China’s Ascension Makes Marxism Relevant Again — Do We Already Live Under a Type of Socialism?
By: The Future, Disorder Collective
Tags: Communism, China, CPC, Marxism, Philsophy

Nick Fewings on Unsplash

“‘We want to do business.’ Quite right, business will be done. We are against no one except the domestic and foreign reactionaries who hinder us from doing business…we shall be able to do business and establish diplomatic relations with all foreign countries on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

— Mao Zedong, On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, 1949

The philosophical tradition of Marxism, and its associated political manifestation in the form of Marxism-Leninism, is more relevant to the state of the world now than during its founding in the 19th and 20th centuries. This isn’t an arbitrary opinion — the basis for the stability of the international system, the structure of the modern international political economy, and its associated institutions, has now found its anchor in the Marxist-Leninist state of the People’s Republic of China. How Westerners, primarily Americans and Europeans, view their own economies and ideological system is now fundamentally integrated and derives legitimacy from, even if indirectly, the actions of the Chinese state and Communist Party, whether it be through trade, technology transfer, or political stability, induced by the largest trading civilization-nation.

Viewed at the geopolitical and international political-economic level, the existence and stability of Capitalism are now irreparably integrated, and in many ways led, by the ideological and political manifestation of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the Communist Party of China (CPC), which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The relative stability of the post-1990s age could very well be not a result of neoliberal Capitalism, which tends toward crisis, but the anchoring of world economic trade by the highly specific and planned policies of the CPC.

While the 2008 financial crisis spurred a number of Western journalists to write slightly sarcastic “Is Marx Back?” articles, the world’s most populous Marxist-Leninist state was building a party capable of mass grassroots organizing and competent management of massive state companies in such a way that is simply impossible in polarized Western liberal democracies. The 2008 crisis in particular was a defining moment for the CPC’s ability to deliver not only for the national economy but the entire globe. China’s stimulus package, worth US$590 billion, was “one of the main drivers of world economic growth” in the post-2008 era, saving countless jobs and lives.

The Chinese people have taken notice. Developing a native ideological system that primarily synthesizes Confucianism, Legalism, Taoism, and Marxism into a coherent construct that can respond effectively to the people’s needs has so far demonstrated the vitality of China’s theory and practice. According to a 17-year Harvard study of public opinion, 93% of Chinese people have strong confidence in the national government of the CPC. Even the much-maligned and misunderstood “social credit system” is rated about 80% positive among the people, according to a German university survey.

As early as the 1990s, when the West had declared absolute ideological victory after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the political foundations for a transition to the next system were already built and amassing a breadth of economic and scientific advancement never before seen in human history. After Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, over the course of only 40 years, the Chinese state lifted over 850 million people out of absolute poverty, built the world’s largest interconnected high-speed rail system — now accounting for over two-thirds of the entire world’s rail, developed the world’s largest, 95-million members strong political party with a clear succession method from the grassroots to the national level, captured international business with the world’s most advanced logistics and supply-chain infrastructure, which drove down the cost of basic goods for Westerners, built the world’s largest consumer market and technology companies, developed the most commonly-exported coronavirus vaccine, eliminated entire deserts by planting billions of trees, became a world leader in solar and wind energy production, and is currently the developer of a groundbreaking nuclear fusion reactor with a promise of unlimited green energy without the associated problem of waste storage.

Average real wages in China have consistently outpaced every other developing country under the CPC

As of 2020, the world’s largest bank, with US$4.3 trillion in assets, is a Chinese state-owned company. Tech giant Huawei is the world’s largest worker-owned company where the Board of Directors is chosen by election. The CPC organ that oversees all state companies, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, is the world’s single largest economic entity with assets of over US$26 trillion (2017). The China Investment Corporation is the second-largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, managing over US$1 trillion, second only to Norway’s oil fund.

The Chinese people have never lived better. Before the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, famine was extremely common, often killing tens of millions at a time on a consistent basis, for example, in 1876–79 and 1907. [1] Aside from the costly agricultural mistakes made during the Great Leap Forward, the CPC has abolished famine occurrences. Malaria, a disease that took 30 million lives a year before 1949, has now been eliminated. Urban Chinese families now have double the net worth of the median American family, largely due to a homeownership rate that tops 95% due to the CPC’s land reform program. By the end of 2020, the CPC had completed its goal of the elimination of absolute poverty while building the world’s largest middle class. Although still somewhat high, inequality has declined in the Xi era, and wealth and health are improving. Certainly, the country has its fair share of problems, such as stubborn pollution and sandstorms, an aging society, ethnic tensions, corruption, and inadequate jobs for their over-educated population, but the Chinese people are among the happiest and most optimistic in the world.

Considering these facts, can we say with confidence that we live in a fully Capitalist global system, at least at the macro-structural level? In his seminal book “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Friedrich Engels describes under what specific conditions necessarily constitute an objective transformation of Capitalism into Socialism by means of state ownership and the attainment of political power by an organization of the vast majority. He wrote in 1880:

“If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army. 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.”

Of course, the development of China did not occur in this exact manner. The CPC is not simply the “national Capitalist,” given it has the integrated legal ability to act against Capital interest, nor does it only “form elements of that solution,” as it is both the means and the solution. China has also not eliminated wage labor or all exploitation and is still subject to Capitalist business cycles, although its state companies and market insulation protect it. Importantly, Engels specifies what Socialism is not — state ownership by the Capitalist class for matters of efficiency or convenience:

“For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the State of today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism. If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III’s reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.”

If we believe, as the Chinese people largely do, that the CPC is the organized political expression of urban workers and rural peasants for the benefit of the overall working class, then the Chinese system cannot logically be labeled as Capitalist. Rather, it is an innovative transformation into state-led Socialism in the context of Chinese culture, both economically and politically. As Chinese Venture Capitalist, Eric Li, has stated: “I’m a Capitalist and I have no [political] power…Capitalism, to me, means, somehow, capital…the interests of capital, rise above the interests of the society as a whole and they capture the political system for their own benefits…that we don’t want in this country.”

The post-1978 market reforms have striking similarities with the early Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy (NEP) devised by Vladimir Lenin. Under the policy, Capitalists were permitted to make profits but under the supervision of the party-state. It was understood that the development of the “productive forces” creates much-needed jobs, tax revenue, and promotes an efficient work culture in some ways similar to a fully-fledged Capitalist system. [2] Deng believed that technology, management methods, and the like, are not inherently Capitalist — insights from both the West and the NEP could be used to build a new Socialist society with state ownership as its central institution. Additionally, he believed that “Democracy and dictatorship of the proletariat are two parts of the same antithesis, and proletarian democracy is far superior to its capitalist counterpart.” This is borne out by a public opinion survey on global democracy perception, which found that 73% of Chinese consider their system democratic, as opposed to only 49% of Americans who think the same of their liberal democracy.

Both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping have commented on this predicament of Chinese development. In 1958 the former stated, “There are still capitalists in China, but the state is under the leadership of the Communist Party,” and the latter said of market reforms, “Is it possible that a new bourgeoisie will emerge? A handful of bourgeois elements may appear, but they will not form a class.” [3] Mao stated in 1949 that the primary purpose of the Chinese revolution was to unite workers and peasants under the leadership of the CPC in order to overthrow “the landlord class and the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie (the monopoly capitalist class).” There was, however, less to fear from the national Capitalists:

“There remain the national bourgeoisie; at the present stage, we can already do a good deal of suitable educational work with many of them. When the time comes to realize socialism, that is, to nationalize private enterprise, we shall carry the work of educating and remoulding them a step further. The people have a powerful state apparatus in their hands — there is no need to fear rebellion by the national bourgeoisie.” (On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, 1949)

In Engels’ example of Prussia under Bismarck, the state-ownership of industry was implemented purely for practical reasons and featured no-such political organization of the vast majority, only the organized state expression of Capitalists and their political allies. Under such a system, to shut down all production and induce the grassroots distribution of goods and information during a pandemic, such as what the CPC accomplished in 2020, would be utterly impossible since the profits of the national Capitalists would be seriously disturbed. The bottom of society would simply be left to suffer and die, or, at best, see a chaotic and disorganized attempt by a Capitalist system to adapt to the new pandemic reality. Instead, a Socialist system rationalizes and removes the anarchy of production from this process by organizing people as the fundamental basis of the state-led market economy. By mid-2020, China had defeated COVID-19, in large part due to its state companies and grassroots party organizations, a time when the West was struggling with such anarchy and disorganization.

And if recent history is any indication of the future, the capacity and development of China and the CPC are only in an early stage. According to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the CPC aims to double the nation’s GDP by 2035 — even during a tumultuous time of a global viral pandemic. This massive expansion of wealth, if managed well enough, translates to bolstered scientific and material production: automated infrastructure via 6G, an expanded welfare system, a massive expansion of green energy technology, accelerated space exploration, expanded use of AI innovation to build hyper-connected megacities, a world-class public university system, the world’s largest supergrid, decreased inequality, common prosperity, and much more. By 2050, China will make up 20% of the world economy, while the US and EU will hold onto 12% and 9%, respectively (estimated in 2017). By at least 2060, the CPC plans for China to be carbon-neutral, and the concept of an “Ecological Civilization,” an ideological-historical concept that links Marxist teleology with Taoist ecology, was implemented in the constitution in 2018.

The rise of China and the relative decline of the United States as the clearly defined hegemon will have enormous effects on the self-image of the Capitalist-imperialist world powers. Although, unlike the 20th century’s Soviet Union, the CPC has deeply mastered the dialectical nature of the Capitalist system of production and is able to manipulate the logic of capital within its borders by using financial incentives and planning methods largely unavailable to Capitalist countries. We live in an age where America’s popular Capitalists, such as Elon Musk, go on Chinese state television to bolster its latest Five-Year Plan and Hillary Clinton tells us to “take back the means of production.” The United States has not only squandered its advantages but willingly participated in the greatest peaceful transfer of power, from one state to another, in human history.

Whether Western commentators and politicians like it or not, there is an objective process of change occurring in the global political economy toward a Socialism and away from a Capitalism. Development occurs not at the exclusive behest of Capitalist profit, which was previously only possible on a foundation of colonialism and natural resource extraction, [4] but a post-colonial process that is organized and planned by the CPC — and affects all nations and peoples.

Many objections can be made to this basic thesis. After all, how can China be Socialist; a country with the world’s largest number of billionaires, many cases of worker protests, bans party-independent labor unions, has relatively long working hours, rampant consumerism, a minimalistic welfare system, and a number of other issues often associated with runaway Capitalism. The answer, from a Chinese-Marxist perspective, is rather straightforward: Socialism is not solely contingent on ideal perfection, workers' rights, ethics, morals, the welfare state, or attaining the highest degree of economic condition in the world immediately or at any given moment. Instead, it is a historical process and a system of state-oriented political-economic organization that evolves to develop civilization over time while recognizing potential contradictions and benefits of the dialectical method of unity of opposites. The rights of workers, labor organization, and the welfare state, are aspects of a highly advanced Socialism being developed over a longer period, but so are economic growth, productivity, cultural harmony, and stability.

A final point of clarification. Many are accustomed to claiming True Socialism to be a definition one creates retroactively, i.e. Socialism as the organized attainment of economic democracy by the working class. However, another view can be proposed. Socialism (or Capitalism for that matter) cannot be a static definition, but a socially determined process of meaning creation through practice, in history and present times. In other words, there is no centralized “Pope of Marxism,” but only theory and practice made through the observation and experience of peoples with vastly different environments, cultures, and histories. In this sense, the CPC is a legitimate expression of authentic Socialism fit for the specifics of Chinese conditions and legitimized by the results it attains and historical role in liberating the Chinese people from colonialism. If the current projections hold, Marxism-Leninism with Chinese Characteristics will be the single most important humanity-defining ideological project of the 21st century, exactly the opposite of the Western projection for the future after the end of the Cold War.

Footnotes:

[1] Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Kishore Mahbubani, pg 110.

[2] Domenico Losurdo (2017) Has China Turned to Capitalism? — Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, International Critical Thought, 7:1, 15–31, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2017.1287585

[3] Ibid.

[4] As Omali Yeshitela has said “it was the enslavement of African people that gave rise to…Capitalism. There was no such thing as Capitalism before black people were enslaved.”