How should we respond when random people tell us how china isn't socialist, but actually a state capitalist country?

Comments

• gun@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  They are correct about China being state capitalism, they admit as much. But China also says they have socialism with Chinese characteristics. It can be both. Every society has a base and a superstructure.

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• TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  China is a market based socialist economy, not just "haha state capitalism, bad!"

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• Windows97@lemmygrad.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  It's in a long term transition. The end goal is communism, but as it is china is in a capitalist global economy which makes any transition to communism at best unsustainable and at worst straight up impossible. Over the last half century china has opened itself up for the most powerful countries in the world to transfer their industry to them, and in the process has created a relationship that makes attacking china much harder than previous communist states like the soviet union. Unfortunately that means that the workers' situation was pretty rough for a long time but they have been improving that too recently, it it likely wouldn't have been much better under a fully capitalist country either.

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  • atomicshrimp@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

    Do any of the socialist countries (vietnam, cuba, china, etc) have any particularly interesting interactions with other socialist countries since they not capitalist?

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• jucheguevara@lemmygrad.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  "who owns the land"

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• gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  Thing is, what does exactly State Capitalism mean for that people? They probably don't even know, yet they're the first ones to be against it, or to call them communists, or whatever. But let's try and understand their little minds and see if we can come up with a conclusion.

  So by "State", we can assume they mean some form of centralized economic system where the government is in charge of the decision making, where all of the productive forces are put in place with the idea of capital growth and maximization; and by "Capitalism" we can understand it as the fact that there's still class society, private property, and so on, but also from the fact that China will interact with other capitalist and non capitalist nations alike in international trade. Now, this does not seem that bad, does it? Well, basically what's happening here is that they're defining SwCC (Socialism with Chinese Characteristics) and branding it as "state capitalism" to delegitimize communism as a whole, because to rightists socialism has never existed, or it was never socialist enough, or whatever. That's why they're both at the same time evil communists and greedy capitalists within their narrative.

  Now, let me explain a bit more what SwCC does and why it tries to improve upon previous mistakes of other socialists movements.

  The core idea is that you need to develop your productive forces. It doesn't matter how much good will your movement has, if you don't have the material conditions to improve the life of your people, you will achieve nothing because you can't defend against external aggressors and because you can't procure your citizens with a minimum living standard, which will create interior conflicts. To do this, SwCC takes advantage of the remaining bourgeoisie within your country and uses it in their favour by keeping a tight control on how they operate, while at the same time they own most of the national resources which they use in a centralized way with the purpose of capital growth, which in turn use this capital to strengthen its international presence with commerce routes and trades.

  I am not a marxist scholar, and even though I could give you a better explanation I don't want to be all day here writing a walltext, so I think this is good enough, if you're interested in understanding better the concepts of SwCC I'm sure you could ask in a bunch of communities for resources.

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  This probably does not belong here, and for future references you should post this kind of questions in something like /c/communism101, you'll get few down votes.

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