thoughts on these critiques:
- I mean, I don’t think it’s a camp so much so as it is reality. Dengism has pushed forth a disastrous capitalist restoration that every single CPC government has done ever since, workers have been continually disenfranchised and chinese capitalists pop up everywhere and establish businesses that exploit the proletariat
- how can a country be a dotp without its basis of government being soviets they give bourgeois the right to vote and participate in government.
- Beijing has legally and specifically preserved capitalist governance where it can during dengism (Basic Laws in Macau, Hong Kong), but even Hong Kong is being outcapitalisted by the mainland, with Shanghai and even Shenzhen surpassing Hong Kong in terms of commerce and trade, points of great pride for Beijing despite this very clearly not being socialist
- the 1918 russian constitution officially denied political power to the nobility and bourgeoisie anyway, universal right to vote is inherently bourgeois. ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS this is very basic stuff
Marxism is a science.
The Soviet Union is not a dogmatic blueprint of what is to be done; we learn the lessons from it - good and bad - along with socialism of how it is practised along the ages globally (including Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam, and attempts at pro-social projects such as Venuzuela, Kerala and Naxalites, and pro-social projects in the Sahel (especially Ibrahim Traore). There are many other historical attempts including Sankara, Cabral, and in Indonesia before the Jakharta Method to name a few.), and then apply it to local material conditions.
We have to consider (1) the USSR fell (2) socialism did not stop at its borders (3) and therefore socialism endured globally including learning from its errors.
One has to understand dialectics, one of the tenets of which is that elements of what is before will be in the synthesis of the new.
If we consider universal healthcare such as the NHS in the UK could be considered a pro-social project under a capitalist country, then in China the “inverse” could be considered where capital is under the power of the proleteriat state.
Like I said Marxism is a science. It is, however, really difficult to do randomised controlled trials for political economies but fortunately we have an almost equivalent in this timeline; India. Compare, what a dictatorship for capital (India) and a dictatorship against capital (China) looks like.
Consider if China is “capitalist” why can’t other capitalist countries replicate the speed of progression and development?
How do you explain 800 million people lifted out of poverty? Because if this is not socialism - and you think this is capitalism - then you have to then concede that capitalism is the best system out there. The system that feeds the poor wins.
Assuming one has the intellectual curiousity to want to understand the counter viewpoint from the “enemy’s” perspective (for you here it appears to be “Dengism”) - ie to be able to make their arguments convincingly - then here is further reading:
(1) Tricontinental Institute: Serve the People - the eradication of extreme poverty
https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/
(2) Explaining high external efficacy in authoritarian countries: a comparison of China and Taiwan (a study by liberals doing mental gymnastics when they discover China is more democratic than liberal democracies):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2016.1183196
(3) Redsails - Why Marxism
https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
(4) Why the World Needs China by Kyle Ferrana
There are further resources such as critiques on Western Marxism by the likes of Rockhill, Losurdo and Prashad, and lots more articles such as the Why China has Billionaires by Redsails but the above is a good starting point for those lurking and interested.
(Yes this is not a point by point rebuttal debate-bro style, this is an attempt to consider the deeper question on whether China is socialist)
I sort of feel like we’re just treading water at this point with these sorts of posts. Maybe we need a masterpost for easy reference to address the most commonly brought up points.
Only thing I will say here is, increasingly, it feels to me like “Dengism” has become the new “Stalinism”. In the sense that there really is no such thing, it is just a meaningless perjorative.
Whatever issues you might have with deng (its mostly foreign policy), he made sure that the PRC was not destroyed in the 90s like most communist parties or states were. Yes even Cuba, Laos and Vietnam had to bend to pressure and do reforms. NK was the only one who didnt and got destroyed by sanctions which led to famine.
even Hong Kong is being outcapitalisted by the mainland, with Shanghai and even Shenzhen surpassing Hong Kong in terms of commerce and trade,
I don’t want to assume the worst, but it really reads like you’re thinking that “capitalism is when trading” which is how liberals understand capitalism
“Capitalism is when buy and sell things.” Is literally how liberals think. That’s like, the first thing a budding leftist realizes is bullshit when they start to learn about socialism. How does someone with this ideal make it as far as Lemmygrad without understanding that? This shit reads like a fed post.
You just reminded me of a terrible experience I had with a liberal trying to convince me that capitalism is when you trade and trading is when you have markets.
He was being unironic.
‘specifically designated economical hubs with combined population nearly 10x larger has higher economy than much smaller area’
Obligatory: https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
The “china is capitalist” camper replied saying this article is billionare apologia and “handwaving” capitalist exploitation
Then they are wedded to an unfalsifiable ideology. True, surplus value is still generated in early-stage socialist China, but who is in control of what gets done with it? Billionaires, or the DOTP? The results of the “capitalist” development of China speak for themselves, especially when you compare them to the development of literally any other country since WWII.
Oh well no point in arguing with someone who can’t read
XD
The time you spend questioning “are you really sure it doesn’t work this way?” could have been spent asking “how does it actually work?”. Who cares about any of this? Chinese citizens have had their material conditions continuously improve for decades with no signs of stopping, quite the opposite, and not at the expense of the rest of the planet. And this is the only thing that ultimately matters in a world where most people can’t say that.
Read Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer and stop listening to trots
PDF download so that the notations/citations are clickable, since they offer a lot of good reading material too. Often you can directly copy/paste into a search engine and they’ll bring up a full copy from marxists.org or another similar site.
I’m interested in reuploading to prolewiki, you can import the PDF copy to a google doc or etherpad or similar and I can simply copy-paste afterwards onto prolewiki and preserve headings and formatting. If you want.
For ease of importing my workflow is typically pass it through OCR software (such as abbyy), export as formatted html, and then start copying and pasting to prolewiki. then we have to add the infobox and the categories and that’s it. I use OCR even for text-layer PDFs because the text layer sucks to copy, OCR makes a readily copiable document.
I just threw the epub version into an html converter real quick, does this work? That way the hyperlinks are preserved.
If not I can try the OCR method or something else
Unfortunately it wants to preserve line breaks and doesn’t understand headings correctly :(
Ah okay my bad, I’ll try again later today when I get a chance. It’d def be great to have it on the wiki so it’s fully readable online
Depending on how the ocr handles it we also need to manually go through the headings to give them the proper tag (level 1 2 3 etc) and if there are in-line references they should ideally be moved to wiki format so they can be clicked but that one is a secondary
Fosho, when I get a minute I’ll read up on mediawiki formatting and try again. It’s been a few years since I edited a wiki.
Hong Kong is being outcapitalisted by the mainland, with Shanghai and even Shenzhen surpassing Hong Kong in terms of commerce and trade
Might need to read a book or something. Commerce and trade happens in socialism. Vietnam trades with other countries. The former USSR traded with other nations. WTF?
i’m not so versed in china, but you’re being kinda harsh with it…
Dengism has pushed forth a disastrous capitalist restoration
maybe, but the cpc has made a considerably good work keeping the stability of the socialist project
how can a country be a dotp without its basis of government being soviets they give bourgeois the right to vote and participate in government
i mean, in what other country a businessman is executed for doing treacherous stuff and being a corrupt state contratist? in what other country a big-ass monopoly is fragmented by the state?
Beijing has legally and specifically preserved capitalist governance…points of great pride for Beijing despite this very clearly not being socialist
i mean, those are still china and china has still some chauvinism and nationalism, still a better record than the ex-ussr
the 1918 russian constitution officially denied political power to the bourgeoisie, universal right to vote is inherently bourgeois
pobody’s nerfect…even with those issues china has pretty decent records. i mean, what would you prefer? a place with dalai lama as the main religious figurehead and an economical politics like the us?
Given the last part especially, it sounds like a classic case of someone who fetishizes what got destroyed (the now defunct USSR), which conveniently no longer exists to keep making mistakes, and criticizes the real and tangible for not being good enough. I am once again linking the excellent essay on this kind of problem in thinking and culture: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Western_Marxism,_the_fetish_for_defeat,_and_Christian_culture
Of course, socialist projects can be criticized, but they are best criticized within the context of their conditions, history, and culture, and that requires understanding how they got where they did and why, not imposing an idealistic view on them from outside.
The west only loves corpses.
Which socialist country retained Soviets?
I think many trots like to idealize Soviets, as some heavenly form of proletarian organization. One need to study the USSR experience to understand that Soviets were simply a transitional form of organization and had issues in coordinating the economy in the national level.
The strange thing about Trots is that most seem to think the economy was essentially socialist (when in reality it was transitional) and that the government was the problem—not ‘democratic’ enough. The Soviets are seen as the one true democracy.
Idk, a lot of these critiques come from a trot so /shrug
Interesting. Honestly, I find the DotP debate difficult to parse. I relatively understand the critique that the Bolsheviks should have maintained the Soviets—the organic organizational form of the proletariat. I understand being opposed Khrushchev’s suppression of Hungary’s Soviets. But Soviet councils are essentially extraneous China. Do they wish the ‘revisionist’ government would invent them? Workers’ councils may be underexplored, but condemning a country for failing to use a certain form of government is simply a weak and external standard.
Give me some examples of Chinese workers getting disenfranchised. Also please explain to me how the Chinese State is controlled by capitalists. Don’t just tell me that the Chinese state allowing some capitalist formations in some areas = capitalists control the state, give me some examples of the Chinese state actually capitulating to the interests of capitalists in ways that benefit the capitalist class more than anyone else.
- The only thing remotely resembling Soviets in China is the only legal union and also owned by the state which is the ACFTU, which has so far made token calls for workers rights but has also actively done strikebreaking and is notorious for being unreliable. Labour disputes and industrial action does happen, but often requiring independent organisation among the workers that doesn’t establish a union, or labour litigation otherwise which is relying on the bourgois courts and not the working class. The ACFTU is just a union, not a legislative or executive body.
I’m sorry, how would a state even “own” a union. Do you know what words mean?
ok but how do you address the strikebreaking allegations
dog soviets and strikes are for the proletariat in a capitalist state; not a socialist state that is under siege by international capital.
but socialist states shouldn’t have carte blanche to abuse workers
Scandinavian countries have trade unions; Norway in particular has labour unions that have enough leverage (for now) to help maintain the largest per capita pension fund in the world with one of the highest HDIs in the world. It could be argued amongst the west it has an extensive welfare state. Does all of that make Norway a socialist country or is it still a capitalist country (tip: it’s still a capitalist country)? Would having pro-social projects negate its overall dictatorship by capital?
On the counterside, would elements of capital negate the socialist state? If so, what is your scientific theory of liberation for the global south that supercedes marxism-leninism?
See, here, socialism is scientific. We went with presumptions of your westernism (you are not alone in thinking like this and a lot of us on these threads were liberals before we were MLs) to see where it took us. Armchair socialism never has to truly consider the realities of how to survive the siege by the west; it only needs to romanticise revolution.
Allowing capital mechanisms under the dictatorship of the proleteriat will bring its own contradictions; it does not mean “carte blanche” and those contradictions will have to be resolved but China does not have to stand up against Western “purity” tests.
Further reading, if you are interested:
it’s not about purity, if workers don’t control their workplace they still need mechanisms to assert themselves against their employer collectively. even if there’s no formal structure you can’t completely prevent wildcat strikes, spontaneous walkouts etc. the siege isn’t an excuse to not provide PPE or something that the government might not act quickly enough on.
it’s not about purity, if workers don’t control their workplace they still need mechanisms to assert themselves against their employer collectively. even if there’s no formal structure you can’t completely prevent wildcat strikes, spontaneous walkouts etc. the siege isn’t an excuse to not provide PPE or something that the government might not act quickly enough on.
You’re going to have to convey you at least understand the counter-perspective otherwise you just come across as a chauvinist bigot.
Why the white-mans-burden perpsective? You can’t help yourself? Even if what you say is true (it’s not), it’s a worker’s state and therefore it’s their contradiction to resolve; you’re giving the impression of larping while conveniently dovetailing western hegemonic narratives. Plenty of NGOs that fit this mould crying crocodile tears.
Think what the logical end point of what you are implying; you feel workers’ rights have not been sufficiently addressed and they ultimately do not have an outlet to address this… in a worker’s state. Which means you really don’t think it is one.
Westernism is a disease.
If a state has achieved socialist revolution already, then their foremost task becomes the historic defeat of international capital. After that, may the unions flourish and all employers weep. The proletariat of the USSR enjoyed comforts that they have not known since the triumph of international Capital in the 1990s - turns out their (state controlled) employers were the least of their problems.
Such a strange thing to say. From where do you think socialist states should receive consequences? Internally or externally?
If internally, then socialist states do not have carte blanche to abuse workers because their citizens hold them accountable.
If externally, then you’re just being chauvinistic
If internally, then socialist states do not have carte blanche to abuse workers because their citizens hold them accountable.
internally, of course, and for acute problems with a particular employer striking may be appropriate in hybrid systems where workplaces aren’t actually socialized yet…
Then, of course, socialist states don’t have carte blanche to abuse workers because they are accountable to their citizens.
A socialist state doesn’t have a reflexive need to abuse its workers, we project that onto them due to our own inability to oust our capitalist ruling class. Have we not observed astronomical gains for the proletariat under historic actually existing socialist states?
I guess I’m sympathetic to unions in mixed socialist economies - but I don’t see the need post-revolution to spark unrest that can be beneficial to international capital.
of course but AES haven’t resolved all the contradictions. if class sizes balloon and the government drags its feet building new schools and training more teachers why shouldn’t they eventually strike if they have to force an issue?
Yes. But the primary contradiction remains to be imperialism. That is the task that cannot be equivocated on. It has primacy to all else - sometimes this means civil society is non-ideal - it’s a similar strategy to war-economy and I don’t aim to glorify that; I naturally would love to see socialism stand on its own merits and operate in good faith with other nations (so long as nations exist). But, the fall of the USSR, if nothing else, should teach us to defend our remaining AES states - each one that falls is comparable to surrenduring a century of working class struggle.
Speaking in good faith with fellow comrades, we can be critical of AES states - but what OP has done in this thread is call into question the validity of China’s DotP, and in so doing, has undermined their popular support - and this is not to be tolerated. Painting China as equivalent to a Dictatorship of the Bourgeosie is something I will not tolerate as it is no better than those who mocked the USSR as a “totalitarian d e g e n e r a t e d worker’s state” - not caring that the fall of that state would cast its working class into a period of acute struggle on such a scale that natural disasters cannot compare. I just really have lost my tolerance for people criticizing post-revolution societies from the perspective of pre-revolution society. Why fixate on other states (and for the love of all that is holy why AES states among them all) while your own capitalist-class still lords over you? I think they deserve your attention more.
unions destroyed the east block, they arent holy.
Bourgeois courts in China?
