you said its bad that china will have socialist imperialist hegemon but at the same time theyre bad because china does not support (i.e fund and buy weapons for) socialist movements worldwide.

truth is, china has no responsibility to fund revolutions and unorganic revolutions do not last for long.

much of eastern europe was ruled by reactionary anti jew anti slav anti worker anti woman rulers and they joined WW2 with nazi germany. USSR then wins the war and elevates the area to sapience. the socialist states crumble because of many reasons, one of them being improper denazification.

only the nation can properly clean themselves of reactionary sentiments and foreigners should not get involved. it will not work.

i saw a chinese person basically explain that china cant do a revolution in other countries because if something emerges from inside the egg it is a new life, but if it emerges from the inside, the egg cracks.

Why would any kind of leftist not like China in a world dominated by western imperialism? It is such a western leftist thing to dislike China lol.

People excuse the private property and “restricted” capitalism as necessary evils

You are already off on the wrong foot. You take Marxism to be a moralist philosophy that states private property is morally wrong therefore should all be made illegal, and you find it problematic that China has not done that, and then see people explaining why as “excusing” it as a “necessary evil.”

Marxism is not a moralist philosophy. The treatment of private property is not that it is morally repugnant. Marxism is a branch of scientific research that attempts to analyze the development of human societies objectively, using evidence and material analysis, to form models of it, as well as to use those models to predict how it will develop in the future.

The treatment of private property originates from Marx’s analysis that the material basis of private property is in the decentralization of production, but that markets have a natural tendency to centralize production as the production process becomes more and more complicated. Marx referred to this centralization of production as “socialization.”

Centralized production is a different foundation than decentralized production, and it is less socially stable when paired with private ownership, because you end up with an extraordinarily tiny number of people meticulously controlling everything in society.

Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised. This is something quite different from the old free competition between manufacturers, scattered and out of touch with one another, and producing for an unknown market…Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.

(Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism)

Marx made a prediction, based on this analysis, that this social instability will grow and grow as enterprises grow larger in scale, and eventually will become so socially unstable that society will not be able to proceed any further unless the contradiction is resolved. Given that the socialization of production is a natural consequence of the immense scale of production due to its technological complexity, Marx did not believe you could always “bust up” large enterprises without destroying their technological foundations (at least the ones which became large through fair means of actually producing the best product). Thus, you instead have to change the ownership structure around it, i.e. to make it public and no longer private.

Why do I mention all of this?

Because the moralist analysis say: “private property is morally evil, therefore we should make it all illegal.” This mentality leads people to think socialism is just about passing a law that says “all private property is now illegal, and any country which doesn’t do this is evil betrayer of ‘true’ socialism.”

But in Marx’s analysis, there is no moral condemnation of private property, but instead the expropriation of industries exists for a very particular purpose, which is to resolve the contradiction between the socialization of production and the privatization of appropriation. There is thus a necessary condition that is a prerequisite to justify expropriating industries: that the industry is sufficiently socialized.

You see, if you nationalize a section of the economy which is dominated by small enterprise, where production is not socialized and it is not already operating on a national scale, then you are requiring the state to take over a section of the economy which the infrastructure and technology objectively, materially does not even exist yet to operate it at a national scale. You will introduce a contradiction between socialized appropriate and private production.

The moralist position ends up introducing policies which are antithetical to Marx’s own analysis and would be predicted to fail. Indeed, Lenin in “A Tax in Kind” said that nationalizing the small producers would be “economic suicide” to the party that attempted it, and that in “Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder” said that you just have to “learn to live alongside them” (the small producers). In the Manifesto Marx is clear that you cannot nationalize all the small producers instantly, but can only nationalize the largest enterprises, and then promote rapid economic development, because this will encourage the development of more national giants and allow you to extend expropriations very gradually over a long period of time.

The Marxist vision of a classless society is not one where there is no private businesses because having a private business is illegal and you will be shot if you try to start one. No, it is a society where the publicly owned national enterprises are so technologically developed and efficient that if you tried to start a private business, you would have no chance of competing and would just go bankrupt. It would not be laws that prevent you from starting your own private business, but the material conditions in the real world.

People complain that “only” 40% of China’s GDP output comes from the public sector, but they forget that 60% of China’s GDP output is from small-to-medium sized enterprises. These kinds of things should not be nationalized to begin with. People often bring up the NEP but it’s not relevant. It is just basic Marxian analysis 101 that it makes zero sense to nationalize producers which are not already operating at a national scale.

What the USSR implemented was ultimately a wartime economy for the purpose of preparing for war against Germany. It is not how Marxist generally understood how the development of socialism would proceed, and is largely an invention of Stalin, which is why it is referred to in Chinese literature as the “Stalin Model” (斯大林模式‌). It is ultimately a revision of classical Marxism that many people copied because for a short time it seemed to work, but that was only when the economy was focused primarily on heavy industry.

When it came time to shift into light industry, they ran into exactly the kind of contradiction that classical Marxism would predict, which is that the state simply lacked the material infrastructure to satisfy all the light industry demand on a national scale, and naturally you had black markets of small producers arise which tried to fill in the gap themselves, but due to Soviet law, they had to constantly crush the small producers that only spontaneously arose to fill the gaps in their own system. This was, again, something Lenin warned about, that you should not waste time trying to crush the small producers that only arise due to your own economic inefficiency.

This, however, contributed to enormous corruption, because, on a material level, their economy was simply not compatible with production on a national scale for all products, and so the small producers were unavoidable and would continually spontaneously return. Since they remained illegal, they became part of the black markets, an unregulated secondary economy which, already in violation of the law, would use their influence to try and bring down the Soviet government.

This is something the PCC in Cuba commented on when they reformed their law as well, that the small producers always existed and the change in law was merely recognizing their existence, and that the purpose of doing so is to allow for them to be properly regulated and controlled, which is more difficult when you just declare them illegal and pretend they don’t exist. There was objectively, materially speaking, always private enterprise in the USSR, Cuba, and China, just written legislation that remained in denial of it.

From an outsider’s perspective, I

From an outsider’s perspective, I consider myself someone who knows very little about China. I’ve learned a lot more than I knew before since my time on lemmygrad, but there is still a lot I’m unclear on or only have a vague impression of.

How much do you actually know about China? Have you been to China? Have you heard directly from Chinese marxists and anti-imperialists in China? Have you examined what China’s leaders are doing and saying in detail, or are only operating on vague telephone game impressions?

Western empire propaganda conditions people to look at AES states with extra suspicion, prejudice, and unrealistic (and double) standards. On top of some good ole’ racism. It tends to start from the conclusion that AES states are all or any of: corrupted, a failure, oppressive. Then it looks for vague data points to support this narrative (or, failing that, makes shit up). “Somebody was treated poorly in an AES state! Look at how bad it is! It’s not fully realized communism yet! Look at how bad it is! It’s communist! Look at how bad it is!” Etc. And notice the contradictory examples there because that is something the western empire will do. It will argue both from an anti-communist perspective and from a purely theoretical pro-communist perspective against “communists in practice failing to do communism right.” In this way, it attacks communism from multiple angles. From the “right” and from the “left”.

The empire’s goal is to wreck solidarity, drive people away from practical proven revolutionary solutions, and put them in an academic corner cleansed of revolutionary organizing where they can crow about how communist revolutions were never pure enough.

I decided to respond this way since others have already provided a myriad of information sources on the subject, as a more general point about interrogating how you view socialist projects (aka: AES states) and how you think about information you encounter about them. The empire, and it is one empire that we are talking about (the western one), is ruthless and shameless when it comes to lying. I could say lying about its “enemies”, but often its “enemies” are peoples who don’t even want to be enemies with it in the first place and would rather coexist in peace.

It’s good that you’re asking questions, and it’s healthy to also be asking, what do I even know to begin with on this subject? If the subject was biology and I studied it in bits and pieces, am I now qualified to judge how effective career biologists are at their jobs? The point here is not to kowtow to anyone calling themself a marxist because “they know more.” The point is to take seriously the nature of decades of a people practicing communism and how much depth there is involved vs. some podcasters on the internet weighing in from the outside.

We have so much to learn from places like China, Cuba, and other socialist projects. Our task is not to figure out to what degree we should be condemning or praising them, but to figure out what we can learn from them and implement where we are, so that we can build a better world together. Not to say condemning or praising shouldn’t ever happen, but it’s often beside the point. The primary point is to be able to enact revolutionary goals and that requires depth of practice and study, not superficial passing of judgment of existing socialist projects.

Socialism itself is a transitional status between capitalism and communism. By definition, socialism contains elements of capitalism and elements of communism, as it gradually turns from one to the other. The existence of private property does not make China capitalist, just like the existence of public property does not make the United States socialist. Socialism is a form of society where the working classes control the state, and public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, ie rising and dominant. Both of these apply to the PRC, ergo it is socialist.

Socialism 4 All is an Ultra. China is not imperialist, and theories of social imperialism arose during the Sino-Soviet split to try to justify supporting one socialist power over the other.

The bit about communism is that it depends on incredibly developed productive forces. The bit about markets is that they are pretty good at stitching together underdeveloped industries and small scale production into large scale production. China leverages markets for development and highly competitive industries to help create the conditions for effective planned economy. This is the socialist market economy. The soviet NEP was shortened because the USSR desperately needed to prepare for war, not because this is the “ideal form of socialism.” As @pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml said in their top-level comment, this is based on classic Marxist analysis of the role of private property and marketization as it relates to socialization of production and distribution.

All in all, I think you need to ask yourself why socialism is scientific. What about China makes it “non-socialist?”

https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#is-china-state-capitalist

Welcome :) Other people have addressed your questions pretty well. I’d like to just address one bit:

I have doubts about whether China’s still even working towards socialism or whether the Chinese proletariat actually hold power over the bourgousie. China doesn’t support communist movements internationally

I also have concerns about privacy and the fact that access to the outside internet is restricted

I’m a staunch supporter of China, I went there for some time, met a lot of people, and had a fuckin’ great time! But I would absolutely acknowledge these as reasonable concerns. There is debate here (and, well, in China) as to how much China should/will export the revolution, how quickly it should push to overcome markets, precisely how it should be democratised, etc. There are books’ worth of arguments to be had, but I think the TL;DR is

• China is standing in opposition to a global capitalist hegemony, so it’s forced to take a more pragmatic stance to misinformation and political manipulation than is ideal, and
• that China is progressing faster than the West in basically every metric, so why change strategy when its winning?

This being said, I think they continue to show very good signs of making good progress, such as a recent country-wide change to mandate worker representation on private company boards, and strengthening legal protection from LGBTQ discrimination, also in 2021 they improved privacy rights with their Civil Code and a Personal Information Protection Law . Beyond the obvious elections, Chinese democracy is very widespread and complex, so I won’t go into it, but there has been focus on improvement participation too, see the recent expansion of a system called “Contact Points of Grassroots Participation”.

Just wanted to acknowledge that many points you raise that are active discussion on the left, so you’re not alone in those worries. But also that China is making… a lot of great progress in these areas, and these improvements are simply never acknowledged or reported on. And reports of their issues are just hugely overexaggerated compared to reality, so just be skeptical of your underlying assumptions!

I’ll try to answer some questions you may have.

You don’t reach socialism by pressing a button. I recommend reading Deng Xiaoping’s essays on the market reforms in China. You need to create the conditions for socialism to come about. The only way to do that is to improve your population’s material conditions. “Better a poor communist than a rich capitalist” is fundamentally wrong, because you can’t be a poor communist. There’s no such thing. Communism is the stage you reach when society has reached a post-abundance stage.

And very importantly, you can’t ignore the conditions that China was and is operating under. China had a fall out with the USSR, was at odds with the West, and had nearly a billion people to care for. If they hadn’t industrialized fast enough, they’d be another India today. I’m not saying that industrialization didn’t introduce economic exploitation, but the choice was either that, or being a backwater low level factory for Western exploitation.

China has now reached the stage where its population is in a good spot, it has a strong industrial base, and it has the largest economy in the world. Hence, ever since Xi became the general secretary, the focus shifted from rapid expansion of industry to the refining of existing base to clear out capitalist influence and undoing Jintao’s mistakes of letting capitalists into the party.

For all its merits, China isn’t perfect, but they’re building towards Socialism. The best evidence for this to me, is the flight of millionaires and billionaires in China is the highest in the world, both in absolute and relative terms. Conversely, US is still the desired location for global capital and Bourgeoise.

With regards to China’s inaction with international movements, China has made it clear that they will never interfere in other countries’ affairs. It learned from the USSR’s mistakes. When you force socialism on people, all it does is alienate them further. They see it as social imperialism, because a foreign system is being forced on them, even if it’s materially better for them. Socialism has to come from the grassroots. It has to come from below, not above.

The USSR used the NEP to industrialize fast, because it had breathing room with most of the capitalist world engaged in an intra capitalist war. Despite that, it still faced a lot of attacks from all sides. Both economic and physical. White army was heavily supported by the West. And the USSR failed in one crucial aspect, its population never had consumer goods. They had great lives and economic development, but not enough consumer goods, since the USSR heavily focused on military to fight the West, neglecting regular people’s wants. This helped capitalist propaganda spread faster, creating reactionary elements in society.

I personally wish China was more like the USSR, but the truth is, USSR isn’t around anymore, and the way it operated also has a large hand in that. China learned from the USSR’s mistakes, and now it’s more powerful than the USSR ever was.

Besides, China accepts materialism, not idealism. They’re not trying to prove socialism is better than capitalism. They already know it’s a fact, and sooner or later, all countries will come to accept it. China is just building towards Socialism, because they know that’s what the future is.

Consider India vs China; if China is capitalist then it is the greatest economic model to exist. If they are both considered capitalist then there is no explanation of India’s poverty that does not end up leading to “Indians are genetically inferior”, and since the latter is clearly wrong then it maybe worthwhile reading:

Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (2017), 60 min - https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/

I would also strongly recommend Why the World Needs China by Kyle Ferrano, and the rest of Losurdo’s works starting with:

• Flight from History
• Class Struggle
• Liberalism.

Best of luck

(Added - Even a superficial understanding of dialectics would consider this: if pro-social structures such as universal healthcare van exist in a capitalist country then captialist structures can exist in a socialist country. Socialism is neither egalitarianism nor workerism nor populism and those distinctions are important to understand why a vanguard of scientific socialists are a thing)

interesting points about how China could become “social imperialist” and succeed the US/NATO

Please tell me how you or this youtuber think this will come about. Taking a time period like the previous 5 or 10 years, how has China advanced its supposed goal of social imperialism since then?

From an outsider’s perspective, I don’t consider the current China socialist because of the fact that private property and many other capitalist elements still exist within it, but I do appreciate how much it has been able to develop over the past few decades, like poverty reduction and massive infrastructure projects that wouldn’t be possible with typical liberal democracies.

For me flipping it on its head helped me understand this. In many capitalist states, especially in europe, the bourgeoisie had to make concessions to the proletariat in order to not have them flee to the USSR. Or use them as counterrevolutionary propaganda “see how good our workers have it, just as good as you plus bananas and modern cars, dont you want that as well??”.

This is why a lot of european nations, even though they have never had a socialist mode of production, have rather good worker rights, comparatively good healthcare (compared with other capitalist nations e.g. USA), access to kindergardens, rent assistance programs etc. There even are housing cooperatives here in Germany, these are socialist policies under capitalism! This was the ruling class making concessions out of necessity in order to keep their position and pacify the workers. And it worked really really well, to this day workers in Germany for instance think that this is just how their country is because their system works better than the others and will defend it. But the main means of production remain firmly in the hands of the bourgeoisie and no one will claim that these nations are anything but capitalist. They can at any point start strangling the working class and indeed we are currently moving in this direction.

Now in China the dominant class is the proletariat, but for various reasons that others can explain better they still need a bourgeoisie. Stuff like pacifying their bourgeoisie so they don’t revolt, or flee or destroy the MoP they possess. Or allowing for more consumer goods and having a free market under state supervision rather than a black market working illegally. However the main modes of production (logistics network for instance) remain under the control of the worker controlled state and therefore the proletariat. That is, at any point the proletariat can start strangling the owning class and indeed we can also see a movement in this direction, for instance mandating worker councils and harsh sentences for billionaires and corrupt officials when they start to work against the common interest.

In his reaction video to The Deprogram’s China Episode, he makes some interesting points about how China could become “social imperialist” and succeed the US/NATO as the new imperialist global hegemon, among some other things.

I mean, this is just a hypothetical. China’s investment in Africa certainly doesn’t look like some hypothetical imperialism in contrast to the very real imperialism of the West like controlling monetary policy with the CFA franc or funding Islamist or other separatist groups like M23. French companies operating in Senegal don’t even pay taxes to Senegal even as they vacuum all the surplus value of overexploited Senegalese workers and send them to France.

China doesn’t support communist movements internationally, and the liberalized economy has gone on far longer than the NEP in the soviet union despite both being created for the same reason, and I can’t seem to find a good reason why it’s lasted this long.

Early 20th century Tsarist Russia was a (declining) imperialist power while the Qing dynasty during the Century of Humiliation was a semi-colonized semi-feudal society full of junkies addicted to opium peddled by European imperialists. China had a lot more to catch up to.

I’d stumbled across this reddit thread a while ago, and while I know reddit isn’t the best place for serious discussion

Don’t bother with Reddit. The sincere socialists on that platform mostly left after /c/chapotraphouse got banned. The people still around are just useless radlibs and controlled opposition ultras who can’t organize a bake sake irl. Also, leftcoms are in practice Western chauvinists. Just search what they have to say about Hamas or the IRI, and it ain’t pretty. I’m talking about completely unhinged shit like “Gazan imperialism”.

I don’t have the time to fully engage with this rn and I apologize for that but this is a list of links commented by Dessalines that I found useful

The PRC is a mixed economy, with the planned socialist sector predominating, and a smaller capitalist sector.

• The backbone of the economy is state ownership and socialist planning. 24 / 25 of the top revenue companies are state-owned and planned. 70% of the top 500 companies are State-owned. 1, 2 The largest bank, construction, electricity, and energy companies in the world, are CPC controlled entities, subject to the 5 year plans laid out by the central committee.
• Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
• Is modern day china communist? Is it staying true to communist values?
• Didn’t China go Capitalist with Deng Xiaoping? Didn’t it liberalize its economy? Is China’s drastic decrease in poverty a result of the increase in free market capitalist policies?
• Is the CPC committed to communism?
• The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
• The myth of Chinese state capitalism. Did Deng really betray Chinese socialism?
• Tsinghua University- Is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics real socialism, or is it state Capitalism?
• Isn’t China revisionist for having a capitalist sector of the economy, and working with capitalists? Why isn’t it fully planned like the USSR was?
• Castro on why both China and Vietnam are socialist countries.
• Roderic Day - China has billionaires.
• What is socialism with Chinese characteristics (SWCC)?
• How is SWCC not revisionist? How is it any different from Gorbachev’s market reforms?, 2
• Domenico Losurdo - is China state capitalist?, 2
• Did Lenin say anything about Market Socialism, or productivism?
• Vijay Prashad - Is China capitalist?
• Why do Chinese billionaires keep ending up in prison? Why are many billionaires and CEOs going missing? China sentences Ex-Chairman of a major bank, guilty of embezzling ~$100M USD, to death in 2019.

No, its trade and infrastructure projects in Africa are not imperialist

• Debunking the claim that “China is Imperialist”
• The demeanor of Chinese leaders (Xi Jinping) vs Western leaders (Nancy Pelosi) towards African nations. One of the reasons why African nations favor China instead of the West. Full video here
• An African leader on the hypocrisy of those saying China is imperialist.
• China africa panel: if you want actual infrastructure, you go to China, not the west.
• Is China really imperialist? What’s the difference between what Europe did to Africa, and what China is doing?
• Five imperialist myths about China’s role in Africa.
• Evo Morales - Why China and Russia aren’t imperialist, but the US is.
• US air force veteran Bill Brown breaks down the history of anti-chinese propaganda, and why China is not colonialist like the west.
• Yanis Varoufakis on China’s foreign policy dealings with Greece and Africa.
• The chinese debt trap is a myth.
• China writes off $6M in debt to rwanda, provides another $60M in grants.
• China forgives over $78M in Cameroon debt.
• China writes off $36m Mozambican debt.
• China writes off substantial amount of Angola debt.
• After a group of Guangdong landlords evicted a group of Africans, the CPC arrested them, apologized to the African Union, paid for hotels for the migrants, passed a series of anti-discrimination laws, and spent weeks going to all the restaurants, landlords, and taxis to warn them of the law.
• Nato’s new enemy: the CPC.
• The western media’s China hysteria.

Lots of answers already so I would put the problem differently; ask yourself why left communists only ever seem to be finding an audience online to push their message onto.

We’ve covered all of this territory many times, so in case no one’s in the mood to retread all of it today, I’ll suggest a few starting points:

• Is China Capitalist?
  • Roderic Day, China Has Billionaires
  • Domenico Losurdo, Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
  • The Atlantic, Why Do Chinese Billionaires Keep Ending Up in Prison?
  • Vijay Prashad, 📺 Is China Capitalist?
• Is China Imperialist?
  • The Atlantic, The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
  • Rainer Shea, Categorically Debunking the Claim that China is Imperialist
  • Five imperialist myths about China’s role in Africa
• Gabriel Rockhill, 🎧 Understanding Siege Socialism