I'm not very well read on Mao, but I'd love to hear a Maoist analysis on how China only became nomenly socialist. The general analysis I've seen is that when China opened itself up to minor capitalist reforms, capitalist and bueuracratic power rose in a way that it simply did not in Cuba and Vietnam, so it stopped being a state for the peasantry and the workers. But what are your thoughts?
The Murder of Chinese Socialism
Maoists do not hold the view that China became nominally socialist, we uphold the correct view that China became socialist after the Great Leap Forward, when the project of constructing low stage socialism was achieved (at least at its lowest level) thought all of the country. We understand that not only did China become socialist but that it reached the greatest hight in the development of socialism so far achieved in history, even surpassing the great achievements of the USSR!
As anti-revisionists we understand that after the Dengist coup in 1976, the revisionist faction set about smashing the communes and opining up the country to foreign investment, joining the IMF and selling off Chinese socialism by the pound to the privet interests of big bureaucrats, up and coming Chinese capitalists and western imperialists. These Dengists took advantage of the fact that western countries where trying to export industrial production to the third world, and where able to secure China a prime spot as a producer of complex industrial products for western consumption, due to the strong industrial base Chinese socialism had built up. This is a position that China still maintains to this day.
Thanks to this strong industrial and agricultural base, China was able to avoid becoming a dumping ground for western products and this combined with a strong state capitalist class, was able to protect it from becoming a semi-colony and instead earned it a spot as a minor imperialist power. None the less the exploitation of western capital and the chaos wrought by the liberalization reforms brought extensive misery to the Chinese people. While Dengist like to wave around their “lifting 30 bajillion out of poverty” any real analysis shows that the former commune members where forced to trade in good if modest lives in the countryside with a rapidly growing socialist economy for lives of urban poverty and capitalist chaos.
China remained a growing but small imperialist power until the 2008 finical crisis. Due to strict state capitalist controles and a relatively underdeveloped monopoly economy it was able to dodge much of the fallout from the crisis and capitalize on it to push into Southeast Asia where western capital was weaked with its own capital export, and used this as a jumping off point to expand its supply of resources and capital which had fueled projects like the Belt and Road Initiative and the New Silk Road. Ever since China has been rapidly gaining on the US and western powers, though it suffered many setbacks over the past few years including political failures in South Korea, Sri Lanka and Nepal, especially due to this so called “South Asian spring” which is rapidly spreading throughout the region. In general living standards in China are on the rise due to the growth of the labor aristocracy, but the general crisis of imperialism, China’s failures in handling the COVID pandemic and the nature of capitalism has resulted in increasing poverty for the majority. It is likely that the next crisis of overproduction will crush any limited positive development in the lives of the people and cast China back into serious economic chaos.
This whole process is something that Zhun Xu explores in depth in his book From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty while China - a new Social-Imperialist Power! It is Integral to the World Capitalist-Imperialist System! charts the political and economic order of the overthrow of Chinese socialism and the development of Chinese imperialism.
As Chairman Mao Zedong identified, class struggle doesn't end under socialism, it intensifies. The marks of the old society don’t disappear second the dictatorship of the proletariat is established nor the second capitalism and feudalism are abolished, they stick around and give rise to inequalities between people, which when unchecked give rise to a new class of private small capitalist, a new petty bourgeoisie. At the same time the party is still a site of class struggle and one side of the party inevitably takes of the capitalist viewpoint and works to establish itself as bureaucrat capitalist who profit off of state property though corruption.
In China, just as in the USSR, these bourgeois elements were able to take control of the state and convert the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the new bourgeoisie, and proletarian state property into bureaucratic bourgeoisie state property. Major bureaucrats were essentially able to treat Chinese state firms as their own property. They embezzle huge sum of money from their corporate holdings and this is permitted as long as they didn’t overdo it, the better the company does the more they can take. They have essentially total power over hiring, firing and promotion, they set policy, production targets, safety standards, schedules, and all other aspects of running a business, the democratic rule of the working class is no more in China. Over time these men acquire huge fortunes end end up engaging in expanded reproduction, reinvesting their personal fortunes into capital in the form of purchasing stocks in corporations, making them into mixed state and private capital and making these bureaucratic capitalists into private capitalists as well. At the same time the new petty-bourgeoisie grew and consolidated into large capitalists and have invested heavily into creating large private firms as well as buying into state firms.
The case of Vietnam and Cuba are in some ways similar and in some ways different. So I will address them separately.
Firstly it is important to understand that neither Cuba or Vietnam were ever socialist economically speaking. Vietnam was on the road to socialism and making good progress, but it never got past state capitalism under the conditions of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Its path to socialism was derailed by the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, and the resulting Soviet Sino Split. Ho Chi Min, though a committed Marxist, failed to properly split with the Soviet revisionists and tried to put forward a conciliatory “let’s all be friends” line and failed to properly combat revisionism in the Communist Party of Vietnam. This resulted in the overturning of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Vietnam by the time of Ho Chi Min’s death and because of the underdevelopment of the Vietnamese economy, it’s subordination as a semi-colony to Soviet Social Imperialism, which even used Vietnam to invade Cambodia.
Cuba is a different case, unlike Vietnam it was never under the leadership of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The Cuban revolution was national and carried out mainly on the back of the rural and urban petty-bourgeoisie. It had some socialist elements, but they where not strong enough lot take charge due to their failures to adopt Marxism-Leninism, instead taking up Guevarism, a line riddled with errors such as Che’s ideas about roaming bands of guerrillas or the lack of a need for a party. This resulted in a revolution that produced a strong(ish) state-national capitalism but failed to fully expel US imperialism until conditions forced this new state’s hand and never resulted in any efforts to produce a socialist economy. Instead Cuba also became subordinated to Soviet Social Imperialism.
Today both Cuba and Vietnam are Semi-colonies. Cuba is a Russian semi-colony under a horrific, genocidal siege by US imperialism. This has made it very reliant on Russia who has since the era of the revisionist USSR sought to make Cuba into its own sugar colony and cripple its other industries. Russia also hopes to use Cuba as a base to project power into the Caribbean, but has been mostly unsuccessful because Cuba is too weak economically to be a jumping off point for capital export and the Russian navy can’t possibly base itself in the Caribbean at this time.
Vietnam is in somewhat of a better spot, it is much more industrialized and is not under siege like Cuba, nor does it serve only one imperialist master. The country is generally in the pocket of the west and a key partner in regional imperialist projects, but ever since the 2008 crisis China has been steadily making ground in the country, especially in making moves to take over energy industries. As is typical China has sought to engage in massive infrastructure building projects as a form of capital export into Vietnam, something the Vietnamese bourgeois government has happily complied with. Vietnam has so far gotten off better than Laos, which has seen the north of the country increasingly turned into a center of Chinese tourism and had its local people moved out to make space for Chinese construction workers and tourists, but given the growth of Chinese tourist investment in Vietnam, this will likely not stay the case.
