Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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what do you think about this comment?
Absolutely nobody can argue with 400 million people out of poverty in 40 years.
Of course it’s revisionist, though. Even official ideology says it is.
And at this point, it’s also clearly state capitalism. The vast majority of goods and services are produced and distributed for profit via the market. Having a decent chunk of this done by commercially-oriented state owned firms doesn’t make it socialist.
I don’t blame them for having done this- it’s almost impossible to survive, let alone thrive, in the capitalist world-system as a socialist state.
But a country with a higher gini coefficient than the US, absolutely rampant consumer culture, rampant labour exploitation, ruling classes composed of investor-bureaucrats, state enterprise executives, and straight capitalists, a huge speculative bubble real estate market (which has paid for local government budgets in recent years), and urban middle classes fixated on entrepreneurship and making money…none of these things are socialist.
OK, so maybe they had to crank up the capital accumulation machine for now so they can build real socialism later? Sounds great, except you’re now placing your faith in the millionaire and billionaire capitalists at the top of the party to just dissolve themselves in favour of the working class some day. Good luck.
The comment identifies several features of SWCC that warrant close analysis. But the criticisms are very abstract, which may distort things.
I assume the comment is about China? I think to unpack the challenges that China is facing and it’s successes and failures on the road to socialism, the criticism needs to be more specific. Otherwise, the risk is making conclusions that don’t follow from the argument. For example:
The conclusion suggests the CPC isn’t aware of the issues and doesn’t have a plan for them. That might be the case. But it might not. We need to know more to say for sure.
Starting with such an abstract view of the country misses any safeguards, contingency plans, restraints, even faults, etc. Is it faith in rich capitalists or faith in a socialist system of socialist checks and balances?
Additionally, the level of abstraction kind of obscures the what, the why, and the how. Consider the following:
What does it mean to be a socialist state in a majority capitalist world? What has China done to navigate that world and control it’s domestic capital? Why and how?
I also think I’d frame it the other way – I’d start from a more positive position, that China’s officials deserve praise for building socialism. They haven’t simply survived. Many other paths would have meant simple survival for the ‘state’. It just seems a bit strange to frame China’s development potentially deserving blame and as doing the bare minimum that it took to survive. Again, I think this stems from the level of abstraction.
Abstraction is useful but it follows from concrete analysis of detail. Otherwise, I agree that China’s rise is unconventional and I look forward to seeing how it deals with the latest contradictions.
“Revisionism” refers to changing the fundamentals of ML, China did not do so.
“State Capitalism” literally is early socialism, if done under the DotP. And the CPC considers China in the early stage of Socialism.