this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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Remember... China has more than 300 billionaire parasites, meaning China harbours the second-largest billionaire parasite infestation on the planet after the US.
Remember that next time your local tankies start blathering about (so-called) "AES" again.
"China Executes 14 Billionaires in 8 Years, Culture News Reports"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-23/china-executes-14-billionaires-in-8-years-culture-news-reports
https://archive.ph/SLDDg
Sounds like they have their billionaire class under control. Over an 8 year period they executed something like nearly 5% but definitely more than 2.5% of the billionaire class for criminality.
You project your understanding of the lawless billionaires of the West to China when their system simply does not work the same. Chinese billionaires face significant consequences for malfeasance and their class is closely controlled by the Party which they aren't not even allowed to join. Their class is only allowed to join the non-voting advisory body called the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CCPCC) where they can make legislative proposals for the CPC to review.
So to review as a class their political influence is subordinated to the workers party and when they break the law they are held accountable, they are even executed for serious crimes.
The billionaire class of China is incomparable to the lawless corrupt class of criminal billionaires that we have in the West
"USA put the Enron guys in jail, it's proof they have their billionaire class under control"
Is there some substantial way in which billionaires in China have political power and conform a ruling class? Because I figure in the US billionaires are the ruling class, the president is one, yet in China billionaires are always scared that they are at the people's mercy and can have it all taken away at any point.
Billionaires in USA are the same way, or did you fail to notice the parade of billionaires prostrating themselves on Trump and kissing the ring? The mere existence of Billionaires is evidence of a failed system, and of definite non-existence of socialism.
You think in the US the state controls the billionaires?
Also I'm pretty sure Cuba is still socialist even though billionaires exist outside of Cuba. Hell, some of those billionaires might somehow own shares in enterprises that exist in Cuba, which would mean there's workers in Cuba being exploited by capitalist billionaires. Does that make Cuba no longer socialist? Would it become not-socialist if the billionaires were Cuban instead (which would be preferable to being exploited by foreign imperialists, by the way)?
I think It's a mutually beneficial relationship. The state can hurt the billionaires, and they can hurt the state. Both of these come at a cost to oneself, so they prefer cooperating for their class interest. Like Chinese billionaires do with their party partners. It's only the ones who cause too much of a ruckus due to greed that get cut down. The others are coddled, like every other capitalist project.
Yes.
I guess I don't think you are totally incorrect but this is a bad analysis regardless. You're painting this as if it was a totally reciprocal and symmetric situation. The US state is totally subservient to the billionaire class: this is evident in its financial policy, foreign policy, down to the way elections are run. The actions you may point to as counterexamples are either capitalist infighting (e.g. the tech capitalists cannibalizing media, monopolization) or the state pushing one capitalist in line to protect the collective interests of all the others. In any long term frame, the US state does nothing but protect its capitalists. That's what the state exists to do.
These 2 sentences are an error that can only be made by missing the forest for the trees as you did in the beginning of your reply. Do you really think the PRC operates with the same guiding principles and historical outlook as the imperialist US state? Looking at the news must be very confusing for you!
Also, you reject Cuban socialism? Do you think socialism is supposed to exist in the real world or is it just for intellectual masturbation?
I don't think my analysis is wrong. The state and capitalists are and have always been partners, this is why you cannot defeat one without defeating the other. This is why the so-called "AES" like the PRC are still, ultimately, just another form of capitalism.
The fact that different capitalist experiments can take infinite amount of forms, some with more human face, and some with less, doesn't make them less capitalist.
I think it's supposed to exist in the real world and that it currently doesn't. I don't label places which are not it, "socialism" just because they say nice things while doing capitalist exploitation.
But that's not what global south socialism is. If there is a global project to establish the sovereignty of exploited and impoverished nations, first with a combined effort of the national bourgeoisie with the workers and the peasantry, socialists across the world should support it. That's what's already happened and you can clearly see that the power the national bourgeoisies gained in the global south after throwing off the yoke of colonialism was either itself significantly weakened through socialist revolution, or it grew to the point of facilitating continued extraction as neocolonies. In the case of the nations that had socialist leadership curb the power of the new bourgeoisie (Cuba, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Tanzania, etc) none of them were able to simply do away with capitalist exploitation entirely. Demanding that they do such a thing is ahistorical, and it misses the point of their revolutions as being, principally, about taking political power into the hands of the people and away from colonizers. Should all of those projects be condemned because they didn't have a time machine to jump 800 years in the future to the point where they could avoid all those problems entirely?
It's completely non-actionable and facile to apply criticism of every socialist nation on the basis that some form or another of exploitation still exists inside of them. If there was a way to have the productive forces to get everyone fed, housed, and healed overnight then sure, you're totally right! It's abhorrent that some workers in Cuba work in private businesses that make profit off their surplus value! They should simply abolish the value-commodity form!
I am not condemning them. I am merely saying that they're not socialist. Struggle to throw off the yoke of colonialism is commendable, whatever form it takes, whether liberal capitalist, or nationalist or state capitalist. It's still capitalism though and no matter how much benefit it brings initially due to the liberalism and industrialization, it will inevitably degenerate to the detriments of those under it's yoke. I just have my eyes open and suggest those people agitate towards socialism. I don't tell them to just "trust the plan" just because their exploiters are flying a red flag.
But their exploiters don't fly a red flag. The state which flies a red flag, the democratically elected governments with extremely high approval ratings, are obviously not the exploiters.
If you go to Cuba and ask around, the problems people might have with the government are probably gonna be related to censorship, not exploitation. The blame for people's economic woes will, unless you talk with a very confused person, be placed on the US blockade. It might be true that for the Cubans who work in a private business, they're being exploited by their bosses, but that's really not a primary concern because the conflict between countries is a much larger issue for everyone in the island. That's true in most of the global south, really, the exploitation done by the owners of little enterprises is very small compared the the larger problem of a nation's resources and sovereignty being trespassed. Those are conditions that make the abolition of capitalist exploitation impossible.
I think that it makes sense for the people in the global south socialist countries to keep their trust in their democratic governments. They're individually incapable of launching some kind of assault on US empire to bring it down, so this is just necessarily a slow process where more places in the world will slowly break away from the US, and the empire will collapse in time. Until then, would it really make sense for anyone to light molotov cocktails in Beijing, Havana, or Caracas? You realize that's exactly what the CIA wants?
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