No, what’s toxic is comparing countries with wildly different circumstances and prior levels of development without properly contextualizing. The famines were not caused by communism, nor mismanagement. The famines were caused by a combination of weather disaster and dramatic underdevelopment of agriculture, which is why both regions commonly had famine before, and why both countries had these as their last famines outside wartime, as they industrialized.

You’re confusing the distinction between socialism and communism, and it’s because you view the world through an individualist frame, not a socialist one. You see socialism only through the eyes of an individual worker and an individual capitalist, you do not see classes. As such, you believe the distinction between socialism and communism as the difference between, essentially, elements of communism and the whole society being communistic. This is wrong.

Socialism is a transition between capitalism and communism, where the working class dominates the state and the economy. It isn’t about individual relationships between workers and capitalists or lack thereof, but the entire class with relation to the entire class. Communism is the point by which all class distinctions have been eradicated and property collectivized, which discounts anarchism which seeks many cooperative-style cells, which leads to class distinctions between cells.

Restricting the ability of class traitors to go against the working class is not a bad thing. Independent unions that seek greater autonomy for a small subset of a class in a way that goes against the rest of the class is the problem with individualist framing. China has the largest federation of unions on the planet, they do a fantastic job of protecting worker rights. The reason independent unions are not allowed is because these cracks in the system become highly exploitable by a capitalist class that very much would love to overthrow the working classes as the ruling class.

I never made the point that workers unions being state recognized made society socialist. I argued that MAGA incorporating workers into a capitalist state is not at all the same as the CPC integrating unions into the socialist state of China. You made the false comparison there.

You double-down on this dishonest framing that workers and capitalists are the same when you talk about authoritarianism. The state is not outside of class struggle, it is within it, and thus can only be the representative of the ruling class. I support the working classes having state authority to protect against capitalists, and this is not at all the same as supporting capitalists having state authority against workers. This is the same problem you keep bumping into, treating tools as abstractions without looking at what class is wielding the tools. You erase class struggle from society.

Your next paragraph just has you add “Capitalist” to the beginning of words, without justifying what makes any of it capitalist. GDP is not capitalist, it’s just a metric used for measuring production. The reason why China is successful is because it’s a socialist country, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the CPC is a proletarian party, which controls the state. It isn’t “capitalism and authoritarianism,” it’s a socialist market economy run democratically. If China was capitalist, it would fall into the same trappings as other capitalist economies, and would be well on its way down. Instead, it is increasing socialization of the economy:

As for China being neocolonial, I look at Africa to know that they aren’t. China forgives debt, develops infrastructure, and facilitates south-south trade. It isn’t neocolonial because it has no reason to be, it isn’t dominated by private finance capital, and as a result Africa is rapidly developing, rather than remaining entrapped like it has been by the west.

As for the PRC vs. the USSR, both are socialist, the USSR just took a more direct confrontational approach. It does not make the PRC capitalist.

Overall, I think you should start studying Marxism-Leninism. Not even to become one, but to understand why China’s socialist road looks the way it does. Everything about China matches up with how Marxist-Leninists would understand it to, but it clearly is thwarting how you are understanding it as an anarchist. To me, as a former anarchist, seeing socialist countries dramatically rise was one of the big problems that caused me to study Marxism and gradually abandon anarchism.

No worries! Yea it has humorous undertones, and to communists it might get a chuckle but not really a laugh.

Stalin was enormously popular, which actually became a problem for him after World War II. From Anna Louise Strong’s This Soviet World, written in 1936:

The operation of Soviet democracy is thus so intimate, continuous and organic that the observer fresh from capitalist politics hardly recognizes it as government. Where is the debate? Who determines general policies? Can the people throw out the upper officials? Can they throw out Stalin? The Communist Party? The Soviet voter, when asked these last questions, replies in a puzzled way: “Why should we want to?” The questioner thinks he has been evaded. But all elections presuppose an existing economic system, which voting is powerless to change. Voters in America cannot change Rockefeller’s method of operating oil companies for private profit. Similarly no Soviet election raises the issue of returning public properties to private hands: this was settled by the Revolution, and forms the foundation beneath the whole government.

Barring that question, there is nothing whatever that Soviet voters cannot change. They actually do change thousands of officials at every election, and as their acquaintance with the wider problems of the country grows, the forms of democracy are being widened to include direct control of the highest officials. Stalin’s chief post is not in the government, but as general secretary of the Communist Party, which would certainly remove him if his policy and actions should ever discredit him with the people; at present he is by far the most popular man in the country. To throw out the Communist Party bodily would be to throw out all the leading and organizing elements in all factories, farms, schools and enterprises; it could clearly be done only by upheaval leading to chaos. But the citizens are constantly at work changing the very membership of the Party, any member of which may be “cleaned out” on protest of his non-Party associates that he is too dictatorial, too rough towards workers, or merely not a fit leader.[27]

Makes sense!

🫠

Why not socialism?

Your example of socialism is a common misunderstanding, one that sees petite bourgeois worker ownership as socialist. The problem is that you abstract an element from the whole. Those that do not work at said cooperative do not share in its ownership, and this creates the rise of class distinctions. The perpetuation of money and the commodity form give rise to capitalism. The lack of understanding of state power and its role in the economy leaves it open to capitalist dominance of the state. This is why your understanding is both common and yet anti-Marxist. It’s a metaphysical error in analyzing society.

Secondly, you further demonstrate a confusion of how the state operates. The state is not outside class struggle, but is within it. The state cannot be anything but under the domination of the ruling class of society. In such a worker-dominated society, the state is not outside of the working classes. Thus, organizing in a way that undermines the socialist state undermines socialism. You try to justify it by saying independent organization is “healthy,” but you do not materially justify this. This becomes a moralistic argument, not a materialist one, and thus falls into idealism.

You fall even further into confusion when you equate MAGA, a fascist movement within a capitalist society, with the CPC, a communist party within a socialist society. The problem is not political loyalty in general, but political loyalty to fascism or socialism! You equate fascism with communism as equal evils here based purely on the similarity in form being political loyalty to the system. Anyone can see that these are very different systems!

Next, “authoritarian rhetoric.” I support the authority of the working class. I do not support the authority of capitalists or fascists. The fact that I support worker states does not mean I support any and all states that support any and all classes. I support a particular form of state, that being a socialist state. Again, you confuse particular similarities in form abstracted from context for absolute similarities in total. This is a metaphysical error repeated.

Next, your confusion of marketization as capitalism. We already went over how cooperatives themselves are not socialism, because what matters is the context of the entire system. The capital that exists in China exists only in secondary industries, where marketization plays a progressive role. Critical and large industry is overwhelmingly state owned and planned. If China had a wealth cap, it would not fundamentally change that until production is socialized and collectivized afterwards, there will exist capitalists. However, as long as these capitalists exist within the birdcage set out by the socialist state, they cannot gain political power.

Further, you make completely unbacked and baseless claims of “neocolonialism.” You do not interrogate or substantiate this point. China’s position on the world stage undermines neoimperialism, which operates via IP monopoly, US cultural hegemony, the dollar as the world reserve currency, and US military dominance. Neoimperialism works through neocolonialism. China’s advance in IP destroys the IP monopoly of the west, undermines their military dominance, creates room for south-south trade, and undermines US supremacy, which is necessary for imperialism in the modern era. There is no neocolonialism from China.

The USSR was also good. I will push back on the idea of a “political upper class,” such a term is not founded in Marxist understandings of class but the simple substitution of class for any category. Class is a social relation to ownership of the means of production, administrators in the Soviet Union had equal ownership to any other worker and were paid wages equivalent to skilled laborers.

Overall, I defend China from a Marxist position, you are attacking it from, at most, an anarchist position. Either you do not believe Marxism is socialist, or you must acknowledge that China certainly isn’t an anarchist’s dream, but at least fulfills Marxist understandings of socialism, which explains their success.

In what sense? I don’t believe the leaders of socialist countries historically fit the understood definition of dictator, as compared to figures like Hitler, Pinochet, and Syngman Rhee. I believe dictators exist, but not in past or present socialist countries.

Correct.

Famines were extremely common in both Tsarist Russia and feudal China. Their respective famines in the beginning were ended because they developed out of that underdeveloped form of agriculture. This is not difficult to understand. Why compare the Soviet Union and PRC to capitalist countries, when we should be comparing them to their former selves?

We don’t both know this, I highly disagree that power is a supernatural force that turns people evil. This is a liberal theory of knowledge, not a Marxist theory. Being well-known does not make it correct.

Public ownership under capitalism is not socialism, and this was precisely my point: the US is not socialist for having a public sector, and China is not capitalist for having a private sector. What matters is what class controls the state, as well as which form of ownership is principal.

Independent worker union rights within the context of socialism can be a barrier to socialism. China has the largest federation of trade unions in the world, and the CPC sides with the trade unions. Independence from this cohesive socialist system can be levereged into disunity and resistance towards socialism, which can be especially dangerous for a society that still retains some degree of private ownership. Any crack becomes a lever.

China has billionaires because it has capitalists. China has capitalists because marketization is enormously useful for turning backwards production into socialized production, at which point it can be more effectively publicly owned and planned. Public ownership of backwards production is enormously difficult, which is why marketization is employed.

I’m not diminishing socialism, I’m taking a principled stance on what socialism is and how we understand it.

The commanding heights of China’s economy are publicly owned, and workers control the state. Sweden, Finland, and France are predominantly controlled by capitalists, and all 3 are examples of imperialist countries. Socialism is not welfarism. Socialism is a mode of production and distribution where public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. Only China out of that list fulfills that.

Which word? General Secretary? General Secretaries are elected positions as leaders of political parties. They retain their posts through popular support, and if this ever changes, they can and will be removed. China is not run from such a top-down manner, policy comes from the bottom-up, works its way through the CPC and the NPC, and then is reinterpreted through Marxism-Leninism and is returned in the form of new policy.

The idea that Xi Jinping “rules with an iron fist” is nonsense. His power comes from democratic means, and the democratic structures in China lead to far more distributed levers of power than in western countries. This is referred to as “Whole-Process People’s Democracy.”

Yep, still settler-colonial, but in a manner that preserves much of indigenous culture and ties to the land. The US and Canada are much closer to Israel in how settlers colonialism is handled, past and present.

I think there’s a distinction between public figures representing organizations, and grassroots dialogue. Even then, you’d be surprised by how many people prefer talking to an open communist than a “could-be-a-socialist.”

It sparks conversations. Plus, this is a community run by communists, so the target audience is communists.

Everything you are saying is entirely compatible with what I said, beyond your assertion that “Xi rules with an iron fist.” Again I ask, what do you believe the role of General Secretary of a political party is for? Why do you believe that collectively running something is contradictory to having a General Secretary?

Mostly agreed, though I think south Korea/Corea and north Korea/Corea are valid terms (specifically keeping the cardinal directions lowercase). Capitalizing the direction reinforces the idea that these are separate peoples, but frequently the distinction is necessary when discussing this or that subject, such as the fact that taxation has been abolished in northern Corea. I even more strongly prefer “northern” and “southern” as signifiers.

The problem with using DPRK and ROK alone arises when we are discussing region, not state. The illegitimacy of the ROK as a colonial state set up by the US Empire does not really help us linguistically. The Corean people are one nation, divided. Essentially, I use DPRK/ROK the vast majority of the time, and “northern/southern Korea/Corea” when discussing relational, geographic matters. When discussing the people, I do not distinguish, they are simply “Korean/Corean.”

Regarding Japan, it’s less a colony and more a vassal state like western Europe. The ROK is more of a direct colony. Japan benefits more directly from imperialism, whereas the ROK is a neocolonial forward operating base for the US to keep China in check.