A lot of it is the western left’s fetish for defeat, as Jones Manoel pointed out in that great article, and which Losurdo is really good at highlighting.

Another part is western chauvinism, that communist expertise must come from those in western europe or the US (who’ve never had any victories and so are talking out of turn), and that eastern communists / (insert whatever racialized term like hordes here) can’t comprehend and apply Marxism.

Anarchists are the biggest offenders for both of those.

Another big part is the short-term mindset that’s unable to see the bargain (ie the tradeoff of temporary low wage exploitation for long-term technology and expertise) , for what it really is: a long-term strategy to end colonialism, transfer control of production out of the hands of western capital, and a way out of the low-wage trap every global south nation is suffering under.

The Long Game and Its Contradictions is probably the best introduction to SWCC, and outlines what this strategy entails.

Gotta be honest, I was one of those MLs before the pandemic.

Seeing China take COVID seriously while every other capitalist nation left us to die really drove the lesson home, and now I understand that politics are still in command despite the apparent liberalization of the economy. Using capitalist development and investment (i.e. getting the capitalists to sell us the rope) is extremely dangerous but it seems China has somehow made it work despite all my doubts. I was wrong.

All I will say is this: most Westerner MLs I have seen (online) fall into the binary camps of “China is a capitalist hellhole” and “China is a socialist paradise that does nothing wrong”, and both trivialize the very real and complex challenges that we have to face.

It’s almost like you have one side that buys fully into Western propaganda and the other side over-corrects by going against everything Western propaganda is saying.

The fact is that China has had many great achievements and also made many critical mistakes (from the perspective of a communist), but most people aren’t interested in nuances and learning the complex history about China. They are more interested in vibes-based politics and things you can meme about.

Like, seriously, how many of you Westerners understand the economic history of China? What happened during the first 30 years under Mao? What changed under Deng? What happened in 1995? What happened during the first decade of the 21st century? What happened after the 2009 global financial crisis? What changed after Xi became president?

I can guarantee you that 95% of the Westerner leftists/MLs (and I’m being generous here) cannot adequately answer the questions above, when each phase marked a very distinct period of Chinese economic history in their attempt to navigate the changing global economic and geopolitical environments.

[aimixin responds to: What makes a country “socialist”?]

A society where public ownership of the means of production, a state controlled by a politically organized proletariat, and production for societal use rather than for profit is the principal aspect (main body) of the economy.

Key term here is principal aspect. There is a weird phenomenon from both anti-communists as well as a lot of ultraleft and leftcom communists themselves of applying a “one drop rule” to socialism, where socialism is only socialism if it’s absolutely pure without a single internal contradiction. But no society in the history of humankind has been pure, they all contain internal contradictions and internal contradictions are necessary for one form of society to develop into the next.

If you applied that same logic to capitalism, then if there was any economic planning or public ownership, then capitalism would cease to be “true capitalism” and become “actually socialism”, which is an argument a lot of right-wing libertarians unironically make. The whole “not true capitalism” and “not true socialism” arguments are two sides of the same coin, that is, people weirdly applying an absolute purity standard to a particular economic system which is fundamentally impossible to exist in reality, so they then can declare their preferred system “has never truly been tried”. But it will never be tried ever because it’s an idealized form which cannot exist in concrete reality, actually-existing capitalism and socialism will always have internal contradictions within itself.

If no idealized form exists and all things contain internal contradictions within themselves, then the only way to define them in a consistent way is not to define them in terms of perfectly and purely matching up to that idealized form, but that description merely becoming the principal aspect in a society filled with other forms and internal contradictions within itself.

A capitalist society introducing some economic planning and public ownership doesn’t make it socialist because the principal aspect is still bourgeois rule and production for profit. This would mean the state and institutions carrying out the economic planning would be most influenced by the bourgeoisie and not by the working class, i.e. they would still behave somewhat privately, the “public ownership” would really be bourgeois ownership and the economic planning would be for the benefit of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.

A similar story in a socialist society with markets and private ownership. If you have a society dominated by public ownership and someone decides to open a shop, where do they get the land, the raw materials, permission for that shop, etc? If they get everything from the public sector, then they exist purely by the explicit approval by the public sector, they don’t have real autonomy. The business may be internally run privately but would be forced to fit into the public plan due to everything around them demanding it for their survival.

Whatever is the dominant aspect of society will shape the subordinated forms. You have to understand societies as all containing internal contradictions and seeking for what is the dominant form in that society that shapes subordinated forms, rather than through an abstract and impossible to realize idealized version of “true socialism”.

Countries like Norway may have things that seemingly contradict capitalism like large social safety nets for workers funded by large amounts of public ownership, but these came as concessions due to the proximity of Nordic countries to the USSR which pressured the bourgeoisie to make concessions with the working class. However, the working class and public ownership and economic planning never became the principal aspect of Norway. The bourgeoisie still remains in control, arguably with a weaker position, but they are still by principal aspect, and in many Nordic countries ever since the dissolution of the USSR, the bourgeoisie has been using that dominant position to roll back concessions.

The argument for China being socialist is not that China has fully achieved some pure, idealized form of socialism, but that China is a DOTP where public ownership alongside the CPC’s Five-Year plans remain the principal aspect of the economy and other economic organization is a subordinated form.

Deng Xiaoping Theory is not a rejection of the economic system the Soviets were trying to build but a criticism of the Soviet understanding socialist development. After the Soviets deemed they had sufficient productive forces to transition into socialism, they attempted to transition into a nearly pure socialist society within a very short amount of time, and then declared socialist construction was completed and the next step was to transition towards communism.

Deng Xiaoping Theory instead argues that socialism itself has to be broken up into development stages a bit like how capitalism also has a “lower” and “higher” phase, so does socialism. The initial stage is to the “primary stage” of underdeveloped socialism, and then the main goal of the communist party is to build towards the developed stage of socialism. The CPC disagreed that the Soviets had actually completed their socialist construction and trying to then build towards communism was rushing things far faster than what the level of productive forces of the country could sustain and inevitably would lead to such great internal contradictions in the economic system to halt economic development.

The argument was not a rejection of the Marxist or Marxist-Leninist understanding of what socialism is, but a disagreement over the development stages, viewing socialism’s development as much more gradual and a country may remain in the primary stage like China is currently in for a long, long time, Deng Xiaoping speculated even 100 years.

I recall reading somethings from Mao where he criticized the Marxian understanding of communism, but not from the basis of it being wrong, but it being speculative. He made the argument that Marx’s detailed analysis of capitalism was only possible because Marx lived in a capitalist society and could see and research its development in real time, therefore Mao was skeptical the current understanding of communism would remain forever, because when you actually try to construct it you would inevitably learn far more than you could speculate about in the future, have a much more detailed understanding of what it is in concrete reality and what its development stages look like.

In a sense, that’s the same position the modern CPC takes towards socialism, that the Soviets and Mao rushed into socialism due to geopolitical circumstances and did not have time to actually fully grasp what socialist development would look like in practice, and Deng Xiaoping Theory introduces the concept of the primary stage of socialism based on their experience actually trying to implement it under Mao.

Despite common misconception, the CPC’s position is indeed that China is currently socialist, not “will be socialist in 2049” or whatever. The argument is that China is in the primary stage of socialism, a system where socialist aspects of the political and economic system have become the main body but in a very underdeveloped form.

A lot of people have a fairly superficial understanding of ML theory, so they see China having capitalism as a betrayal of the core principles. Effectively this shows lack of class analysis on their part. My reply to this point is that if China allowing a limited form of capitalism makes it capitalist, then Canada must be communist because we have some social services like free healthcare. It’s an absurd line of argument to make, yet it’s the level of understanding a lot of people are stuck at.

Once people internalize the idea that China is communist only nominally, then other stuff easily builds on top of that. For example, the atrocity propaganda becomes easy to swallow because obviously capitalists would exploit minorities, we see them do it in our own countries and everywhere around the globe.

I suspect another big aspect is chauvinism. People just don’t want to accept that China managed to succeed where their society failed. It’s much more comfortable to believe that China is just a different branding of the same system they live under. Acknowledging that China is a successful socialist society run by a principled Communist party means also having to grapple with the failure of western left.

Turns out that not everyone that calls itself a marxist-leninist is a marxist-leninist. You need to internalize the dialectical materialist outlook, its painfully obvious that China is socialist when you can hear the music.

Personally, I see that as a sign the strategy is working. Using market forces to your advantage, as a nominally socialist organization, is inevitably going to draw a lot of criticism from your left. You get two groups: purists who see any sort of market action as an immediate and disqualifying sin; and more principled materialists who understand the rational, but also recognize the risk of being overwhelmed by market forces. It’s nice to say you will strip out private capital in the future, but when will that actually be? When the conditions are right, will it actually happen? Worse, will your organization even be able to recognize those conditions? These are important questions, but we’re not gonna see the answer any time soon.

In the mean time, western leftist doing the fire-&-brimstone preacher act is useful. Capitalists (the smarter, self-aware capitalist…) hear leftist discord over China and interpret that as meaning their oversees investments are safe.

A big part is China tries to appear respectable to as many people as possible by not intervening and not appearing too anti-capitalist. Their socialism is not rushed and they work against imperialism protractedly and peacefully. This is very different from how the USSR was, and people expect all socialism to be the USSR copy-pasted.

It’s one thing to say that you are going to liberalize the economy to build up productive forces in theory. When you actually liberalize the economy in practice, I can understand why many MLs went batshit and started criticizing China. The wariness is completely understandable.

The criticism is definitely lessening now that the results are coming in from the great Chinese experiment. I am seeing even some Trotskyist publications praising CPC these days.

There are a lot of deeply unserious people who call themselves Marxist-Leninists but it becomes pretty apparent that they have a fragile grasp on theory and are just as reliant on being spoon fed narratives as the libs, probably why they uncritically parrot NATO propaganda. And that’s the most generous I can be, I think there’s also a strong component of racism baked in there when it comes from the global western left.

From this excellent essay

These myopic and short-sighted “left com”, “ultra-left”, or modern “Maoist” types love to denounce modern China as a betrayal of socialism, without considering that it is the failure of the Western left to do successful revolutions in their countries which made it necessary for existing socialist states to adapt to the global conditions of entrenched neo-liberal capitalism.

China, as the workhouse of the world, has done a lot of bag carrying for Western Capital. And there’s plenty of legit critiques of 996 work schedules and poor safety standards and environmental destruction.

I think it’s hard to see “Made on China” on everything at Walmart and not read that as "Betrayal of the Revolution "

Propaganda is helluva drug. I believe there’s so many layers of brainwash to clean off before most people see the cracks behind CIA lies of China. Though I think people can skip this process of unlearning if they visited China, watch videos of people having a good time in China (and what an absolutely beautiful, majestic country it is, looking like something from a science fiction/fantasy with so many wholesome and wonderful people), or read a non-Western book about China. When I began reading Socialist Reconstruction, my wife was skeptical of how China was being portrayed very positively, but I was slightly more willing to accept the book as being truthful and not “overly-biased” (not that I care about bias, as long as the message is honest). Only recently after, my wife and I began freeing our Western conditioned minds.

I believe people like Fellow Traveler and such should know better by now. Maybe they are being used as controlled opposition, idk.

I think the main issue is that the theorists aren’t ever the ones actually executing the organizational work needed to manage an incredibly complex economic system. Without that experience, they don’t know how to analyze China’s performance. They have theories that they never had to put into practice. It’s very academic.

The truth is that there’s some straight up freaks that pose as MLs and the unfortunate thing about the marginalization of the left in the non-AES world and the need for leftist “unity” is that we have to suffer their presence in our discourse. It’s been the state of things back when the USSR still endured and it’s still the case today as seen with “ML” takes on China.

I remember reading Keeran and Kenny’s work on the dissolution of the USSR, how the capitalist restoration led the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War, still ongoing today through legacy conflicts like Ukraine. K&K observed how some sociopathic Western “MLs” actually celebrated its collapse at the time because “now that the USSR was gone, real socialism could finally begin.”

It’s important to remember that China before Xi’s reforms was pretty much a capitalist hellhole. Corruption, environmental degradation and poverty were rampant, while the high rates of profits in China kept western capitalism on life support. Things have improved from 2010 onward, but even the CPC’s official stance is that Deng made some rightist errors. The CPC’s ability to improve things and correct past errors doesn’t mean that they don’t make any errors. And given that the CPC made rightist errors, it is only expected that it would receive criticism from the left.

Furthermore, the CPC itself claims that it is only in the very early stages of building socialism. As a result, there are a lot of similarities with capitalism such as a very high Gini coefficient and long working hours. The western left has correctly learnt from its past struggles that reducing working hours and levels of inequality improves productivity and living standards. They have fought against the bullshit excuses from their ruling class which has argued the necessity of poor working conditions for decades. They do not however realize that China does not have the luxury of setting its own working conditions to whatever it wants. It has until very recently been at the whims of the imperialists, who only invest in countries where they can squeeze profits.

The CPC has also made errors in recent years by becoming more nationalistic and has moved slower on LGBTQ rights than is expected of a socialist country. We cannot even justify these mistakes by appealing to the economy or national defense. These latter mistakes are just pure mistakes.