WASHINGTON (AP) — Communism, President Donald Trump says, is the greatest threat the U.S. has ever faced.
This summer, citing similarly grave concerns, he took the rare step of delivering a primetime address to the nation, accusing China of “sinister election meddling” in 2020 and reviving his yearslong push to dispute his loss in that year’s election.
Even as Trump seeks to decry Democrats as communists ahead of November’s midterm elections, he is rolling out the red carpet this week for Chinese President Xi Jinping, the leader of the world’s most powerful communist country.
The state visit comes as the president himself has increasingly directed his administration to take large stakes in private companies to try to stimulate the economy — something even some Republicans decry as corporate socialism.
The important factors, from a Marxist standpoint, are that the working classes control the state and that the commanding heights of the economy are publicly owned. Rhodesia was as you said, a settler-colony that ran on colonialism as their primary mode of production and class character. As for questioning the authenticity of the CPC, I invite everyone who knows a decent bit about Marxism to read statements from the CPC and critique them here.
For a Marxist like myself, you can’t really “fake” this kind of understanding. Even if Marxists can disagree with him here, what cannot be said is that this is all talk. The people of China do study Marxism, and though it is true that a good number tune out as we all do from class, it becomes incredibly difficult to present a “faux-Marxism” in a well-educated socialist state.
Talk is cheap, actions speak clearly. It’s very hard to claim that the workers control the state, when they are responding more out of fear of falling into a disfavoured underclass (or worse) than they are responding to their own needs. I have no doubt that in spirit the people of China consider the promise of Communism their goal, but the political class speaks a different truth with their hands than they speak with their voices.
The actions of the CPC do back up their talk with action. Did you read the article I linked? China is progressing exactly as Xi Jinping described, in my opinion, which is why I invited you to criticize openly so we can discuss. One thing I think you have confused is the idea that there is a “political class.” In Marxist analysis, there is no such thing. Administration is not a class, but an occupation. What determines class is ones relation to ownership of the means of production, which administrators in socialism share in common with factory workers and whatnot.
Can you explain how the CPC is not adhering to Marxism? I think the article presents a good intro point for discussion.
Sounds great in principle except while the devolution of profit is far more equitable, the devolution of authority is not, so the claim that administrators have devolved ownership to the worker is only half true. The fundamental problem is that true devolution of ownership would imply equal participation in defining objectives and a synthesis of perspective. The tight information controls, aggressive, punitive discipline rather than integrative discipline methods, and extremely harmful consequences for breaking with party narrative, even with good cause create a de facto class stratification between the partisan administration and the proletariat. This not only harms the individual in lack of self-actualization, but also the nation as a whole in terms of limiting adaptability, and preventing the integration of feedback not previously modelled, and producing misguided, misinformed leadership, corrupted by their own personal biases.
It’s the same semi-devolved state of ownership which most socialist societies get stuck at. Systemic authoritarian bottlenecks and a failure to learn, integrate, and achieve mutual consensus rather than imposing consensus from above ends up recreating the worst sins of tyranny, and plutocracy. China has done better than most at navigating this obstacle, but it hasn’t overcome it. Its hybrid semi-socialist state creates exploited underclasses out of ethnic minorities and perspectives deemed incompatible with the flawed perspective of the political elite.
There are two major disagreements I have with your analysis.
The first is your firm break from Marxism and materialism into idealist analysis. Administrators in socialism perform a socially necessary form of mental and managerial labor in coordinating society. This does not make them a distinct class, just like managers are not a distinct class. Again, ownership of production is the primary distinction between workers and owners, not whether one coordinates other workers. The administrators in the CPC are overwhelmingly proletarian, but you divert from Marxism here.
Secondly, the actual, practical experience of China paints a wildly different picture of society than you describe as its supposed shortcomings. Even according to western firms like NIRA data, perceptions of democracy are incredibly high:
This is no accident. Policy in China comes from the bottom-up, in a process called “Whole Process People’s Democracy.” It then gets interpreted by the CPC, who relay and simplify policy with a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, which then gets feedback and is implemented. Democratic centralism makes policy quick when necessary, and gradual when consensus needs to be built. It’s why policy in China has radically adapted over the existence of the PRC, far more so than other countries, while maintaining more political stability.
In essense, you critique China from a liberal perspective while maintaining Marxist phrasing. That’s why I invited you to analyze the article and critique it, so that we have a common basepoint.
Survey data is not reliable in that kind of controlled information environment. I don’t discount the value of administrative labour, I dispute the claim of decentralized ownership. Effective distribution of material gain does not represent effective distribution of authority. You too quickly glossed over the inherent power imbalance of “interpretation of the feedback.”
Describing the “whole democracy process” mechanism in principle does not make it the process in practice, and the punitive disciplinary system is not compatible with its ideals.
Survey data is consistent in China, though. Jason Hickel explained that the data regarding support for China’s system and government is accurate. You keep returning to these claims of “equal distribution of authority,” which is not a Marxist critique nor something avoidable in building socialism. China is not a classless society in a communist world.
Further, simply hinting that Whole-Process People’s Democracy doesn’t exist in practice is not evidence against it. For proof, read Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance by Professor Roland Boer. It’s a lot longer than the article from Xi Jinping I linked earlier though, so if you aren’t going to read that article I don’t see why you’d read either of the things I linked here.
That’s absolutely false. Marx was very keenly aware of power imbalances outside simple economic distribution. Only the most shallow understanding of Marxism stops at the distribution of wealth and means. You are however correct, I have no demonstrable evidence that Whole-Process People’s Democracy doesn’t exist in practice given the fact I am not prepared to out my sources. I assure you I trust them far more than a random tiangou on the internet.
Marx directly countered the anarchist conception of worker-run administration as a power imbalance. Power imbalances exist even without class, of course I understand this, but power imbalance is not the basis of class. Further, again, you refuse to either provide your own sources as well as refuse to engage with the sources I provided in any meaningful capacity. Whether you truly have sources that go against peer-reviewed study and widespread consensus or not is irrelevant to the fact that, without addressing the arguments and sources I brought, any onlooker can see that I have at minimum brought more to the table here.
They don’t in any sense control the state. An authoritarian “vanguard party” rules on their behalf. And the commanding heights are owned by whom exactly? That same party, not the working class itself.
The CPC is a proletarian party. I think you’re confusing what class is, in Marxist analysis. The party is not its own class of people, but a subsection of the working class. If plumbers were the only ones responsible for administration, it would not be accurate to say the “plumber class” owned the means of production. Classes are relations to ownership of the means of production, and in that administrative labor is one subset of the proletariat.