u/Azirahael - originally from r/GenZhou
So, you’ll have run into leftcomms, ultras, and maybe even trots all saying shit that pisses you off, like ‘Vietnam is capitalist! China is imperialist!’ and other dumb shit like that.
Why? What the fuck is wrong with these people?
And they are not anarchists.
You can’t just tell them to read a fucking book. These clowns HAVE read books. Possibly more than you have. That’s kind of the problem.
Why are they like this? Did they read the wrong books? Are they idiots? Like, what the fuck?
No. Well, probably not.
No, the basic problem is that they are right.
OMG, did I just go left comm? Am I gonna grow an armchair out my butt right now?
Well, I am in a recliner typing this…
Naw. I’m doing that to get you to pay attention. They are right, and I’m gonna explain why you are too.
Here’s a bit Lenin quoted of Engels: “And from this follows a superstitious reverence for the state and everything connected with it, which takes root the more readily since people are accustomed from childhood to imagine that the affairs and interests common to the whole of society could not be looked after other than as they have been looked after in the past, that is, through the state and its lucratively positioned officials. And people think they have taken quite an extraordinary bold
step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
So what is Engels/Lenin saying here?
Well that people are overly congratulating themselves on having gotten rid of monarchs [Good!] but then replaced them with something similar in all but name [democratic bourgeois republic.]
That the rulers change names and tactics, but not that they rule over the ‘lower’ classes.
This is [one of] the leftcomm points, and it’s taken up by other groups that we would call ultras.
What is the point swapping the monarch for the caps, and then swapping the caps for the state bureaucrat?
And that’s their whole point. The workers still have someone in charge of them.
And they are right.
If this relationship is maintained, then you can’t say that the workers have control over the state, and by that standard, it’s not socialism.
Same goes for the workplace. If there are standard capitalist relations of boss and worker, and then the state takes over, and you’re taking orders from a state boss, well, not a whole lot has changed. And this is what the like of Rick Wolff use as their measure of socialism.
And by that standard, China is only sorta socialist. Because they have all sorts of co-ops, but they also have regular capitalist enterprises, and also state run standard hierarchical orgs.
Omg! So China is not socialist! No. Calm down. That’s the wrong take. So what’s the right take?
Anything is right from its point of view, the question is: is that the right point of view, and how do you justify it?
So, if you want to keep it simple [and that’s an instinctive human thing] then you need to boil it down to a diagnostic criteria.
[If X+Y, then Z].
And so different groups boil it down in different ways.
- Is commodity production ended? If yes, socialism. If not, capitalism.
- Are there still hierarchical work relationships? If no, socialism. If yes, capitalism.
- Are the working class in control of the state? If yes, socialism. If not, capitalism.
- So, by any given standard, any past or existing socialist state can be socialist, or not.
- This is why there are so many disagreements about past and existing states.
So if you are a Wolffian type socialist, there have been no socialist states, given that they as a group ONLY consider the employer-employee relationship to be the measure of whether there is socialism or not, and no AES has been totally co-op and not containing any ‘small group of people in charge.’
Trots are similar, in that they consider any dictatorship of the proletariat, that also does not have complete control from the soviets, is not a ‘real’ worker’s state.
Which is bizarre, because that’s what China has, and they don’t consider China socialist.
Others will say that the measure of socialism is whether the economy is planned soviet style, or not.
Others will say that the measure of socialism is whether the economy is focussed on the needs of the working class. Are the people’s standards of living improving? Are they getting education, food, opportunities?
So, when a person says ‘X country is not really socialist,’ they are right.
From their point of view.
So in reality, the question is not ‘Is country X socialist or not?’ the real question is ‘What measure of socialism is most useful?’
Which point of view?
Well, here’s how I look at it:
Why are you a socialist?
What is the point of you being a socialist?
Is it because you really want a planned economy?
Why is a planned economy important?
Is it because you want worker democracy?
Why is worker control over the workplace important?
Is it democratic control of the government?
Why does that matter?
Well, here’s what I say:
Socialism is about building a better life, a better future for the working class.
Why them? Because they ARE society. The rich 1% are not part of it. They fly over it. That’s why they are ok with cutting social services. They don’t use them. So as far as they are concerned, these things are worthless.
So we focus on the working class.
A planned economy is a good thing, because it avoids the anarchy of production. It avoids waste, it avoids the boom/bust cycles that ruin worker’s lives, and concentrates power in the hands of the 1%.
Which is why we are against capitalism. Worker democracy is important, because it gives power to the workers who are affected by the policies that are decided. So those people should have input.
And political democracy is important for the same reason. And this is why China is socialist.
Why?
Because everything they do is to improve the lot of the working class.
That’s why they are controlling the capitalists, strengthening the state, rebuilding communal farms, building productive forces.
They are building socialism right now.
And for those who claim they are full of it, I point out: they keep making claims about building socialism. With dates on them.
And they hit or even beat those dates.
Yeah, China is socialist.
Maybe not the type of socialism YOU want.
But socialism it is, nonetheless.
And I maintain that my measure of socialism is the more useful measure than commodity form/co-ops/etc.
u/amihartz - originally from r/GenZhouI don't really like this explanation. That is not why China is socialist.
While you're correct in criticizing the question-and-answer checklist like approach of "is this country socialist," I don't think your answer to it that China is socialist just because they care for the working class is satisfactory. I will give what my view on the rebuttal to this is.
Socialism is not simply a checklist of things you've accomplished. Commodity production, for example, contradicts with socialism. So we could say commodity production is not socialist, and a socialist economy is defined as one that does not have commodity production but social production around central planning.
But then it would be incorrect to take this definition and conclude if a society has commodity production, it must not be socialist. No matter how we define a socialist society, no matter how complex our checklist is, any economy we try to establish will inevitably defy this categorization, it will contain things that contradict with that characterization, at least on some scale.
Socialism should not be viewed as something matching a list of checkboxes. Socialism has certain defining characteristics, but these characteristics exist not on paper, but in the real world. And the real world is complex and messy and all economic systems---including capitalism---are filled with internal contradictions, things that contradict the definition. But just because capitalism contains internal contradictions, this does not mean it ceases to be capitalism. It remains capitalism because capitalism is the dominant mode of production, the dominant system. In other words, any mode of production that contradicts with capitalism, capitalism is still the principle aspect of that contradiction, hence the society is capitalist.
We should not boil socialism down to simply "helping the working class". Socialism is still, as Engels defined it, a centrally planned economy based in social production and not commodity production, based in common ownership and not private ownership.
The question of whether or not a society is capitalist should not be "does private enterprise exist?" but "is private ownership the dominant form of ownership?" The question of whether or not a society is socialist should not be "is it fully economically planned?" but "is economic planning the dominant mode of production?
The problem here is not that leftcoms are wrong when they say things like commodity production or private ownership contradict with socialism. This is true. They are wrong in how they use their categories. It is a category error. They take the definition of socialism and insist that the world must conform to it perfectly without contradiction to count as "true socialism". When non-contradictory systems simply do not exist in the real world. Nothing is "pure".
We can really see how irrational their point of view is if we try to apply this line of thinking to any other economic system. Central ownership contradicts with capitalism. Therefore, public ownership, or even private monopolies, would therefore prove your economy is not capitalist. An ancap would agree with leftcoms here, funnily enough. Or, any vestige of feudalism, such as a monarchy or a peasantry, would prove a country is not capitalist. That would mean tons of countries in the global south, as well as a few first-world countries, are not capitalist.
The demand for purity and the insistence that contradictions cannot exist in the real world is a fault of leftcoms reading Marx's economic analysis but then not reading anything on dialectics. They make horrible category errors because they treat categories metaphysically and not dialectically, and deny the fact that contradictions can exist in the real world, and instead insist that contradicts are "absurd" and to claim something is socialist that contains something contradicting socialism is an "absurdity".
Basically, leftcoms reject dialectics. That is their fault.
When we say China is socialist, we do not mean "it is good for the working class". Nor do we mean that it contains no elements contradicting socialism (commodity production, private ownership, etc). We simply mean that dominant form of ownership is public ownership, that the central plans dominant over the anarchy of the market. There are a lot of things in China's economy that contradicts with the public sector and the central plans, but the central plan is always the principle aspect of that contradiction.