The House of Representatives passed an updated version of its annual resolution condemning socialism. This year it complained about the Democratic Socialists of American (DSA) in particular. DSA did not take it lying down. A prominent DSA ideologist, Ben Burgis, took to the webpages of Jacobin, DSA’s unofficial magazine, with a fierce protest: DSA is anti- communist!
Burgis begins, “The House just passed a resolution condemning the Democratic Socialists of America and socialism broadly. While it rehearses opposition to Stalinist authoritarianism, the bill’s real preoccupation is with socialists’ advocacy for expanded democracy.”
Burgis is a philosophy teacher and logician. The heart of his rebuttal is this paragraph:
“The resolution’s nominal argument is a mess. The first two ‘whereas’ clauses are claims about the crimes of Stalinist regimes. But democratic socialists have always been critical of such regimes, even then. Condemning democratic socialists with claims about the crimes of Stalinist authoritarianism makes about as much sense as an atheist bringing up the Spanish Inquisition to condemn the Southern Baptists.”
To be clear, the idea of a “communist dictator” is more projection, all socialist states have been collectively run socialist projects. Perpetuating the caricature of socialism that the Red Scare concocted damages left wing momentum.
Is this a No True Scotsman claim?
In what sense? I don’t believe the leaders of socialist countries historically fit the understood definition of dictator, as compared to figures like Hitler, Pinochet, and Syngman Rhee. I believe dictators exist, but not in past or present socialist countries.
I’d assume that Stalin had concentrated enough power to himself that the party’s support for him came more from fear of reprisal than ideological consent, but I’m definitely not well-read on that part of soviet history.
Edit - Thx all for the education
Stalin was enormously popular, which actually became a problem for him after World War II. From Anna Louise Strong’s This Soviet World, written in 1936:
It’s an understandably common misconception. Here’s a screenshot of an internal CIA memo from 1956 titled “comments on change in Soviet leadership”. Really only the first couple lines are relevant:
No true at all. Collectively run socialist projects would never have a figurehead like Xi or Stalin because they wouldn’t need one. Ultimately if Xi says there is corruption and needs to do a purge this is his decision and not a collective one.
What do you believe the role of General Secretary of a political party is for? Why do you believe that collectively running something is contradictory to having a General Secretary? Neither Xi nor Stalin have/had such a unilateral power, but because of their consistent leadership skills and sound analysis that led to them being elected to General Secretary, what they say is taken seriously by the party, both at the Central Committee level and beyond.
Both the decisions by Stalin and Xi that the respective communist parties they belong to regarding purges were necessary and correct.
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He was very clearly having a mental health episode (most likely mental confusion inline with his age). Escorting someone out of the public eye during such episodes before they humiliate themselves or otherwise end up in distress is common decency. Even anti-China rags like the economist knew the nonsense you are trying to push with this jab was too blatantly nonsense even for them.
He was just sitting there. You guys are hilarious.
Very obviously in a confused state before reaching for others papers before finally being escorted away out of the public eye.
If you want to take a stance that was too ridiculous even for the economist that’s your prerogative but to be condescending at the same time simply makes you look silly.
Everything you are saying is entirely compatible with what I said, beyond your assertion that “Xi rules with an iron fist.” Again I ask, what do you believe the role of General Secretary of a political party is for? Why do you believe that collectively running something is contradictory to having a General Secretary?
We must have a different understanding of the word you are using. You have something in mind so why don’t you tell me?
Which word? General Secretary? General Secretaries are elected positions as leaders of political parties. They retain their posts through popular support, and if this ever changes, they can and will be removed. China is not run from such a top-down manner, policy comes from the bottom-up, works its way through the CPC and the NPC, and then is reinterpreted through Marxism-Leninism and is returned in the form of new policy.
The idea that Xi Jinping “rules with an iron fist” is nonsense. His power comes from democratic means, and the democratic structures in China lead to far more distributed levers of power than in western countries. This is referred to as “Whole-Process People’s Democracy.”
I’m talking about how it actually manifests itself. We both know that democracy has nothing to do with this. Once a leader get given so much power it corrupts them. It doesn’t amtter what system or country they are operating under. It’s a well know phenomenon.
We don’t both know this, I highly disagree that power is a supernatural force that turns people evil. This is a liberal theory of knowledge, not a Marxist theory. Being well-known does not make it correct.
This is like when a little kid walks up to an adult and says “Nuh uh, mosquitoes are birds”
Don’t feed into the rhetoric, China is not any more Socialist or collectivist than countries like Sweden, Finland, France, etc. China is fundamentally a Capitalist country, at least in its current form.
Better than countries like the UK or USA? Sure, but that’s a low bar.
The commanding heights of China’s economy are publicly owned, and workers control the state. Sweden, Finland, and France are predominantly controlled by capitalists, and all 3 are examples of imperialist countries. Socialism is not welfarism. Socialism is a mode of production and distribution where public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. Only China out of that list fulfills that.
So if the US government purchased controlling shares in its largest defense contractors and tech companies, it would be a socialist country?
China’s constitution does not grant independent worker unions rights, it does not grant independent worker-owned cooperatives or collectives rights.
China allows and has hundreds of billionaires, more than any other country except the USA, it also has thousands of centi-millionaires, ultra wealthy celebrities and one of the largest ultra-luxury goods industries in the world, selling to their own people, not just exports to other Capitalist countries.
Stop diminishing the actual Socialist/Communist project by crediting Capitalist countries with being Socialist/Communist.
Public ownership under capitalism is not socialism, and this was precisely my point: the US is not socialist for having a public sector, and China is not capitalist for having a private sector. What matters is what class controls the state, as well as which form of ownership is principal.
Independent worker union rights within the context of socialism can be a barrier to socialism. China has the largest federation of trade unions in the world, and the CPC sides with the trade unions. Independence from this cohesive socialist system can be levereged into disunity and resistance towards socialism, which can be especially dangerous for a society that still retains some degree of private ownership. Any crack becomes a lever.
China has billionaires because it has capitalists. China has capitalists because marketization is enormously useful for turning backwards production into socialized production, at which point it can be more effectively publicly owned and planned. Public ownership of backwards production is enormously difficult, which is why marketization is employed.
I’m not diminishing socialism, I’m taking a principled stance on what socialism is and how we understand it.
Worker ownership is Socialism, that’s literally the most basic definition of Socialism, when workers own the means of production. A business where 100% of the ownership is possessed by the workers, where workers have full democratic control on the deployment of capital, where class distinction is eliminated and role distinction is elevated but confers no special privileges, is a Socialist business.
If the only way that workers are allowed to influence a state is from within the State-approved structure, then it’s meaningless. Chinese workers aren’t allowed to organize organically, they are required to organize only within the approved bounds of the CCP.
If tomorrow, Trump announced that the US government was automatically enrolling all workers into a national MAGA union, but the rules stated that all other unions would be dissolved and all membership transfered into the MAGA union, would that be Socialism?
Independent worker unions are essential to a healthy Socialist movement.
This is authoritarian rhetoric, the exact same as what is currently being used by the USA and the EU to justify more surveillance, more population control, and more repression of dissent to Capitalist, Neocolonial interests.
I actually agree with most of this. But there is still no excuse to allow Billionaires to exist even in a Capitalist market, same with centi-millionaires and the ultra-wealthy in general. Where Capitalism flourishes, so do all these things, and they will shift the class interests at every level. Ironically, the CCP is far more friendly to Capitalism than to Socialism, and if that doesn’t change, China will follow the same path as the EU and US. Capitalism is a cancer that spreads deep and fast through a society. China is kicking the EU and US’ asses right now, that’s indisputable, but they’re beating them at their own game, Capitalist, Neo-Colonial dominance.
The USSR, despite its many massive flaws, was actually a much better example of fighting the US/NATO on its own terms. The fact that they led the space race for many years, were a comparable military power for decades, and managed to construct quite a few megaprojects while operating a highly inefficient planned economy and having a highly corrupt political upper class, is pretty shocking and impressive.
Your example of socialism is a common misunderstanding, one that sees petite bourgeois worker ownership as socialist. The problem is that you abstract an element from the whole. Those that do not work at said cooperative do not share in its ownership, and this creates the rise of class distinctions. The perpetuation of money and the commodity form give rise to capitalism. The lack of understanding of state power and its role in the economy leaves it open to capitalist dominance of the state. This is why your understanding is both common and yet anti-Marxist. It’s a metaphysical error in analyzing society.
Secondly, you further demonstrate a confusion of how the state operates. The state is not outside class struggle, but is within it. The state cannot be anything but under the domination of the ruling class of society. In such a worker-dominated society, the state is not outside of the working classes. Thus, organizing in a way that undermines the socialist state undermines socialism. You try to justify it by saying independent organization is “healthy,” but you do not materially justify this. This becomes a moralistic argument, not a materialist one, and thus falls into idealism.
You fall even further into confusion when you equate MAGA, a fascist movement within a capitalist society, with the CPC, a communist party within a socialist society. The problem is not political loyalty in general, but political loyalty to fascism or socialism! You equate fascism with communism as equal evils here based purely on the similarity in form being political loyalty to the system. Anyone can see that these are very different systems!
Next, “authoritarian rhetoric.” I support the authority of the working class. I do not support the authority of capitalists or fascists. The fact that I support worker states does not mean I support any and all states that support any and all classes. I support a particular form of state, that being a socialist state. Again, you confuse particular similarities in form abstracted from context for absolute similarities in total. This is a metaphysical error repeated.
Next, your confusion of marketization as capitalism. We already went over how cooperatives themselves are not socialism, because what matters is the context of the entire system. The capital that exists in China exists only in secondary industries, where marketization plays a progressive role. Critical and large industry is overwhelmingly state owned and planned. If China had a wealth cap, it would not fundamentally change that until production is socialized and collectivized afterwards, there will exist capitalists. However, as long as these capitalists exist within the birdcage set out by the socialist state, they cannot gain political power.
Further, you make completely unbacked and baseless claims of “neocolonialism.” You do not interrogate or substantiate this point. China’s position on the world stage undermines neoimperialism, which operates via IP monopoly, US cultural hegemony, the dollar as the world reserve currency, and US military dominance. Neoimperialism works through neocolonialism. China’s advance in IP destroys the IP monopoly of the west, undermines their military dominance, creates room for south-south trade, and undermines US supremacy, which is necessary for imperialism in the modern era. There is no neocolonialism from China.
The USSR was also good. I will push back on the idea of a “political upper class,” such a term is not founded in Marxist understandings of class but the simple substitution of class for any category. Class is a social relation to ownership of the means of production, administrators in the Soviet Union had equal ownership to any other worker and were paid wages equivalent to skilled laborers.
Overall, I defend China from a Marxist position, you are attacking it from, at most, an anarchist position. Either you do not believe Marxism is socialist, or you must acknowledge that China certainly isn’t an anarchist’s dream, but at least fulfills Marxist understandings of socialism, which explains their success.
A society where all members collectively share in all ownership isn’t a Socialist society, it’s a Communist society, which is what we should be trying to move towards. Going from individualist, Capitalist ownership to a worker-owned model with direct worker democracy is Socialist. Of course ideally all workers everywhere would share equally in the fruits of the labor of the entire society, but again, that’s Communism, not Socialism.
No it undermines State Socialism and specifically, that particular State’s Socialist framework, not Socialism as a whole. The whole point of Socialism is to embody worker’s rights to both the fruits of their labor, and the governance of their labor. Restricting that is antithetical to Socialist progress.
There is a lot of material evidence for this, I just don’t feel like getting a ton a sources together and posting them in a comment section debate on Lemmy. That being said, it is easy to find studies on worker-owned cooperatives and how they outperform traditional firms on the whole. The entire open source software movement is a testament to the robustness of independent Socialist organization against Fascist and Capitalist interests.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here at all. I never said MAGA and the CCP were the same. I argued that merely incorporating workers into a national union structure, especially under an Authoritarian State apparatus, doesn’t make the society Socialist.
Authority is not the same as Authoritarian. You didn’t address my core point at all here, which was that the argument that the State must act in an Authoritarian manner in order to reduce the risk of itself being undermined by dissent, is the exact same rhetoric that the US and EU are using right now as they continue to roll out more frameworks for surveillance and control. Unless you are admitting that you have no problem with that, as long as the people you support are the ones who are doing it, which in that case, alright, fair enough. You’re in the same rhetorical spot as MAGA supporters who cheer on ICE raids. They love seeing ICE roaming their streets because ICE is, (for now), acting in accordance with their worldview. Of course the actual critique ought to be structural, which if you analyze ICE through that lens, you quickly see that those same agents who are kicking in immigrant’s doors and dragging them into vans, will eventually come for the MAGA supporters too.
I am against Authoritarianism because I understand the structural critique. I understand that when any entity, a State, a ruler, a group of workers, is granted a structural framework within their society to act with absolute power, it will always degrade and devolve into every form of abuse we see in the world today. I reject Hobbes’s central thesis, humanity is on the whole, cooperative and constructive, not individualist and destructive.
No, I understand that markets are not the same thing as Capitalism, obviously. China embraces Capitalist consumerism, Capitalist GDP growth, Capitalist sector dominance, Capitalist trade, Capitalist work ethic, Capitalist profit motives. They have managed it far better than the USA and most other western nations, but the same can be said for the Scandinavian countries, which are Capitalist. For this reason, I get frustrated watching China succeed so strongly, because it seems like a perfect counter-example to my worldview that Capitalism and Authoritarianism cannot produce long term societal happiness and prosperity. China seems to have figured out, (for now), how to make Authoritarian State Capitalism work. If that remains true in the years and decades to come, then it will be a massive blow against the viability of actual Socialism.
China is Neocolonialist for sure, look at what they are doing in Africa. The difference is that China is smart, and understands how to exploit the poorest countries in the world without having to torture and massacre people, unlike most Western countries. I am happy that China is undermining IP monopoly, US and NATO military dominance, and so forth, I am against all those things as well. It remains to be seen if China will actually free people from the evils of IP law globally, I doubt it strongly, but I can dream, same with their military.
I don’t have the energy or interest to debate the USSR being “good” whatever that might mean to you. You didn’t address my main point here either, which was that the USSR was a much better example of fighting the US and NATO on their own (The USSR’s) terms, instead of trying to just do Capitalism but better. The USSR’s leadership suffered from horrific corruption, especially at the local level, which is what makes it all the more impressive that despite that, they were able to accomplish what they did…the last true adversary to the USA. China isn’t so much beating the USA as they are just watching the USA rapidly decay after 50+ years of Neo-liberal, Capitalist cancer. Not to take too much credit away from China, they are absolutely doing things no other nation has ever done in recorded history, which is impressive from a Humanist POV.
Bingo, Anarchist here. That explains a large portion of our disagreements.