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China has billionaires and stock markets. Is it still socialist?

After nearly half a century of market reforms – with billionaires, stock exchanges and world-famous private brands – can China seriously still be described as a socialist country? This video examines the case against, the record any serious analysis must explain, and above all the political question the sceptics too rarely ask: which class holds state power?

It is based on the notes for a talk Carlos Martinez gave on 23 July 2026 to the Croydon Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group at Ruskin House. A report of the meeting is available on the Croydon Communists site.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

In 1989, Deng Xiaoping met with Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian president, and told him: “So long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.”

The implication was that the fate of socialism as a global project – the project of a world without exploitation, poverty or imperialism – was bound up with the fate of socialism in China. The reverse is also true. If socialism has collapsed in China – if the world’s largest socialist experiment has quietly dissolved itself into just another capitalist power – then the implications for the left everywhere are pretty bleak.

The question, then, is whether China is still socialist? After nearly half a century of market reforms, of billionaires and stock exchanges and branches of McDonald’s in every major city – can the People’s Republic seriously still be described as a socialist country?

It is a serious question, asked in good faith by many people on the left. Any convincing answer has to acknowledge what the sceptics get right, identify what they miss, and establish what actually determines whether a country is socialist.

The case against

If you’re a socialist in Britain, the United States, or the West in general, there’s a lot about modern China that doesn’t feel like the world we’re trying to build.

China has been carrying out market-oriented reforms since 1978 – that’s coming up on half a century. It has several hundred billionaires and significant inequality – between rich and poor, between the coastal cities and the inland countryside. It has globally famous private brands: Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, BYD. It has stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen. It has a market economy in which private capital operates, in which the profit motive operates, and in which – let’s say it plainly – the exploitation of labour takes place. Wage workers in private enterprises produce surplus value, and a portion of that surplus value is appropriated by capitalists.

None of that sounds like the socialism we signed up for. The world we’re fighting for is a world without exploitation, without poverty, without billionaires: a world based on planning, public ownership, solidarity and the common good. And when we reach for real-world reference points, we tend to think of the Soviet Union – a society that essentially did away with private capital altogether.

A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

Greg Godels has published a thoughtful response in ML Today to Carlos Martinez’s recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Godels argues that the exploitation of the many by the few remains a central driving force of the Chinese economy, and questions whether China’s market reforms and its billionaire class can be squared with a socialist trajectory.

In the article below, Carlos argues that the decisive Marxist question is not simply whether wage labour and surplus value exist, but which class holds state power and in whose interest the economic surplus is directed. On that test – the class nature of the state – China’s billionaires answer to the state rather than command it; its reforms were a conscious strategy to develop the productive forces and build the material basis for a more advanced socialism; and China provably does not participate in imperialist super-exploitation.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Greg Godels has written a considered response in ML Today to my recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Unlike much of what passes for left commentary on China, Godels writes as a comrade, not a Cold Warrior. He admires the Chinese revolution, insists that China’s fate must be decided by the Chinese people, and closes by affirming that, whatever its difficulties, “it is China’s road”. On all of that we agree. Where we part company is over a question that Godels, for all his fidelity to the classics of Marxism, never quite poses: which class holds state power?

State and revolution

Godels’s central charge is that the debate over China too rarely invokes “the exploitation of the many by the few”, and that when I ask for exploitation to be “contextualised”, I am really relativising and rationalising it. He is right that exploitation belongs at the centre of any Marxist analysis. But there is a second important category that is missing from his account entirely: the class nature of the state.

For Marx and Lenin alike, the question of whether a society is advancing towards socialism was never settled simply by cataloguing the presence or absence of wage labour and surplus value at the point of production. It was settled principally by asking which class holds power, and in whose interest the state directs the economic surplus. This is the whole point of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of Lenin’s insistence, throughout the period of the New Economic Policy, that market mechanisms within a workers’ state are something categorically different from capitalism under a bourgeois state.

Under the NEP in the Soviet state, private capital, wage labour, rich peasants and market relations all flourished. Lenin did not conclude that the October Revolution had thereby been cancelled. He concluded that the proletarian state would make use of capitalist forms, on its own terms and under its own control, in order to build the material foundations of socialism.

Interview: Fighting spirit has allowed the CPC to survive and adapt over a century

The following is the full text of an interview given by Carlos Martinez to the Global Times, marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). An abridged version was published by the Global Times on 12 July 2026 as part of a special series of interviews with international scholars reflecting on the party’s century-long journey.

In the interview, conducted by GT reporter Xia Wenxin, Carlos explores the meaning of the CPC’s “fighting spirit”, or “spirit of struggle” – a concept he argues is routinely misread in the West as blind confrontation or factional intrigue, but which in fact flows directly from the dialectical core of Marxism. Struggle, in this sense, is not a mood but a method: the recognition that development happens through contradiction, and that a serious revolutionary party must identify the principal contradiction of each period and mobilise the masses to resolve it.

Tracing this thread from Mao Zedong’s 1945 parable of the Foolish Old Man who removed the mountains through to the present day, Carlos discusses how the same method has allowed the party to survive and adapt across a century that saw so many other revolutionary projects defeated. He examines the CPC’s practice of self-revolution and its unrelenting campaign against corruption; the targeted poverty alleviation drive that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty; and the fundamental difference between the Chinese dialectical understanding of struggle as productive and the Western view of conflict as terminal.

Finally, he considers how this fighting spirit will be tested on the new battlefields of the 15th Five-Year Plan – high-tech self-reliance under conditions of US containment, the green transition, and the assorted domestic challenges on the road to the Second Centenary Goal of 2049. As he concludes, “on the record of the last 105 years, I would not bet against the CPC and the Chinese people surmounting these new challenges.”

The abridged version of this interview first appeared in the Global Times. The full version was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

As the CPC marks its 105th anniversary, it stands as one of the longest-governing political parties in modern history. Looking back at this journey, how do you evaluate the role of the “fighting spirit” in helping the party navigate historical crises and constantly adapt to changing eras?

I think that, for the CPC, “fighting spirit” is closely related to the dialectical core of Marxism: the recognition that development happens through contradiction, that nothing valuable arrives without meaningful effort, and that a serious revolutionary party has to identify the principal contradiction of each period and work to resolve it. Struggle, in this sense, is not a mood; it is a method.

This is not a recent slogan grafted onto the Party; it runs right through its tradition. One of the clearest statements of it is Mao’s closing speech to the Seventh Party Congress in June 1945, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains”, in which he retold an old fable. A foolish old man sets out to dig away two great mountains that block the way to his house; when a wise old man mocks the folly of it, he replies, “When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” The two mountains, Mao said, were imperialism and feudalism, and the task of the Chinese people was to dig them out. What turns the parable into a statement of strategy is its ending: “Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?”

Fighting spirit, in this conception, is not so much heroic individual will as the conviction that an apparently immovable obstacle yields to patient, collective, intergenerational effort, once the masses are mobilised to do the digging.

That method is exactly what has allowed the Party to survive and adapt across a century in which so many of the other revolutionary projects of its generation were defeated. Consider the sheer range of conditions it has had to navigate: a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country torn apart by foreign invasion and civil war; the construction of an entire industrial and social base from near-zero after 1949; the turn to reform and opening up; and then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states in 1989–91, when counter-revolution triumphed almost everywhere – but was resolutely defeated in China. As Deng Xiaoping told Julius Nyerere in 1989, “so long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world”.

That the People’s Republic did not collapse was not luck. It was the product of a party willing to struggle on every level: against foreign domination, against feudalism, against poverty, against underdevelopment, against corruption, and against ideological ossification.

What defines the CPC’s 105-year success? – a CGTN Dialogue

The following is a discussion from CGTN’s Dialogue programme marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Broadcast in the wake of Xi Jinping’s anniversary speech – in which he hailed the Party’s 105-year history as the “most magnificent epic” of the Chinese nation – it brings together Xia Lu, associate professor at the School of CPC History and Party Building at Renmin University of China; Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China; and Radhika Desai, convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

The panel discusses how to evaluate the CPC’s achievements and governing logic; the role of Marxism – seeking truth from facts, the mass line, and the Party’s capacity for self-renewal – in explaining its longevity and legitimacy; and the distinctiveness of Chinese modernisation. Radhika Desai argues that the Chinese revolution, following the Bolshevik revolution, set humanity on a path to socialism, and that amid a declining capitalism China has become an “ocean of stability”. Carlos Martinez stresses that China’s is a modernisation achieved without colonialism, slavery or war – shattering the Eurocentric assumption that to modernise is to Westernise. Xia Lu reads the Party’s six outstanding qualities through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism, and emphasises the mass line and the Party’s vigilance against detachment from the people.

This discussion was originally broadcast by CGTN’s Dialogue. The video and a transcript follow.

Transcript

Host: Hello and welcome to Dialogue. Addressing a gathering marking the 105th anniversary of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping hailed the 105-year history of the Party as the “most magnificent epic” of the Chinese nation. He urged the Party to press ahead to build China into a modern socialist country on schedule. So how should we evaluate the Party’s achievements and governing logic over the past 105 years? What does the speech tell us about the Party’s discipline and capacity for self-renewal? And as China moves toward its long-term modernisation goals, what challenges lie ahead? Joining me today from Beijing are Xia Lu, associate professor from the School of CPC History and Party Building at Renmin University of China; Carlos Martinez, author of The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China; and also Radhika Desai, convenor of the International Manifesto Group. Welcome to the show. Radhika, I’ll start with you: I’m sure you followed the speech, so I wonder what were your major takeaways?

Radhika Desai: Well, first of all, President Xi’s speech really grasps the fundamentals of the achievements of the Party. I would say that for this party to be more than a century old – 105 years old – while retaining its legitimacy among a billion-strong population, and having essentially transformed the people of China not only into an agent of their own history, giving the destiny of the people into the hands of the people of China, but into an agent of world history – that is a tremendous achievement. The second major event setting the world on a path to socialism after the Bolshevik revolution was the Chinese revolution. And the Bolshevik revolution is no longer; the Chinese revolution is still going. So it set humanity on a path to socialism, and it continues there – at this particular time in history when circumstances have become extremely dangerous, thanks to the decline of that very capitalism. In its decline, capitalism is unleashing chaos, destruction and economic disruption all over the world. In this context, the CPC not only holds great legitimacy among the people of China, but shows the way forward to the rest of the world, and has become a beacon, an oasis of stability, and a visionary path to the future.

Host: Carlos, President Xi said the Party’s endeavours over the past 105 years have fundamentally transformed the future of the Chinese people – as Radhika said, blazed the right path toward the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, demonstrated the strong vitality of Marxism, had a profound influence on the course of world history, and made the CPC a powerful communist party. What do you make of such a statement?

The Great Road – Zhu De, fifty years on

The following article by Carlos Martinez marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Zhu De – founder of the People’s Liberation Army and, with Mao Zedong, one of the leading architects of the Chinese Revolution’s victory.

Drawing on the classic accounts of Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow and Evans Carlson, it traces Zhu De’s journey from a tenant’s hut in Sichuan, through to the founding of the Red Army and the rostrum at Tiananmen Square – and asks what his life still teaches, half a century on.

This article was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

Fifty years ago, on 6 July 1976, Zhu De died in Beijing at the age of 89. It was a year of terrible losses for the Chinese people: Zhou Enlai had died in January; Mao Zedong would follow in September. Of the three, Zhu De is the least remembered in the West – and yet the army he built, the People’s Liberation Army, remains the guarantor of everything the Chinese Revolution has achieved, and his life traces the arc of that revolution more completely than almost any other.

Red Virtue: origins in Sichuan

Zhu De was born in December 1886 into a tenant family in Yilong county, Sichuan, on an estate whose landlord was known locally as the “King of Hell”. By what Edgar Snow called “a strange accident of language”, the two characters of his name mean “Red Virtue” – a fact his parents could hardly have foreseen, “or they would surely have changed it in terror”.

His mother bore 13 children; the last five were drowned at birth because the family could not feed them. She herself, he recalled, “was so humble that she had no name of her own”. The clan pooled its resources to educate a single son who could talk back to the tax collectors – and so Zhu De, almost by accident, became literate, passed through the old examination system in its dying days, and entered the Yunnan Military Academy, where he joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary Tongmenghui (a radical secret society and precursor to the Kuomintang) and took part in the 1911 Revolution and the campaigns that destroyed Yuan Shikai’s attempted monarchy.

The hardest battle

By his mid-thirties Zhu De was a general in the warlord armies of the south-west: wealthy, decorated, and addicted to opium. The 1911 Revolution, he concluded, had been “aborted by republican compromise with foreign imperialism”; warlordism was a dead end, and he was part of it. So he walked away. He gave up his commands and his fortune, and broke his opium addiction alone – pacing the deck of a Yangtze steamer for a month, in what Snow called “the hardest battle of his life”, proof that “this man had more steel in his will than his acquaintances supposed”.

Then he asked to join the infant Communist Party. His reasoning was characteristically direct: if the foreign imperialists attacked this party with everything ugly in their vocabulary, “it was the party for Chu Teh” (Chu Teh being the older Western spelling of his name). Rejected in Shanghai by then CPC General Secretary Chen Duxiu – who could not believe a former warlord general capable of becoming a communist – he sailed for Europe, and in Berlin in late 1922 presented himself to a student organiser more than ten years his junior named Zhou Enlai. His old life, he said, “had turned to ashes beneath his feet”. He was admitted to the party he would serve for the remaining 54 years of his life.

What would Rajani Palme Dutt have made of contemporary China?

To mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of Rajani Palme Dutt – theoretician, organiser and, for half a century, one of the foremost Marxist minds in the British movement – Carlos Martinez asks what he would have made of contemporary China, testing his 1967 pamphlet Whither China? against the verdict of history.

This lecture was delivered on 27 June 2026 at the R. Palme Dutt Memorial Lecture 2026 at SOAS University of London, organised by the Students’ Federation of India UK and the Young Communist League.

The text was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

Comrades and friends. Thank you to the Students’ Federation of India UK and the Young Communist League for organising this event, and for asking me to speak.

We gather to mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of Rajani Palme Dutt – theoretician, organiser, anti-imperialist, and for half a century one of the foremost Marxist minds in the British movement. A man whose very name – the Bengali ‘Rajani’ and ‘Dutt’ alongside the Swedish ‘Palme’ – embodied the internationalism he preached and practised.

I want to use my time to ask a particular question. Palme Dutt died in 1974. He did not live to see China’s reform and opening up, the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s rise to becoming the second-largest economy on earth, or the New Cold War now being waged against the People’s Republic. So: what would Rajani Palme Dutt have made of contemporary China?

It might seem a strange or pointless question to pose. The most substantial thing Palme Dutt wrote about China was his 1967 pamphlet Whither China? – which is, on its surface, a sharp polemic against the Chinese leadership, written at the height of the Sino-Soviet split, a year into the Cultural Revolution.

Palme Dutt was of course very much on the Soviet side in that split. Nonetheless, his pamphlet was not a simple repetition of the Soviet line, but a careful and serious analysis from a fundamentally comradely perspective.

So the question is posed not as a parlour game, but as a way of asking what a great Marxist of the past would make of the present; of testing his analysis against the reality of history; and of separating enduring principles from contingent positions.

A pamphlet of its moment

The Sino-Soviet split was, of course, one of the greatest setbacks our global movement has ever suffered, and reading Palme Dutt’s pamphlet, you feel the weight of it on every page. He is clearly shocked and deeply saddened by the bitterness of the situation.

And with the hindsight of six decades, we can recognise that both sides were at fault and went too far. As Deng Xiaoping put it to Gorbachev in 1989, when the two parties finally normalised relations again, “there was a lot of empty talk on both sides”. Deng’s verdict – “we no longer think that everything we said at that time was right” – could stand as an epitaph for the whole dispute.

So let me look at the substance of a few elements of Palme Dutt’s critique, and subject it to the test of history.

Cuba’s economic reforms and the prospects for socialist renewal

This month Cuba approved the most far-reaching changes to its economic model in more than 60 years. In this article, Carlos Martinez argues that – far from the blockade finally breaking the Revolution – the reforms are best understood as a defence of socialism under siege, following the strategic logic China has pursued since 1978: the controlled use of markets and foreign investment to develop the productive forces while the Communist Party retains political power and public ownership of the commanding heights.

This article first appeared on Friends of Socialist China. A version of the article, translated into Portuguese, can be found on Brasil de Fato.

This month Cuba announced the most far-reaching changes to its economic model in more than 60 years. Approved by an Extraordinary Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and passed unanimously by the National Assembly, the programme runs to 23 strategic axes and 176 concrete measures. Predictably, much of the Western press – along with a substantial section of the Western left – has rushed to interpret it as the moment the blockade finally broke the Revolution, as proof that Havana has at last been forced onto the capitalist road.

Such a reading misunderstands both the content of the measures and the history that has produced them. The reforms are best understood as Cuba’s attempt to do what several other besieged socialist states have had to do before it: to defend itself by developing its productive forces, on its own terms, but under conditions not of its choosing. As the Cuba specialist Isaac Saney puts it, the measures, “far from representing a retreat”, in fact constitute “a strategic effort to preserve and deepen the social gains of the Revolution in the face of relentless external pressure and unprecedented economic challenges”.

For those that have followed China’s development, the framework on display in Havana is immediately recognisable. Cuba is reaching, under enormous duress, for the strategic logic that has guided the Chinese Revolution since 1978: the controlled use of markets and foreign investment to develop the productive forces, while the Communist Party retains political power and public ownership of the commanding heights. It is also reaching for the support of its longstanding friends. China and Vietnam have been Cuba’s most consequential partners in weathering the present siege, and the deepening relationship between their parties forms an essential part of the backdrop to these reforms.

What the reforms actually do

Under the new package, Cuba will scrap the long-standing requirement that foreign investors partner with a state-owned company. It will authorise large private firms, permit private banks to operate, allow private real estate development, and open the door to domestic and foreign investors acquiring stakes in state enterprises, some of which are to be converted into joint-stock companies.

Cubans living abroad will be actively encouraged to invest, donate, import technology and build businesses at home. State-owned enterprises – which remain the principal pillar of the economy – will be granted far greater autonomy over investment, hiring, pricing and financial management, while municipal governments will gain expanded powers to pursue local development. Wage ceilings that have motivated significant numbers of skilled professionals to leave the country are to be lifted.

Interview: Can the working class win?

The video below is an interview of Carlos Martinez by Jason Smith, for CGTN’s The Bridge to China podcast. Recorded in the lead-up to the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the wide-ranging conversation covers the nature of China’s economic system, the achievements of Chinese socialism, the state of the left in the West, and the transition to a multipolar world.

Carlos argues that China is best understood on its own terms, as socialism with Chinese characteristics: a fundamentally socialist system with a significant market component, in which the state holds the commanding heights – banking, energy, telecommunications, rail and the top levels of industry – and directs investment through national planning. The presence of markets, billionaires or inequality does not make a country capitalist; what matters is which class holds power, and the ultimate measure is the living standards of ordinary working people.

On that measure, China stands apart: it is the country that has eliminated extreme poverty, effectively ended homelessness, and pursued common prosperity, a world-leading renewable energy build-out and the saving of lives during the Covid pandemic. If China is socialist and succeeding, Carlos contends, that vindicates the project of the global left – which is precisely why the West’s new cold war is aimed at preventing a socialist alternative from succeeding.

The interview surveys the scale of China’s transformation – some 800 million people lifted out of poverty, the “seven guarantees” that underpin poverty alleviation, life expectancy rising from around 35 at liberation to over 79 today, near-universal mortgage-free home ownership, and the most extensive public infrastructure in the world. Comparing China with India – liberated within two years of one another, from similar starting points – Carlos draws out what a revolution and Communist Party-led planning have made possible: sovereign development free of IMF discipline, coherent five-year plans, and the capacity for mass mobilisation, exemplified by the three million cadres deployed in the poverty alleviation campaign.

Turning to the West, Carlos describes the long retreat of the left under the neoliberal counter-revolution – de-industrialisation, the rise of the precariat, and a social peace bought with the super-profits of imperialism that are now drying up. He points to the crisis of confidence deepened by Gaza and to the Corbyn moment as signs that material reality is shifting, and to a growing openness to China – from “Chinamaxxing” and the RedNote migration to the surge in inbound tourism. The dogmatism that still leads much of the Western left to withhold recognition of China’s decidedly socialist achievements, he argues, plays into a US grand strategy whose core is the encirclement and containment of China.

The lesson for developed and developing countries alike, Carlos concludes, is that public ownership is not inefficient but the precondition for any serious industrial policy, that long-term planning beats short-term shareholder value, and that the West must come to terms with an inevitably multipolar world – starting, at a minimum, with adherence to the United Nations Charter.

A full transcript follows below. Individual answers will also be posted as separate clips on the Invent the Future YouTube channel.

Transcript

Jason Smith: Socialism, China, and the West. Hey everyone, I’m Jason Smith, originally from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Joining us today is Carlos Martinez, a British Marxist writer, researcher, and anti-imperialist activist. He is co-author of The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China. Welcome back to The Bridge to China.

Carlos Martinez: Hey Jason, great to be with you. I think this is the third time.

Jason Smith: I think it is. I really wanted to have you on because the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China is coming up, and I wanted to get your thoughts on socialism, Marxism and Western perspectives of Chinese socialism. But before we get there — people may not have seen our previous interviews, or may not be familiar with your work. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with China and how you got into studying it?

Why does China still love Mao so much?

The standard Western story about modern China is that Mao has been quietly buried by the Communist Party, that Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy, and that the China that emerged after 1978 is no longer really socialist. By implication, China’s success is the success of capitalism, not of the revolution.

So why do ordinary Chinese people still travel in their millions to Shaoshan – the village in Hunan where Mao was born, now one of the most-visited tourist sites in China – to pay their respects to the founder of the People’s Republic? Stand there among the crowds and the Western story falls apart on contact.

In this video, Carlos Martinez draws on a recent trip to Shaoshan, and on the hard development data from the Mao era, to answer that question: the Mao era and the reform era are not opposed phases of Chinese history. They are two stages of a single revolutionary project, and the Chinese people know it.

Between 1949 and 1976, life expectancy in China rose by 32 years – the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Adult illiteracy fell from over 80 per cent to 33 per cent by 1978. Land was redistributed. Women were emancipated. A complete industrial base was built from near-zero. The treaty ports were abolished. The country was unified after a century of fragmentation. This is the China the post-Mao leadership inherited – not the impoverished backwater of Western myth.

Without Mao, no Deng. Without 1949, no 1978. As the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin put it, the take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.” It is also exactly how the Communist Party of China understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “the two cannot negates.”

Sources and further reading:

Carlos Martinez, “No great wall: on the continuity of the Chinese Revolution”
https://invent-the-future.org/2021/05/no-great-wall/

Samir Amin, “China 2013”
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/china-2013/

Domenico Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/

Friends of Socialist China
https://socialistchina.org

Transcript

Hello and welcome. In April this year, I had the privilege of visiting Shaoshan, the small village in Hunan province where Mao Zedong was born in 1893. And Shaoshan is one of the most visited tourist sites in China. Ordinary Chinese people travel there in their millions every year. The Mao family home is preserved as it was. There’s a major statue erected in 1993 for the centenary of his birth. And across China, there are museums, study halls, and exhibition rooms commemorating the life of the man Chinese people overwhelmingly regard as the founder of modern China.

And I wanted to talk about Shaoshan because what you see there very much goes against the narrative that Western ruling class media and academia have been telling us about China for the last half century or so. The standard story runs like this. Mao’s been quietly buried by the Communist Party of China. Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy. The reform era China that emerged after 1978 is essentially a market economy with red branding, no longer connected to the revolutionary project that began in 1921, or to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. And the implication is that China’s success story is not a function of socialism. The achievements you can see across the country today are the achievements of capitalism. And Mao is some kind of embarrassing relic that the party can neither fully claim nor fully repudiate.

Lenin walks around the world

The following article by Carlos Martinez, discussing Lenin’s contribution to understanding the global applicability of Marxism, was originally published on 20 January 2024 in the Morning Star, to coincide with the centenary of Lenin’s death.

The original slogan of the communist movement, ‘Workers of the world unite’ – the rallying cry and final phrase from the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1848 – was put forward at a time when the nascent communist movement was geographically limited to Europe and North America, and focused almost exclusively on the industrial working class.

Lenin’s study of global political economy, and particularly of the dynamics of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of modern imperialism, led him to an acute understanding of the expanded – global – applicability of Marxist thought.

Study of imperialism

Marx had already outlined the economic dynamics of an emerging international capitalism in Volume 1 of Capital, first published in 1867: “A new and international division of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.”

By the end of the 19th century, the extraordinary concentration of capital and the supremacy of finance capital had brought the era of ‘free market’ capitalism to an end and ushered in an era of monopoly capitalism – in which phase capitalism remains.

Having dominated and saturated the home market, monopolies were increasingly driven abroad in pursuit of profit. Lenin wrote in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that “the export of capital greatly affects and accelerates the development of capitalism in those countries to which it is exported.” Export of capital stimulated the incorporation of the “chiefly agricultural” economies of the Global South into the world capitalist system, introducing industrial production and creating a social class that had no option but to sell its labour power – the working class.

With the internationalisation of capital and the subjugation of the greater part of the planet by a handful of wealthy nations, capitalism became more and more militarised. Extreme force was needed to keep colonies and “spheres of influence” under control, and furthermore was a key feature of the rising competition between the imperialist countries for control of the world’s land, labour, natural resources and markets. Such competition was the basis for World War 1.

Lenin understood that, with capitalism having “grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries”, the capitalist class of the metropolis had become an enemy not just to the working class in the advanced capitalist countries but to the broad masses of the oppressed in all countries. “Imperialism is leading to annexation, to increased national oppression, and, consequently, also to increasing resistance.”

This analysis provided the theoretical basis for a strategic unity of the socialist and national liberation movements, on which basis Lenin and the Bolsheviks proposed the development of a worldwide united front of the working class and all peoples oppressed by imperialism. Such a united front would be capable – indeed still is capable – of taking the fight to the oppressors, of defeating imperialism, of establishing national independence and sovereignty for the peoples of the Global South, and thereby opening the possibility for a global advance to socialism.

Hence at the second congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920, ‘Workers of the world unite’ was updated to ‘Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite’.

In Lenin’s report to the Third Congress of the Comintern in June 1921, he enthused: “The revolutionary movement among the hundreds of millions of oppressed peoples of the East is growing with remarkable vigour.” He elaborates on this in his letter Better Fewer, But Better, the last document he wrote:

“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.”

Summing up this theoretical contribution in his 1924 book Foundations of Leninism, Joseph Stalin wrote that “the interests of the proletarian movement in the developed countries and of the national liberation movement in the colonies call for the union of these two forms of the revolutionary movement into a common front against the common enemy, against imperialism” and, further, that “the victory of the working class in the developed countries and the liberation of the oppressed peoples from the yoke of imperialism are impossible without the formation and the consolidation of a common revolutionary front.”

Imperialism and the split in socialism

Unfortunately, the pursuit of a global revolutionary anti-imperialist front was not a consensus position in the communist movement of the time. Many of the large workers’ parties in the West rejected – explicitly or implicitly – such a strategy and worked towards a tacit alliance with their ‘own’ imperialist ruling classes.

The material basis for such an alliance was provided by the superprofits of imperialism. The “high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries” opens up “the economic possibility of corrupting the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives form to, and strengthens opportunism” (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism).

Further: “A few crumbs of the bourgeoisie’s huge profits may come the way of the small group of labour bureaucrats, labour aristocrats, and petty-bourgeois fellow-travellers. Social chauvinism and opportunism have the same class basis, namely, the alliance of a small section of privileged workers with ‘their’ national bourgeoisie against the working class masses.” (Lenin, Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International)

Lenin labelled this phenomenon social chauvinism – “socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds” – and described it as “the utter betrayal of socialism” and “complete desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie.” In his 1916 article Imperialism and the Split in Socialism he wrote that “the opportunists (social chauvinists) are working hand in glove with the imperialist bourgeoisie precisely towards creating an imperialist Europe on the backs of Asia and Africa”, and that “objectively the opportunists are a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of a certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement.”

He pointed out that the ruling classes themselves perfectly well understand and deliberately implement this strategy. Indeed, he cites the notorious colonialist Cecil Rhodes, writing in 1895:

I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread, bread, bread,” and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e. in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

Lenin concluded that, to defeat the social chauvinist trend and to move forwards with the global class struggle, communists must go “lower and deeper”; must seek out, educate and organise the most oppressed sections of the working class, “who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars.” These strata are far less corruptible; are far more capable of learning “to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.”

Success of Leninism in practice

In words and deeds, the Bolsheviks pursued the global anti-imperialist front, seeking (in Lenin’s words) to “convert the [masses of the oppressed countries] into an active factor in world politics and in the revolutionary destruction of imperialism” (Third Congress of the Communist International).

This effort bore historic fruit. The Soviet Union rendered indispensable support to the national liberation and socialist movements in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

In his 1960 essay The Path Which Led Me To Leninism, Ho Chi Minh movingly describes his years in Paris in the early 1920s, participating in the debates between the Leninists and the social chauvinists.

My only argument was: “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?” … At first, patriotism, not yet communism, led me to have confidence in Lenin, in the Third International. Step by step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism parallel with participation in practical activities, I gradually came upon the fact that only socialism and communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people throughout the world from slavery.

Similarly, Mao Zedong stated in 1949, just two months before the proclamation of the People’s Republic, that “it was through the Russians that the Chinese found Marxism. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China, as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation’s destiny and considering anew their own problems.”

In turn, the Chinese communists have played a crucial role in developing Lenin’s ideas of anti-imperialism and applying them in practice. The overthrow of imperialist domination and the construction of socialism in China, Korea and Vietnam represented a profound shift of the revolutionary centre of gravity in the world towards the East and the South. The radical governments emerging in the Sahel and Latin America today represent a continuation and deepening of this process.

Such are the outcomes of a revolutionary strategy based on the slogan ‘Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite’. The outcomes of class collaborationist social democracy in the West are, it is fair to say, less impressive.

Lenin lives

Lenin was, above all, a revolutionary Marxist, and there are two famous quotes from Marx which to a significant degree encapsulate Leninism today: “A nation that oppresses another cannot itself be free”, and “Labour in the white skin can never free itself as long as labour in the black skin is branded.”

To be Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century means to return to a strategy of a worldwide united front between the socialist countries, the oppressed nations, and the working class in the imperialist countries. It means standing up for Palestine. It means continuing the fight for a united Ireland. It means opposing the campaign of containing and encircling China. It means opposing NATO. It means supporting the emerging multipolar trend. It means standing with Cuba, with Vietnam, with the DPRK, with Laos, with Venezuela, with Nicaragua, with Syria, with all countries defiantly standing up against imperialist hegemony. It means opposing racism, sexism and all forms of exploitation and oppression, rejecting collaborationism and social chauvinism, going “lower and deeper” and fighting resolutely for a socialist future.