Chapotraphouse

China's improving material conditions will do the heavy lifting for us. Life in the West will continue to get worse, life in China will continue to get better, and eventually people will shift their positions to align with that new material reality.

Ironically, politically disengaged Westerners might be easier to convince than Western """socialists""" because they're not as ideological.

The student org I had considered joining were pro-ukraine. I tried explaining euromaidan and one member accused me of being a pro Putin shill and linked me to their newspaper article written in February 2022 (incredible).

The kicker was when that same member said all countries are imperialist except North Korea and Cuba. They stopped responding to me after I stated that the DPRK directly aided Russia and is in full support of the SMO.

Trotskyism cannot even be called derivative of Marxism.

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 infuriating

Average western left org tbh

Typical tripe from those who have no idea how to actually build and maintain a real political movement, instead simply using their ideology to build up their own superiority and ego. Literally liberalism.

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.

Trotskyism is a disease

Questions based on static definitions (is X of type Y) are undialectical and a waste of time. Ultraleftists and western Marxists don’t understand dialectics and that’s why they suck at applying Marxism.

Check out this 1864 draft of Capital. Marx ponders two categories, the commodity and money, not as fixed things but as a dynamical objects which emerged in undeveloped forms and underwent a series of evolutions before they acquired all of the features capital required of them. Marx explicitly acknowledges money as a category predating capitalism. He traces how capital appropriated both commodities and money and made them into something new, just as capitalism took labor power — an obviously precapitalist category — and created out of it the proletarian working class which we have today. Nowhere in this excerpt does Marx ask such inane questions as “is this a commodity?”

Just make this argument:

1. China is by most metrics better than India.

2. China shares many characteristics with India (large Asian country that was victimized by Western imperialism)

3. 2 means that whatever minor difference between the two countries can explain 1.

Then the question becomes what singular difference between the two country causes one country to have achieved so much while another country continues to struggle. It boils down to either their economic system or their culture.

Arguing that China is capitalist means that it's the culture that makes the real difference since India is also capitalist. Chinese capitalists are apparently big-brained heirs of a 5000 year old civilization while Indian capitalists are pea-brained cow worshipers.

Either the Chinese economic system is supreme versus the Indian economic system or the Chinese people themselves are supreme versus Indian people. I am not a loser Han chauvinist, so I would make the argument that it is the economic system (ie socialism) that makes the difference.

The question of "is X country socialist?" doesn't mean a whole lot because the bar can be set somewhat arbitrarily even if a person is trying their best and not being a chauvinist or liberal. Is it socialist if there's a dictatorship of the proletariat? How do we measure it? We all know that class contradictions will exist right up until class is abolished, i.e. a future realization of actual full communist society, yet people cite a lack of class abolition as a disqualifier for a country being socialist. One could argue that no countries have ever been socialist by setting bars like "they have a market economy in some sense" or "they have foreign direct investments". Would that actually mean anything or are they setting meaningless bars? Aren't we actually all just trying to call these states socialist projects? Socialist revolutionary states developing in a different direction because they are run by socialists, by socialist parties?

Nobody can correctly argue that China does not have a vastly different history and trajectory as a "developing" nation and that this is due to its socialist governance, even if (some say because!) its governance eventually moderated class struggle and attempts to use limited capitalist relations with guard rails to build itself up. This is the only contention regarding China and socialism that can be reasonably discussed and it's just about whether a person can recognize capitalist relations and trappings can exist in a socialist state, even be common. But even then it is sidestepping the only thing that really matters, which is whether it's a socialist project by socialists attempting to build socialism in their country, and the answer is clearly yes. One can understand a dismayed person in the 80s thinking capitalist roaders had taken over, but it's not a serious position today.

Putting aside the pointlessness of the bar of "is X country socialist?", their criticisms are full of liberal propaganda and what is surely a misunderstanding of Marxist thought and imperialism.

Not expansing worldwide socialism? They mean not taking naked steps to export revolution, which yes China does not do. It still provides actual material support to other socialist states and it's building a multipolar world order where your socialist project won't get choked by blockade and sanctions by imperialists. But more importantly who said that socialism is when you export revolution? This is a question of strategy among socialists, not an existential question of whether a project is socialist. And the primary socialist project that did export revolution collapsed from its contradictions (and of course immense external pressure that has never stopped being applied to every socialist-run state).

Imperialism in Africa? I beg them to define imperialism. One wonders if they've even read Lenin. The most I've seen from such accusations is people who think imperialism is when there's foreign ownership. They neglect to remember that the reason Lenin was describing imperialism we to note that it is the catalyst for war between capitalist powers, of carving out parts of the world because profits are too low for domestic monopolies compared to the much larger profits to be made by expanding monopolies overseas. None of these things describe Chinese companies' investments in Africa, which often result in debts that are forgiven and are not negotiated at gunpoint, either through actual military flexing or via control of global finance and markets (which are themselves controlled at gunpoint). Oh, and the investments themselves are highly productive and actually benefit the common people in African countries, though of course this is on the balance and not prefecture uniform. Finally, China remains net exploited. No serious Marxist can use these false accusations of imperialism in good faith.

Regarding China developing renewables for profit:

1. This didn't happen through the anarchy of the market but through top-down industrial policy via the CPC. It has actual strategic value on multiple levels laid out by those crafting that policy and this has direct through-lines on multiple fronts in renewables production in China. And rather than attempt to make their own profits through this supposed gold mine, imperialist countries are trying to limit renewables production and instead promote oil dependency.
2. One of the basic predictions of early Marxists was that socialists in control would do capitalism (production, but also profit) better than capitalists.

Regarding the retention of capitalist dynamics within China: yeah duh everyone knows this and understands it, it is probably the only point worth considering but only because it's a good evercise in thinking about the diversity of approaches taken to socialist development. China runs an expanded version of how much capitalist relations and allowed to exist, but zero socialist states have ever abolished those relations, all have "backtracked" from positions initially forwarded by communists to push class struggle as far as they could as fast as they could. Ultimately this is a question of tactics and whether they will succeed, but socialists and fake friends of socialists love to categorically label anything outside of their own tactics as revisionist, ultra, capitalist, imperialist... and only sometimes are they correct.

Anyways sorry you had to deal with those chauvinists. Tell them to focus on their own countries' imperialism and stop worrying about China sharing productive industry and infrastructure with African countries.

this reminds me of how zara larsson said that she likes socialism a few months back but she cancelled a brand collab with huawei cause ”china is not a nice state” like in 2020.

I've been reading the comments and damn, what kind of a mess of an org are you in? Total fucking hodgepodge of incoherent ideologizing.

Imo you and your comrades are by the sound of it having issues where you confuse "socialist", "dictatorship of the proletariat", "anti-imperialist", "nice to live in" and "progressive" for semisynonymous moral categories instead of seperate political-economic categories without moral weight.

Also by instead of respecting democratic centralism and party discipline going and posting about it in public online spaces you are sorta in the wrong here imo. Instead of posting about this online you should do further investigation and discuss it further with your comrades while engaged in the work of leafletting or postering where youre less likely to be dogpiled

Anyway, the capitalist mode of production is a different thing from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The capitalist mode of production is M-C-M`, it is the laws of value and the production and circulation of commodities. "'Accumulate, accumulate' this is Moses and the Prophets" as Marx put it. The chinese economy operates, including in the state sector, on M-C-M' and on the law of value and production and circulation of commodities.

This is in contrast to the soviet union, whose plans followed M-C-M', but did not allow things to circulate based on the laws of value but instead the needs of the economic plan (and this planning structure was itself a development of the war communism compromise, not what the bolsheviks had in mind in october 1917).

And both of these are very different from Cuba's economy, which is much closer to the lower stage of communism (socialism) than any other socialist project: they have made strides towards the abolition of the urban-rural divide, the divison between manual and mental labour, the metabolic rift and the commodity form.

Whether china is a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the bourgeois is a seperate question from whether its economy is organised along capitalist lines, and this is an entirely seperate question from whether china's interests are opposed to american imperialism and from the 4th question of their poverty reduction—which, you will note, is accompanied by increased investments of capital overseas, including to buy up land and resources to export food, minerals, etc to china. Bolivian and Ethiopian peasants arent much happier if their land is stolen or waters poisoned to supply china with cheaper food and lithium.

By tying these questions together in a nebulous "is china socialist" (by which you mean "good" rather than any marxist analysis) you confuse the matter and make discussion impossible. China has reduced poverty in China during one of the greatest increases in global poverty in world history—see for example the massive land grabs and dispossesions in Africa from the 00s on.

It remains to be seen whether China will dismantle the global systems of imperialist oppression (the institutions they joined in the 90s and 00s like the imf, wto, world bank etc) to allow the global population to also stop being fucked over, or take them over and merely reform them while BRICS becomes a new G20 or OECD. It remains to be seen whether they will return to supporting revolutionaries like the USSR and Cuba, or if they will continue to trade with Israel and the Phillipines and the USA while they commit genocides and snuff out revolutions. It remains to be seen if, as the USA collapses and oyher global south countries can increase their working and living conditions, China will accept these losses. But based on how China doesnt seem to do much about the industrial abuses their companies commit overseas (thinking especially of the big mining disaster in africa a while ago), my hopes are sadly at a record low atm.

Imperialism is a world system, any participation in the global economy as a winner (and china is increasingly a winner) is participation in imperialism. You are the one deviating from lenin's theory by turning it into a set of policies a nation can choose or reject. Youve turned critical support agaisnt imperialism into uncritical support against criticism.

That said, your comrades are 100% wrong on Cuba imo, both bc of the supply situation and bc the USSR was much less helpful there than it could or should.have been (because, from Khrushchev on, the USSR also increasingly operates according to the laws of value and commodity circulation, or, as one of the leaders of the communist party of british guyana put it in the 60s when the soviets wouldnt give help developing their industry bc it wouldnt benefit soviet economy enough: "theyre just as businesslike on this [east] side of the iron curtain as the other")