So I’ve been putting off writing this for a long time and it’ll probably need to be a series, but I’ve had a difficult time answering challenges from my friends who assert that China is either a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie or of the Bureaucracy (i.e. state capitalists), and that it’s a competing imperialist power along with America (and they also say Russia but I can answer that one being stupid on my own).
The problem with China Discourse is that there is a serious paucity of sources dealing with nuanced critiques rather than just “debt trap!” bullshit or whatever, since the objections of liberals and the objections of smarter ultras are very different. At the very least, the sources dealing with this Discourse are less accessible to me.
But now I’m extremely bored and also recently saw Comrade Queermmunist’s excellent rebuttal against the claim of China doing imperialism in the DRC, which gave me some hope that Hexbear would be able to answer some of these claims with something at least plausible.
The main objects of concern are the for-profit national businesses causing bureacratic class antagonism, foreign policy in the form of UN peacekeeping contributions, and straightforward imperialism at the base of its supply chain, along with miscellany like this:
https://newworker.us/international/chinas-stock-market-a-lesson-on-what-socialism-is-not/
I don’t know, it’s all a mess and putting off ideological work causes problems. If nothing else, let this be a practical lesson to you:
To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
It catches up with you and makes things worse in the end.
In a way, I understand what you’re saying, but ultimately this feels like standpoint epistemology in the worse sense of the term. You don’t need to be a successful revolutionary to say that Gonzalites and Khmer Rouge were weirdo revisionists. Marxism is “the ruthless criticism of all that exists,” and that should especially include projects that claim to be Marxist.
Marxist criticism is more than expressing a personal opinion about ideas divorced from material reality. My feelings about Chinese state policy aren’t less valid than an individual CPC member’s because of some metaphysical inherited quality. They’re less valid because I don’t speak the language. I didn’t experience their history. I’m not immersed in their material conditions. Everything that the anglophone world “knows” about China is filtered through the lens of an empire dedicated to reimposing colonial subjugation on them. When imperial citizens do “criticism” of a place that only exists to them as a caricature pieced together from media dedicated to showing it as a dystopia in need of the “civilizing influence” of liberal democracy, what is the intended material result of that “criticism”? Is the power of their superior theoretical knowledge supposed to somehow make China more communist? Is it supposed to make the empire more communist?
The answer that ultras can’t admit is that the purpose of this “criticism” is about making themselves more comfortable with their own conditions. It’s easy to theoretically “criticize” the conditions of the empire while materially benefiting from them. If every place that successfully struggled against those conditions is actually just as “imperialist” as the empire, then then the passive impotence of the imperial “left” is actually wise and good, since anything else would have simply produced the “worse” conditions everywhere else. It’s just internalizing the Churchill quote about capitalism being the worst economic system except for all the others, then telling yourself that insight makes you the only serious critic of capitalism.