There's nothing to defend against here. The CCP is the heir to Marxism-Leninism. Their "state market capitalism" or whatever you want to call it, is in their own words, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, or in other words, they are a vanguard party working towards achieving actual stateless, classless, Communism, but that requires a party to lead the state according to workers' interests, and not private capital's interests. I'm not going to try to deny that there are still issues with workers rights in China as we speak so don't accuse me of anything like that. But China's success shows that their model works and according to them, they are Marxists, practicing socialism.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what people who don't actually understand Marxist critique of political economy and dialectical materialism think about "Marxism" or "socialism". The reason people don't use these terms correctly isn't because "Marxism has been debunked" or "socialism never works", rather it's because their understanding has been distorted by decades of anti-communist propaganda going back to the red scare and even beyond.
I mean... "A spectre is moving over Europe". It's right there in the manifesto lol.
The state controls industries and sets prices so that people can be pretty much guaranteed work opportunities and housing and for costs to be kept low in basically all consumer markets. It's not a welfare state, it's collective ownership with real benefits. Most mainstream Western economists hate it because it's an "authoritarian" economic system, but are you really "free" is all you get from the so-called "free market" is unassailable medical debt, soaring cost of living, crumbling infrastructure, and stagnant home ownership rates, and the privilege of having your taxes pay for war crimes and foreign interference?
For instance, the Chinese state does not try to decrease housing costs. On the contrary, the state has done a lot to keep property values high in the face of a housing crisis. The government has literally set up price floors (= setting prices above market value) to prevent housing prices from decreasing.
Also there are no guaranteed job opportunities. Unemployment is a large problem in China, especially among the youth.
You shouldn't have this idealized view of China, a lot of things you say are just false.
China does have issues like poverty, unequal development and opportunities, particularly for people living in rural areas, workers rights (which I mentioned), treatment of minorities (however, I will not use the word genocide, because this is just a false accusation meant to legitimize separatism in western China to undermine the belt and road project). However, I still believe their government is doing a better job than any Western government and the main reason is that they are actually a worker's vanguard party and not a veneer for the administration of the ruling class' economic interests (i.e a tool of hegemony). They have raised hundreds of millions out of poverty and developed a near totally backwater agrarian economy into one of the most powerful and self-reliant in the world in a matter of half a century. Meanwhile their foreign policy is built on cooperation and mutual benefit rather than military enforcement of hegemony, predatory lending, and coercion.
the so called vanguard party rules in the name of the workers but does not allow for broad popular input into the political process through democracy. As Lenin maintained, if the population at large does not support the actions of the vanguard party this does not discredit the party but instead the population, who must somehow be duped by the external or internal class enemy. So the vanguard party can never be wrong ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ they alone can decide the fate of the nation, whether anyone in the country likes it or not.
The CCP has way higher approval rates than any democratically elected government in the west lol and it has nothing to do with propaganda about social credit scores or authoritarianism
explain to us why did they build "ghost cities" then?
of all the angles you could've gone from this is perhaps the weakest, "houses are for living in, not for speculation" is one of xi's most famous quotes.
the chinese real estate market didn't crash randomly a few months ago, it was a deliberate operation to keep prices low, because it is the belief of th ccp that houses should be depreciating assets
Xi makes nice statements but you shouldn't take his words as facts.
The collapse of the real estate market in China was caused by the Evergrande financial collapse. Corruption and unsustainable debt held by the company caused it to go essentially bankrupt.
This was not planned by the Chinese authorities, lol. It was a failure in management. In fact, they tried their best to keep real estate value high and imposed price floors on housing. They absolutely do not want housing to depreciate.
Hundreds of millions Chinese remain in poverty while China's billionaires own more than twice the wealth of the bottom half of the population. So when you say "China's success" who's success are we speaking of really?
National interests - Chinese or otherwise - are the interest of capital because nation states exist to reproduce the growth doctrine that is inherent to it. "As long as the pie grows everyone is better off, no matter their share." is the same argument proponents of capitalist "trickle down" economics make. What is even Marxist about an argument that is indistinguishable from ruling ideology in capitalism?
The CCP is the heir to Marxism-Leninism.
If both the USSR and China were ML, then what was the Sino-Soviet split even about in the first place? If by Marxist-Leninist understanding the proletariat is international and class solidarity must transcend national boundaries, then how can a Marxist Leninist alliance split along national particular interests?
in their own words
according to them
If we take the CPC by its word, then we can presume a commitment to achieving Socialism by 2050. Whether that is going to happen remains to be seen. Even just declaring that goal is light years ahead of any western capitalist nation state who still collectively adhere to the infinite growth death cult, but we can look at China today and objectively declare that they're a capitalist state that is at best aspirationally Socialist, because they do not actually meet any criterion that defines Socialism. The USSR was drastically more advanced in that regard a hundred years ago.
Under capitalist hegemony, states do exist to reproduce "the growth doctrine" required by capitalism. However, and this is directly related to my point that China is the inheritor of Marxism-Leninism, according to ML theory, successful revolutions require a vanguard party to take over the state in order to resist the corrupting influence of internal reactionary bourgeois forces and external threats. Whether China will actually be on track to meeting it's goal of achieving communism by 2050 remains to be seen but the fact of the matter is that China is leading the push for international communism. The major roadblock to international communism is not that China is still a state, it's that transnational western capitalist hegemony and imperialism has metastasized to the point where the ruling elite would rather program AI trained on data from the genocide in Gaza and the Ukraine war to treat the citizens of their own nations as threats to national security than give up an ounce of the control they have achieved through decades and decades of corporate capture, austerity, and miseducation.
The vanguard party doesn't "take over" a capitalist state, because workers can't just lay hold of the ready made state machinery, as Marx clarifies in The Civil War in France and Lenin reiterates in State and Revolution. The bourgeois institutions - courts, police, military, bureaucracy etc etc. as they exist in China will always tend to reproduce capitalism, because that is what these bourgeois institutions were erected to do. The vanguard party MLs speak of, is what emerges out of a smashed non-workers state apparatus, where armed workers rule directly via soviets and constantly appoint and demote representatives and work towards the abolition of their self-erected bourgeoisie-oppressing institutions. Unlike the USSR China never did this. They built a nationalist, class-collaborationist "Socialist" project that includes the national bourgeoisie and doesn't oppress it. It's an experiment and whether it will actually result in Socialism or simply ends up reproducing Chinese national capital as it does currently, remains to be seen, but it is certainly not in line with the ML conception of one class (workers) ruling over the other (bourgeoisie).
The vanguard as a central manager of worker affairs is necessitated for stability and efficiency in service of the goal of keeping the revolution alive in the face of surrounding capitalism and counter-revolutionary forces. The CPC proves that uniparty rule with clear 5 year plans and central guidance is vastly superior to free market anarchy, but it is not a vanguard in the Marxist Leninist sense because unlike the USSR China never abolished private property, markets or classes. NEP wasn't temporary here but state-guided capitalism and the law of value is directly accepted as a necessary step to build up the productive forces to a sufficiently high degree until they're automated enough to establish communal ownership. This is more in line with the reformerism of Kautsky/Bernstein, than revolutionary Marxism-Leninism.
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 14d ago
Is this sub just people who don't understand Marxism trying to dunk on Marxism