Real western chauvinism hours
If you want to talk about socialism, let us not forget what socialism achieved in China. At one time it was the land of hunger, poverty, disasters. Today there is none of that. Today China can feed, dress, educate, and care for the health of 1.2 billion people.
I think China is a socialist country, and Vietnam is a socialist nation as well. And they insist that they have introduced all the necessary reforms in order to motivate national development and to continue seeking the objectives of socialism.
There are no fully pure regimes or systems. In Cuba, for instance, we have many forms of private property. We have hundreds of thousands of farm owners. In some cases they own up to 110 acres. In Europe they would be considered large landholders. Practically all Cubans own their own home and, what is more, we welcome foreign investment. But that does not mean that Cuba has stopped being socialist.
Castro in 2004:
Socialism will definitively remain the only real hope of peace and survival of our species. This is precisely what the Communist Party and the people of the People’s Republic of China have irrefutably demonstrated. They demonstrated at the same time, as Cuba and other brotherly countries have shown, that each people must adapt their strategy and revolutionary objectives to the concrete conditions of their own country and that there are not two absolutely equal socialist revolutionary processes. From each of them, you can take the best experiences and learn from each of their most serious mistakes.
China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. I do not hesitate to say that it is already the main engine of the world economy. In what time? In only 83 years after the foundation of its glorious Communist Party and 55 years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Fidel in 2014:
Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.
Socialism with billionaires is indeed curious
40 years ago China had the statistics of sub suharan Africa
China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in a generation
From being illiterate, backward farmers still binding the feet of women and a million other backward characteristics to a space faring nation
Without exploiting a single colony as the imperialists did
Now im not a communist that believes China is socialist right now (though I am sympathetic to the arguements made) however China under CPC leadership has moved mountains on Earth
And the Chinese Communist Party acknowledges the many contradictions within Chinese society
So im all for a comradely debate on China…Only when Westerners acknowledge CPCs achievements
You can recognize all of the above and have them not be socialist, it really isn’t complicated. There’s not much materially different between how Singapore runs their country than what China does.
The interlocking of state and economy with limited judicial oversight is an incredibly effective way to uplift an entire country.
There are a number reasons for the western left to view China favorably, but they don’t really have much to do with them being socialist.
Hell, ask political leaders in China what they are and they’ll tell you that they view themselves as a social democracy that arrived to that point but in the opposite direction.
That’s I think the reason western leftists are skeptical more than anything.
There is a lot more than just that. From the outside everything about it looks insanely sketchy. I know how most of it is justified but I’m very skeptical still. I don’t think I’d stop being skeptical until the promised transition from capitalism begins. I really hope it works out.
As a newer socialist I don’t entirely understand whats going on in china but that part does confuse me. I heard it was a transition phase but I still don’t think I entirely understand what that entails.
they were one of the poorest countries in the world back then (around $156 per capita gdp when the reforms were enacted), and the party decided they needed to allow the return of capital to develop their productive forces before having the appropriate conditions for socialism
bear in mind that allowing the return of capital (that is, the existence of capital and market forces within your country) is not the same as allowing the return of capitalism (which is a system like ours where capitalists wield actual decision-making power, something i’m sure even the critics of the CPC would agree is definitely not the case in china)
this is not a brand new take either, the basis of the whole thing is very similar to lenin’s NEP and i don’t see anyone here being skeptical about lenin’s motives
it’s also so weird to see people arguing whether china is a socialist or a capitalist country when it’s basically neither and they even admit it themselves - “socialism with chinese characteristics” is just their way of saying “we’re not a capitalist country, because capital isn’t making any key decisions on how the country works; but we haven’t reached the ideal point to transition into actual socialism either”, that’s what the “chinese characteristics” part is supposed to mean
(edit for a typo)
Now I’ll preface this by saying I haven’t actually studied any Dengist theory.
But from what I understand Dengism is effectively a synthesis of Marxist-Leninism and the orthodox Marxism of the original Social Democratic Party of Germany or Mensheviks. It would definitely be considered a right-deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, probably the closest to a “Bukharinist” position I think you could see.
Original SPD, the Mensheviks, and other orthodox Marxists in the early 20th century dogmatically believed that in order to achieve communism a country MUST experience a period of bourgeois liberal capitalist development. Hence why SPD and the Mensheviks turned against the more radical left-wing parties like the Spartacists/KPD and the Bolsheviks, respectively. But a problem that has consistently plagued countries where actually existing communism has successfully taken hold, such as the USSR and the PRC, is a severe shortage of indigenous capital. The answer Stalin arrived at to solve this problem in the USSR was effectively to force march industrialization and modernization through a complex economic model that skimmed profit off agricultural revenue combined with economic planning and brutal coercion. But this model can only be so successful - it is likely to stagnate a la an S-Curve and requires an immense amount of resource self-sufficiency (for example, Cuba and the DPRK have great difficulty maintaining this economic model).
So the PRC, facing economic problems in the 1970s and being increasingly recognized internationally as part of the United States’ Cold War strategy to exploit the Sino-Soviet split, decided reform was necessary after Mao’s death. So Deng and his successors decided to liberalize the economy, but to maintain the Communist Party’s ironclad monopoly on political power. They are effectively doing capitalism in order to develop the country and raise their population out of poverty a la the archaic Marxist orthodoxy, but while maintaining the Leninist Dictatorship of the Proletariat. I must insistently point out that the Chinese model is NOT neoliberal (IIRC David Harvey has revised his once-hostile position regarding China in the 15 years since A Brief History of Neoliberalism was published). It is arguably more accurate to say that the Chinese are doing Keynesianism. Their economic growth is heavily based on state-directed investment; they still practice comprehensive economic planning; most key industries are state-owned; and the Communist Party does indeed ensure that the gains of their incredible economic growth fall in part to the working class (As in, you know that stat neoliberals like to bandy about regarding “declining global poverty”? That’s almost entirely because of China. If you erase them from the statistics, the trend reverses) . This has, however, been allowed to happen because of the brutal rise in exploitation of the labor of the Chinese working class, despite their material gains - to attract Western investment, one of the things the Party had to do was shutter a lot of stable, heavily-unionized industry in northern China in favor of a much more “flexible” neoliberal-style labor market.
Thanks for the in depth answer, this actually nearly perfectly answered my question, I have one more though. You said that the progress was allowed to happen because of the brutal rise in exploitation of the labor of the Chinese working class, so how is china going to deal with that now? I thought I heard somewhere that companies were moving manufacturing away from china because there were cheaper options in nearby countries. Is china doing something to combat the worker exploitation going on?
They are still capitalist, but their government is structured in such a way that capitalists are subservient to the government and not the other way around, and they are insanely strict about ensuring it stays that way. It’s also illegal to criticize certain core tenants of their version of socialism, and they are quite strict about enforcing that.
Ok and that’s so they can transtion to socialism once they have built up enough industry?
That’s essentially true in Singapore too, and singapore doesn’t consider itself to be communist in the slightest.
China is a social democracy with a more centralized power structure. They’re like Singapore, an authoritarian country ran by technocrats with meaningful links between state and economy.
It’s just they reached the point of social democracy by moving society to the right rather than moving society to the left as was done in western europe.
There are other reasons to support China as a western leftist that are unique to them that pertain to geopolitics.
hmmm, how curious…
That is a very thick blue line. It was released in August of 2020 amid a purge of police officials.
It is notably similar to the Fire and Rescue Service flag created in 2018, and various Flags of the PLA.
Pictures from the flag award ceremonies for Fire and Rescue and Police force show the shade of blue is identical; also the same as in the old badges of the now disbanded Fire Services of the Ministry of Public Security (via zh.wikipedia).
I doubt that any resemblance to the various Thin Blue Line flags was intentional.
Therer are 90 million people in the Chinese Communist Party yet western leftists convinced themselves that they’re the ones who figured it all
People who discovered socialism a few months ago acting like they’re enlightened on the entire history of socialist and working class struggle and that they’ve discovered something the rest of the world has never thought of before is absolutely mind bogging and enraging. I’ve seen so many surface level “socialists” with absolutely no understanding of anything beyond just wanting free healthcare who talk about socialist countries around the world with the utmost disdain and how we actually need to distance ourselves from them to be successful socialists lol. Do people never ask themselves why the us isnt even a social democracy?
this is silly, unless you’re a Western Chauvinist yourself, the Socialist movement is not confined to struggles between Western internet kiddies, there are actual Maoist movements engaged in Protracted People’s War in India and the Philippines. MLM is not what China practices, it was synthesized by the Maoists in Peru and India, they see China as Capitalist since Deng’s reforms. If you guys were around when Jiang Zemin was in power, I would guess there would be far fewer Dengists around. Jiang and his Shanghai clique were the most blatant expression of Chinese Capitalism. It was under Jiang’s rule that the CCP officially allowed Capitalist to be members of the “Communist” Party. That’s why Chinese Bezo, Jack Ma is a full Communist member. The CCP and Xi knows that the excesses of Capitalism will lead to more and more unrest in China, that’s why they will try to keep the mega capitalists under their control. Defend China against Western Propaganda, a strong China will at least give countries under the chokehold of US imperialism some breathing space.
