I totally agree. A society can, in principle, transition from capitalist to another form of class society without going through socialism, and there’s nothing prevented an already imperfect attempt at socialist construction in adverse conditions from transitioning to a form of class society that is not capitalism, although as Russia shows it can also transition to capitalism. As East Germany showed, you can transition from capitalism, through fascistic capitalism, through imperfect but in many mays very movingly impressive attempts at socialist construction, back to capitalism (albeit in neoliberal form). As I mentioned in my other comment in this thread, they don’t have boom-bust cycles which we expect to be necessary to any capitalist economy (and which Marx establishes rigorousless in Capital. It’s work pointing out that while, as a single, circularly unified economy, I dont think we can call the mode of production in place there ‘capitalist’, this doesn’t mean that at the local level, we might not find local economies that seem to function capitalistically, at least in the short-term, due to the presence of certain economic institutions that form the sociological relations of the capitalist base, namely the existence of the social relation of capital, private property, capitalists, and workers. So at the micro-level we can see capitalistic socio-economic situations but at the macro-level I don’t think this is the case, as evidenced by the lack of traditional business cycles, at least of the short-to-medium-lengh wave variety. Ofc, microeconomics if practically meaningless without macroeconomics (as the classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo, as well as Marx and Keynes, realised).

Ofc, there were limited forms of capitalistic behaviours in late feudal societies among the burghers, merchants and bankers. The emergence and development of the economic institutions, social relations and political conditions leading to capitalism as a mode of production in which a certain kind of economic behaviour is predominates, was a gradual process leading to certain politically revolutionary situations.

On the relation of the superstructure to the base structure: if we are going to use this to classify a mode of production, then this raises again my point that Chinese society is different to capitalist societies as those in the rest of the world have lived them, or to the Eastern Bloc or Maoist, (early) Vietnamese, Cuban or North Korean societies. Firstly the base is organized differently; secondly the superstructure has a different relation to said base, including to the capitalistic parts of the base, compared to the relationship between the western capitalist state and its capitalist base.

I also don’t really think it normally makes sense to describe China as state capitalist, pending whatever anyone might happen to mean by this term, which is often looks like it gets used in many different senses. If one meant that the state essentially acts a single large corporation, then that implies that it is concerned with surplus-value maximization in the form of profit-maximization, and would directly or indirectly control commodity production with that purpose in mind. In one sense the party is obviously concerned with the production of profit in the economy. They are connected to international and localized national capitalism in that sense. But that does not imply that that is the be-all and end-all of their economic policy. Indeed it seems like it isn’t in the long-term. The party are not a capitalist class in their running of the state, and have apparently made it clear that political considerations come before profit-maximization. In any case, the behaviour of the Chinese state is not reducible to the behaviour one would predict of the entire economy or a large and dominant section of the commanding heights of the economy run as a single nationalized firm,.

Honestly I think that fleshing out in rigorous politico-economic terms the nature of the contemporary Chinese economy should be a pretty imperative question for Marxists intellectuals to answer. Suppose, for example, that a revolutionary situation develops in contemporary China. If we do not understand the politcal-economy of China we are not going to be able to properly understand how, why, or when such a revolutionary situation could be expected to occur. Obviously this is easier said that done and it would require spending serious time in China, but I’m still relatively unaware of relevant theory on the topic that I’ve found compelling. The CPC’s characterizations of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ are also not enough for me imo.