Post #2639530

It is not “playing the racism card” to point out racism when it appears. You treated Chinese people’s own analysis of our country, revolution, party, state, and social formation as irrelevant unless it is validated by your approved sources, which in practice most likely means Western, liberal, Trotskyite, anarchist, NGO-adjacent, or white academic sources. That is chauvinism. Disliking the word does not change the content. Your definition of socialism as “a state where workers own the means of production” is not a definition. It is a slogan. What does “workers own” mean concretely? Does every worker become a petty bourgeois small proprietor? Does every enterprise become a cooperative competing in the market? Does ownership mean legal title, political power, control over investment, planning authority, abolition of capital as the commanding social force, public ownership of the strategic sectors, or the dictatorship of the proletariat? You have not specified any of this. You have taken a phrase, emptied it of historical content, and analytical value and used it as a purity test against real revolutions. A serious definition must begin from transition. Socialism is not communism. It is not classlessness, statelessness, or the immediate disappearance of contradiction, commodity forms, inequality, bourgeois right, or inherited backwardness. Socialism is the transitional form in which the proletariat holds political power, public ownership is primary, the commanding heights are controlled by the state, planning stands above capital accumulation, and remaining capitalist elements are subordinated to the strategic direction of the workers’ state. It exists under pressure from the capitalist world system, sanctions, military encirclement, technological dependence, uneven development, and contradictions inherited from the old society. That is why socialism has contradictions. If those contradictions had vanished, it would no longer be socialism. It would be communism. Your claim that China is “not led by workers” is asserted, not demonstrated. China is not a liberal parliamentary market where parties compete for donors, media access, and bourgeois legitimacy. It has people’s congresses, mass organisations, party leadership, consultation, supervision, cadre evaluation, local elections, and planning. The roughly three million deputies to people’s congresses are overwhelmingly drawn from workers, peasants, technicians, professionals, cadres, soldiers, ethnic minorities, and other strata of the working class. Around two and a half million of those are directly elected at county and township levels. You may reject it because it does not resemble your idealist puritan utopian notions of how “it should be”, but that only exposes the poverty of your framework. On which class rules, which class commands the state, which class directs development, and which interests discipline capital, China is not ambiguous it is the working class wielding the state in their interest. Your statement that China’s means of production are “mainly owned by individuals” is simply false. Land is publicly owned. Finance, Energy, telecommunications, transport, heavy industry, strategic infrastructure, defence, banking, and the decisive commanding heights are publicly owned or state controlled. Even outside the core state sectors, the firms with serious macroeconomic weight are disproportionately public or under decisive public discipline. Private capital exists, but it is secondary. It does not command the state. It operates within limits set by the socialist state and can be cut down when it exceeds them. This is the decisive distinction: under capitalism, finance disciplines the state. In China, the state disciplines finance. That is why Jack Ma and Ant Group were checked when they attempted to push China toward capitalist financialisation, consumer debt expansion, and parasitic fintech power. In a capitalist state, that sort of figure is protected, celebrated, and integrated into policy (just look at the capitalist nations reaction to the incident). In China, he was reminded that capital does not rule the republic. That example alone tells you more than a hundred abstract slogans about “worker ownership.” (not to mind how it’s far from an isolated example) Your dismissal of the vanguard party as a “perversion” is pure idealism. Class consciousness does not magically arise from suffering. A revolutionary programme does not spontaneously appear because exploitation exists. The working class is fragmented by region, skill, nationality, gender, wages, imperialist bribery, religion, media, trade-union economism, and every ideological weapon the bourgeoisie possesses. Without organisation, theory, discipline, continuity, and a party capable of concentrating the advanced experience of the class, the working class remains trapped in defensive struggle. A vanguard party is not a bourgeois party with red flags. It is not a club competing in a marketplace of opinions. It is the organised political form through which the most conscious elements of the working class and oppressed masses lead the struggle for state power, defend the revolution, suppress counter-revolution, coordinate development, and prevent the bourgeoisie from restoring its dictatorship. Every successful socialist revolution required such an instrument. Russia required it. China required it. Vietnam required it. Cuba required it. Korea required it. This was not an accidental deformation. It was the organisational answer to class struggle under real historical conditions. You have no real alternative only fantasy. Eight billion people do not spontaneously become revolutionary strategists. Workers scattered across global supply chains do not spontaneously defeat imperialism. A peasantry emerging from semi-feudal relations does not spontaneously build socialist industry. A revolution without a leading political centre is not “more democratic” or “more pure”. It is merely easier to destroy. Your idea that “parties are for democracies” is equally confused. Bourgeois parties administer capitalist dictatorship behind a pluralist curtain. A communist party in a socialist state has a different function: securing proletarian leadership, maintaining revolutionary continuity, disciplining capital, and coordinating the transition. Socialism needs mass participation, supervision, criticism, rectification, planning, local election, cadre accountability, and organised proletarian leadership. On wealth concentration: yes, China has billionaires. Yes, this is a contradiction. No, the existence of contradictions does not automatically make a society capitalist. Again, socialism is a transition. The question is whether capital is sovereign or subordinated. Does private wealth command the army, land, banks, party, courts, planning system, currency, and state? In China, it does not. Chinese billionaires are not sacred political subjects. They are regularly investigated, disciplined, removed from public life, or have entire business models destroyed when they threaten social stability and state direction. Under capitalism, billionaires buy media, elections, legislation, housing, universities, infrastructure, and foreign policy. Treating these systems as identical because both contain wealthy individuals is simply surface-level moralism with academic pretensions. The claim that China is “transitioning out of socialism” is especially absurd. A country transitioning out of socialism does not keep land publicly owned, strengthen state planning, discipline finance capital, expand public infrastructure at historic scale, eliminate extreme poverty, build world-leading public transport for a financial loss, expand party cells in private firms, centralise strategic industries, subordinate billionaires to political authority, and maintain communist party leadership over the army and state. That is not a transition out of socialism. It is a socialist state using markets, capital, and uneven development as instruments within a broader strategy of national development, proletarian state power, and long-term transition. You are confusing markets with the rule of capital. You are confusing private firms with capitalist state power. You are confusing inequality with capitalism as such. You are confusing socialism with the immediate abolition of every inherited contradiction. Above all, you are confusing an abstract moral image of socialism with the actual historical process of revolution, construction, retreat, correction, struggle, and development. This is not a serious critique of China. It is a critique of a China that exists mostly in your head. Socialism is not proven by aesthetic purity. It is judged by the class character of the state, ownership and control of the commanding heights, the subordination of capital to political power, the direction of development, and the organised capacity of the masses to exercise power through institutions built by their own revolution. By those standards, China is not “capitalist because billionaires exist.” It is a socialist society with serious contradictions, operating inside a capitalist world economy, using controlled capitalist mechanisms under the leadership of a communist party and a workers’ state.