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.
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.
Surplus-labor is not the principal feature of capitalism; capitalism is the surplus-labor exploitation of the proletariat and the socialization of production with large scale enterprise, along with the competition between capitalists causing the domination of exchange-value (and so the "boundless thirst" of surplus value). All forms of class society feature surplus-value, and communism (classless society) does as well, where this surplus is commonly owned. The state is centralization, and however much capitalist monopoly tends towards this total state ownership cannot exist under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
The state is an organ serving the interests of the dominant class, so does not necessarily have "power over the workers" if under the form of the DOTP (unless you want to argue against this fitting the definition of a "state," and this is just semantics), is desirable as a workers dictatorship following the overthrow of the bourgeoisie (where it would be seizing and centralizing capital if properly developed, so yes it should have power over capital), and only undesirable altogether when classes cease to exist.
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.