Like the title says, I’m new to Marxism and have only read a couple works relating to socialism. I don’t think I know enough about Marxism to firmly define myself into any “type” (although council communism sounds pretty interesting.) Second Thought and Yugopnik are what got me into Marxism, but more recently I’ve been listening to Socialism For All’s audiobooks and reaction videos while driving. 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. 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. People excuse the private property and “restricted” capitalism as necessary evils until China has the conditions to create socialism, but 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, 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. (I also have concerns about privacy and the fact that access to the outside internet is restricted, although that’s not really related to this topic.) I’d stumbled across this reddit thread a while ago, and while I know reddit isn’t the best place for serious discussion, I think that the person in the video does make good points, as do the people in both the r/TankieTheDeprogram and r/ultraleft threads and I honestly don’t know what to think or who to take seriously in that discussion. I would appreciate if anyone could give me a genuine response to these concerns, thanks.

Edit: Thank you all so much for the responses! I’ve learned quite a bit reading them, although I haven’t had a chance to check out the links people have sent yet. I’ll try to update this post with any new questions and respond to comments whenever I have time.

  • Soot [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    25·
    5 days ago

    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!

    • CaptainRipcord@lemmygrad.ml
      11·
      4 days ago

      I just want to add also that Chinese people are super chill about it and about being patient. Every party member I’ve met in China has been like “Yeah, we’ve been here for 5,000 years, so we can just wait as long as things are improving” lol