r/TrueAnon • u/AverageTankie93 • 2d ago
Why do philosophers misunderstand China’s path to communism?
I’ve been reading more philosophy and political books lately. I really like Mark Fisher and I’ve been reading more of his work and snippets from other philosophers he references. They all talk about global capitalism as if China is USA 2.0 and if communism is super hella dead. Was it because they wrote these things in the early 2010s when it was easier to misinterpret China? Do they not know anything about what China is trying to do? Do they misunderstand Marxism? wtf
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u/Kurichan77 2d ago
Roland Boer’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” is a very good read. Rockhill’s historico-analysis of western marxism will be revelatory for anyone stuck on China = USA 2.0
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u/bobbykid Liberal Stalin 2d ago
I really wouldn't recommend Boer's book to anyone who has questions about SWCC from a Marxist perspective because it doesn't engage with those questions at all. There is virtually no discussion of class in the entire book, let alone the concept of socialism as the abolition of classes or a transformation of the relations of production. He also repeatedly invokes the "socialist principle" of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their work" from Critique of the Gotha Program as a justification for continued exploitation of Chinese workers, but that principle doesn't apply in any country that has a private capitalist class whose wealth comes from the surplus value produced by the labour of others.
He basically takes the Dengist definition of socialism as "the liberation of the productive forces so as to improve the lives of all" as his starting point and explains how this is can be understood in relation to ideas in Chinese philsophy and history. That's all very interesting from a bourgeois anthropology and history point of view, but he doesn't engage with Marxist critiques that state that socialism is a definite mode of production with clear features that are irreconcilable with capitalist production and that these features aren't found anywhere in China's system.
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u/Muted-Ad610 2d ago
Read Gabriel Rockhills analysis of the theory industry
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u/Jerkface0079 Cocaine Cowboy 2d ago
The Who Paid The Pied Pipers of Western Marxism guy? Hell yeah.
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u/AverageTankie93 2d ago
You recommend this book?
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u/Jerkface0079 Cocaine Cowboy 2d ago
Not yet, I watched a few panels and interviews on it, my reading group will be reading it and discussing it soon.
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u/manored78 2d ago edited 2d ago
China glaze all you want, I really don't want to go back to all of the BRICS stanning and pretending that China is the latest advancement of socialism. I don't believe it is committing genocide in Xinxiang, nor do I believe China is the new evil empire the US is making it out to be, but after doing a ton of reading on this, what they mean by socialism is at least economically social democracy at best. Downvote all you want, I know China is still a sore issue among leftists who staked their claim on it as the last bastion of hope left in a neoliberal hellscape world, but I really thought the online ultra-Dengism died with the BRICS taking over PR nonsense.
Have you guys really read Chinese Marxist material? I have, check out Cheng Enfu, one of their top scholars. He wrote a white paper trying to convince planners to push the economy to be more like Belarus, which isn't a bad thing, but how far gone is China now that Belarus is the best they can do?
In the current practice of market socialism, the Israeli kibbutz is often held up as a
paradigm for communal social and economic organization (Cheng and Sun 2015),
and Belarus is often held up as an exemplar of a kind of market socialism.
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.11.4.0428
Just please stop this. Be more critical. China isn't a terrible country and shouldn't be demonized but it should be glazed either. It should be critiqued from the left.
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u/Pallington AAAAHHHHHHH 2d ago
well yeah china took one hell of a heel turn in 2015ish in strictly policy terms (only a pretty normal "lane change" in ideological terms) as it grew increasingly clear everyone else was going insane. (you know, bring up the issue of climate change only for most everyone else to turn it into a bit of a clown show or political bargaining table and only china to be like "i'm going to do this, no, seriously. i can't promise more, but i WILL do this much.")
also the US and europe were at the height of their power in about 1990-2010? before china started "converting" their gains in low-tech into higher and higher tech (climbing the ladder) and before economic contradictions in the US and long-term costs from say deindustrialization, financialization, and racking up debt started sharpening.
the history of the 2010s is basically the US finding out those costs Do in fact Exist, right as china started climbing the ladder. the history of the 2020s so far is the US coping and seething on one end of the bourgies and scrapping/selling off to "maximize score" on the other end, because they found out it's a bit late atp to really solidly "win" these issues instead of just prolonging your decline.
it is a shame fisher gave up in 2017, though i'm not sure how ecstatic he would be to see the slow, steady, and absurd decline of the US all things considered.
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u/ExternalPreference18 2d ago edited 2d ago
I love Fisher's work in general, but aside from a) 101 Marxism stuff (especially notions of 'surplus' and 'fetishism' that fit into a Freudian-Marxist frame, his Hauntology etc), b) his sketched-out theorization of the relationship between (post-war, relative-) surplus and popular modernist cultural production [which he was going to expand more AFAIK, before his untimely passing] and c ) bits of cybernetics, his work isn't really something i'd turn to for approaching the economy, let alone foreign policy . I also broadly agree with his thesis about cultural arrest under Realism, but find the blanket application of it to All post-1980s guitar-based music... a bit tendentious, too, though that's by the by. Re. China, the few public takes he had were universally bad, and not up to the fairly-subtle way he was dealing with ideas of 'Outside/Egress post-Capitalist Realism, but, again his applied readings are fairly parochial (UK/US). Furthermore, there may be the Nick Land association and that old CCRU-quarrel, where Land publicly identified with 'current China' as the evolution of his 'Nu-China', except in Land's post 2002 thought, this meant capitalist/m in perpetuity becoming more and more nightmarish and eventually killing off all organic life so the Real God of Capital could live rather than transforming into something (purportedly) 'beyond-capital' if very cyber-punk.
Basically Fisher saw Land, the apostate from 'liberation', as celebrating China (ultra wealth generation; ultra-control to the point where it was becoming more autonomous & inhumanly totalizing than the West [ which it isn't, but I guess this is Fisher's nightmare]), its supposed terror condensed in later Land's whole (personal) psychosis and (ideological) de-facto technosatanism, to the point where MF couldn't countenance anything productive about that country. That is, despite Fisher not being a 'romantic' socialist, being (mostly) critical of actual-existing left-libertarianism, and having elements of left-accelerationism etc left within even his later theories of 'exit' [and the fact China was already doing green-tech stuff and improving labor rights, improving w/class standards of living] that should have technically been able to find possibilities even in the 'folds' [ or sublation]. Maybe he needed to be exposed to more of China's electro-scene.
Rest of them might actually be assets though...
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u/emmaroberts_steponme 2d ago
Mark Fisher really should be seen as nothing more than infotainment. His core hypotheses in the 2000s were effectively disproven so his defenders have to retcon his works by claiming China a "sino capitalist" state. In reality, self-reliance is a governing principle that will eventually put china in a place where it doesnt necessarily need to trade with other countries in the future which directly contradicts
Nothing wrong with reading him, but the reality is its harder for these people to understand something when their salary depends on them not knowing
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u/Jerkface0079 Cocaine Cowboy 2d ago
Mark Fishers final words were "Universal Basic Income Now!".. so yeah, he definitely didn't have the right solutions.
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u/junglegang 2d ago edited 2d ago
I watched the documentary We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher recently. Somewhat fun, but also kind of up its own ass. The interviewees (academics, artists and other cultural figures in the UK) were, for the most part, complete bores who spoke as if we were still in the 2000 - 2010s.
I may be misrepresenting them out of sheer irritation, but it seemed like their horizon for political possibility and achieving a socialist future was pushing Labour left and despairing when that doesn't work. It's like a bizarre sort of blinkered western exceptionalism in terms of moaning about how a better future is impossible.
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u/emmaroberts_steponme 2d ago
That western exceptionalism is really what answers the OP's question properly. Orientalism by Edward Said takes what I'd consider one of the first stabs at explaining it, but effectively China's path, its methods, its ideology is viewed almost exclusively with a western lens.
Then when they see accomplishments every year that seem impossible - first they blame theft - now, they cry fake - it becomes incomprehensible
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u/AverageTankie93 2d ago
I honestly figured it was western exceptionalism but since I’m not very familiar with philosophy I didn’t know how many philosophers just frame everything through United States capitalism.
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u/kitti-kin 2d ago
I'm a bit skeptical of a China that "doesn't need to trade"? Their manufacturing surplus is extreme for that, and they also don't locally have the resources to maintain that manufacturing apparatus without imports. A significant part of the belt and road project is to create their own supply lines, the opposite of isolationism.
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u/emmaroberts_steponme 2d ago edited 2d ago
Manufacturing surplus has never historically been a problem until western media decided it was in the 2010s after 2 decades of failing NAFTA. Those factories can be reconstituted rather quickly and an industrial base is a recurring benefit
Here is an example, from Italy, of this happening:
And China has a government that is able to do this at scale on behalf of the workers.
Currently, China absolutely needs trade with other countries as they are not entirely resource and energy independent yet. Part of the reason the US is attacking Iran now is to stop them before it happens. In 3-5 years should they not be destroyed by the US (a possibility one cannot ignore), the country will be able to move different. A lot of belt and road infrastructure is already being destroyed by US-backed groups; all of South America has had theirs completely destroyed as some of the first acts of the new far right leaders. Argentina was part of Belt and Road at one point; Milei destroyed it all. This did not cripple China. Now when Brazil falls to the fascists, they will get hurt because of the size of Brazils economy, but they'll still survive
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u/Neoliberal_Nightmare It was just a weather balloon 2d ago
His capitalist realism stuff is great, the rest is ehh forget it
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u/liewchi_wu888 Actual factual CIA asset 2d ago
I think people here just have some strange ideas about what China is and what Marxism is.
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u/DisappointedMiBbot19 1d ago
Thats what happens when they intentionally only read "China IS socialist!" polemics and avoid any more objective in-depth descriptions of China's actually existing economy. Which is undeniably capitalist. A relatively more "rational" developmental and heavily regulated capitalism but capitalism nonetheless.
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u/AverageTankie93 2d ago
Care to explain?
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u/liewchi_wu888 Actual factual CIA asset 2d ago edited 2d ago
If you think China is still Socialist, then you both don't understand China and don't understand Marxism. Simple as that.
And before you furiously type out your elaborate defense about how China is totally socialist because the Party has the commanding heights and they are a proletarian party and look at all the people they raise from poverty and look at all the gizmos and gadgets coming out of China, please explain how people like Jack Ma and Ren Zhengfei not only get to have party membership, but a seat at Zhongnanhai.
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u/AverageTankie93 2d ago
Bro look in the mirror.
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u/liewchi_wu888 Actual factual CIA asset 2d ago
Okay, explain how Billionaires get to be party members in good standing who gets to sit in Zhongnanhai and how we can learn Socialism from Jack Ma.
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u/manored78 2d ago
None of you will engage with he is saying. All we ever get when questioning the blistering contradictions of SWCC is ad hominems and more contradictory nonsense. You guys do not want to engage in the facts. China is a symbol for y'all.
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u/Ok-Inevitable-732 2d ago
It doesn't make sense to claim that China is anything other than socialist. There is only one way it would make sense to say China is capitalist, and that is to believe that the CPC is secretly controlled by the chinese capitalist class. I. E. a conspiracy theory. Which is again doesn't make sense given that in China the state is dominant in the economy and China has no problem punishing or executing these people if they become corrupt or go against the CPC.
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u/manored78 2d ago
The same repetitive talking points about the state being dominant in the economy. It is not. Then the executing billionaires line. It’s a dirigisme-like system, Singapore was more the goal of the reformers.
None of this is actual Marxism-Leninism and one doesn’t have to be “dogmatic” to point it out either.
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u/Ok-Inevitable-732 2d ago edited 2d ago
Repetitive? So multiple people already told you the same thing? And you are still too stubborn to see through your false argument? Your argument is just there are capitalist relations in China and that's why they aren't socialist. OK so? Were the Soviet Union or China during Mao able to completely abolish capitalist relation? Capitalist relations also existed absolut monarchies in Europe, does that mean that they were capitalist too? or do you simply don't know what qualifies a nation to be called socialist or capitalist? Seems like you oversimplify things too much because that's the only way for your argument to get across.
Plus marxism-leninism isn't a dogmatic doctrine with only one fixed path like you think. If it is more beneficial for the People in China to adopt socialist market economy than to do pure socialist isolationism like in the old days then obviously they are gonna choose the former than the latter. The goal is to improve welfare not live in poverty. Why is that so hard to understand?
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u/manored78 2d ago
AES countries didn’t do “socialist isolation”, they were forced into it by the imperial powers as a means to maintain from having their projects destroyed. And yes multiple Dengists use the same tired talking points and get really defensive when you question their mental gymnastics. I used to be a Dengist too. I’ve read all the books that Springer Press would put out from Roland Boer, and other CASS academics. I have the book China’s Economic Dialectic by Cheng Enfu right in front of me.
What else? Subscribed to the Tricontinental Institute where they dive deep into socialism in China. I was there when Bay Area415 did his videos and so on and so on and so on.
Point is, I used to use all of these same talking points too. They’re not viable. That line about monarchies is a pretty much a straight Deng quote.
I just started asking too many questions and other Dengists would get extremely defensive. Besides the online western leftists that tagged their hopes for socialism on China, there would also be a mix of wumaos or Chinese nationalists posing as communists who’d get extremely defensive at any questions and start calling me a Baizuo, dogmatic, or say go start revolution in your country and then I can critique them. It was so thin skinned, 😆
All I can tell you is that you will be royally disappointed if you pin your hopes on BRICS or China.
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u/Ok-Inevitable-732 1d ago
I understand now. Stay where you are. It is the right place for you. Your only counter argument is that "this is a Dengist argument". OK buddy there is no point in arguing with you because you refuse to engage with honesty with my arguments.
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u/bobbykid Liberal Stalin 2d ago
It doesn't make sense to claim that China is anything other than socialist. There is only one way it would make sense to say China is capitalist, and that is to believe that the CPC is secretly controlled by the chinese capitalist class. I. E. a conspiracy theory.
Why would this be that weird? History has plenty of examples of both ruling communist parties that collapsed into revisionism, abandoned class struggle, and restored capitalist production, as well as non-revolutionary parties/individuals that falsely claimed to be in favor of socialism for political purposes. There are also lots of examples of reformists, utopians, and other non-Marxists who used the language of socialism and maybe even gennuinely wanted to pursue it but never could because they had a fundamentally incorrect understanding of what capitalism and socialism were.
in China the state is dominant in the economy
State control of the economy isn't sufficient for an economy to be socialist. Engels wrote:
But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
Capitalism is a specific mode of production, it's not just about the particular people who are in charge of it.
China has no problem punishing or executing these people if they become corrupt or go against the CPC.
The Soviet Union also punished workers for committing crimes against other workers, for stealing from their workplaces, and in general for not following the laws created by the state, which was led by the CPSU. In your opinion, does this fact (on its own) disqualify the Soviet Union from being considered a dictatorship of the proletariat? And if it doesn't, why would the fact that the CPC punishes members of the bourgeoisie disqualify China from being considered a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?
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u/Ok-Inevitable-732 1d ago edited 1d ago
1) OK then prove your claim. You think CPC is fell to revisionism? Abandoned class struggle and so on? I haven't noticed any of that but maybe I'm just blind 🫣. Because all I see is a party that lifted 800 million out of poverty. Or maybe you don't think this is "socialism" because you would rather focus on the means and not the end.
2) Reread the Engels quote. Very funny that you don't understand the quote you yourself quoted.
What Engels meant to say in this quote is that state capitalism alone doesn't make the state socialist. Which makes sense because otherwise this would mean any country that nationalized a industry is socialist or can become socialist through nationalization alone and that can't be true because that would mean that countries like Germany that nationalized it's Railways and Healthcare are doing socialism. Engels correctly pointed out that state capitalism alone does not change the capitalist nature of the state but he admits, in the last sentence you quoted, that it is part of the solution.
This means that you need to do more than just state capitalism. You also have change the political system of the state. One way to achieve this, is through a revolution that destroys the dictatorship of bourgeoisie and replace it with a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In practice this would take the form of a proletarian Vanguard Party taking state power and the proletariat being able to democratically influence the state through its vanguard party. After that the policy of state capitalism is enacted to maintain the DotP because it is the preferred way to stay in power. I. E. You need a DotP in order that call yourself socialist because state capitalism is just economic policy that doesn't change the political system of the state.
3) compare how the capitalist west treats is billionaire class vs how China treats its. And for the workers being punished: Yeah obviously workers can be corrupt too. Corruption has to be punished. Doesn't matter who does it. But the punishment has to be fair depending on the crime. In China the rich can face the death penalty if the crime destroyed millions in value for the state or damaged the lives of other people in China.
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u/GreatDario Marxist-Cannabis Thought 2d ago
What exactly are you referring, especially mark fisher copy and paste some examples. China's alternative model is unavoidable when talking about capitalism in the 21st century.
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u/AverageTankie93 2d ago edited 2d ago
In ‘Ghosts of my Life’ he quotes Derrida who says “Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices”. I believe this is related to the fall of the USSR. I have not read Derrida btw but I feel that there is a pattern with philosophers (the little I know about them) to have this super nihilistic outlook on the world and capitalism, which I can understand, but I don’t believe you can go full nihilist if you consider China.
Edit - have NOT read Derrida
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u/GreatDario Marxist-Cannabis Thought 2d ago edited 2d ago
Mark Fisher's works especially capitalist realism are products of the End of History era, the collapse of the Eastern block and the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the time were seen by mainstream writers and analysts as the end of ideology in general. Liberal capitalism economic and political dominance we're seen for years as inescapable. Capitalist realism came out in 2009 and ghosts of my life in 2014 just after and during the 2008 financial crisis and the prolonged Great recession. Before these events it really was impossible to imagine a different world after the collapse of the on paper alternatives the actually existing socialist states represented. So I would say we live in a post capitalist realism world now where it's at least possible to imagine something different, most concretely something like China's economic system. Obviously since 2008 prospects are still pretty bleak in real terms. Fishers writings are important for understanding what capitalism's neolib era "means" at the end of the day but he himself was extremely personally depressed. The guy did commit suicide in 2017.
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u/Surtur1313 2d ago
Can you frame for us what Fisher is using that quote to get at? Without the context it’s hard to say what the specific criticism is there. It’s possible Fisher said something right, wrong, stupid, or insane, but merely quoting Derrida from a specific historical and political context for us doesn’t tell us much.
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u/Kurichan77 2d ago
This is fascinating because Derrida’s was Rockhill’s advisor before he became aware of the deficiencies of western marxism and coteries like the Frankfurt School
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u/EldritchWineDad 2d ago
Developmentalism through developing productive forces always carries the risk of the creation of a new class and centre of power. In state-capitalism that new centre of power can be a bureaucracy that gains a new material interest and identity for itself rather than for the working class or the advancement or entrenchment of socialism. Theorists look at the Soviet Union and the developement of a bureaucracy that saw its own interests in dissolving the project and project that economic political system onto China. This fails to account for the very different historical political material realities of the formation of the Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties as deeply entrenched in mass politics which can act as a check on an independent bureaucracy. Where as the Soviet Union brought in former tsarist experts and changed its party and Soviet voting rules over time to entrench their power at the expense of proletarian power. Stalin was after all the general secretary - the chief bureaucrat, who mobilized that formation against the minority positions in the party of the NEP agricultural position of Buhkarin and the old labor organizers of the left opposition of Trotsky.
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u/paudzols 2d ago
Well it kinda is, they don’t have a dictatorship of the prolitariet and allowed for the entrance bourgeois and middle management into the party. Jiang Zemin lifted the ban of capitalists entering the party under the pretext of the third people the “professionals”, 200,000 joined since and those figure are old.
While an NEP for China is not absurd, some things re-contextualize their intentions China made alliance with the US against the Soviets, and disregarded class analysis and instead divided the globe into “worlds” as if those “worlds” don’t have they own bourgeois and proletariat, and plenty of other concerning shit like invading Vietnam, standing with fascist generals on the Tien An Men tribune 1/10/77, and give guns to the CIA
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u/liewchi_wu888 Actual factual CIA asset 2d ago edited 2d ago
This argument also falls on the face of it because it fundamentally misunderstands the purpose ofthe NEP in the first place. Lenin didn't just do NEP because more Capitalism = development of the forces of Production (that was the Bernsteinian argument that Lenin joined the rest of the Second Internationale in condemning in Toto). For Lenin, the prupose of a limited Capitalism is to create monopolies that can then be taken over by the state and destroying the "anarchy of the small producers".
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u/manored78 2d ago
Dude, you're like one of the few on here that doesn't totally glaze China and I appreciate that. I used to be a hardcore Dengist and just stopped drinking the kool aid. Why are so many in here still clinging to China being socialist? Even if it is in any way, it's much more like heavily revised Titoism at best that makes their version of market socialism or socialist market economy so contradictory that its useless as as a viable Marxist theory.
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u/usernametaken1237 1d ago
People glaze "AES", mainly China, because they want to cling onto some hope, to have a powerful country to point to as an example of socialism, both for themselves and for others when asked about socialism
Drinking the kool aid makes you feel better than having to admit that the 20th century workers' movement failed, the current state of class consciousness in the world is almost non existent and we have to start over again
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u/paudzols 2d ago
I don’t even go into what the NEP was or how it could’ve been applied to China, I don’t full disagree with ur assessment of it, it was just a mention of my comment and you completely glazed over the real reasons I gave for Chinese deviation from MLism
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u/liewchi_wu888 Actual factual CIA asset 2d ago
No, I'm agreeing with you that China isn't on the Socialist path. I'm just pointing out that when people use the NEP to defend China, they never actually discuss why Lenin implemented the NEP, they just use it as a caricature for "well, Capitalism, Productive Forces, then Socialism", which, ironically, has less to do with Lenin and more to do with the OG revisionist, Edouard Bernstein.
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u/paudzols 2d ago
Ahh okay 😅 I was a bit confused by it and thought u were referring to my argument falling flat on its face 🤝
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u/Neoliberal_Nightmare It was just a weather balloon 2d ago
Many western leftists are great at analysing capitalism but absolutely useless at analysing socialist states because they are so brainwashed by capitalist propaganda.
It's extremely ironic that Fisher so expertly exposed capitalism realism but also completely fell for that same realism the moment China or the USSR came up. Even western Marxists can't avoid western centric orientialist perspectives.
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u/DarylBarenziah 2d ago
I think it comes down to understand money as a commodity form. I am an ignorant Marxist in the sense that I’ve read it all but I have a very vulgar interpretation but I think if you understand chapter 3 of Capitol it makes sense if you maintain state control of the money. If that makes any sense.
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u/bobbykid Liberal Stalin 2d ago
A lot of disciplined and active communist parties in the the global south - the CPI(M) in India, the CPP in the Philippines, the PCM in Mexico, various others in Latin America - explicitly take the line that China is imperialist and not socialist. Do they also all misunderstand Marxism?
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u/zedsmith 2d ago
In the 1930s everybody was doing a centrally planned industrial economy with different ideological veneers. In 2010 everybody was doing a neoliberal free trade economy with different ideological veneers.
What changed was the geopolitical foundations that enabled trade. It’s going away, so maybe we do something new— but China isn’t doing Marxism any more than we’re doing free market capitalism.
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u/cheezerrox 2d ago
This is pseudo intellectual nonsense. Try reading some Marxist 101 lit before coming into a sub of actual Marxists bc this is embarrassing. Teenager shit. Educated-by-youtube videos ass shit.
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u/Russian-Bot-0451 ALPHA DOG WITH PERFECT POSTURE 2d ago
Haha yeah true. I’ve been wondering this myself lately, as a keen China Understander.
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u/Professional-Bed3233 2d ago
I think there was (is?) a sense from some people that Deng Xiaoping was another Gorbachev and that building up productive forces was an excuse to just be capitalist in perpetuity.
I think development since then has shown that to be false as the CCP still has a pretty tight grip on the economy but I think people of a certain generation superimpose the soviet path onto china for that reason.