**USSR Economy **
The USSR had commodity-production and wage labor i.e workers working for salaries and then buying stuff with that money. Commodity production means making things to be sold, rather than to be used immediately. Firms in the USSR, post-Stalin had pseudo market-type reforms i.e they had to take loans from the state, pay interest, had to be profitable and there even was a type of psuedo competition between the state enterprises, but at the same time they had to follow the plan set by the state. This is what people mean by state capitalism.
The USSR had many problems mainly because they were emulating capitalism without the key ingredient that causes capitalism to be productive : real competition between capitalist. The market style reforms also made planning difficult as firms had to follow the plan while being profitable at the same time. Technological development was slow as the economic incentives didnt work as intended. For example, shutting the firm down for retooling meant loss of revenue. Firms would rather work with old inefficient methods than shut down to upgrade their technology.
Even during Stalin's time, the USSR had wage-labor, commodity production etc, but the major difference was that capital goods were mostly allocated based on their use-values rather than their exchange values, meaning that capital goods were mostly not treated like commodities. Some Marxist economists believe this is the secret behind the phenomenal economic growth during Stalin's time. The conversion of peasants into urban workers also played a role in economic growth, but this is not unique to socialism.
Interestingly, in 1965, Che Guevara studied Stalin's economic methods and wanted to implement Stalin style socialism(where the state operated as a single enterprise) rather than Khruschev style socialism(pseudo market reforms, marginalist economics etc). Unfortunately he died in 1967. To the best of my knowledge, Cuba did not adopt that model.
Now most people wont consider any system without private ownership and competition as capitalism, but Marxists understand capitalism as more than that : capitalism is generalized commodity production. Imagine if Amazon and Walmart merge and take over the entire market of distributing consumer goods. So now, anything that you buy will come from Walmazon only. In this scenario, Walmazon becomes so powerful, it can become the state, and it operates without competition. It can control who gets what, plans where to set up shops, who gets what jobs etc. Now imagine the US govt takes ownership of Walmazon. Now you have the People's Republic of the USA. But nothing has fundamentally changed, from private Walmazon to Peoples Repubic of USA, in the way commodity production occurs. There is no private property and no competition. But the basic capitalist system : producing commodities, wage-labor, buying and selling stuff etc would still exist. This hypothetical system would be somewhat similar to what USSR, China, Vietnam etc all had before their full capitalist restoration.
The USSR's experience was as long as commodity production existed, you have to create rational incentives for economic growth. These incentives rapidly converge into market-style reforms. This is the ironic reason why the USSR collapsed. They didnt realize that the problems they were facing was due to such reforms, and the more they reformed, the more problems they had. The additional problems were assumed to be because of central planning rather than the reforms, so they further increased reforms. Near the end of the USSR, they had a massive shadow economy, slowing economic growth and excess military spending. The shadow economy generated a shadow capitalist class, who came out into the open with the collapse of the USSR as its new ruling class.
** China's politics **
There was a lot of debate in the 1970s China about the economic strategy, and they came to this conclusion : that China needed to develop productive forces rapidly by any means necessary. The "return to capitalism" under Deng, was really a return to private property and real competition from state ownership and no competition. From an inefficient neutered form of capitalism to "true" capitalism.
However, the reform and opening up of China was fundamentally different to the reform and opening up of all the other third-world countries that still remain poor. China's massive market, their ability to build a competent infrastructure and relatively strong rule of law meant that they could extract concessions from capitalists, both foreign and domestic. From foreign capitalists, they "stole" technologies that enabled them to rapidly catch up. Their authoritarian state power meant that domestic capitalists couldnt do whatever they wanted like in the USA, but have to follow state mandates regarding the overall direction of development.
China's SOE(state owned enterprises) played a major role in this development that even Marxist economists havent fully figured out. Inspite of being generally inefficient and slower to respond than private enterprises, they played an important role in developing advanced industries that private firms would never have done due to lack of profitability involved, the massive investment and long term planning required. They worked to temporarily absorb unemployed and were a key part of the "commanding heights" that need to be controlled to ensure state power.
So China is unique in that it is a (mostly) free-market privately owned capitalist economy controlled by a (nominally) socialist ruling class. Now you might wonder, how do we know whether China's ruling class is truly socialist? The answer is not easy. One way to know, is to see which side they will take during a capitalist crisis, which China is yet to experience. Another way is to see their day to day actions, whether they benefit workers or capitalists. The recent shutting down of Ant financial was a massive blow to financial capital, its not something you would ever see in a capitalist country.
Also regarding their "imperialism", their African investments are the opposite of imperialism. China is loaning low interest loans to African countries, along with lending expertise, to build value-adding infrastructure in these poor countries. Even right-wing economist admit that Chinese investment is helping in ways that decades of western neocolonialism and "foreign aid" couldn't.
It is commonly admitted among the Western ruling class that they misjudged the nature of Chinese "return to capitalism". They had assumed that reforms would eventually bring the capitalist class back to power, and the experience of USSR, Jiang Zemin's and Hu Jinatos liberal rule, and general trend of history, further solidified their belief of the "end of history". Then Daddy Xi came in, reasserted the ruling role of the CPC and now you have the anti-Chinese manufactured consent on the Western consciousness as the ruling class has come to realize the true nature of Chinese capitalism.
Now comes the key question, will China ever move to "real socialism"? First it would be useful to understand what socialism is.
Real socialism
Socialism means the common ownership of means of production and free distribution of all goods. There is no salaries and so no wage-labor. No salaries means no money. No money means no markets. No markets implies no private property. No private property, no competition. And crucially, there is no commodity-production. All goods and services produced are produced for the purpose of consumption, not for exchange. This means that all production and distribution of goods and services is done consciously, according to a plan.
It is very easy to now understand, why the statement "true socialism has never been tried" makes sense, and also why it is not easy to simply do away with commodity-production in a world where trading between nations(and hence the reintroduction of commodity production) is necessary to attain a reasonable level of development.
Marx also believed it was possible to have a "lower form" of socialism, where instead of money, people received labour-vouchers that could only be exchanged for consumption goods (and hence cannot be used as money). This would continue until the productive forces were advanced enough to achieve an abundance of produce for all.
So will real socialism come to China soon? It will depend on the way China's capitalism evolves, and since the direction of Chinese capitalism is controlled by the socialist state, China has the possibility of socialism.
Edit: Under Stalin, firms that adopted new techniques were subsidized which led to fast dispersion of technological advancements.
As of 2015, the bottom 50% of the Chinese people (~536 million people) collectively owned a measly 6.4% of the nation’s wealth while the top 1% (~10.7 million people) had accumulated 29.7% of the total share. The wealth inequality is fast approaching the level seen in the United States.
Yes, thats how capitalism works. China's Gini index has actually come down in the past 10 years. You also have to consider that 40% of China lives in rural areas, so obviously farm laborers and small craftsmen make and own less wealth.
Just talk to any average Chinese worker and you will find that almost each and every one of them has experienced heavy debt, getting squeezed by landlords, daily exploitation from employers who skirt labor laws, the 996 culture (9am-9pm, 6 days a week; some sectors are even worse with >12 hour shift and full 7-day work week), the impossibility of owning a house without incurring a massive debt, getting scammed through internet peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, the extremely limited social mobility and a grim view of their very own future (living your entire life as a worker only to retire and receive pension barely enough to cover for your own aging healthcare cost in a country with no free healthcare - a common occurrence that really characterizes the current prospect of the Chinese working class).
CPC has >90% approval rating among the Chinese people, according to a Harvard study. Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
The average standard of living has constantly been on a rise. China now has higher real income than Argentina or Mexico, by 2030 they will have almost first-world GDP per capita of $16,000. The average working hours in China is 46 hours, similar to the USA. China's home ownership rate is almost 90%. Chinese pay much less rent as a percent of their total income than Americans. P2P lending is literally what Xi cracked down on with the end of Ant financial. It sent a very clear message to finance capital. Once again, all those problems you mention exist, but the scale of the problem is what is important. Most importantly, I vehemently disagree with the idea of pessimism in Chinese people. Chinese people are actually highly optimistic about the future development of their country.
Have to agree with OP, the Chinese people is generally optimistic (from what I've seen in my relatives from Hulunbeir) and since China has seen more social mobility than they've had in decades as the ""middle"" class population exploded. I don't know how the replier is supposed to back this up.
What evidence do you have for that? If anything it is China more than any other country that has a better chance of entering first world status, while Brazil, Mexico, Phillipines, South Africa etc, have been stuck in middle income trap for decades
I'm interested to hear where you got these takes - do you live in China or have relatives there? Or just some articles to read. I'm not trying to be a jerk, it just seems you have a lot of information that most westerners don't have and i'd like to learn more.
I don't know where they got it from, but as a Chinese-Australian who speaks with relatives regularly about this sort of stuff, his point about teaching Marxism in high school is largely correct. Most people just treat it as any other class and will forget it later in their life. Of course, you have students who legitimately take it to heart, but it is a small number. A lot of relatives I know have taken these classes but are typical liberals. I'm pretty sure someone who does an hour of research will know more about Marxist theory than my relatives.
lol, that makes sense honestly. That's really interesting, thank you :)
I agree with most points, but the last paragraph is totally wrong.
Without Marxist education, "class consciousness is on the rise amongst Chinese millenials and zoomers, many of whom are starting to become aware of the increasingly worse capitalist exploitation that take place in their country and society" would not be possible.
"widespread access to the internet and social media"is not the answer to everything. You have overlooked an important fact. China is not the only country with internet and social media. Marxist education has made it possible for more people to attack capitalists for their exploitation.
This post clearly points out the important fact "China has the possibility of socialism." The Marxist education you refute is a major foundation for this possibility.
If the general population has even the amount of class consciousness that left twitter does, I would consider that an accomplishment though maybe I follow different people.
I also don't think the average person in the world with relative comfort is really interested in politics beyond the bare basics.
beyond the very bare basics
You got hundreds of millions of people who know the bare basic Marxism, is that not enough?
same as leftists in the West
Have you noticed that you are comparing the mainstream of one country with the left wing of another country?
but the party meetings are a joke. Basically you have to attend some courses and monthly meetings, but nobody ever discusses theory, Marxism or socialism in these meetings
These things are already in Chinese textbooks
So China is unique in that it is a (mostly) free-market privately owned capitalist economy controlled by a (nominally) socialist ruling class.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the ratio of state owned to private enterprises somewhere around 50/50? And also, private ownership doesn't always mean the type of private ownership that we see as dominant in western capitalist countries since worker cooperatives are also technically "private enterprises", just that they are privately owned by a collective of the people who do the work at the enterprise rather than one person or a small group of people who contribute little in the way of actual labor.
For example, Huawei is technically a private company, but it is also technically a worker co-op with the majority of its shares being owned by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a trade union which represents all domestic Chinese Employees of Huawei, and allows their worker to vote on the 115 member Representation committee that ultimately selects the board of director and board of supervisors for the company. The ACFTU is also controlled by the CPC, which would also make Huawei a sort of semi-state owned enterprise in a way.
So while I agree that China has a long way to go before meeting enough criteria to be considered as fully socialist, and that mere government control is not socialism, the CPC still controls almost the entire economy of China, through a mixture of SOEs, party run unions, and CPC committees within private enterprises, so to call China a "privately owned capitalist economy" is perhaps a bit of an over simplification at best. It would take a fair bit of research, but I think it would beneficial for the left to do a thorough analysis of how exactly Chinese enterprises are run internally (ie: worker democracy, etc.) for both private and public enterprises, and to break down the composition of China's private economy to see what types of enterprises there are (ie: multi-nationals, co-ops, etc.), and to what degree the CPC has control over them.
There's existing Marxist analysis on how the Chinese economy functions such as this and this book, the first of which goes through a decent amount of it to argue the economy is driven to ecological collapse in the way it is ran. Don't know if there's other book length works that are recent. There's random papers here and there from the few Marxist economists in the US that have been in dialogue with Chinese economics such as this paper from the mid 2000s (which paints a super unhealthy picture of debate and Marx in China).
Some of those takes from pro-privatization economist are absolutely mind boggling, like how tf do you argue Marx as being pro private property.
That said, I do kind of wonder how relevant those texts are in our current moment, since the article is from 2007, and the book seems like it’s probably from back when Chinese pollution was a much more obvious problem to people with how smog choked their cities were up until a few years ago. On the environmental front, I’d actually say China’s future is probably looking up for now. From what I understand President Xi is an environmentalist himself and has been one of the main reasons for China’s cleanup in recent years. Also, the CPC under his leadership seems to be going against a lot of the pro-privatization currents seen in the article with crackdowns against corrupt gov/party officials, and most recently, with the shutdown of Jack Ma’s plans which would’ve shifted a lot of economic power away from the CPC and into private hands, so it’d be interesting to see what debates are happening among Chinese economists nowadays.
I do not think it's much different, the same people in the departments are still there and their students are. The book also focuses on how Xi's efforts, whatever their underlying motivations, are fundamentally not going to work on a material basis. Like the point of the book is even with the environmental reforms, the underlying driving factors of the economy (including the form the state run production takes, which is not going to be changed), are what stops the reforms from fully succeeding.
I mean look at the people who are on Xi's side like Jiang Shigong. His goal of making China "Marxist" again is to shore up state authority, rejuvenate the Chinese people, and polish the global image both of the country as well as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Actual Marxist analysis of value, alienation, radical republicanism, class struggle, is not there. I mean Shigong advocates for the ideas of Carl Schmitt and calls himself a "conservative socialist". He is not a Marxist.
OK so the big radical thing that turned a feudal shithole into world superpower was stopping making shit just because someone might buy it and only make shit someone really need?
Weird, huh
Attacking the USSR and Stalin = cringe.
Anyway,
The USSR was not communist, but it was socialist. The means of production were entirely in state hands, and the state was directly controlled by workers. Soviets (workers councils) were the backbone of society, many citizens participated in co-ops, and in Stalin's era many citizens worked on collective communal farms.
China had things called "people's communes," which were literal communes; Mao probably got closer to full communism than Stalin, but Stalin was still one of the greats.
This of course doesn't even begin to go into the fact that the USSR had a very high HDI, super low illiteracy rates, no unemployment, some of the best doctors ever, etc etc. And today, Cuba performs similarly well to the USSR.
Yes of course, the USSR had capitalist elements, but it needed them to develop the means of production, as Marxist theory dictates. Russia was still in the feudal stage, and so was not ready to go to communism, it had to undergo some form of capitalism. Under Lenin and Stalin, the USSR had socialism - not communism, but socialism. While private property and markets were all but abolished, wage labor and commodity production still existed, yes - but that was needed. Why do you think Stalin put so much emphasis on increasing production? The USSR had to undergo rapid industrialization to be able to transition to communism, and the best way to do that without going full capitalist like Gorbachev or revisionist like Kruschev was through socialism, and common ownership of the means of production, and elements of communism, like communal farms and co-ops in public life. And of course, the soviets, which had huge influence over local politics and were literal workers councils, and socialist in principle and practice.
Yes, wage-labor and commodity production existed, but it had to in order for the USSR to be able to maintain socialism (and not fall into Kruschevite capitalist revisionism) while being able to develop the MoP to the point where they could go to communism.
Had Stalin weeded out more traitors like Kruschev, Yeltsin, and Gorbachev, the USSR would be a fully communist nation by now, or at least very close.
lenin :halal:
stalin :haram:
Had Stalin weeded out more traitors like Kruschev, Yeltsin, and Gorbachev, the USSR would be a fully communist nation by now, or at least very close.
this is quite the statement
Stalin :haram:
Nah, Stalin and Lenin are both cool, but I agree with the second part that we can't fall into Great Man of History bullshit where we think that just having good individuals in power and bad individuals out of power is sufficient to change the course of history.
Kruchshev's Secret Speech led to a major change in the world Communist movement. That speech was the decision of an individual, and it absolutely changed the course of history.
If the CPSU successfully purged Krushchev's bloc, and Stalin was succeeded by a pro-Stalin figure, the USSR would have been on a significantly different path.
"Great Man Theory" is a myth which claims Great Men are born with innate traits that lead them to historical prominence, and all history is the history of Great Men. It is not "when individuals influence the world."
I don't actually disagree, individual actions can have an immense impact, but as you said, there was a bloc backing Khrushchev's actions, so merely purging Khrushchev alone wouldn't necessarily have changed what happened, as the political conditions within the CPSU may well have led someone else to carry out similar actions instead of Khrushchev. I was trying to get at the fact that the actions of individuals are almost always going to be the consequence of broader material and political struggles, or to put it another way, individuals who influence history on the level of Khrushchev are generally given that opportunity and subsequently supported in their actions by conditions that aren't completely under their control. So while Khrushchev started destalinization, the majority of the CPSU's power structure supported him in doing that, meaning that it wouldn't be correct to say that Khrushchev's actions as an individual were the only thing changing the course of history
tl;dr: you're right that the actions of individuals are very important in shaping history, but only when amplified by collective human action.
Stalin was more socialist in his policies than Lenin was - ffs, Lenin created the NEP while Stalin pushed collectivization. How would Stalin be bad but Lenin good? Both of them are good.
didn’t Stalin away power from the Soviets and effectively give it to the party
Yeah democracy in the USSR on a country wide scale was basically not existent. Workers did not control their own production or the government. Now this does not mean there was not mass participation, but that participation was not democratic in any meaningful way beyond very local levels and it was heavily bounded (for example mass participation in the purges).
They voted on everything, and the local economies were run by workers councils, so long as it didn't clash with national goals of production. I can link numerous articles on soviet democracy if you'd like - all the officials were democratically elected.
China embraced capitalism a long time ago. Here's an entire database on Chinese revisionism if you want to look more into it.
Also regarding their “imperialism”, their African investments are the opposite of imperialism. China is loaning low interest loans to African countries, along with lending expertise, to build value-adding infrastructure in these poor countries. Even right-wing economist admit that Chinese investment is helping in ways that decades of western neocolonialism and “foreign aid” couldn’t.
Many people love to parrot right-wing talking points to defend China and this is no different. Capitalism A-OK when they do it. If it was the US or some other country doing what they are doing in Africa, you'd be screaming imperialism. That's the contradiction of the "anti-imperialists". They truly believe that the US is the only country that can be imperialist despite this being completely against Lenin's own definition of imperialism. China is pretty much colonizing Africa under their belt and road policies. Here's a link from that same site detailing Chinese imperialism and another one if you want to see why they're doing it.
You know what would be great? If we could actually build a working class movement in the US instead of keeping the left all divided fighting over stupid shit. Arguing over China is probably the #1 stupid thing we fight about the most as western leftists. One half wants to defend them no matter what, and the other half realizes all the contradictions that they are simply communist in name only, but at the end of the day, none of this benefits us and just furthers the divide.
You know what would be great? If we could actually build a working class movement in the US instead of keeping the left all divided fighting over stupid shit. Arguing over China is probably the #1 stupid thing we fight about the most as western leftists. One half wants to defend them no matter what, and the other half realizes all the contradictions that they are simply communist in name only
"We could all stop fighting if everybody would just agree with me"
had me right up into:
realizes all the contradictions that they are simply communist in name only
i totally agree the western left needs to chill it on the china/ussr struggle sessions, but "agree with me" is not the way to end that lol
