Eh, I’m in the fence about China overall but I’m not sure I’m totally convinced by the “they’re defo commies cuz if they weren’t they’d just call themselves liberals cuz it’s easier”.
There’s explanations why they’d remain a one party state even if they are no longer genuine in their pursuit of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
1 to claim the legacies of Mao and other communist leaders.
2 being a liberal state would probably require capitulation to other liberal states. China wants to be independent from the west and having a strong military means they have to take an antagonistic stance towards the west.
3 they want to development a PMC (would will also help with point 2). If they embraced western liberal capitalism they’d be expected to keep their working based poor and undereducated. Having a strong centralized state to direct capital production is good for building a middle class.
This would still make them the imperial west’s enemies which I guess is still good but then they’d be doing so under a nationalistic desire to be their own strong capital economy.
I'm sorry but I would not say that is textbook Marxism at all. Nowhere does Marx endorse doing that in a sort of stagist progression that in the end makes private ownership defunct. The relations of production are also not something that can be advanced, they are just descriptive of the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. We should not mix up quantitative gains in productive capacity or living conditions with social relations of production.
No, that particular sort of Two-Stage Marx is one of the most pervasive misreading's. Though Marx and Engels clearly argue that the tech advances necessary for socialism is provided by Capitalism, and the destroyers of the capitalist class is the working class born from the development of capital, there is no two stage formula about highly developing capital in some controlled way. Check out Radhika Desai's work on how Marx's purpose was not to make a stagist argument. I have a recording of talk she did, not sure if the link is still active but I can DM it.
Also what you describe is not the "withering away" of the state. Beyond dealing with whether Lenin's argument is correct (I would partially challenge that it is, it's mixing up Marx's lower stage of communism with some other stuff), and whether Engels coining of the term in the Anti-Duhring is coherent with Marx, what China is doing is definitely not that. I would argue the wage form and the market, private property, the army, the bureaucracy are decidedly already abolished with the establishment of the DotP if we take Marx's position. I mean Marx is very clear in his writing on the commune that the binding of government to capital must be completely severed for there to be a DotP and for the state (at which point the govt is no longer really the state) to go away. I mean Marx says that self government of the workers would be nothing but "a sham and a snare" if the the workshops did not or were not able abolish the market and freely democratically decide production among themselves.
Also one last note on the objective factors argument from earlier, there's a very good quote from Marx's Inferno that deals with it well and so I'll post it here:
"The material conditions of socialism are
not the objective factors of industrial technology ...
but the proletariat’s felt need for large-scale, cooperative
production, coordinated on a national or global scale. This can
only be a felt need when capitalist development has broken
down the laborers’ reserve of individual skills, so as to make
their material interdependence obvious and robust, and when
the power of the capitalist state has developed to the point
where the futility of worker separatism has become equally
obvious. Both of these developments have an objective,
technological component. Industrial technology helps to realize
the first condition; military and bureaucratic technology help to
realize the second. But what makes these conditions material
to the foundation of socialism is their apprehension by the
laboring classes. The material conditions of socialism are the
conditions that matter for its feasibility, and these are, for Marx,
primarily the motivational—hence “subjective”—conditions of the
mass of laborers. Insofar as these motivational conditions have
objective, technological preconditions, the link between the two is
not so problematic as in Cohen’s construal. Cohen’s subjective
conditions are moral and other-regarding, whereas Marx’s are
prudential, and, while there is no reason to think that the
level of industrial development has any straightforward
repercussions for people’s moral commitments, it would be very
odd not to think that the level of industrial development has
direct and specifiable repercussions for people’s prudential
strategies."
Developing the felt need for cooperation is what births socialism, not developing capitalism in any controlled manner or the state improving working conditions (though this is obviously a good thing), and any attempt to do so on the basis that that develops socialism misses the point. For example the independent outbursts of labor struggle in China we see that the state suppress is in fact the very thing that needs to be developed.
I am of the opinion that the DotP is not the state in referring to the institutions that Marx says make up the state towards the end of his life. It is a state of affairs and political organization, but not "the state".
Also I am referring principally to documents Marx wrote late in his life, at which point he has stopped using terms as they meant in the manifesto. The manifesto is too particular to the 1848 revolution. I mean Marx absolutely does support centralization of production in the hands of the proletariat but that's not centralization under the state as he writes later in his life. I do not think that passage contradicts anything I said. I mean the goal of the manifesto is not about what constitutes and establishes socialism. That passage and the 10 planks that are given directly beneath it are demands for society that could be bettered in his time period under capitalism. They aren't well developed. I mean that section specifically is called out in the 1872 preface as the one that needs significant rewrites.
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You really think the CCP is gonna toss aside global capitalism once they control it? Your faith in Xi and the boys is much stronger than mine.
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Eh, I’m in the fence about China overall but I’m not sure I’m totally convinced by the “they’re defo commies cuz if they weren’t they’d just call themselves liberals cuz it’s easier”.
There’s explanations why they’d remain a one party state even if they are no longer genuine in their pursuit of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
1 to claim the legacies of Mao and other communist leaders.
2 being a liberal state would probably require capitulation to other liberal states. China wants to be independent from the west and having a strong military means they have to take an antagonistic stance towards the west.
3 they want to development a PMC (would will also help with point 2). If they embraced western liberal capitalism they’d be expected to keep their working based poor and undereducated. Having a strong centralized state to direct capital production is good for building a middle class.
This would still make them the imperial west’s enemies which I guess is still good but then they’d be doing so under a nationalistic desire to be their own strong capital economy.
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Let's hope you're right.
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I'm sorry but I would not say that is textbook Marxism at all. Nowhere does Marx endorse doing that in a sort of stagist progression that in the end makes private ownership defunct. The relations of production are also not something that can be advanced, they are just descriptive of the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. We should not mix up quantitative gains in productive capacity or living conditions with social relations of production.
deleted by creator
No, that particular sort of Two-Stage Marx is one of the most pervasive misreading's. Though Marx and Engels clearly argue that the tech advances necessary for socialism is provided by Capitalism, and the destroyers of the capitalist class is the working class born from the development of capital, there is no two stage formula about highly developing capital in some controlled way. Check out Radhika Desai's work on how Marx's purpose was not to make a stagist argument. I have a recording of talk she did, not sure if the link is still active but I can DM it.
Also what you describe is not the "withering away" of the state. Beyond dealing with whether Lenin's argument is correct (I would partially challenge that it is, it's mixing up Marx's lower stage of communism with some other stuff), and whether Engels coining of the term in the Anti-Duhring is coherent with Marx, what China is doing is definitely not that. I would argue the wage form and the market, private property, the army, the bureaucracy are decidedly already abolished with the establishment of the DotP if we take Marx's position. I mean Marx is very clear in his writing on the commune that the binding of government to capital must be completely severed for there to be a DotP and for the state (at which point the govt is no longer really the state) to go away. I mean Marx says that self government of the workers would be nothing but "a sham and a snare" if the the workshops did not or were not able abolish the market and freely democratically decide production among themselves.
Also one last note on the objective factors argument from earlier, there's a very good quote from Marx's Inferno that deals with it well and so I'll post it here: "The material conditions of socialism are not the objective factors of industrial technology ... but the proletariat’s felt need for large-scale, cooperative production, coordinated on a national or global scale. This can only be a felt need when capitalist development has broken down the laborers’ reserve of individual skills, so as to make their material interdependence obvious and robust, and when the power of the capitalist state has developed to the point where the futility of worker separatism has become equally obvious. Both of these developments have an objective, technological component. Industrial technology helps to realize the first condition; military and bureaucratic technology help to realize the second. But what makes these conditions material to the foundation of socialism is their apprehension by the laboring classes. The material conditions of socialism are the conditions that matter for its feasibility, and these are, for Marx, primarily the motivational—hence “subjective”—conditions of the mass of laborers. Insofar as these motivational conditions have objective, technological preconditions, the link between the two is not so problematic as in Cohen’s construal. Cohen’s subjective conditions are moral and other-regarding, whereas Marx’s are prudential, and, while there is no reason to think that the level of industrial development has any straightforward repercussions for people’s moral commitments, it would be very odd not to think that the level of industrial development has direct and specifiable repercussions for people’s prudential strategies."
Developing the felt need for cooperation is what births socialism, not developing capitalism in any controlled manner or the state improving working conditions (though this is obviously a good thing), and any attempt to do so on the basis that that develops socialism misses the point. For example the independent outbursts of labor struggle in China we see that the state suppress is in fact the very thing that needs to be developed.
deleted by creator
I am of the opinion that the DotP is not the state in referring to the institutions that Marx says make up the state towards the end of his life. It is a state of affairs and political organization, but not "the state".
Also I am referring principally to documents Marx wrote late in his life, at which point he has stopped using terms as they meant in the manifesto. The manifesto is too particular to the 1848 revolution. I mean Marx absolutely does support centralization of production in the hands of the proletariat but that's not centralization under the state as he writes later in his life. I do not think that passage contradicts anything I said. I mean the goal of the manifesto is not about what constitutes and establishes socialism. That passage and the 10 planks that are given directly beneath it are demands for society that could be bettered in his time period under capitalism. They aren't well developed. I mean that section specifically is called out in the 1872 preface as the one that needs significant rewrites.
deleted by creator