The far-right populist Alternative for Germany party rejects a values-based foreign policy, just as much as it rejects NATO and the US. That approach has attracted the attention of Beijing.
China cooperates with everyone. It’s a pretty major point of contention among tankies; on the one hand it sucks when you’re backing fascists, but on the other hand, at least China isn’t going around warring and couping foreign governments (except the one mistake in Vietnam).
Yes, sure. It seems hypocritical to me to say, on the one hand, that there is no political difference between the yankies bombing Yemeni children directly, vs giving the Saudis the bombs to drop, and then on the other hand, say that there is a difference between China supporting fascists who murder children (i.e. Israel or the Apartheid goverment), vs actually murdering those people themselves. I’m not saying that you are defending this, but it strikes me as a weird mental gymnastic were some ‘tankies’ (or whatever term you want to use, no normative judgement intended) will engage in basically some classic liberalism in order to let China off the hook on this front.
We should also mention the Khymer Rouge. Fascist might not be the correct term here, but it was politically equivalent in terms of how destructive, bloody and reactionary it was.
Israel is fascist. There is no excuse, by the nature of fascism, for supporting it. Ever. Yet China is happy to fund both the Israeli army and the West Bank administration.
Again, people can’t have their cake and eat it too. You can’t both say (i) profoundly reactionary as Russia is, Ukraine is more deeply fascicized and that as an immediate consequence of that, there should be a preference for the war ending on Russia’s terms; and (ii) that China may be funding fascists, but this is understandable and justifiable in the context. Okay. So then what are the criteria and conditions here apart from biased vibes to decide when critical support in these extreme cases is justified or not? What’s the line? I know I have my own ideas about this, but it’s often difficult to see what other peoples’ are.
It’s should go without saying that China’s foreign policy, including during the Maoist period, has been by far one of its most reactionary aspects. Once again, the Sino-Soviet split was a historical tragedy and reflects the challenge for communists of avoiding finding themselves in post-revolutionary situations in which their politics becomes nationalist due to them coming to identify their interests with those of the traditional nation state as a matter of reality and pragmatic necessity.
Yeah as I said, Chinese Cold War foreign policy is a pretty contentious subject even amongst China fans and you won’t find many if any here supporting it. Clearly significant mistakes were made.
Modern day Chinese policy is a bit harder to judge. I’m not sure what the nature of China and Israel’s relationship is; does it go further than simply trade? Regardless I would say they still remain the best of the 21stC superpowers just because they aren’t engaging in open conflict, but no policy is perfect. Secondly I’d say that China’s stance of ‘respect and work with any state who respects us’ is more principled than the US’s selective list of designated friends and enemies; China works with Israel because they work with everyone, for better or worse, while the US works with Israel because they ideologically support Israel and its goals. I guess materially the result could be the same regardless of intention so maybe that doesn’t matter?
What is the difference between a mistake, and unfortunate necessities? Why are lesser-evil arguments not theoretical mistakes on our part when we make them about China?
I’m not disagreeing with what you’ve said about how China rationalizes their policies, but my point is that, as a massive obligation of all Marxists, we need to critically examine it both analytically and normatively.
The intention is important because it’s relevant to understanding how China will act in the future.
For instance, if revolutionary situations emerge in the rest of the world, will China actively support them?
China has showed little to no interest in the contemporary era in supporting radical movements. I agree that they may be right to do this. There is perhaps a ‘socialism in one country’ calculation which goes beyond the Stalinist one (as Stalinist Russia did continue to support revolutionary movements, tho massively shit the bed in the case of China). Perhaps it is the correct one. But it does introduce the fear that they may never change this position, including in revolutionary scenarios when it would be in the interest of the world proletariat for them to do so.
We can go back to my previous comment to note that it goes further than trade, and depends what they are trading. China is not a group of students. If they boycot Israel or just don’t trade with it, it has a bigger effect, and will not contribue, indirect as it may or may not be, to the active repression of Palestinians in an area that is one of the most important for politicala and ant-colonial struggle in the current world.
I think the issue goes deeper than mistakes. Vulgar marxists often seem to judge things either ‘mistakes’ or ‘determined deterministically by their historical conditions, so stop moralizing about it’ based on their vibes towards the choice in question; mostly because they havent actually properly thought through and analyzed as Marxists the relationship between normative thought and judgement, and explanation in the context of historical materialism (which we can understand to mean here, in a relatively minimal and non-metaphysical sense, as simply a theory of social reality or phenemenon which aims to explain them on the basis of class, and how the latter determines the control and distribution of the economic surplus and other social relations in virtue of how the class relations organize and are influenced by transformations between the classes and between them and the forces of production). So you often see some people act or speak as if any use of normative concepts is ‘idealism’ (whatever they happen to mean here, which often seems to fluctuate incoherently), and cite out of context and reductively the quote where Marx says that communism is not an ideal to be established but a real movement of history. Ofc, even beyond the context, Marxism is not a religious dogma. It is not a cult. It is the proletarian stage of human enlightenment and a continuation of the scientific method in its first real application to the social, hence to itself, which in term influences itself, thus the world, thus itself in term and so on (whereby the mind-bending aspects of dialectics in the social context). Marx himself, and all of us, and any Marxist, when you read about their lives, and first and foremost motivated to political radicalism not based on some metaphysical revelation or scientifc realization of the dialectic of the movements of history (athough perhaps this is the more advanced view which develops later). It is based on the experience of oppression, exploitation, abuse, repression, violence, coercion and alienation, which reflect something not coherent with our own material interests. What matters normatively, in a concrete and experiential sense, are the material consequences that affect the majority of people. Experiences of justice are a part of this. Political thought decisions require necessarily normative (thus ethical or moral) forms of thought, though the latter don’t exhaust the former. But we need to be able to respond when people ask ‘why should we have communism/socialism/anarchism’? And they are going to what normative arguments in terms of how that kind of society will be more beneficial for them and the people they care about. If fascism was a more likely ‘real movement’ of history I would still oppose it and hopefully be willing to die fighting it than to simply say ‘okay well history has spoken’. The reason why there is a movement of history towards the conditions of socialism and communism is because they are, from the point of view of socio-historical evolution of the species, more advanced, efficient, beneficial ways of organizing society. Societies evolve into new forms based on their tensions, instabilities and internal dynamics, and those which have the historical advantage, as capitalism did when it emerged due to its greater powers of production and control, will often take a historical lead. We’ll see if China can do this. But socialism is a normative necessity, not a metaphysical necessity, although the two are linked in virtue of my last comment.
Btw I’m not saying at all that you are doing the above ‘vulgar marxism’, just highlighting it as a relevant topic of discussion. Just to be clear that I’m not attacking you here.
Chinese foreign policy was definitely, I agree, filled with actual mistakes. But if we put in the context of the Cold War and the increasing revisionism of the USSR, the hostility of the latter towards China, and the fact that the interests of the CPC were now tied to those of a nation-state structure, it forces us to realise the difficulty of determining the historically progressive policies when there is an immense temptation to identity those with the more spatially and temporally localized ones of the nation state one happens to control.
Its not about universal values at all but about what the Chinese People want and what the party determined is the interests of their communist goals. I don’t love that China treats Israel as anything other than the fascist government it is, but the biggest difference is locality/direct influence. Russia is directly affected by the fascists at their border, because their fascism is directed eastward. China isn’t impacted by the Israeli fascism and therefore has no direct interests.
Maybe you call this classic liberalism, but the analysis here begins in a materialist position. China just takes the very minimal-conflict path within their material position. This means that great evils occurring elsewhere do not trump their need to develop and become strong enough to become communist. Once those evils are aimed towards them, they react and sometimes not perfectly, but in the way which is protectionist. Hopefully, from their example, we can learn to be better at exporting revolutions like the USSR but without destroying ourselves, like the USSR allowed itself to be destroyed (the phrasing here isn’t meant to indicate systemic intent, but it wasn’t prevented obviously). I hope we can be better at internationalism than China but they’re surviving and influencing the world while every other communist led country has been marred by a sort of irrelevance to the rest of the world if they didn’t get destroyed.
I don’t know how many times this needs to be said but I’ll say it again: Marxism is a univeralist (at least applied to human history and societies) scientific theory and set of revolutionary normative principles of thought and action that emerged in modern Europe as the Proletarian stage of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
If people want to do historical relativism of value based on nationalist considerations, then they’re basically a postmodern fascist whose view is identical to the basis of Dugin’s ideology. Dugin himself thinks that’s he’s synthesized and gone beyond liberal capitalism, communism and fascism here, by identifying the material interests of individual people’s with their national identity. Ofc this is just postmodern strasserism.
There are also several distinct questions here: firstly to what extent the Chinese people have actual democratic control over the CPC and the PRC, which I’d say is little, and which is different to whether or not the policies of the CPC are in their interest (to a great degree, I’d say yes), and is also different to the question of whether or not they have objectively high approval ratings (also genuinely very high compared to any other society that comes to mind).
I agree with you that there is a locality/directness factor that is imporant, but the two examples are not fully analogous because in the one case we are talking about whether Russia’s invasion is understanding from the pov of Russia’s interests, whereas in the other we are not talking about invasion, but about whether China should be supporting fascists. It answers why China might be excused from not intervening in Ukraine more directly but it doesn’t answer why they should be economically supporting Israel. Ofc, perhaps they want economic leverage to eventually pull Israel away from the US orbit based on Irsael’s perception of its own interests. I don’t know. I’m not saying we should unilaterally and unequivocally condemn China on a purely detached ‘moralist’ basis here. The final judgement has to be in terms of whether or not their actions contribute positively or negatively in the long-term to world communist revolution.
The way you’ve phrased it would suggest that China’s interests are those of the realist modern nation-state. These are inevitably part of them, but China is not the nation state. The latter is the state of the society, which is part of but not identical to the society itself. The Chinese working classes interests are ultimately those of a transition to socialism and world-revolution. Your phrasing also suggests that Israel is not in their direct interests. I think you need to make clearer what you mean by direct interest. Do you mean no interest at all if not direct? Or can they still be of indirect interest if not direct? But Israel is a bulwark of American influence in the middle east and key source of black ops and intelligence operations. No-one is better at killing radicals than Israel. It is also in the interest of China as a society, again, to contribute to a world revolutionary situation. How is the Chinese government doing this? If so, is it intentional? If not, then why is this not a problem, given that intentions are our guide to what China’s power structure would do in any future potentially revolutionary situation. If they were not an interest at all, then they wouldn’t be trading and helping the IDF to arm itself.
This is important because communism is not, I repeat not, possible without a world revolution.
I’m saying that the mental manouver justifying the position in one that is common in liberalism. I’m not even necessarily saying it’s wrong. But I’m asking for clarification why it’s justified to make that move when talking and thinking about China, and not about other states. Which states are not reasoning in terms of their materialist position? They all are, more or less, when looked at from a Marxist pov. This is explanation. It’s not justification. Justification in the Marxist revolution is always, first and foremost, what most likely contributes in the long-term to a world-proletarian revolution. This is always the end goal (although the end goal of the revolution is the production of conditions for real fulfilling and ethical life and advancement of the species).
Just replying to your splitting it into 3 questions: this is in direct opposition to democratic centralism and is a liberal absurdity to think that these should be considered separately. It doesn’t really impact the rest of your comment though, so that’s below.
Also Marxism is a universalism based in a scientific approach, not based in a set of principles i think. Unless you mean by principles here: dialectical approach and materialist basis.
By direct and indirect, I mean primarily that its immediate. I should use that word, and that’s a good critique of my phrasing for sure. But it’s immediacy does not negate the eventual interest, a direct but not immediate interest, in revolution in Israel. I mean I can forgive eventuality for immediacy if this is part of the scientific learning process of world transition. Why I justify it for China is that I believe there is a clear communist party interested in the highest levels of focus and learning for the sake of communism doing this. I think their track record is clear in this sense despite mistakes.
I’m not absolutely sure what you mean by the first sentence.
It seems pretty clear to me that you’re confusing the fact that the questions have things in common, whether they are about similar topics, or whether one question is relevant to another because implies consequences that determine or influence our answers to the other questions, with the idea that they are the same single question. The fact that China’s government has very high approval by all measures, is not proof that the government is democratically run in a socialist sense. Indeed we know it’s not, because Chinese workers do not have direct control over the means of production. So it’s not sufficient for it to be democratic. However it’s almost definitely a necessary condition, so you would need it, and it is evidence in favor in the weak sense that it does not refute the idea that China is democratic by itself. But there is other evidence not in favor.
But historical materialism is not mystical nonsense where suddenly everything connected or with any property in common in suddenly identical. It’s not a metaphysical calculator you can use to answer every question.
Democratic Centralism is a theory about how a party should be organized. It has no bearing on a linguistic or semantic question. End of. What it implies, which you seem to me to be confusing with the idea that these are the same question, is that the questions practically have to be considered together, or that you can’t answer one without one or more of the others. I completely agree in the latter case. As evidenced by this very discussion, it will be difficult to enter into a discussion where you discuss one but you don’t discuss the others. But they are not the same thing, and saying they are is just a logical error (which dialectical materialism or democratic centralism have nothing to do with) which ends up with us treating China as closer to socialism than it actually is, which is a massive failure on our part as Marxists. For Marxists more than any else, we have a duty to be clear, because the truth is on our side and we are not in power.
Okay but if but now I need to ask the exact same question about the word ‘immediate’. This seems to be a synonym for ‘direct’ here, so it doesn’t necessarily make it more clear to me what it means. In a dialectical context it is difficult to make any sense of the concept of directness or immediately (unless it is meant relatively), due to the omnipresence of mediation. I’m assuming therefore that you don’t mean it in that more philosophical or meta-theoretical sense as used in the Marxist tradition. I’m guessing you just mean that practically it is more important or pressing for China’s interests if it is more direct, in that it should be given priority as an objective.
In that sense I don’t completely disagree with you, but there’s also a difference between not having an aggressive policy towards Israel and actively funding it’s settler-colonial apartheid project. Why is the latter sometimes treated as absolutely and necessarily unjustifiable in some cases but not here?
My claim in the first part is not a philosophical claim about the possibility of separate questions interacting, it’s that a judgement of existing socialism based on the dividing of some necessary or sufficient conditions as opposed to how these are intended to maximize the democratic process as a whole while integrated over time (meaning that these processes continually allow for the better development of all aspects of democracy. With the most portant being that the interests of the working class and desired results of the people are achieved. Any further division is unnecessary at this stage. Improvements are another, but the way you philosophically divide it is not something that hasn’t already been discussed as infinitum and understood by our Chinese comrades. This is what I intended at the beginning, though I did sloppily present that, including a use of “democratic centralism” without being clear that I meant “it’s against the principles and plans which have been determined best by democratic centralism incorporating the interests of about 18% of the world population.”
The fact that it’s not yet communist and/or fully worker owned is just unfortunately not yet relevant at all. It’s not philosophically incorrect, just divisive and not necessary, because the plan to arrive there has been clearly laid out. Is your critique on that plan then, or just the current state? The plan, unfortunately, currently includes being so protectionist that they can’t intervene against Israel and must include them in the global trading powerhouse they are developing. I say unfortunately, but know that I mean that I wish it could be otherwise but the scientific approach has led to that conclusion based on the failure of other approaches. I find it a conservative (here meaning not radical) approach, but conflict avoidance does currently entail trade with all States which are not currently threatening China, especially those in hotspots of western imperialism to drag them away from american-centric policies. China will eventually hopefully be able to utilize this dominance to push radically, and I will most definitely critique the approach if this doesn’t change once war with america is no longer a giant possibility.
I use immediacy to describe the time-aspect, and I don’t think I made that clear based on your response, so here my response may seem tangential but I think we are just not using the terms the same so I’m going off of my intended meaning and ignoring what I think was a response to something I didn’t mean. We have geographic and time variables at play (which affect each other in pretty obvious ways i think). Russia was presented with both immediacy and directness of the fascists at their border (and the USSR before them, of course). China with Israel has determined that both are not at play, that Israel is not a “becoming” problem for them as a possible war actor and is geographically not direct. “The omnipresence of mediation” how you use it here seems to be an almost trotsky-like position where all issues must be tackled simultaneously, which I can’t see concluding anything except for for the immediate attempt at the overthrow of all capitalist nations by every communist. I’d love it, but Stalin was, i think, proven correct that socialism in one country was necessary in those conditions (pre WW2, though I think we all usually agree he shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin lol) and therefore the omnipresent mediation does not supersede the immediacy or directness aspect.
Good Convo though, even though we’re talking a bit last one another. You seem more knowledgeable about the philosophical terms, and I appreciate your fairly clear usage. Still haven’t read grundrisse lol
Yeh good convo. No beef obviously. Marxism is a part of science and so has to include continuous critique.
My point is simply that the confusion of these questions as if they are the same, when they are trivially not, actually gets in the way of precisely the important objective you’ve cited, namely understanding and taking the correct position on China. If our position does not make sense when explained to people then that it our fault and issue, not their’s. People not being Marxist is just as much, if not more, the fault of us as Marxist to clearly explain and convince that it is their’s.
However I’m still not fully understanding your first point. Breaking down concepts, making clear definition, and thus theoretical conditions, is for the sake of clarity and so that we can actually analyze properly, and is obligatory at the onset of any scientific analysis or inquiry, once we’ve gotten beyond the more intuition stage of concept formation. I’m not disagreeing with you that the answers to those questions, the properties and facts they are making reference to, all have to be taken into account in a holistic way if we are going to give a proper analysis or have a decent understanding of how democratic the Chinese political and socio-economic system is and whether it is moving in that direction. It’s also essential so that we know what conditions would produce these conditions, so that we know whether the socio-economic basis for a deepening of proletarian democracy is developing. But clear analysis of concepts at the very onset is still essential. Even tho this points have ofc, as you say, been analyzed to deathly minutiae ad infinitum by millions of Chinese comrades, I’m not seeing how this makes is irrelevant for those of us outside of China. It is still important for us, in our own position, to have a correct understanding of China as Marxists. Marx wrote much of his work before the conditions of as pure capitalism as he describes in works such as Das Capital were even really there. Marx reflected with scientific ruthlessness and lack of qualms about people’s political correctness ceaselessly. This is why we still read him today and not other analysts of capitalism from the time. Hell, even the Communist Manifesto describes a capitalism which is too purified for the time. But this was not an irrelevant mistake on Marx’s part. It was scientific foresight as to where European societies undergoing the transition to capitalism were headed. We need similar analysis today of China, if we think or hope that China will be a future global revolutionary center.
On the plan for socialist transition being laid out, the CPC most certainly have stated and presented such a plan, although I haven’t seen very detailed data demonstrating that such a plan is seriously being laid out and applied. It seems to be based on a kind of faith in the CPC. The argument that they have continued to massively improve the standard of living since the Reform and Opening up, bringing 800 million people out of poverty is of course correct and a historic achievement. However the same argument is often used by liberals to justify, say, the capitalism of the 50s-70s in which living standards in the West did considerably go up. The difference which might be brought up is the fact that China has done so without using imperialism. However, given that the core issue of imperialism is that it is exploitation (of some of the most extreme kind), and given that China has charged its development in recent decades (and did so in the 50s when Liu Shaoqi was saying things like ‘exploitation can be good!’) with exploitation of its working class and peasantry, citing improvements in living standards is not proof that the intentions of the part-leadership are necessarily geared towards a truly socialist transition. So I don’t think it’s just a philosophical point, but something to be always born in mind so that we suspend judgement until hard evidence is there that the CPC will, so to speak ‘push the big red button’. I’m not going to believe something unless I have actual incontrovertible evidence for it. That doesn’t mean that I know that they won’t. But something it’s just not possible to be confident either way. Another issue is that the current mode of production in China does not function like capitalism as we know it at the macro-level, nor does it operate fully like socialism. Maybe it is a type of transitionary stage (but then we hear the Leninist critique of the reforming, Menshevik notion of non-revolutionary transition to socialism in our heads). In either case, it makes clear to me again that one reason for so much of the theoretical impasse of people outside of China trying to understand it is that we don’t have a fully adequate understanding of the key mechanisms at the macro-level of their mode of production.
Of course I’m happy to be proven wrong on this point. The main issue is that I’ve only just recently started leaning Mandarin, so I cannot read Chinese sources. But if anyone has excellent economic data and analysis to give me on this point i’d be happy to see it.
This is, again, why intentions are important. Political groups with different interest take on different objectives and intentions in the same set of external material conditions, so the fact that the Dengist are in power and not the Maoists, and that the economic base of support for the party and the state is therefore different now in the aftermath of the reforms, is very significant for trying to understand what the intentions of the current CPC leadership actually is.
I personally don’t really understand how saying the truth about China, as far as we can discern it through scientific, Marxist analysis (which in no way contradicts, but rather radically extends, the methods of scientific enquiry of the past, whichever culture they were taken from), amongst ourselves is an issue. We have an political and therefore intellectual duty for our understanding of China to be as clear as possible, and that’s not going to be achieved by saying that certain questions which are relevant to understanding China’s contemporary political system are divisive. I’m not seeing how you and I having this convo is divisive. Furthermore, rigorous critique and debate is of the essence of Marxist methodology. Look at the records of the Bolshevik party until the Stalinist period. Before they were in power they were rigorously critiquing each other (perhaps too viviously) left, right and centre. Lenin was theoretically beefing with everyone all the time. In the 20s, once the Stalinist position was dominant, you can look for instance at economic debates or at the party debates on China. They were theoretically sophisticated and based on the premise that a clear theoretical understanding is essential for policy. Obviously we are not in anything like such a position of power of influence, but we do need to start, as part of a truly Marxist culture, to act and prepare for this, not only because liberal hegemony will not last forever, but because it’s important that in order to convince people of the correctness of our view, that we can do so rigorously and clearly.
I’m not using mediation in a Trotskyist position (not a Trotskyist). I was just checking whether you meant directness in a more philosophical, meta-theoretic sense appropriate to materialist dialectics or whether you were using it in a more colloquial sense. Obviously the latter as you’ve clarified that it has to do the time-aspect and thus the pragmatic importance. I’m also not disagreeing in the slightest that the Trotskyist position of that type, especially today, would be ultraleftism in the pejorative sense.
I think it’s worth adding that we also need to be aware that in any multipolar world, preferable as it may, or may not, be, it is perfectly possible that other spheres of influence around the main poles develop imperialist positions. I personally think that Russia has already well displayed this capacity. It’s interests as a nationalist state capitalist power will naturally drive it to an imperialist position in its region of influence, imo.
China actually warned Allende to be “careful of counter-revolutionary”, and specifically called out the army IIRC, they just didn’t break off relations with the country post-coup
They’re after that “peaceful coexistence” the USSR could never achieve because they failed to see that in order to peacefully coexist they first had to absorb most of the west’s manufacturing capacity.
they failed to see that in order to peacefully coexist they first had to absorb most of the west’s manufacturing capacity.
They never had a chance to even negotiate with the International bourgeoisie in the first place!
The RSFSR was literally being invaded by Entente and Central power exeditionary armies from day one and the Soviet Union from the day it was founded was under a cruel international economic siege as well.
Peace was never an option as the only offer was unconditional surrender.
Yeah, was just joking. It was of course never on the table for the soviets, and would be an absurd thing to plan in the first place. I doubt even deng ever thought China was doing anything more than developing their productive forces and buying a modicum of security by opening up. The idea that the west would be stupid enough to deindustrialize itself (by offshoring to a communist country no less) to the extent it has makes sense in hindsight, but I doubt anyone had the foresight to anticipate things turning out quite like this, let alone actually plan it.
Dengist foreign policy and the Sino Soviet split was such a disaster. China even invaded Vietnam at around the same time period. Went from backing the ANC to backing the PAC and even the apartheid government, as your article states.
That’s not Deng that’s Mao and Zhou Wenlai. Mao was even mad that Zhou was getting all the credit for reopening relationships with the west and stuff. By the time Deng was rehabilitated and given more power (by Mao btw) China’s foreign policy was already set.
Just for the record (and for context) - China cooperated with the Apartheid-regime.
China cooperates with everyone. It’s a pretty major point of contention among tankies; on the one hand it sucks when you’re backing fascists, but on the other hand, at least China isn’t going around warring and couping foreign governments (except the one mistake in Vietnam).
Yes, sure. It seems hypocritical to me to say, on the one hand, that there is no political difference between the yankies bombing Yemeni children directly, vs giving the Saudis the bombs to drop, and then on the other hand, say that there is a difference between China supporting fascists who murder children (i.e. Israel or the Apartheid goverment), vs actually murdering those people themselves. I’m not saying that you are defending this, but it strikes me as a weird mental gymnastic were some ‘tankies’ (or whatever term you want to use, no normative judgement intended) will engage in basically some classic liberalism in order to let China off the hook on this front.
We should also mention the Khymer Rouge. Fascist might not be the correct term here, but it was politically equivalent in terms of how destructive, bloody and reactionary it was.
Israel is fascist. There is no excuse, by the nature of fascism, for supporting it. Ever. Yet China is happy to fund both the Israeli army and the West Bank administration.
Again, people can’t have their cake and eat it too. You can’t both say (i) profoundly reactionary as Russia is, Ukraine is more deeply fascicized and that as an immediate consequence of that, there should be a preference for the war ending on Russia’s terms; and (ii) that China may be funding fascists, but this is understandable and justifiable in the context. Okay. So then what are the criteria and conditions here apart from biased vibes to decide when critical support in these extreme cases is justified or not? What’s the line? I know I have my own ideas about this, but it’s often difficult to see what other peoples’ are.
It’s should go without saying that China’s foreign policy, including during the Maoist period, has been by far one of its most reactionary aspects. Once again, the Sino-Soviet split was a historical tragedy and reflects the challenge for communists of avoiding finding themselves in post-revolutionary situations in which their politics becomes nationalist due to them coming to identify their interests with those of the traditional nation state as a matter of reality and pragmatic necessity.
Yeah as I said, Chinese Cold War foreign policy is a pretty contentious subject even amongst China fans and you won’t find many if any here supporting it. Clearly significant mistakes were made.
Modern day Chinese policy is a bit harder to judge. I’m not sure what the nature of China and Israel’s relationship is; does it go further than simply trade? Regardless I would say they still remain the best of the 21stC superpowers just because they aren’t engaging in open conflict, but no policy is perfect. Secondly I’d say that China’s stance of ‘respect and work with any state who respects us’ is more principled than the US’s selective list of designated friends and enemies; China works with Israel because they work with everyone, for better or worse, while the US works with Israel because they ideologically support Israel and its goals. I guess materially the result could be the same regardless of intention so maybe that doesn’t matter?
What is the difference between a mistake, and unfortunate necessities? Why are lesser-evil arguments not theoretical mistakes on our part when we make them about China? I’m not disagreeing with what you’ve said about how China rationalizes their policies, but my point is that, as a massive obligation of all Marxists, we need to critically examine it both analytically and normatively.
The intention is important because it’s relevant to understanding how China will act in the future. For instance, if revolutionary situations emerge in the rest of the world, will China actively support them? China has showed little to no interest in the contemporary era in supporting radical movements. I agree that they may be right to do this. There is perhaps a ‘socialism in one country’ calculation which goes beyond the Stalinist one (as Stalinist Russia did continue to support revolutionary movements, tho massively shit the bed in the case of China). Perhaps it is the correct one. But it does introduce the fear that they may never change this position, including in revolutionary scenarios when it would be in the interest of the world proletariat for them to do so.
We can go back to my previous comment to note that it goes further than trade, and depends what they are trading. China is not a group of students. If they boycot Israel or just don’t trade with it, it has a bigger effect, and will not contribue, indirect as it may or may not be, to the active repression of Palestinians in an area that is one of the most important for politicala and ant-colonial struggle in the current world.
I think the issue goes deeper than mistakes. Vulgar marxists often seem to judge things either ‘mistakes’ or ‘determined deterministically by their historical conditions, so stop moralizing about it’ based on their vibes towards the choice in question; mostly because they havent actually properly thought through and analyzed as Marxists the relationship between normative thought and judgement, and explanation in the context of historical materialism (which we can understand to mean here, in a relatively minimal and non-metaphysical sense, as simply a theory of social reality or phenemenon which aims to explain them on the basis of class, and how the latter determines the control and distribution of the economic surplus and other social relations in virtue of how the class relations organize and are influenced by transformations between the classes and between them and the forces of production). So you often see some people act or speak as if any use of normative concepts is ‘idealism’ (whatever they happen to mean here, which often seems to fluctuate incoherently), and cite out of context and reductively the quote where Marx says that communism is not an ideal to be established but a real movement of history. Ofc, even beyond the context, Marxism is not a religious dogma. It is not a cult. It is the proletarian stage of human enlightenment and a continuation of the scientific method in its first real application to the social, hence to itself, which in term influences itself, thus the world, thus itself in term and so on (whereby the mind-bending aspects of dialectics in the social context). Marx himself, and all of us, and any Marxist, when you read about their lives, and first and foremost motivated to political radicalism not based on some metaphysical revelation or scientifc realization of the dialectic of the movements of history (athough perhaps this is the more advanced view which develops later). It is based on the experience of oppression, exploitation, abuse, repression, violence, coercion and alienation, which reflect something not coherent with our own material interests. What matters normatively, in a concrete and experiential sense, are the material consequences that affect the majority of people. Experiences of justice are a part of this. Political thought decisions require necessarily normative (thus ethical or moral) forms of thought, though the latter don’t exhaust the former. But we need to be able to respond when people ask ‘why should we have communism/socialism/anarchism’? And they are going to what normative arguments in terms of how that kind of society will be more beneficial for them and the people they care about. If fascism was a more likely ‘real movement’ of history I would still oppose it and hopefully be willing to die fighting it than to simply say ‘okay well history has spoken’. The reason why there is a movement of history towards the conditions of socialism and communism is because they are, from the point of view of socio-historical evolution of the species, more advanced, efficient, beneficial ways of organizing society. Societies evolve into new forms based on their tensions, instabilities and internal dynamics, and those which have the historical advantage, as capitalism did when it emerged due to its greater powers of production and control, will often take a historical lead. We’ll see if China can do this. But socialism is a normative necessity, not a metaphysical necessity, although the two are linked in virtue of my last comment.
Btw I’m not saying at all that you are doing the above ‘vulgar marxism’, just highlighting it as a relevant topic of discussion. Just to be clear that I’m not attacking you here.
Chinese foreign policy was definitely, I agree, filled with actual mistakes. But if we put in the context of the Cold War and the increasing revisionism of the USSR, the hostility of the latter towards China, and the fact that the interests of the CPC were now tied to those of a nation-state structure, it forces us to realise the difficulty of determining the historically progressive policies when there is an immense temptation to identity those with the more spatially and temporally localized ones of the nation state one happens to control.
Its not about universal values at all but about what the Chinese People want and what the party determined is the interests of their communist goals. I don’t love that China treats Israel as anything other than the fascist government it is, but the biggest difference is locality/direct influence. Russia is directly affected by the fascists at their border, because their fascism is directed eastward. China isn’t impacted by the Israeli fascism and therefore has no direct interests.
Maybe you call this classic liberalism, but the analysis here begins in a materialist position. China just takes the very minimal-conflict path within their material position. This means that great evils occurring elsewhere do not trump their need to develop and become strong enough to become communist. Once those evils are aimed towards them, they react and sometimes not perfectly, but in the way which is protectionist. Hopefully, from their example, we can learn to be better at exporting revolutions like the USSR but without destroying ourselves, like the USSR allowed itself to be destroyed (the phrasing here isn’t meant to indicate systemic intent, but it wasn’t prevented obviously). I hope we can be better at internationalism than China but they’re surviving and influencing the world while every other communist led country has been marred by a sort of irrelevance to the rest of the world if they didn’t get destroyed.
I don’t know how many times this needs to be said but I’ll say it again: Marxism is a univeralist (at least applied to human history and societies) scientific theory and set of revolutionary normative principles of thought and action that emerged in modern Europe as the Proletarian stage of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
If people want to do historical relativism of value based on nationalist considerations, then they’re basically a postmodern fascist whose view is identical to the basis of Dugin’s ideology. Dugin himself thinks that’s he’s synthesized and gone beyond liberal capitalism, communism and fascism here, by identifying the material interests of individual people’s with their national identity. Ofc this is just postmodern strasserism.
There are also several distinct questions here: firstly to what extent the Chinese people have actual democratic control over the CPC and the PRC, which I’d say is little, and which is different to whether or not the policies of the CPC are in their interest (to a great degree, I’d say yes), and is also different to the question of whether or not they have objectively high approval ratings (also genuinely very high compared to any other society that comes to mind).
I agree with you that there is a locality/directness factor that is imporant, but the two examples are not fully analogous because in the one case we are talking about whether Russia’s invasion is understanding from the pov of Russia’s interests, whereas in the other we are not talking about invasion, but about whether China should be supporting fascists. It answers why China might be excused from not intervening in Ukraine more directly but it doesn’t answer why they should be economically supporting Israel. Ofc, perhaps they want economic leverage to eventually pull Israel away from the US orbit based on Irsael’s perception of its own interests. I don’t know. I’m not saying we should unilaterally and unequivocally condemn China on a purely detached ‘moralist’ basis here. The final judgement has to be in terms of whether or not their actions contribute positively or negatively in the long-term to world communist revolution.
The way you’ve phrased it would suggest that China’s interests are those of the realist modern nation-state. These are inevitably part of them, but China is not the nation state. The latter is the state of the society, which is part of but not identical to the society itself. The Chinese working classes interests are ultimately those of a transition to socialism and world-revolution. Your phrasing also suggests that Israel is not in their direct interests. I think you need to make clearer what you mean by direct interest. Do you mean no interest at all if not direct? Or can they still be of indirect interest if not direct? But Israel is a bulwark of American influence in the middle east and key source of black ops and intelligence operations. No-one is better at killing radicals than Israel. It is also in the interest of China as a society, again, to contribute to a world revolutionary situation. How is the Chinese government doing this? If so, is it intentional? If not, then why is this not a problem, given that intentions are our guide to what China’s power structure would do in any future potentially revolutionary situation. If they were not an interest at all, then they wouldn’t be trading and helping the IDF to arm itself.
This is important because communism is not, I repeat not, possible without a world revolution.
I’m saying that the mental manouver justifying the position in one that is common in liberalism. I’m not even necessarily saying it’s wrong. But I’m asking for clarification why it’s justified to make that move when talking and thinking about China, and not about other states. Which states are not reasoning in terms of their materialist position? They all are, more or less, when looked at from a Marxist pov. This is explanation. It’s not justification. Justification in the Marxist revolution is always, first and foremost, what most likely contributes in the long-term to a world-proletarian revolution. This is always the end goal (although the end goal of the revolution is the production of conditions for real fulfilling and ethical life and advancement of the species).
Just replying to your splitting it into 3 questions: this is in direct opposition to democratic centralism and is a liberal absurdity to think that these should be considered separately. It doesn’t really impact the rest of your comment though, so that’s below.
Also Marxism is a universalism based in a scientific approach, not based in a set of principles i think. Unless you mean by principles here: dialectical approach and materialist basis.
By direct and indirect, I mean primarily that its immediate. I should use that word, and that’s a good critique of my phrasing for sure. But it’s immediacy does not negate the eventual interest, a direct but not immediate interest, in revolution in Israel. I mean I can forgive eventuality for immediacy if this is part of the scientific learning process of world transition. Why I justify it for China is that I believe there is a clear communist party interested in the highest levels of focus and learning for the sake of communism doing this. I think their track record is clear in this sense despite mistakes.
I’m not absolutely sure what you mean by the first sentence.
It seems pretty clear to me that you’re confusing the fact that the questions have things in common, whether they are about similar topics, or whether one question is relevant to another because implies consequences that determine or influence our answers to the other questions, with the idea that they are the same single question. The fact that China’s government has very high approval by all measures, is not proof that the government is democratically run in a socialist sense. Indeed we know it’s not, because Chinese workers do not have direct control over the means of production. So it’s not sufficient for it to be democratic. However it’s almost definitely a necessary condition, so you would need it, and it is evidence in favor in the weak sense that it does not refute the idea that China is democratic by itself. But there is other evidence not in favor.
But historical materialism is not mystical nonsense where suddenly everything connected or with any property in common in suddenly identical. It’s not a metaphysical calculator you can use to answer every question.
Democratic Centralism is a theory about how a party should be organized. It has no bearing on a linguistic or semantic question. End of. What it implies, which you seem to me to be confusing with the idea that these are the same question, is that the questions practically have to be considered together, or that you can’t answer one without one or more of the others. I completely agree in the latter case. As evidenced by this very discussion, it will be difficult to enter into a discussion where you discuss one but you don’t discuss the others. But they are not the same thing, and saying they are is just a logical error (which dialectical materialism or democratic centralism have nothing to do with) which ends up with us treating China as closer to socialism than it actually is, which is a massive failure on our part as Marxists. For Marxists more than any else, we have a duty to be clear, because the truth is on our side and we are not in power.
Okay but if but now I need to ask the exact same question about the word ‘immediate’. This seems to be a synonym for ‘direct’ here, so it doesn’t necessarily make it more clear to me what it means. In a dialectical context it is difficult to make any sense of the concept of directness or immediately (unless it is meant relatively), due to the omnipresence of mediation. I’m assuming therefore that you don’t mean it in that more philosophical or meta-theoretical sense as used in the Marxist tradition. I’m guessing you just mean that practically it is more important or pressing for China’s interests if it is more direct, in that it should be given priority as an objective.
In that sense I don’t completely disagree with you, but there’s also a difference between not having an aggressive policy towards Israel and actively funding it’s settler-colonial apartheid project. Why is the latter sometimes treated as absolutely and necessarily unjustifiable in some cases but not here?
My claim in the first part is not a philosophical claim about the possibility of separate questions interacting, it’s that a judgement of existing socialism based on the dividing of some necessary or sufficient conditions as opposed to how these are intended to maximize the democratic process as a whole while integrated over time (meaning that these processes continually allow for the better development of all aspects of democracy. With the most portant being that the interests of the working class and desired results of the people are achieved. Any further division is unnecessary at this stage. Improvements are another, but the way you philosophically divide it is not something that hasn’t already been discussed as infinitum and understood by our Chinese comrades. This is what I intended at the beginning, though I did sloppily present that, including a use of “democratic centralism” without being clear that I meant “it’s against the principles and plans which have been determined best by democratic centralism incorporating the interests of about 18% of the world population.”
The fact that it’s not yet communist and/or fully worker owned is just unfortunately not yet relevant at all. It’s not philosophically incorrect, just divisive and not necessary, because the plan to arrive there has been clearly laid out. Is your critique on that plan then, or just the current state? The plan, unfortunately, currently includes being so protectionist that they can’t intervene against Israel and must include them in the global trading powerhouse they are developing. I say unfortunately, but know that I mean that I wish it could be otherwise but the scientific approach has led to that conclusion based on the failure of other approaches. I find it a conservative (here meaning not radical) approach, but conflict avoidance does currently entail trade with all States which are not currently threatening China, especially those in hotspots of western imperialism to drag them away from american-centric policies. China will eventually hopefully be able to utilize this dominance to push radically, and I will most definitely critique the approach if this doesn’t change once war with america is no longer a giant possibility.
I use immediacy to describe the time-aspect, and I don’t think I made that clear based on your response, so here my response may seem tangential but I think we are just not using the terms the same so I’m going off of my intended meaning and ignoring what I think was a response to something I didn’t mean. We have geographic and time variables at play (which affect each other in pretty obvious ways i think). Russia was presented with both immediacy and directness of the fascists at their border (and the USSR before them, of course). China with Israel has determined that both are not at play, that Israel is not a “becoming” problem for them as a possible war actor and is geographically not direct. “The omnipresence of mediation” how you use it here seems to be an almost trotsky-like position where all issues must be tackled simultaneously, which I can’t see concluding anything except for for the immediate attempt at the overthrow of all capitalist nations by every communist. I’d love it, but Stalin was, i think, proven correct that socialism in one country was necessary in those conditions (pre WW2, though I think we all usually agree he shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin lol) and therefore the omnipresent mediation does not supersede the immediacy or directness aspect.
Good Convo though, even though we’re talking a bit last one another. You seem more knowledgeable about the philosophical terms, and I appreciate your fairly clear usage. Still haven’t read grundrisse lol
Yeh good convo. No beef obviously. Marxism is a part of science and so has to include continuous critique.
My point is simply that the confusion of these questions as if they are the same, when they are trivially not, actually gets in the way of precisely the important objective you’ve cited, namely understanding and taking the correct position on China. If our position does not make sense when explained to people then that it our fault and issue, not their’s. People not being Marxist is just as much, if not more, the fault of us as Marxist to clearly explain and convince that it is their’s.
However I’m still not fully understanding your first point. Breaking down concepts, making clear definition, and thus theoretical conditions, is for the sake of clarity and so that we can actually analyze properly, and is obligatory at the onset of any scientific analysis or inquiry, once we’ve gotten beyond the more intuition stage of concept formation. I’m not disagreeing with you that the answers to those questions, the properties and facts they are making reference to, all have to be taken into account in a holistic way if we are going to give a proper analysis or have a decent understanding of how democratic the Chinese political and socio-economic system is and whether it is moving in that direction. It’s also essential so that we know what conditions would produce these conditions, so that we know whether the socio-economic basis for a deepening of proletarian democracy is developing. But clear analysis of concepts at the very onset is still essential. Even tho this points have ofc, as you say, been analyzed to deathly minutiae ad infinitum by millions of Chinese comrades, I’m not seeing how this makes is irrelevant for those of us outside of China. It is still important for us, in our own position, to have a correct understanding of China as Marxists. Marx wrote much of his work before the conditions of as pure capitalism as he describes in works such as Das Capital were even really there. Marx reflected with scientific ruthlessness and lack of qualms about people’s political correctness ceaselessly. This is why we still read him today and not other analysts of capitalism from the time. Hell, even the Communist Manifesto describes a capitalism which is too purified for the time. But this was not an irrelevant mistake on Marx’s part. It was scientific foresight as to where European societies undergoing the transition to capitalism were headed. We need similar analysis today of China, if we think or hope that China will be a future global revolutionary center.
On the plan for socialist transition being laid out, the CPC most certainly have stated and presented such a plan, although I haven’t seen very detailed data demonstrating that such a plan is seriously being laid out and applied. It seems to be based on a kind of faith in the CPC. The argument that they have continued to massively improve the standard of living since the Reform and Opening up, bringing 800 million people out of poverty is of course correct and a historic achievement. However the same argument is often used by liberals to justify, say, the capitalism of the 50s-70s in which living standards in the West did considerably go up. The difference which might be brought up is the fact that China has done so without using imperialism. However, given that the core issue of imperialism is that it is exploitation (of some of the most extreme kind), and given that China has charged its development in recent decades (and did so in the 50s when Liu Shaoqi was saying things like ‘exploitation can be good!’) with exploitation of its working class and peasantry, citing improvements in living standards is not proof that the intentions of the part-leadership are necessarily geared towards a truly socialist transition. So I don’t think it’s just a philosophical point, but something to be always born in mind so that we suspend judgement until hard evidence is there that the CPC will, so to speak ‘push the big red button’. I’m not going to believe something unless I have actual incontrovertible evidence for it. That doesn’t mean that I know that they won’t. But something it’s just not possible to be confident either way. Another issue is that the current mode of production in China does not function like capitalism as we know it at the macro-level, nor does it operate fully like socialism. Maybe it is a type of transitionary stage (but then we hear the Leninist critique of the reforming, Menshevik notion of non-revolutionary transition to socialism in our heads). In either case, it makes clear to me again that one reason for so much of the theoretical impasse of people outside of China trying to understand it is that we don’t have a fully adequate understanding of the key mechanisms at the macro-level of their mode of production.
Of course I’m happy to be proven wrong on this point. The main issue is that I’ve only just recently started leaning Mandarin, so I cannot read Chinese sources. But if anyone has excellent economic data and analysis to give me on this point i’d be happy to see it.
This is, again, why intentions are important. Political groups with different interest take on different objectives and intentions in the same set of external material conditions, so the fact that the Dengist are in power and not the Maoists, and that the economic base of support for the party and the state is therefore different now in the aftermath of the reforms, is very significant for trying to understand what the intentions of the current CPC leadership actually is.
I personally don’t really understand how saying the truth about China, as far as we can discern it through scientific, Marxist analysis (which in no way contradicts, but rather radically extends, the methods of scientific enquiry of the past, whichever culture they were taken from), amongst ourselves is an issue. We have an political and therefore intellectual duty for our understanding of China to be as clear as possible, and that’s not going to be achieved by saying that certain questions which are relevant to understanding China’s contemporary political system are divisive. I’m not seeing how you and I having this convo is divisive. Furthermore, rigorous critique and debate is of the essence of Marxist methodology. Look at the records of the Bolshevik party until the Stalinist period. Before they were in power they were rigorously critiquing each other (perhaps too viviously) left, right and centre. Lenin was theoretically beefing with everyone all the time. In the 20s, once the Stalinist position was dominant, you can look for instance at economic debates or at the party debates on China. They were theoretically sophisticated and based on the premise that a clear theoretical understanding is essential for policy. Obviously we are not in anything like such a position of power of influence, but we do need to start, as part of a truly Marxist culture, to act and prepare for this, not only because liberal hegemony will not last forever, but because it’s important that in order to convince people of the correctness of our view, that we can do so rigorously and clearly.
I’m not using mediation in a Trotskyist position (not a Trotskyist). I was just checking whether you meant directness in a more philosophical, meta-theoretic sense appropriate to materialist dialectics or whether you were using it in a more colloquial sense. Obviously the latter as you’ve clarified that it has to do the time-aspect and thus the pragmatic importance. I’m also not disagreeing in the slightest that the Trotskyist position of that type, especially today, would be ultraleftism in the pejorative sense.
Removed by mod
Yes I agree with everything you’ve said.
I think it’s worth adding that we also need to be aware that in any multipolar world, preferable as it may, or may not, be, it is perfectly possible that other spheres of influence around the main poles develop imperialist positions. I personally think that Russia has already well displayed this capacity. It’s interests as a nationalist state capitalist power will naturally drive it to an imperialist position in its region of influence, imo.
And Chile.
China actually warned Allende to be “careful of counter-revolutionary”, and specifically called out the army IIRC, they just didn’t break off relations with the country post-coup
They literally collaborated in the coup itself.
Sounds like bullshit, what do you base that on?
As far as I can tell, Deng openly admits that in the interview that we all like:
https://redsails.org/deng-and-fallaci/
Can you cite a passage? The only relevant thing I can see is talking about maintaining relations with post-coup Chile.
They’re after that “peaceful coexistence” the USSR could never achieve because they failed to see that in order to peacefully coexist they first had to absorb most of the west’s manufacturing capacity.
They never had a chance to even negotiate with the International bourgeoisie in the first place!
The RSFSR was literally being invaded by Entente and Central power exeditionary armies from day one and the Soviet Union from the day it was founded was under a cruel international economic siege as well.
Peace was never an option as the only offer was unconditional surrender.
Yeah, was just joking. It was of course never on the table for the soviets, and would be an absurd thing to plan in the first place. I doubt even deng ever thought China was doing anything more than developing their productive forces and buying a modicum of security by opening up. The idea that the west would be stupid enough to deindustrialize itself (by offshoring to a communist country no less) to the extent it has makes sense in hindsight, but I doubt anyone had the foresight to anticipate things turning out quite like this, let alone actually plan it.
Dengist foreign policy and the Sino Soviet split was such a disaster. China even invaded Vietnam at around the same time period. Went from backing the ANC to backing the PAC and even the apartheid government, as your article states.
That’s not Deng that’s Mao and Zhou Wenlai. Mao was even mad that Zhou was getting all the credit for reopening relationships with the west and stuff. By the time Deng was rehabilitated and given more power (by Mao btw) China’s foreign policy was already set.
Read Vogel’s biography of Deng it’s very good