So I’ve been putting off writing this for a long time and it’ll probably need to be a series, but I’ve had a difficult time answering challenges from my friends who assert that China is either a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie or of the Bureaucracy (i.e. state capitalists), and that it’s a competing imperialist power along with America (and they also say Russia but I can answer that one being stupid on my own).
The problem with China Discourse is that there is a serious paucity of sources dealing with nuanced critiques rather than just “debt trap!” bullshit or whatever, since the objections of liberals and the objections of smarter ultras are very different. At the very least, the sources dealing with this Discourse are less accessible to me.
But now I’m extremely bored and also recently saw Comrade Queermmunist’s excellent rebuttal against the claim of China doing imperialism in the DRC, which gave me some hope that Hexbear would be able to answer some of these claims with something at least plausible.
The main objects of concern are the for-profit national businesses causing bureacratic class antagonism, foreign policy in the form of UN peacekeeping contributions, and straightforward imperialism at the base of its supply chain, along with miscellany like this:
https://newworker.us/international/chinas-stock-market-a-lesson-on-what-socialism-is-not/
I don’t know, it’s all a mess and putting off ideological work causes problems. If nothing else, let this be a practical lesson to you:
To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
It catches up with you and makes things worse in the end.
The biggest misconception people have over the differences between colonialism and neocolonialism is that colonialism involves the military while neocolonialism is purely through economic means when as we can see with Francafrique, that’s not remotely true. The boots never leave the neocolony, whether they are soldiers from the imperialist country or separatists (not so) covertly backed by the colonizer in order to destabilize the country or various members of the security apparatus of the colonizing country attempting to assassinate the revolutionary leader. Just look at Burkina Faso. Sankara was assassinated by a comprador traitor with ties to the French who then invited French troops back into Burkina Faso and even then, various Jihadist groups totally not backed by the French sprung up in the north to further destabilize the country giving France an excuse to station ever more French troops in order to “combat” terrorism. And once a Sankarist wrestled control away from the various comprador factions and kicked out official French troops again, Traore has faced numerous assassination attempts by the French. He has gone out of his way to ruthlessly purge people within the government who has sympathies with their French neocolonial masters.
This is actually existing imperialism. It’s not just exporting capital, which is just 1 of 5 criteria laid out by Lenin. Even something like “owning every single gold mine” by itself means nothing since with a stroke of a pen, those mines can be unceremoniously nationalized exactly like what Castro did to property owned by United Fruit. Imperialism is more like “owning every single gold mine and having a drone base next to the mines in order to fight “terrorists” that you also supply with and having special forces assets in the capital ready to assassinate the president if they even think about nationalizing the mines.” France owned the uranium mines in Niger, and when Nigeriens went out to protest, France scrambled French fighter jets to dump tear gas on the protestors. The jet obviously wasn’t flown straight from France but from an airstrip located on Nigerien soil.
I’d absolutely be critical of the CPC if I were a Chinese citizen, but as a present citizen of a NATO member there’s no way I could take myself or my arguments seriously enough to actually attempt any sort of debate.
Every time I interrogate a specific feature of present-day China that irks me, there’s only a history of antagonism and covert actions by capitalists which puts it in context.
Every time I interrogate a specific feature of present-day China that irks me, there’s only a history of antagonism and covert actions by capitalists which puts it in context.
Could you elaborate?
I’m not OP, but Xinjiang is like that to me. Doing a lot of full society policing and re-education is not good. It’s not a genocide or slave labour, and it’s also not as bad as any of the western responses to large scale separatism/terrorism such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, but it is still a shit load of police action. However, I criticize the US more for fucking up Afghanistan and sponsoring terrorism across the region than I criticize China for how they handled that situation.
When you’re asked to criticize any ugly thing that done by one of NATO’s official enemies trying to survive in a hostile environment created by NATO, you always have to ask if there was even a plausible alternative.
Was China not supposed to address religious reactionary terrorism in Xinjiang? Is letting reactionaries destabilize the country so it can be pillaged by the richest Westerners and their collaborators really an acceptable option?
I think it takes a very special kind of hubris to believe that the dozens of powerless, historically ineffective “Marxist” reading groups in the imperial core are the only ones that have the right ideas about how to do socialism correctly, while the hundred million members of the ruling communist party of the largest socialist state in the world all have it wrong.
It’s totally plausible that there are things about China that could be improved, but it’s wild to me that a bunch of people that don’t know the language and can’t take a city council in their own country think they’re the ones to do it.
In a way, I understand what you’re saying, but ultimately this feels like standpoint epistemology in the worse sense of the term. You don’t need to be a successful revolutionary to say that Gonzalites and Khmer Rouge were weirdo revisionists. Marxism is “the ruthless criticism of all that exists,” and that should especially include projects that claim to be Marxist.
You don’t let things slide for the sake of peace or friendship, you let them slide because they do not matter and interfere with your actual political activism.
Unless you are engaged in international politics it doesn’t really matter what you think, you can’t influence china. The thoughts only matter so far as they matter for the work they are willing to do and the systemic critiques they can engage in. If they’re still socialists or the like, they still hate their government and cops, they still go out and fight and organise, they can still peer thru capitalist propaganda, then it really doesn’t matter what they think of a country on the other side of the earth. Engaging in that discussion only causes needless strife, where the best case scenario is that they end up agreeing with, which also changes nothing in your day to day actionImperialism can be quantified. Make them do so. What is the unequal exchange, how does it compare to their own exploitation, and are there any material differences in outcome when China comes to town vs. The IMF or Canada?
They will hate this question because their accusation of imperialism is based on vibes and nut an economic critique or class analysis.
They might also hate the question because that represents a lot of work to tabulate.
Work they should’ve done if they wanted to make the claim! Imperialism actually means something to communists! It’s not just when you have a military or trade or even foreign ownership.
You must not talk nonsense! It will not do! It will not do!
It’s pretty obvious that they’re doing a much better job at handling capitalism for the people than the western capitalists, but it’s debatable if this will ever stop being a necessary measure to achieve socialism or if China will slip to reaction and lose its socialist roots.
Things seem to be taking a positive direction but time will tell. It’s interesting what new possibilities would open if China overtook the USA for good and starts influencing the western world more than the US. I believe it would be much more able to defend and spread socialism after having overpowered the imperialist leader at their own game, and so would the new socialist states that are yet to come.
I hope that this is the path they’ll take and become fully socialist for good when the threat of counter revolution is smaller. I also don’t have any idea of the material conditions that all the different parts of China have, it’s possible that less developed parts of the country require capitalism temporarily in order to achieve the massive concentration of means of production and socialization of work that makes socialist revolution possible.
State Capitalism just means ‘socialism but I don’t like it’. How would a state be capable of even being capitalistic in and of itself? A state cab be a capitalist state as in it allows and encourages capitalism but the practice of capitalism in a literal sense is private and not state run. State Capitalism is when industry is nationalized and I guess the labor exploitation is like…taxes? Where’s the capitalism here?
i think there’s a few conceptions of state capitalism that have a logic to them:
a) a ‘complete’ monopoly capitalism where state & corporate authority are the same–not usually the accusation levelled at China but i think ultraleft rubes would say it about the USSR
b) the state organizes & serves the capitalist order, this is actually called “liberal democracy” but westerners can’t even accuse asians of being liberals without trying to make it a racially peculiar thing
not that most of “state capitalism” critiques are actually proposing a consistent analysis like these tho, most times its literally just the existence of wages and institutions with passing resemblances to joint stock companies
So your argument is there can’t be any exploitation if a company is run by the state, because somehow the state is super special and distinct from private ownership?
If we switch a board of capitalist owners with a state bureaucracy, suddenly it’s impossible to profit off of workers? Furthermore, it’s not like the workers get control or a say over where the capital generated by their work go. Maybe it goes into social policies, maybe they go into funding a war or a genocide, or maybe they go some rich politician’s 13th gold plated toilet. You don’t know.
I just don’t buy the argument in favor of state ownership. To the extent to which it is “socialism”, nobody should like it because it just puts a new label on the capitalist like putting lipstick on a pig. The state is not a desirable element, it should not be getting all that power over the workers nor all that capital.
I was with you until the last paragraph. It is correct to say that state capitalism as defined by ultras is something that can exist, for as you said, if you switched the major corporations’ boards of trustees with de facto heads of state (and did nothing else to change the relationship workers have to the means of production) then that’s essentially what you would have: state capitalism. Given the revolving door that sees CEOs becoming politicians, that’s not too far off from a lot of our so-called liberal democracies we actually have in the west, it’s just that a pretense of a delineation between the two (as well as a pretense of public approval) is maintained.
But the key thing to understand here is the part about the worker’s relationship to the means of production. As robin_IV already explained, the state is simply the tool that the ruling class uses to enforce its interests. It makes no sense to say that the state “should not be getting all that power over the workers” if it is the workers who are the ones wielding the state. And that is definitely desirable! It’s what we desire as communists who recognize we can’t achieve a classless society in one fell swoop.
