Europe has convinced itself that Russia and China are existential threats to the EU, largely due to the EU’s status as vassals in the US Empire. The US Empire has been demoting the EU from vassal to periphery, though, so now they are caught between increasing tensions with the US Empire and their own historical hatred of Russia and China.
Starmer’s visit to Beijing makes it seem fairly clear that the European bourgeoisie at least wishes to normalize more with the PRC.
it’s my latest. thanks for the link! i’ve knocked out most of the prominent marx / engel writing though i want to “finish” capital, and start “the 18th…”
i tend also to read anarchistic theory too. since at least right now that clicks in my brain more too. :)
Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy in the PRC, and the working classes control the state. For example, when looking at publicly owned industries, we can see the following:
Even checking Wikipedia, data from 2022 shows that the overwhelming majority of the top companies are publicly owned SOEs. This is China’s strategy, they’ve been honest about it from the beginning. The private sector is about half cooperatives like Huawei or farming cooperarives and sole proprietorships, with the other half being small and medium firms. As these grow, they are folded into the public sector gradually. This is China’s Socialist Market Economy.
As for the state being run by the working classes, this is also pretty straightforward. Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the CPC, a working class party, dominates the state. At a democratic level, local elections are direct, while higher levels are elected by lower rungs. At the top, constant opinion gathering and polling occurs, gathering public opinion, driving gradual change. This system is better elaborated on in Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, and we can see the class breakdown of the top of the government itself:
me when I do liberal reductionism and don’t understand anything Lenin, Chairman Mao or Stalin wrote.
Edit:
To more properly explain.
You rely on a crude, ahistorical definition of socialism and treats China as a static abstraction rather than a real society developing under concrete material conditions. You reduce Marxism to a legal-form checklist and ignores class power, historical development, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a fundamental error.
In Marxism, “who owns the means of production” is not a question of paper titles but of class rule. Ownership only matters insofar as it expresses which class holds political power, controls surplus, and sets the direction of development. Defining socialism as the immediate abolition of all private enterprise is not Marxism; it is utopian liberal nonsense.
Lenin addressed this explicitly. Under proletarian rule, state capitalism is a socialist tool. His formulation is unambiguous: state capitalism under a dictatorship of the proletariat is not capitalism in the bourgeois sense but a form subordinated to socialist power and goals. The decisive issue is not whether markets or private firms exist, but which class commands them.
In China, the commanding heights of the economy are publicly owned and planned: land (state-owned in cities, collectively owned in the countryside), finance, energy, heavy industry, transport, telecommunications, arms production, and strategic resources. These sectors form the backbone of the economy. Private capital exists, but it does not dominate accumulation or political power.
The Chinese bourgeoisie does not rule. It has no independent state power and no ability to capture the party. Capitalists are subordinate to the Communist Party and can be regulated, expropriated, imprisoned, or eliminated when they conflict with socialist objectives. Recent crackdowns on tech monopolies, finance, real estate speculation, and billionaire figures demonstrate this class relation. In capitalist states, capital disciplines the state. In China, the state disciplines capital.
Surplus extraction and allocation further expose the difference. Under capitalism, surplus is privately appropriated and reinvested for profit. In China, surplus (especially from state and regulated sectors) is redirected toward long-term national development: infrastructure, industrial upgrading, poverty eradication, and technological independence. The largest poverty reduction in human history did not occur through laissez-faire capitalism, but through state-directed socialist accumulation (nearly a billion people lifted from poverty).
Chairman Mao was also clear that socialism is not a finished endpoint but a long historical process filled with contradictions. He emphasized that class struggle continues under socialism and that development occurs through uneven, conflicting processes. Socialism is transitional by definition: it emerges from capitalism, contains remnants of it, and advances toward communism through struggle and transformation. Treating socialism as a stable, contradiction-free end state is anti-Marxist.
Calling China “authoritarian capitalism” is ridiculous. I’ve already dealt with the “capitalism” issue but also authoritarian is a useless modifier used by liberals to easily bundle together countries that opposed the status quo as evil and immoral. Try reading On Authority
“Everything else follows from there” is exactly wrong. Everything follows from class power, historical conditions, and the direction of development. Your reductionist liberal framework cannot explain why China plans five-year strategies, suppresses finance capital, controls land, resists imperialism, and openly declares socialism as its goal. Marxism can however.
The mental gymnastics you need to go trough trying to defend why being capitalistic is basically anticapitalist when the ruling party has “communist” in their name is telling.
No? You’re trying to say that an economy where public ownership is clearly the principle aspect is actually one where private ownership is principle, and are pretending materialist arguments about the structute of socialism are about what a party is named. Just respond to the actual comment, don’t insult yourself by hiding behind a strawman.
There are indeed communists here, that have been able to debunk the user you’re replying to. Simply calling unsourced claims “stating the obvious” in the face of hard facts and statistics is illogical to the extreme.
A tankie is when people point out you don’t understand what you’re talking about and are just regurgitating talking points and it makes you feel bad.
Come to China I can give you a tour I can translate so you can talk to the locals and you can see we’re humans too not just some brainwashed peasant “untermensch”. You chauvinist loser.
When did I say chinese people arent people? Are you replying to the wrong comment? You sound like you are 14 with your reading skills and going straight to calling me a loser lol.
You are a loser. You don’t view us as independent people who have our own views on our country. You ignore the fact that even western outlets report over 80% of us support the government. But none of that matters to you because we’re just peasants brainwashed by the evil “authoritarians”.
QinShiHuangsShlong was clearly explaining how you are utterly mistaken about China. When Chinese tell you that public ownership is principle (ie controls the commanding heights), that the working classes run the state, and an overwhelming number support the CPC, your response is that it’s “stating the obvious” to say otherwise. This stems from a sheer distrust of the words of Chinese people, and is why your comment is chauvanist.
They said I dont see Chinese people as people instead of focusing on the ‘stating the obvious’ part. They literally came up with something I never said to support their point.
You are defending and agreeing with someone calling China evil and authoritarian capitalist. He is wrong and so are you. No amount of dodging or hiding behind semantics will change the position you chose to defend and that you clearly chose to defend it for chauvinist reasons.
They try to keep a low profile globally, but they fully support Russia and North Korea. Not to mention, all the drama in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the surrounding seas.
The Russian Federation and DPRK are better than the west, though, as neither is plundering the global south. As for Hong Kong, it’s good that they are no longer colonized by the UK, and the PRC’s stance on Taiwan is that they will rejoin the PRC when they decide, and can wait it out.
The DPRK is a socialist country, that more than any other has been the subject of constant misinformation and mythologizing in the west. It’s the single most misunderstood state on the planet. No, it isn’t some utopia, but it instead is a real country with real people living their lives. It isn’t Mordor.
The Black Panther Party famously supported the DPRK, as do many African countries for the DPRK’s role in African liberation movements in the 20th century. Cuba maintains friendly ties. More than anything, it’s been mythologized about to the point of absurdity.
The problem with reporting on the DPRK is that information is extremely limited on what is actually going on there, at least in the English language (much can be read in Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and even Spanish). Most reports come from defectors, and said defectors are notoriously dubious in their accounts, something the WikiPedia page on Media Coverage of North Korea spells out quite clearly. These defectors are also held in confined cells for around 6 months before being released to the public in the ROK, in… unkind conditions, and pressured into divulging information. Additionally, defectors are paid for giving testemonials, and these testimonials are paid more the more severe they are. From the Wiki page:
Felix Abt, a Swiss businessman who lived in the DPRK, argues that defectors are inherently biased. He says that 70 percent of defectors in South Korea are unemployed, and selling sensationalist stories is a way for them to make a living.
Side note: there is a great documentary on the treatment of DPRK defectors titled Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, which interviews DPRK defectors and laywers legally defending them, if you’re curious. I also recommend My Brothers and Sisters in the North, a documentary made by a journalist from the Republic of Korea that was stripped of her citizenship for making this documentary humanizing the people in the DPRK.
In fact, the report is a propaganda piece likely geared at shoring up the rule of Kim Jong Eun, North Korea’s young and relatively new leader, said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Most likely, North Koreans don’t take the report literally, Lee told LiveScience.
“It’s more symbolic,” Lee said, adding, “My take is North Koreans don’t believe all of that, but they bring certain symbolic value to celebrating your own identify, maybe even notions of cultural exceptionalism and superiority. It boosts morale.”
Sadly, some people end up using outlandish media stories as an “acceptable outlet” for racism. By accepting uncritically narratives about “barbaric Koreans” pushing trains, eating rats, etc, it serves as a “get out of jail free” card for racists to freely agree with narratives devoid of real evidence.
It’s important to recognize that a large part of why the DPRK appears to be insular is because of UN-imposed sanctions, helmed by the US Empire. It is difficult to get accurate information on the DPRK, but not impossible; Russia, China, and Cuba all have frequent interactions and student exchanges, trade such as in the Rason special economic zone, etc, and there are videos released onto the broader internet from this.
Finally, it’s more unlikely than ever that the DPRK will collapse. The economy was estimated by the Bank of Korea (an ROK bank) to have grown by 3.7% in 2024, thanks to increased trade with Russia. The harshest period for the DPRK, the Arduous March, was in the 90s, and the government did not collapse then. That was the era of mass statvation thanks to the dissolution of the USSR and horrible weather disaster that made the already difficult agricultural climate of northern Korea even worse. Nowadays food is far more stable and the economy is growing, collapse is highly unlikely.
What I think is more likely is that these trends will continue. As the US Empire’s influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information and helping grow their economy, perhaps even enabling some form of reunification with the ROK. The US Empire leaving the peninsula is the number 1 most important task for reunification, so this is increasingly likely as the US Empire becomes untenable.
That “drama” in Hong Kong is the result of 100 years of British colonial occupation. North Korea is the result of the US bombing the entire country until there were literally no structures left. Koreans in the North needed to live in caves to avoid being covered in napalm (and if you haven’t read about how napalm interacts with human flesh, please do).
China is not the bad guy in these situations. Britain, the US, France, Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany - these are the bad guys.
why is china the bad guy?
Social and political misalignment I think. Being wary of anyone “bigger than you” is a common defensive stand too.
Europe has convinced itself that Russia and China are existential threats to the EU, largely due to the EU’s status as vassals in the US Empire. The US Empire has been demoting the EU from vassal to periphery, though, so now they are caught between increasing tensions with the US Empire and their own historical hatred of Russia and China.
Starmer’s visit to Beijing makes it seem fairly clear that the European bourgeoisie at least wishes to normalize more with the PRC.
unrelated: just finished “state and revolution.” liked it a lot, was able to let it sink in. thoughts on next?!
That’s great! Consider checking out the Marxist-Leninist reading list I made! State and Rev is fantastic, but is that your first work of Marxist theory, or just the latest? What are you interested in?
it’s my latest. thanks for the link! i’ve knocked out most of the prominent marx / engel writing though i want to “finish” capital, and start “the 18th…”
i tend also to read anarchistic theory too. since at least right now that clicks in my brain more too. :)
thanks again!
No problem!
i concur. i feel like the op meme is just slop. not ai just … bog standard slop.
Yep, we’ll see soon how the tides change.
Authoritarian capitalistic state?
For all the tankies disagreeing simply ask yourself two questions:
Who owns the means of production in a socialist society?
Who owns the means of production in China?
Everything else follows from there
Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy in the PRC, and the working classes control the state. For example, when looking at publicly owned industries, we can see the following:
Even checking Wikipedia, data from 2022 shows that the overwhelming majority of the top companies are publicly owned SOEs. This is China’s strategy, they’ve been honest about it from the beginning. The private sector is about half cooperatives like Huawei or farming cooperarives and sole proprietorships, with the other half being small and medium firms. As these grow, they are folded into the public sector gradually. This is China’s Socialist Market Economy.
As for the state being run by the working classes, this is also pretty straightforward. Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the CPC, a working class party, dominates the state. At a democratic level, local elections are direct, while higher levels are elected by lower rungs. At the top, constant opinion gathering and polling occurs, gathering public opinion, driving gradual change. This system is better elaborated on in Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, and we can see the class breakdown of the top of the government itself:
Overall, this system has resulted in over 90% of the population approving the government, which is shown to be consistent and accurate. If you want to learn more, while not nearly as in-depth due to time limits as Roland Boer’s work (and mostly focused on the Xi Jinping era), Red Pen’s A Summary of Xi Jinping’s Governance of China can be a good primer! There’s also This is how China’s economic model works: Explaining Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Geopolitical Economy Report.
Edit: To more properly explain.
You rely on a crude, ahistorical definition of socialism and treats China as a static abstraction rather than a real society developing under concrete material conditions. You reduce Marxism to a legal-form checklist and ignores class power, historical development, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a fundamental error.
In Marxism, “who owns the means of production” is not a question of paper titles but of class rule. Ownership only matters insofar as it expresses which class holds political power, controls surplus, and sets the direction of development. Defining socialism as the immediate abolition of all private enterprise is not Marxism; it is utopian liberal nonsense.
Lenin addressed this explicitly. Under proletarian rule, state capitalism is a socialist tool. His formulation is unambiguous: state capitalism under a dictatorship of the proletariat is not capitalism in the bourgeois sense but a form subordinated to socialist power and goals. The decisive issue is not whether markets or private firms exist, but which class commands them.
In China, the commanding heights of the economy are publicly owned and planned: land (state-owned in cities, collectively owned in the countryside), finance, energy, heavy industry, transport, telecommunications, arms production, and strategic resources. These sectors form the backbone of the economy. Private capital exists, but it does not dominate accumulation or political power.
The Chinese bourgeoisie does not rule. It has no independent state power and no ability to capture the party. Capitalists are subordinate to the Communist Party and can be regulated, expropriated, imprisoned, or eliminated when they conflict with socialist objectives. Recent crackdowns on tech monopolies, finance, real estate speculation, and billionaire figures demonstrate this class relation. In capitalist states, capital disciplines the state. In China, the state disciplines capital.
Surplus extraction and allocation further expose the difference. Under capitalism, surplus is privately appropriated and reinvested for profit. In China, surplus (especially from state and regulated sectors) is redirected toward long-term national development: infrastructure, industrial upgrading, poverty eradication, and technological independence. The largest poverty reduction in human history did not occur through laissez-faire capitalism, but through state-directed socialist accumulation (nearly a billion people lifted from poverty).
Chairman Mao was also clear that socialism is not a finished endpoint but a long historical process filled with contradictions. He emphasized that class struggle continues under socialism and that development occurs through uneven, conflicting processes. Socialism is transitional by definition: it emerges from capitalism, contains remnants of it, and advances toward communism through struggle and transformation. Treating socialism as a stable, contradiction-free end state is anti-Marxist.
Calling China “authoritarian capitalism” is ridiculous. I’ve already dealt with the “capitalism” issue but also authoritarian is a useless modifier used by liberals to easily bundle together countries that opposed the status quo as evil and immoral. Try reading On Authority
“Everything else follows from there” is exactly wrong. Everything follows from class power, historical conditions, and the direction of development. Your reductionist liberal framework cannot explain why China plans five-year strategies, suppresses finance capital, controls land, resists imperialism, and openly declares socialism as its goal. Marxism can however.
The mental gymnastics you need to go trough trying to defend why being capitalistic is basically anticapitalist when the ruling party has “communist” in their name is telling.
The German brainpan not able to comprehending a popular socialist government
No? You’re trying to say that an economy where public ownership is clearly the principle aspect is actually one where private ownership is principle, and are pretending materialist arguments about the structute of socialism are about what a party is named. Just respond to the actual comment, don’t insult yourself by hiding behind a strawman.
You didn’t read anything I wrote. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Please read a book.
The people, the people.
Good luck trying to state the obvious here, lots of tankies on lemmy.ml (as you can see from the other replies)
There are indeed communists here, that have been able to debunk the user you’re replying to. Simply calling unsourced claims “stating the obvious” in the face of hard facts and statistics is illogical to the extreme.
Come to China I can give you a tour I can translate so you can talk to the locals and you can see we’re humans too not just some brainwashed peasant “untermensch”. You chauvinist loser.
When did I say chinese people arent people? Are you replying to the wrong comment? You sound like you are 14 with your reading skills and going straight to calling me a loser lol.
You are a loser. You don’t view us as independent people who have our own views on our country. You ignore the fact that even western outlets report over 80% of us support the government. But none of that matters to you because we’re just peasants brainwashed by the evil “authoritarians”.
Does lemmy.ml include entirety of China? Because I was only talking about lemmy.ml. Again, you sure you replied to the right comment?
QinShiHuangsShlong was clearly explaining how you are utterly mistaken about China. When Chinese tell you that public ownership is principle (ie controls the commanding heights), that the working classes run the state, and an overwhelming number support the CPC, your response is that it’s “stating the obvious” to say otherwise. This stems from a sheer distrust of the words of Chinese people, and is why your comment is chauvanist.
They said I dont see Chinese people as people instead of focusing on the ‘stating the obvious’ part. They literally came up with something I never said to support their point.
You are defending and agreeing with someone calling China evil and authoritarian capitalist. He is wrong and so are you. No amount of dodging or hiding behind semantics will change the position you chose to defend and that you clearly chose to defend it for chauvinist reasons.
You said I didnt see Chinese people as people, which I never said ever. Are you gonna retract that? Cause you are still wrong.
They try to keep a low profile globally, but they fully support Russia and North Korea. Not to mention, all the drama in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the surrounding seas.
Good.
You 白左 really hate the liberation of your owners colonial holdings and fascist attack dogs.
Unrelated, but I wanted to say you’ve got fantastic english skills
Also, if I was to visit China, do you have any recommendations on where to visit?
The Russian Federation and DPRK are better than the west, though, as neither is plundering the global south. As for Hong Kong, it’s good that they are no longer colonized by the UK, and the PRC’s stance on Taiwan is that they will rejoin the PRC when they decide, and can wait it out.
The DPRK is a socialist country, that more than any other has been the subject of constant misinformation and mythologizing in the west. It’s the single most misunderstood state on the planet. No, it isn’t some utopia, but it instead is a real country with real people living their lives. It isn’t Mordor.
The Black Panther Party famously supported the DPRK, as do many African countries for the DPRK’s role in African liberation movements in the 20th century. Cuba maintains friendly ties. More than anything, it’s been mythologized about to the point of absurdity.
The problem with reporting on the DPRK is that information is extremely limited on what is actually going on there, at least in the English language (much can be read in Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and even Spanish). Most reports come from defectors, and said defectors are notoriously dubious in their accounts, something the WikiPedia page on Media Coverage of North Korea spells out quite clearly. These defectors are also held in confined cells for around 6 months before being released to the public in the ROK, in… unkind conditions, and pressured into divulging information. Additionally, defectors are paid for giving testemonials, and these testimonials are paid more the more severe they are. From the Wiki page:
Side note: there is a great documentary on the treatment of DPRK defectors titled Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, which interviews DPRK defectors and laywers legally defending them, if you’re curious. I also recommend My Brothers and Sisters in the North, a documentary made by a journalist from the Republic of Korea that was stripped of her citizenship for making this documentary humanizing the people in the DPRK.
Because of these issues, there is a long history of what we consider legitimate news sources of reporting and then walking back stories. Even the famous “120 dogs” execution ended up to have been a fabrication originating in a Chinese satirical column, reported entirely seriously and later walked back by some news outlets. The famous “unicorn lair” story ended up being a misunderstanding:
These aren’t tabloids, these are mainstream news sources. NBC News reported the 120 dogs story. Same with USA Today. The frequently reported concept of “state-mandated haircut styles”, as an example, also ended up being bogus sensationalism. People have made entire videos going over this long-running sensationalist misinformation, why it exists, and debunking some of the more absurd articles. As for Radio Free Asia, it is US-government founded and funded. There is good reason to be skeptical of reports sourced entirely from RFA about geopolitical enemies of the US Empire.
Sadly, some people end up using outlandish media stories as an “acceptable outlet” for racism. By accepting uncritically narratives about “barbaric Koreans” pushing trains, eating rats, etc, it serves as a “get out of jail free” card for racists to freely agree with narratives devoid of real evidence.
It’s important to recognize that a large part of why the DPRK appears to be insular is because of UN-imposed sanctions, helmed by the US Empire. It is difficult to get accurate information on the DPRK, but not impossible; Russia, China, and Cuba all have frequent interactions and student exchanges, trade such as in the Rason special economic zone, etc, and there are videos released onto the broader internet from this.
In fact, many citizens who flee the DPRK actually seek to return, and are denied by the ROK. Even BBC is reporting on a high-profile case where a 95 year old veteran wishes to be buried in his homeland, sparking protests by pro-reunification activists in the ROK to help him go home in his final years.
Finally, it’s more unlikely than ever that the DPRK will collapse. The economy was estimated by the Bank of Korea (an ROK bank) to have grown by 3.7% in 2024, thanks to increased trade with Russia. The harshest period for the DPRK, the Arduous March, was in the 90s, and the government did not collapse then. That was the era of mass statvation thanks to the dissolution of the USSR and horrible weather disaster that made the already difficult agricultural climate of northern Korea even worse. Nowadays food is far more stable and the economy is growing, collapse is highly unlikely.
What I think is more likely is that these trends will continue. As the US Empire’s influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information and helping grow their economy, perhaps even enabling some form of reunification with the ROK. The US Empire leaving the peninsula is the number 1 most important task for reunification, so this is increasingly likely as the US Empire becomes untenable.
Nodutdol, an anti-imperialist group of Korean expats, released a toolkit on better understanding the situation in Korea. This is more like homework, though. I also recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance for learning about the DPRK’s democratic structure.
That “drama” in Hong Kong is the result of 100 years of British colonial occupation. North Korea is the result of the US bombing the entire country until there were literally no structures left. Koreans in the North needed to live in caves to avoid being covered in napalm (and if you haven’t read about how napalm interacts with human flesh, please do).
China is not the bad guy in these situations. Britain, the US, France, Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany - these are the bad guys.