With China’s popularity rising, there has to come a point where a country’s population decides to say:
“We need to follow a Marxist-Leninist model pronto if we want to remain a functioning society, because capitalism isn’t working anymore.”
Which country is gonna say it first?
Marxist-Leninist model has everything to do with China’s development. You can read this book on the subject which explains how China’s rise is a direct product of Marxist central planning.
The whole idea of state capitalism is a bit of a misnomer. It basically says that even though USSR had state owned enterprise, the internal capitalist relations within it remain largely the same. While that’s true, there is a fundamental difference here. Capitalism is a system where people who own capital hire workers to exploit there labor with the purpose of increasing their capital. The goal of capitalist enterprise is to create wealth for the owners with any social benefits being strictly incidental. On the other hand, the purpose of state enterprise is to provide social value. Workers in state owned companies are producing things that the society needs. They are working for their own benefit and those of others around them. Therefore, the nature of work itself is fundamentally different from actual capitalism.
And this is precisely what socialism is. It’s a transitional stage between a capitalist society and a future communist society where the working class has seized the control of the state, but existing material relations have not yet been abolished.
Also worth noting that the state in China is firmly in control of the commanding heights of the economy.
The actual innovation in China is in combining high level central planning with dynamic allocation. The problem with Soviet economy was that any large system will produce a lot of noise as information travels through it. So, when you do central planning the way USSR was, it becomes very difficult to balance things. You make a plan, the directives travel down to the factories and farms where production happens, there’s delay in the information arriving, mistakes in transcription, and so on. Then the same thing happens on the way back up, so the picture at the top is divergent from the situation on the ground. And that leads to things like overcorrections, and plans based on false data, so the system becomes unbalanced over time. And that’s what we saw happen in USSR. I can highly recommend reading Thinking in Systems for a deeper explanation of the problem.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the idea of central planning itself is wrong. The problem is with trying to do micromanagement at high level which just doesn’t work. And this is the problem China figure out how to solve by using markets as allocators within the centrally planned system. The planners still set five year plans, they still control the commanding heights of the economy, and give overall direction on what types of things should be produced, but the details are left to market mechanisms to work out dynamically at the appropriate level. And this type of a hybrid system is proving to be highly effective.
That’s a lot of words to reiterate what I said. If China is in a transition state, then it isn’t full communism. Also, China has decentralized some decision making from its planned economy, the “third way” which I reference.
Nobody claims that China is full communism, not even the Chinese themselves. It’s a socialist state with a communist party in charge. And yes, decentralizing decision making at the lower levels while continuing to do central planning at high level is the key innovation. Your original comment was nonsensical claiming that China has diverged from Marxism-Leninism and that it’s state capitalist. Next, you’ll be telling me that Lenin diverged from Marxism-Leninism when he implemented NEP.
There seems to be this weird Schrodinger’s Cat situation where is both the “this isn’t Communism yet” combined with “no, we are creating this on Communist principles”.
And the talking point for the discussion is about China’s form of “Communism” should be replicated across different countries. My statement that China’s economy currently fits a state capitalist model is still valid because China hasn’t full communist like how the Soviet Union never hit full communist. It is a step on the path.
I feel like the argument right now is that I’m using the word capitalism to describe the current step on the path.
As I’ve already explained to you in the above comment, and you studiously ignored, China is a socialist state. Soviet Union was also a socialist state. There is no Schrodinger’s Cat situation here at all. Your confusion stems from the fact that you don’t understand what socialism actually is. Socialism is the transitional phase when the working class takes power in society, but the existing material relations have not yet been abolished. That’s precisely what we see in China today. That’s the whole difference between the socialist stage of development and communism which no country has achieved, and is unlikely to be possible as long as capitalism remains the dominant ideology in the world.
The argument right now is that you’re just using words in nonsensical fashion because you lack understanding of the subject we’re discussing. You can start educating yourself on the subject by reading this short article. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3228-lenin-s-three-theoretical-arguments-about-the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat
I’m describing a step, you’re describing a walk.
I’m mainly correcting the whole China isn’t following Marxism-Leninism claim and clarifying what state capitalism really means. It’s also important to understand what the socialist state of development actually is and how it relates to communism. Everything you’ve said in this thread distorts these ideas.