I don’t agree with the premise of this question, aren’t the people who say it is capitalist actually arguing that it is state capitalist, and doesn’t that explain the difference in outcomes?
Because “state capitalism” isn’t a real thing. If capitalists do not control the economy , it’s not capitalism. In capitalist states that isn’t the case, as the state exists first and foremost to serve the interest of capital. So wether capitalists control the economy directly or through the state has negligible impact (Individual interests vs collective class interests).
On the other hand, no one in their right mind would claim that the Chinese state exists to serve the interests of capital.
You’re missing the very point of the term, the point was never that state capitalism is equivalent/identical to capitalism, the point was that the oppressive force moves from the capitalist class to the state.
If the state oppresses people and has all the power, then they have effectively replaced the capitalist class, but are going to have much of the same problems because they have much of the same incentive structure.
Also, I’m unsure if the chinese state exists to serve capital, i don’t think this is an all-or-nothing situation, they have been helping capital a great deal for a long time now, perhaps they won’t in the future, but all we have is the current, and in the current, modern framework, they have billionaires, and don’t seem that different from capitalist nations. Don’t get me wrong, america is worse by basically every single metric, but china isn’t exactly doing communism perfectly, some would say they aren’t even doing socialism at all, considering they haven’t done any of the following:
The workers don’t own the means of production
Currency isn’t abolished
There are still very clear class divisions
They aren’t even vaguely close to withering away the state.
They can still turn this around by doing literally any of those things, but because they haven’t, I think they fit the definition of state capitalist, currently anyway, we’ll see if things change, this is still much better than an outright capitalist country though, because at least they’re claiming they want to do those things.
Your whole point is terrible. Oppression from the state doesn’t define the economic system. I shouldn’t have to explain this.
The Chinese state hasn’t been helping capital either. It allowed capital to enter parts of the country, monitored it, and when capital investable fucks up, the Chinese state has let said capital either die, or cannibalised it. How can you say they are helping capital in the comments of a news article about how they are letting the whole real estate sector die?
As for your points of socialism:
Workers do own the means of production in china. Not fully, but they do. Farming cooperatives alone comprise of more than 100 million households. That’s households, not individual workers. State owned enterprises also dominate the economy, and where they don’t, you typically have worker cooperatives (huwae is a worker coop), or private enterprises which have party members in the board. Truly private enterprises in China make up a remarkably small part of the economy.
This point and point 3 are just the result of China being in an early stage of socialism. They have just very recently eradicated extreme poverty. You will start to see the points be addressed in the next few decades.
You can’t wither away the state while in the early stages of socialism, or while the world’s biggest state is looking for any opportunity to destroy you.
You misunderstand my point, I never claimed it was an economic system, it’s a state of affairs, it’s a matter of saying simply the oppressors have moved into the state.
i reject the notion that the state is equivalent to or represents the workers interests, which makes them being state owned not equivalent to worker ownership as well.
The source for them fighting for the workers interests seems to be “trust us, we totally will”
edit: Furthermore I just got home and checked, 60% of the GDP is private businesses, 40% is state owned… that doesn’t seem like a socialist paradise to me. That sounds like state and private ownership over the means of production, and I will repeat, neither the state, nor the capitalists are the workers themselves.
Socialism is literally the period of transition between capitalism and communism. It’s expected to still have currency, classes, and the state. Especially as communism isn’t an internal process. Class divisions doesn’t apply purely to internal divisions, just as the state’s role as wielder of violence for one class cannot be limited internally.
You don’t wither away the state, that’s not even what “wither away” means grammatically. It’s an organic process that happens depending on way more factors than the will of the ruling class (wether the proletariat or the bourgeoisie). There is no communism button, and there never was.
Starting to intentionally weaken the state, in a context where class divisons are strong both internally and externally, is probably the best way to get yourself invaded or couped.
Beside, the workers do own the means of production in China. The communist party represents them exclusively. Last time I checked, out of the 2000 members of China’s national Congress, only 2 could be considered capitalists. Additionally the communist party has cells in every major company, and effectively all of the infrastructure and extraction industry is state-owned. Companies have no choice but to comply to will of the CPC, as the latter could simply prevent them from accessing necessary goods or services, and has demonstrated a willingness to execute rebellious CEOs.
China is no less socialist than the USSR, though maybe you would call them state capitalist too, in which case I’m afraid we simply do not have the same understanding of socialism.
Finally, let me end with a few appeals to authority.
Lenin :
Source
“Within the limits indicated, however, this is not at all dangerous for socialism as long as transport and large-scale industry remain in the hands of the proletariat. On the contrary, the development of capitalism, controlled and regulated by the proletarian state (i.e., “state” capitalism in this sense of the term), is advantageous and necessary in an extremely devastated and backward small-peasant country (within certain limits, of course), inasmuch as it is capable of hastening the immediate revival of peasant farming. This applies still more to concessions: without denationalising anything, the workers’ state leases certain mines, forest tracts, oilfields, and so forth, to foreign capitalists in order to obtain from them extra equipment and machinery that will enable us to accelerate the restoration of Soviet large-scale industry.”
“The dictatorship of the proletariat does not signify a cessation of the class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new weapons. This dictatorship is essential as long as classes exist, as long as the bourgeoisie, overthrown in one country, intensifies tenfold its attacks on socialism on an international scale.”
"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
State owned =/= worker owned, even if the state claims to represent the workers, I see no evidence that it actually does over the states interests
to me that means they have accomplished close to nothing in regards to socialism.
Almost nothing is in the hands of the proletariat, 60% of the GDP is in private businesses, 40% in state-owned businesses, and I reiterate, the state is not the workers, they are two separate entities. I don’t see any reason to believe the states incentive structure is in some way based on the workers, the workers seem to have little to no say in anything.
I’ve read the full texts of what you’ve linked in the past, and none of that strikes me as “the state should own everything” of course a violent revolution is violent, but in the end, if the state owns everything, the revolution has failed. Maybe someday the state will relinquish ownership, but it has not, and I see no reason to believe it will. The workers have no democratic control over the means of production, they have to hope the states interests align with theirs, and oftentimes it might, but it is not the same as them having control over the means of production, they have no real control over it.
Can you give me one example of a time where china decided the workers interests were more important than the states interests? This would need to happen EVERY time, not just once, anyway, or you seem to misunderstand what dictatorship of the proletariat means.
edit: I honestly don’t know if this is a valid source or not, but i’ve been looking into labor rights in china, and what i’m seeing is frankly horrifying.
I can’t find a single source not saying that workers have no right to strike in china. Does that seem like that’s in the interest of the worker to you? They went out of their way to remove it from the constitution.
The chinese government has often had to make decisions in the past on the basis of pleasing foreign institutions and capital, otherwise, the reform and opening up strategy would have failed. It is only a very recent thing (like the past 4 or so years) that the Chinese economy has become strong enough that it can adopt a more independent path, which we are just beginning to see. And even then, china still doesn’t have things like food sovereignty. It has to tread very carefully.
Also your whole “the state does not represent the workers” thing is frankly, idiotic. It betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how either the chinese state or CPC works. The same goes for the historical reasons certain decisions were made.
If you really want to see whether or not the chinese state represents the workers. Just consider the fact that it lifted over 800 million people out of extreme poverty in 40 years. Without china in the stats, world poverty actually goes up, as is the natural tendency of capitalism. Also consider the fact that they went out of their way to develop clean energy resources for the whole world. Virtually all or the progress made in the 2010s on solar power and wind power (solar power became nearly 10 times cheaper) was because of the chinese government’s directions. They have gone so far in helping the green energy transition that recently, the Europeans have started to complain that china is overproduction green tech.
None of those things sound like things highly regulated capitalism couldn’t accomplish to me. I don’t see it, that makes china a nice country, not a socialist one.
Talk to me about china being socialist when they actually do something socialist.
Do you actually believe that capitalists have never lifted people out of poverty? Not even marx agrees with any of what you said
Why did they remove workers right to strike in 1982?
None of those things sound like things highly regulated capitalism couldn’t accomplish to me.
None of those things are things that even the most highly regulated of capitalisms has accomplished. Or come close to accomplishing. It is a historic fact that the rise of capitalists was responsible for the extreme poverty of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The result of closing off the commons and the genocidal plunder of the third world. This was observed by marx, who remarked that the growth of wealth coincided with the growth of poverty.
Remove all of the socialist countries from the world statistics and adjust for cost of living. Then show me how well the capitalists lift people out of poverty
Talk to me about china being socialist when they actually do something socialist.
China sets itself on a decades long path to invert the power dynamic between the imperialist countries and third world, and this is somehow just something capitalists do. China aggressively builds not only its own infrastructure, but of other countries, for very favourable rates (often forgiving loans outright if they can’t be paid). This is another thing that capitalists do.
Remove all of the socialist countries from the world statistics and adjust for cost of living. Then show me how well the capitalists lift people out of poverty
The vast majority of capitalist systems see little to no regulation, the closest thing to an exception is norway, that doesn’t change the fact that china is a highly regulated non-socialist country. Your observations of what marx said are irrelevant here, I completely agree with what marx said, especially during that time, but china is just an even more regulated norway situation, more akin to a social democracy than socialism. Once the workers own the means of production, if they ever do, that will change, but we live in the present.
China sets itself on a decades long path to invert the power dynamic between the imperialist countries and third world, and this is somehow just something capitalists do.
This is good but does not make them socialist, that’s just foreign policy, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. What have they done to make socialism happen in their own country? The answer appears to be nothing other than promise that they wlll someday. You say they just can’t right now, and you trust them, but the fact is, they haven’t done anything in this regard yet, you’re just hoping they will stand by their word.
China aggressively builds not only its own infrastructure, but of other countries, for very favourable rates (often forgiving loans outright if they can’t be paid). This is another thing that capitalists do.
This is a thing highly regulated social democracies can absolutely do. They’re still capitalist, 60% of their gdp is privately held, and the rest still isn’t even owned by the workers.
Also, they don’t forgive the loans outright, they keep what they worked on and continue to use it.
If they’re going to do socialism, why don’t the workers own the means of production? If they don’t right now, they aren’t socialist.
What is the difference between a social democracy that claims to be communist and china?
I don’t agree with the premise of this question, aren’t the people who say it is capitalist actually arguing that it is state capitalist, and doesn’t that explain the difference in outcomes?
Because “state capitalism” isn’t a real thing. If capitalists do not control the economy , it’s not capitalism. In capitalist states that isn’t the case, as the state exists first and foremost to serve the interest of capital. So wether capitalists control the economy directly or through the state has negligible impact (Individual interests vs collective class interests).
On the other hand, no one in their right mind would claim that the Chinese state exists to serve the interests of capital.
You’re missing the very point of the term, the point was never that state capitalism is equivalent/identical to capitalism, the point was that the oppressive force moves from the capitalist class to the state.
If the state oppresses people and has all the power, then they have effectively replaced the capitalist class, but are going to have much of the same problems because they have much of the same incentive structure.
Also, I’m unsure if the chinese state exists to serve capital, i don’t think this is an all-or-nothing situation, they have been helping capital a great deal for a long time now, perhaps they won’t in the future, but all we have is the current, and in the current, modern framework, they have billionaires, and don’t seem that different from capitalist nations. Don’t get me wrong, america is worse by basically every single metric, but china isn’t exactly doing communism perfectly, some would say they aren’t even doing socialism at all, considering they haven’t done any of the following:
They can still turn this around by doing literally any of those things, but because they haven’t, I think they fit the definition of state capitalist, currently anyway, we’ll see if things change, this is still much better than an outright capitalist country though, because at least they’re claiming they want to do those things.
Your whole point is terrible. Oppression from the state doesn’t define the economic system. I shouldn’t have to explain this.
The Chinese state hasn’t been helping capital either. It allowed capital to enter parts of the country, monitored it, and when capital investable fucks up, the Chinese state has let said capital either die, or cannibalised it. How can you say they are helping capital in the comments of a news article about how they are letting the whole real estate sector die?
As for your points of socialism:
Workers do own the means of production in china. Not fully, but they do. Farming cooperatives alone comprise of more than 100 million households. That’s households, not individual workers. State owned enterprises also dominate the economy, and where they don’t, you typically have worker cooperatives (huwae is a worker coop), or private enterprises which have party members in the board. Truly private enterprises in China make up a remarkably small part of the economy.
This point and point 3 are just the result of China being in an early stage of socialism. They have just very recently eradicated extreme poverty. You will start to see the points be addressed in the next few decades.
You can’t wither away the state while in the early stages of socialism, or while the world’s biggest state is looking for any opportunity to destroy you.
You misunderstand my point, I never claimed it was an economic system, it’s a state of affairs, it’s a matter of saying simply the oppressors have moved into the state.
i reject the notion that the state is equivalent to or represents the workers interests, which makes them being state owned not equivalent to worker ownership as well.
The source for them fighting for the workers interests seems to be “trust us, we totally will”
edit: Furthermore I just got home and checked, 60% of the GDP is private businesses, 40% is state owned… that doesn’t seem like a socialist paradise to me. That sounds like state and private ownership over the means of production, and I will repeat, neither the state, nor the capitalists are the workers themselves.
Socialism is literally the period of transition between capitalism and communism. It’s expected to still have currency, classes, and the state. Especially as communism isn’t an internal process. Class divisions doesn’t apply purely to internal divisions, just as the state’s role as wielder of violence for one class cannot be limited internally.
You don’t wither away the state, that’s not even what “wither away” means grammatically. It’s an organic process that happens depending on way more factors than the will of the ruling class (wether the proletariat or the bourgeoisie). There is no communism button, and there never was.
Starting to intentionally weaken the state, in a context where class divisons are strong both internally and externally, is probably the best way to get yourself invaded or couped.
Beside, the workers do own the means of production in China. The communist party represents them exclusively. Last time I checked, out of the 2000 members of China’s national Congress, only 2 could be considered capitalists. Additionally the communist party has cells in every major company, and effectively all of the infrastructure and extraction industry is state-owned. Companies have no choice but to comply to will of the CPC, as the latter could simply prevent them from accessing necessary goods or services, and has demonstrated a willingness to execute rebellious CEOs.
China is no less socialist than the USSR, though maybe you would call them state capitalist too, in which case I’m afraid we simply do not have the same understanding of socialism.
Finally, let me end with a few appeals to authority.
Lenin : Source “Within the limits indicated, however, this is not at all dangerous for socialism as long as transport and large-scale industry remain in the hands of the proletariat. On the contrary, the development of capitalism, controlled and regulated by the proletarian state (i.e., “state” capitalism in this sense of the term), is advantageous and necessary in an extremely devastated and backward small-peasant country (within certain limits, of course), inasmuch as it is capable of hastening the immediate revival of peasant farming. This applies still more to concessions: without denationalising anything, the workers’ state leases certain mines, forest tracts, oilfields, and so forth, to foreign capitalists in order to obtain from them extra equipment and machinery that will enable us to accelerate the restoration of Soviet large-scale industry.”
“The dictatorship of the proletariat does not signify a cessation of the class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new weapons. This dictatorship is essential as long as classes exist, as long as the bourgeoisie, overthrown in one country, intensifies tenfold its attacks on socialism on an international scale.”
Engel’s “On Authority”
"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
State owned =/= worker owned, even if the state claims to represent the workers, I see no evidence that it actually does over the states interests
to me that means they have accomplished close to nothing in regards to socialism.
Almost nothing is in the hands of the proletariat, 60% of the GDP is in private businesses, 40% in state-owned businesses, and I reiterate, the state is not the workers, they are two separate entities. I don’t see any reason to believe the states incentive structure is in some way based on the workers, the workers seem to have little to no say in anything.
I’ve read the full texts of what you’ve linked in the past, and none of that strikes me as “the state should own everything” of course a violent revolution is violent, but in the end, if the state owns everything, the revolution has failed. Maybe someday the state will relinquish ownership, but it has not, and I see no reason to believe it will. The workers have no democratic control over the means of production, they have to hope the states interests align with theirs, and oftentimes it might, but it is not the same as them having control over the means of production, they have no real control over it.
Can you give me one example of a time where china decided the workers interests were more important than the states interests? This would need to happen EVERY time, not just once, anyway, or you seem to misunderstand what dictatorship of the proletariat means.
edit: I honestly don’t know if this is a valid source or not, but i’ve been looking into labor rights in china, and what i’m seeing is frankly horrifying.
https://clb.org.hk/en/content/workers’-rights-and-labour-relations-china
I can’t find a single source not saying that workers have no right to strike in china. Does that seem like that’s in the interest of the worker to you? They went out of their way to remove it from the constitution.
The chinese government has often had to make decisions in the past on the basis of pleasing foreign institutions and capital, otherwise, the reform and opening up strategy would have failed. It is only a very recent thing (like the past 4 or so years) that the Chinese economy has become strong enough that it can adopt a more independent path, which we are just beginning to see. And even then, china still doesn’t have things like food sovereignty. It has to tread very carefully.
Also your whole “the state does not represent the workers” thing is frankly, idiotic. It betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how either the chinese state or CPC works. The same goes for the historical reasons certain decisions were made.
If you really want to see whether or not the chinese state represents the workers. Just consider the fact that it lifted over 800 million people out of extreme poverty in 40 years. Without china in the stats, world poverty actually goes up, as is the natural tendency of capitalism. Also consider the fact that they went out of their way to develop clean energy resources for the whole world. Virtually all or the progress made in the 2010s on solar power and wind power (solar power became nearly 10 times cheaper) was because of the chinese government’s directions. They have gone so far in helping the green energy transition that recently, the Europeans have started to complain that china is overproduction green tech.
None of those things sound like things highly regulated capitalism couldn’t accomplish to me. I don’t see it, that makes china a nice country, not a socialist one.
Talk to me about china being socialist when they actually do something socialist.
Do you actually believe that capitalists have never lifted people out of poverty? Not even marx agrees with any of what you said
Why did they remove workers right to strike in 1982?
None of those things are things that even the most highly regulated of capitalisms has accomplished. Or come close to accomplishing. It is a historic fact that the rise of capitalists was responsible for the extreme poverty of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The result of closing off the commons and the genocidal plunder of the third world. This was observed by marx, who remarked that the growth of wealth coincided with the growth of poverty.
Remove all of the socialist countries from the world statistics and adjust for cost of living. Then show me how well the capitalists lift people out of poverty
China sets itself on a decades long path to invert the power dynamic between the imperialist countries and third world, and this is somehow just something capitalists do. China aggressively builds not only its own infrastructure, but of other countries, for very favourable rates (often forgiving loans outright if they can’t be paid). This is another thing that capitalists do.
The vast majority of capitalist systems see little to no regulation, the closest thing to an exception is norway, that doesn’t change the fact that china is a highly regulated non-socialist country. Your observations of what marx said are irrelevant here, I completely agree with what marx said, especially during that time, but china is just an even more regulated norway situation, more akin to a social democracy than socialism. Once the workers own the means of production, if they ever do, that will change, but we live in the present.
This is good but does not make them socialist, that’s just foreign policy, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. What have they done to make socialism happen in their own country? The answer appears to be nothing other than promise that they wlll someday. You say they just can’t right now, and you trust them, but the fact is, they haven’t done anything in this regard yet, you’re just hoping they will stand by their word.
This is a thing highly regulated social democracies can absolutely do. They’re still capitalist, 60% of their gdp is privately held, and the rest still isn’t even owned by the workers.
Also, they don’t forgive the loans outright, they keep what they worked on and continue to use it.
If they’re going to do socialism, why don’t the workers own the means of production? If they don’t right now, they aren’t socialist.
What is the difference between a social democracy that claims to be communist and china?