It’s like China is just that one country (aside from the Khmer Rouge) that every ML (aside from Dengists like us) agrees to hate on.
Fellow Traveler and leftypol uploaded videos criticizing them, the Shining Path hung up literal dogs to protest them, Maoists go all insane saying that it’s some red fash social-imperialist nation because (insert nato propaganda here). And Hoxhaists claim that China was never socialist and that the only socialist nation ever was USSR before Khrushchev and almighty holy Albania.
What is it that makes China so controversial even among MLs? I get that it’s not perfect and every AES state has their Ls, but jesus.
A lot of it is the western left’s fetish for defeat, as Jones Manoel pointed out in that great article, and which Losurdo is really good at highlighting.
Another part is western chauvinism, that communist expertise must come from those in western europe or the US (who’ve never had any victories and so are talking out of turn), and that eastern communists / (insert whatever racialized term like hordes here) can’t comprehend and apply Marxism.
Anarchists are the biggest offenders for both of those.
Another big part is the short-term mindset that’s unable to see the bargain (ie the tradeoff of temporary low wage exploitation for long-term technology and expertise) , for what it really is: a long-term strategy to end colonialism, transfer control of production out of the hands of western capital, and a way out of the low-wage trap every global south nation is suffering under.
The Long Game and Its Contradictions is probably the best introduction to SWCC, and outlines what this strategy entails.
A lot of people have a fairly superficial understanding of ML theory, so they see China having capitalism as a betrayal of the core principles. Effectively this shows lack of class analysis on their part. My reply to this point is that if China allowing a limited form of capitalism makes it capitalist, then Canada must be communist because we have some social services like free healthcare. It’s an absurd line of argument to make, yet it’s the level of understanding a lot of people are stuck at.
Once people internalize the idea that China is communist only nominally, then other stuff easily builds on top of that. For example, the atrocity propaganda becomes easy to swallow because obviously capitalists would exploit minorities, we see them do it in our own countries and everywhere around the globe.
I suspect another big aspect is chauvinism. People just don’t want to accept that China managed to succeed where their society failed. It’s much more comfortable to believe that China is just a different branding of the same system they live under. Acknowledging that China is a successful socialist society run by a principled Communist party means also having to grapple with the failure of western left.
Gotta be honest, I was one of those MLs before the pandemic.
Seeing China take COVID seriously while every other capitalist nation left us to die really drove the lesson home, and now I understand that politics are still in command despite the apparent liberalization of the economy. Using capitalist development and investment (i.e. getting the capitalists to sell us the rope) is extremely dangerous but it seems China has somehow made it work despite all my doubts. I was wrong.
you might like this essay
What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]
This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.
from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
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