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 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.
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"
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.
China today looking instead like Cuba today would have been a catastrophic failure resulting in millions of excessive deaths and untold suffering, but you're just casually throwing it away here like that's an obvious small price to pay for what? Appeasing western marxists? It wouldn't appease the ones we're talking about who don't even view Cuba as a successful socialist project.
Millions of excess deaths from what?? Like genuinely baffled, what do you think would cause millions of excess deaths if China held course instead of changing tack? They would be in a better position than either Iran or Cuba, considering chinas supplies of natural resources. Cuba and Iran are both doing pretty damn well, especially considering the sieges both have developed under.
This comment chain began with:
And everything I've said so far has been under the assumption that we were still talking about the same thing i.e. you defending supposed "Marxists" who believe that every real world example of socialism is either completely impotent or collapses into revisionism. Including Cuba. If that's not what you're defending, then you aren't even having the same conversation as the rest of us in this comment chain. Do you sort by /Chat and not pay attention to parents?
as you can see, i was criticising the "if we aren't winning I give up" logic here, not whether any socialist project is socialist or not
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
Sorry if this is a little vague, I am trying to argue "for" a position that is incoherent and inconsistent as far as I'm concerned, let's call it the "western chauvinist left" position, that particular strange of vaguely sort of ultra-left but oddly demsoc kind of "leftist" who loves ever socialist experiment except the ones that had any successes, and refuses to learn the history of any AES.
The sort of person who knows nothing about the USSR except that it "failed" and isn't interested in actually understanding the nuances of why it was destroyed and what led up to that, only interested in lumping in all AES alongside the USSR and saying they are all on the same path to destruction. While also bizarrely arguing for "socialism" which I take to mean proletarian control of the state, but without any sort of way to prevent the same sort of "revisionism" that they claim is responsible for the downfall of all AES, just insisting that it won't happen "when they do their revolution" (but like, never actually organise for it, at most they maybe go to a protest every now and then, and their org is more of a social club than anything actually revolutionary).
I realise I'm just venting about a vague attitude that I have to deal with a lot than I am about any actually specific idea, most of the people like this I know would consider themselves an ML, not a Maoist or anything, just "Socialist with CIA characteristics" kind of person who will happily regurgitate any lies they have fed about AES and refuse to look further, even to understand "how they went wrong" better.
Your addendum is the most important point here, the sort of person I'm talking about despises nuance and understanding and would much rather paint all AES with a broad brush, instead of looking at their different models and what worked and what didn't work. Barely one step above just calling them "authoritarian" (and sometimes literally doing exactly that).