What you describe is why China is a successful and wealthy nation. Not really why it should still be considered socialist. I do not know whether the concessions China made to capitalism where necessary, but they sure were successful in raising the standard of living. However, if they were necessary it means that China wasn’t able to establish socialism in the end. And this is not a critique against the Chinese people. As you say: the world is capitalist. It may just be impossible to establish socialism under the current conditions, whithout a world revolution. That total isolation doesn’t work very can be considered proven by now.
Claiming that I suggested that China is capitalist is also a pretty big straw man. China has a socialist and a capitalist sector. That doesn’t make the country capitalist, but it has lost the basic principles that make socialism: The workers don’t own the means of production in the capitalist sector. You try to talk this away by changing the very definition of socialism.
No matter how well-controlled this sector is, the a large part of the surplus those workers achieve goes into the pockets of capitalists. Even if those workers are as well-paid and well-protected as their counterparts in the socialist sector, the are still alienated from their work. Some of the fruits of their work are funding some rich man’s mega yacht and the betterment of the socialist state. By this, you create two classes of workers - that means giving up on working towards a classless society.
You may say this is a temporary setup raise the standard of living, but concentrated money always creates power and corruption. Enough money will always find some weak-willed individuals to buy power, no matter how draconic the punishment might be. The fact that billionaires have to be put to death shows that this is already happening on a grand scale. There are only two ways this can go, in my opinion: Either China will decide to reintegrate the capitalist sector back into the socialist society or this sector will quickly erode what remains of the socialist society. At this point, the first will not go through without bloodshed.
To me, the question stands whether a country can use “controlled capitalist mechnisms” at all and still stay socialists. Controlled capitalism isn’t socialism. This could be discussed. However, once you allow privately owned international businesses on a grand scale, it is really hard to argue for your position.
I already explained why China should be considered socialist: not because it is merely successful or wealthy, but because socialism is a transitional process full of contradiction, and the decisive question is which class holds political power. In China it is unambiguously the working class who hold the state, command the commanding heights, discipline capital, direct development, and subordinate private accumulation to national and social objectives.
You are also conflating socialism with communism. Communism requires the global abolition of capitalism. Socialism does not. Socialism can exist, has existed, and does exist under capitalist encirclement: the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, the DPRK. It cannot complete itself globally in one country, but the proletariat can seize and wield state power, build public ownership, suppress bourgeois political power, develop the productive forces, and carry out transition under hostile world conditions.
Your claim that capitalist concessions mean socialism was not established is not Marxism. As Lenin put it state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the same social relation as capitalism under bourgeois rule. The same economic form has different class content depending on which class commands the state. State capitalism under bourgeois rule strengthens the bourgeoisie. State capitalism under proletarian rule serves socialist construction.
So the serious question is not whether capitalist mechanisms exist. They obviously do. The question is whether they are sovereign. Do they command the party, state, army, land, finance, planning, courts, banks, currency, or national development strategy? In China, no. They do not.
You say I straw-manned you, but you explicitly said China was “transitioning out of socialism.” You now soften this into “China has a socialist sector and a capitalist sector,” then again treat the existence of the capitalist sector as proof that socialism’s basic principle has been lost. That is the same argument with padding.
A socialist transition is not defined by the absence of capitalist relations. It is defined by proletarian political supremacy and the subordination of capitalist relations to socialist development. If private property automatically means socialism has failed, then the NEP, New Democracy, Cuba, Vietnam, and every real revolutionary state operating under scarcity, siege, and uneven development vanish from socialist history. Your definition does not clarify socialism. It abolishes it.
Yes, workers in the private sector do not legally own those firms. That is a contradiction. I have never denied this. But you leap from “contradictions remain” to “therefore class struggle has been abandoned.” That is simply unserious to put it lightly. Class struggle has not been abandoned in China. Since around 2014, the birdcage has been tightening: finance restrained, platform capital checked, real estate capital forced into correction, anti-corruption intensified, party cells expanded in private firms, and strategic sectors reasserted under state direction. This is not capital digesting the socialist state. It is the socialist state reasserting command over capital.
Your treatment of corruption is equally crude. The existence of corruption does not prove degeneration. The toleration of corruption, or the inability to discipline it, would. Rooting it out from top to bottom, including at high levels, proves the opposite.
You also conflate financial assets with social power. Money is not power in itself. It is a token of command over labour, resources, and territory, mediated by law and the state. In a bourgeois state, money becomes political power because the bourgeoisie controls the institutions through which money commands society. In China, wealth does not automatically become sovereignty because the bourgeoisie does not own the state. The capitalist may have money; the state decides whether that money becomes command or becomes a liability.
This is why Chinese billionaires are not equivalent to Western billionaires. In the West, they buy elections, media, parties, universities, housing, legislation, think tanks, and foreign policy. In China, they have no pathways to purchasing meaningful power or influence. That is the difference between capital ruling the state and capital being subordinated by the state.
You say “controlled capitalism isn’t socialism.” Again, capitalist mechanisms controlled by a bourgeois state are capitalism. Capitalist mechanisms subordinated to a proletarian state are part of socialist transition.
This is the point of Chinese socialist political economy’s distinction between private capital and public capital. The argument is not that capital relations are harmless. The argument is that in the primary stage of socialism, market relations and capital cannot simply be wished away. The question is whether capital is privately sovereign or publicly commanded. Public capital in the commanding heights compels accumulation for social development rather than private domination.
You also misdescribe China’s relation to international business. China did not simply “allow privately owned international business on a large scale” in the liberal sense. It used foreign capital, technology, export markets, and capitalist greed for national development goals under conditions set by the Chinese state. Foreign capital wanted profit and market access. China extracted infrastructure, technology transfer, industrial capacity, employment, training, supply chains, and productive upgrading.
As Lenin put it, the capitalists will sell us the rope with which they will be hanged. Capital can and should be used against itself when operating under hostile class power.
You see private firms and conclude surrender. You see foreign capital and conclude dependence. You see billionaires and conclude bourgeois rule. But none of these categories can be understood apart from the state power containing them. In China, large capital does not dictate the national project. It is used, restricted, disciplined, and punished when it threatens the whole.
Yes, there is danger. If capital gained political command, if public ownership ceased to dominate the commanding heights, if finance disciplined the state, if the party became the administrative committee of the bourgeoisie, then China would be moving out of socialism. But that is not the present reality nor the present trend. The trend is a tightening birdcage, stronger state direction, common prosperity, anti-corruption, strategic self-reliance, party leadership over private firms, and discipline of capital.
Your argument is not grounded in China’s present conditions or trajectory, but in an abstract fear that because capital exists, capital must inevitably rule. That is not materialism. It is fatalism.
China remains socialist not because it is pure, but because the working class holds state power, public ownership controls the commanding heights, land and finance remain under state authority, planning governs accumulation, capital is subordinated to national development, and the bourgeoisie are still disciplined by the state.
What you describe is why China is a successful and wealthy nation. Not really why it should still be considered socialist. I do not know whether the concessions China made to capitalism where necessary, but they sure were successful in raising the standard of living. However, if they were necessary it means that China wasn’t able to establish socialism in the end. And this is not a critique against the Chinese people. As you say: the world is capitalist. It may just be impossible to establish socialism under the current conditions, whithout a world revolution. That total isolation doesn’t work very can be considered proven by now.
Claiming that I suggested that China is capitalist is also a pretty big straw man. China has a socialist and a capitalist sector. That doesn’t make the country capitalist, but it has lost the basic principles that make socialism: The workers don’t own the means of production in the capitalist sector. You try to talk this away by changing the very definition of socialism.
No matter how well-controlled this sector is, the a large part of the surplus those workers achieve goes into the pockets of capitalists. Even if those workers are as well-paid and well-protected as their counterparts in the socialist sector, the are still alienated from their work. Some of the fruits of their work are funding some rich man’s mega yacht and the betterment of the socialist state. By this, you create two classes of workers - that means giving up on working towards a classless society.
You may say this is a temporary setup raise the standard of living, but concentrated money always creates power and corruption. Enough money will always find some weak-willed individuals to buy power, no matter how draconic the punishment might be. The fact that billionaires have to be put to death shows that this is already happening on a grand scale. There are only two ways this can go, in my opinion: Either China will decide to reintegrate the capitalist sector back into the socialist society or this sector will quickly erode what remains of the socialist society. At this point, the first will not go through without bloodshed.
To me, the question stands whether a country can use “controlled capitalist mechnisms” at all and still stay socialists. Controlled capitalism isn’t socialism. This could be discussed. However, once you allow privately owned international businesses on a grand scale, it is really hard to argue for your position.
I already explained why China should be considered socialist: not because it is merely successful or wealthy, but because socialism is a transitional process full of contradiction, and the decisive question is which class holds political power. In China it is unambiguously the working class who hold the state, command the commanding heights, discipline capital, direct development, and subordinate private accumulation to national and social objectives.
You are also conflating socialism with communism. Communism requires the global abolition of capitalism. Socialism does not. Socialism can exist, has existed, and does exist under capitalist encirclement: the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, the DPRK. It cannot complete itself globally in one country, but the proletariat can seize and wield state power, build public ownership, suppress bourgeois political power, develop the productive forces, and carry out transition under hostile world conditions.
Your claim that capitalist concessions mean socialism was not established is not Marxism. As Lenin put it state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the same social relation as capitalism under bourgeois rule. The same economic form has different class content depending on which class commands the state. State capitalism under bourgeois rule strengthens the bourgeoisie. State capitalism under proletarian rule serves socialist construction.
So the serious question is not whether capitalist mechanisms exist. They obviously do. The question is whether they are sovereign. Do they command the party, state, army, land, finance, planning, courts, banks, currency, or national development strategy? In China, no. They do not.
You say I straw-manned you, but you explicitly said China was “transitioning out of socialism.” You now soften this into “China has a socialist sector and a capitalist sector,” then again treat the existence of the capitalist sector as proof that socialism’s basic principle has been lost. That is the same argument with padding.
A socialist transition is not defined by the absence of capitalist relations. It is defined by proletarian political supremacy and the subordination of capitalist relations to socialist development. If private property automatically means socialism has failed, then the NEP, New Democracy, Cuba, Vietnam, and every real revolutionary state operating under scarcity, siege, and uneven development vanish from socialist history. Your definition does not clarify socialism. It abolishes it.
Yes, workers in the private sector do not legally own those firms. That is a contradiction. I have never denied this. But you leap from “contradictions remain” to “therefore class struggle has been abandoned.” That is simply unserious to put it lightly. Class struggle has not been abandoned in China. Since around 2014, the birdcage has been tightening: finance restrained, platform capital checked, real estate capital forced into correction, anti-corruption intensified, party cells expanded in private firms, and strategic sectors reasserted under state direction. This is not capital digesting the socialist state. It is the socialist state reasserting command over capital.
Your treatment of corruption is equally crude. The existence of corruption does not prove degeneration. The toleration of corruption, or the inability to discipline it, would. Rooting it out from top to bottom, including at high levels, proves the opposite.
You also conflate financial assets with social power. Money is not power in itself. It is a token of command over labour, resources, and territory, mediated by law and the state. In a bourgeois state, money becomes political power because the bourgeoisie controls the institutions through which money commands society. In China, wealth does not automatically become sovereignty because the bourgeoisie does not own the state. The capitalist may have money; the state decides whether that money becomes command or becomes a liability.
This is why Chinese billionaires are not equivalent to Western billionaires. In the West, they buy elections, media, parties, universities, housing, legislation, think tanks, and foreign policy. In China, they have no pathways to purchasing meaningful power or influence. That is the difference between capital ruling the state and capital being subordinated by the state.
You say “controlled capitalism isn’t socialism.” Again, capitalist mechanisms controlled by a bourgeois state are capitalism. Capitalist mechanisms subordinated to a proletarian state are part of socialist transition.
This is the point of Chinese socialist political economy’s distinction between private capital and public capital. The argument is not that capital relations are harmless. The argument is that in the primary stage of socialism, market relations and capital cannot simply be wished away. The question is whether capital is privately sovereign or publicly commanded. Public capital in the commanding heights compels accumulation for social development rather than private domination.
You also misdescribe China’s relation to international business. China did not simply “allow privately owned international business on a large scale” in the liberal sense. It used foreign capital, technology, export markets, and capitalist greed for national development goals under conditions set by the Chinese state. Foreign capital wanted profit and market access. China extracted infrastructure, technology transfer, industrial capacity, employment, training, supply chains, and productive upgrading.
As Lenin put it, the capitalists will sell us the rope with which they will be hanged. Capital can and should be used against itself when operating under hostile class power.
You see private firms and conclude surrender. You see foreign capital and conclude dependence. You see billionaires and conclude bourgeois rule. But none of these categories can be understood apart from the state power containing them. In China, large capital does not dictate the national project. It is used, restricted, disciplined, and punished when it threatens the whole.
Yes, there is danger. If capital gained political command, if public ownership ceased to dominate the commanding heights, if finance disciplined the state, if the party became the administrative committee of the bourgeoisie, then China would be moving out of socialism. But that is not the present reality nor the present trend. The trend is a tightening birdcage, stronger state direction, common prosperity, anti-corruption, strategic self-reliance, party leadership over private firms, and discipline of capital.
Your argument is not grounded in China’s present conditions or trajectory, but in an abstract fear that because capital exists, capital must inevitably rule. That is not materialism. It is fatalism.
China remains socialist not because it is pure, but because the working class holds state power, public ownership controls the commanding heights, land and finance remain under state authority, planning governs accumulation, capital is subordinated to national development, and the bourgeoisie are still disciplined by the state.