Adapted from our in-progress book The PCP is the most advanced political party of our time. Naturally, it has become a victim of bourgeois propaganda of all types. Strangely, though, it seems to be…
I think it makes some points. Does anyone more knowledgeable on this subject have a different take?
How’d you find this post? You’re welcome to stay here, our community is a lot better than whatever you’ve got on Quora and IG. Just know most of us don’t support Gonzalo. Just because someone calls themselves communist doesn’t mean they’re worth our support. Should we support Jim Jones? La Rouche? Caleb Maupen? Besides just understanding cults you should understand the line struggle between right and left deviations. It should be clear that the PCP were a pretty far left deviation. I’d rather support a slightly right deviationist China that continues to improve people’s lives and counter US hegemony than a random guerrilla group that killed random people motivated by hatred of people even slightly to the right of them (that failed).
Beside that our ideologies aren’t much different, so I’d hope you’d remain open and converse here.
I searched this site because a sudden rise in traffic to our site, and especially my article which you shared above, came from here. This community doesn’t seem too promising considering all the bourgeois and imperialist myths they believe about the PCP, but I’ll stay here and see how it goes.
The PCP was not a cult like Jim Jones’s group was. There’s a clear difference between a party working to liberate the people in a place where most parties turned electoralist and capitulated to the state, and a government that has turned bourgeois rather than simply being “slightly right deviationist”. The US “improved people’s lives” for quite some time because that’s how development works; China could have continued on the socialist path with a planned economy and worked just fine, just as the Stalin era saw the most massive improvement in development for the USSR, but the bourgeoisie seized power and reversed that trend. The PCP was not a “random guerrilla group”; it was a revolutionary party with support from the oppressed masses.
A bourgeois government would not eliminate poverty. The US has more poverty than China at this point. Global poverty’s on the rise if you take China out of the statistics. They are the only reason it’s going down. I didn’t point to Jim Jones as the same kind of thing, I just meant don’t believe everyone when they tell you they’re a communist. Honestly Jones probably wasn’t even some random dude who got a following, but an op. I’ll take a look at your sources.
Our Gonzalite friend is wrong about an number of things, but there is real criticism to be made about Deng radically increasing poverty by undercutting the systems installed under Mao that brought poverty to low levels. The “Chinese miracle” was in many respects solving problems that it itself caused and is a sort of liberal historical revisionism, though of course the more contemporary extreme poverty eradication initiative made real headway that was not made under Mao.
The same statistics that say China’s poverty is reducing claim that people under Mao lived in poverty. Poverty is defined as lacking basic needs, and while Mao-era China was still relatively underdeveloped, the people were not poor because they got basic needs met. Deng Xiaoping commodified things that used to be decommodified, ended subsidies for goods, and overall caused inflation of most prices and a decline in wages. Speaking of wages, Deng re-commodified labor-power, and now China has a higher unemployment rate than the US; what sort of socialist society has the purchase and sale of labor-power?! Commodity production is inevitable in underdeveloped socialism, but there are also plenty of de-commodified goods and services; the capitalist-roaders eliminated them. If you’re not a fan of Khrushchev, you cannot support Deng.
Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. Commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private owner-ship of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wageworkers by capitalists exists in the country. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands, and when the workers are bereft of means of production and are compelled to sell their labour power as a commodity.
Poverty is defined as lacking basic needs, and while Mao-era China was still relatively underdeveloped, the people were not poor because they got basic needs met.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one here who is suspicious of the metrics used to prop up the 800 million lifted out of poverty narrative. IIRC the data used to justify the claim is a World Bank report that shows the population making over a certain threshold of income increasing. As you touched on, this data says nothing as to whether or not their needs are actually met.
I’m definitely pro-Mao. Just because I support later leaders’ further improvements to the Chinese people’s wealth doesn’t mean Mao didn’t lay the groundwork and vastly improve from fuedalism. I never said China was socialist, but they’re on their way. Also aren’t you the one who posted the meme that said both leftcoms and libertarians say “capitalism is trade?” The same argument is sort of being made by saying China’s bad for having commodity production. Also here’s a sourced YT comment I saw a while ago that seemed convincing:
spoiler
1 mean, here’s a master post I typically drop in “Is China Socialist” questions, although many of your critiques will not be addressed in it. This IS a complex topic with a thousand facets.
"If we actually want to know if China is socialist or capitalist we have to take a look at the internal dynamics of the country, and it’s clear that the bourgeoisie are not the ones with the dominance on political authority.
So there are several things to establish.
First, is that the public sector dominates over the private, and that the second, is that the public sector actually represents the working masses’ interests. Both have to be established.
If we are Marxists, then we should understand that political authority originates from control over the means of production, and the Chinese state is not just, by far, the largest enterprise in China, but the largest on the entire planet. The biggest company in the world in terms of net revenue is Apple, and yet Apple’s net revenue is not even a tenth of the net revenue of China’s SOEs. No company even comes close.
State-owned industry is an absolute
behemoth in China that towers over everything else.
Often, the counter-argument is to point out that state-owned industry is 40% of the GDP, but private is 60%. But this fails for obvious reasons.
First it ignores that almost none of these are large-scale enterprises. Nearly half of all employment in China is self-employed and about half of businesses are micro-enterprises. Not only is it silly to even suggest something like this should be nationalized, but it’s not even a legitimate threat to the authority of the DOTP. A mom-and-pop shop or someone who is self-employed does not have the capital to actually threaten the authority of the DOTP.
Second, it ignores that, again, there is an enormous gap in even the largest enterprises in China and the SOEs. Chinese state enterprises have a net revenue exceeding $280 billion, the closet is Tencent which has a net revenue of about $35 billion.
Third it ignores that not all industries are equal. Not everyone needs bouncy balls, but most every business needs rubber at
some point, including the bouncy ball manufacturing business. So controlling rubber production gives you much greater influence in the economy than controlling bouncy ball production, since with the former, you’d control something many businesses rely on, while in the latter, you would not.
Fourth, it ignores that there is no private ownership of land. This is pretty massive as is it means any business, even if it is a private business, cannot own the land it is standing on, which allows the government, both national and local, to plan out development by denying land to enterprises it doesn’t think are going to be beneficial to the community, favoring land to ones that are, and also using the rents charged to these businesses to fund public services and infrastructure rather than being pocketed by land lords.
[How the land system with Chinese characteristics affects China’s economic growth](https://www.emerald.com/insight/ content/do/10.1108/CPE-05-2020-0009/ full/html)
Fifth it ignores that there is a spectrum between “private” and “public” and that
many enterprises in China exist between this spectrum. For example, there are forms of soft control in China like opening up party branches within private businesses. Nearly half of all private businesses have party branch within them, and almost every single large enterprise does.
[Influence without Ownership: the Chinese
Communist Party Targets the Private Sector](https://www.institutmontaigne.org/ en/blog/influence-without-ownership-chinese-communist-party-targets-private-sector)
There’s also forms of partial ownership, such as, the public sector owning only a percentage of a private enterprise, such as, 10% of McDonald’s is owned by the public sector in China.
In fact, the amount of money Tencent has pledged to give away freely without even formal taxation, to just donate to the state for social programs, is roughly 3/4th of its entire 2020 profits.
[Tencent Doubles Social Aid] (https:// i.imgur.com/KztMXf6.png)
Insisting that it is the private sector in control when we see things like this just comes off as extremely absurd to me.
Take another example, with COVID recently, and hai the lIC let 1 million+ die while the Chinese government protected its people first, and people who were under lockdown also received free food deliveries and other services like free pet care.
[Xian delivers free groceries to residents in
COVID-19 lockdown](https:// english.news.cn/
20211230/1d0ebadbc0f3449bafcd6716b37f
3eb2/c.html)
The government has also been fighting to reduce inequality, which the GINI coefficient in China has been declining for years now while rising in comparison to the USA. The rural-urban gap has also been closing for over a decade now.
[Gini Indez](https://i.imgur.com/ WflfOEs.png)
[Inequality gap closing in China as rural income rises ](https://news.cgtn.com/news/ 32597a47a597a6333566d54/ share_p.html)
With Evergrande, if it was any capitalist country, the state would’ve bailed Evergrande out. Instead, the state has chosen to expand the influence of state-owned developers instead.
[China property market faces more nationalisation](https://www.reuters.com/ markets/asia/china-property-market-faces-more-nationalisation-2021-12-06/)
China also has a large co-operative sector, in agricultural, roughly half of all rural families are part of a farming cooperative, and part of the Xi administration’s poverty-alleviation program has been to promote the expansion of various kinds of co-operatives to increase the income of the rural poor.
[How Village Co-ops Are Remapping China’s
Rural Communities](https://
www.sixthtone.com/news/1004505/how-village-co-ops-are-remapping-chinas-rural-
communities) & [Xi Jinping turns to Mao Zedong-era system to lift millions of China’s rural poor out of poverty] (https:// www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy
article/2184810/can-china-get-its-farmers-back-track-us400-million-fund-state)
As Mao put it, you can tell if a country is socialist or capitalist by the direction it is moving. China has not only been strengthening co-operative ownership but also state ownership. [Xi Jinping calls for China’s state-owned enterprises to be ‘stronger and bigger’ despite US, EU opposition ](https:// www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/ article/3108288/xi-jinping-calls-chinas-state-owned-enterprises-be-stronger)
Of course, you probably already know that the vast majority of people in China view their government positively. We also see China embracing sustainable development, transforming deserts into forests, and being the biggest investor into green energy in the world, working towards being carbon neutral by 2060.
[Taking China’s pulse] (https://
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/ long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/)
and [How China Turned DEADLY Desert Into Green Forest | China’s Green Wall] (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApSP5apZEfk)
and [These are the strategies behind
China’s ambitious clean energy transition] (https://www.greenbiz.com/article/these-are-strategies-behind-chinas-ambitious-clean-energy-transition)
If it’s possible to have a version of capitalism that places people above profits, that can plan for long-term sustainable development goals, that can invest massively into public industry and infrastructure, where inequality can go down rather that go upwards, where approval ratings for the government are nearly universal, all while not having to go to war or couping any countries, all while maintaining consistent and fast and rapid technological and industrial development, with the standard of living constantly improving…if this is possible, then you’re making capitalism not sound too bad.
If you consider this to be “capitalism” then what do we gain from moving to “socialism” in a real, material sense?"
How’d you find this post? You’re welcome to stay here, our community is a lot better than whatever you’ve got on Quora and IG. Just know most of us don’t support Gonzalo. Just because someone calls themselves communist doesn’t mean they’re worth our support. Should we support Jim Jones? La Rouche? Caleb Maupen? Besides just understanding cults you should understand the line struggle between right and left deviations. It should be clear that the PCP were a pretty far left deviation. I’d rather support a slightly right deviationist China that continues to improve people’s lives and counter US hegemony than a random guerrilla group that killed random people motivated by hatred of people even slightly to the right of them (that failed).
Beside that our ideologies aren’t much different, so I’d hope you’d remain open and converse here.
I searched this site because a sudden rise in traffic to our site, and especially my article which you shared above, came from here. This community doesn’t seem too promising considering all the bourgeois and imperialist myths they believe about the PCP, but I’ll stay here and see how it goes.
The PCP was not a cult like Jim Jones’s group was. There’s a clear difference between a party working to liberate the people in a place where most parties turned electoralist and capitulated to the state, and a government that has turned bourgeois rather than simply being “slightly right deviationist”. The US “improved people’s lives” for quite some time because that’s how development works; China could have continued on the socialist path with a planned economy and worked just fine, just as the Stalin era saw the most massive improvement in development for the USSR, but the bourgeoisie seized power and reversed that trend. The PCP was not a “random guerrilla group”; it was a revolutionary party with support from the oppressed masses.
Here’s a document with even more sources than what I used in my article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16bue8TQo-knWAKlkpuNBnePOs7j7KDh11aDoNa_dPO0/edit
I also have a playlist with some decent documentaries that Bad Empanada would never show: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1otLYuSiLBdsx6Wu0hRxdT_T2RLKpGAY
A bourgeois government would not eliminate poverty. The US has more poverty than China at this point. Global poverty’s on the rise if you take China out of the statistics. They are the only reason it’s going down. I didn’t point to Jim Jones as the same kind of thing, I just meant don’t believe everyone when they tell you they’re a communist. Honestly Jones probably wasn’t even some random dude who got a following, but an op. I’ll take a look at your sources.
Our Gonzalite friend is wrong about an number of things, but there is real criticism to be made about Deng radically increasing poverty by undercutting the systems installed under Mao that brought poverty to low levels. The “Chinese miracle” was in many respects solving problems that it itself caused and is a sort of liberal historical revisionism, though of course the more contemporary extreme poverty eradication initiative made real headway that was not made under Mao.
The same statistics that say China’s poverty is reducing claim that people under Mao lived in poverty. Poverty is defined as lacking basic needs, and while Mao-era China was still relatively underdeveloped, the people were not poor because they got basic needs met. Deng Xiaoping commodified things that used to be decommodified, ended subsidies for goods, and overall caused inflation of most prices and a decline in wages. Speaking of wages, Deng re-commodified labor-power, and now China has a higher unemployment rate than the US; what sort of socialist society has the purchase and sale of labor-power?! Commodity production is inevitable in underdeveloped socialism, but there are also plenty of de-commodified goods and services; the capitalist-roaders eliminated them. If you’re not a fan of Khrushchev, you cannot support Deng.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch03.htm
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one here who is suspicious of the metrics used to prop up the 800 million lifted out of poverty narrative. IIRC the data used to justify the claim is a World Bank report that shows the population making over a certain threshold of income increasing. As you touched on, this data says nothing as to whether or not their needs are actually met.
I’m definitely pro-Mao. Just because I support later leaders’ further improvements to the Chinese people’s wealth doesn’t mean Mao didn’t lay the groundwork and vastly improve from fuedalism. I never said China was socialist, but they’re on their way. Also aren’t you the one who posted the meme that said both leftcoms and libertarians say “capitalism is trade?” The same argument is sort of being made by saying China’s bad for having commodity production. Also here’s a sourced YT comment I saw a while ago that seemed convincing:
spoiler
1 mean, here’s a master post I typically drop in “Is China Socialist” questions, although many of your critiques will not be addressed in it. This IS a complex topic with a thousand facets. "If we actually want to know if China is socialist or capitalist we have to take a look at the internal dynamics of the country, and it’s clear that the bourgeoisie are not the ones with the dominance on political authority.
So there are several things to establish. First, is that the public sector dominates over the private, and that the second, is that the public sector actually represents the working masses’ interests. Both have to be established. If we are Marxists, then we should understand that political authority originates from control over the means of production, and the Chinese state is not just, by far, the largest enterprise in China, but the largest on the entire planet. The biggest company in the world in terms of net revenue is Apple, and yet Apple’s net revenue is not even a tenth of the net revenue of China’s SOEs. No company even comes close. State-owned industry is an absolute
behemoth in China that towers over everything else.
Often, the counter-argument is to point out that state-owned industry is 40% of the GDP, but private is 60%. But this fails for obvious reasons.
First it ignores that almost none of these are large-scale enterprises. Nearly half of all employment in China is self-employed and about half of businesses are micro-enterprises. Not only is it silly to even suggest something like this should be nationalized, but it’s not even a legitimate threat to the authority of the DOTP. A mom-and-pop shop or someone who is self-employed does not have the capital to actually threaten the authority of the DOTP.
Second, it ignores that, again, there is an enormous gap in even the largest enterprises in China and the SOEs. Chinese state enterprises have a net revenue exceeding $280 billion, the closet is Tencent which has a net revenue of about $35 billion.
Third it ignores that not all industries are equal. Not everyone needs bouncy balls, but most every business needs rubber at
some point, including the bouncy ball manufacturing business. So controlling rubber production gives you much greater influence in the economy than controlling bouncy ball production, since with the former, you’d control something many businesses rely on, while in the latter, you would not.
Fourth, it ignores that there is no private ownership of land. This is pretty massive as is it means any business, even if it is a private business, cannot own the land it is standing on, which allows the government, both national and local, to plan out development by denying land to enterprises it doesn’t think are going to be beneficial to the community, favoring land to ones that are, and also using the rents charged to these businesses to fund public services and infrastructure rather than being pocketed by land lords.
[How the land system with Chinese characteristics affects China’s economic growth](https://www.emerald.com/insight/ content/do/10.1108/CPE-05-2020-0009/ full/html)
Fifth it ignores that there is a spectrum between “private” and “public” and that
many enterprises in China exist between this spectrum. For example, there are forms of soft control in China like opening up party branches within private businesses. Nearly half of all private businesses have party branch within them, and almost every single large enterprise does.
[Influence without Ownership: the Chinese Communist Party Targets the Private Sector](https://www.institutmontaigne.org/ en/blog/influence-without-ownership-chinese-communist-party-targets-private-sector) There’s also forms of partial ownership, such as, the public sector owning only a percentage of a private enterprise, such as, 10% of McDonald’s is owned by the public sector in China.
But this form of soft control isn’t just for show. We can see, for example, Alibaba created a party app promoting the Communist Party. [Alibaba is the force behind hit Chinese Communist Party app] (https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-china-alibaba-government/alibaba-is-the-force-behind-hit-chinese-communist-party-app-sources-idUSKCN1Q70Y7) Compare a DOTB like the US to a DOTP like China and the difference is stark. In the USA, Amazon pays $0 taxes. In China, not only do big companies pay taxes, but they “voluntarily” give up enormous amounts of their profits in donations to the state to fund social programs. China’s Tech Giants Are Giving Away Their Money
In fact, the amount of money Tencent has pledged to give away freely without even formal taxation, to just donate to the state for social programs, is roughly 3/4th of its entire 2020 profits. [Tencent Doubles Social Aid] (https:// i.imgur.com/KztMXf6.png) Insisting that it is the private sector in control when we see things like this just comes off as extremely absurd to me. Take another example, with COVID recently, and hai the lIC let 1 million+ die while the Chinese government protected its people first, and people who were under lockdown also received free food deliveries and other services like free pet care. [Xian delivers free groceries to residents in COVID-19 lockdown](https:// english.news.cn/ 20211230/1d0ebadbc0f3449bafcd6716b37f 3eb2/c.html)
The government has also been fighting to reduce inequality, which the GINI coefficient in China has been declining for years now while rising in comparison to the USA. The rural-urban gap has also been closing for over a decade now. [Gini Indez](https://i.imgur.com/ WflfOEs.png) [Inequality gap closing in China as rural income rises ](https://news.cgtn.com/news/ 32597a47a597a6333566d54/ share_p.html) With Evergrande, if it was any capitalist country, the state would’ve bailed Evergrande out. Instead, the state has chosen to expand the influence of state-owned developers instead. [China property market faces more nationalisation](https://www.reuters.com/ markets/asia/china-property-market-faces-more-nationalisation-2021-12-06/) China also has a large co-operative sector, in agricultural, roughly half of all rural families are part of a farming cooperative, and part of the Xi administration’s poverty-alleviation program has been to promote the expansion of various kinds of co-operatives to increase the income of the rural poor.
[How Village Co-ops Are Remapping China’s Rural Communities](https:// www.sixthtone.com/news/1004505/how-village-co-ops-are-remapping-chinas-rural- communities) & [Xi Jinping turns to Mao Zedong-era system to lift millions of China’s rural poor out of poverty] (https:// www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy article/2184810/can-china-get-its-farmers-back-track-us400-million-fund-state) As Mao put it, you can tell if a country is socialist or capitalist by the direction it is moving. China has not only been strengthening co-operative ownership but also state ownership. [Xi Jinping calls for China’s state-owned enterprises to be ‘stronger and bigger’ despite US, EU opposition ](https:// www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/ article/3108288/xi-jinping-calls-chinas-state-owned-enterprises-be-stronger) Of course, you probably already know that the vast majority of people in China view their government positively. We also see China embracing sustainable development, transforming deserts into forests, and being the biggest investor into green energy in the world, working towards being carbon neutral by 2060. [Taking China’s pulse] (https:// news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/ long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/) and [How China Turned DEADLY Desert Into Green Forest | China’s Green Wall] (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApSP5apZEfk) and [These are the strategies behind China’s ambitious clean energy transition] (https://www.greenbiz.com/article/these-are-strategies-behind-chinas-ambitious-clean-energy-transition)
If it’s possible to have a version of capitalism that places people above profits, that can plan for long-term sustainable development goals, that can invest massively into public industry and infrastructure, where inequality can go down rather that go upwards, where approval ratings for the government are nearly universal, all while not having to go to war or couping any countries, all while maintaining consistent and fast and rapid technological and industrial development, with the standard of living constantly improving…if this is possible, then you’re making capitalism not sound too bad. If you consider this to be “capitalism” then what do we gain from moving to “socialism” in a real, material sense?"