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!
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.