So I recently joined a socialist org (Eur*pe), been participating in some cool anti-imperialist protests and anti-fascist local struggle.
The topic of China’s socialism came up in conversation, and I naturally said that China is socialist. They looked at me as if I were nuts, and a discussion ensued about China not being socialist.
Their points are that it’s not expanding worldwide socialism, that it’s engaging in imperialism in Africa, that it’s only shifting to renewables because it’s profitable for them, and the classic “but they have rich capitalist owners and the Chinese workers are exploited”.
Doesn’t matter that their capitalists don’t control the media and state apparatus (which they somehow disagree with), that they’re the only country capable of fighting the fossil fuel lobby, that they’ve uplifted 800mn people from poverty in 30 years, that they deindustrialized NATO, that they support Iran and are creating the possibility of a multipolar world, that most investments in Africa are in electric infrastructure, that Chinese people overwhelmingly say that they live in a democracy and support their socialist government, that housing is not only not prohibitively expensive but actually prices are going down, that food is incredibly affordable, that they don’t engage in imperialist war… Nothing is good enough, they’re capitalists because they conform to capitalist mode of production (which isn’t even true because like half their economy is state-owned). And they have the guts to tell ME I’m being dogmatic and only seeing black and white, because I dare speak about a model of socialism that doesn’t conform to their narrow views.
I swear it’s impossible to find socialists in Eur*pe who aren’t patronizing, condescending, and honestly fucking racist to global south socialist movements. They literally told me that Cuba “should have industrialized”. Like, god fucking damn it, do you SERIOUSLY believe you know better about the possibilities of the economy of Cuba than the people devoting their entire lives to it in the country, supporting and maintaining the revolution throughout the 70 years of murderous embargo? Like, how do you believe you can thoroughly industrialize a 10mn inhabitant island entirely cut from trade with the rest of the world? The Eastern Block could only do this because it had like a fucking third the landmass of Earth and some 400mn inhabitants, and even then they suffered limitations such as lack of access to critical semiconductor technology due to embargo. But no, Cuba is not socialist because it has private hotels for tourists, as if they had any other way to get foreign currency to purchase high-tech medical diagnosis machines and critical energy resources. Fucking bunch of idealist, anti-materialist, condescending pieces of shit!
I think this is clearly wrong as if China didn’t open it’s economy to take in this manufacturing (on great terms for china might I add as we’re seeing with the benefits of tech transfer etc) it would have been pushed onto the likes of India (as it has been in recent times anyway) without the benefits of building a real counter balance to present hegemony.
Again I disagree, this is a reductive take on ultraleftism. Taking bordiga as an example the issue with his party line was not simply that they campaigned against existing socialism of the time but that their criticisms were sterile and negative stemming from poor analysis. In a similar vein the KKE and their pyramid of imperialism nonsense is ultra leftist analysis that obscures the material reality of what imperialism truly is and how it functions which is again not simply an issue of tactics but of poor analysis.
I agree with this largely however it is important to look at matters from the perspective of the actors of the time. I simply felt in your previous comment you appeared to be simplifying what was a tragedy caused by serious missteps on both sides to a fantasy of China simply seeking sanctions relief and self gain in siding against Moscow with no mention of how Moscow created the initial wedge through their attempts to subordinate the Chinese project rather than seeing us as equal.
Imo (as I’ve said elsewhere in the barrage of replies, sorry if i already said it to you) given the dictatorship of the bourgeois and what i’ve read about mao era china and the transition to markets (stuff like “From Commune to Capitalism” and “The Battle for China’s Past”) they’d end up more like Cuba than India if they’d held course
This disagreement is more semantics than substantial, but i’d call that a “poor analysis” and explain what the problems are rather than calling it “ultraleftist” and moving on
unrelated to anything else, but i’m in an org that subscribes to the kke’s imperialist pyramid thingy and i still don’t understand what the difference is between it and imperial core / periphery lol
I think you misread what I said. I wasn’t saying China would have become India I’m saying India would have been used as the cheap manufacturing hub “helping imperialism rebound in the 80s and 90s” without any of the benefits of industrialising a power that could act as a counter balance to the cure hegemony.
The KKE’s “imperialist pyramid” model argues that all non-communist states form part of a single imperialist hierarchy. The problem is that this framework blurs the decisive distinction between imperialist and imperialised nations. Taken to its logical conclusion, it can lead to absurd conclusions such as: because the Democratic Republic of the Congo participates in commodity production and the world capitalist market, it is a part of the imperialist system in a politically meaningful sense. But this plainly contradicts material reality. The Congo is not an imperialist power; it is an imperialised nation. Its labour, land, minerals, and strategic resources are subordinated to foreign capital, unequal exchange, debt, comprador relations, and imperialist intervention. A country whose wealth is systematically extracted by external monopolies and global supply chains cannot be placed in the same analytical category as the powers that dominate and profit from that extraction.
The standard Marxist-Leninist position, and the more materially correct one in my view, is that the world is currently divided into three broad zones: the imperial core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery. The imperial core is the ruling bloc of imperialist nations, centred mainly in North America, Western Europe, and their allied advanced capitalist states. These countries dominate global finance, military alliances, technology, trade institutions, currency systems, and multinational capital. The periphery refers to the oppressed and imperialised nations. These countries are often rich in labour, land, minerals, agricultural products, and strategic resources, but they are structurally subordinated within the world economy, as seen clearly in the Congo. The semi-periphery sits between the two. These countries are not simply helpless colonies or fully dependent peripheral states, but they are also not dominant imperialist powers. This category can include anti-imperialist minor powers like Iran, modern socialist states, and states such as Russia, which have regional power and independent state capacity but remain outside the dominant imperialist bloc and thus take the side of anti imperialist struggle as a means to compete in a meaningful sense with the entrenched core.
The core issue with the KKE’s model is that it mistakes the existence of capitalist relations for imperialism itself. But imperialism is not merely the existence of commodity production, a bourgeois state, or integration into the world market. It is a concrete relation of domination, monopoly capital, finance capital, unequal exchange, military pressure, and the extraction of value from oppressed nations. By flattening these distinctions into a pyramid where every non-communist country is “imperialist” to some degree, the KKE replaces concrete material analysis with abstract formalism.
This is a common ultra-left error: prioritising ideological purity and hypothetical future development over present material reality. Yes, a dependent capitalist country could theoretically develop into an imperialist power under different historical conditions. But Marxists analyse the actual balance of forces as it exists now, not abstract possibilities. To call, for example, the Congo imperialist because it is capitalist is to erase the distinction between exploiter and exploited nations, weaken anti-imperialist analysis, and ultimately obscure the real structure of global capitalism.
Yeah I misread, thanks for pointing it out. I agree that would be bad, but I’m unsure how plausible that situation would be. From what ive read about the period (stuff like Vogels book on Deng), China’s labour force was much more attractive to the wests than india (the main things i see mentioned are education, sociopolitical stability and infrastructure), so they wouldnt be able to rely on india in the same way they did china
I appreciate you explaining, but I have heard similar explainations before and still fail to understand how it is different from the core-periphery model. In the former, congo is at the bottom of the imperialist pyramid, in the latter its in the periphery—in both cases its understood as being on the recieving end of imperialism (i.e. capital exported to them etc) as part of the imperialist world-system. Same thing with semipheriphery vs middle of the imperialist pyramid; in both cases its countries that both export capital and have capital exported to them.
It all feels very much like a semantics debate more than any disagreement over reality to me
Yes, more attractive, absolutely. But that does not mean imperialism uniquely depended on China or would have failed to restructure without it. China was attractive because of the material gains of the revolutionary period: literacy, health, infrastructure, social stability, and an organised labour force. The revolution is also why China could absorb foreign capital in a more disciplined and strategic way than most dependent countries. If China had stayed closed, capital would not have given up; it would have shifted more aggressively into India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, etc. Maybe less efficiently, but it would still have found cheap labour and resources. The difference is that those countries were not going to turn that integration into the kind of industrial, technological, and geopolitical counterweight China has become.
I think there is a real disagreement here. If the KKE model only meant “all countries exist within the current world-system dominated by imperial hegemony,” then fine, that is basically just a less clear version of core/periphery analysis. But the problem is that it goes further and labels all “capitalist states” as imperialist to some degree. This very much blurs the difference between participation in the current world system and domination within that system. The Congo is part of the global capitalist system, but as an oppressed and plundered country, not as an imperialist country “lower down the pyramid.”
Imperialism is not simply capitalism, commodity production, or even some outward capital flows. It is a concrete relation of domination: monopoly capital, finance capital, unequal exchange, military pressure, sanctions, comprador mediation, and the extraction of value from oppressed nations. A peripheral country can have capitalists, a bourgeois state, and even limited regional interests without being imperialist. With the KKE model distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations gets flattened into a mere ranking system which weakens the analysis.
The pyramid model turns qualitative relations into quantitative gradations, as if an exploited peasant is just a landlord at the bottom of the landlord pyramid. The core/periphery model preserves the actual antagonism: the core dominates, the periphery is dominated, and the semi-periphery occupies a contradictory position. Without these clear distinctions anti-imperialism turns into abstract denunciation of all “capitalist states” rather than concrete analysis of who is extracting value, who is being subordinated, and which contradictions weaken the imperial core. While denouncing all “capitalist states” seems revolutionary, it is not a useful tool for analysis. Not to mind the issues of truly defining what states are capitalist and which are not.
I put “capitalist state” in quotation marks because I think the KKE’s method of classification, and the similar approach taken by many ultra-leftists, Trotskyites, etc., is deeply flawed. In the KKE’s case especially, China for example is often disqualified as socialist by treating the existence of markets, private capital, commodity production, or integration into the world economy as sufficient proof that the state itself has become capitalist. But this is a mechanical and formalistic definition. The class character of a state is not determined by isolating one economic form from the whole social formation. A capitalist state does not become socialist simply because it has state-owned enterprises, public land, welfare measures, or planning mechanisms. Likewise, a socialist state does not automatically become capitalist because it makes controlled use of markets, private capital, or capitalist mechanisms, provided political power remains under communist party leadership and these mechanisms are subordinated to socialist construction, national development, and class struggle.