Communism in China today

Recently?

Could you provide more info?

it doesnt even classify as illiberal capitalism, let alone socialism

Anyone interested in/worried about the proletariat as revolutionary subject should be looking at China right now. An older generation of workers in the Chinese northeast who gave their lives to the post-1949 socialist contract are left without pensions and their children without jobs. Dongbei (the northeast) is the oldest area of industrialisation in China - thnks to Japanese and later the Soviets - state-owned industries there have rotted post-Deng. These are old areas of proletarian class consciousness where many remember or understand vicariously that post-1949 they are in the priviliged class.

Post-Deng there is one of the greatest human migrations on record, of the Chinese peasantry into the cities (initially in the south; the kind of migration Marx writes about in Capital, and EP Thompson, and Braverman; the working class builds its organisation and consciousness on its basis as dispossessed peasantry), the creation of a new middle class, the creation of a new proletariat, one that does not have a well-articulated class consciousness and must define itself both in terms of the Maoist revolutionary legacy as well as against the executors of that legacy.

It is sad to see a generation of revolutionary working class go to their graves having sacrificed so much, only to see their state pensions unpaid for capitalist reforms in the public sector. But a new and internationalized Chinese proletariat is in the process of making itself. It is a blank slate. It is in the strange circumstance of having to define itself against a party that claims still (not entirely unconvincingly) to serve its interests. But it is versatile with socialism and the articulation of socialist ideas, even if its main experience with those ideas has been an empty one.

Li Minqi: The Rise of China and Demise of the Capitalist World Order
Ching Kwan Lee: Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt
Wang Bing: Tie Xi Qu (West of the Tracks) documentary of SOC workers in Shenyang, Dongbei

I think you meant state capitalist

kek

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No Socialism only crony capitalism.

Hell State Capitalism is a prefferable alternative to the current Chinese economic system.

Elaborate

You don't know what state capitalism is.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maoist_Communist_Party_of_China

Good post. Are you Chinese?

A return to socialism can only happen with the CPC. They are, in fact, afraid that a social uprising undermines their legitimacy. They are under attack from both liberals and socialists and will be forced to turn back to socialism when pressure is applied. Reminder that every higher member of the CPC is still a Marxist with Leftcom characteristics, which means that they will be questioning capitalism once they see the productive forces being properly evolved.

I am less concerned with the political ideas of the higher members of the CPC and more concerned with those who will be applying the pressure. A return to socialism can only happen/is only happening with organised effort for things like collective bargaining on the part of the Chinese urban working class. They are often first-generation migrant workers with peasant history and antagonistic relations with the Party and with urban locals due to hukou restrictions on residence and education.

I am not anti-Party but to focus on the "proper evolving of productive forces", and the worthy ideals you suppose the Chinese nomenklatura to hold, while skipping over the hard work of building a consciousness that is ready to take over those tools is suspicious to me.

Not Chinese, I have worked in Mandarin translation for eight years.

chinalaborwatch.org/home.aspx
clb.org.hk/

This is literally reformism.

Once a state becomes capitalist, it is a bourgeois state, and therefore must be abolished via revolution like all bourgeois states. This is basic Marxism.

Fucking chinks actually had a shot at true communism, and they ruin it.

What do you think about about Xi's idea to revive Mao's mass line to sort of connect local party officials to the general public?

The situation in China is somewhat different as the state is already seized by a communist vanguard with revolutionary means and is therefore not bourgeois.

But it's a revision of Marx to say there even is a difference.

This is correct. Marx spoke of a lower stage of communism (in which the prime directive is to automate what remaining labor there is) and a higher stage (this is "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs"). Lenin revised it to be capitalism -> socialism -> communism. It makes perfect sense, however, to immediately transition today and on a global scale into the upper stage of communism if you remain true to a materialist analysis of actually-existing conditions.

I'd think so cuz China was till fairly recently full on communist, but obviously nowadays the country overall don't give a shit bout the ideals of Mao no more.

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uh, no, lol

everyone forgot about that shit when the first gucci store opened.

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yes there is and it's called the communist party of China

Lots of countries have Pirate parties
Are they Pirates?

are the pirate parties in power?

You're missing the point of his question or you're supremely retarded. The Nazis called themselves socialist and got into power, therefore they were socialist by that criterion.

Doesn't the fact that they are ruled by the descendants of a revolutionary socialist movement count for something? When Marx et al. spoke of revolution and the state,I doubt this was something they would have foreseen.

It does. It means it's better able to mislead workers then an ordinary bourgeois state and workers start looking towards Western liberal countries for salvation due to the false dichotomy of Western imperialism.

Genuine MLs have called for a second socialist revolution inside the revisionist countries for sometime:ciml.250x.com/archive/hoxha/english/enver_hoxha_1968_the-working-class-in-revisionist-countries-must-take-the-field-and-re-establish-the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat_zip.pdf

I dont really think China was ever really a socialist country so this would be the first in their case.

great post

Not true at all

Not Chinese, I have worked in Mandarin translation for eight years.
As someone who is trying to learn Mandarin, how'd you get so gud?

Nice argument there.

jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404544.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

They are pretty much Leftcoms in practice.

I'm sorry, I just don't but any of them are true believers. I think they're opportunists who cynically use socialist rhetoric only as a means to protect the current power dynamic.

*buy

The CPC is merely leading China through the necessary capitalist stage of history. They did nothing wrong, praise be upon comrade Xi.

Yes, China has the biggest communist movement on the planet, in circles both within and outside the CCP. There is a major impetus to push back against market forces through popular action.

Within the CCP is the New Left movement, that ranges from SocDems to leftcoms desiring to bring China to the left kicking and screaming. These people have a nuanced perspective on the Maoist legacy and are the only force within the Chinese government seriously critical of capitalism.

newbloommag.net/2016/03/11/chinese-new-left-eng/

This article is liberal and devotes far to much time to spurious nationalistic tendencies within the New Left, but gives you an alright run-down of the movement. It started in China's universities but is now a substantial force within the party, enjoying broad youth appeal as well.

Like said, check out Chuang. It's the best Marxist publication in the planet and has a pretty wide readership across East Asia and is affiliated with the New Left movement.

In addition to this kind of political organization, China is the center of the world's labor movement. Just as it was 150 years ago in Europe, the Chinese labor movement is clandestine and under-reported. Thousands of wildcat strikes happen a year and seem to be on the rise.

ft.com/content/56afb47c-23fd-3bcd-a19f-bddab6a27883

In addition, the Chinese tradition celebrates popular resistance against oppression or corruption, particularly in rural places where the legacy of Maoism is strong.

npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/06/23/482920408/a-rebellious-chinese-village-challenges-the-authorities-again

This article makes it sound like a rarity, but every year hundreds of Chinese villages drive out their corrupt local politicians. Chinese social media is full of fat-cat local bureaucrats being exposed by underprivileged villagers as they party with strippers and champagne. The Chinese central government does not inhibit this, because they know their legitimacy comes from the actions of the people. If the CCP punishes one village for taking politics into their own hands, many more villages will do the same.

Fuck off, the shittiness of the Chinese state is irrelevant to discussions of popular movements.>>1660005

Again, I'd say the anti-corruption campaign Xi is leading is merely a cynical exhaust valve for an angry population. It's carefully stage-managed, only taking down weak links while the entire bureaucracy and higher leadership themselves enjoy self-enrichment and widespread graft.

I'm not a Dengist, so I believe they got themselves undermined by bourgeois interests which is the normal process in every capitalist country. To believe that you can have a totally antagonistic element amongst the ruling class like a communist party existing unspoiled next to a bourgeoisie is idealistic.

Nonetheless, they maintain study of Marxism, they universities and research centers dedicated to interpret Marx and Socialism in general, and to believe that the CPC is not believing in it is quite a stretch. They might work in bourgeois interests but, at least in their own minds, they are still Marxists.

Xi Jinping on the inevitability of socialism:

Operation Foxhunt is completely different. This isn't state action, but popular and illegal (!) uprisings against CCP officials.

Xi's mass line is an articulation of informal democratic or pseudodemocratic processes the CPC uses to gauge, respond to, and/or 'manage' public opinion. Post-Deng the party has been a victim of its own success - with the growth of the private sphere, membership is less of a career boost, and often seen as pointless/ a hindrance in many lines of work. The popular opinion is that the Party is bloated, corrupt, and self-serving. As mentioned by user above, Chinese have a strong tradition of punishing these kind of bureaucrats. The party can find itself in the tricky position of the workers seeing it as corrupt, and the growing middle class seeing it as an imposition. Smth has to be done. So whether you see the mass line as 'rectification' that re-enables the Party to serve the people's interests and/or function as revolutionary vanguard, or rather as a purely selfish way to secure consent for its own perseverance as an institution, depends on what colour your spectacles are tinted/which side your bread is buttered on.

Some of the measures for reconnecting cadres with the masses are reminiscent of the 'countryside' movement during the Cultural Revolution. I have some emotional sympathy with these kinds of methods of 're-education' because some of the spoilt cunts just fucking need it, on an individual level, but its efficacy is doubtful. Consider the lengths it took and the personalities required for the party to be aligned with the people in the first place. Those conditions will not be replicated by letting cadres 'do time' as street sweepers or farm workers. When a nomenklatura develops there is a distance that cannot be overcome from the top down. Mao had insight on this problem. It seems to me like a parent or teacher trying to be 'cool' in front their children. The very fact they are trying, and trying so hard, is a continual and painful reminder that they are not on the same wavelength! The children understand this instinctively.

Informal democratic mechanisms like the mass line, and the 'campaigns' that are popular in Chinese politics, are dubious because their informal nature makes them very open to abuse, and basically unthreatening to the sources of the problems they are supposed to address. Every campaign has an end, if an official can weather the storm. Drive against 'formalism' can be spun as reducing red tape, getting rid of corruption, 'streamlining' in Western business terms. It can equally be seen as opening windows for the arbitrary exercise of power.

As is talking about, looking at the collective actions of the masses themselves, as well as at the New Left movement w/in and w/out the party, is a better guide to the nature and the future of socialism in China than focusing on party-led political initiatives like the mass line.

Different stages of learning require very different strategies, I think. After getting the rudiments from a Chinese tutor, I self-taught reading and writing by many hours of reading and then writing out what I read, until both became faster and smoother. 'Boring' and time-consuming but I enjoy that kind of study and by it I managed to get thru most of Mao's Collected Writings! Writing them out slowly and then less slowly and then badgering Chinese friends with questions. Then I got the necessary HSK to let me study a translation masters at a Chinese university, where I am still based. How long & how have you been learning?

I'm embarrassed to admit i don't undestand this part. How can there be no any mode of production at place?

Relevant to this thread. Looks like China is aware of the SJW Idpol bullshit.

opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/chenchen-zhang/curious-rise-of-white-left-as-chinese-internet-insult

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Is the CPC the ultimate accelerationist party?

super communists reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1690S2

Bump

I found this thread a couple a week later, and it's surprisingly not shit.

Please, more info

Not even state-capitalist. The communist party of China is centre-right if anything.

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