My response to "China isn't socialist" is just "then I guess I like what they're doing more." I only give a shit about socialism because I tend to think it could make life better, but if something else is doing that instead, I'm choosing whatever that is. When these types are mad at us, they call us pejoratives like "dogmatic", but we're the ones picking movements for what they've actually done, rather than some sort of brand recognition or ideological purity.

Basically, the chauvinist left's whole angle amounts to "that's not real socialism, real socialism is when you suck ass and fail without actually helping anybody or improving anything."

I guess real socialism is like liberalism, but even more whiny and even less effectual.

And they have the guts to tell ME I'm being dogmatic and only seeing black and white,

The student org I had considered joining were pro-ukraine. I tried explaining euromaidan and one member accused me of being a pro Putin shill and linked me to their newspaper article written in February 2022 (incredible).

The kicker was when that same member said all countries are imperialist except North Korea and Cuba. They stopped responding to me after I stated that the DPRK directly aided Russia and is in full support of the SMO.

Trotskyism cannot even be called derivative of Marxism.

China's improving material conditions will do the heavy lifting for us. Life in the West will continue to get worse, life in China will continue to get better, and eventually people will shift their positions to align with that new material reality. Ironically, politically disengaged Westoids might be easier to convince than Western """socialists""" because they're not as ideological.

Questions based on static definitions (is X of type Y) are undialectical and a waste of time. Ultraleftists don’t understand dialectics and that’s why they suck at applying Marxism.

Check out this 1864 draft of Capital. Marx ponders two categories, the commodity and money, not as fixed things but as a dynamical objects which emerged in undeveloped forms (from the perspective of capital) and underwent a series of evolutions before they acquired all of the features capital required of them. Marx explicitly acknowledges these categories as predating capitalism. He traces how capital appropriated both commodities and money and made them into something new, just as capitalism took labor power — an obviously precapitalist category — and created out of it the proletarian working class which we have today. Nowhere in this excerpt does Marx ask such inane questions as “is this a commodity?”

The question of "is X country socialist?" doesn't mean a whole lot because the bar can be set somewhat arbitrarily even if a person is trying their best and not being a chauvinist or liberal. Is it socialist if there's a dictatorship of the proletariat? How do we measure it? We all know that class contradictions will exist right up until class is abolished, i.e. a future realization of actual full communist society, yet people cite a lack of class abolition as a disqualifier for a country being socialist. One could argue that no countries have ever been socialist by setting bars like "they have a market economy in some sense" or "they have foreign direct investments". Would that actually mean anything or are they setting meaningless bars? Aren't we actually all just trying to call these states socialist projects? Socialist revolutionary states developing in a different direction because they are run by socialists, by socialist parties?

Nobody can correctly argue that China does not have a vastly different history and trajectory as a "developing" nation and that this is due to its socialist governance, even if (some say because!) its governance eventually moderated class struggle and attempts to use limited capitalist relations with guard rails to build itself up. This is the only contention regarding China and socialism that can be reasonably discussed and it's just about whether a person can recognize capitalist relations and trappings can exist in a socialist state, even be common. But even then it is sidestepping the only thing that really matters, which is whether it's a socialist project by socialists attempting to build socialism in their country, and the answer is clearly yes. One can understand a dismayed person in the 80s thinking capitalist roaders had taken over, but it's not a serious position today.

Putting aside the pointlessness of the bar of "is X country socialist?", their criticisms are full of liberal propaganda and what is surely a misunderstanding of Marxist thought and imperialism.

Not expansing worldwide socialism? They mean not taking naked steps to export revolution, which yes China does not do. It still provides actual material support to other socialist states and it's building a multipolar world order where your socialist project won't get choked by blockade and sanctions by imperialists. But more importantly who said that socialism is when you export revolution? This is a question of strategy among socialists, not an existential question of whether a project is socialist. And the primary socialist project that did export revolution collapsed from its contradictions (and of course immense external pressure that has never stopped being applied to every socialist-run state).

Imperialism in Africa? I beg them to define imperialism. One wonders if they've even read Lenin. The most I've seen from such accusations is people who think imperialism is when there's foreign ownership. They neglect to remember that the reason Lenin was describing imperialism we to note that it is the catalyst for war between capitalist powers, of carving out parts of the world because profits are too low for domestic monopolies compared to the much larger profits to be made by expanding monopolies overseas. None of these things describe Chinese companies' investments in Africa, which often result in debts that are forgiven and are not negotiated at gunpoint, either through actual military flexing or via control of global finance and markets (which are themselves controlled at gunpoint). Oh, and the investments themselves are highly productive and actually benefit the common people in African countries, though of course this is on the balance and not prefecture uniform. Finally, China remains net exploited. No serious Marxist can use these false accusations of imperialism in good faith.

Regarding China developing renewables for profit:

1. This didn't happen through the anarchy of the market but through top-down industrial policy via the CPC. It has actual strategic value on multiple levels laid out by those crafting that policy and this has direct through-lines on multiple fronts in renewables production in China. And rather than attempt to make their own profits through this supposed gold mine, imperialist countries are trying to limit renewables production and instead promote oil dependency.
2. One of the basic predictions of early Marxists was that socialists in control would do capitalism (production, but also profit) better than capitalists.

Regarding the retention of capitalist dynamics within China: yeah duh everyone knows this and understands it, it is probably the only point worth considering but only because it's a good evercise in thinking about the diversity of approaches taken to socialist development. China runs an expanded version of how much capitalist relations and allowed to exist, but zero socialist states have ever abolished those relations, all have "backtracked" from positions initially forwarded by communists to push class struggle as far as they could as fast as they could. Ultimately this is a question of tactics and whether they will succeed, but socialists and fake friends of socialists love to categorically label anything outside of their own tactics as revisionist, ultra, capitalist, imperialist... and only sometimes are they correct.

Anyways sorry you had to deal with those chauvinists. Tell them to focus on their own countries' imperialism and stop worrying about China sharing productive industry and infrastructure with African countries.

Typical tripe from those who have no idea how to actually build and maintain a real political movement, instead simply using their ideology to build up their own superiority and ego. Literally liberalism.

This is infuriating

Imo you and your comrades are by the sound of it having issues where you confuse "socialist", "dictatorship of the proletariat", "anti-imperialist", "nice to live in" and "progressive" for semisynonymous moral categories instead of seperate political-economic categories without moral weight.

Also by instead of respecting democratic centralism and party discipline going and posting about it in public online spaces you are sorta in the wrong here imo. Instead of posting about this online you should do further investigation and discuss it further with your comrades while engaged in the work of leafletting or postering where youre less likely to be dogpiled

Anyway, the capitalist mode of production is a different thing from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The capitalist mode of production is M-C-M`, it is the laws of value and the production and circulation of commodities. "'Accumulate, accumulate' this is Moses and the Prophets" as Marx put it. The chinese economy operates, including in the state sector, on M-C-M' and on the law of value and production and circulation of commodities.

This is in contrast to the soviet union, whose plans followed M-C-M', but did not allow things to circulate based on the laws of value but instead the needs of the economic plan (and this planning structure was itself a development of the war communism compromise, not what the bolsheviks had in mind in october 1917).

And both of these are very different from Cuba's economy, which is much closer to the lower stage of communism (socialism) than any other socialist project: they have made strides towards the abolition of the urban-rural divide, the divison between manual and mental labour, the metabolic rift and the commodity form.

Whether china is a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the bourgeois is a seperate question from whether its economy is organised along capitalist lines, and this is an entirely seperate question from whether china's interests are opposed to american imperialism and from the 4th question of their poverty reduction—which, you will note, is accompanied by increased investments of capital overseas, including to buy up land and resources to export food, minerals, etc to china. Bolivian and Ethiopian peasants arent much happier if their land is stolen or waters poisoned to supply china with cheaper food and lithium.

By tying these questions together in a nebulous "is china socialist" (by which you mean "good" rather than any marxist analysis) you confuse the matter and make discussion impossible. China has reduced poverty in China during one of the greatest increases in global poverty in world history—see for example the massive land grabs and dispossesions in Africa from the 00s on.

It remains to be seen whether China will dismantle the global systems of imperialist oppression (the institutions they joined in the 90s and 00s like the imf, wto, world bank etc) to allow the global population to also stop being fucked over, or take them over and merely reform them while BRICS becomes a new G20 or OECD. It remains to be seen whether they will return to supporting revolutionaries like the USSR and Cuba, or if they will continue to trade with Israel and the Phillipines and the USA while they commit genocides and snuff out revolutions. It remains to be seen if, as the USA collapses and oyher global south countries can increase their working and living conditions, China will accept these losses. But based on how China doesnt seem to do much about the industrial abuses their companies commit overseas (thinking especially of the big mining disaster in africa a while ago), my hopes are sadly at a record low atm.

Imperialism is a world system, any participation in the global economy as a winner (and china is increasingly a winner) is participation in imperialism. You are the one deviating from lenin's theory by turning it into a set of policies a nation can choose or reject. Youve turned critical support agaisnt imperialism into uncritical support against criticism.

That said, your comrades are 100% wrong on Cuba imo, both bc of the supply situation and bc the USSR was much less helpful there than it could or should.have been (because, from Khrushchev on, the USSR also increasingly operates according to the laws of value and commodity circulation, or, as one of the leaders of the communist party of british guyana put it in the 60s when the soviets wouldnt give help developing their industry bc it wouldnt benefit soviet economy enough: "theyre just as businesslike on this [east] side of the iron curtain as the other")

I'll raise your hot take one better. It's not just that China is socialist, it's pretty much the whole world is (lower stage) socialist as Marx understood it, and has been that since out great grandparents. WW1 and WW2 were the great crises of capitalism and WW2 was basically a battle between different solution to the end of capitalism. Since WW1 and great depression allocation of resources with profit motive has been and afterthought and every economy and state intervention and control in the economy just to keep it running is basically the norm, not an exception, even in the so called free capitalist west. In the west we essentially live in a bourgeoisie socialism where markets are not anymore necessary, or endured, but purposefully maintained by inertial and as form of social control to keep the existing societal order stable and the "ultra rich theme park" of a world order running. In advanced economies and semi-advanced economies the monopolization has reached such a degree that the battle is mainly political, not about driving the productive forces forward.