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!
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:
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.