In China today, the fingerprints of American capitalist excess are hard to miss, as the golden arches and the KFCs stand lined up next to Walmart stores. The history of China’s economic development is a pretty simple story as told in the West: Mao’s Soviet-style economy was abandoned by Deng who swung open the doors to western capitalism and everything we see in China today is the mere culmination of decades of market magic. With this story lodged into our heads by so many western journalists, whose understanding of Marx is even less than their understanding of China, it is no wonder why Beijing’s trajectory is wide open to interpretation.
The sequence of human history is one of modes of production. Societies organize around productive forces and, as these forces evolve, so does a new social formation eventually sublate the previous one existing. The Greek polis represents a sublation of Neolithic communal society, just as Medieval Europe represents a sublation of the Roman Empire.1
The process is not mechanical and it has varied wildly depending on the region in question. For example, the capitalist mode of production was concretized only after a significant period of violent primitive accumulation driven by erstwhile feudal merchants who amassed vast sums of wealth at the expense of European peasants, African slaves and New World Indigenous clans. What capitalism has allowed us to do by way of revolutions in technology, science and philosophy, is gain a self-awareness of this historical process and ask the question: if capitalism is a sublation of the feudal mode, what might represent a sublation of the capitalist mode?
The capitalist mode of production has brought with it a material abundance previously unknown to humanity. This helps to explain widespread resistance against any effort toward revolutionary change. On the other hand, capitalism has also carried over imperial tendencies toward warfare, environmental destruction and the deracination of the community. It is these noxious aspects of capitalism that have formed the basis of western populist demands and global revolutionary politics.
Marxism-Leninism emerged from an impoverished Russian Empire long-mismanaged by Tsars wielding absolute power. For the Soviet Union, it expressed the post-revolutionary desire for rapid modernization without the capitalist hallmarks of colonial extraction and working class exploitation. With near-universal public ownership of production, these two aims were largely successful and the USSR experienced an improbable rise to superpower status, all the while providing housing, healthcare, free education and employment to all.
Mao Zedong was obviously heavily influenced by the Soviet experience but he recognized that his China of 1949 was even less developed than 1917 Russia, thanks to the compounded effects of Japanese invasion, civil war and a century of humiliation at the hands of European colonial powers. At its founding, the People’s Republic of China was almost an entirely illiterate, agrarian economy suffering from a massive drug addiction epidemic and in a state of chronic famine.
Mao set his modernization program along the lines of mass literacy campaigns, accessible medicine and large-scale irrigation projects. He recognized the feudal landlord class as a vestige of feudalism and a barrier to progress. That class was eliminated with land reforms. But, as a historical materialist, Mao also saw the bourgeoisie as an important ingredient to Chinese modernization. Adopted in 1949, the Chinese flag even includes a star each for the national and petit bourgeoisie, against a red background representing the revolution.
Soviet socialism was a sublation of Russian feudalism that practically skipped the capitalist mode altogether. But it collapsed under a heavy burden of economic embargoes and repeated military confrontations against combined capitalist powers that had centuries of wealth accumulation under their feet.
Relieved of sanctions in 1979, China has been determined to build socialism in the East along the timescale of how capitalism was built in the West: a period of wealth accumulation and technological advancement that will make it possible to transcend the global capitalist economy. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, rejected western capitalism and he modelled his own reforms on Lenin’s New Economic Policy.
China has not engaged in foreign colonization or the subjugation of other lands. As a Global South country long-preyed upon by the West, they have recognized that their path to modernization must necessarily be different than it was for imperial states. With particular attention to Volumes 2 and 3 of Marx’s Capital, Beijing has instead constructed a public sector designed to capture the surplus value of their capitalist workforce and channel it toward the development of new productive forces.
As Marx described liberal states, the surplus value produced by workers is claimed as rent, interest and profit. In liberal states, the disposal of this enormous surplus is decided by the private whims of financial firms, landlords and corporations—leading to the socially disruptive practice of outsourced labour and the curious phenomena of “dead money.” In addition, the circulation of surplus value in the form of loans, banking fees and debt-financing are tallied as part of the national gross domestic product—despite producing no value whatsoever. This has led the economist Michael Hudson to decry GDP accounting in the United States as “a travesty that credits the financial sector with producing a product, not as imposing zero-sum transfer payments.”2
As a Marxist state, China treats surplus value as a social product rather than a private gain. Because much of the banking, resource, construction and manufacturing sectors are under state ownership, they are able to convert surplus value that is captured in the form of interest and profits and push a dramatic material transformation of the entire country. Where private ownership exists, party cadres operate within the enterprise to ensure compliance with national planning. China’s ability to build at breakneck speed is also facilitated by maintaining an extremely low cost of goods and services through strategic deflation and the “purging of rent-seeking profits” from the economy.3 This conscious suppression of price and profit are virtually unthinkable for a liberal country.
The fault line between China and the West is therefore not one of “capitalism vs. socialism” but “liberalism vs. Marxism.” At this point in history, every country on Earth contains elements of both socialism and capitalism. In liberalism, capital accumulation is treated as an end in itself—and the result is a sprawling financial services sector that cannibalizes national industry in exchange for abstract financial products. In Marxism, capital accumulation is treated as an evolutionary step between industrial capitalism and socialist transformation. The result of this treatment is a country that looks like China.
By compressing surplus value formation into material production rather than financialization, China is betting on a transformation of productive quantity into social quality, one that will eventually lead to a sublation of private capitalism by public socialism. This is not meant as an explicit endorsement of vanguardism, nor is it meant to praise each aspect of Chinese governance or policy decision made by Beijing. We should take lessons from China and adapt them to our own national circumstances. But that can only be done with recognition that their meteoric rise is resultant from the application of Marxist theory at the commanding heights of the economy.
Thanks for reading!
John Bellamy Foster explores the communal aspects of antiquity in “Marx and Communal Society,” Monthly Review, Vol. 77, No. 3: 47-64. ↩︎
Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover” in Review of Radical Political Economics, 2021: 12. ↩︎
See: Kevin Walmsley, “Top China execs forecast more deflation and falling profits ahead,” Substack, Nov. 2025. ↩︎
