this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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Huh? No? If you have the capability to pass the test you're not being restricted to a whitelist? It's a test, with pass and failure thresholds. Anyone can study to pass a test, particularly if there's no limit to the number of times you can fail it.
The party has an entrance exam to join as a standard member at the lowest level, why wouldn't you have further exams for the more advance levels?
"Just pass the test to get on the whitelist, then the whitelist doesn't impact you"
This is like an alternate version of "meritcratic" academic testing, it's still a barrier to people who don't have the same resources as others, which I would dare to assert that is a bad thing.
I'm sorry but if Xi could go from living in a literal cave sleeping on a rock bed to being party leader I have to disagree that it's presenting a resource-based barrier.
With that said he did fail his first entrance exam into the party multiple times.
Not to downplay Xi's abilities, but he wasn't just some random peasant kid who grew up in a cave, he was the son of an incredibly famous revolutionary and politician. His dad was vice-chairman of the NPC for most of Xi Jinping's early-mid political career.
Also, to be clear, Yaodong "cave houses" aren't actually caves; Xi probably had a wooden bed.
Literal bootstrapism. I could present you success stories about poor people getting into Ivy League schools, and you'd rightly say that such stories are masking systemic problems.
What do you propose instead? This exists to prevent what occurred with the party in the USSR which ultimately led to the biggest standard of living disaster in history.
Is that true? Is that how you get people in there who propose that risk is a type of labor? I am pretty sure Xi was involved in things by 2006 as a comparatively petty official, which is not to say that this is his view, but that this shit was allowed in the Party in a relevant timeframe and exams didn't stop it.
I'm sure that politicians being uneducated was a problem in the Soviet Union, but there were people who would at least turn revisionist who were among the Soviet vanguard since before the October Revolution. The problem fundamentally isn't ignorance, or it is somehow that many years of schooling are needed not to trip and fall into being a reactionary. The former means that education won't solve it, the latter is basically an excuse for having a party of the elite who the plebians can't hope to understand the intellectual workings of, who they must sit passively by and approve or disapprove from the short procession of learned individuals who had the privilege to go through all this political grooming.
But that's a counterfactual, I think the main problem wasn't a lack of education a failure to guard against the ability to be a revisionist based on choice rather than mistake. Given that, I think imposing these educational barriers, most of all ones that weren't decided on a direct democratic basis, is just enabling the party to be insular without doing a thing to protect it from intentional revisionism, the much greater threat if we're worried about an autopsy of the Soviet Union.