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!
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.