Alright, now I get that your opinion is positive on average, but we gotta address the elephant in the room, which is that China is a market economy and that there’s no soviets or direct ownership of the means of production (or at least not as far as I know). How is China socialist then? I have heard many Trotskyst define China as “state capitalist” more than socialist
EDIT: Thank you all for your detailed responses, I will make sure to do my homework and study well
This’ll be controversial here but it needs to be said:
Yes, China is by definition not a socialist state.
Not only are the means of production privately owned by the capitalist class but the state, likewise, is controlled by the capitalist class who make up the majority of the communist party’s membership. To deny this obvious fact is pure cope and doesn’t help our analysis of the Chinese model but hinder it. The reality is Deng Xiaoping was the Chinese Gorbachev but without the liberalism and modern China is a glimpse at what the USSR could’ve looked like if Gorbachev had been more ruthless and less idealistic.
The catch here is that China is developing along a very different path from that of the West. It isn’t developing through imperialist plunder and colonial conquest and it isn’t abandoning its peoples’ needs nor ignoring them. It isn’t trying to align with the West nor compete with them for hegemony, as post-Soviet Russia has done.
The cynical interpretation here is that the Chinese are just doing what Europe did during the Cold War with their Social Democracies; bread & circuses to keep the masses in check, only this time to stave off a U.S. backed color-revolution instead of a communist uprising.
But I don’t agree with that perspective. If the CPC was truly captured by the interests of capital they’d just become a fascist state, social democracy, or neoliberal shithole. Instead they’re building a society much closer to the Soviet model - an improved version, I’d say. They’re not robbing their people & country blind and instead are investing in its future in ways that no social democracy ever could.
Because of that I believe that true comrades are still in charge of the Party and, at worst, are bourgeois class traitors in support of the revolution; e.g. Zhou Enlai-types. I believe they’re pursuing an unorthodox approach to genuine socialism, but one which is ultimately proving successful nevertheless. For that reason I give them my critical support with a silent prayer that it all works out. Their success would quite literally change everything.
The central nervous system of any modern economy is finance. In the West, private banks dictate state policy through debt and credit allocation. In China, the banking system is entirely state owned. The state controls capital allocation, directing credit toward strategic sectors like green energy, high speed rail, and advanced manufacturing based on Five Year Plans rather than short term profit motives. The state also maintains absolute ownership over land, energy, telecommunications, and heavy industry. This means the proletariat holds the dominant economic levers. Private capital is permitted to operate in the consumer and service sectors, but it is strictly subordinated to state planning. Expropriating all private property is neither necessary nor strictly Marxist. When the Soviet Union attempted to nationalize every small enterprise, it created massive bureaucratic inefficiencies as well as a thriving black economy of small firms ripe for counterrevolutionary leveraging. Only national scale industries and monopolies require direct public ownership to prevent the formation of oligarchies. Small and medium enterprises actually provide vital flexibility, local employment, and innovation. As long as the state controls finance and the commanding heights, private property in the nonstrategic sectors acts as a dynamic supplement to socialist construction rather than a threat to it.
Your comparison of Deng to Gorbachev fundamentally misreads the ideological trajectory of both nations. Gorbachev was the final tragic link in a long chain of ideological degradation that began with Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956 introduced historical nihilism into the communist movement by attacking Stalin with bourgeois lies. Khrushchev fractured the ideological unity of the Soviet vanguard and planted the seeds of revisionism. This ideological rot festered for decades until Gorbachev completely capitulated to Western liberalism, actively dismantling the party apparatus and surrendering state power. Deng took a radically different path based on a materialist analysis of China’s primary contradiction. China inherited immense historical backwardness. The most critical task of the Chinese revolution at that stage was the modernization and rapid development of the productive forces. Deng recognized that you cannot build a higher stage of society on a foundation of poverty and scarcity. He consciously adapted the strategy to utilize market mechanisms while strictly upholding the leadership of the Communist Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Deng developed the economy to strengthen the socialist state, whereas Gorbachev destroyed the state to appease imperialists.
Far from being an unorthodox approach, China’s current path is actually a return to the orthodox Marxist understanding of historical development. Marx and Engels clearly theorized that socialism requires a highly developed material base. It is the Soviet command economy model that was historically unorthodox. The Soviet system of total public ownership, extending down to the smallest retail shops and local services, was not a blueprint for socialism but an emergency measure necessitated by the brutal realities of a war economy and total imperialist encirclement. By forcing full public ownership of all small and medium firms, the Soviet state created a fatal contradiction. They outlawed legitimate small scale private enterprise, which directly pushed those economic activities into the shadows. This created a massive black market and a second economy. The operators of these shadow enterprises accumulated illicit wealth and eventually allied with counterrevolutionary elements within the party bureaucracy. When the Soviet state weakened, this shadow capitalist class actively supported the dissolution of the USSR so they could legally privatize their stolen wealth. By legalizing and regulating small and medium enterprises under the strict supervision of the vanguard party, China avoids creating a disenfranchised black market class. China is successfully building the massive productive forces required for transition.
To begin with, our first undertaking is that we must dispel your fundamental error of treating markets and capitalism as synonyms. They are not. Markets predate capitalism by millennia through simple commodity production and exchange, and they will likely outlive it as well. The market is merely a mechanism for resource allocation and a tool to develop the productive forces, not the defining characteristic of a capitalist mode of production. Socialism utilizes the market to build the material wealth required for a higher stage of communism, subordinating it to the needs of society rather than allowing it to dictate social relations.
Furthermore, the expectation of direct, individualized ownership of the means of production is petty bourgeois nonsense. What Marxists actually advocate for is the ownership of the means of production as a class. It is the proletariat, organized as the ruling class, that collectively owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy. Demanding that workers hold literal, individualized deeds to their factories reflects a profound misunderstanding of socialized production and retreats into utopian petit-bourgeois ideology.
Finally, addressing the Trotskyist accusation of state capitalism requires looking past superficial appearances. State capitalism and the primary stage of socialism are necessarily very similar because they share many identical economic forms, such as commodity production, wage labor, and state enterprises. However, analyzing form devoid from class content is nonsense that elucidates nothing. The decisive factor is which class holds political supremacy and dictates the purpose of these economic forms. Under bourgeois state capitalism, the state apparatus serves to maximize profit for the monopoly bourgeoisie. In China, the state is an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by the Communist Party. Here, state capital is directed consciously to develop the productive forces, eradicate poverty, and build the material conditions for communism. The forms may resemble those of the transition period from capitalism, but the class content is entirely socialist because the market is strictly subordinated to the political and economic objectives of the working class.
