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?
This conversation is getting tedious because you refuse to understand or acknowledge the timeliness of events here. The Chinese government said that it would open up and reform the economy in order to attract much needed foreign technologies, and to use market forces under state guidance to eliminate extreme poverty. They then proceeded to do it, and in the deadline they promised (2020).
Now the goal of the Chinese government is to become a developed nation with “intermediate socialism”, aka more worker coops and state owned firms by 2049. There is no reason to believe they won’t make a sincere effort, since they have already started. On the technological level, china has achieved immense levels of automation (with over half of the world’s industrial robots) and continues to improve at a rapid pace. On the social relations level, the Chinese have already begun to aggressively promote worker cooperatives, which today in china make up a substantial portion of the “private sector” gdp. In the other private firms, the CPC has great control over the boards of these firms and actively participates in them. They have also begun reigning in the malactors in the economy, as evidenced by their recent actions against even the biggest of Chinese firms. I honestly doubt they will need until 2050 to get to this goal. They already almost classified as a “higher income” country, and things in china move fast.
Now you deny that state ownership is socialism to begin with. But the Chinese are not anarchists. They do not care what poorly defined definition of socialism you use. You refuse to accept the Chinese system as socialist (even if it’s only work in progress), but that doesn’t matter because the Chinese move on regardless of what you think. Maybe in 10-20 years when china is further down its path of development will you see my point.
This conversation is getting tedious because you refuse to understand or acknowledge the timeliness of events here. The Chinese government said that it would open up and reform the economy in order to attract much needed foreign technologies, and to use market forces under state guidance to eliminate extreme poverty. They then proceeded to do it, and in the deadline they promised (2020).
…that is yet another explanation of why they are not yet socialist, what do you not agree with what i’m saying here?
They’re not socialist, at best, they’re promising to one day become socialist.
Now the goal of the Chinese government is to become a developed nation with “intermediate socialism”, aka more worker coops and state owned firms by 2049. There is no reason to believe they won’t make a sincere effort, since they have already started.
I see no evidence that they have started.
On the technological level, china has achieved immense levels of automation (with over half of the world’s industrial robots) and continues to improve at a rapid pace.
This has nothing to do with whether or not they are socialist.
On the social relations level, the Chinese have already begun to aggressively promote worker cooperatives, which today in china make up a substantial portion of the “private sector” gdp.
How much, exactly? Can I have evidence of this?
In the other private firms, the CPC has great control over the boards of these firms and actively participates in them.
The CPC is not workers, they are separate entities, this is meaningless to me.
They have also begun reigning in the malactors in the economy, as evidenced by their recent actions against even the biggest of Chinese firms.
Norway does this. They are not socialists.
I honestly doubt they will need until 2050 to get to this goal. They already almost classified as a “higher income” country, and things in china move fast.
We’ll see, but they still have not yet done anything socialist that I can see.
I will show you evidence of the coops thing when I get home. But it’s not hard to find yourself. Just Google the farmer’s specialised cooperatives. Or the other industrial cooperatives in china
…that is yet another explanation of why they are not yet socialist, what do you not agree with what i’m saying here?
No society has ever achieved fully developed socialism. But different societies have gone down the path of developing towards it. In China’s case, with the weakening and dissolution of the USSR and almost the whole socialist bloc, they realised that the developmental strategy they had been using was fatally flawed, which is why they had to make a temporary retreat so they could go down a different path. That doesn’t mean that the political dominance of the proletariat was removed. Nor did the economy stop being directed.
Now, you may feel as if a state-managed economy, or state ownership is not socialism, but nobody cares. You literally say “this is meaningless to me”. What are you, the fucking arbiter of socialism? Even Marx himself does not get this privilege. You say that the state is not the workers, and yet, any organization that the workers use to control the economy will not be the same thing as them. This is obvious. it doesn’t matter whether or not the workers control the economy through the state, through unions, through cooperatives, because none of those entities is equivalent to the workers themselves.
This has nothing to do with whether or not they are socialist.
On the contrary, it is extremely important. As materialists, we recognise that the technological base is as important to determining the mode of production as are the social relations. Capitalism is not wage labor, as wage labor existed throughout most of history. Capitalism only becomes fully developed capitalism when wage labor becomes socialised and is combined with machine production and fossil energy. When the capitalist class becomes politically dominant.
Much in the same way, a fully developed socialism requires the political dominance of the proletariat class, a fully command and automated economy and clean energy. These aren’t arbitrary or optional requirements. A command economy is necessary to overcome the anarchy of production, automation is necessary to abolish the law of value, and clean energy is necessary to ensure the sustainable perpetuation of the system.
Norway does this. They are not socialists.
It does not. Show me an example of Norway literally letting a sector constituting 20% of its GDP die a painful death because its not useful anymore.
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?
This conversation is getting tedious because you refuse to understand or acknowledge the timeliness of events here. The Chinese government said that it would open up and reform the economy in order to attract much needed foreign technologies, and to use market forces under state guidance to eliminate extreme poverty. They then proceeded to do it, and in the deadline they promised (2020).
Now the goal of the Chinese government is to become a developed nation with “intermediate socialism”, aka more worker coops and state owned firms by 2049. There is no reason to believe they won’t make a sincere effort, since they have already started. On the technological level, china has achieved immense levels of automation (with over half of the world’s industrial robots) and continues to improve at a rapid pace. On the social relations level, the Chinese have already begun to aggressively promote worker cooperatives, which today in china make up a substantial portion of the “private sector” gdp. In the other private firms, the CPC has great control over the boards of these firms and actively participates in them. They have also begun reigning in the malactors in the economy, as evidenced by their recent actions against even the biggest of Chinese firms. I honestly doubt they will need until 2050 to get to this goal. They already almost classified as a “higher income” country, and things in china move fast.
Now you deny that state ownership is socialism to begin with. But the Chinese are not anarchists. They do not care what poorly defined definition of socialism you use. You refuse to accept the Chinese system as socialist (even if it’s only work in progress), but that doesn’t matter because the Chinese move on regardless of what you think. Maybe in 10-20 years when china is further down its path of development will you see my point.
…that is yet another explanation of why they are not yet socialist, what do you not agree with what i’m saying here?
They’re not socialist, at best, they’re promising to one day become socialist.
I see no evidence that they have started.
This has nothing to do with whether or not they are socialist.
How much, exactly? Can I have evidence of this?
The CPC is not workers, they are separate entities, this is meaningless to me.
Norway does this. They are not socialists.
We’ll see, but they still have not yet done anything socialist that I can see.
I will show you evidence of the coops thing when I get home. But it’s not hard to find yourself. Just Google the farmer’s specialised cooperatives. Or the other industrial cooperatives in china
Edit: https://www.dlg.org/en/agriculture/topics/dlg-agrifuture-magazine/knowledge-skills/china-rapid-development-of-farmer-cooperatives
No society has ever achieved fully developed socialism. But different societies have gone down the path of developing towards it. In China’s case, with the weakening and dissolution of the USSR and almost the whole socialist bloc, they realised that the developmental strategy they had been using was fatally flawed, which is why they had to make a temporary retreat so they could go down a different path. That doesn’t mean that the political dominance of the proletariat was removed. Nor did the economy stop being directed.
Now, you may feel as if a state-managed economy, or state ownership is not socialism, but nobody cares. You literally say “this is meaningless to me”. What are you, the fucking arbiter of socialism? Even Marx himself does not get this privilege. You say that the state is not the workers, and yet, any organization that the workers use to control the economy will not be the same thing as them. This is obvious. it doesn’t matter whether or not the workers control the economy through the state, through unions, through cooperatives, because none of those entities is equivalent to the workers themselves.
On the contrary, it is extremely important. As materialists, we recognise that the technological base is as important to determining the mode of production as are the social relations. Capitalism is not wage labor, as wage labor existed throughout most of history. Capitalism only becomes fully developed capitalism when wage labor becomes socialised and is combined with machine production and fossil energy. When the capitalist class becomes politically dominant.
Much in the same way, a fully developed socialism requires the political dominance of the proletariat class, a fully command and automated economy and clean energy. These aren’t arbitrary or optional requirements. A command economy is necessary to overcome the anarchy of production, automation is necessary to abolish the law of value, and clean energy is necessary to ensure the sustainable perpetuation of the system.
It does not. Show me an example of Norway literally letting a sector constituting 20% of its GDP die a painful death because its not useful anymore.