Tag: USA

  • In Brief: Revolution is Inevitable

    In Brief: Revolution is Inevitable

    In Capitalism and the Death Drive, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that “revolution is impossible today” because any resistance to the neoliberal order either quickly dissipates or becomes absorbed by corporate mass consumerism.1 Commodified Che Guevara T-shirts come to mind, as do counterculture movements like punk rock and Burning Man.

    In the age of social media our personal absorption into the commercial sphere is even more ubiquitous; we put ourselves under surveillance and freely subject our activity to data harvesting and resale. Han writes:

    System-preserving power has now taken on a smart, friendly form, and it has thereby become invisible and unassailable. The subordinated subject is not even aware of its subordination. It believes itself to be free. This technology of rule is a highly efficient way of neutralizing resistance.2

    In the absence of polling data, this view is likely mainstream even on the left where it is echoed by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher.3 While nobody would rule out revolutions in economy and culture, it is that all-important political revolution that feels forever achingly out of reach.

    It is easy to forget about the movement of tectonic plates once accustomed to the ground under our feet. Even Lenin was once discouraged about the prospects of revolution—with similar doubts over the level of adequate resistance to Russia’s ancien régime. But the absolute monarchy of the Tsar was doomed once industrial production began melting away the feudal relations in countries to Russia’s east and west. This caused Tsarist Russia to lose badly in wars against Germany and Japan. The question of revolution was never an “if” only a “when.”

    To understand why revolution is inevitable, we need only turn to one of the most important paragraphs that Karl Marx ever wrote:

    In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.4

    For Marx, a social revolution is not simply a change of government, policy or cultural norm—it is a complete change of ruling class. Notice that he does not speak of “adequate resistance” when he lays out the conditions of revolution. Revolution appears as a tectonic economic shift away from the existing ruling class, first and foremost.

    This occurred in the West when royal authority and the landed aristocracy became an impediment to merchant capital accumulation. It happened in Russia and China after their industrialized neighbours attacked, pecking at the morass of decaying feudal orders. It happened intercontinentally, across the Global South, as colonial regimes experienced diminishing returns from ransacking the economic productivity of their subjects. 

    The revolutionary potential of the West has been non-existent for almost a century now. The last time it emerged was during Great Depression. This was when the rapidly industrializing Soviet Union garnered the appeal of unemployed masses and western governments swiftly countered with a barrage of social democratic compromises, including public works projects and social security payments.

    The next economic catastrophe will not experience the same social democratic outcome. Liberal capitalism emerged as the political analog to economies dependent on territorial expansion and the steady opening of new markets to capital interests. Almost single-handedly, China is now melting down the western dependency on rent-seeking profits. Vertical integration of supply chains, overproduction of renewable energy, suppression of private financial capital, managed deflation and strategic technological development are saturating the world with low-cost goods and medicines and high quality open source software. The addressable market for western conglomerates is shrinking, evermore reliant on debt and speculation to fund operations. Western governments are flailing, pouring money into the furnace of war and doubling down on fossil fuels in the faint hope of maintaining dominance with atavistic 20th century strategies.

    The liberal paradigm cannot conceptualize this technological levelling of the global economic pyramid. It is collapsing inwards like a dying star. Drone warfare has seen ragtag armies grind the world’s mightiest militaries to a halt. Cheap solar panels bring miniature power plants to even the most remote of African villages. Open source A.I. is shredding the U.S. Big Tech profit model to pieces. Multiparty “democracy” has factionalized society into camps of superficial enemies, denying even the possibility of long-term strategic planning. Rampant inflation is quietly brandished as an escape from heaving debt loads handcuffing public and private entities. U.S. dollar dominance is declining with the overuse of criminal sanctions. Social media has turned “free speech” into a vector of weird conspiracies, sensational propaganda and pornography. “Free market” ideology has become the ramparts of financial monopolies and homelessness and hardcore drug addiction.

    In short, the social relations of the West are in open contradiction with the new productive forces being unleashed. This is the smoke signal for revolution.

    The technological levelling described above means that the liberal order will not be able to rejuvenate itself with a social spending package and a war, as it did during the Great Depression. The rent-extracting platforms of the current ruling class of CEOs and financiers are cracking. When they finally break, the only way out will be a political order that subsumes the new powers of production and seizes the means of finance, construction, resource extraction and strategic industries. Only then will it be possible to fix the underlying mechanical problems hampering our historical progression on a livable planet.

    As it disintegrates before our eyes, movements rejecting liberalism will grow. We must embrace long-term planning, direct democratic implements, international cooperation, green development, abundant housing and services, livable communities and expedient public infrastructure. The capitalist ruling class will be supplanted as a political authority or else destitution will result. Some countries have discovered this already and some will take fascistic detours before arriving at the right destination. It is inevitable.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive (Polity Press, 2019): 15.  ↩︎

    2. Ibid, 17. ↩︎

    3. The inescapable totality of capitalist consumerism is one of the primary focuses for each of these thinkers. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
  • In Brief: China’s Marxian Paradigm

    In Brief: China’s Marxian Paradigm

    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!


    1. John Bellamy Foster explores the communal aspects of antiquity in “Marx and Communal Society,” Monthly Review, Vol. 77, No. 3: 47-64. ↩︎

    2. Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover” in Review of Radical Political Economics, 2021: 12. ↩︎

    3. See: Kevin Walmsley, “Top China execs forecast more deflation and falling profits ahead,” Substack, Nov. 2025. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: ‘The Rupture’

    Ask the Editor: ‘The Rupture’

    To the editor,

    Canada has been targeted with threats from Trump since Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech. Can you tell me why it was so provocative?

    Thank you,

    Kay.

    [Sent via WordPress]

    Hi Kay,

    Mark Carney’s diagnosis of “a rupture” in the world order has been hailed for its clarion call to middle powers to band together and form a counterweight to American global hegemony. Under threat of U.S. economic reprisals, Carney explained, a variety of demands are now being made on the allies that have benefitted from Pax Americana. As if trying to prove Carney’s point, Trump replied the next day: “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” By acknowledging Trump’s coercive demands, Carney invited another one—stop complaining or Canada might not live.

    Since 2016, Trump has promised to shake down the world on behalf of America and Carney only affirmed that fact in Davos. It is unclear if Trump really understood the content of the message or if he was merely offended that headlines were grabbed by another world leader. The psychological pathologies of the current U.S. leader are difficult to overstate. Unintentionally, Trump’s threatening response to Carney’s speech elevated its importance and imparted a lot more aura to its content than it would have otherwise had.

    Carney only described a rupture in the appearance of the world order. Not its substance. Speaking as an elite financier, Carney cited a controversial former president of Czechoslovakia and said it was only a sign in the window that made people believe in the working class power of former socialist states. As an analogy for the present, Carney implied that the concept of a liberal “rules-based international order” was only ever a guise for operational U.S. global hegemony. Strategic allies such as Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Korea enjoyed market access in exchange for adherence to “American interests”—but this was the extent of the norm.

    The U.S.-led global order has always been transactional and never about hifalutin “democratic values” or rational global governance. The trail of human rights violations, democratic overthrows, targeted assassinations and full-scale invasions is too long to claim otherwise. The revival of state-sanctioned piracy and gunboat diplomacy targeting Venezuela, Cuba and Iran only adds to a long-established pattern of lawless American aggression abroad.

    The shockwave of U.S. military rampage felt for decades in the Global South harkens Karl Marx: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”1 Trump is not a rupture to the American hegemonic order. He is the ruling class without clothes. He offends the elitist sensibility of a Davos crowd not accustomed to being slapped about the head by the swinging dick of America’s president. But let’s exit the world of posh Swiss resorts in the Alps. How about those crowds of Baghdad, Caracas, Mogadishu, Havana, Jakarta, Ramallah or Tehran? Threats of annexation and tariffs against middle powers must appear positively trifling next to the suffocating economic embargoes, CIA-managed torture chambers, genocidal carpet bombings and rock-ribbed support for right wing dictatorships that have visited the Global South.

    As a central banker, Carney is well aware of the vital function that international debt bondage and structural adjustment programs play in securing cheap labour and resources to middle powers. If he seemed to gesture toward the brutal and ongoing excesses of American control without denouncing any examples—this is why. The middle powers lack the scale of the hegemon but they lean on a system of dramatic capitalist exploitation all the same. Carney may be able to capture the zeitgeist of the World Economic Forum but a man with his pedigree will never apprehend the economic basis that is needed to construct a true new world order. 

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007): 124. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: The Demonic Nature of Global Rearmament

    Ask the Editor: The Demonic Nature of Global Rearmament

    To the editor,



    There are huge increases to military budgets around the world and a lot of talk about a wider war with Russia, conflict with China over Taiwan and the “Donroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere. Are countries preparing for  World War III?

    Thank you,

    Kyle.

    [Sent by email]

    Hi Kyle,

    The situations in Ukraine, Venezuela and Iran demonstrate an aggressive push for hegemonic consolidation: the U.S. is determined to put all of Latin America into a stranglehold and knockout Israel’s last major stronghold of resistance in the Middle East, while Europe is now tasked with keeping Russia out of their sphere. Throw in the rise of China, and these developments have the world starting to resemble the European balance of power that collapsed into World War I.

    In a world balancing on the weight of military strength, countries are compelled to invest in armaments or be tossed from the scale. Japan has rubber stamped a record-setting military budget and Taiwan has done the same. Canada wants to triple its military spending; Australia is under pressure to raise theirs by 75%. India, Germany and France all have proposals to double their military spending, with Emmanuel Macron adding: “To be free in this world we must be feared. To be feared we must be powerful.” Without parsing what that means to the freedom of those cowering in fear, Trump seems to agree with Macron by proposing a 50% increase to America’s already-whopping $1 trillion military budget. His proposed $1.5 trillion military spend doesn’t sound like a peacetime budget—that’s a budget for war. 

    In this political context, worrying about World War III is not unreasonable. Against a similar arms race backdrop in 19th century Europe, Friedrich Engels predicted World War I:

    I imagine that the plan is not to push things to extremities, to more than a sham war. But once the first shot is fired, control ceases, the horse can take the bit between its teeth…Eight to ten million soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.1

    Bombing countries like Iran or kidnapping the presidents of countries like Venezuela might not get us there. But desensitization to this uptick of radical interventionism makes a miscalculation more likely, as happened between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia once upon a time.

    The timing of this global rearmament could not be worse, given the present state of the environment and the residue of an inflationary crisis already aggravated by global conflict. Marx held complex views about the role of the military within the broader capitalist economy, but in the Grundrisse he noted: “The impact of war is self-evident, since economically it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop part of its capital into the ocean.”2 Warfare vanquishes the resources that could be used to build an economy of human flourishing into plumes of blood and fire. In a competitive world of amplified scarcity such as it is, the proliferation of advanced weaponry and nuclear bombs adhere to a quest for economic dominance—consequences to human survival be damned.

    The ominous parallels between the first world war and a possible third recall Freud’s compulsion to repeat: we live in a neurotic civilization containing “a demonic character” whereby repressed traumas override the pleasure principle and are revisited again and again and again in order to “re-encounter our identity.”3 Given the violent and domineering history of capitalism, revisiting past demons in a nuclear-armed multipolar world would be nothing short of biblical.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. There was an estimated 8.8 million military deaths during World War I, making Engels’ prediction exceptionally accurate. A further 6–13 million civilian casualties are estimated, resembling that “swarm of locusts” stripping Europe bare. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005): 129. ↩︎

    3. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Press, 2011): 74-75. ↩︎
  • Understanding Chinese Socialism

    Understanding Chinese Socialism

    China is one of the most misunderstood countries in the West for all of the predictable reasons: the far-away geography, the curious culture, the unfamiliar politics, the ferocious economy. It is either portrayed as a one-dimensional menace to democracies or, less often, as the last hope to save the biosphere or the Global South. China can be the rigid communist or the wild capitalist—it only depends on the point of view of the observer. Dan Wang is the latest to re-cast China, an engineering state in contrast to the lawyerly society of the United States. He hit the shore of this discovery when it occurred to him that many of America’s founding fathers were lawyers and Deng Xiaoping had promoted a lot of engineers in the 1980s. According to Wang, this is the reason why China builds a lot more stuff than the U.S. today. But he’s wrong.

    What Wang discovered is only a basic difference between Marxist-Leninist societies and liberal capitalist ones. The Soviet Union was dominated by engineers, as China and Vietnam are today. Even Cuba has been described as “a society of engineers.” Conversely, western bourgeois revolutions were all dominated by those with legal backgrounds; Thomas Jefferson in the U.S., Oliver Cromwell in Britain, Maximilien Robespierre in France—to name only the most notorious. The first prime ministers of Canada, Australia and India were also lawyers. But if the American “lawyerly society” was able to out-build and outproduce the Soviet engineering state, why can’t it do the same against the Chinese?

    The answer has little to do with lawyers or engineers and everything to do with economics and governing ideology. Whereas the American commitment to capitalist class power led it directly into a deindustrialized, cannibalistic financial economy, China’s commitment to building socialism led it to becoming the greatest workshop in human history, in command of entire supply chains and advanced technology. America had built a great industrial power by the early twentieth century and organized labour had won considerable political power throughout the New Deal and Cold War eras. But this unravelled almost the moment the Cold War wound down. The disciplining of the western workforce was inevitable in an economic system pursuing profit for the sake of profit, and it arrived in the form of offshore manufacturing, real estate speculation, vulture capitalism, super-exploited migrant labor and intensified corporate lobbying. 

    Marxism-Leninism in China

    China, meanwhile, was an accident of epic proportions. Whereas other Marxist-Leninist states in the Soviet bloc were successfully marginalized from the global capitalist economy, the U.S. under Nixon and Kissinger embraced China in a successful effort to defeat Moscow by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split. Successive presidential administrations gambled that global capitalism would so thoroughly corrupt Chinese socialist aspirations that the country would abandon Marxist thought altogether. This has turned out to be a bad bet if the words of paramount leader Xi Jinping are any indication: “If we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our Party would lose its soul and direction. On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.”

    Statements like this from Chinese leadership mystify western audiences, both left and right. Too many people view socialism through the narrow paradigm of the Soviet system or left wing politics at home and conclude that China has hopelessly deviated from Marxist theory. But what if it is the western left that is aimless and the Soviets who were forced to deviate? Western politics is so saturated with capital that even nominally “progressive” forces don’t understand the corporate interests being served by mass migration crises and obsessional identity politics. And the Soviet Union, facing multiple foreign invasions at the outset, rapidly nationalized most of its economy and placed it under a central command in order to first stave off European aggression and then counter American containment strategies. The Soviet Union was able to achieve incredibly high levels of human development and military superpower status, but balancing these two priorities against western counter-pressure proved unsustainable over the long haul.

    China pursued somewhat similar policies to the Soviets until American rapprochement came in 1972, when Nixon visited Mao. Imperial pressure against China was lifted, culminating in large amounts of western commercial investment by 1979 and a U.S. State Department upgrade for China to “friendly, developing nation.” This is where the great misunderstanding of China began: for the left, China was seen as selling out the socialist movement to imperialists and for the right, China was increasingly seen as a nascent capitalist champion. Neither side was completely right or wrong.

    China did embrace capitalist investment in a way that was not geopolitically possible for other Marxist-Leninist states. The private sector of China is notoriously wild and cutthroat. At the same time this does not represent a reversal of the Marxist course in China, as originally charted by Mao. Consider the Chinese flag: four small stars representing the national bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, the working class and the peasantry. Mao, while fiercely antagonistic toward rent-extracting landlords, had a different understanding of China’s domestic capitalists: 

    The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods.1

    In Marxist theory, capitalism is seen as a major progressive advance over the feudal mode of production. When Mao came to power, China was largely a feudal state. For this reason Mao favoured China’s capitalist elements over the landlords of the feudal order. Mao proposed a five-tiered structure of ownership during China’s transition phase which has been applied throughout the country: state-owned enterprises, cooperative land ownership, individually owned businesses, private corporations and public-private partnerships. The Communist Party of China, while it bristles under imperialism, has always recognized this classical Marxist principle: capitalism is the mother of socialism, not its enemy. Karl Marx: 

    The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world—on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand, the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the markets of the world and the modern powers of production and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.2

    Having built a mass-party of over 100 million members, the CPC believes that China has already completed its great social revolution and have set themselves the task of mastering “the results of the bourgeois epoch.” In Building Socialism with a Specifically Chinese Character, Deng Xiaoping describes foreign investment as “a major supplement in the building of socialism,” with the goal of “highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth.” This is a redux of Engels, who said that the forces of production “must be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society” before private property can be abolished.3

    Whereas the advanced capitalist countries were able to develop their productive forces through a historical process involving colonial extraction, debt bondage, slavery and corporate-driven markets, China is doing the same with a combination of foreign capital investment, state owned enterprises, domestic start-ups and state-dominated markets operating under the umbrella of five year plans and consultative democracy. 

    The Limits to Capital

    Since the dawn of civilization, Marx noted, the property relations of an economy eventually become barriers to the further advancement of technology and production.4 In feudalism, there was only so much progress that was possible in an economy dominated by illiterate subsistence farmers paying rent to lords. The limits inherent to the feudal order are what eventually provoked daring exploration missions leading to the discovery of the Americas, European mercantilism, the plantation economy and subsequent Industrial Revolution. 

    As industry has progressed, it has gradually given way to rent-seeking financial monopolies and Big Tech companies which are posing enormous barriers to production in western economies. Even our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data can no longer be trusted, as the economist Michael Hudson explains: “Bank penalties and fees are now counted toward GDP rather than as an economic cost. GDP accounting is now a travesty that credits finance as producing a product rather than zero-sum transfer payments.”5 Our system cannot solve this problem because our system is the problem—and no quantity of Trumpian neofascist rebellions will change the fundamental contours of the western economy. Only a revolution can do that.

    Post-revolutionary China, on the other hand, has seen enough to avoid these pitfalls. Financial capital currently plays an important role allocating resources toward innovation and productivity but, left to its own devices, it will devolve into debt predation, real estate speculation and inflating unproductive assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies. According to Marxian economics, money has a price but only production can create objective value. Banks in China are state owned and directed to fulfill the five year plans that build their country. Salaries and compensation for financial service managers have been reigned in and regulatory frameworks ensure that Chinese hedge funds invest in domestic products like DeepSeek rather than asset prices. It’s been said that the West can never produce like China and this is why.

    Projects from state owned enterprises, clockwise from left: Raffles City, Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, China Energy Engineering Corporation. The public sector can build according to use rather than profit.

    Marx and Engels supported free trade and industrial competition as a means of provoking technological revolution and working class development.6 China has used both instruments to build out world-leading high speed rail, renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles, high tech skyscrapers and record-setting bridges. Unlike capitalist countries that over-promise and under-deliver on almost everything, China’s public sector consistently beats its own targets. They have a working class of 772 million people, of which 500 million are considered middle class. But the contradictions created by technological change, fluctuations in value and financially ruinous competition often spur crises, and these crises promote changes to economic relations and political orientation. 

    Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

    For China, crises precede expansion of the public sector. Banking, land and resources are already under socialized ownership. Further, there are 362,000 state owned enterprises in the country comprising 60% of total market capitalization. With many people forecasting future economic turbulence, economists Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei see a China that is well-positioned to: 

    Either take over the remaining capitalist enterprises or invest in new socially owned enterprises to replace the bankrupt capitalist enterprises. Eventually, this could pave the way for social control over economic surplus, to be used for the free development of all individuals in manners to be determined by democratic decisions.7

    Throughout their work, Marx and Engels stressed the need to not simply oppose capitalism but to go beyond it.8 Neither the workers’ state of the Soviet Union nor the welfare states of western nations have actualized this concept.9 By prioritizing production over distribution, China is doing exactly what Marx outlined in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Engels in his Principles of Communism: driving the forces of capitalist production to their technological limit before crossing the barricade that capitalist relations inevitably impose.

    The colossal solar plants, hydro dams and wind farms that China is constructing are not just for show. They are the building blocks of a fully-automated robotic economy powered by the Sun. Under social ownership, an advanced economy of this type makes class distinctions extinct. It makes economic democracy viable, free development of individuals possible and the Communist Party unnecessary—as Mao envisioned.10

    In America, plantation slavery funded industrial capitalism and industrial capitalism, in turn, made slavery obsolete. In China, capitalism is funding a high-tech socialist economy and socialism, in turn, will make capitalism obsolete. Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”11 China finishes the thought: “And the socially-owned robot gives you society without class.”  

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Mao Zedong, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎

    3. Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.” ↩︎

    5. Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover,” in Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 53, No. 4: 12. ↩︎

    6. Karl Marx, Capital Volume II (Penguin, 1992): 250. ↩︎

    7. Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei, “Surplus Absorption, Secular Stagnation & the Transition to Socialism in China,” in Monthly Review Vol. 76, No. 5: 25. ↩︎

    8. In particular, see Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Friedrich Engels’ The Principles of Communism. ↩︎

    9. Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man: “Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad “welfare” or “workers’” state.  ↩︎

    10. Mao Zedong, On Contradiction and On Practice (Midnight Press, 2023): 47. “To build the Communist Party is in fact to prepare the conditions to eliminate the party and all parties.” ↩︎

    11. Karl Marx, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy” in The Poverty of Philosophy. ↩︎