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If your first instinct as a westerner is to criticize and lecture 3rd world communist movements, instead of learning from their successes, then you have internalized the patronizing arrogance of the colonial system you claim to oppose.
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If your first instinct as a westerner is to criticize and lecture 3rd world communist movements, instead of learning from their successes, then you have internalized the patronizing arrogance of the colonial system you claim to oppose.
Meanwhile the success in question: The 3rd world communist countries have managed to more or less industrialize and build up wealth, but under (state) capitalist system with all the bells of whistles which are markets, commodity production, wage labor, etc. In other words, they used capitalism to build up wealth.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually think they had some absolutely amazing policies for the workers like free housing and social benefits, and good on them for building themselves up. However, this has nothing to do with socialism (socialist mode of production in this case) or communism as it was achieved with, and is therefore a win for capitalism - the same system that drove colonialism and the system that had already built up wealth for ‘non-socialist’ feudal/agrarian countries in the 19-20th century.
EDIT: Damn, judging from the amount of upvotes, it genuinely feels like walking into a bar and everyone drawing a gun and pointing at you. This is probably the most antagonistic I’ve been towards ML (or MLM/Dengist/Maoist) ideology and it’s kinda disappointing how there’s no actual non-ML Marxists to be seen here.
That is another western chauvinist talking point. That any development of industry (the primary task of countries who’ve just freed themselves from colonial rule), is a “betrayal” of socialism, because it didn’t go according to whatever the given critic laid out as sufficiently socialist enough, and that only the western critics of socialist countries have the correct plan.
China specifically can’t be called state capitalist in the slightest, considering that the CPC stands above the political system, unlike capitalist dictatorships where capital rises above political power:
You’ve done a really good job misrepresenting my argument, keep it up.
Yeah, any critique of 3rd world communist countries is western chauvinism, therefore we should avoid looking at those countries through objective materialist perspective and uncritically support them just because they’re third-worldist - that’s something an imperialist crakkka like me should know.
I’d like you to point out where I said that industrialization is bad. The argument is literally about how the development was achieved and I concluded that it was through (state) capitalism and capitalist mode of production rather than socialism, even saying how it’s good that they managed to build up wealth. I explicitly didn’t moralize this either, this is literally how these countries materially functioned.
My critique also comes strictly from Marxism which is essentially the basis for communism regardless of culture, but sure.
You’re confusing political power with class relations, the key isn’t who holds political power but what social relations of production are. If a state (CPC controlled or otherwise) oversees an economy where wage labor, capital accumulation, commodity exchange persists, then it’s still state capitalism.