“The relations between different nations depend on the extent to which each of them has developed its productive forces, the division of labor and internal exchange. This principle is generally recognized. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of that same nation depends on the level of development of its production and its internal exchange. The extent to which the productive forces of a nation are developed is most clearly shown by the degree of development of the division of labour.”
(Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1846).
Summary
- Introduction
- Overcoming the historical issue of productive backwardness
- The question of prices: overtaking in the international class struggle
- A workers’ state, on which the capitalist mode of production has become dependent
- A powerful combo for the transition: Developing forces and conquering the world market
- The national and international class struggle for prices, de-dollarization and tariff war
- The inequality that grows in the capitalist world, decreases in China
- “New imperialism”, “Weberian developmental state” and “State capitalism”
- A system in transition threatened by dangerous structural and geopolitical contradictions
- In defense of socialist internationalism!
1. Introduction
China is the world’s factory, it hegemonizes the world capitalist market, but, exceptionally, it is not controlled by the imperialist financial system, nor by the international monopolies, nor by the richest Chinese billionaires.
China is controlled by its state, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This second exceptionality ensures the existence of the first. Capital does not command the state or guide the economy because the state controlled by the communist party is the one that controls everything, to the detriment of and against capital. The state controls most companies, the financial system is dominated by state-owned banks, the land ownership system is largely dominated by local and municipal governments.
The following document will point out how the China of the 21st century has overcome several limitations of China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the smaller transitional states created in the 20th century. in the production of commodities, in internal exchange, with wage increases, the reduction of inequalities and misery, in the external exchange of these commodities, produced at a lower price and with greater technology than in competitors, achieving hegemony in the world market. However, this process occurred at the expense of a relative setback in the division of labor and privatizations that have been mediated and reversed in recent years by the incorporation of technologies in production, but still in coexistence with strenuous working hours.
On the geopolitical level, apart from a few diplomatic and formal protests, China does not show any trace of proletarian internationalism against the aggressions, sanctions and blockades carried out by the imperialist powers against oppressed nations and peoples.
This working day and this geopolitics, as well as a billionaire, growing and powerful bourgeois class, despite the flight of capital and capitalists in recent years, weaken China in the medium and long term in the confrontation with capitalism internally and extremely, and can compromise its evolution towards socialism.
2. Overcoming the historical issue of productive backwardness
China has been solving, on the basis of planned state control, the historical problem of the development of the productive forces. Contradictorily, the beginning of the resolution of this historical problem was given by the combination of two opposing global forces: on the one hand, world monopoly capital, through productive investments (industrial and technological) from the setting up of the Special Economic Zones, in 1979-80; on the other hand, the greatest planetary productive force united in a single nation, the Chinese proletariat, composed of one billion workers.
The question of the backwardness of the productive forces was a historical, chronic problem common to all workers’ states that emerged from socialist revolutions in the twentieth century, which occurred in backward, semi-colonial capitalist states or weaker links in the chain of capitalist-imperialist states, such as Russia. For this reason, the epigraph that opens this document, written by Marx, highlights: “The relations between different nations depend on the extent to which each of them has developed its productive forces, the division of labor and internal exchange” (Marx, German Ideology, 2007, p.89).
The Paris Commune, the first workers’ government in history during capitalism, which took place in 1871, was established for only two months, although in an advanced capitalist nation, which could therefore have the best possible conditions at the time for the development of the productive forces, did not constitute a workers’ state or seize economic power. the Bank of France.
All human evolution is based on the development of the relations of production, of social life among men and of the evolution of the productive forces.
Relations of production are the social relations that are established in the process of production and in the distribution of that production, including the way in which the means of production are owned and how the labor force is organized and exploited. The evolution of relations lies in the overcoming or attenuation of the exploitation of man by man, which exists, for example, in the passage from slavery to capitalism in Brazil with the abolitionist revolution of 1888.
Productive forces in general are the means of production, they refer to the development of science, technological inventions, the division and combination of labor, the improvement of the means of communication, the creation of the world market, machinery, etc. However, from its gestation in the Paleolithic period to the agricultural revolution and all subsequent historical development, the productive forces in general depend on the productive force of human labor (the labor capacity of individuals). Therefore, “the main productive force [is] the human being himself” (Marx, Grundisse, 2011, p. 346). The evolution of the productive forces can be measured by the improvement of the living conditions of the human being.
The evolutionary dialectic between these two elements, relations of production of social life and productive forces, is what determines the mode of production. In other words: The combination of material production with the corresponding form of exchange constitutes the mode of production. And what is fundamental for us to understand at what moment in the historical process towards a developed communism we find ourselves.
For thousands of years, the primitive communist form of the relations of production, based on social labor, mediated man’s relationship with nature and transformed nature in general and human nature in particular. The genus Homo has existed for at least 1.5 million years. Class society, less than 10 thousand years ago. It was primitive communism that was responsible for the appearance of homo sapiens in the terrestrial fauna, approximately 300 thousand years ago, separating it from the other wild higher primates. Man is man only because of primitive communism, because of the relations of production developed by men among themselves in community to survive in nature.
It was very recently in the course of this evolution, with the evolution of the productive forces, that contradictorily the relations of production retreated from primitive communism to class society. This step backwards promoted other steps forward in the evolution of the productive forces and in the relations of production, from the original slave society to the current capitalism.
Trying to solve the problem of the backwardness of the productive forces, in 1917, Russia made a socialist revolution, made a huge leap in the evolution of the relations of production, but 4 years later, it had to take a step back in these relations of production to develop the productive forces, creating the New Economic Policy. Russian backwardness, attacked and sabotaged on all sides by world imperialism and Nazism, created by imperialism against communism and the USSR, prevented a further development of the productive forces. Be that as it may, the Russian experience was advanced for its time, or perhaps precocious.
In 1949, a powerful social revolution took place in China when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s guerrilla armies took power and established a workers state, defeating the Kuomintang, the party of the national bourgeoisie, which was backed by US imperialism and its allies such as Britain. This took place in the broader context of the defeat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in the Second World War, which was both a war of self-defence by the USSR workers state agaisnt Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, and an inter-imperialist war between Germany/Italy/Japan and the US and its West European allies. At the end of the war, Soviet troops fought Japanese imperialism in Mongolia and Manchuria, and that helped create the context for the later victory of the CCP forces.
The politics of the CCP were very much in the same mould as that of Stalin’s leadership of the USSR, which represented a conservative workers bureaucracy that had abandoned the goal of world revolution, and sought ‘peaceful coexistence’ with imperialism to stave off dangers to the workers state. The CCP based itself not on the proletariat in China’s cities, but on China’s enormous, impoverished and oppressed peasantry, and its struggle, initially aimed at national liberation and a bloc with the national bourgeoisie, with ‘socialism’ postponed until a later stage, was still a mighty struggle of the peasant masses. The bureaucratic regime in the CCP and its armies resembled Stalin’s regime in the USSR. On taking power it was confronted with the reality that the national bourgeoisie preferred the support of imperialism, and such a multi-class regime was impossible. This was demonstrated particularly in the counterrevolutionary war imperialism waged in neighbouring Korea, where the imperialists at one point threatened China itself. So the Chinese Communist Party’s bureuacratic regime, for its own self-preservation, was driven to unleash a fully-fledged social revolution, establishing a deformed workers state with a bureaucratic regime similar in many ways to that in the USSR under Stalin and his successors.
This social revolution made a huge leap in quality in relation to the evolution of production relations and for 40 years it struggled to develop the productive forces, in this period it had to drain enormous resources from the peasantry to industrialize, it did not succeed, until the 1980s China’s GDP was lower than Brazil’s. Then, it was only from the 1980s onwards that China began to be crossed by capitalist-imperialist investments, because China’s break with the Soviet Union made the Chinese Communist Party relatively reliable for imperialism so that it invested huge masses of capital to transplant the global production of commodities to China and make the country the “workshop of the world” as Lenin called England at the beginning of the twentieth century. in his book “Imperialism,…” of 1916.
The development of the Chinese productive forces, with imperialism blowing in favor and no Nazi threat as the USSR saw in the superpowerful imperialist Germany in the hands of Hitler, and the flexibilization of the relations of production created in China ideal conditions for a new attempt at socialism, counting in its favor an incomparable abundance of the greatest productive force on the planet. the factor of greatest creation of social wealth, the human labor force, which copied, studied and catapulted another productive force, technology. In these respects, China resumes the course and prospects of the socialist evolution of mankind towards a developed communism. Financialized and deindustrialized imperialism realized the danger only after three decades of investments and the 2008 crisis itself, which weakened it even more. Regardless of the singular characteristics or the comings and goings that world politics has had in the last 17 years, imperialism has recreated the Nazi monster to recover the lost hegemony in the market, in technology, in world politics and in the development of the productive forces, which the American neo-Nazi movement translates into Make American Great Again (MAGA).
But this attempt to stop the course of history came late and even if it came early, it is not possible to establish an end to history without liquidating the human species and also planetary nature.
This tariff war, a harbinger of military war, is only succeeding in isolating the United States of America (USA) from an economic point of view, which could weaken the United States at the beginning of a third world war. And this may even abort the third war, so damaging is the Trumpist tactic of making America great again. He will not reindustrialize the country, and in these almost 100 days in office, he is also ruining financial capitalism itself. Big Techs and Wall Street have lost 10 trillion dollars since February, between the bursting of the speculative bomb of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the threats of tariffs, and have recovered by a merely speculative movement, four of these 10 trillion dollars with the suspension of tariffs for three months. But this is just another demonstration of the unstoppable condition of Chinese development, as Haway, BYD, DeepSeek, etc. have been.
The positive resolution of the problem of the development of the productive forces is only possible through the conscious mediation of the state’s planned control of this development, through reinvestment in research, the improvement of the living conditions of the working class, through the urbanization of society, the reduction of poverty and the increase of wages (in spite of the still strenuous working day), of measures against arrests to reduce the costs of constant capital that in every capitalist environment generates the reduction of profit rates.
We suppose that, while the capitalist West becomes even more bizarre and bestial, persecuting and combating the materialist and historical methods of understanding life in society and the capitalist economy, as has been happening in the witch hunt promoted by the Trump administration to American universities, the economic planning controlled by the Chinese Communist Party is based on the critique of Marxist political economy and tries to mitigate the consequences of the market and capitalism in the economy Chinese.
In this way, by making constant capital cheaper, China has taken the lead in the technological revolution of AI, as occurred with the recent case of the extraordinary overcoming in costs, energy expenditures, yields, and the release of the use of DeepSeek in relation to the AI applications developed and monopolized until then by the USA. Despite any criticism of AI, the powerful Chinese counterpunch, using a weapon that was developed immanently in the sanctions policy, is an anti-imperialist and anti-monopoly counterattack on technology by imperialism. In reducing the constant capital costs of their companies, China’s technocrats employ measures they learned from Marx’s study. In Book III of Capital, Marx enumerates six causes against arrests for the law of the tendency of the interest rate to fall. One of them, the third, is the cheapening of the elements of constant capital. (see also Emancipation of Labor: Humberto Rodrigues, DeepSeek – the missile that pierced the speculative bubble of big techs, https://emancipacaodotrabalho.org/Publicacao.aspx?id=566942)
3. The question of prices: overtaking in the international class struggle
At the beginning of the Bolshevik government, despite all the determination of the proletariat and its leadership in the USSR, there was doubt as to who would win the international class struggle, the proletariat of the USSR or imperialism. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Departments of Political Education, on October 17, 1921, Lenin updated his “What is to be done?” by asking the audience with the concrete questions of the time:
What do you want to do?
The whole question is: who will overtake whom?
— Lenin
Trotsky in 1925 and Stalin in 1929 took up Lenin’s question again under different tactics. The question came to be used as a formula that describes the inevitability of the class struggle, that is, who (which of the two antagonists) will dominate the other. In this view, all compromises and promises between enemies are just expedients—tactical maneuvers in the struggle for supremacy.
Trotsky resumes the debate in 1936, in Revolution Betrayed:
“The question posed by Lenin – Who will prevail? – is a question of the correlation of forces between the Soviet Union and the world revolutionary proletariat, on the one hand, and, on the other, international capital and the hostile forces within the Union. The economic successes of the Soviet Union enable it to strengthen, advance, arm itself, and, when necessary, retreat and wait—in a word, resist. But at its core, the question of Who will prevail – not only as a military question, but even more so as an economic question – confronts the Soviet Union on a world scale. Military intervention is a danger. The intervention of cheap goods in the luggage trains of a capitalist army would be incomparably greater. The victory of the proletariat in one of the Western countries would, of course, immediately and radically alter the correlation of forces. But as long as the Soviet Union remains isolated and, worse than that, as long as the European proletariat suffers setbacks and continues to retreat, the strength of the Soviet structure will ultimately be measured by the productivity of labor. And this, in a market economy, is expressed in the costs and prices of production. The difference between domestic prices and prices on the world market is one of the main means of measuring this correlation of forces. Soviet statisticians, however, are forbidden even to address this issue. The reason is that, despite its condition of stagnation and decomposition, capitalism is still far ahead in terms of technique, organization and qualification of the workforce.“
(Trotsky, 1936, Revolution Betrayed, 2. Comparative estimates of these achievements; emphases in bold ours,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch01.htm#ch01-2).
None of this, which haunted the Bolshevik leaders in the first decades of Soviet power, worries China today! Not only does China not run the risk of being invaded by low-priced Western goods, but it has been promoting the opposite movement on the world market for decades. Moreover, it is the richest capitalist power in the entire history of the world that feels threatened by Chinese goods and resorts to a violent and desperate tariff policy to “defend itself”. China celebrates victories upon victories “in the costs and prices of production”, the “difference between domestic prices and prices in the world market” has demonstrated, “one of the main means of measuring this correlation of forces”, has been shown the superiority of China in the correlation of forces; and increasingly, as recent disputes with Haway, BYD and DeepSeek have revealed, China “is far ahead in terms of technique, organization and qualification of the workforce”. All this indicates that, in response to this subtitle and Lenin’s question, China is overtaking imperialism.
4. A workers’ state, on which the capitalist mode of production has become dependent
China is the largest contemporary “manufacturing power”. This condition, achieved by the country only in the twenty-first century, makes China the largest producer of the “immense collection of goods” used and exchanged all over the planet. This set of commodities is the form in which the wealth of bourgeois society in the capitalist mode of production is presented at first sight. Beyond appearance, China is effectively responsible for the production of the commodity in its dual nature, that of use value and that of exchange value, which supplies the world population [1].
In 2023, China’s industrial production was US$ 4.659 trillion and China accounted for 29% of global industrial production, surpassing the next four largest economies combined (USA, Japan, Germany and South Korea). That put the country nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the second-placed United States, which used to have the world’s largest manufacturing sector until China overtook it in 2010.
In 2024, China became responsible for 32% of global industrial production.
In the first quarter of 2025, industrial production by large Chinese companies rose 7.7%, compared to the same period in 2024, the country’s statistics office, the NBS, reported.
“In March, the value added of industrial enterprises above the designated size increased by 7.7% […] are enterprises with annual revenue of the main business exceeding 20 million yuan […] The total value of exports was 2,251.5 billion yuan, an increase of 13.5 percent.”
(NBS: The national economy got off to a good start in the first quarter, 16/04/2025,
https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202504/t20250416_1959313.html).
Exchanges between human beings evolved from local trade – after the enormous initial leap for the development of the productive forces made by the agricultural revolution that created the surplus of production – to trade between city-states, between neighboring regions, continents and passed to the world market. All of this was enhanced by the so-called globalization of trade, a growing process between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries of integration and interdependence between nations, encompassing the circulation of goods, services, information, capital and people on a global scale.
China was the nation that benefited the most productively and technologically from the globalization of the neoliberal stage of the imperialist phase, due to the liberalization of the transfer of industrial plants and production technologies to the Asian country by imperialist monopolies. The capitalist metropolises chose to deindustrialize and benefit from the capitalist world circuit, keeping the financial and speculative dividends of the global market.
In the last 15 years, between 2010 and 2025, after the economic crisis of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic, which potentiated financial decay, deindustrialization and virtualization of the world imperialist system, China first achieved quantitative hegemony in the world market and then made a qualitative leap in this hegemony. The country started from exporting low value-added manufactures to achieve its technological sovereignty and scale in the export of high value-added manufactures.
The growth process has taken a leap in quality in recent years. China has climbed the value chain and has become the largest producer of low- and high-value-added goods. Although part of the production of lower value-added goods has been dispersed to neighboring Asian nations, such as Vietnam and India, China continues to dominate the world export of manufactured goods such as clothing, appliances, footwear, but also goods with the highest technology incorporated, such as smartphones, lithium-ion batteries, electric cars and Artificial Intelligence. automated machine tools and robotics; aerospace and aeronautical equipment; marine equipment and high-tech transportation; modern rail transport equipment; energy equipment; agricultural equipment; new materials; and biopharmaceuticals and advanced medical products. Between 1995 and 2020, the quality of goods for export changed and reversed:
“In 1995, clothing and other textiles accounted for 20% of total Chinese exports, while electronics accounted for less than 9%. In 2020, this scenario was reversed: electronics accounted for 24% of Chinese exports and textiles, only 10%.
“This process, often referred to as moving up the value chain, requires capital investment and technical expertise to build and operate modernized manufacturing facilities. In previous generations of industrial planning, Chinese manufacturers absorbed these factors of production from foreign companies, generating frustrations with technology transfer that fueled trade tensions in the 2010s. In some areas, however, Chinese technology leaders have caught up with—or surpassed—their international competitors, requiring greater reliance on domestic innovation”
(China Power: Measuring China’s Manufacturing Might,
https://chinapower.csis.org/tracker/china-manufacturing/#:~:text=China’s%20Manufacturing%20Dominance,-China%20has%20rapidly&text=China’s%20lead%20has%20widened%20since,%2C%20Germany%2C%20and%20India ).
China has become hegemonic over the world market because this whole process described above has led China to the condition of the largest exporting economy in the world and the second largest importer, second only to the US until 2024. However, it is very likely that, after the unprecedented import tariffs announced by Donald Trump’s government on practically all its trading partners, the greater protectionism of the US will reduce the amount of goods exported from other countries, isolating it commercially from the rest of the planet, and result in the loss of the title of the world’s largest importer and China will consolidate its trajectory as the largest exporter and importer in the world market.
The dependence that the capitalist mode of production has on China has become even more evident, explicit and shameful for the US, after Trump raised his package of tariffs on imports from China to 245% and then had to exempt from them a list of 20 categories of products, such as cell phones, computers, semiconductors, etc. memory chips and flat-panel displays.
The U.S. government’s tariff war against China demonstrates that world imperialism does not rule China. The military and financial leadership of world capitalism does not govern the core of the production of world commodities – although most of the imperialist monopolies continue to have gains in profitability with their plants installed in China since the implementation of the Special Economic Zones – an unprecedented situation in the history of the capitalist mode of production.
5. A powerful combo for the transition: developing forces and conquering the world market
In The German Ideology (1845-6), written after the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), historical materialism will incorporate the concepts of labor and alienation and will gain an improved format that will outline the rest of Marx and Engels’ work.
“This ‘alienation’ [Entfremdung], to use a term comprehensible to philosophers, can only be overcome, of course, under two practical presuppositions. In order for it to become an “unbearable” power, i.e., a power against which a revolution is made, it must have produced the mass of humanity as absolutely “propertyless” and at the same time in contradiction to a world of existing wealth and culture, conditions which presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development – and, on the other hand, this development of the productive forces (in which at the same time human empirical existence is contained, given not on the local plane, but on the world-historical plane) is a practical presupposition, absolutely necessary, because without it scarcity is only generalized, and therefore, with the famine, the struggles for the necessary foodstuffs would begin again and all the old filth would eventually be re-established; Moreover, only with this universal development of the productive forces is a universal exchange of men established , and thereby the phenomenon of the ‘propertyless’ mass (universal competition) is produced simultaneously in all peoples, making each of them dependent on the revolutions of the other; and, finally, empirically universal, world-historical individuals are put in the place of local individuals. Without this, 1) communism could exist only as a local phenomenon; 2) the forces of exchange themselves could not have developed as universal forces, and therefore as unbearable forces; they would have remained as domestic-superstitious “circumstances”; and 3) any extension of exchange would have surpassed local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as a ‘sudden’ and simultaneous action of the dominant peoples, which presupposes the universal development of the productive force and the world exchange associated with this development.
(Marx’s notes, written in the margin of the manuscript that were published as footnotes to the book German Ideology, 2007, p. 38).
With the transition to the urban life of the majority of humanity (in which China is a central player) and with the industrialization of agriculture, the conditions for the abolition of class society and the transition to the future communist society are increasingly being created. It should be noted that information technology and telecommunications create the conditions for the central planning of production and change at the international level in an integrated manner and without any type of bureaucratization; cybernetics, including artificial intelligence, make it possible to pave the way for the abolition of the difference between manual and intellectual work, etc.
By promoting a great increase in the productive forces (general and labor) – “a practical assumption, absolutely necessary, because without it scarcity is only generalized and, therefore, with the famine, the struggles for the necessary foodstuffs would begin again and all the old filth would eventually be reestablished” – simultaneously with the conquest of hegemony over the world market, in the (capitalist) condition of the largest exporting economy and the second largest importer of goods on the planet, by developing universal and unbearable forces for the hegemony of imperialism, China shows that it is situated in the transition between capitalism and socialism, whose advance to communism, empirically, is only possible as a “sudden” and simultaneous action of the dominant peoples, which presupposes the universal development of the productive force and the world exchange associated with this development.”
In this last sentence may lie where the peaceful and defensive nature of Confucian thought (from 551 and 479 B.C.), a system of social and political ethics that emphasizes harmony, order and morality identified with the old Asian mode of production, inherited by the ruling layer of the CPC resists the dynamic of revolutionary proletarian Marxism to act as a decisive subject for the “sudden action” that turns the Chinese proletariat from the “dominant people” into a class” leader”, as Gramsci would say, in addition to exercising dominion over the means of production, also exercises political, cultural and ideological leadership over the process of universal historical evolution in opposition to decadent imperialism and in favor of all peoples oppressed by it.
6. The national and international class struggle for prices, de-dollarization and tariff war
China, in its “thousand-year NEP”, escaped the “Scissors Crisis”, a contradiction generated by the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the USSR in 1923, which promoted the gap between the prices of agricultural and manufactured products. China has recently escaped the “Shock Therapy” imposed by imperialism on the workers’ states of the USSR and Eastern Europe in the processes of capitalist restoration, which radically liberalized prices and trade, simultaneously privatizing the state, leading the economies of these countries to collapse in the 1990s.
China has been winning not only the internal price war, but the global price war, which is why it has become the world’s largest producer and exporter of goods.
It is necessary to establish here the differences between the dual nature of commodities, use value, exchange value, and the categories of value, price and money, which are distinct but related concepts, as Marx himself elucidates in Chapter I of Capital. Every commodity is the product of human labor. Use value consists of the individual function of the object useful to human beings. The other forms of value are created from the relation of the commodity to the other commodities, both by the use of human labour (a special commodity which creates the others) in the manufacture of the commodity, that is, by the relation between labour-power and the commodity; and by the relation which this commodity acquires to the other individual commodities; as well as by the domestic or foreign market value that this commodity will assume. Value is the objective expression of human labor in the commodity.
It is human labor that gives the social unit of measurement for the comparison of different commodities, this social unit is determined by the labor time socially necessary for the production of the commodity. Exchange value is the relation of the commodity to other commodities, a comparison that can only exist by the existence of value. Exchange value is the form of value, though not its content. But just as value is not equal to exchange value, exchange value is not automatically the price of commodities.
The price of commodities is the monetary manifestation of the exchange value of a commodity. The price is influenced by factors such as supply and demand, and may diverge from the value in certain cases. Money is a commodity that functions as a measure of value, a means of circulation, its use value is to be a universal equivalent value for the exchange between commodities within a local, regional or world market. “When commodity production has reached a certain degree of development (…) It (money) becomes the universal commodity of contracts” (Marx, 2013, p. 213). However, when commodity production overflowed the national markets, so did money. “Only in the world market does money function fully as the commodity whose natural form is, at the same time, the immediately social form of realization of human labor in abstracto” (Marx, 2013, p. 213). In China, with an employed labor force of one billion people, humanity has concentrated in a single country the largest productive force in history.
In 1944, the dominant capitalist nations, the USA and Britain; then the world’s largest producers of goods, established in Bretton Woods that the dollar will be “THE” standard currency for world transactions. The USA assumed this hegemony at a time when Great Britain, violently demolished in World War II by Germany, had lost its status as the “factory of the world”.
Now, China, being the current factory of the world, is impelled to question the hegemony of the dollar, even if it does not propose that its currency is automatically the substitute for the dollar, but that it claims not to pay the “use tax” to the US, in exchanges in which the latter is not involved. De-dollarization is a trend in the world economy in a process in which the US is no longer the largest producer of goods and its dollar commodity already becomes dysfunctional, inflationary for global trade. But, above all, this impasse in the dispute for the world currency was generated because, since China is the current factory of the world, it is in China that “the immediately social form of the realization of human labor in abstracto” is more produced than in any other part of the globe. Trump’s tariff war against the world is a desperate reaction in fulfillment of the threat he made shortly after being elected in November 2024 that he would overtax the BRICS if they advanced the project of de-dollarization of trade transactions.
7. Inequality that grows in the capitalist world, decreases in China
In most capitalist countries, as the research of Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, attests, inequality has increased. One of the main findings of the study is that there has been an increase in wealth inequalities after 30 years and the fact that wealth inequalities are more pronounced in the US. The growing social barbarism, resulting from the deindustrialization and financialization of the Western world (including Japan and Australia) produces the formation of immense pockets of misery and populations living on the streets as “homeless”, despite the growth of empty properties.
In any capitalist state, the accumulation of capital catapults growing misery. On the law of increasing misery, for Marx and for Marxists,
“Within the capitalist system, all methods of raising the productivity of capitalist labor, as capital accumulates, must worsen the condition of the worker, whether his remuneration rises or falls. an accumulation of misery corresponding to the accumulation of capital. Therefore, the accumulation of wealth at one pole is, at the same time, the accumulation of misery, the torture of work, slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation at the opposite pole.”
(MARX, 2013, p.721).
Conversely, China has lifted more than 700 million people out of extreme poverty (defined by the World Bank as an income of less than US$ 2.15 per day or R$ 209 per month), representing one of humanity’s greatest and fastest advances in poverty reduction in history. This process occurred simultaneously with the last four decades that projected China as a world power.
The reduction of extreme poverty was in the wake of the doubling of the consuming middle class and associated with the increase in wages.
“In January 2025, millions of civil servants in China received a significant pay raise, the first in a decade. The average increase was about 500 yuan ($68.50) per month. This January wage adjustment aims to stimulate domestic consumption and boost the economy amid persistent economic challenges. Comparing data from the ILO (International Labor Organization) while average wages in China grew 564% between 2000 and 2015, countries such as Australia, Germany, South Korea, the United States and Chile recorded increases of 17%, 10%, 24%, 15% and 35%, respectively.”
(Abert: China’s Average Wage is the fastest growing in the world and boosts the domestic market, 03/02/2025,
In all capitalist societies, the accumulation of capital, that is, the existence of billionaires, generates increasing misery. However, in China today, with an overaccumulation of capital, that is, with the construction of the largest multinational companies in history and billionaires, the rural population has risen from the misery they lived, wage earners are earning more and the so-called Chinese middle class, which was already 400 million people, is doubling in size (ADB: The Rise of the Middle Class in the People’s Republic of China, February 2011, https://www.adb.org/publications/rise-middle-class-peoples-republic-china).
Wages have been raised, reducing China’s dependence on the oscillations and crises of the world capitalist market, while increasing the dependence of the world market on China.
8. “New imperialism”, “Weberian developmental state” and “State capitalism”
China’s empowerment in the capitalist world market, confronting US imperialism in the economic and diplomatic field, instead of attracting, frightens many leftists who have come to characterize the Asian country as a new imperialist nation. For these leftists, the message that Lenin sent to the leftists of the time (Mensheviks, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and anarchists) when he defended the NEP in his famous document “On the Tax in Kind, the Meaning of the New Economic Policy and Its Conditions” is valid:
“Socialism is inconceivable without the great capitalist technique, based on the last word of modern science, without a harmonious state organization which subjects tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a single norm in the production and distribution of products. We Marxists always talk about it and it is not worth spending even two seconds to talk about it with people who do not understand at least this (anarchists are a good part of the left-wing esserists).
At the same time, socialism is inconceivable without the domination of the state by the proletariat: this is also elementary. And history (from which no one, except the obtuse first-class Mensheviks, expected ‘integral’ socialism to take place in a smooth, quiet, easy, simple way) followed such an original path that it generated, until 1918, two separate halves of socialism; one next to the other, just like two chicks under the same wing of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia most clearly embodied the material realisation of the social, productive and economic economic conditions of socialism on the one hand and its political conditions on the other.” (Lenin, On the Tax in Kind, 1922, p. 148).
Lenin’s words fit like a glove for us to understand that: 1) the present conditions in China express the domination of great capitalist technique, based on the last word of modern science, under a harmonious state organization that subjects tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a single norm in the production and distribution of products; 2) and the relationship between China and its partners such as Russia, Iran and, to a certain extent, the BRICS, which embodied, in 2025, “in the most obvious way, the material realization of the economic-social, productive and economic conditions of socialism” in a higher stage of productive and economic conditions, but hesitate to geopolitically challenge the hegemony of the imperialist system.
The characterization that China embodies a new type of imperialism has no adherence to reality. From this characterization that China is imperialist, the situation worsens, because the Mensheviks, Esserists and anarchists of the 21st century, whether they come from Stalinist, Maoist or Trotskyist shades, who immediately expected the realization of an “integral socialism” and, as reality did not immediately meet their idealizations, took the opportunity to adhere to the ideological propaganda of the imperialist enemy, claiming a policy of double defeatism in the face of conflicts between China and the USA, just as they do in the war between NATO and Russia, which takes place in Ukraine. We understand that this is a tacit, shameful and cowardly way of allying with imperialism against Russia and China in the escalation of the world conflict.
Marxists take sides in all conflicts involving imperialism and nations oppressed by it (even if this oppression is tariff or in the form of sanctions), they are unconditionally on the opposite side of imperialism.
Part of the centrist leftists, who claim to be Marxists, characterize China as a kind of “state capitalism”, and not a few among them have been advancing from this centrist position to state that China represents the evolution of state capitalism to a new type of imperialism, after all, it cannot be said that the Chinese government is a mere management committee of the affairs of the internal or external bourgeoisie, no matter how much exceptionalities are recognized in the supposed Chinese version of state capitalism.
Many scholars characterize China as a “Weberian developmental state” (So, 2003; Dickson, 2008; McNally and Wright, 2010; van der Pijl, 2012, 2016; Yao, 2010, 2011), therefore, a capitalist technocratic state. The problem with this reasoning lies in believing that the State would have full capacity to maintain control over the national bourgeoisie, disregarding the class struggle.
These two characterizations consider a relatively cooperative and harmonious coexistence between the state and the Chinese bourgeoisie and minimize the existence of a class struggle between capital and labor in China and on the planet involving the global role occupied by China in the class struggle, regardless of whether or not its ruling political layer wants to occupy this role.
Both have an increasingly weak argumentative and political support, especially after the pandemic and the fact that relations between the State and Chinese billionaires have soured, due to the flight of capital promoted by the latter and the repression of the former.
Since 2023, the “tense alliance” between the national bourgeoisie and the state, which marked the 2009-2022 period, has been broken by the Xi Jimping government.
“The pressure on business elites has not eased, and now that the borders are open, many are considering exit plans. Last month, Hui Ka Yan, founder of ailing Evergrande and Asia’s former richest man, was arrested for unspecified crimes. Bao Fan, a renowned investment banker once seen as a kingmaker in the tech business world, was detained in February and has not been seen since. Other executives were banned from leaving.
“The current scenario is a marked change from the 1990s and early 2000s, when China was preparing to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and implementing a series of market reforms that allowed Chinese entrepreneurs to amass enormous wealth. That was an era when making money came before anything else. But under Mr. Xi, who has consolidated his personal power more than any other leader since Mao, the emphasis has shifted back to political control rather than economic freedom.
“’The arbitrary punishment imposed on the wealthy class is unlike anything we’ve seen since the 1990s,’ says Victor Shih, a professor of political economy in China at the University of California, San Diego. ‘This has led many of this class to think about diversifying their businesses out of China […]Wealthy Chinese are also looking for ways to move, and also to take their money, out of China. About 13,500 high-net-worth individuals are expected to leave China this year, up from 10,800 last year, according to Henley & Partners, an immigration consultancy.
“’The Chinese government plays for keeps, as Jack Ma and many others have discovered,’ says David Lesperance, an independent consultant who helps high-net-worth people move. ‘So we need to look at how to protect their assets and their well-being.’’”
(The Guardian: China’s billionaires are looking to move their money and themselves out. 30/10/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/chinas-billionaires-looking-to-move-their-cash-and-themselves-out#:~:text=Of%20the%20world’s%20estimated%202%2C640%20billionaires%2C%20at,money%2C%20and%20themselves%2C%20out%20of%20the%20country ).
This movement is real, apparently consistent and scandalizes the British imperialist press which increases the demonization of China. The participation of private capital has been reduced and the influence of the State in the economy of companies has been expanded in the last five years. This trend is evident in the growing number of state-owned enterprises and mixed-ownership enterprises whose majority stake belongs to the Chinese party-state.
“Panel ‘a’ of the chart shows the aggregate market capitalization share of the top 100 listed companies in China, by company ownership, while panel ‘b’ shows the aggregate revenue share of all Chinese companies included in the Fortune Global 500, also by company ownership.
“This tracker is based on the methodology set out in our 2022 Working Paper. The private sector is narrowly defined as companies with less than 10% state participation. The state-owned sector includes both mixed-ownership enterprises (SMEs), in which the state owns between 10% and 50%, and majority-owned state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
“Private companies’ share of market capitalization among China’s 100 largest listed companies has fallen from a peak of around 55% in mid-2021 to just 33% at the end of June this year, a decline of more than 40% in just three years (see panel ‘a’). At the same time, the share of state-owned enterprises, i.e. those majority-owned by the Chinese party-state, has risen steadily from less than a third to around 54% […]
“These developments look increasingly structural. The authorities’ stance since 2020, including regulatory tightening and COVID-free lockdowns, appears to have done lasting damage to China’s private economy, whose dynamism has been a defining feature of its economic miracle over the past four decades. Nearly 20 months after China’s reopening due to COVID, the private sector has yet to recover, despite many pro-private statements and gestures from the Chinese leadership. In short, the findings corroborate the view that China continues to suffer from “prolonged economic COVID.”
Panels ‘a’ and ‘b’ are an integral part of the article: China’s private sector has lost ground as state sector has gained share among top corporations since 2021, written by Tianlei Huang and Nicolas Véron in September 2024 for the Peterson Institute for International Economics https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-private-sector-has-lost-ground-state-sector-has-gained-share-among .
Everything indicates that after the Covid-19 epidemic, the Xi Jimping government took the opportunity to deepen and consolidate a structural statist trend, increasing the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the state.
It seems, which may not be a consolidated trend, that the forms of property and capitalist relations of production that have developed since the end of the 1970s continue to evolve as in the last four decades and the struggle between socialist and capitalist relations of production in the national and international context is intensifying. ultimately, between world monopoly capital and the Chinese proletariat. This progressive conjuncture gives rise to the negation of the negation in favor of the continuity of the revolution that began in 1949.
Debating the terminology of “state capitalism”, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), highlights the revolutionary perspectives of the structural nationalization of the economy:
“Under an integral ‘state capitalism’, this law of the equal rate of profit would be realized not by tortuous ways – that is, by competition between different capitals – but immediately and directly by state accounting. Such a regime, however, has never existed, and because of profound contradictions among the owners themselves, it never will, all the more so since, in its capacity as the universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution.
(Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed; Chapter 9 – Social Relations in the Soviet Union: State Capitalism, 1936,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch09.htm#ch09-1 )
According to the thinking of the Ukrainian revolutionary, the state monopoly of the rate of profit, eliminating competition between different capitals, makes accounting and state control even more favorable, and therefore favors economic planning in the short, medium and long term.
He considered that such a regime never existed and could never exist. In fact, the present Chinese regime, as well as the Soviet political regime in its early years, has come closest to this hypothetical regime in which the “profound contradictions between the owners” are subject to state intervention that tends to overcome with socialist measures the quality of the sole representative of the monopoly of ownership of the means of production.
Trotsky did not envision, nor could he at the time, that the hypothetical country to install “integral state capitalism” would have a political regime established by a social revolution that remained in power for 76 long years. The rupture and overcoming of the stage of the “tense alliance” (2009-2020) between the Chinese state and the fleeing Chinese bourgeoisie, points to the deepening of a revolutionary tendency that was too tempting for the political regime established by the Chinese revolution of 1949.
If China were capitalist or imperialist, it must be agreed that it would be a very rare model, not because we believe that there is an ideal classical model to which China should be compared, but because, in fact, despite the wage-earning of labor power and capitalist exchange and accumulation relations existing in China, it is very necessary to define it as a capitalist state because several tendential laws of the capitalist economy, postulated by Marx; and imperialist economy, postulated by Lenin, do not apply in the Asian country.
For example, the law of increasing misery, resulting from the accumulation of capital; the modification of the technical composition of capital, with the variable part becoming smaller and smaller in relation to the constant part of capital, also resulting from capitalist accumulation; from the foregoing process would also derive the tendency of the rate of profit; the formation of an industrial reserve army. But none of this is proven. Perhaps, as Lenin supposes in his “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916), what can be inferred from Lenin’s prognostications lies in the fact that certain advanced elements of the Chinese economy may be gestating the opposite of imperialism, perceived by imperialism more than by many leftists. For example: when he supposes that the monopoly economy
It has reached a certain very high stage of its development, when certain fundamental features of capitalism begin to become its antithesis, when traces of the epoch of capitalism’s transition to a higher economic and social structure take shape and manifest themselves in every line. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher regime (Lenin, 2002, p. 67)
If some fundamental features of capitalism begin to become its antithesis, and if monopoly is an indication of the transition from capitalism to a higher system, the more advanced will be the process in which monopoly is under the tutelage of socialist state planning.
9. A system in transition threatened by growing structural and geopolitical contradictions
There is one constant in all capitalist countries: the state is the political representative of the interests of the capitalists. Bourgeois or bourgeois workers’ parties, such as the Labour Party in Great Britain or the Workers’ Party in Brazil, exercise temporary government, but not absolute power over the political regime, which is the set of political institutions through which a state organizes itself in order to exercise its power over society. But, even in the cases of the LP and the PT, the State is not an instrument of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, at most, at most, there are governments to contain the most voracious appetites of the bourgeoisie, making increasing concessions to neoliberal policies.
In all the workers’ states that were thus constituted after the social revolutions of the twentieth century, communist parties were the main or only governing parties and leaders of the established regimes. This is maintained in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and China.
The current Chinese state is a creation of the 1949 revolution and all the changes, contradictions, and internal struggles carried out by the Chinese Communist Party since then. Never has any capitalist state in history been ruled by a communist party, not even for 5 years, let alone for 76 years. In China, as much as there have been palace infighting between factions of the CCP, the political regime is the same as that which was instituted in 1949.
Today, the CCP controls 96 state-owned business conglomerates, almost all of which are global monopolies, and party members are stationed in all executive bodies of all companies with more than 100 employees. The CCP controls the four largest banks on the planet (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China). It is this control that prevents the imperialist system and its “multilateral” organizations, created and developed after the Second World War, as well as the all-powerful world finance capital from controlling China. At the same time, this economic power has favored the creation of a new system of multilateral organizations of oppressed peoples, such as the BRICS, the New Development Bank (NDB), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The Communist Party organizes and expresses the interests of the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie in a contradictory way, as the four stars of the Chinese flag express the four factions into which the Chinese people are divided. The organized numerical strength of the working class, of one billion people, as an active labor force, is what presses the orientation of defensive actions to contain the appetites of Chinese billionaires and the private monopolies of imperialism. These are the aspects that make China a workers’ state and not a capitalist state or a capitalist power like the components of the G-7.
It has been said that great power generates great responsibilities (Stan Lee). This same powerful nation, which cannot be treated only as a mere nation-state of the modern capitalist era, but already as a nucleus of an international system that is the productive engine of the planet that supplies the world market of goods, has been relieving itself of responsibility for the defense of the oppressed peoples of the globe.
China does not go beyond a few timid diplomatic demonstrations, in defense of the other peoples and nations oppressed by imperialism and the workers of the rest of the world under the worst attacks of the states and armies of international capital throughout the oppressed world, as in Palestine, for example. Even compared to institutional programs, such as the Export of Health Services from Cuba, which began in the 1960s, the state of China does not offer anything similar to the workers of the world that are brothers of the Chinese. China does not even move to help countries in economic difficulties aggravated by imperialist oppression and sanctions such as Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen or Iran. A Chinese task force in support of Cuba or Venezuela would break all the ties of sanctions and blockades imposed on the two countries and enable extraordinary growth of their economies and societies.
On the international level, in geopolitics, China limits itself to timid manifestations of protests and diplomatic votes in the multilateral bodies of the imperialist system, but it does not carry out any proletarian internationalism against the exploitation and oppression exercised by big international capital against the proletariat and oppressed peoples, in the form of aggressions, sanctions and blockades.
The Chinese workers’ state is now at a crossroads between capitalism and socialism. Imperialism discovered late the danger it helped to create when it boosted China’s productive development by transferring its larger factories to the Asian country. The prospects of this crossroads will be decided by the revolutionary anti-imperialist and communist struggle both on the world arena as well as by the power struggle between the four classes in China.
The policies of the CCP bureaucracy of staying quiet in world geopolitics, moving only slowly in the dispute for markets, hoping to gain time in the face of the decay of the imperialist system and hoping to be spared a more fulminating attack now, weaken China in the confrontation with capitalism internally and extremely, and may not only compromise its evolution towards socialism, but its existence as an independent nation. A Chinese intervention in the Palestinian question, with all the productive capacity and the high development of the country’s geoengineering, would rebuild Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen, devastated by the genocidal Zionist-imperialist escalation, in less than a year. Such an intervention can certainly lead to a military confrontation with Israel and the US, but it can also contain the escalation of recolonization of West Asia carried out by Washington and Tel Aviv, a vital space that cannot be completely replaced by the Arctic route, for the development of the New Silk Road (BRI). a Chinese initiative exponentially superior to the US Marshall Plan.
Imperialism intends to close the siege of world maritime trade – crucial to the global economy, responsible for 80% of the volume of world trade – against China in the Panama Canals, Suez, and the Straits of Bab El Mandab and Malacca.
Nationalism in this respect is the antithesis of proletarian and socialist internationalism, and therefore weighs on China’s retreat towards capitalism. Technocratic and capitalist deformations are to the post-capitalism of the 21st century, what the bureaucratization of the USSR was to the post-capitalism of the 20th century.
The current trade war between China and imperialism, like all other conflicts between China and imperialism, were all on the initiative of imperialism and not of the Chinese non-internationalist communists.
The CPC seeks a peaceful coexistence with imperialism. It is imperialism that, for its part, does not tolerate Chinese growth. It is then thanks to enemy pressure that this illusory policy of peaceful coexistence becomes impossible and the leadership of the party is pushed into the anti-imperialist struggle.
The accumulation of capital and the specifically capitalist mode of production develop as two factors which, in the combined production of reciprocally giving impulses, modify the technical composition of capital, increasing the costs of constant capital. But, as we have seen and proven in the fight for AI between China and US big techs, China has been reducing the costs of constant capital.
Our program allowed itself to be contaminated by the anti-defencist influence of pseudo-Trotskyism and by impressionism with the imperialist ideological offensive, generalizing and equating the Asian workers’ states with the defeats we suffered in Eastern Europe and the USSR, without making a concrete analysis of the concrete situation not only in China, but also in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, maintaining the status of workers’ state only for North Korea and Cuba. We had a centrist characterization that has been defeated by the evolution of the concrete relationship between China and imperialism in recent years. Although we made several correct characterizations of the decay of the financialized imperialist system and also correctly defended China and Russia against all the onslaughts of imperialism, we believed that China and Russia were at a similar stage and were new social formations, which were “capitalist, non-imperialist states, positively deformed by decades of non-capitalist development” (LCFI Statement: Marxism and the Post-Counterrevolution Cold War: The Diminution of Imperialism and the Rise of Non-Imperialist Capitalism, Deformed by Decades of Non-Capitalist Development, in Russia and China,
https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/lcfi-statement-marxism-and-the-post-counterrevolution-cold-war/). Under this centrist and impressionistic policy, we hastened to recognize that capitalist restoration in China had already been completely consummated, despite the immense exceptionalities of the Chinese state for both the internal and international class struggle.
Neither the Tianamen Square conflict (1989) in Beijing nor China’s entry into the WTO (1992) changed the political regime or the mode of production of the 1949 revolution. Tianamen was the failure of a liberal-anti-bureaucratic colour counterrevolution, one of the many promoted by the CIA between 1989 and 1991. China’s entry into the WTO was only a formality to try to adapt the country to the rules of international trade, however, despite the privatisation reforms, China was far from adopting shock therapy, whose original laboratory was Pinochet’s Chile, which completely deregulated prices, trade and privatized the economy, as happened in Yeltsin’s Russia.
The proof that Russia and China followed qualitatively different restorationist patterns is also proven by the consequences for Russia of the application of shock therapy, the difference in the two-way price system policy:
“The macroeconomic outcome of China’s market reform policies was the opposite of Russia’s: inflation was low or moderate, but output growth was extremely rapid (see figures below). Rather than destroying the existing system of prices and planning, with the hope that a market economy would somehow emerge ‘from the ruins’, China adopted an experimentalist approach, which used the given institutional realities to construct a new economic system. The state gradually recreated markets from the margins of the old system. […] reforms in China were gradual—not only in terms of pace, but also in terms of movement from the margins of the old industrial system toward its core. Triggering a dynamic of growth and reindustrialization, the gradual entry into the market ended up changing the entire economic policy, at the same time that the State maintained control over the strategic sectors of the economy. The most prominent manifestation of China’s approach is the two-way pricing system, which is the opposite of shock therapy. Instead of releasing all prices in one big bang, the state continued to plan the industrial core of the economy and fix the prices of essential goods, while the prices of surplus products and non-essential goods were successively released. As a result, prices began to be gradually determined by the market. The two-way street system is not simply a pricing policy, but also a process of creating and regulating the market through the participation of the State”. (Weber, 2023, p. 29)
Evidently, the difference was due to the control of the state over the economy and the control of the state by a centralized Party, vindicating the revolutionary and communist traditions of the social revolution of 1949.
Another element that needs to be overcome in our previous elaboration, and the present document points in this direction, is the need to radically break with the nihilistic influences of the triumphalist ideology of imperialism on the international communist movement, with the implicit influence of the imperialist theses of the end of history (F. Fukuyama). We believed that the struggle for socialism suffered a long-term, almost strategic, defeat after the defeats of the 89-91 process.
Despite our mistakes, we continue to join the progressive sectors of Trotskyism and Stalinist centrism that defend China and the oppressed countries (including Russia and Iran) against imperialism.
We have not been consistent in separating to the necessary extent the critique of politics from the critique of economics. According to the history of political science, a social and political revolution is possible in backward, very backward countries such as Cambodia or even in half a country such as the Korean peninsula. But the development of the social bases for socialism is not possible without a development of the productive forces.
In Capital, in fact, Marx stated that “the capitalist mode of production presents itself […] as a historical necessity for the transformation of the work process into a social process”. For him, the social productive power of labor develops gratuitously whenever workers are under certain conditions, and it is capital that places them under these conditions.” Marx understood that the most favorable circumstances for communism could only have been realized with the expansion of capital. The development of the social bases for socialism is not possible without the development of the productive forces,” which seems to be the case with China’s economy.
That is why the most revolutionary party in the world, the Bolsheviks, was forced to take “a step back” with the NEP. Our criticism of the Chinese process lies in the fact that the Chinese NEP was operated, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jimping, passing through all the others, in a process of class conciliation with the main enemy of humanity, US imperialism.
Another argument against the working-class character of the Chinese state lies in the existence of billionaires, being the country with the second most billionaires in the world economy. The existence of billionaires does not represent a capitalist state if the state is not controlled by these billionaires. The existence of billionaires only attests to the fact that under the workers’ state contradictions of bourgeois norms of distribution coexist and that the bureaucracy itself has a bourgeois character, as Trotsky attested in the USSR, in spite of the fact that, unlike contemporary China, the bourgeoisie has been eliminated as a social class in the USSR:
“The assertion that the bureaucracy of a workers’ state has a bourgeois character must seem not only unintelligible, but completely meaningless to people with a formal mentality. However, chemically pure types of state have never existed and do not exist in general. The semi-feudal Prussian monarchy carried out the most important tasks of the bourgeoisie, but it carried them out in its own way, i.e. in a feudal, not a Jacobin, style. In Japan we still observe an analogous correlation between the bourgeois character of the state and the semi-feudal character of the ruling caste. But all this does not prevent us from clearly differentiating between a feudal and a bourgeois society. It is true that it may be objected that collaboration between feudal and bourgeois forces is immeasurably easier to achieve than collaboration between bourgeois and proletarian forces, since the former case presents a case of two forms of class exploitation. This is completely correct. But a workers’ state does not create a new society in a day. Marx wrote that in the first period of a workers’ state, the bourgeois norms of distribution are still preserved. (On this, see The Revolution Betrayed, section Socialism and the State, p. 53.) It is necessary to ponder well and reflect on this until the end. The workers’ state itself, as a state, is necessary precisely because the bourgeois norms of distribution still remain in force.
“This means that even the most revolutionary bureaucracy is to a certain degree a bourgeois organ in the workers’ state. It is clear that the degree of this bureaucratization and the general trend of development are of decisive importance. If the workers’ state loses its bureaucratization and gradually disintegrates, it means that its development moves in the direction of socialism. On the contrary, if the bureaucracy becomes more and more powerful, authoritarian, privileged and conservative, this means that, in the workers’ state, bourgeois tendencies grow at the expense of socialist ones; in other words, that internal contradiction which, to a certain degree, has lodged itself in the workers’ state since the first days of its rise, does not diminish, as the “norm” demands, but increases. However, as long as this contradiction has not passed from the sphere of distribution to the sphere of production and has not destroyed nationalized property and the planned economy, the state remains a workers’ state. (Trotsky, Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?, 1937).
In a transitional state between capitalism and socialism, there continues to be class struggle and bourgeois norms of distribution, which agitate the struggles of the working class. From the empirical data that we present throughout this document, it can be seen that the ownership of the means of production has become increasingly nationalized in recent years, especially after the pandemic, and that at no time in the last four decades has the economy ceased to be planned.
If, as Marxists, we understand that the state is ultimately the special detachment of armed men, we must ask ourselves whether the Chinese armed forces today intervene in favor of or against the interests of the billionaires, in the consolidation of their power over the state conglomerates in China. In Russia, between 1985 and 1991, a hegemonic fraction of the bureaucracy modified the country’s political, social and economic regime and operated capitalist restoration. This did not occur in China.
The current economic war between the US and the Chinese workers’ state emerges as a prelude to a third world war, between the imperialist system and the bloc of oppressed nations led by China, Russia and Iran. But other issues of the internal class struggle are even more dangerous because they could jeopardize the future of the core of power in the Chinese economy: structural problems with the proletariat.
The comparative advantages achieved by China in the development of the productive forces have come at the expense of the relations of production. At first, the formation of the Chinese urban proletariat in the last decade of the twentieth century resembled the process of original accumulation of British capital in the sixteenth century, when the capitalist era began (Marx, 2017, p. 787). The pressures of exhausting working hours, on the one hand, and petty-bourgeois pressures, on the other, can lead China to a social crisis that aborts the course of the transition to socialism.
The Chinese working day is one of the most strenuous. If, in various parts of the world, there are struggles for the reduction of the 6×1 workday, that is, for the end of work on six of the 7 days a week, in China, contrary to the labor legislation itself, the workday is 6 or 7 days a week, from 9 am to 9 pm, resulting in a 72-hour workweek.
The “996” culture has been associated with physical and mental health problems, stress, burnout, and difficulties in reconciling work and personal life. The pressure to work excessively can also lead to a lack of creativity, innovation, and job satisfaction. This practice, while not officially mandatory in all companies, is common in sectors such as technology and Chinese startups.
Many young people of the new generations carry out an individual movement of resistance to these working days, opposing work or claiming free time. The term “involution” (or neijuan in Chinese, literally translated as “screw”) has come to be widely used to express a sense of exhaustion derived from work and to criticize the process in which population growth does not result in productivity improvements or innovation. Billionaire Jack Ma (owner of the Alibaba conglomerate, a kind of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, Chinese), is one of the defenders of the Culture of 996, which he calls a “blessing”.
Some movements in favor of free time and for the reduction of working hours and rhythms have been exploited by the imperialist press.
“The anthropological term “involution” (or neijuan in Chinese, literally translated as “screw”) refers to a social concept according to which population growth does not result in productivity improvements or innovation. Today, the term is widely used to express a sense of exhaustion. The trend began on the campuses of the country’s elite universities with the publication of images of students hard at work on the internet. These images went viral last year. In one of the photos, a student at Tsinghua University used his laptop while riding his bike. The student was christened the “‘involuted’ king of Tsinghua”. The idea of devolution began to permeate the entire young generation in China, with a special echo among millennials and the so-called generation Z. On Weibo, the country’s largest social network, keywords related to devolution were viewed more than 1 billion times. The term was also included in a popular ranking of last year’s top 10 buzzwords.
The idea behind tang ping — not working too hard, being satisfied with achievable goals, and allowing yourself time to relax — has been praised by many and inspired countless memes. This became a kind of spiritual movement.” (Fan Wang and Yitsing Wang, BBC, 29 June 2021 ‘Neijuan’: the new generation rebelling against excessive work for success in China, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-57609077).
Despite the development of the productive forces, the policies of wage increases, triggered by many workers’ strikes – which favors the domestic consumer market, reducing China’s dependence on the international market – despite the reduction of misery to 700 million people, Culture 996 is a component of the setback in the relations of production, of exploitation of absolute surplus value and discourages the young proletarian generations in the generational reproduction of the power of work.
The struggle of the working class for free time, simultaneous with the increase in productivity, development of the productive forces and technology, must be one of the priorities for the workers and for the future of China. An aggressive campaign for the reduction of the working day with the maintenance of the policy of wage appreciation would also reduce the focus of imperialist propaganda for “democracy” and “freedom”, against the alleged Chinese slavery, propaganda that seeks to rely on real contradictions in society in favor of pro-imperialist color revolutions.
10. For socialist internationalism!
In short, we come to characterize China as a deformed workers’ state, which can become an advanced nucleus of the international system in transition to socialism. It must lead a coalition of the oppressed with nuclear weapons to defend peoples who are under an open policy of extermination, such as the Palestinians. But this will only be possible if its leading Communist Party transforms its nationalism, progressive in relation to imperialism, into socialist internationalism.
This requires a major political change, and it unlikely to just happen spontaneously out of the existing political framework of the CCP. Genuine, internationalist communist currents must crystallise among China’s communists, based on a programme that consciously seeks to put the resources of the very advanced, but still deformed, Chinese workers state consccioiusly and consistently at the disposal of the world revolution and the struggle agaisnt imperialism. This must particularly base itself on the strategic necessity for the Anti-Imperialist United Front, as formulated by the Communist International in the period when it was still animated by the Bolshevik programme of international revolution. We need a new World Party of Socialist Revolution, and Chinese communists must play a crucial role in creating that. Whether under the CCP banner or a new one is an open question. The class conscious working class needs to be fully in power within the Chinese workers state, to put its mighty resources fully at the disposal of the world revolution – this would be a revolutionary change from the politics of peaceful coexistence and avoiding conflicts with capitalism.
Be that as it may, we continue to unconditionally defend China against any and all military, diplomatic, political and tariff attacks by imperialism.
We believe that imperialism’s economic or nuclear war against China threatens to abort the current course of the country’s transition, but, paraphrasing Trotsky, we consider infinitely even more dangerous 1) the unovercome consequences of the process of implementing market measures, such as Culture 996, which sickens and depresses the Chinese proletariat; 2) the non-expropriation and nationalization without compensation of all the bourgeois monopolies; 3) the renunciation of the government of China to defend economically, geopolitically and militarily the other oppressed peoples.
We advocate the overcoming of bureaucratic obstacles through the defencist and revolutionary struggle towards a genuine proletarian democracy of people’s communes, based on socialist internationalism between the powerful Chinese working class and its working and oppressed brothers all over the world.
Notes:
“The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, appears as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a double aspect: use value and exchange value.” Marx first formulated this sentence in his “Critique of Political Economy” (1859) and later developed it in Capital (1867), inspired by a passage from Aristotle’s Republic. For Marx, this discovery was so important that it is the opening sentence of two of his most important works on the critique of bourgeois political economy. The passage from Aristotle that inspired Marx is as follows: “Aristotle, De Republica, LI, C. “Of everything we possess there are two uses:… one is one’s own, and the other is improper or secondary use. For example, a shoe is used for wear and is used for changing; Both are uses of the shoe. The one who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to whoever wants it, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not his proper or primary purpose, for a shoe is not meant to be an object of exchange. The same can be said of all possessions…” (Aristotle, 380 B.C., apud in Karl Marx: Critique of Political Economy. 1859, Part I – THE COMMODITY) -. In Capital, published 18 years after the “Critique” of 1859, Marx makes small changes to the original text: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” (Karl Marx. Capital Volume One; Part I: Commodities and Money; Chapter One: The Commodity). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm
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