WASHINGTON (AP) — Communism, President Donald Trump says, is the greatest threat the U.S. has ever faced.
This summer, citing similarly grave concerns, he took the rare step of delivering a primetime address to the nation, accusing China of “sinister election meddling” in 2020 and reviving his yearslong push to dispute his loss in that year’s election.
Even as Trump seeks to decry Democrats as communists ahead of November’s midterm elections, he is rolling out the red carpet this week for Chinese President Xi Jinping, the leader of the world’s most powerful communist country.
The state visit comes as the president himself has increasingly directed his administration to take large stakes in private companies to try to stimulate the economy — something even some Republicans decry as corporate socialism.
There are two major disagreements I have with your analysis.
The first is your firm break from Marxism and materialism into idealist analysis. Administrators in socialism perform a socially necessary form of mental and managerial labor in coordinating society. This does not make them a distinct class, just like managers are not a distinct class. Again, ownership of production is the primary distinction between workers and owners, not whether one coordinates other workers. The administrators in the CPC are overwhelmingly proletarian, but you divert from Marxism here.
Secondly, the actual, practical experience of China paints a wildly different picture of society than you describe as its supposed shortcomings. Even according to western firms like NIRA data, perceptions of democracy are incredibly high:
This is no accident. Policy in China comes from the bottom-up, in a process called “Whole Process People’s Democracy.” It then gets interpreted by the CPC, who relay and simplify policy with a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, which then gets feedback and is implemented. Democratic centralism makes policy quick when necessary, and gradual when consensus needs to be built. It’s why policy in China has radically adapted over the existence of the PRC, far more so than other countries, while maintaining more political stability.
In essense, you critique China from a liberal perspective while maintaining Marxist phrasing. That’s why I invited you to analyze the article and critique it, so that we have a common basepoint.
Survey data is not reliable in that kind of controlled information environment. I don’t discount the value of administrative labour, I dispute the claim of decentralized ownership. Effective distribution of material gain does not represent effective distribution of authority. You too quickly glossed over the inherent power imbalance of “interpretation of the feedback.”
Describing the “whole democracy process” mechanism in principle does not make it the process in practice, and the punitive disciplinary system is not compatible with its ideals.
Survey data is consistent in China, though. Jason Hickel explained that the data regarding support for China’s system and government is accurate. You keep returning to these claims of “equal distribution of authority,” which is not a Marxist critique nor something avoidable in building socialism. China is not a classless society in a communist world.
Further, simply hinting that Whole-Process People’s Democracy doesn’t exist in practice is not evidence against it. For proof, read Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance by Professor Roland Boer. It’s a lot longer than the article from Xi Jinping I linked earlier though, so if you aren’t going to read that article I don’t see why you’d read either of the things I linked here.
That’s absolutely false. Marx was very keenly aware of power imbalances outside simple economic distribution. Only the most shallow understanding of Marxism stops at the distribution of wealth and means. You are however correct, I have no demonstrable evidence that Whole-Process People’s Democracy doesn’t exist in practice given the fact I am not prepared to out my sources. I assure you I trust them far more than a random tiangou on the internet.
Marx directly countered the anarchist conception of worker-run administration as a power imbalance. Power imbalances exist even without class, of course I understand this, but power imbalance is not the basis of class. Further, again, you refuse to either provide your own sources as well as refuse to engage with the sources I provided in any meaningful capacity. Whether you truly have sources that go against peer-reviewed study and widespread consensus or not is irrelevant to the fact that, without addressing the arguments and sources I brought, any onlooker can see that I have at minimum brought more to the table here.