China and Statism
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Similar to the 5-year socialist planning of the soviet union initiated by Stalin, they were just capitalist planning for the development of capitalism based on a semi-feudal society.
Raya Dunayevskaya analysed the Soviet Five-Year Plans as proof that the USSR was state-capitalist rather than socialist or a true workers’ state.
Key Arguments on the Five-Year Plans
• State-Capitalism: Dunayevskaya argued that abolishing private property did not eliminate capitalism. Instead of private capitalists, the Soviet state itself acted as a single total capitalist monopolising the means of production and alienating the direct producers.
• The Law of Value: She was among the first Marxist theorists to analyse the initial Soviet Five-Year Plans through the lens of Marxist economics, asserting that the Soviet economy remained dominated by the law of value and capital accumulation over human consumption.
• Exploitation of Labour: State planning did not liberate workers; instead, it subjected them to intensive wage-slavery mechanisms like piecework, Stakhanovism (state-sponsored worker productivity competition), and forced labour to extract surplus value.
• Break with Trotsky: This study led to her political break with Leon Trotsky in 1939, as she rejected his view that the USSR remained a “degenerate workers’ state” that still needed to be defended.
Her detailed findings on the plans were further elaborated in her writings, including her 1946 essay “The Nature of the Russian Economy” and her book Marxism and Freedom.Besides all that, the Soviet leaders introduced the Ford assembly line in the production of commodities. Marx Capital was completely applicable to the Soviet Union
ttps://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/ch04.htm.
Grandpa still hasn’t explained how Mao took power by coup d’Ă©tat, which, as we know, he didn’t. Not of the country. He did however browbeat his way to control of the “Communist” Party, but that was during the Long March.
The same argument you are using, “look how prosperous we are”, was used in the UK even up to the1950s0 – 60s (MacMillan’s “affluent society”)
As Marx wrote, capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”
It’s the same in China, as in the UK, Russia.
And if you think the UA is any different,t try reading books such as My Heart at Wounded Knee
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In the USA, people do not read any books or newspapers, just Marvel comics books; bookstores and libraries are being closed, and 99.9% of the workers do not have a clue what socialism really is, and they do not know the real history of the USA; it is all based on mythology.
People just repeat like parrots what their leaders tell them. They do not know that 1776 is the foundation of US capitalism, which was founded by robbery, land expropriation, settler colonialism, killing, genocide, slavery, and wars.
The whole Southwest was stolen and expropriated from Mexico through wars and killing; the USA was going to be a small republic surrounded by several larger republics with more natural resources, more cultural diversity and different languages
Most teachers who were teaching the real history of those territories and their inhabitants were laid off; the reality is that the school textbooks are based on mythologies like the fake history of the bible.
It has been described by the historians Francis Jennings and Howard Zinn; they want to ban their books from the educational system and libraries.
Jennings shows the great advancement of the Cherokees, Apaches and the Comanches, which have been portrayed as savages and ignorant, and he called the so-called Puritan colonies a genocidal invasion, and the natives as the real founders of the so-called Americas. named after an agent of European colonialism
There are Latin American historians who know more about the real history than any US historian, and their books are school textbooks which have not been banned; Galeano’s books should be part of the USA school system, but they will open the eyes and minds of the young people. Some of them are based on the materialist conception of history, which is the correct method to study history instead of religious idealism.
Grandpa still hasn’t explained how Mao took power by coup d’état, which, as we know, he didn’t. Not of the country. He did, however, browbeat his way to control of the “Communist” Party, but that was during the Long March.
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You will not get the answer, and probably he has not read the five volumes of Mao Tse-tung, or Peking Review, to have an idea of what the leftists call Mao Tse-tung thought; it is all pure state capitalism, a similar society described by Marx in his ethnological notebooks on the Asiatic mode of production. Or the critiques made by Enver Hoxha of Mao Tse-tung thought and the Chinese economy.
Stalin also took control of the central committee of the communist party using different manoeuvres and defeated Leon Trotsky because he lost popularity among the russian workers, and the workers did not want a military figure. Stalin knew the real definition of socialism; he was better versed than Mao and Trotsky.
The ones who have taken power by coup d’etat are the governments, the economic system and the leaders that he is defending.
The USA has placed, by coup, hundreds of leaders and military juntas around the whole world, especially in Latin America, and they have forced democratically elected leaders to resign, like Juan Bosh after six months in his presidency, with the pretext of being a communist, and he was a liberal social democrat.
Ironically, the president of Haiti, who was an ex-Jesuit priest, was overthrown by a coup, and he was also forced to resign, and he was deported to Africa, and he was not allowed to come back to Haiti.
Zelaya was removed in pyjamas from his presidential residence, and he was overthrown, and Nicolas Maduro was overthrown and kidnapped by the USA, and Salvador Allende was overthrown by a coup, killing more than 30,000 people; another fake narrative about communism. More than 132 invasions to consolidate exploitation and robbery
Ironically, most of these so called anti communists anpro-capitalistts wage slaves have never read or understood the works of Marx and Engels; they are just repeaters, and now, with the emergence of AI, they are experts at copy and paste, posting bottled informations
In our time, people ( including intellectuals) are just echoes of the capitalist class, and they worship their own leaders like gods, and the so-called nationalist Christians are worse than the non-Christians, and they are also experts on communism, and they have not read one page of the communist manifesto, and sometimes they come to this forum pretending to teach on communism, and they are just a bunch of amateurs; the only way to learn about socialism is reading the proper sources
The socialist party is the only political working-class party that knows the real definition of socialism. We are not a large organisation because we are not reformists and we are not Leninist. We cannot compete with the reformists; they will win the contest. People are so confused that the US democratic party has been labelled as a communist party, and there are peasants in other countries who know the difference between communism and social democracy. The Democratic Party does not even qualify to be called a social democratic party, and it is not a member of the Bernsteinian Socialist International; moreover, many democratic socialists do not know anything about edward bernstein
Quite so, Ciudanado. You are absolutely correct.
Living in a place does not guarantee one knows anything of its history. I’ve known Chinese who have never heard of the Ch’ing dynasty and who know no more of the history of China than many do here in the UK of British history.The fake “Communist” victory in China in 1945-1949 was a massive tidal wave of peasant armies sweeping the country, carrying Mao and his cronies on its shoulders, certainly not a coup. (Chiang’s April 1927 takeover was a coup.)
“Leaders” do not lead, they are carried, and Mao & Co. were carried to power by millions of peasants – peasants for whom “Communist” was a mere word they had no understanding of; a mere label.Most people living in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did not know anything about socialism; they thought that they were living in a socialist society because it was propaganda made by the leaders, and they did not know the real history of Russia and the Eastern European countries, or why and how those regimes came about.
You talk to any of those so-called anti-communist exiles from the Cold War period, and they do not have a clue of what socialism really is; they do not know that they were used as propaganda for inter-capitalist disputes; most of them were not members of any political movement and have never read anything about Marx and Engels, and the difference between Leninism and Marxism.
Socialism/communis has no history yet because it has not been established; you can not write history about a ghost; it is like trying to prove the existence of God, which has never existed as a reality but as a mythology.
You do not have to visit or live in Egypt to know the history of the Egyptian empire; hundreds of books have been written about Africa, the Egyptians, and Middle Eastern cultures and civilisations since the time of the Sumerians and the Chaldeans, more accurate than the bible. They were part of the educational system of many countries around the world. Some historians want to eliminate the merits of the Egyptian empire.
Albania was also a capitalist country that called itself the only socialist country. They had their own radio programs; they were political and cultural. Albania Today magazines were sent all over the world, and the Soviet Union had Moscow Radio and Progress Publishing. At that time, people were reading more books and magazines, and they had shortwave radios; now they are just repeaters and television addicts, which are just brainwashing devices.
People who did not read about the controversy between China, Russia and Albania do not know what happened among them, and how the Maoists lost a big chunk of their followers. You did not have to go to Albania, China, or Russia to be informed; probably reading Enver Hoxha works would be more than enough. It was not a struggle between communist countries; it was a struggle for markets among capitalist countries and capitalist leaders.
Some Stalinists do not know that he knew the real definition of socialism as it was written in one of his books; most Stalinist parties only studied the Fundamentals of Leninism, and he was the creator of the concept of Marxism-Leninism, two concepts that can not be combined.d
They are saying that the removal of the Gang of Four was a coup, and the hardcore Maoists opposed Ping, and he was welcomed by Bill Clinton to establish commercial relationships with China, and they did not care about the coup; they implemented the so-called four modernisations, which were just capitalist developments.
The best source of information about China was Peking Review, a weekly magazine mailed around the whole world for a few dollars under a yearly subscription, and Mao Tse-tung works only cost $7.00, and another source of information was Peking Radio, which was transmitted in several languages, including cultural programs.
People do not talk to each other anymore; they are hooked on a so-called smartphone, and they think that they are well informed. Journalists are just a bunch of cardboard readers; they do not do any research.
The fake “Communist” victory in China in 1945-1949 was a massive tidal wave of peasant armies sweeping the country, carrying Mao and his cronies on its shoulders, certainly not a coup. (Chiang’s April 1927 takeover was a coup.)
“Leaders” do not lead; they are carried, and Mao & Co. were carried to power by millions of peasants – peasants for whom “Communist” was a mere word they had no understanding of; a mere label.——————————————–
The same thoughts can be applied to the so-called socialist/communist revolutions in Latin America conducted by guerrilla fighters and peasant struggles for land reforms and against landowners; they did not want socialism; they wanted, like the russian peasants, land reforms.
Mexico had a larger land reform than the soviet union, conducted by the Zapatista peasant movement; some movements failed because the peasants did not support them, showing that the real leaders were the peasants. Anarchists also supported land reforms like Magon in Mexico and Mariategui in Peru.
Most of their leaders were nationalists and anti-imperialists who ended up supporting state capitalism and bourgeois nationalisation, and social democratic reforms, but capitalism was never eliminated. Anti-imperialism is not anti-capitalism; for many of them, socialism is just state control and regulations.
The peasants did not have a clue of what socialism really is, and the guerrilla fighters did not know it either, including Fidel Castro, as well as Manolo and Cáamano, and the Tupamaros; only Che Guevara had certain notions about socialism, and his grandson, who was an anarchist, said that he was like a Maoist who had contradictions with Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union.
Hugo Chavez read more than they did about Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci, and he stepped back when it was discovered that Marx did not support SimĂłn BolĂvar; it was the end of the honeymoon, but the letter had already been published on their works for several years.
They never mentioned Luxemburg’s stance on national liberation and Nationalism, and that before 1914 socialists had rejected nationalism and patriotism, and that all capitalist countries are expansionist, including their own allies like China and the soviet union, and Venezuelan capitalism is expansionist too
Good to hear from you L Bird
Haven’t heard from you for a while, I hope life is treating you as well as it can.
Well, apart from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest two months ago (which apparently less than 10% survive), and having my life saved by my wife’s CPR, yeah, life is treating me as well as it can!
Glad you are better L.Bird, and hope your health will improve more. Be well, and all our best regards.
Ciudanado, you are absolutely correct.
I subscribed to Peking Review in the 1970s and had all the works of Stalin and Mao published by FLP Peking.
I have learned a lot about China since and realise how full of errors on Chinese history the books from Peking were while the Maoists were still in power. Chinese Literature magazine too was a load of vicious rot while the “Cultural Revolution” gang were still in power. In the subsequent decades it became a decent literary journal, freed from all Maoist nonsense. One could buy classics too very cheap, including de luxe hardbacks such as Wu Ch’ing-tzu’s The Scholars – still the most luxurious volume in my home library. FLP published P’u Yi’s autobiography in two hardback volumes, and Panda Books published some great literature, including a novel about the first Manchu emperor and a pretty four-volume edition of Chinese folk tales. FLP also produced an English four volume boxed set of The Water Margin, with Ming dynasty woodcuts, and all very affordable.
Maybe it starts with good intentions, but it always ends in failure. Don’t use theory, look at the results when you try to socially engineer a society.
“As Marx wrote, capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” More than societies who abandoned capitalism put into mass graves?
You shouldn’t be surprised that your ideas don’t work and always result in dictatorships, as the Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists fight among themselves over theory. You’ve had your day of bloodbaths and failures, but this time you’ll get it right? They all said that.
Grandpa, you are not even reading our answers, are you? Each of your posts merely repeat themselves.
And you haven’t answered any of our points put to you, whereas we have answered all of yours, over and over.
You shouldn’t be surprised that your ideas don’t work and always result in dictatorships, as the Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists fight among themselves over theory. You’ve had your day of bloodbaths and failures, but this time you’ll get it right? They all said that.
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It looks like you are not reading anything, just repeating old lies, repeated by reactionaries and recalcitrants who do not know anything about socialism/communism, and you have not read anything about it. You have not even read anything about Mao.
The Socialist Party never said that China and Russia were socialist, and you have not read that either.
You do not know the peasant character of the Chinese revolution and the economic backwardness of Chinese society; capitalism evolved after the creation of the republic, and it was the only choice that they had, like the Bolsheviks
The fight was not about theory; it was about management style. All of them supported Leninism, and Leninism is a state capitalist conception, as we have said here several times.
Socialism/communism, as we have said several times in this forum, would be a society without a state and without a leader, and without government. Where did you get the idea of dictatorship? You do not know what you are talking about
You should bring your notebook instead of trying to give lectures, and accept that you do not have a clue about socialism.
The Cold War was not ideological either; it was an inter-capitalist dispute for world domination
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