Meh. China's bureaucracy does things that look suspiciously like capitalist accumulation and imperial expansion from the outside. You don't need to have your brain fried by Adrian Zenz to look crosswise at a rising Superpower stacked full of bureaucratic hierarchy and think "This probably isn't going to end in Stateless, Classless Society like we were promised".
It's still extremely naive to sit within the western Imperial Core and throw shade at actual fucking Communists, however far off the mark you think they've landed. Particularly when most of your information is getting filtered through western media.
tbh i dont think bureaucratization is irriversable in China like it was in post Andropov USSR nor nearly as gerontocracized and monolithic. At least it hasnt expanded its scope and corruption in the Xi years (the opposite really) and there is progressively more focus given in local party grassroot actions. Not any revolutionary shift but enough to keep things more balanced for now. And even if its not gonna end in communism probably its overtaking of the US globaly opens the doors for other projects to try and do so in their own ways without them getting invaded/couped and destroyed by the dominant power. Also inside China itself, its much more likely for avid communists and wings of the party like that to gain significant influence and change the course of the party and country towards the left than it is for that to happen in western liberal democratic systems so you never know. Xi's administration was a non radical but noticable step towards the right direction, maybe the next one is even more so if Xi plays his cards and influence and party running right ,it may as well slip back into more neolib revisionism
Oh, definitely. And then there's the more-obvious benefits - the resilience to western external pressures, the near-elimination of poverty, the huge boom in infrastructure development and accompanying economic improvements, the leaps in science and technology - that echo the USSR's heyday.
Setting aside the politics, China Good. But is it Marxist? I don't know. I think that's going to be something only time will tell.
A related, and maybe more interesting question is: "Could a committed Marxist come to power in China?" Whatever one thinks of China today, is there a path from here to a good end state that wouldn't require revolutionary change?
I think the answer is yes, and that by itself is a huge improvement on most countries.
How would you say someone is actually communist or not?
A lot of what westerners kick and scream about China doing amounts to "they're not paying us rents!"
From the fight over IP to territorial control of the provinces, Chinese people are consistently telling western imperialists to GTFO.
This also happens to be why Putin has sent DC into fits for over twenty years. Despite overthrowing the Russian Communist Party, Americans did not succeed in capturing the Russian lands or the productive labors their peoples.
That, I think, is a necessary precondition for any kind of Communist state. It's the defining characteristic that separates a Commune from a Plantation.
I think it's hard to dissect what's going on inside China, and whether the labor value of the proletariat is truly coming back to them in any meaningful quantity. But from the outside, they're keeping the claws of expropriative Westerners off their backs.
But opposition to imperialism is something that Iran also does, and Iran bans communist parties and flogs striking workers. It's not enough to simply be opposed to the West. Even Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was opposed to the Anglos and went to war with them.
Meh. China's bureaucracy does things that look suspiciously like capitalist accumulation and imperial expansion from the outside. You don't need to have your brain fried by Adrian Zenz to look crosswise at a rising Superpower stacked full of bureaucratic hierarchy and think "This probably isn't going to end in Stateless, Classless Society like we were promised".
It's still extremely naive to sit within the western Imperial Core and throw shade at actual fucking Communists, however far off the mark you think they've landed. Particularly when most of your information is getting filtered through western media.
tbh i dont think bureaucratization is irriversable in China like it was in post Andropov USSR nor nearly as gerontocracized and monolithic. At least it hasnt expanded its scope and corruption in the Xi years (the opposite really) and there is progressively more focus given in local party grassroot actions. Not any revolutionary shift but enough to keep things more balanced for now. And even if its not gonna end in communism probably its overtaking of the US globaly opens the doors for other projects to try and do so in their own ways without them getting invaded/couped and destroyed by the dominant power. Also inside China itself, its much more likely for avid communists and wings of the party like that to gain significant influence and change the course of the party and country towards the left than it is for that to happen in western liberal democratic systems so you never know. Xi's administration was a non radical but noticable step towards the right direction, maybe the next one is even more so if Xi plays his cards and influence and party running right ,it may as well slip back into more neolib revisionism
Oh, definitely. And then there's the more-obvious benefits - the resilience to western external pressures, the near-elimination of poverty, the huge boom in infrastructure development and accompanying economic improvements, the leaps in science and technology - that echo the USSR's heyday.
Setting aside the politics, China Good. But is it Marxist? I don't know. I think that's going to be something only time will tell.
A related, and maybe more interesting question is: "Could a committed Marxist come to power in China?" Whatever one thinks of China today, is there a path from here to a good end state that wouldn't require revolutionary change?
I think the answer is yes, and that by itself is a huge improvement on most countries.
:xi-lib-tears:
That's true enough.
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China surpassing the US under Xi would be a huge boon for his wing of the party and a blow to the right wing.
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How would you say someone is actually communist or not? Is it enough to call oneself a communist?
A lot of what westerners kick and scream about China doing amounts to "they're not paying us rents!"
From the fight over IP to territorial control of the provinces, Chinese people are consistently telling western imperialists to GTFO.
This also happens to be why Putin has sent DC into fits for over twenty years. Despite overthrowing the Russian Communist Party, Americans did not succeed in capturing the Russian lands or the productive labors their peoples.
That, I think, is a necessary precondition for any kind of Communist state. It's the defining characteristic that separates a Commune from a Plantation.
I think it's hard to dissect what's going on inside China, and whether the labor value of the proletariat is truly coming back to them in any meaningful quantity. But from the outside, they're keeping the claws of expropriative Westerners off their backs.
That's got to count for something.
But opposition to imperialism is something that Iran also does, and Iran bans communist parties and flogs striking workers. It's not enough to simply be opposed to the West. Even Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was opposed to the Anglos and went to war with them.