I don’t support the PRC because the CPC calls itself communist, I support it because it has a socialist system. The commanding heights and critical industries in China are overwhelmingly publicly owned, and the state is dominated by the working class through the CPC. Marketization is employed in underdeveloped industries where markets still play a progressive role in accelerating socialization of production and distribution, and as these grow they are folded into the public sector. This is Marxist economics. See Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide for a basic, entry-level explanation that requires no background in Marxist economics. See Cheng Enfu’s handy diagram:

As for having the “fastest growing billionaire class,” China has billionaires because the marketized sector has private property. The acceleration of development speeds up the timeline for collectivizing production and distribution, and the rise of billionaires is the tradeoff. Good thing Marxism isn’t a moralist philosophy that sees private property as a sin, but instead a scientific approach to socialism based on dialectical materialism. The bit about “suppressing worker incomes” is entirely false, worker incomes have been dramatically rising year over year for decades:

I honestly have no clue why you immediately assume I only support China because they call themselves communist. It’s such a bad-faith way to terminate a conversation before it even begins. I support China because of its system, because I am a communist that studies Marxism.

You made a bunch of vague whataboutisms. Do you have an actual point here? My point is that the issues with the US regime will not be ended by removing Trump, this isn’t a matter of 80 years ago but today. Genocides are not “communist tools,” and the majority of those that lived in the USSR and its member states regret its dissolution.

I’m a Statesian, just like you, the primary difference is that I am directing my critique against the system that is actually causing the problems of today, rather than the individual that happens to be in charge of a portion of it at this present moment in time. Changing out the individual will not change the system, and thus will not actually alleviate pressure worldwide. Only changing the system can do that.

We have to seek truth from facts, not simply rely on our gut feelings. That’s why I took issue with your conspiracy theory to begin with, you are agreeing with whatever your bias leads you to believe. I’m aware that I’m biased, which is why I do my best to seek truth from facts, rather than rely on my gut.

Sealioning is a relentless badgering for evidence while maintaining a false adherance to civility. What I did was make an argument, that the problems of the US are systemic, rather than foreign-created.

Jumping to Taiwan, the KMT lost the civil war against the communists, and took over Taiwan, killing tens of thousands that resisted, and imprisoning over 140,000. The only reason the civil war did not result in total communist victory was the US blocking access to Taiwan, protecting the nationalist KMT while they slaughtered the indigenous population, and then the US began treating Taiwan as a military outpost to contain China. Critically, modern Taiwan sees what is happening in Ukraine, and is thawing relations with the mainland because they do not want to end up in the same position.

As for your absurd equation of the Nazis, who tried to bring European-style colonialism to Europe, with the USSR, who supported anti-colonial liberation movements around the globe, this is a form of Holocaust trivialization. US foreign policy has always been genocidal, from the vicious wars on indigenous populations to the brutal colonization of Hawaii and Cuba to the bestial wars on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, to the intense bombing around the world. The US is a genocidal empire, this is not new with Trump, but a continuation of genocidal policy since the inception of the US.

I’m a communist, I don’t support Trump, I oppose the entire genocidal system that he is merely a symptom of.

I never said Katie Zacharia was Chinese-born, I said she’s almost certainly not a Chinese spy, and that even if everyone born in China that was high up in the American gov and system was a spy, it still wouldn’t mean China was responsible for the problems with the US Empire. Those are systemic, and no, that isn’t an “America bad” argument. What it is, is an argument based on the inherent processes of settler-colonialism, capitalism, and the imperialist stage of capitalism.

Second, getting a job in China as a white person is not automatically a “White Monkey” job. You seem to be under the impression that China is infiltrating the US, but espionage is high-skill labor. Katie cannot both be highly unqualified and a Chinese spy, but your claims that she took a “White Monkey” job go directly against that.

Third, I did not say that China has no influence over the US. I said the problems of the US are not caused by China, but instead are due to, again, settler-colonialism, capitalism, and the imperialist stage of capitalism. Democracy is not being “eroded,” it never existed in the first place.

Finally, I am not sealioning you. I am arguing in good faith against your tabloid-level conspiracy theory that seems to be putting the blame of systemic failures on foreign infiltration, with nearly nothing to back it. At the slightest pushback, you immediately accuse me of being bad-faith or a sealion, it’s absurd.

I hate to break it to you but the reason the US Empire is so terrible isn’t because of an evil Chinese communist conspiracy, it’s because the US is a decaying capitalist empire thoroughly dominated by monopoly finance capital and big tech, and began its existence as a genocidal settler-colony (that it still is today). Even if every Chinese-born person in the government and higher up places in the US were all spies, they still would not be responsible for the fact that workers have never held power in the US, it was dominated by capital from the very outset.

These are just the necessary consequences of capitalism. Workers never had a choice in the system, we can only ever express our voice through collective action, like how the Civil Rights Movement was fought. This isn’t a new development, it’s a new stage in deterioration of the imperialist stage in capitalism. The solution is socialism, and the method to establish it is revolution. This has been clear for over a century.

You misunderstand, just because you can describe something does not mean that it’s a useful or accurate description. Debating the correctness and accuracy of how we define systems and structures is core to socioeconomic debate, because without definitions that accurately describe the world and its processes, we are left with fantasy. I explained why your definition was incorrect, and responded to these weaknesses. Nevertheless, I’ll address your points directly.

1. Moralism is not a base for scientific consensus. I already addressed the inherent failures of this form of argumentation. You even open yourself up for counter by saying “society getting more prosperous is a good thing,” when it is capitalism that is holding back common prosperity by funneling the wealth of society into the hands of a few. We must make our analysis based on materialism, on scientific fact, not the vague idea that stopping wage slavery is wrong because it requires force.

2. You are taking an incredibly eurocentric and chauvanist claim by saying “no modern economist believes in surplus value.” Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and many more economists vehemontly disagree with you. Some of the most respected economists on the world stage are Chinese, such as Cheng Enfu. At best, your point is purely ignorant, at worst it’s racist. In any case, management of capital is labor, but ownership itself does not create value. All new value comes from labor, be it managerial or not, and the portion of the day workers labor for means beyond their own wages is the surplus that forms the basis of profits.

3. This is, frankly, naive. The version of capitalism you advocate for is not a real thing, and does not exist. You are moving from the realm of fact to the realm of utopianism. Just because you are uncomfortable with the inevitable consequences of marketization and private property relations does not mean you get to hide by defining them away. It is a simple, proven fact that in the real world, when markets progress, they trend towards monopolization. When they reach the boundaries of the national scale, they seek new markets internationally, which allows them to leverage their advanced position to exploit developing countries. This is capitalism as it actually exists. Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism is a short article going over how this system came to be and evolved in the modern day.

4. China did not take on “capitalist reforms.” China marketized underdeveloped industries, as the material base of marketization is decentralized production. For industries of a national scale and critical importance, China maintains dominance and planned economy. This is Marxist economics. See Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide for a basic, entry-level explanation that requires no background in Marxist economics. China is a socialist economy, in the primary stage. The US is a capitalist economy as it is dominated by private capital even at the national and international scale. See the aforementioned Cheng Enfu’s handy diagram:

5. Mises is a clown that was disproven the second socialism began outperforming capitalist economies. The Soviet Union, despite being largely a siege economy, was again one of the most rapidly developing countries in history. Trying to attribute their successes to pilfering from the west is, again, chauvanist at worst and ignorant at best, and in any case would require an enormous level of proof on your part that you neglected to provide. Soviet economic planning avoided the crisis of overproduction and the crisis of profitability that shook the capitalist world, proving that they were independent from their problems. The economic calculation problem was invented by a clown, before the invention of computers. For an explanation, see Towards a New Socialism, which explains potential economic planning beyond price. You could even skip the book and just read Cockshott’s WordPress article on socialist computation.

Overall, I’m disappointed. You presented yourself as something of an expert, but you don’t even pretend to entertain essential functions of traditional debate like discussing definitions, you just take the definitions as a given. This is hardly taken seriously even by mainstream liberal economists.

(Side note on Cockshott, massive transphobe, unfortunately. His work on cybernetics is valuable, but his overall Marxist knowledge should be taken with heavy grains of salt due to his fundamentally incorrect understanding of dialectical materlaism).

As a communist, to me this just means that we need to continue educating the working class on a proper and aligned understanding. The biggest strength of the working class is our numbers, and the best way to utilize mass is with unity and direction.

Capitalism is a system where capital owners dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy, socialism is a system where workers dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy. Any confusion of welfare for socialism implies that systems where capitalists are the dominant force is still socialist if it gives welfare, but existing social democracies that follow this model depend on exploiting the global south to prop up this welfare while maintaining capitalist profits.

There’s a lot that’s fundamentally wrong with this comment, but I think I can hit the core pretty narrowly. You cannot disentangle capitalism from the state, the capitalist state is not outside of capitalism but is instead a core function of it. Corporatism and cronyism are not in opposition to capitalism, they are a later stage in capitalist development, as compared to earlier capitalism when markets are highly underdeveloped and instead very decentralized and anarchic.

You also have a deeply moralist analysis, not a materialist, logical analysis. There is nothing inherently good about private property rights, and justifying the theft of surplus value on the basis that it is already common practice and would require violence in the form of revolution to change it is a moralist argument. It is just as easy to say that the everyday violence of theft of surplus value is a violent attack on working people, who create all new value. We must make scientific, materialist arguments, not simply rely on emotional soundbites.

You also ignore imperialism as a function of capitalism as it develops. The expansionist nature of capitalism causes it to dominate developing countries, where a share of the spoils are used to uplift the imperial working class. This is why the poor often get richer in developed capitalist economies, not because capitalism lifts all, but because developed capitalist economies shift their greatest contradictions to the international scale.

When you move on to socialism, you are entirely wrong. For example, the marketization in China is found in their developing industries, where markets do play a progressive role. However, in their developed and critical industries, China uses central planning. This is because planned economies overtake marketization when production advances to the national and international scale. It isn’t a binary planned/market distinction that socialists advocate for, it’s instead looking at the level of development of the productive forces and using the correct method accordingly.

Monopolies are an inevitable result of capitalism, because as technology improves, it requires more input to maintain. We cannot simply break up monopoly without inefficiently destroying productive forces in the process. This is where cronyism and corporatism, as you describe it, come in. Socialism and planned economy solves these problems by using the developed productive forces according to scientific planning, which is far more efficient at this scale (and is why China is doing so much better than capitalist economies).

Even more totally planned economies like the USSR saw some of the most rapid economic growth on the planet. They did not introduce starvation, they took overwhelmingly backward societies and brought them at and beyond their peers in rapid time. Life expectancy doubled between Tsarism and socialism in a matter of decades. Famine, while common in Tsarist Russia, was eliminated by 1935 outside of wartime. GDP growth was extremely rapid, all without running into crisis of overproduction or falling profitability:

You write a lot about what you “oppose” about capitalism, but without a coherent understanding of the totality of the system, you are reduced to unactionable moral platitudes, rather than concrete actions that can be taken. You remove the state from the economy and pretend it can be made to work both in the interests of the people as a whole while also shrinking, despite the fact that capitalists prop up and dominate the state as a co-evolutionary process.

The solution is socialism. Planned economy for developed industry, marketization limited to developing industry, and as all industry develops, transition to full planning to a collective and scientific aim.

It starves many despite producing more than enough for everyone.

Socialism is not welfare, nor is capitalism any form of doing something in favor of a reward. Your metaphor, I feel, does a disservice to understanding each.

Yep! My biggest problem with it is that the language surrounding national minorities is… Dated… But beyond that, it’s an excellent look at the Soviet Union!

Yep, almost done reading this book too!

People confuse private with independence and state with dominance because they don’t see the state as a product and tool of class struggle.

I read works from Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Hudson, etc. Even if they aren’t strictly Marxist-Leninist, many progressives have good analysis that you can sharpen with your own understanding of dialectical materialism.

Communism isn’t really “different in practice,” people just confuse the socialist stage with the highly developed communist stage and judge past/present socialism against far-future communism.

Total state ownership isn’t oppression for most people, though, assuming it’s a worker-run state. It’s also a necessary step towards building a fully classless society.

Planned economy is better once highly developed productive forces are achieved, and history shows that planned economies dramatically expanded production as compared to what came before. Rather than underperforming, the USSR was one of the fastest growing economies on the planet during its existence, while never once facing a crisis of overproduction:

The DPRK also outperformed the ROK until the ROK was flooded with western investment, and this was further hampered by the dissolution of the USSR. Today, however, the DPRK is steadily progressing (largely based on increased arms sales, such as to the Russian Federation), while the ROK appears to be in crisis.

Markets serve a progressive role historically when they stitch together disconnected production into production on a national and international scale. However, once they reach the national level, they quickly lose any amount of progressive quality and immediately become an impediment to further progress. At this point, planned economy becomes far better. This isn’t a binary either, socialist countries like China leverage planned economy for their large firms and key industries, and marketize underdeveloped sectors.

Surplus value exploitation is not merely people “skimming.” Capitalist profits come from exploitation of labor, paying workers less than the actual value they create. Ownership does not create value, labor does. Further, the fact that the monopoly stage has been reached does not mean we can work backwards, with monopoly scale comes technologies and productive techniques that can only be employed by monopolies. This is why markets lose their progressive character to planned economy as monopolies form, as planned production can make much better use of the scale developed by markets.

As for the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, it leads to crisis of profitability and economic collapse. This is a key force behind what turns monopoly capitalism into its imperialist stage, as capitalists chase increased absolute profits through market expansion to fight this. If they can establish an absolute monopoly globally, they can then price fix as they please, accelerating enshittification.

Cooperatives are not the solution. They retain all of the core problems with capitalism, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, class distinctions, the inherent chaos of markets, the inability to be coherently planned, and all of the major issues with producing for exchange, rather than use. Socialism is the answer, collective ownership at a societal level, not at the level of individual cells.

The majority can become the ruling class, but it must do so by creating a state in its own class interest. A capitalist state isn’t a state that happens to govern capitalism, it’s a specific form of state that exists exclusively with capitalism. Likewise, socialist states are their own specific forms.

Scandinavian countries are imperialist today. They all depend on super-exploiting the global south, through mechanisms like neocolonialism and unequal exchange. Monopoly finance capital expands outwards and preys on the overexploited countries. Systems like the IMF and NATO help maintain this system of international plunder. The bulk of what people in Scandinavia consume does not come from the sweat of their own brows, but through the labor of global south workers.

If you want to disparage socialists for mindlessly raging against capitalism, then I suggest you actually listen to what we say, rather than completely ignore core concepts like unequal exchange.