Tag: USSR

  • 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. ↩︎
  • Siege Socialism

    Siege Socialism

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    When Vladimir Lenin took power after a bloodless coup in November, 1917, shockwaves reverberated through imperial hallways the world over. The world’s first working class government was formed in Moscow and the response was swift. The world’s first working class government was formed in Russia and the response was swift. Intervening were 70,000 Japanese, 50,000 British, 15,000 French, 13,000 American and 4,700 Canadian soldiers ordered to throw back the socialist forces that had deposed the Tsar and aid the ultra-right Russian White Army in seizing Moscow. The Reds, of course, won this war with the support of peasants and workers. But it wouldn’t be long until the USSR was attacked yet again, as the largest invasion force ever assembled poured over Soviet borders under the command of Nazi Germany. In the years following World War II virtually every successful socialist movement—China, Cuba, Chile, North Korea, Afghanistan, Laos, Nicaragua and Vietnam—found itself enmeshed in bloody battles with the US army or CIA-funded guerrilla saboteurs. The 20th century is pockmarked by so much needless bloodshed between advanced Western countries and chronically-poor nations attempting to chart a sovereign path to modernity.

    Under the unfortunate conditions of extreme foreign aggression and economic poverty, a heavy-handed, security-focused and state-oriented “siege socialism” developed—a term coined by Michael Parenti.1 They were tasked with both warding off foreign invasion and simultaneously rapidly growing the industrial base and social development of their people. Like their capitalist counterparts in the first and third worlds, these second-world socialist countries had plenty of defects and sometimes-horrific blights on their record of governance. But Parenti pushes back on any judgement of pitiable failure on their part: 

    To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and nobody was denied medical attention. Some of us from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are much impressed by these achievements and are unwilling to dismiss them.2

    The siege socialism of Marxist-Leninist regimes locked in an objective rise of living standards and quality of life—impressive, considering the headwinds they faced. But the experience of these states marks a deviation from classical Marxist dictates, which state that the emancipatory revolution must find a home with advanced capitalist states that have negated Western liberal capitalism into a higher order: 

    Marx himself never imagined that socialism could be achieved in impoverished conditions. Such a project would require almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the internet in the Middle Ages. Nor did any Marxist thinker until Stalin imagine this was possible, including Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership.3

    Karl Marx was aware of the cruelties that the bourgeois class and their armies were capable of raining down upon any threat to their economic power. Up to 20,000 people, including women and children, were massacred by the French National Army when they broke up the Paris Commune in 1871, events immortalized in Marx’s essay The Civil War in France. Only a nation that was economically advanced at the outset of revolution would be able to negate capitalist relations along humanistic lines while buttressing against foreign aggression.

    Lacking this, 20th century Marxist-Leninist states came to resemble the “crude communism” of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, where “the role of the worker is not abolished but extended to all men.”4 Like the working classes under capitalism, wage labour in siege socialist regimes became universalized, with alienation piqued by irrational bureaucratic decision-making. Individuals in these countries often fell “between two stools,” where, 

    Workers were told that the property of the means of production belonged to the whole society, including them, but they did not have a decisive role in determining how to employ the machinery or how to dispose of the product. For that reason, Soviet workers considered the “socialist means of production” to be not fully theirs, but someone else’s—or, most often, nobody’s!5

    And so, there was barely a whimper when party bureaucrats sold out their countries under the tutelage of Western economic advisors. Millions in Eastern Europe lost their job, healthcare, pensions—and starved. Hyperinflation over scarce goods ensued. Life expectancy crashed. Hundreds of thousands of East European women and children disappeared into sex markets, only to resurface over the Internet’s seamiest corners naked, humiliated, exploited. All was right in the world again.

    Further reading:

    Karl Marx, The Civil War in France.

    ———–


    1. Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, 1997), 49-52. ↩︎

    2. Ibid, 85. ↩︎

    3. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Yale University Press, 2011), 16. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎

    5. Chris Gilbert, “Luisa Cáceres: Commune-Building in Urban Venezuela,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 7: 26. ↩︎