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’ve been reading the comments and damn, what kind of a mess of an org are you in? Total fucking hodgepodge of incoherent ideologizing.
Just make this argument:
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China is by most metrics better than India.
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China shares many characteristics with India (large Asian country that was victimized by Western imperialism)
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2 means that whatever minor difference between the two countries can explain 1.
Then the question becomes what singular difference between the two country causes one country to have achieved so much while another country continues to struggle. It boils down to either their economic system or their culture.
Arguing that China is capitalist means that it’s the culture that makes the real difference since India is also capitalist. Chinese capitalists are apparently big-brained heirs of a 5000 year old civilization while Indian capitalists are pea-brained cow worshipers.
Either the Chinese economic system is supreme versus the Indian economic system or the Chinese people themselves are supreme versus Indian people. I am not a loser Han chauvinist, so I would make the argument that it is the economic system (ie socialism) that makes the difference.
I did make the argument! The response was that socialism isn’t when the working class gets the breadcrumbs that come with development, which itself is possible in China because of the special form of state capitalism they have.
Deeply unserious IMO, I asked them why the rest of the capitalist world doesn’t shift towards this model seeing how well it works, they simply said it’s not how it works and I can’t compare the material conditions of China and the west.
which itself is possible in China because of the special form of state capitalism they have.
What a hand-wavy explanation lmao. And it still doesn’t explain how or why their “state capitalism” is somehow different.
and I can’t compare the material conditions of China and the west.
If you mentioned a similar nation with a similar population size and similar history like India, somehow I imagine they’d have a million reasons why you can’t compare India and China as well.
This feels like a “monkey’s paw” sort of thing, you get these western chauvinists to stop hating China, not by seeing China as a socialist state, but by accidentally making them more racist against Indian people.
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Not that I think telling a group of 9 European socialists “read these 2 books” would help here, but a while back I decided to read Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer because I had so many questions about how China could rely on a market economy for decades and remain a socialist project, or else how they could maintain the trajectories they’ve maintained without being a socialist project, and I was sick of getting longwinded non-answers from sources outside China. It not only answered all of my questions except for their international strategy (which could be read clearly between the lines imo, in light of their sovereignty-focused foreign policy), but it also expanded my understanding of dialectics.
Then Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill came out, providing a materialist analysis of the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption in the context of a global war waged by the US-led West against communism. It gives concrete examples of how psychological war accompanies material war, and how the US in particular has relied on psychological war to an outstanding degree since its founding as a settler-colonial oligarchy which took exceptional measures against democracy while advancing a narrative that it is exceptionally democratic. It traces that line through to the US framing its imperialist campaign against self-determination as protecting the world’s freedom from imperial domination.
That background and more is used to firmly plant the feet of the book’s focus on a material base, oriented directly against the idealism of “anti-anti-imperialist” Western Marxist traditions. It goes on to extensively detail the organizational and funding structures of the clandestine bourgeois/state campaign to ideologically “turn the world upside down”, including monopolizing Marxist discourse in the West and beyond with myriad pseudomarxist positions that all happen to Freely agree that the only thing worse than capitalism is actually-existing socialism.
In the context of that global campaign, I feel much more certain about what I initially thought I could read between the lines of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: that a main pillar of China’s international strategy is to use material means to turn the world right-side up. No matter how certain I am that the values produced by capitalism are misanthropic, and that the floor of economic security matters infinitely more than the ceiling of excessive consumption, that certainty exists in the material vacuum of abstract philosophy. Capitalist values, on the other hand, have been projected onto the world with the full material force of global hegemony, such that they have been made tactically important to the strategic goal of building socialism. It is not enough to act on sound principles; those principles must constantly be dialectically applied to the conditions of an interconnected and everchanging world.
It’s not simply that China is “better than us at capitalism,” as I often hear. Instead, China is demonstrating that socialism is more capable than capitalism of fulfilling even the warped values imposed on the world by capitalists. Of course material security for everyone remains of the utmost importance, but China has never abandoned that. In fact, it’s the core of their model for human rights - a model they’ve been incomparably more honest, consistent, and successful in enacting than the West has with its abstract model. I used to wonder how China could focus on building something instead of fighting fires as the world burned, but now I see they were building a firebreak.
Your first rec is on the internet archive without even having to borrow: https://archive.org/details/socialism-with-chinese-characteristics/page/n5/mode/2up
The preface is fire
Let me begin with a quotation from Mao Zedong:
Some foreigners say that our ideological reform is brainwashing. As I see it, they are correct in what they say. It is washing brains, that’s what it is! This brain of mine was washed to become what it is. After joining the revolution, it was slowly washed, washed for several decades. What I received before was all bourgeois education, and even some feudal education. (Mao Zedong, quoted in Shao 2017, 2)!
Mao was speaking to Chinese students studying in Moscow in 1957, but his words are still resonant today. For me at least, the in-depth study of Chinese Marxism, of socialism with Chinese characteristics, has required a washing of my brain, a washing that has taken a dozen years or more. Why? When I first came to China, I thought I was open-minded, thought that I did not assume the frameworks and assumptions with which I had been brought up and educated. How wrong I was. Like other foreigners, I had developed an opinion about China that was quite erroneous. This is particularly so for those from the small number of countries that make up the ‘West’ (containing about 14% of the global population). I have found that those who have grown up in socialist countries—past and present—find it much easier to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics. This is also the case for the many who come from developing countries, for there too is a living memory of the experience of colonial depredation at the hands of the ‘West’. So if you are like me, having been brought up and educated in one of the few Western countries, then you may well need to engage in a process of washing your brain so as to be able to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics, or sinified Marxism.
Thanks for linking to it! Like a much-needed wash, I found relief I didn’t entirely know my brain needed in reading Boer’s straightforward synthesis of the history and theory of Dialectical and Historical Materialism as it applies to the particular experience of China.
Thanks for the elaborate response. I actually bought Rockhill’s book and is on my reading list, I’m pushing it up right now! I’ve heard Rockhill already, some talks of his which are uploaded to YouTube by ChemicalMind, and some interviews to podcasts like The Deprogram, but I’m so interested in understanding the actual, specific underlying reasons for the existence of the so-called compatible left
I listened to several interviews with Rockhill too - I was eager to learn more while I waited for a non-PDF version of the book. The ones I heard were good but mostly covered the same ground as each other. A couple of weeks ago, though, The Black Myths Podcast released a very different, praxis-focused interview with him.
https://blackmyths.libsyn.com/myth-all-marxisms-are-created-equal-w-gabriel-rockhill
The hosts ask how he sees his findings applying to the concrete practice of organizing in the US, and his answer surprised me. He notes that the compatible left was always meant to be a temporary concession by the bourgeoisie, with the ultimate goal being to remove any and all space for Marxism. In the context of the stated goal for his work being to help reorient the Western left against imperialism, his thesis in short is that in many instances this goal will require tactically working to defend elements of the compatible left from attacks by the right.
He said it might be a tough pill to swallow, and for me it was. At first I thought he had to be wrong, because it sounded like he was suggesting we undialectically try to push history backward. But situating it in the context of rapidly changing material conditions, I’ve started to think he’s right. Anticommunism can no longer rely on perverting people’s evaluation of real material conditions to sustain its legitimacy, increasingly leading to the failure of mechanisms used to harness compatible left sentiments toward imperialist ends.
I always default to “capitalism requires the capitalists to be the ones in charge, if they’re not in charge and the working class party is repressing them then it’s clearly a socialist transitionary state, whatever measures they are taking to succeed and survive during that transition are a product of the conditions that exist”.
Socialism begins at the revolution creating a dotp and does not end until that dotp ends. Everything from the moment of its creation is transitionary socialism, whether they’re implementing markets or other measures is all part of surviving the existing global conditions during that transition.
If they won’t even accept Cuba is socialist then to these people there is literally no socialism anywhere in the world. It is the easiest socialist state to support.
If they won’t even accept Cuba is socialist then to these people there is literally no socialism anywhere in the world
This is exactly European Marxism: the only real socialist in the world is my tiny organization without the slightest political power.
Which always raises a question for me: If they think that, why are they even socialists? If every real world example of socialism is either completely impotent or collapses into “revisionism” then Marxism demonstrably doesn’t work and is an incorrect theory. But they aren’t scientific socialists, they’re either weekend communists just cosplaying for fun, or ideologues who treat Marxism like a religion, not a science. I have to deal with this same sort of thing in my local orgs too.
Some people are fine with fighting for communism, even if we havent succeeded so far. Not everyone falls to despair and defeatism if they arent currently winning. Starting from the premise “i’d feel sad if there were no socialist projects” and reasoning backwards from there to declare that XYZ country must be socialist or “there would be no socialist countries [and this would make me sad and defeatist]” is dogshit reasoning, regardless of one’s opinion on past and present socialist projects. Marxism is a science, and that means rigorous definitions and analysis, not changing definitions to make ourselves feel better.
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Some people are fine with pointless philosophizing and not actually changing the world, but that’s not scientific, and that’s not Marxist. If Marxism can’t actually build any real socialist projects, if every revolution ends in failure and there’s literally no socialism anywhere in the world, then it’s pointless. If we analyze past and present socialist projects and conclude they are all failures, then scientifically, why be a Marxist? When every experiment ends in failure a good scientist must conclude that Marxism demonstrably doesn’t work and is an incorrect theory.
Some people are fine with being dogmatic martyrs for ideology, but again: that’s not scientific, and that’s not Marxist.
Thank you for putting my point into better words than I could!
A project failing means you figure out what went wrong and try again, not give up and go home. Marx didnt give up in '49 when the streets of paris ran with workers blood. He didnt shrug his shoulders and give up when the commune was crushed in '71. He analysed those failures for lessons to use in the future. Lenin read those analyses. He didnt surrender when the revolution of 1905 was stamped out. Mao didn’t cry it was impossible when the kmt turned on the cpc. They used those failures to figure out how to reach the goal, which, unless we are not both communists, is to end the rule of markets over the world, not just to provide bandaid solutions that will be removed when the rate of profit falls too far).
The point isnt to be a matyr, it is to have a full understanding of what the problem is, how to fix it, and not to give up and move the goalposts from “end exploitation” to “make wage-labourers slightly less exploited”
[…] the goal, which, unless we are not both communists, is to end the rule of markets over the world […]
I shared that perspective until it was brought to my attention that capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy. In case you’re interested, I’ll excerpt the most relevant chapter of the book that brought it to my attention, but otherwise I’ll cut straight to the Marx of it and note that he examines the configuration of precapitalist market economies in both slave and feudal societies in Capital vol. 3.
Excerpt
from Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer:
Chapter 5.2.2 - Market Economies in History
This point is rather straightforward: market economies have existed in many periods of human history, but they have by no means been capitalist market economies. This reality was already foreshadowed in the text I quoted earlier, from 1979, where Deng Xiaoping observed that a ‘market economy was in its embryonic stages as early as feudalist society’. Further, on a number of occasions he offered the comparative point that a planned economy is also part of capitalism, the more so during times of economic difficulties. While most Chinese scholars make similar observations, neither they nor Deng were the first in the Marxist tradition to deploy historical arguments in relation to market economies.
The first was actually Marx, in the third volume of Capital(1894b, 583–599; 1894a, 588–605), where he examines the market economy of ancient Rome. His concern is to trace the effects of “usurer’s capital”. Found in the ‘most diverse economic formations of society’, in Rome a portion of this capital led to commodities, money, trade, borrowing, surplus, and profit. In other words, we have some of the core components of a ‘market economy’. But is it a capitalist market economy? Not at all. It is a slave economy, for its primary purpose was to find, transport, and buy the labour of others as slaves. The whole market economy of ancient Rome (and indeed ancient Greece) was geared for and subordinated to this purpose. Marx subsequently outlines the way some of these components worked: usury, interest, surplus, money, labour, and so on, were arranged quite differently and functioned in ways that are far from a capitalist market economy. Or, if they do at times seem similar, they function in ‘altered conditions’, without a capitalist framework (Marx 1894b, 587, 590; 1894a, 592, 595). Marx moves on to outline how some elements of feudal markets worked, and then how the different constellation of a capitalist mode of production overturned and reconfigured many of these earlier features (especially usury). For Marx at least, market economies are not all the same and do not function in exactly the same way. They may have some components in common, and to a casual observer such market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.
We may add to Marx’s initial thoughts that it was precisely a slave market economy that was a major component of the Ancient mode of production of both Greece and Rome (Boer and Petterson 2017), and that the ancient Persians of the first millennium BCE developed a military market economy by deploying the relatively recent invention of coinage (Boer 2015), and that the European feudal market economy was primarily focused on the estate’s own production and well-being (Kula 1976). I mean not local peasant produce markets, but state-wide and even empire-wide socio-economic systems of which market economies formed an important component. As Chinese scholars routinely point out, market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies (Yang J. 2009, 174). But they also point out that these market economies are by no means capitalist in nature, since they are shaped by the socio-economic system of which they are a component: to assert otherwise is—as Deng Xiaoping made clear—to become dogmatic, or to fall into what we may also call ‘economics imperialism’, in which the assumptions of a capitalist market economy (and its economic theory) are de-historicised, de-socialised, universalised, and superimposed on any historical market economy, thereby skewing analysis (Milonakis and Fine 2009; Fine and Milonakis 2009).
There’s a difference between Lenin not being deterred by the failure of the Paris Commune and a bunch of so-called socialists thinking every single socialist project for the past 150+ years ended in failure from within. Intellectually honest communists who sincerely believe that almost every single socialist and communist party that has ever existed became revisionist should just say that the vanguard model is trash for inevitably leading to revisionism and become an anarchist who eschewed vanguardism and embraces the anarchist tradition. That’s actual intellectual honesty. But going “Vanguardism is good except for every single attempt of vanguardism that ended in failure in the real world” isn’t reasonable at all. How is this any different from “That’s not real capitalism. That’s crony capitalism” from loser ancaps?
Not every liberatory project is tied to Marxism. There’s liberation theology, there’s revolutionary Islam as adopted by Iran, there’s pan-Africanism, there’s Indigenous-led movements like what’s going on in Bolivia, and so on. But if these losers think liberation theology sucks and Iran sucks and Pan-Africanism sucks and Bolivia sucks and China sucks and anarchists suck and so on, then they’re really nothing more than armchair revolutionaries.
This isn’t a project failing. This is every single project that has ever been attempted failing over and over again for 150 years. If we’re scientists, then we should learn from repeated test results and conclude that Marxism is incorrect theory. Why be a Marxist?
There are two scientific ways to approach a historical analysis of Marxism. Either AES countries are examples of Marxism working in practice, or Marxism hasn’t worked in practice and there’s no reason to be a Marxist. There isn’t some third option where you refuse to give up on a failure ideology that never works, simply because you have faith. That’s not scientific, that’s religious.
Which brings us back to the question: why be a Marxist? If this failure ideology collapses every time it is tried, it’s pointless. Lenin tried, and failed. Mao tried, and failed. Everyone that has ever tried has failed. Eventually, it doesn’t make sense to keep trying. This isn’t about feeling bad and crying because we lost faith in our religion, as good scientists we should be doing something different.
The USSR was working tho. It started suffering economic problems because it moved away from the Stalin-era model. It did so according to Molotov (Molotov Remembers, interviews from the 70s and 80s with him) in large part because of the failure of the partys leadership (including himself at the time) to understand the importance of this struggle against the commodities. The combination of economic issues and lack of a theoretical basis for proactive leadership by the party is what caused the ussr to fall, not
China was also working fine before Deng’s economic reforms (much less the more drastic ones under Jiang or Hu). China’s economy was growing, the people were educated and increasingly politicised. If China had stayed on its path, it might look something like Cuba or Iran today (i.e. a revolutionary state under siege) it wouldnt have just evaporated from existence for lack of american capital or engineers.
And Cuba still exists today and has made more progress towards overcome the urban-rural divide, healing the ecosystems and abolishing commodities than any other project. Idk why youre acting like it has failed, and like if it failed it would be for any reason at this point besides the imperialist encirclement—they have done literally everything right.
But even if Cuba were invaded and the revolution crushed or if Xi announced tomorrow that China is abandoning marxism this wouldnt be cause to give up. We dont have the luxury of giving up because the market rules the world and will kill us all if its not stopped. We cant just move the goalposts from abolish exploitation to reduce exploitation.
It’s not about “feeling sad” rather, if every single time people have tried something, it has failed, why try doing that same thing? Why not do something else entirely, since it obviously doesn’t work? And these sorts of people do end up taking on that position eventually, there’s a reason trots end up becoming neocons.
If something gives you the same result time and time again in science, it means you can predict that it will continue to give you that same result time and time again. If these people’s analysis was both accurate and scientific, then they shouldn’t be socialists, since socialism cannot work according to their understanding of it.
If they truly believe socialism has never worked, but still try for it anyway, that’s just stupidity and stubbornness. It’s not brave or noble to fight for a lost cause, it’s much better to find a new cause. If their model is correct, then the correct thing to do is to find a new way of doing things that will improve people’s lives, not cling to an outdated idea that doesn’t work, which to the credit of some of these sorts of people, they do think they are doing.
To be clear, are you saying that communism (as defined by marx, i.e. the abolition of markets and commodities) is impossible so we can only struggle to improve living conditions in societies dominated by commodity production, or am I misreading you?
Not really, I’m arguing that based on the sorts of understanding of socialism and socialist states that most western leftists have, AES and former AES models are not at all the way to get there because they have always “failed”.
This isn’t something I believe at all, but it is something that I think follows from their logic, but it isn’t (usually) something they adhere to.
My view is theyve failed less as a result of fundamental failures of the “AES model” and more as a result them moving away from that model after the 50s and 60s, and (in the case of the USSR particularly) ideological and theoretical failures of the party’s leadership resulting in them providing little to no proactive leadership. This last point (ideological and theoretical errors of leadership, including himself when he was stalins right hand man) is talked about a lot by Molotov in Molotov Remembers.
[1] tho tbh this is vague; the USSR and the other Warsaw Pact countries had very different models, and their individual policies varied a lot over time, but i’m assuming by that you mean “state control”, correct me if i’ve inferred wrongly
My response to “China isn’t socialist” is just “then I guess I like what they’re doing more.” I only give a shit about socialism because I tend to think it could make life better, but if something else is doing that instead, I’m choosing whatever that is. When these types are mad at us, they call us pejoratives like “dogmatic”, but we’re the ones picking movements for what they’ve actually done, rather than some sort of brand recognition or ideological purity.
Basically, the chauvinist left’s whole angle amounts to “that’s not real socialism, real socialism is when you suck ass and fail without actually helping anybody or improving anything.”
I guess real socialism is like liberalism, but even more whiny and even less effectual.
What made Marxism so important isnt that it thought up ways to improve the conditions of the poor, many utopians have done that. What Marxism did is show, with evidence and painstaking scientific investigation, that unless the capitalist mode of production—commodities, markets, the laws of value—are abolished any improvements in the conditions of the poor will be temporary because the laws of capitalist production will re-assert themselves unless its germ, the commodity form, is fully eradicated from the globe. Anything else is just social democratic reformism that moves the chairs around on a sinking ship
Exactly right: socialism is amazing because it gives us the scientific tools to evaluate the best analysis of history, of economy, of strategies and of action with the goal of making peoples’ lives better. Socialism is good because socialism works to this end, and not because it’s a set of strict definitions.
Socialists doing socialism socially
Is this capitalism?
If so, guess I’m a capitalist.
Ah but you forget, they’re doing socialism while not being white. Clearly a sign of their inferiority. Western Chauvinism is just awful.
China’s improving material conditions will do the heavy lifting for us. Life in the West will continue to get worse, life in China will continue to get better, and eventually people will shift their positions to align with that new material reality. Ironically, politically disengaged Westoids might be easier to convince than Western “”“socialists”“” because they’re not as ideological.
Ironically, politically disengaged Westoids might be easier to convince than Western “”“socialists”“” because they’re not as ideological.
I can confirm this bigtime. I’ve never convinced a self described socialist or Marxist that China isn’t the monster hiding under their bed, but I have convinced plenty of average people that what China has done and continues to do is pretty great. And their response is usually a sort of “Why don’t we do that sort of stuff here?” Which is great, they’re getting it, they’re asking the right questions. Which is one of the reasons why my country has such a big anti-China propaganda push, especially amongst “leftist” groups.
In my US university the average normie student is already pro China, all they needed to see was a competent government providing increasing amounts of treats and running cool industrial and infrastructure projects while everything crumbles around us.
To a certain extent this is already the case. Tiktok has opened many peoples’ eyes to the realities of life in modern China, and people are exposed to a lot more coming from China than they were just 5 years ago.
I’d actually include xianxia and wuxia fandom in this too, Chinese pop culture is starting to penetrate the West.
Maybe we’ll see a cultivation blockbuster trilogy in the next decade.
kung fu movies are back?
And they have the guts to tell ME I’m being dogmatic and only seeing black and white,
The student org I had considered joining were pro-ukraine. I tried explaining euromaidan and one member accused me of being a pro Putin shill and linked me to their newspaper article written in February 2022 (incredible).
The kicker was when that same member said all countries are imperialist except North Korea and Cuba. They stopped responding to me after I stated that the DPRK directly aided Russia and is in full support of the SMO.
Trotskyism cannot even be called derivative of Marxism.
Trotskyism cannot even be called derivative of Marxism.
It feels like their main takeaway from Trotsky is that the more annoying and obnoxious a person is, the more Marxist they are.
where’s the lie
Concern trolling about Ukraine among “leftists” falls apart pretty quickly when you ask Eur*peans what they think of the 9 million in demographic losses in the country (or about 20% of the former population) between 1990 and 2020 due to European colonization of their economy. Literally worse than the 1930s famine.
Average western left org tbh
Typical tripe from those who have no idea how to actually build and maintain a real political movement, instead simply using their ideology to build up their own superiority and ego. Literally liberalism.
This is infuriating
I was telling them: can you imagine living in a country where they’re not at risk of fascists? Like, they simply aren’t 5 years away from fascism in China, they don’t have fascist political parties, they don’t have fascist political commentators, they don’t have fascists owning their social media… I literally can’t comprehend how one can look at that, look back at Europe, and immediately embrace China as Socialist. Like, duh, China isn’t perfect, the country fucking exists in a world dominated by NATO capitalism, but hell are they doing fucking great!
Questions based on static definitions (is X of type Y) are undialectical and a waste of time. Ultraleftists don’t understand dialectics and that’s why they suck at applying Marxism.
Check out this 1864 draft of Capital. Marx ponders two categories, the commodity and money, not as fixed things but as a dynamical objects which emerged in undeveloped forms (from the perspective of capital) and underwent a series of evolutions before they acquired all of the features capital required of them. Marx explicitly acknowledges these categories as predating capitalism. He traces how capital appropriated both commodities and money and made them into something new, just as capitalism took labor power — an obviously precapitalist category — and created out of it the proletarian working class which we have today. Nowhere in this excerpt does Marx ask such inane questions as “is this a commodity?”
Behind the question “is China socialist?”, underlies the question “do we recognise the Chinese model as a successful contender in the path to Communism?”. The question of support for a socialist movement often hinges on it being even considered socialist, which is of course full of greys and not strictly defined. “Does China mostly operate under a capitalist mode of production?” is a measurable question about economics which has a clear answer, “is China capitalist?” is a judgement of its successes, its goals, and whether we would pursue a similar trend if we were in the same conditions as they are. I personally don’t even consider the Chinese model applicable to Europe as it is an already industrialized continent and instead believe that a socialist planned economy is more realistic, but I think the question of support to past socialist movements is an important one in the struggle for future socialism.
Edit: not disagreeing here, just elaborating ig
Asking if China is on the path to communism is only a rephrasing of the question. The more important questions are what is currently reproducing capitalism as a global system? what concrete steps can be taken to undermine that reproduction? which entities in the world have the capacity to enact those steps?
It’s not a question of whether China “is” socialist or “on the path to” any statically defined state of being. Nor it is a question whether China has a bourgeoisie. It definitively does. But how does one characterize the whole of China as a process, as a changing system in motion. What is the nature of this bourgeoisie, does their power grow over time and undermine the people’s power held by the party? What is the nature of China’s foreign policy and international investment, does it have an imperial character equal to the western countries or is it different? I think the CPC has a pretty good grasp of these dynamics. Not to say it’s perfect; there are neoliberal elements in Chinese politics too. But the fact that these questions can be practically pondered at all puts China far ahead of any western, so-called socialists.
this reminds me of how zara larsson said that she likes socialism a few months back but she cancelled a brand collab with huawei cause ”china is not a nice state” like in 2020.
The question of “is X country socialist?” doesn’t mean a whole lot because the bar can be set somewhat arbitrarily even if a person is trying their best and not being a chauvinist or liberal. Is it socialist if there’s a dictatorship of the proletariat? How do we measure it? We all know that class contradictions will exist right up until class is abolished, i.e. a future realization of actual full communist society, yet people cite a lack of class abolition as a disqualifier for a country being socialist. One could argue that no countries have ever been socialist by setting bars like “they have a market economy in some sense” or “they have foreign direct investments”. Would that actually mean anything or are they setting meaningless bars? Aren’t we actually all just trying to call these states socialist projects? Socialist revolutionary states developing in a different direction because they are run by socialists, by socialist parties?
Nobody can correctly argue that China does not have a vastly different history and trajectory as a “developing” nation and that this is due to its socialist governance, even if (some say because!) its governance eventually moderated class struggle and attempts to use limited capitalist relations with guard rails to build itself up. This is the only contention regarding China and socialism that can be reasonably discussed and it’s just about whether a person can recognize capitalist relations and trappings can exist in a socialist state, even be common. But even then it is sidestepping the only thing that really matters, which is whether it’s a socialist project by socialists attempting to build socialism in their country, and the answer is clearly yes. One can understand a dismayed person in the 80s thinking capitalist roaders had taken over, but it’s not a serious position today.
Putting aside the pointlessness of the bar of “is X country socialist?”, their criticisms are full of liberal propaganda and what is surely a misunderstanding of Marxist thought and imperialism.
Not expansing worldwide socialism? They mean not taking naked steps to export revolution, which yes China does not do. It still provides actual material support to other socialist states and it’s building a multipolar world order where your socialist project won’t get choked by blockade and sanctions by imperialists. But more importantly who said that socialism is when you export revolution? This is a question of strategy among socialists, not an existential question of whether a project is socialist. And the primary socialist project that did export revolution collapsed from its contradictions (and of course immense external pressure that has never stopped being applied to every socialist-run state).
Imperialism in Africa? I beg them to define imperialism. One wonders if they’ve even read Lenin. The most I’ve seen from such accusations is people who think imperialism is when there’s foreign ownership. They neglect to remember that the reason Lenin was describing imperialism we to note that it is the catalyst for war between capitalist powers, of carving out parts of the world because profits are too low for domestic monopolies compared to the much larger profits to be made by expanding monopolies overseas. None of these things describe Chinese companies’ investments in Africa, which often result in debts that are forgiven and are not negotiated at gunpoint, either through actual military flexing or via control of global finance and markets (which are themselves controlled at gunpoint). Oh, and the investments themselves are highly productive and actually benefit the common people in African countries, though of course this is on the balance and not prefecture uniform. Finally, China remains net exploited. No serious Marxist can use these false accusations of imperialism in good faith.
Regarding China developing renewables for profit:
- This didn’t happen through the anarchy of the market but through top-down industrial policy via the CPC. It has actual strategic value on multiple levels laid out by those crafting that policy and this has direct through-lines on multiple fronts in renewables production in China. And rather than attempt to make their own profits through this supposed gold mine, imperialist countries are trying to limit renewables production and instead promote oil dependency.
- One of the basic predictions of early Marxists was that socialists in control would do capitalism (production, but also profit) better than capitalists.
Regarding the retention of capitalist dynamics within China: yeah duh everyone knows this and understands it, it is probably the only point worth considering but only because it’s a good evercise in thinking about the diversity of approaches taken to socialist development. China runs an expanded version of how much capitalist relations and allowed to exist, but zero socialist states have ever abolished those relations, all have “backtracked” from positions initially forwarded by communists to push class struggle as far as they could as fast as they could. Ultimately this is a question of tactics and whether they will succeed, but socialists and fake friends of socialists love to categorically label anything outside of their own tactics as revisionist, ultra, capitalist, imperialist… and only sometimes are they correct.
Anyways sorry you had to deal with those chauvinists. Tell them to focus on their own countries’ imperialism and stop worrying about China sharing productive industry and infrastructure with African countries.
Imo you and your comrades are by the sound of it having issues where you confuse “socialist”, “dictatorship of the proletariat”, “anti-imperialist”, “nice to live in” and “progressive” for semisynonymous moral categories instead of seperate political-economic categories without moral weight.
Also by instead of respecting democratic centralism and party discipline going and posting about it in public online spaces you are sorta in the wrong here imo. Instead of posting about this online you should do further investigation and discuss it further with your comrades while engaged in the work of leafletting or postering where youre less likely to be dogpiled
Anyway, the capitalist mode of production is a different thing from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The capitalist mode of production is M-C-M`, it is the laws of value and the production and circulation of commodities. “‘Accumulate, accumulate’ this is Moses and the Prophets” as Marx put it. The chinese economy operates, including in the state sector, on M-C-M’ and on the law of value and production and circulation of commodities.
This is in contrast to the soviet union, whose plans followed M-C-M’, but did not allow things to circulate based on the laws of value but instead the needs of the economic plan (and this planning structure was itself a development of the war communism compromise, not what the bolsheviks had in mind in october 1917).
And both of these are very different from Cuba’s economy, which is much closer to the lower stage of communism (socialism) than any other socialist project: they have made strides towards the abolition of the urban-rural divide, the divison between manual and mental labour, the metabolic rift and the commodity form.
Whether china is a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the bourgeois is a seperate question from whether its economy is organised along capitalist lines, and this is an entirely seperate question from whether china’s interests are opposed to american imperialism and from the 4th question of their poverty reduction—which, you will note, is accompanied by increased investments of capital overseas, including to buy up land and resources to export food, minerals, etc to china. Bolivian and Ethiopian peasants arent much happier if their land is stolen or waters poisoned to supply china with cheaper food and lithium.
By tying these questions together in a nebulous “is china socialist” (by which you mean “good” rather than any marxist analysis) you confuse the matter and make discussion impossible. China has reduced poverty in China during one of the greatest increases in global poverty in world history—see for example the massive land grabs and dispossesions in Africa from the 00s on.
It remains to be seen whether China will dismantle the global systems of imperialist oppression (the institutions they joined in the 90s and 00s like the imf, wto, world bank etc) to allow the global population to also stop being fucked over, or take them over and merely reform them while BRICS becomes a new G20 or OECD. It remains to be seen whether they will return to supporting revolutionaries like the USSR and Cuba, or if they will continue to trade with Israel and the Phillipines and the USA while they commit genocides and snuff out revolutions. It remains to be seen if, as the USA collapses and oyher global south countries can increase their working and living conditions, China will accept these losses. But based on how China doesnt seem to do much about the industrial abuses their companies commit overseas (thinking especially of the big mining disaster in africa a while ago), my hopes are sadly at a record low atm.
Imperialism is a world system, any participation in the global economy as a winner (and china is increasingly a winner) is participation in imperialism. You are the one deviating from lenin’s theory by turning it into a set of policies a nation can choose or reject. Youve turned critical support agaisnt imperialism into uncritical support against criticism.
That said, your comrades are 100% wrong on Cuba imo, both bc of the supply situation and bc the USSR was much less helpful there than it could or should.have been (because, from Khrushchev on, the USSR also increasingly operates according to the laws of value and commodity circulation, or, as one of the leaders of the communist party of british guyana put it in the 60s when the soviets wouldnt give help developing their industry bc it wouldnt benefit soviet economy enough: “theyre just as businesslike on this [east] side of the iron curtain as the other”)
by instead of respecting democratic centralism and party discipline going and posting about it in public online spaces you are sorta in the wrong here imo.
I’m posting it anonymously without mentioning my org. A violation of democratic centralism would be to publicly rant about it Trotsky style. The act of posting this here exposes me to other viewpoints and research such as yours, which contributes to my ideological growth.
Regarding your explanation of M-C-M’, China does operate to a certain extent according to the capitalist mode of production, this much is obvious, that doesn’t mean that they can be described a capitalist country anymore than you’d describe Lenin’s New Economic Policy as capitalist, or agriculture during the Stalin eras as capitalist (most farmers were organized in cooperatives which did reproduce the M-C-M’ cycle and operated under the profit motive, only with most grain being sold not on free markets but at fixed prices designated by the state).
Whether China is a socialist country goes beyond the dominant mode of production, and any analysis lumping together China with, say, Germany or the USA, is bad analysis. China being a dictatorship of the proletariat is a much more useful definition of it being a socialist country, note I said socialist and not communist. Nowhere in your comment do you mention that China developed in a world dominated by western capital. Failing to acknowledge the realities of siege socialism / actually existing socialism in the current world and focusing exclusively on the internal economic relations will lead to ultra-left analysis.
It does remain to see whether China will dismantle the global systems of imperialist oppression, but the fact that they are a dictatorship of the proletariat would lead one to think that this is their endgoal in the long term, which they themselves say is communism, and that their current geopolitical stance and economic relation with the rest of the world is a matter of strategy and not of ideology. It’s also lazy and selfish to expect other countries to do the work of revolution for you, and while I agree there should be criticism of China and even a degree of skepticism, it should primarily come from support of its project and not from rejection of their extremely successful model.
Imperialism is a world system, any participation in the global economy as a winner (and china is increasingly a winner) is participation in imperialism. You are the one deviating from lenin’s theory by turning it into a set of policies a nation can choose or reject. Youve turned critical support agaisnt imperialism into uncritical support against criticism.
As I said before: leaving aside the realities of siege socialism is bad analysis. Ask yourself this question: is China in a better position in 2026 to start a struggle against global imperialism than it was in 1980? Throwing oneself naked at the guns of capitalism may seem like a very honourable thing to do, but the fact is that China survives and western capitalism patently doesn’t want it to.
Your final bit on the USSR operating under the laws of value and commodity circulation in international exchange is simply wrong, btw, there is extended analysis of this in Albert Szymanski’s “Is the Red Flag Flying”, and the numbers are given proving that the USSR didn’t engage in the way whatever Guyanan official declared in 1960. The USSR actually mostly invested in foreign countries through direct industrialization schemes, where they would loan the necessary materials or industrial goods or even currency to put the industry there in the first place, and then they’d receive the payment back in kind in the industrially produced goods. This can be hardly described as “the Soviets wouldn’t give help developing their industry”. The USSR also put itself in the short end of the stick of unequal exchange by being a net exporter of raw materials and energy resources to the eastern block, and a net importer of industrially produced goods, which made possible the industrialization of the rest of countries of the Eastern Block, yes, also during and after Khruschyov.
Dont have much time so dont have time to edit
demcent
Fair, I shouldnt have assumed your org has the same rules as mine
that doesn’t mean that they can be described a capitalist country anymore than you’d describe Lenin’s New Economic Policy as capitalist, or agriculture during the Stalin eras as capitalist
I would describe both of those policies as still operating within the global capitalist mode of production, overseen by a dictatorship of the proletariat rebelling against that mode of production with the goal of building productive forces to defend against imperialism/counterrevolution and transition towards socialism. I try to avoid phrases like “capitalist country” or “socialist country” (or “imperialist country”) as I view such formulations as overly simplistic and anti-marxist. For me the gold standard of description of economic systems is the opening line’s of capital, describing “societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production”; I would describe all socialist projects such societies. A major goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to struggle against and dismantle the capitalist mode of production towards the goal of establishing a community of producers and eventually abolishing the commodity form.
China being a dictatorship of the proletariat is a much more useful definition of it being a socialist country
As I’ve said, I don’t think the phrase “socialist country” or “socialism” is a synonym for “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The terms describe two different things imo.
Nowhere in your comment do you mention that China developed in a world dominated by western capital. Failing to acknowledge the realities of siege socialism / actually existing socialism in the current world and focusing exclusively on the internal economic relations will lead to ultra-left analysis.
China sided with the Americans against the USSR to get the west to lift its economic siege so it could abandon the economic aspects of siege socialism in favour of integration in the global economy. I have mentioned the current state of affairs of China, which, far from being under siege is at the centre of many of the global imperialist institutions. To my understanding, ultraleftism is a tactical rather than analytical error, i.e. forming a sect instead of participating in the mass movements. Lenin didn’t disagree with the dutch and italian ultraleft bc he thought their analysis of trade unions and parliament being reactionary was wrong, he criticised them because he believed their tactic of abstaining from participation in reactionary trade unions and parliament was wrong
It does remain to see whether China will dismantle the global systems of imperialist oppression, but the fact that they are a dictatorship of the proletariat would lead one to think that this is their endgoal in the long term, which they themselves say is communism, and that their current geopolitical stance and economic relation with the rest of the world is a matter of strategy and not of ideology.
And imo, the more powerful China gets, the more opportunities to weaken America it lets pass with mere strongly worded letters, the more they don’t discipline their companies as strongly for abuses internationally as domestically, the more in feels they’ve transitioned into exactly the sorta social imperialists Deng worried might emerge with his policies.
It’s also lazy and selfish to expect other countries to do the work of revolution for you, and while I agree there should be criticism of China and even a degree of skepticism, it should primarily come from support of its project and not from rejection of their extremely successful model.
I don’t expect them to do the work of revolution for me, I am disappointed that they no longer express much material solidarity with other revolutionary organisations and in fact trade with and supply reactionary regimes like Israel, the USA and the Phillipines. Criticial support in the context of the west means, imo, absolute support for China against western imperialism, in particular NATO’s current drive towards war, while internally among comrades acknowledging and analysing the current shortcomings.
As I said before: leaving aside the realities of siege socialism is bad analysis. Ask yourself this question: is China in a better position in 2026 to start a struggle against global imperialism than it was in 1980?
No, imo they’re in a much worse position considering their integration into the global economy (including their supply of US dollars!) has made them try to talk Iran down repeatedly from challenging global imperialism and disrupting China’s trade, as well as not pursuing de-dollarisation back in 2022. They might have sufficient resources to win a struggle against global imperialism, but their integration has made them increasingly unlikely to want to disrupt the status quo by starting a struggle against global imperialism.
Your final bit on the USSR operating under the laws of value and commodity circulation in international exchange is simply wrong, btw, there is extended analysis of this in Albert Szymanski’s “Is the Red Flag Flying”, and the numbers are given proving that the USSR didn’t engage in the way whatever Guyanan official declared in 1960. The USSR actually mostly invested in foreign countries through direct industrialization schemes, where they would loan the necessary materials or industrial goods or even currency to put the industry there in the first place, and then they’d receive the payment back in kind in the industrially produced goods.
The official in question is Janet Jagan, found the name, if you were curious. She asked the USSR for aid, and the USSR decided they wouldn’t be able to produce enough stuff in kind to make it economically worthwhile for the USSR. Loans and repayment of certain value of goods is exactly what I am talking about with the law of value still prevailing, not just the use of money.
No, imo they’re in a much worse position considering their integration into the global economy (including their supply of US dollars!)
You think China would be in a better position if they didn’t have a seat at the UN and the US still recognized the ROC as the representative of all of China? Interesting take.
A better position to challenge imperialism yeah. “A better position” by itself is abstract and means nothing
You’ve already explained how if the siege had continued China might be in an ideologically more militant (better in your mind) position to challenge imperialism but that means nothing without the material means to back it up. Could you explain how China being less developed in every way through being cut off from the world would improve it’s ability to challenge imperialism?
If China had not taken the path of development Cuba would have no solar infrastructure to help it withstand the imperialist blockade and would not have received over a hundred thousand tons of food aid, the DPRK would not have been able to leverage China for their own developmental miracle, most of Africa would not have alternative developmental pathways and would still be under the thumb of the IMF and world bank, Iran would not have the drone and missile architecture it has since it is built in large part on Chinese dual use components and rocket precursor.
Your ultraleftism sounds revolutionary and great from an ideological point of view but ideology removed from material reality holds no meaning. You also seem to lump all of the blame for the Sino-Soviet split on China with the nebulous idea of China jumping into opportunism simply wanting to escape sanctions but make no mention of Moscow’s wrongs of attempting to subordinate Beijing (which created the initial wedge).
I think your second paragraph us very good criticism, thanks for it. In particular i had no idea about irans missiles.
To answer the first paragraph I think without China’s supply of labour and resources imperialism probably wouldnt have been able to rebound like it did in the 80s and 90s
Re: ultraleftism, thats an issue of tactics not analysis. Ultraleftism is when you go around campaigning and shouting about how bad china is, helping NATO drive towards their war against China. Ultraleftism is not when you criticise china to other comrades.
Re: sinosoviet split, i dont “blame” china for splitting with the ussr, i “blame” them for joining ranks with the western imperialists against the ussr. I agree with most of chinas criticisms of the ussr (e.g.,revisionism, hegemonism and cancelling economic programmes); i dont think this justified throwing in with the western imperialists
To answer the first paragraph I think without China’s supply of labour and resources imperialism probably wouldnt have been able to rebound like it did in the 80s and 90s
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.
Re: ultraleftism, thats an issue of tactics not analysis. Ultraleftism is when you go around campaigning and shouting about how bad china is, helping NATO drive towards their war against China. Ultraleftism is not when you criticise china to other comrades.
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 dont think this justified throwing in with the western imperialists
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.
I’ll raise your hot take one better. It’s not just that China is socialist, it’s pretty much the whole world is (lower stage) socialist as Marx understood it, and has been that since out great grandparents. WW1 and WW2 were the great crises of capitalism and WW2 was basically a battle between different solution to the end of capitalism. Since WW1 and great depression allocation of resources with profit motive has been and afterthought and every economy and state intervention and control in the economy just to keep it running is basically the norm, not an exception, even in the so called free capitalist west. In the west we essentially live in a bourgeoisie socialism where markets are not anymore necessary, or endured, but purposefully maintained by inertial and as form of social control to keep the existing societal order stable and the “ultra rich theme park” of a world order running. In advanced economies and semi-advanced economies the monopolization has reached such a degree that the battle is mainly political, not about driving the productive forces forward.
This is an interesting argument I haven’t heard before. Is there somewhere I can read more?
