The political compass is an attempt to reduce incredibly complicated political questions into two simple lines, and people accept it because it aligns with oversimplified narratives and cultural preconceptions.
“Liberty” and “authority” have little meaning beyond “good” and “bad.” If authority is defined more rigorously, or if we use more neutral terms like “centralization” or public vs private, then it becomes a lot less clear that what we’re talking about is contrary to “liberty.” The private sector, and private individuals, can be just as restrictive of liberty.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is the American Civil War. The southerners were the champions of decentralization, they spoke constantly about how they were fighting for “liberty” against the supposed tyranny of the northerners - and the reason they wanted “states’ rights” and decentralization is that they would be able to keep people enslaved. It was big, centralized government, that evil “authoritarian” force imposing it’s authority that resulted in a greater degree of liberty. But that is not just some freak exception.
If someone can’t go out at night without fear of being attacked, that person is no more “free” to go out than if they feared legal repercussions. Governments are, at their worst, no different from a criminal organization, and yet there is this tendency to assign special status to restrictions imposed by the law, rather than being on the same level as restrictions imposed by private individuals or organizations.
And again, we can see how “big government” or “authoritarianism” can increase liberty in the context of regulations, of pollution, of food safety, and of untested drugs. If I can trust regulators to stop a restaurant from serving anything unsafe, then I’m free to order anything off the menu, whereas if not, then everything’s a gamble and I might feel restricted to foods I expect to be “safe,” if I don’t avoid the restaurant entirely.
There once was a time when states viewed things like murder as a personal dispute between families, and didn’t generally get involved. This led to all kinds of generational feuds, with people killing each other over a long forgotten dispute between their great-grandfathers. Was that “liberty?” Is that something we should idealize and try to return to?
I’m sure there are people who will read this as me being “pro-authoritarian” and ignoring all the bad things done by states. But that’s missing the point. The point is not that centralization or state power are always good, the point is that it’s not automatically bad. Having a knee-jerk reaction against it is just oversimplifying complicated issues, and doing so in a way that lots of powerful people want you to do. Because the ruling class understands that they can wield private institutions and privatization just as they can wield public institutions.
You can’t just blindly apply an idealist ideological framework of “anti-authoritarianism” to every problem and expect that to produce good results. You have to look at things on a case-by-case basis, applying class analysis.
China is socialist and has been since October 1st 1949.
counterpoint, no, not even close
Explain why is china not (never even close to being) socialist in your mind?
Because workers doesn’t control the means of production? Unless you make some massive and stupid logical leaps, it’s not fucking socialist
What would count, in your view, as workers controlling the means of production?
Because if your answer is every workplace instantly becoming a self-managed island with no state, no party, no planning authority, no contradictions, no markets, no hierarchy, no technical authority, and no transition period, then you are not describing socialism. You are describing an abstract fantasy of communism detached from history and honestly reality.
Socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and communism. It still contains contradictions inherited from capitalism: classes, class struggle, law, administration, uneven development, commodity forms, wages, technical hierarchy, bureaucracy, and limited market mechanisms. The question is not whether contradictions exist. Of course they do. The question is which class holds political power, which class commands the decisive levers of the economy, and in what direction society is moving.
China has been socialist since October 1st 1949 because the old landlord-bureaucrat-comprador state was destroyed and replaced by a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class through the Communist Party (over 100M members, 1/14 people). Landlord power was destroyed. Foreign imperialist domination was broken. The commanding heights were brought under public ownership and state direction. The new state was built to suppress reaction, defend sovereignty, develop the productive forces, and transform society.
Also, the state is not “the government.” Government, broadly, means administration, coordination, planning, record-keeping, infrastructure management, public decision-making, and the organisation of social production. That does not disappear under communism. Hospitals, transport systems, power grids, agriculture, housing, logistics, education, science, and industry still need coordination.
The state, more specifically, is government as an instrument of class rule. It is the organised force by which one class suppresses another. Under capitalism, even the most democratic republic is a dictatorship of capital because capital controls production, finance, land, media, lobbying, courts, policy formation, and the basic conditions of social life. You can vote every few years, but you do not vote on whether banks, factories, logistics networks, mines, ports, data infrastructure, and energy grids serve profit or social need.
Under socialism, the state does not vanish overnight. It changes class character. It becomes a tool of proletarian rule against old exploiting classes, new bourgeois elements, comprador forces, imperialist pressure, corruption, sabotage, and restorationist tendencies. Only when class antagonisms are abolished does the state, as a tool of class domination, wither away. Government as social administration remains, but it ceases to be a state in the strict sense because there is no antagonistic class left to suppress.
That is also why “socialism means no hierarchy or authority” is infantile. Engels already dealt with this. Large-scale production requires authority in the technical and organisational sense. A hospital cannot run on the idea that the surgeon, nurse, cleaner, patient, and administrator all have equal authority over surgery. A nuclear power plant cannot run as a vibes-based commune where everyone takes turns deciding reactor procedure. Railways, ports, mines, aerospace, flood control, public health, and defence all require expertise, discipline, command structures, and binding decisions.
The issue is not whether authority exists. The issue is what kind of authority, rooted in which class power, serving which social purpose, and subject to what supervision. Authority as such is not the problem. Class exploitation is.
In China, the bourgeoisie exists, but it does not rule as a class. Capitalists can own firms, make profits, and accumulate wealth within limits (as quickly advancing the productive forces serves social goals), but they do not command the state, the army, the land, the central banking system, or the strategic direction of the economy. They do not sit above the Communist Party as sovereign power. When they conflict with the long-term interests of socialist construction, they are disciplined, subordinated, investigated, broken up, or politically neutralised.
That is not how bourgeois dictatorship works. In a bourgeois dictatorship, the state serves capital. In China, capital is permitted to exist and develop under conditions set by the socialist state, because developing productive forces, technology, infrastructure, industry, and national strength is not optional in a world still dominated by imperialism.
People act as though China could press the communism button in 1949 after the century of humiliation, semi-colonial dismemberment, warlordism, Japanese invasion, civil war, mass poverty, illiteracy, and productive backwardness. That is childish. Socialism does not abolish scarcity by decree. It inherits a real society at a real level of development inside a hostile capitalist world system. If a socialist country remains poor, weak, dependent, and militarily vulnerable, it gets strangled, sanctioned, invaded, or colour-revolutioned.
China’s use of markets after reform and opening was not a restoration of bourgeois rule. It was a controlled and dangerous method of developing the productive forces under the leadership of a socialist state. Dangerous, yes. Full of contradictions, yes. But “contradictions exist” is not the same as “capitalism has been restored.”
Capitalist states across Europe and America impose austerity while telling people there is no money for housing, healthcare, rail, wages, or basic infrastructure; China, without funding itself through imperial plunder, lifted over 800 million people out of extreme poverty (excluding China global poverty is actually worsening), and saw the most successful and equal land reform project in history. A capitalist state does not build HSR at world-historical scale because of its immense social value, even when many lines have little or no profit on the books.
And (I know what you’re about to say) no, bureaucrats or administrators are not automatically a ruling class because they administer. Class is decided by relation to the means of production. Can they privately appropriate surplus as owners? Can they sell, inherit, and transfer productive property as capital? Can they reproduce themselves as a property-owning class independent of the state and above society? If not, they are not a separate ruling class. They may become privileged, corrupt, revisionist, or bureaucratic. They may become a site of class struggle. But that is not the same as being a bourgeoisie.
The Chinese state is not withering away tomorrow because the conditions for that do not exist. The state withers away when class antagonisms disappear, and class antagonisms cannot disappear in one country while global capitalism and imperialism still exist. So long as hostile bourgeois states, finance capital, military encirclement, sanctions, comprador forces, separatist projects, colour revolution networks, etc. exist, the proletarian state remains necessary. Giving up the state before the bourgeoisie is defeated globally would not be more socialist. It would be suicide.
The end goal is the abolition of class society. But you do not abolish class society by pretending class enemies no longer exist, and you do not abolish administration by pretending complex production can run without coordination. You abolish class rule by using proletarian state power to suppress reaction, develop production, socialise the economy further, reduce material inequalities, discipline capital, and expand the real capacity of ordinary people to govern society.
That is what China has been doing, unevenly and with contradictions, since 1949. China built sovereignty where there was semi-colonial subjugation. Industrialised on a world-historical scale. Eliminated extreme poverty. Built infrastructure, education, healthcare capacity, science, technology, and productive power at enormous speed. Maintained public ownership and planning over the commanding heights. Kept the Communist Party, not the bourgeoisie, at the centre of political authority. Repeatedly disciplined capital when capital threatened social stability or party leadership.
So no, “China has markets” is not an argument. “China has billionaires” is not an argument. “China has inequality” is not an argument. “China has hierarchy” is not an argument. These are observations of contradictions and organisational necessities inside a socialist transition. They only become arguments if you can show that the bourgeoisie rules the state, commands the commanding heights, controls the army, determines national policy, and has turned the Communist Party into its political instrument.
That is the actual standard.
China is socialist because the proletarian-led state holds political power, commands the strategic economy, subordinates capital to national and social development, suppresses reactionary threats, and continues the long transition out of capitalism under conditions of imperialist encirclement and uneven development.
This is really thought provoking, thank you for sharing. I disagree fundamentally with a lot of claims stated as settled fact such as “engels has already dealt with this” and ok, I’ll accept that an ML would believe this, but that’s more of the type of tautological thinking that just can’t be escaped when discussing anything with state socialists.
That said, at the end of the day this is just a really long way of saying “China will become actually socialist eventually, trust me bro.” I don’t see anything here that actually proves the CCP has demonstrated worker control, but rather redefines worker control as whatever the CCP is doing, cuz reasons. “capitalists get punished sometimes” ok bro, do the workers control the means of production? Are the workers at foxconn secretly calling the shots?
I should also mention a total lack of understanding of concepts outside of MLism/MLMism. Nobody serious is saying abolishing hierarchy or authority means people are just going to take turns running the nuclear power plant. You are repeating the same reactionary talking points capitalist media uses against communism itself. that without bosses, cops, and centralized state authority, society instantly collapses into chaos. The way you frame stateless communism is basically indistinguishable from capitalist propaganda. No one who thinks this way will ever relegate power to the working class, they’ll just redefine who the working class is to include themselves and not the actual workers.
I understand why this stuff is seductive, I just wish you guys would contend with material reality.
You still have not answered the basic question: what, concretely, would count as workers controlling the means of production?
Not vibes. Not “not that.” Not “the CPC does not count because I dislike it.” What institutional form? What mechanism? What class power? What system of production, planning, administration, defence, logistics, and enforcement? How would it be built, how would it function, and how would it defend itself in a world still dominated by imperialist states, sanctions, finance capital, military blocs, colour revolution networks, and global supply chains?
Because so far your position is just “China is not socialist because I have defined socialism as whatever China is not.”
Calling my position tautological does not make it tautological. Engels on authority is not magic or scripture. It is simply a very simple point grounded in reality: modern production requires coordination, discipline, technical authority, administration, and binding decisions. If you think Engels is wrong, identify the flaw. Do not just sneer at “state socialists” and move on.
You also keep collapsing socialism and communism into the same thing. They are not the same thing. Communism is the higher stage, where class antagonisms have been abolished and the state, as an instrument of class rule, has withered away. Socialism is the transition toward that. It still contains contradictions inherited from capitalism. It still has law, administration, technical hierarchy, uneven development, wages, commodity forms, markets in certain forms, and class struggle. Pointing at a contradiction inside socialism and yelling “see, not communism” is not analysis. It is category confusion.
China is not “going to become socialist eventually.” China is socialist, and socialism is the transition toward communism.
You also use “CCP,” which already tells me how much of this is coming from Western discourse rather than actual engagement. It is the CPC. And no, worker control does not mean every individual worker at every individual workplace directly “calls the shots” in isolation. That is not social ownership. That is petty-producer fantasy projected onto modern industry. The working class controls production politically through its state, its party, its planning institutions, its mass organisations, its public ownership of the commanding heights, its land system, its development plans, its cadre system, and its ability to subordinate private capital to national and social goals.
In a capitalist state, capital rules. In China, capital exists but does not rule. Capitalists do not command the army. They do not own the land. They do not control the central bank. They do not dictate the five-year plans. They do not sit above the Party. They do not get to form an independent bourgeois political bloc and take state power. When they attempt to step above the socialist state, they are disciplined, investigated, broken up, disappeared from political life, or forced back into line. That is not bourgeois dictatorship. That is capital being contained inside a socialist transition.
Also the CPC is not an external clique floating above Chinese society. It is a proletarian vanguard party rooted in the organised working masses, built to concentrate their long-term political interests into state power. Through the mass line, it gathers the scattered ideas, needs, grievances, and experiences of the people, process them through revolutionary theory and practical investigation, then return them as policy, campaigns, planning, correction, and mobilisation. Whole-process people’s democracy is not liberal ballot worship where capital owns the media, funds the parties, writes the policy, and then lets you choose between its approved managers every few years. It is participation through congresses, consultative bodies, local elections, workplace and residential committees, mass organisations, party channels, cadre evaluation, public consultation, supervision, petitioning, anti-corruption discipline, and policy feedback across the entire governing process. Pretending it is simply “the party doing whatever it wants” is lazy. The point is that the working class does not rule as atomised individuals shouting orders inside each workplace. It rules through organised political power, through a party and state capable of planning, disciplining capital, defending sovereignty, and transforming society at scale.
You accuse me of not understanding anarchist, left-communist, Trotskyite, etc. arguments. I understand them. I just think most of them collapse into idealism the moment they are forced to explain actual production, actual defence, actual state power, actual imperialism, actual scarcity, actual uneven development, and actual social administration. It is very easy to denounce all existing socialist projects from the safety of abstraction. It is much harder to explain how your alternative would feed, house, defend, educate, electrify, industrialise, medically care for, and coordinate hundreds of millions or billions of people under real global conditions.
Your claim that I am repeating capitalist propaganda by saying authority is necessary is absurd. Capitalist propaganda says workers cannot rule. I am saying workers can rule, but rule is still rule. Administration is still administration. Production is still production. Authority does not become reactionary because it exists. It becomes reactionary when it serves exploiting classes. A planner’s authority in coordinating national infrastructure is not capitalism. A proletarian state suppressing bourgeois restoration is not capitalism. Your problem is that you treat authority itself as the enemy instead of asking which class it serves.
Again stateless communism does not mean society without coordination. It means society without class rule. Government in the administrative sense remains: planning, coordination, allocation, infrastructure, health, education, production, logistics. What withers away is the state as a coercive instrument of one class suppressing another, because classes themselves have been abolished. That cannot happen in one isolated country while imperialism still exists globally. If a socialist state lays down its coercive power before the bourgeoisie is defeated, it does not become more communist. It gets destroyed.
So again: what is your concrete alternative?
How do workers control chip fabrication? How do they coordinate national rail? How do they run hospitals and nuclear plants? How do they defend against sanctions, invasion, sabotage, capital flight, and colour revolution? How do they supply insulin, dialysis machines, antibiotics, prosthetics, wheelchairs, public housing, flood control, food logistics, and power grids? How do they prevent the re-emergence of capital? How do they deal with hostile imperialist encirclement?
I have the answer and you’re not going to like it. It’s through their control of a proletarian state.
“I wish you would contend with material reality” is rich coming from someone whose entire argument is refusing to define socialism, refusing to define worker control, refusing to explain the transition, refusing to explain defence, refusing to explain complex production, and refusing to distinguish contradictions inside socialism from capitalist restoration.
You have not disproven that China is socialist. You have only shown that your standard for socialism is an imaginary society with no transition, no state power, no coercion, no authority, no contradictions, no hostile world system, and no actual mechanism for production at modern scale.
It’s extremely obvious but you can’t agree with it because it proves that China is definitely not that.
Not even remotely true and a purposely poor understanding of what I’ve already said. Either way, if china is “socialist” according to your definition, I just don’t give a shit about that fucking unprincipled version of socialism. I don’t want it, I don’t think it will lead to communism. It’s just a bourgeois state with red aesthetics. Spare me the excuses, your doctrine is flawed and you can’t contend with that.
I know you’re aware of the alternatives, but I’m certain you’re totally ignorant, willfully or from intellectual laziness/dishonesty. You’ve already somewhat proven this point by saying that having a stateless society is akin to people taking turns running the nuclear power plant. You don’t believe in communism dude.
again, proving my point - you simply don’t believe communism is possible. And once again you’re repeating anti communist propaganda.
There are entire theories that describe exactly this, and it would be pointless to replicate them verbatim here. ML/MLMism isn’t the only leftist theory that exists, you know that right?
No, cnt-fai I would say was much closer to socialism than china ever has been. and no, but neither have you proven china is socialist, unless you contort everything to fit that definition. And again I must impress, you seem to believe that communism is actually impossible. Everything you’re arguing against is actual communism. You’re just making excuses.
Obvious to who? Can’t agree with what? You still have not said what “that” is. You keep saying China is not worker control, but you refuse to define what worker control actually means in institutional, political, economic, and military terms. Not slogans. Not negation. What form of ownership? What organs of power? What planning mechanism? What enforcement mechanism? What defence against restoration, sanctions, invasion, sabotage, and capital flight? If it is so obvious, state it clearly.
That is at least honest. You are not arguing that China fails the Marxist definition of socialism. You are saying you reject that definition because you prefer another one that you still will not explain. Fine, but then stop pretending this is a material analysis of China. It is not. It is you rejecting the socialist transition because it contains state power, authority, contradiction, uneven development, and the use of controlled markets.
You call China a bourgeois state with red aesthetics, so prove it. Which section of the bourgeoisie rules China? Through what institutions? How does it command the army? How does it control the land? How does it dictate the central bank, the five-year plans, the SOEs, the party-state, the courts, and national development strategy? How does it reproduce itself as a ruling class above the CPC? How does it turn private wealth into sovereign political power? Because in an actual bourgeois state, capital rules the state. In China, capital exists under the state and is disciplined when it steps outside the boundaries set by socialist construction.
You are not more principled because you reject every existing socialist project for failing to be the finished form of communism. That is not principle. That is purity politics detached from the problem of transition. To quote Jones Manoel : According to Perry Anderson there is a separation between Western and Eastern Marxism, and Western Marxism is basically a kind of Marxism which has, as a key characteristic, never exercised political power. It is a Marxism that has, more and more frequently, concerned itself with philosophical and aesthetic issues. It has pulled back, for example, from criticism of political economy and the problem of the conquest of political power. More and more it has taken a historic distance from the concrete experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba and so forth. This western Marxism considers itself to be superior to eastern Marxism because it hasn’t tarnished Marxism by transforming it into an ideology of the State like, for example, Soviet Marxism, and it has never been authoritarian, totalitarian or violent. This Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth — this is a very important point. Wherever a victorious socialist revolution has taken place in the West, like Cuba, it is much more closely associated with the so-called eastern Marxism than with this western Marxism produced in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and parts of South America. This Marxism is proud of its purity, and this is the first elemental characteristic that derives from Christianity.
Name the alternative and explain it. This vague hand-waving is useless. “There are theories” is not an argument. I have read anarchist, left-communist, Trotskyist, syndicalist, council communist, and autonomist arguments. I reject most of them because they collapse the moment they are forced to deal with actual state power, actual imperialism, actual war, actual scarcity, actual uneven development, actual logistics, and actual complex production. If your alternative is better, explain how it works.
And stop twisting my point about stateless communism. I did not say communism means people take turns running a nuclear plant. I said your treatment of authority collapses into that nonsense if you cannot distinguish class rule from technical and administrative authority. The state and government are not identical. The state is the coercive instrument of class rule. It withers away when class antagonisms are abolished. Government in the administrative sense remains: planning, coordination, production, logistics, health, education, infrastructure, allocation, safety, and public administration. Communism is not the abolition of coordination. It is the abolition of class rule.
I believe in communism. I just do not believe it can be wished into existence by pretending the transition is unnecessary.
No, I believe communism is possible when capitalism is overcome globally and the material basis for class society has been abolished. Until then, socialism is the transition. That transition requires proletarian state power because the bourgeoisie does not disappear when you declare it abolished. Imperialism does not stop being violent because you announce stateless communism. Sanctions, invasion, sabotage, comprador forces, separatism, capital flight, technological dependency, and military encirclement do not vanish because you find authority distasteful.
This is where your politics becomes fantasy. You treat the means necessary to defend and develop the revolution as proof that the revolution is fake. By that logic, any revolution that survives reality has already betrayed itself.
I know. The issue is not whether other theories exist. The issue is whether they work. So stop gesturing vaguely at “entire theories” and state your actual position. What is the superior model? How does it seize power? How does it defend itself? How does it organise production? How does it prevent bourgeois restoration? How does it coordinate chip fabrication, rail, ports, energy, hospitals, agriculture, housing, medicine, disability care, and military defence? How does it function at the scale of hundreds of millions or billions of people? How does it survive imperialist encirclement?
If your answer is “go read theory,” then you have no argument here. I am not asking whether books exist. I am asking what your politics can actually do in the world.
The CNT-FAI is a perfect example of what I mean. It may appeal to you aesthetically because it looks closer to your ideal form (which you have yet to elaborate on in any meaningful way), but what did it actually achieve historically? a durable socialist transition? It did not consolidate state power. It did not defeat fascism. It did not survive imperialist and reactionary pressure. It did not industrialise a poor country. It did not lift hundreds of millions from poverty. It did not build a sovereign development model. It did not construct an enduring workers’ state capable of defending revolutionary gains over generations. It was heroic in places, but heroism is not the same as a viable path to communism.
A form that briefly looks purer but cannot survive is not “closer to socialism” in any serious historical sense. It is closer to your preference. That is different.
Communism is the end goal. Socialism is the transition toward it. You cannot skip the transition by denouncing every actual attempt to carry it out as “red capitalism.” If you want to learn Chinese, you do not start at HSK6. If someone is not yet at HSK6, that does not mean they are not learning Chinese. It means there is a process between the starting point and the goal. Society is no different. You do not get from semi-colonial poverty, imperialist domination, underdevelopment, and class society to communism by pressing a magic button.
China is socialist because the proletarian-led state holds political power, commands the strategic economy, controls the commanding heights, subordinates capital to national development, maintains public ownership of land, plans development, disciplines the bourgeoisie, defends sovereignty, and works through the contradictions inherited from capitalism under global imperialist pressure.
Also if you have figured out how to go from the present reality of global capitalism, imperialist violence, scarcity, uneven development, technological dependency, sanctions, militarised borders, and class struggle straight into pure end-stage communism, then by all means, press the communism button. The reason you have not is obvious: there is no button. There is only transition, struggle, state power, production, defence, planning, contradiction, and the hard work of building communism out of the world capitalism leaves behind. Pretending otherwise is not revolutionary. It is contrarian wrecker politics.