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1/25/2025 From TikTok to Rednote: The Dialectical Transition into Opposites By: Carlos L. GarridoRead Now The last week has shocked American lawmakers as their efforts to ban the Singaporean app, TikTok, under the auspices of being used by the Chinese to surveil Americans, has backfired terribly. Millions of Americans marched to the App Store this week to download the Chinese equivalent of Instagram, Rednote, which translates to Little Red Book, an homage to the famous cultural revolution pocketbook of Chairman Mao’s Quotations.  Is this not a clear case of a process turning a thing into its opposite, as the monumental German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel repeatedly describes it in the various moments of the Concept’s development in his Logic? The American political class, unable to tame the contradictions of its decaying society, is forced to externalize onto a boogeyman ‘other’ the faults for the wretched conditions its system has put its people in. China is today’s boogeyman, the entity onto which all blame is placed. It is not the U.S.’s decades long covert involvement in the drug trade, used to fund the contras and destroy poor communities at home, which has led to the fentanyl crisis of today. No, according to the fanciful imagination of the ideologues of empire, it is the Chinese who are to blame! It is not the fault of massive monopolistic investment firms like Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street for buying up property and farmland for speculation. No, it is the Chinese! You know, the country whose president quite literally emphasized that ‘houses are for living in, not for speculation,’ which is leading the speculation effort in the American housing market. American propagandists turn the world on its head as a way to cope with the fact that it is the decaying, highly financialized capitalist system that has produced these outcomes for the people, not a foreign boogeyman. The war on TikTok is but one part of an all-out assault on China by the American ruling class.  Image created by Chinese Weibo blogger @青红造了个白. The irrationality of this attack could not be any clearer once one realizes that TikTok in the U.S. was forced to hand control over its servers from ByteDance to Oracle, a Texas-based company that quickly hired a litany of NATO and state department officials to do ‘content moderation’ on the app: a code word for censoring discourse that challenges their narratives, and proliferating those which defend it. Our accounts at the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think tank in the U.S. would get banned seven times, including our first account which amassed nearly half a million followers in less than a year. But even with all the censorship on the American version of the app, this was not enough. Their control was tubular, and leakages to their censorship edifice became evident. Videos showing the truth about key geopolitical events, especially the barbarity of the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza, would continue to go viral, reaching millions of Americans. Such a disavowal of the ‘official narratives’ of the U.S. empire could not go unpunished. Banning the app completely was the only ‘solution’ the elite could come up with. These are the actions of a desperate empire in the midst of a deep crisis of legitimacy. As could have been expected, the intent to censor the truth by banning TikTok turned into its opposite, into the great migration onto the Little Red Book app by millions of American ‘refugees.’ Videos are now going viral of American creators saying quite explicitly that they will rather give their data to Xi Jinping than the U.S. government. The propaganda, clearly, is no longer working on a population struggling with paying bills and drowning in debt. The development of the crisis of capitalism has turned the American dream into its opposite, into the American nightmare. This is an era of nodal points, where radical leaps into opposites are evident all over. The TikTok ban is a clear case of an action whose intended result produces an opposite effect. The hope to curb ‘Chinese surveillance of Americans’ on a Singaporean app backfired into a mass exodus to a Chinese app. As we say in Cuba, le salió el tiro por la culata. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE. This article was produced by The China Academy. Archives January 2025
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