this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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This is so important. I think, frankly, it would have been naive to defend China as a socialist project in the 90s and early 2000s, the height of capitalist restoration. What possible reason would an observer, internal or external, have to believe that China was sticking to a socialist path and not undergoing a total surrender to capital? The only thing to go off of was a frankly ridiculous promise from the CPC that they were actually definitely pulling off history's greatest long game to dupe the capitalist west into building up their productive forces for a big socialist switcheroo. It's preposterous, unprecedented, and unbelievable.
But... time has proven
to be perhaps the greatest long-term geopolitical strategist of all time, the CPC to be a genuine vehicle for working class democracy, and 
to be a world-historical contributor to the development of socialism. If people remain stuck in the old analysis (which, again, was obviously the reasonable conclusion at the time!), then they are not doing living, materialist Marxism. Our understanding must continually evolve and incorporate the new lessons being learned by those struggling for socialism around the world, and at this point that clearly includes the PRC.
What? Did the CPC keep flipping the switch back and forth? What definition of socialism allows you to say this?
That is basically what it looked like, yes. The only historical examples to go off of were all socialist societies embracing market and private property systems to the destruction of their socialist ones. And China had quite willingly participated in US imperial schemes against Vietnam in the post-Mao era, along with a general abandonment of proletarian internationalism. If you were applying the historical lessons available at the time, the evidence-based conclusion would have been that China was on a path to full capitalist restoration.
That's very debatable, especially claiming that the PRC was willingly doing the US's bidding during its war with Vietnam. But to the point: Is foreign policy what makes an economy socialist or not? And what evidence do you have that the CPC suddenly became capitalist, and gave up its control over the land and economy to private capital?
Did you not finish reading my comment? I don't think they did.
I really enjoyed reading Socialism Betrayed. But I did take note of the page or two when they talked about contemporary China. They did kinda say “this sure seems like what the USSR did wrong under Khrushchev only on a much larger scale”. But that book was written in 2004, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for western Marxists to come to that conclusion, albeit incorrectly, at that time. Not to mention the authors did approach it with some humility, not outright saying China was doomed but still pointing out it sure seemed the same as revisionism the USSR in 2004.
Even Parenti made that mistake in Blackshirts and Reds. I don't hold it against him, since it came from his methodology of using western sources, but it was a mistake after all.