Both. The state is a necessary product of class struggle, and exists until class struggle is negated.

As long as class struggle exists, there will exist a state that serves as the monopoly on violence in the hands of a given class. If the proletariat does not take hold of the bourgeois state, smash it, and replace it with a proletarian one, then the bourgeois state will prevent the establishment of socialism. Either the proletariat is subjugated by the bourgeoisie, or the bourgeoisie is subjugated by the proletariat. The purpose of maintaining a monopoly on violence over the bourgeoisie is so that you can gradually collectivize production and distribution, negating the proletariat and bourgeoisie as classes.

This is still a state, though. Existing socialist states are run by the many, and rooted in the will of the people. Further, your example assumes 100% alignment, and the second one goes against the grain it is de jure dissolved, but de facto has no actual mechanism for doing so.

China has been socialist since 1949. Public ownership has been the principle aspect of their economy since then, as well as fact that the working classes control the state.

I disagree with the notion that people haven’t spent a ton of time thinking of alternative structures. This, however, is ultimately quite similar to utopianism. I fail to see how you can end class struggle without going through a period where the proletariat dominates the bourgeoisie, unless you mean to change the name of this structure from a state without changing the structure itself. How does the proletariat dominate the bourgeoisie while both exist, without a state?

To clarify, I’m an anarchist. I don’t think the state should exist, period, and I think it’s self-defeating to try to impose communism via the state.

Communism can only be established via the state. You cannot go from capitalism straight to a fully collectivized system of production and distribution, class struggle does not disappear overnight. Anarchists tend to propose something entirely different, something more communalist in nature, but this is not the same as communism from a Marxist perspective.

But more to the point, my original comment was in response to your analysis of OP’s questioning of China’s alleged human rights abuses. I was interested in your dialectical thinking because I hadn’t seen it applied so clearly before and I wanted to use it as a learning opportunity. I’m coming away feeling more educated, which I’m grateful for. But I’m also not convinced your analysis allays worries about potential abuses mentioned in the OP, and I wanted to say as much.

Understood.

So ultimately, I’m not really arguing for anything specific, mainly because I don’t pretend to have concrete answers. If anything, I’m arguing for greater political imagination. Liberal democracy is obviously not the answer, but I’m not convinced an authoritarian socialist state is either. So how could we build on the works of Marx and other communist thinkers to come up with a way to implement communism that avoids the pitfalls you yourself have admitted are potential problems with a communist-party-controlled state?

I want to clarify something: contradictions are not avoidable. All change proceeds through a resolution of contradictions. It is not feasible to totally avoid any and all problems encountered in the building of socialism and communism in real life. As I said earlier, class struggle itself continues into socialism. The process of building communism itself is a gradual, protracted process of resolving contradictions.

If you have a proposed alternative to existing socialist democracy, then we can discuss that, but you will not be able to avoid the problem of class struggle.

The important factor is that the driver of revolution is the revolutionary class, and in the US Empire that will be the working classes, along with resolving the question of settler-colonialism. Decolonization and socialism are both necessities, driven by imperialist decay.

Ultimately, what the US Empire needs is revolution. The west isn’t doing what it’s doing out of a lack of intelligence, but instead a rational following of a fundamentally unsustainable economic system. Capital is what drives the Empire.

Gotcha! I’ll try to respond to your comment here.

I do feel like you’re missing how a one-party socialist state is still inherently an instance of unjustified power, even if it’s “self-correcting” like China seems to be. Institutional power gives default material, ideological, and epistemological authority to whoever occupies that institution.

Minor technical correction, the PRC has 8 political parties in addition to the CPC that collaborate and advise the CPC in special interest areas. More to the point, however, the idea that a multi-party system is necessary for socialism is born from liberal conceptions of democracy. The PRC is a socialist economy, run collaboratively. The state in any given society is representative of a single class above all else, and in the PRC that class is the proletariat. Liberal democracy that focuses on competition over collaboration is poor at achieving long-term progress, while not adding democracy.

That authority can be good if it’s truly the will of the proletariat, but the paradox is that because there is default authority given to certain ways of thinking about the world, the peoples’ ability to know whether it is indeed the will of the proletariat is distorted. If, for example, party leadership were to come out and say “accumulation of capital is compatible with socialism, actually”, then even though there would be mechanisms for people to come in and be like “no the fuck it isn’t”, because party leadership occupies a platform of default authority, their statement would be taken as true until challenged otherwise. That is unjustified power.

It’s possible thst revisionism and liberalism can infect communist parties, but the possibility of this does not translate to them being unjustifiable, which is more of a moral argument than a materialist one.

Epistemologically the only thing we can be sure of with any authoritarian socialist state is that (a) the party occupying the institutional power structure is claiming to represent the will of the proletariat, and (b) there are mechanisms for people to “correct” the institution to better represent the proletariat.

All states are authoritarian, in that all states are mechanisms by which one class wields a monopoly on violence to forward their own class interests. The idea that there is a “non-authoritarian state” is itself flawed. Either way, the PRC’s electoral structure has room for recall elections, and candidates are elected locally and ladder upward indirectly. There is thus a connection from the top to the bottom.

Neither of these things are enough to justify the general default authority given to an authoritarian state, imo. Power needs to always be exercised from a place of epistemological humility and with the understanding that you or your organization could very well not be fit to wield it. Institutional power structures are fundamentally just not compatible with this.

I’m not sure what you’re actually arguing for. A multiparty, liberal form of democracy? That isn’t what the people of China want. Mechanisms for overturning communist rule? Historically very easy to take advantage of by foreign powers. The CPC maintains direct connection to the people via the Mass Line, and conducts constant polling.

I understand how the PRC is playing the west, but this is a good thing for China, and a sign of socialism. Air pollution is going down dramatically as they invest in solar and nuclear, the working classes have seen steady large real wage increases, and the west hollowed out their own industry to their own detriment.

Which part of QinShiHuangsSchlong’s comment was misinformation? Can you articulate how and why? Further, the war started as a consequence of Donetsk and Luhansk seceding from Kiev into the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, following the far-right western-backed coup of Yanukovych. Once the Banderites took power and started oppressing ethnic Russians, the DPR and LPR seceded.

Are you saying the PRC isn’t socialist because it allows foreign investment in secondary and small-medium industries? These international investment deals are done for knowledge and technology transfer, as well as to expedite development of underdeveloped industry. The basis of socialized production is in large-scale, mass industry, so socializing production through market mechanisms is done in a controlled manner, where the CPC gradually folds these industries into the public sector as they grow.

Public ownership usually works better with higher levels of development, private at lower levels. Keeping the large firms and key industries in the public sector while allowing private capital in a controlled manner to help develop the productive forces is the secret to the PRC’s skyrocketing development. This development is why they have far surpassed the west in production of solar, high speed rail, infrastructural development, poverty alleviation, etc, without this form of economy they would not be as developed as they are today.

Cool, I don’t see how that applies here. I’m plenty critical of China for valid reasons, such as their presently poor LGBTQIA+ legislation (though it has been gradually improving) or their backing of Cambodia over Vietnam back during the time of Pol Pot. Your “criticisms,” more often than not, aren’t logically justified.

China owns a factory in Israel, sure. Is your argument that they are imperializing Israeli proletarians? Is it imperialist to own factories in other countries, regardless of the nature of the relations themselves? I can absolutely accept valid criticism of the PRC, you’ll notice I’m not really pushing back against those disappointed with how long China is taking to sever economic ties with Israel. However, critique doesn’t have merit purely for existing.

Not sure what you mean by “jeopardizing that paycheck,” if you’re insinuating I get paid to be a communist then I can only say that I wish that were the case. Instead, I pay dues out of my own actual paycheck from the job I work.

The reason I bring up communalism, the more anarchist-adjacent forms of organization, is because they aren’t really the same as what people talking about Marxist communism are. Tribal formations and communes are localized, based on self-sufficient and small-scale production and distribution.

Communism, in the Marxist sense, can be seen more as the stitching together of all humanity into one unified system, with mass production and distribution scientifically organized and planned to meet everyone’s needs. This isn’t really a moral judgement about either, but the understanding that when someone says “communism is authoritarian,” they are referring to the Marxist conception, which is qualitatively different from the anarchist.

But even assuming that state power of some degree is required, there is a lot of room for debate about how much. Original commenter seemed concerned about authoritarianism, I assume that their understanding of communism is Stalin’s USSR. There are certainly ways to be auth/com without going that far, and that commenter may find those appealing.

This is a much more interesting argument, in my opinion, because it requires answering what it means to wield authority.

In Marxist analysis, the state is within the class struggle, and exists precisely to represent a definite class. Thus, authority lies within the hands of a definite class in any given state, that class being the one with political and economic control.

What determines the extent to which authority is wielded?

It can seem pretty obvious that it’s the decision of the government to act in this or that matter when dealing with different problems faced by society. However, this is looking at the effect, not the cause. The cause of wielding authority is the class struggle, which has necessary material struggles. In other words, the extent to which authority is employed is not simply a choice by the state, but a reaction to the conditions one finds themselves in.

Take Germany, for example. The rise of the Nazi party was an explicit reaction to ongoing labor organizing, capitalist decay, and a crisis in economy due to the inter-war debts. However, Germany of today has had less of a need to exert authority, so it hasn’t. This is changing, though, as pro-Palestinian protestors are beaten, and the far-right is rising due to intense economic crisis and the downfall of imperialism as a means to inflate the economy.

The same applies to the USSR. The system of the soviet union was fundamentally democratic. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

What happened wasn’t a crisis in structure, but a reaction to existing heightened class struggle and siege from imperialists. Fascists and tsarists, kulaks and capitalists, all manner of those opposed to socialism remained in the USSR long after its inception. Revolution does not immediately abolish them, no matter how democratic or egalitarian your new society is, because the older ruling classes lose in socialism. Class struggle continues under socialism.

That’s why my question is simple: what could the USSR have done to be “less authoritarian?” That isn’t to say that the soviet union never made mistakes or errors, or was structurally perfect, but instead to ask about the nature of authority itself, and why it’s applied more or less in different conditions. Is it as simple as a choice made by the state? Or is it deeper than that, a result of dialectical contradictions working themselves out?

Are you saying the PRC isn’t socialist because it trades with other countries? Or are you equating trade with the sheer plunder committed by the west towards the global south?

Not unless you’re the PRC, Vietnam, etc, which regularly execute or imprison capitalists.

Your argument is still idealist, not materialist, and thus relies on supernatural explanation. Appealing to the idea of a universal human spirit that trends towards imperialism and increasing power is a supernatural explanation for why imperialism exists, and why power structures are formed. Same with the idea thay any “unchecked” ideology will “assert itself unilaterally,” which itself could be a good thing!

Imperialism is caused by capitalist expansion, capital expands outward and seeks foreign markets to plunder in order to fight the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This isn’t because of “human nature” or any other vague and supernatural explanation, but because of material processes of economics.

If your arguments are restrained to the realm of the supernatural, we can’t take them seriously.

Correct, there have been thousands of deaths, not the fantastical numbers in the 10s of thousands reported by Hasbara accounts and western media, and not the result of the IRGC one-sidedly slaughtering people en masse but intense riots and turmoil. Exaggerating tragedies and changing the nature of real events is exactly how western atrocity propaganda functions.

Military excursions in the name of ideology, particularly when they are done by a superpower, very quickly become imperialism.

Connect this. How is a country materially supporting anti-fascism and anti-imperialism a road to imperialism? Tie it directly to Marxism-Leninism in particular. Focusing on vague generalities while ignoring specifics that are inconvenient to your argument is poor logic.

Thinking China is immune to that is immensely naive.

Why? Connect the argument, address the claims directly.