender, as the intersex movement has taught us, we can also put sex under this critical lens. Sex is also put into a binary framework in our society, male and female, which fails to recognize the range of hormonal, sexual, and even chromosomal makeup that people can embody and, importantly, also ignores the coercive nature of the state’s attempts to define our sexual selves for us at birth. This allows for a more holistic politics of sex, sexuality, and gender. It also gives us theoretical space to queer our naturalized assumptions about other identities. Consider, for example, people who exist in the margins of available categories for race and how it can make their existence or identity incoherent or, perhaps, changing depending on the context they are in —“white” in some contexts, perhaps Latino in others, and so on. What might politics look like if we began looking at identities in ways that do not treat them as fixed, monolithic, and eternal?

Rather than trying to fit all of these pieces into a single, coherent definition of the word, we collected chapters knowing that they would at times be contradictory.

Quotes are from the book Queering Anarchism.

Queer theory, in particular, can often be dense and obscure, seemingly meant to be read (or at least understood) only by those in the academy who are willing to spend long hours reading (and rereading) it. But the essays in this volume communicate complexity without obfuscation, many of them drawing on real-life, concrete organizing experiences to elucidate the challenges to fixed categories and to binary thinking that have traditionally characterized queer theory. At the same time, they highlight the difficulties posed for an activism that attempts to move forward without re-inscribing those same binaries in the name of challenging them.

Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology, and media literacy will somehow “save” or “educate” rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.

In Shandong Province, I asked one thief why they decided to steal from the government. As if I were missing the obvious, they responded, “Well, clearly I would never steal from other villagers and none of the villagers would steal from me. We all know each other. Once in a while, we’ll take vegetables from each other’s gardens. But anything of value, I’d steal from someone I don’t know!”

And the government would deserve it, to be honest. (This would apply to many governments, more than just the Chinese government, as they're all complicit in hoarding wealth and resources.)

The easy argument is that the world is moving faster, becoming more controlled because of the internet and mobile devices. But the gravity of acceleration is not inevitable. The way we experience time has changed; the kind of critical wonder we hold toward objects has collapsed. My great-uncle once sat in amazement looking at the new Japanese-made TV we bought him, at how crisp the image was, and how remarkable it was that so much complex circuitry could fit inside a thin screen. He now looks up from his smartphone occasionally, complaining how slow his phone is at opening apps.

Hardin’s original essay in 1968 used the example of the medieval commons, a place where peasants grazed their cows. According to Hardin, the ungoverned nature of the commons led to overgrazing, which is why the commons had to eventually be enclosed and privatized. Yet Hardin was also wrong about this history—the commons model had actually thrived in Europe for hundreds of years. The mismanagement of the commons by peasants was a lie, an excuse made up by powerful landowners who wanted to seize and control these spaces.

The same is often applicable to the quality of goods/services, which is also brought up. The quality of food, for example, was less of an issue prior to different forms of centralisation; companies demanded that people do things for as little as possible (squeezing them), and this in turn impacted the quality of those goods/services (making them worse).

Which then led to yet another round of 'tightening' and centralisation of those goods/services, which just keeps causing the cycle to get worse.

We trust all sorts of technical systems every day without having to read their code. The software that flies our planes, runs our city trains. Like a lot of emerging technologies, blockchain is beholden only to its makers, and to a handful of well-funded companies. The conventional answer to this is to suggest government regulation of software, as is the case with airplane and train software. Yet the political ethos of blockchain is precisely about taking power away from a central authority like the government. And deep down, I find that sentiment admirable. However, blockchain has yet to answer the question: If it takes power away from a central authority, can it truly put power back in the hands of the people, and not just a select group of people? Will it serve as an infrastructure that amplifies trust, rather than increasing both mistrust and a singular reliance on technical infrastructure? Will it provide ways to materially organize and enrich a community, rather than further accelerating financial systems that serve a select few? Can the community expand and diversify itself, so that it does not reproduce the system of power and patriarchy that it is attempting to dismantle?

By creating a system based on the assumption that humans are destructive and selfish, you only end up making those assumptions reality: a self-fulfilling prophecy. It serves as a reminder of the physical, material relationships that bind our world together.

YEP.

There is some debate about whether blockchain and crypto are here to stay, whether the technology is actually able to do all the things it says it will do. I think of the melamine-milk scandal, and whether blockchain would have helped in that situation. The contamination came from farmers, driven by economic pressures. Blockchain wouldn’t have helped prevent falsification, but it would have made the milk more expensive. Under authoritarianism, which benefits from holding expertise within its realm of power, and under an economic system that thrives off inequality in creating a market, of course blockchain is here to stay. It creates another layer of inequality, another incentive to make food a commodity.

According to Jianhu, the first case of ASF [African swine flu] in China was in a backyard pork operation, one of the many midsize pork farms with fewer than a hundred pigs. Ninety-eight percent of the pork farms in China have fewer than fifty animals, and these small to midsize farms account for about a third of pork production in China. These highly decentralized farms make government oversight difficult. There is also enormous pressure for these farms to keep up with the market price for pork, and to maintain steady production. The government was finding ASF a convenient excuse to eradicate these small farms, making way for centralized, industrial-scale operations.

See previous comment about the commons and centralisation/quality.

We created the ASF epidemic, says Jianhu, out of the quest for cheap pork. One of the ways to ensure cheap pork is to lower the cost of feeding pigs. Xiangyang village’s pigs were fed cooked grains and beans fit for human consumption. ASF has been transferred through industrial pig swill.

Later explanation that industrial pig swill includes treated food waste that often includes pork, which means that they're effectively feeding pigs to pigs.

Since 2009, in Lushan, Zhejiang, NetEase has been perfecting the art of raising pigs under Weiyang, its new agricultural products division. The farm in Lushan has the precision of an electronics factory and the feeling of the world’s most sterile, meticulous resort. On this farm, pigs live an optimized life, with an optimal amount of exercise and an optimal swill mix. They even listen to a soothing soundtrack, carefully designed for stress relief. This music is beneficial for us, as pork eaters. Stress before slaughter can alter a pig’s metabolism, increasing cortisol and resulting in what’s known in the industry as “DFD” (dark, firm, dry) meat. Weiyang pork is now available online and at special Weiyang retail stores scattered across China’s software capital, Hangzhou.

More than a lone founder’s quest for pork purity or sheer novelty, NetEase’s foray into the food space is a clever business move. As Matilda mentioned to me in Shanghai, information about food is central to food safety. This makes industrialized farming, including modern pig farming, an information business, with a focus on scaling trust. NetEase Weiyang declares itself to be combining “internet thinking and modern agriculture.” And part of internet thinking involves farming at a scale and degree of precision possible in software—a level of control over every microscopic variable along the way, such as pig stress levels. Weiyang’s entire approach is crudely transparent—food, like engineers, can be a pipeline and sourcing issue, solved through increased vertical integration. NetEase has set up numerous massive online open courses (MOOCs) to create a population of skilled workers for recruiting directly into their company, addressing the existing shortage of skilled high-tech workers. Similarly, Weiyang skips the step of working with sources, instead creating its own source of high-quality pork, further eliminating any point of failure.

All of this is just beyond bizarre to me, especially as someone who grew up on a dairy farm.

The logic is striking. A demand for pork drives industrialized farming of pigs, which increases disease transmission. The constant emergence of diseases drives the implementation of new technologies like AI pork farming. These technologies go on to make pork cheap, driving even more availability and demand, as people start to believe pork is a necessary part of their diet. AI is not the balm to any problem—it is just one piece of the ever-hungry quest for scale.

I see the myth of automation replacing humans as yet another attempt by those in power to sharply define the boundaries of what being human means, elevating AI to a form of power that seems to have a righteous, natural force in our lives. This myth defines being human as simply being a rational, efficient worker. The fear instilled by these radical proponents of AI is ominous and forceful, and it implies an inevitability written by those in charge—leaders in the tech world, owners of companies that are building this scary AI. The same fear of automation drives a public discourse that glints with a subterfuge: that being human is the only thing that makes us special.

The desire for a controlled world arises from an inability to honor the unknown. “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas”; we think that “the brain alone will set us free,” wrote the poet Audre Lorde in 1977. As a writer and activist, Lorde experienced firsthand the connection between the personal and the political, asking us to question the historically conditioned ways we have been taught to understand the world. “The white fathers told us: ‘I think, therefore I am,’” she says, referring to the Enlightenment-era philosophers who dissected knowledge as a technical, mechanical pursuit, rather than seeing forms of knowing as a reservoir of opacity, felt and lived through poetry. She asks us to move beyond dichotomies of rational versus emotional ways of knowing, for “rationality is not unnecessary … I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.” Beyond binaries, it is the place of poetry, “that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, to which our analysis and understanding can only build roads.” Poetry is a place of power within each of us, and poetry is “the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.”

On the ground, the bulk of AI research is being carried out by large companies like Alibaba. The realm of AI ethics and public discourse is saturated and funded by those same companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Baidu, and corporations directly manipulate the creation of ethical frameworks. It takes millions of dollars to create AI models like ET Agricultural Brain, and an enormous amount of computation time and data labeling. The economics of these technical requirements concentrate control over these models in a handful of companies. The broader AI industry requires a massive amount of data, and subsequently, companies advocate for lax government restrictions on collecting data. Until the makers and builders of AI solve the material realities of the technology, AI will be stuck in a downward spiral, as a tool to optimize life, shaping it into a closed system. Without questioning the intrinsic faith held in prediction, or the political economies of building algorithms, the field of AI ethics and algorithmic fairness will remain mere fodder for dinner party conversations among the rich.

For ET Agricultural Brain, so much labor goes into making the models: not just the labor of engineers at Alibaba, but also the labor of those who create the training data. Farmers examining training data and labeling the pig in the images as sick or healthy. Entire swaths of Guiyang designated as “digital towns,” where young rural migrants sit and generate training data for AI, clicking on images, tagging animals and objects. Despite stories of AI replacing humans, AI still desperately needs us. . That is the reality of work and labor. For more than twenty-five years, my mother woke up at 4:00 a.m. and drove to her job as a university cafeteria worker outside Boston. She used to have a deep commitment to her job, and it gave her a sense of fulfillment. It felt good to feed stressed-out college students who weren’t taking care of themselves. She and her coworkers were trusted by management, given breaks and autonomy on the job. . Over the past ten years, her feelings of fulfillment have drastically turned. The school optimized her work with arbitrary, quantitative metrics. As a result of this optimization process, there’s less autonomy, fewer breaks, and new, bizarre working schedules. My mother feels little connection to her job now. My mother’s is the kind of job that some people think robots should take over, that should be optimized and automated. After all, she would supposedly get more free time and fulfillment in life. The irony is, she stopped feeling fulfilled when her workplace became optimized, her work stripped of meaning, turned into mere labor.

I ask Sun Wei his opinion about the equalizing effects of technology, if a technical position like his is liberating and will allow him to do anything he wants in the future. These equalizing effects are pervasive throughout the technology and development world, the stories of “technology transforming lives” tiresome in their ubiquity. Projects like the failed One Laptop per Child, by Nicholas Negroponte, or the Hole in the Wall project exude this techno-optimistic belief—if you can give a laptop to a child or put a computer in an Indian slum, children will teach themselves linear algebra and become the next Bill Gates. We now know this is a myth inflated by a hype cycle. A whole support system of teachers, peers, and family is a stronger influence than a laptop or computer screen. But part of me—the American part of me—wants to believe the narrative about individualistic passion overcoming everything, including a lack of formal schooling or connections.

It would be nice if we could toss the formal schooling, honestly.

The word “innovation” is laden with baggage. It gives rise to a whole industry built on conferences, media, and thought leadership. It’s not clear what exactly innovation is, but whatever it is, there is apparently a paucity of this golden resource everywhere except Silicon Valley. . In English, “innovation” was not always regarded as positively as it is now. Its original form in Latin means “to renew, to introduce something as new,” perhaps subliminally acknowledging that the category “entirely new” is difficult to define. The word “innovation” was derogatory in the age of monarchs, as it referred to political and economic change that could bring down empires, threatening the status of kings and elites. But slowly, throughout the Industrial Revolution, the phrase began to be seen as more positive when engineering culture took shape. In the early 1900s, Thorstien Veblen advocated the idea that technology was the output, the product of a group of male workers he termed “engineers.” And while engineers worked to create technology, it was the company owners, the grand industrialists, who reaped the profits of innovation. . Contemporary innovation in the United States and China appears to strengthen rather than threaten the political and economic order of the world. Riffling through recent coverage on innovation shows the most innovative products appear to be varying forms of management through technology—managing people, cars, take-out orders, or goods. Our modern-day monarchs, corporations and CEOs, are unthreatened by innovation. It begs the question: If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?

For both this young analyst and my VC friend, innovation still seems to carry a lot of assumptions. Why does the new, the novel, always require a certain amount of addiction to an app? If failure is so important for innovation, why are we only confronted with stories of technology’s successes, rather than stories of its spectacular technical failures? If embracing failure is the prerequisite for innovation, who has the privilege of failing?

Membership in the Rice Harmony Cooperative has been growing every year, and this is no small feat in modern China, where individualism is increasing and the memory of previously disastrous attempts at collectivization by the government remains. Yet the cooperative structure centers the community as the locus of decision-making, creating a collective investment that is resilient under the strain of strong personalities and politics. This is not an easy process to navigate, with cooperative members needing to resolve conflict rather than walk away from it. As a shanzhai endeavor, actions cannot be singular and individual. Xinghai and Qiu spend planting seasons in their own fields, and alongside other farmers, providing technical advice and negotiating interpersonal conflict.

Explained in the text: Shanzhai literally means "mountain stronghold," but it is a reference to knock-offs (because people in those mountain villages couldn't afford name brands or official products).

I wander through the paddies, past the Frankenstein machines, past the piles of rice straw used as organic fertilizer. If innovation casts the spell of capitalism, in this mountain stronghold, I see shanzhai as a verb, used to cast a different kind of spell. To shanzhai. To turn protocols into practices that bind us together rather than centralize authority. To turn back the worship of scale and renew our commitments to care. I think back to the words I heard when I was a kid, the other magical phrase, Made in China, and the dismissive tone in the man’s voice. Barometers of success and innovation are invented by those with money, turning engagement into the surface-level interactions of informed users, rather than the deeper actions that tackle structural, social change by invested citizens willing to hold long village meetings. Entire entrepreneurship programs exist, funded by VCs, designed to foster what VCs see as the core values of innovation. Instead of continuing to accept success and innovation as empty containers, I propose new measures, understanding our world through shanzhai, through the ability to care, maintain, renew, and deepen commitments.

This is definitely an aspect of the world I would love to see supported.

Like China’s food and language, urban villages have an enormous amount of regional variation. What is common across all urban villages is that they are home to those on the fringes of city life—nannies, housekeepers, construction workers, delivery drivers. In Shenzhen, urban villages have played a key part in the city’s rise, nurturing new inventors with brash ideas and informal economies. Yet because of the socioeconomic status of the population residing in urban villages, these areas are deemed dangerous by upper-middle-class urbanites. The term that upper-middle-class Chinese people use to describe this population is “low-quality” (disuzhi, 低素质). Strangely, the upper-middle class seems to have no qualms about the low-quality population traveling to wealthier parts, watching over their children and cleaning their homes.

Though they don't often reside in 'urban villages', many people reside in suburbs and outside of the cities in which they do the same work. They live on the fringes of the city, in the cheaper areas, working for the wealthy who look down upon them; the wealthy see those areas as either worthless or dangerous (or both), yet they don't care that they rely upon these people. The contradiction doesn't connect for them.

To be fair, I feel this in my work. I'm from a rural background and have made cities my home, working with the children of upper-middle-class people. They have no qualms about me teaching their kids, but they are still happy to talk about me (and people like me) as if I have no value.

All this information sits in a database, a hulking engineering marvel that underpins so much of our modern world. Databases allow people to read, write, update, and destroy data in a fairly dependable way. They also require the people who build databases to form strong opinions about the world and the way it’s structured. For example, the attributes of a user on a platform are dictated by columns an engineer defines in the database. Different databases have different logics for the way data must be formatted, which in turn shapes the way we have come to encode the world. In the case of Real Population Platform, Xiaoli tells me the hardest part is data compatibility. . “To be honest, many of the recent upgrades in Guiyang have been a headache.” Xiaoli looks at me, and then suddenly asks, “It is true that Americans each have a number that allows them to be tracked? But that there is only one database that has that number? The social benefits number?” It takes me a second to realize that he means social security numbers. After all, it’s not immediately obvious to me that a social security number tracks us. But it does, as any American can attest to: the social security number and credit score follows us, it dictates if we get loans, if we can access credit, and if we can access housing. And while we give our social security number out somewhat casually, research has shown the ways credit scores, attached to our social security numbers, exacerbate deeply entrenched inequality in the United States. For an individual, it’s an innocuous number, but on a large scale, it forms a hulking system.

The commercial runs, with sound effects, on repeat, every minute. Standing in front of the screen, abetted by the occasional coo and glitter effects behind her, the Megvii spokeswoman I talk to makes it very clear: Megvii doesn’t store any data, it just makes the algorithm. It is innocent, she says. What governments and companies do with it is up to them. The engineers show up every day and just do their job. . The Megvii algorithms break down bodies and life into numbers, measurements, and parts. This kind of thinking is not new—many of us have been locked into it for hundreds of years, while grasping at an elusive, atomic sense of identity. Looking at the engineers at their desks, it can be easy to judge their ethics, to question why they continue to show up every day when Skynet videos play on loop next door. Yet, like most desk-based jobs these days, the ethical boundary becomes defined by awareness. When you have been made accustomed to solving problems by breaking them down into parts, how could you see the larger picture to know whether you’re doing harm? The world is certainly complex, but doesn’t it feel good helping law enforcement make the world safer? Why shouldn’t you trust that your work is being used by policy makers who know what they are doing?

Megvii (Face++) is one of the beautification programs and identification algorithms.

The "just do their job" is so ubiquitous that, one day, we need people to realise they do not need to simply do their job. But it's hard to get people to understand how the work they're doing is harmful, especially when it's couched as something as simple as "a beautification tool" on WeChat or a filter on TikTok or whatever people want to call them.

At some point, we need to recognise that people are using these tools (across the globe) to harm and/or control us. They're using them to create programs that allow us to "securely" access our social benefits; they're using them to determine who is allowed to go where and how.

And while it sounds like fear-mongering, we should be concerned. It's not "just doing your job" after a while.

Inner Mongolia was my friend’s home province. The trip was his attempt for us to see the grasslands of the region—instead, it ended up being a tiring journey on buses and trains, a requiem for the last parts of nomadic Mongolian life. We drove from a copper mine to a coal mine outside of Hulunbuir, watching straggly sheep herds in the waning grassland. He’s ethnically Mongolian, but his family ended up on the Chinese side of the border during the split between independent Mongolia and Inner Mongolia as a territory of China. As an ethnic minority in China, he has a fraught relationship to the government. Early assimilationist policies, alongside forced resettlement of nomadic Mongolian herders into Han Chinese–built cities, has led to an erasure of Mongolian language and culture in the region. Mining, an industry exalted by the national government, is desecrating pastureland—these tensions were crystallized in a series of 2011 protests after a Han Chinese miner ran over a Mongolian herder.

This whole section is incredibly sad, particularly as it details their friend's life and how he is trapped with a criminal record from brash behaviour when he was a teen (which is entangled in his ethnic minority status).

Yet as a tactic of policing, surveillance has always been crucial in making criminality throughout history, drawing a line between those on the so-called right and wrong sides of society. And this line drawing is enabled by distilling life into arbitrary parts: class, race, gender, with the line of criminality itself constantly shifting throughout time, serving political-economic crises. “Crime went up; crime came down; we cracked down,” writes the scholar Ruth Gilmore.

There is another side to data, illuminated once we understand constructions of fear in our day-to-day lives. “Can data ever know who we really are?” asks the policy researcher and activist Zara Rahman. For my friend and many others, the data on a past crime remains committed to his record. And while his life changes—he becomes a friend, a husband, a doting father, an artist, an uncle—all the data points about his past remain static. Data cannot truly represent the full spectrum of life. It remains a thin slice of the world. There is always some kind of bias built in. Yet we imagine numbers to mean something, and this creates a common tendency that the statistician Philip B. Stark calls “quantifauxcation”: the attempt to assign numbers or quantify phenomenon, as if quantitative data can offer certainty. Some strategies for quantifauxcation, says Stark, include saying things people want to believe, and adding opaque complexity to models, since complexity has become conflated with accuracy.

Why didn’t Xiao Niu stay in Guangzhou? “City life is not designed to keep you there,” he says. “If you earn RMB 3,000 or 4,000 a month, that’s great money, sure, but city residents spend more than that just on rent. You can’t build a life off that.” Sometimes we play the game or the game plays us. And so Xiao Niu took the money he’d earned and returned home to the mountains of Guizhou, determined not to be played by the game. It at least was enough money to do things like improve his parents’ house and buy his dad a printer. . Part of tackling poverty means being able to measure and map it. There are disputes among experts in the field of international development on how to do this, especially on how to measure poverty in communities that rely on farming. Defining household assets is one method, but with farms, depending on the season when you take the measurements, assets will change before and after harvest season. Another method is quantifying household disposable income—the ability to purchase. It’s these on-the-ground variations, compounded into larger macro-economic figures, that lead to claims that global poverty is getting much better, or much worse. Yet these claims do not answer how people become poor in the first place, and, if we have found the key to eradicating poverty, why it still exists. . However you quantify it, the facts laid bare are these: Shangdiping and other places in rural China have higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy rates than cities. Education access is lower. And the entrenched poverty of China persists in its remote, rural, ethnic minority regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia, Guizhou, and Yunnan.

RMB 3,000 to 4,000 is equal to roughly USD $460 to 620.

To note, the rent that I paid when living in Shanghai (which was cheaper than most of my friends)? Was RMB 7,000, which is a little bit under USD $1,100. A lot of my Chinese co-workers were severely underpaid (especially in comparison to every single white person working in the school); they might have pulled in half of my salary (RMB 22,000 - almost USD $3,400), working as teachers in the same school.

So keep that in mind.

But it's also worth pointing out that none of these poverty-measuring tools are consistent. The EU measures it based on percentage, some organisations measure China's "raising people out of poverty" based on people living on more than $1.90/day, etc. It's also interesting to note that the people determining levels of poverty are the same people who are responsible for many people being impoverished in the first place.

Funny that.

“Alibaba sucks us dry,” he says. “It sucks the blood out of us, and it will suck the blood out of this village. As sellers, all our money is kept in Alipay because that’s how buyers send money. At the drop of a pin they can demand a refund, and because of the escrow service, the money gets sent back to them, even if I’ve shipped the order already. Or maybe they don’t like the material, they think it’s cheap. But we have to keep on making worse-quality stuff. How are we supposed to keep prices low and also compete with others? The government thinks it’s great and keeps doing things like building roads, putting in broadband. And Alibaba uses all this infrastructure for free, relies on us to make decisions on lowering the quality of goods. But what happens next? There’s only so much cutting corners we can do. There’s only so many ads we can buy, lies about the products we can say. What happens when this system fails?”

Refusal and purchasing to support are both cruel optimism, providing a false sense of control. It’s that same sense of control that makes shopping so pleasurable. In a world that is so interconnected, with problems at a scale I cannot comprehend—climate change, plastics in the ocean, e-waste, political instability from globalization—the trick of shopping is that it makes me feel like I am doing something about those problems. I am asserting my agency, this agency that I am promised as an American. My small choice to either buy or not buy exerts control over the world as I want to see it—as I imagine it, maybe more eco-friendly, more sustainable.

The proliferation of MLMs [multi-level marketing schemes] can be easily blamed on social media and technology, just like the spread of misinformation, bizarre health advice, or selfie culture. Yet the reality is more complicated. Social media and online community certainly play a part in accelerating information, as well as in decreasing the barrier of accessing content. But these online interactions are a manifestation of broader socioeconomic conditions. With one of the worst, most error-prone health-care systems in the developed world, why wouldn’t you seek out online health advice or alternative explanations for illness in the United States? With deepening job insecurity and the elusiveness of the American Dream, why wouldn’t you at least try joining an MLM to sell online?

The popular Chinese press likes to fan the flames of Kuaishou’s impact on rural society. For example: Zheng Tao, a rural youth who left his village for factory work in a city. A loser on the margins of urban life, he moved back home and became a livestream celebrity, making money from adoring fans. Other similar success stories have encouraged millions of youth to search for money and fame online. Chinese livestream’s popularity echoes the same desires of American livestream, whether it’s groups behind pearl parties or niche YouTube stars. The desire for community, for companionship, and, mostly, for monetizing emotions has never been stronger.

A movement coalesced around Peppa Pig, crystalizing a careless nihilism and rejection of mainstream values. Like in so many other countries, consumption has become the sacred value of daily life in China. The narrow path laid out by authority figures and parents is to get good grades to go to a good school, go to a good school to get a good job, and with a good job, shop, have kids, and shop some more. Instead of abiding by this prescribed life, shehui ren have no desire to enter the competitive whirl of school and employment; they see through the expectations of society. And the government sees this kind of nihilism as troubling, both socially and economically.

In Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, he provokes readers to think about a set of impossible politics, a theory of failure. While conventional politics are defined as the push and pull between the left and right, he insists that most of us end up creating a culture where political action is premised on the illusory figure of “the Child.” The call to act is haunted by the specter of “our children,” whether it is a future of environmental destruction or a disorderly future without “traditional values.” We are always trying to live for the child that does not yet exist, fixing the world for our children who do, impressing our expectations on their desires. These political visions draw upon fears of decline or loss of control, on an innate need to crave a future—some kind of story or meaning that motivates us to keep living. This same need is the reason why we get stuck in a cycle of chasing after the future, a future that never appears as perfect as we imagined it to be.

I think of my parents, my grandparents. My grandmother and her nightmares, how the last few years of her life were marked by her confronting the depth of her past, despite having lived for the future in her youth. My mother’s insistence on a better life, as she defined it, full of expectations for her children’s future that neither my sister nor I was able to fulfill. Her fingertips, cracked and dry from working, saving for a life that she felt was not hers. Why do I work long days to dutifully pay off the five-figure student debt I have, the debt I took on in fantasizing about a better life? Even if I paid off the debt, would the debt-free future that awaited me be as perfect as I imagine?

I stare into the darkness that shifts with occasional washes of light. I cannot bring myself to see the honeyed visions of a comfortable future. Instead, I see the intrinsic truth of living as one of difficulty, the constant effluent of change. Without a future, I must give myself over to the present, to undertaking the work that must be done.

I continue to stare. The present stares back. The present moment promises nothing—it only demands. It demands building the communities that shift culture, that allow interbeing to thrive. It demands the work of awareness and care, instead of the tools of efficiency and scale. It demands seeing individual freedom as nothing more than a way for all of us to be oppressed. Most of all, the present demands the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting. Through the present moment I see the glimmers of liberation embedded in the work we must do at this time. Because what else can we do?

Quotes from the intro:

Freire also did not hesitate to demonstrate his “just ire” by denouncing the critical posture of many facile liberals and some so-called critical educators who often find refuge in the academy by hiding their addiction to obscene consumerism, while at the same time attacking in their written discourses the market theology of neoliberalism. Too often, these facile liberals and so-called critical educators’ tastes and ways of being in the world and with the world remain, according to Freire, wedded to the very neoliberal market solutions that they denounce at the level of written critical discourse. In their day-to-day practices, these facile liberals and so-called critical educators often betray the action required by praxis by fossilizing their purported political project into an obscure discursive criticality that begs to move beyond the always “postponed arrival” of action – that is, action designed to transform the current perniciousness of the neoliberal Godification of the market into new democratic structures that lead to equity, equality, and authentic democratic practices. In other words, many facile liberals and so-called critical educators boast of their leftist credentials by wearing their proclaimed Marxism on their sleeve (usually only expressed in written discourse or in the safety of the academy) and, sometimes, feel the urge to further boast that, for example, their radicalism beyond Marx’s proposals to the degree that they are authentically more Maoist in their political orientation – a posture they believe to be even more radical. As a consequence, leftist labels in the academy become appropriated, exoticized political and cultural currency where to be a Marxist-in-residence in the ivory tower bestows status but is little more than a chic brand – in reality, the epitome of consumerism sustained by transactions occurring in a merely symbolic register of names and labels that are otherwise vacuous in substance. In essence, the academic branding of “Marxist” by some critical educators turns ethical and political action into a spectacle, and leftist viewpoints into de facto commodities. As commodities, these self-ascribed “radical” positions and labels are emptied out of their progressive content to the extent that they are decoupled from principled action – a decoupling that remains fundamental in the reproduction of the market theology of neoliberalism where collective social engagement based on critical thinking is discouraged and zealous cutthroat competition is rewarded. The insidious process of decoupling critical discourse and action legitimizes not “walking the talk”: it affords the proclaimed Marxist-in-residence the opportunity, for instance, to claim to be antiracist while turning antiracism into a lifeless cliché that does not provide pedagogical spaces to critique white supremacist ideologies. In this process, their progressive stances are often co-opted, mobilized only to the degree that they denounce racism at the level of written critical discourse, all the while reaping privileges from the cemented institutional racism which they, willfully, refuse to acknowledge and engage in action to dismantle.