Trav argues that Deng bastardized socialism, and that post-Mao leadership took class struggle out of Marxism.
I’m not one to answer your question well. I am interested in seeing more people’s viewpoints and knowledge here as I did have a previous discussion on Lemmygrad where I learned that the Cultural Revolution was hijacked by ultras and Lin Biao attempted to assassinate Mao.
I disagree calling China not socialist. Forgive me if this is an oversimplification of China’s economy and government, but I view China as analagous to a computer with a Linux host with a Windows virtual machine, but instead they are a socialist country with a capitalism virtual machine, which they have done well hardening against and preventing a “capitalism vm escape”. Now in the current era of Xi Jinping, China has been shrinking the capitalist vm and gradually replacing obsolete components with state controlled industry, such as their recent vow to centralize their tech industry (just as Linux tools develop to a stage where users are enabled to replace the programs they rely on Windows for with Linux supported alternatives).
I dislike that millions of disadvantaged workers lost some of their rights and had to work in the non-unionized private firms to help China increase its production. I don’t know if China would have been able to reach the stage it has achieved today if they continued the socialist only road, but I believe considering reality, I am afraid they may have sufferred the same fate as the Soviet Union if they didn’t convince imperialist nations to invest into their economy. It’s a brutal world, and unfortunate things happen that not even the strongest socialist nation can stop 100%. Thus, I believe China did their best and managed to be successful, which I am grateful for as a USian.
What do you think of Trav’s accusation that modern China doesn’t talk about class struggle, and instead thinks that socialism is when growth?
Class struggle in China is not a primary contradiction for the world at this time. The more pressing issues to resolve are related to development of the global south and defeating imperialism’s global neoliberal hegemony.
The tasks of a ruling communist party are different from those of one that is still engaged in revolutionary struggle. The CPC has a duty to its people to maintain peace and improve their lives in tangible ways. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics allows China to do these things in a way that no capitalist system ever could. If the CPC did not fulfil its duty to the people it would lose the mandate it has to rule.
How would it benefit the class struggle if the communist government of the largest economy on the planet fell because it prioritized dogmatic ideological goals over real material improvements to the people’s lives?
Isn’t the point of class struggle that by overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie the lives of average people can finally improve and do so without the spoils of neo-colonialism and imperialism?
And China is waging class struggle, not just globally by uplifting the global south, but also domestically by taking action against the interests of capital, by dealing with issues like inequality, corruption and rural poverty.
Trav also claims that China is an imperialist country. Even though he doesn’t believe the debt trap exists, he claims that Chinese loans are inherently imperialist.
Trav also asks how a country can stay a DotP while being open for capitalist investments.
Lastly, I would also like to hear your argument on Xi Jinping stating that “China will never be a planned economy.”
It doesn’t matter what ultras claim, the fact is that China is not imperialist and this is objectively demonstrable. The myth of Chinese “debt traps” has been extensively debunked by now, and the notion that all loans are imperialist is frankly infantile and an indication that the person claiming this has a very superficial understanding of both imperialism and political economy.
Accepting capitalist investment has nothing to do with the DotP, it does not change in whose hands the state power lies, so this is a total non-sequitur. As is the question of market or planned economy, which is by the way a false dichotomy. Markets and economic planning are both just tools that can be used by bourgeois and proletarian states alike, and they can and do coexist in most countries.
These are pretty solid answers. This helped me connect the dots to what I have been having trouble articulating and formulating in my mind regarding this topic. Thank you very much, comrade.
And frankly you don’t need to delve into any kind of theory or economics to see that this argument that China is actually a capitalist state pretending to be socialist is prima facie nonsense. That’s just not what the bourgeoisie do when they manage to overthrow a socialist state.
They have nothing to gain from continuing to pretend like they are Marxist-Leninists. When socialism falls it is unmistakeable, it looks like what happened in the former Soviet Union, it looks like genocide by economic collapse.
They gain much more benefits from declaring outright that they are in power than from such an elaborate decades long charade in a world where capitalism is still dominant. If nothing else they would gain good relations with other bourgeois states which can help them stay in power and enrich themselves even more as comprador elites.
So this is just nothing more than a childish conspiracy theory, to believe that if socialism was actually defeated the new ruling class would keep up the pretense that it has not, maintaining the inevitable animosity with the imperialist world that such a status brings with it.
It is absurd even to imagine it. Do you know of any capitalists who would sit through and even mandate hours and hours of classes in the study of socialist theory for themselves and their fellow ruling class elites?
Indeed, I believe that the only way to make a “coherent” argument that somehow China is ruled by a bourgeois that pretends to be Marxist is through racist stereotypes. Only if you accept the racist trope that the chinese people are always hiding their intentions and are deceptive by nature you could argue that the CPC is in fact deceiving the entire world and their population by posing as communist.
Yeah, an actual collapse of socialism looks like US committing genocide via shock therapy during the overthrow and balkanization of the Soviet Union, which was magnitudes worse than the COVID pandemic. Yet we don’t see Russia being called “well ackshually they are a capitalist state pretending to be socialist” in the same vain as China. That’s because they did have a capitalist takeover, and they don’t pretend to be socialist nor have a reason to. I totally agree with your statement here. I just didn’t have the words to dismantle the other ultra-leftist arguments, which you helped greatly.
We also don’t see capitalist, cracker politicians hiding their primitiveness, surely some socialist theory, let alone merely reading a book, would have helped:
The entire argument comes from having internalized that “communism is when poor”. Since China is no longer poor, it must mean that it is no longer communist.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
If he’s both admitting that the accusations against China are complete fabrications and yet still insists that China is imperialist “inherently” then there isn’t much point listening to someone like this. They aren’t exercising dialectical materialism here, they’re being dogmatic and retroactively trying to find excuses to badmouth China instead of examining the society as a whole and what they’re actually doing.
He didn’t say “inherently”, Im gonna rewatch and find out what he said
Trav also asks how a country can stay a DotP while being open for capitalist investments.
Lenin in shambles (/s)
This is what I am interested in hearing other people answer first. All I can say is that it is difficult for socialism to succeed in a capitalist dominated world. While I am also curious about the argument regarding class struggle, I believe each country’s path to socialism will be different in different nations. China at this time is serving a massive role in maintaining peace as much as possible and to prevent another capitalist takeover of their country. This is necessary, especially with their 100 year plan and goal toward US dedollarization via becoming a world leading centralized nation mutually benefitting in trade with Eurasia and Africa. While people were hurt in the process, I believe the emancipation of the proletariat has an improved chance of succeeding across the world than if China had the same fate as the Soviet Union.
I suspect most people would have wanted the Cultural Revolution to succeed if it would have yielded better results, but that is not what happened. What is important is understanding the material reality and how it was impacted by Dengist policies, which brought China to its current stage today. Perhaps in the future we can see other countries have revolutions and manage to stick to the socialist only road, though I believe it is likely the case that China essentially took one for the team and allowed other countries to not have to go through the same struggles and risks.
They do talk about class struggle, it’s part of the high school curriculum for the course “思想政治”, ideology and politics course. Also, you can look at the three represents, which tackles the class question.
There is a point where class struggle has to take the back seat in a socialist controlled country for you to properly levy your productive forces and create cohesion. Constantly fighting the forces within when bourgeois forces don’t hold political power is self-defeating.
Here is what Trav said: “Deng Xiaoping Theory operates on a similar premise: that class struggle is over in the People’s Republic of China. Since it’s had its revolution, it’s now ‘the people’ in charge” (Trav 16:54)
People in governance and the party come from the ordinary people. The country however isn’t directly run by the people, due to the responsibilities and capacity the identity as a party member or someone in governance entails you there is a separation. There is a reason for the distinction, because as a party member you have to exclude yourself and the other people in the party from the ordinary people. Because you’re working for the prosperity of the ordinary people, and that doesn’t include party members. If it did it’d become an excuse for corruption.
Saying the people are in charge leaves out a lot of nuance.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1987/133.htm
“Better to be poor under socialism and communism than to be rich under capitalism.” It may sound reasonable to reject the goal of becoming rich under capitalism. But how can we advocate being poor under socialism and communism? It was that kind of thinking that brought China to a standstill. That situation forced us to re-examine the question.
Our first conclusion was that we had to uphold socialism and that to do that we had, above all, to eliminate poverty and backwardness, greatly expand the productive forces and demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism.
"We summed up our experience in building socialism over the past few decades. We had not been quite clear about what socialism is and what Marxism is. Another term for Marxism is communism. It is for the realization of communism that we have struggled for so many years. We believe in communism, and our ideal is to bring it into being. In our darkest days we were sustained by the ideal of communism. It was for the realization of this ideal that countless people laid down their lives. A communist society is one in which there is no exploitation of man by man, there is great material abundance, and the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” is applied. It is impossible to apply that principle without overwhelming material wealth. In order to realize communism, we have to accomplish the tasks set in the socialist stage. They are legion, but the fundamental one is to develop the productive forces so as to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism and provide the material basis for communism.
For a long time we neglected the development of the productive forces of the socialist society. From 1957 on they grew at a snail’s pace. In the countryside, after ten years — that is, in 1966 — the peasants’ income had risen only very slightly. Although peasants in some areas were better off, those in many other areas still lived in poverty. Of course, even that was progress, compared with the old days. Still, it was far from a socialist standard of living. During the “cultural revolution” things went from bad to worse." - Deng Xiaoping
https://redsails.org/reform-is-the-only-way-for-china/
The ones that bastardized socialism were the ultras, literally utopian socialists as Engels once mentioned, that turned it into a poverty cult, marxism has always put emphasis on production and developing production. The conclusion of the materialist conception of history through dialectics, known as historical materialism, is that production is the chief determinant force of development of society, it’s marxism 101. These utopian socialists are idealists.
Westerners calling this or that for global south people . I will ask these guys like Putin - Who the hell you are ?
Trav privated the video
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
