Using “multimillionaire” vs “billionaire” was a mistake on my part. I was really trying to get at the difference between the petite bourgeoisie and the haute bourgeoisie, for which i’m pretty sure there is a qualitative difference. I’m not trying to advocate for social democracy, but I do think it would be logical for a dictatorship of the proletariat to, ya know, make policies that support the proletariat. Surely one of those policies would be suppressing the bourgeoisie to an extent that the haute bourgeoisie, the ones who control massive amounts of capital and have political influence, would be nonexistent, correct?
Our goal is not to fine-tune this concentration via taxation, but to ensure the state firmly controls the commanding heights of the economy, compelling secondary forms of private ownership to serve the people as a whole, and making capital accumulation merely a byproduct of developing productive forces.
What I’ve been saying is that the existence of billionaires runs contradictory to this statement, since if capital accumulation was really just “a byproduct”, no one would accumulate enough to become a billionaire. From my point of view, it seems like their existence is enough to cast doubt on whether or not the “state firmly controls the commanding heights of the economy”.
Allowing independent political organizations to act at odds with the collective decisions of the people and their elected representatives would only lead to social fragmentation and interference by external forces.
But allowing random people to control vast amounts of capital is chill? and if democratic centralism represents the majority opinion, what about minorities? Won’t they become alienated from repeatedly having no say because they’re outnumbered? I think some amount of federalism/decentralization would be necessary to avoid this.
At a systemic level, there are no legitimate institutional channels for Communist Party members or state officials to privately appropriate the surplus value generated by state-owned enterprises.
The thing that concerns me in particular with this topic is the “Three Represents” (?) policy that literally allows capitalists to join the CPC. How nice of the dictatorship of the proletariat to let the bourgeoisie have representation. That’s why I joked about comparing China to Mussolini.
About your last paragraph: I’m not a fortune teller and I’m not trying to be. But going by the dictionary definition of socialism, “worker ownership of the means of production”, it seems very unlikely that China meets this. I don’t understand what’s wrong with being rigid on this, otherwise, aren’t you redefining the point of what socialism even is? Maybe I’ll be proven wrong and China will transition into a fully socialist economy in the future, I have no clue.
I understand that you are new to Marxism and still grappling with many of its concepts, but our current discussion has truly become circular. You do not seem to have genuinely absorbed or responded to the core logic that I and others have previously explained to you.
You remain stuck in a moralistic perspective, viewing private property as inherently evil and insisting it must be abolished immediately, or else the socialist cause is betrayed. Marxism is not moralizing; it is a science. We oppose private ownership to fundamentally resolve the basic contradiction in advanced firms between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of surplus, not out of some abstract moral purism. As Marx and Engels explicitly addressed in The Principles of Communism:
Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?
No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.
In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.
Attempting to eliminate private ownership through a mere decree runs completely counter to historical materialism. Lenin also pointed out that forcibly expropriating small and medium-sized producers is not only unnecessary but extremely harmful; it merely spawns a massive, ineradicable underground black market economy. The history of the late Soviet Union painfully demonstrated that these networks of small and medium-scale private enterprise (forced underground by unnecessary suppression) ultimately became key instruments in the disintegration and subversion of the socialist system.
Secondly, regarding the “Three Represents” policy you mentioned: I do not intend to offer a defense of policy from the eras of Jiang and Hu; indeed, there was excessive compromise made in the name of economic development. However, regarding the specific issue of allowing certain capitalists to join the Party, we must clearly understand the actual structure of power. Even if they obtain Party membership, within the actual political architecture, they are strictly excluded from the core decision-making bodies (such as the Politburo and the core leadership of People’s Congresses at various levels). They neither control the core state apparatus nor exercise substantive state power. The core leadership of the state remains firmly in the hands of a force representing the fundamental interests of the proletariat and the broad masses of working people; this stands in stark contrast to the class nature of fascism, characterized by the complete fusion of capital and state power.
Finally, regarding your definition of socialism: the phrase you cited, “workers’ ownership of the means of production”, is more akin to an accessible political slogan. While it points toward the ultimate value-oriented goal, it cannot serve as a rigorous definition within Marxist political economy. In actual scientific socialist theory, socialism is a specific historical stage of transition from capitalism to communism. During this stage, the proletariat has seized and holds state power; its core task is to utilize this power to oversee and drive the immense development of productive forces and the socialization of production, thereby laying a solid material foundation for advancing to a higher stage of socialism and, ultimately, to communism.
I don’t want to seem dismissive but before we continue circling I really think you should read these foundational texts:
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism
The Detrimental Effects of Premature Expropriation of Small Producers
Lenin, The Tax in Kind
Socialism as a Historical Phase and China’s Position Within It
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
Cheng Enfu, On the Three Stages in the Development of Socialism
Using “multimillionaire” vs “billionaire” was a mistake on my part. I was really trying to get at the difference between the petite bourgeoisie and the haute bourgeoisie, for which i’m pretty sure there is a qualitative difference. I’m not trying to advocate for social democracy, but I do think it would be logical for a dictatorship of the proletariat to, ya know, make policies that support the proletariat. Surely one of those policies would be suppressing the bourgeoisie to an extent that the haute bourgeoisie, the ones who control massive amounts of capital and have political influence, would be nonexistent, correct?
What I’ve been saying is that the existence of billionaires runs contradictory to this statement, since if capital accumulation was really just “a byproduct”, no one would accumulate enough to become a billionaire. From my point of view, it seems like their existence is enough to cast doubt on whether or not the “state firmly controls the commanding heights of the economy”.
But allowing random people to control vast amounts of capital is chill? and if democratic centralism represents the majority opinion, what about minorities? Won’t they become alienated from repeatedly having no say because they’re outnumbered? I think some amount of federalism/decentralization would be necessary to avoid this.
The thing that concerns me in particular with this topic is the “Three Represents” (?) policy that literally allows capitalists to join the CPC. How nice of the dictatorship of the proletariat to let the bourgeoisie have representation. That’s why I joked about comparing China to Mussolini.
About your last paragraph: I’m not a fortune teller and I’m not trying to be. But going by the dictionary definition of socialism, “worker ownership of the means of production”, it seems very unlikely that China meets this. I don’t understand what’s wrong with being rigid on this, otherwise, aren’t you redefining the point of what socialism even is? Maybe I’ll be proven wrong and China will transition into a fully socialist economy in the future, I have no clue.
I understand that you are new to Marxism and still grappling with many of its concepts, but our current discussion has truly become circular. You do not seem to have genuinely absorbed or responded to the core logic that I and others have previously explained to you.
You remain stuck in a moralistic perspective, viewing private property as inherently evil and insisting it must be abolished immediately, or else the socialist cause is betrayed. Marxism is not moralizing; it is a science. We oppose private ownership to fundamentally resolve the basic contradiction in advanced firms between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of surplus, not out of some abstract moral purism. As Marx and Engels explicitly addressed in The Principles of Communism:
Attempting to eliminate private ownership through a mere decree runs completely counter to historical materialism. Lenin also pointed out that forcibly expropriating small and medium-sized producers is not only unnecessary but extremely harmful; it merely spawns a massive, ineradicable underground black market economy. The history of the late Soviet Union painfully demonstrated that these networks of small and medium-scale private enterprise (forced underground by unnecessary suppression) ultimately became key instruments in the disintegration and subversion of the socialist system.
Secondly, regarding the “Three Represents” policy you mentioned: I do not intend to offer a defense of policy from the eras of Jiang and Hu; indeed, there was excessive compromise made in the name of economic development. However, regarding the specific issue of allowing certain capitalists to join the Party, we must clearly understand the actual structure of power. Even if they obtain Party membership, within the actual political architecture, they are strictly excluded from the core decision-making bodies (such as the Politburo and the core leadership of People’s Congresses at various levels). They neither control the core state apparatus nor exercise substantive state power. The core leadership of the state remains firmly in the hands of a force representing the fundamental interests of the proletariat and the broad masses of working people; this stands in stark contrast to the class nature of fascism, characterized by the complete fusion of capital and state power.
Finally, regarding your definition of socialism: the phrase you cited, “workers’ ownership of the means of production”, is more akin to an accessible political slogan. While it points toward the ultimate value-oriented goal, it cannot serve as a rigorous definition within Marxist political economy. In actual scientific socialist theory, socialism is a specific historical stage of transition from capitalism to communism. During this stage, the proletariat has seized and holds state power; its core task is to utilize this power to oversee and drive the immense development of productive forces and the socialization of production, thereby laying a solid material foundation for advancing to a higher stage of socialism and, ultimately, to communism.
I don’t want to seem dismissive but before we continue circling I really think you should read these foundational texts:
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism
The Detrimental Effects of Premature Expropriation of Small Producers
Lenin, The Tax in Kind
Socialism as a Historical Phase and China’s Position Within It
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
Cheng Enfu, On the Three Stages in the Development of Socialism