Chapotraphouse

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[–] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 19 points 3 years ago (10 children)

That's something. Now, what do you mean by "state capitalist"?

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[–] uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (9 children)

My understanding of it is a system of ownership and direction of enterprizes, where the state participates as a capitalist and as managenent, either wholely or in concert with private ownership.

You know, like Lennin meant

edit to add: Lennin was certainly against any private participation in capitalism, but the soviet party did loosen that with parastroika, and the Chinese Communist party started with, I believe, Deng Xiaping Thought, tho I would have to double chetk that it didn't start earlier

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[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 18 points 3 years ago (7 children)

Worth a read, this is from Vijay Prashad's organisation: https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2023-2-socialism-3-in-china/

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[–] uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 years ago (6 children)

Thanks, that did help deepen my understanding. Its good to see that the current thought remains commited to socialism and recognizes the miss-steps of the past, and is continuing to iterate towards a more equitable future.

Perhaps one day they will achieve it. I certainly hope they do. As of yet, the state capitalism approach to building socialism has had a number of mistakes and limited success, such that I still remain skeptical of it.

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[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 14 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

I think the important element here is simply to understand that the DOTP is secure, arguably much more secure than it has ever been in the past. As long as it remains secure I think incremental improvements are always going to occur.

I do not agree with using this term "state capitalism" and think it was a mistake for it to have ever been used in the past to describe anything within a socialist state. Capitalism is, by definition, a state controlled by the capitalists. Socialism is, by definition, a state that is not controlled by the capitalists but by the people, working towards the goal of communism. All states under a DOTP are socialist regardless of the current economic mode of production, what percentage is marketised, etc etc.

Ultimately we probably won't agree on this point though. Just please be wary that it's a contentious and likely sectarian point of disagreement that is liable to blow up into a struggle session whenever it's raised. I don't really mind so much whether we disagree on it though just so long as you're not actively trying to destroy these states, which would only help the capitalists at the end of the day, not to mention ruin the lives of 1.7billion people with a 1990s-like collapse on a terrifying scale.

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[–] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

I mean, I think their reading of Lenin is correct but they are just applying it carelessly. This is why I always say "liberalism" to describe the political system is more useful.

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[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Yeah it's not so bad. I just think that Lenin was in the wrong using the phrase to begin with, and that we seem to all acknowledge it's a shit phrase by not using it, and instead using "socialism" or "AES" to describe states doing this.

In my experience people that want to adhere to Lenin's term are usually doing so because they want to imply that these states aren't socialism and that they are just capitalism. This is where we can easily get into conflicts.

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[–] uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 years ago

To clarify, I was not trying to do this. I was, and do, talk about it as a socialist strategy. I don't call it socialism alone, because that erases other, non-statist forms of socialism such as cooperativism, syndicalism, or parecon. We might call this "state socialism", but I have found that term to be less understood than "state capitalsm"

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[–] silent_water@hexbear.net 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

listen to season 2 of Blowback on Cuba. American policy radicalized the revolution and forced them from a more reformist stance, into ML orthodoxy, and they've achieved a tremendous amount while under seige from the US.

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[–] uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 years ago

so much respect for cuba. Thedy have accomplished a lot in the face of tremendous advercity

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[–] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 12 points 3 years ago*

You are correct on what state capitalism is, but that flies in the face of the cases discussed. Perestroika USSR is not Lenin's USSR, but one that suffered from decades of revisionist rot that started before Stalin's corpse was even cold.

Normal-ass private citizen capitalists are anathema to Lenin's state capitalist model, the whole point was for the state to take that mantle in order to remove the existence of an independent capitalist class. I don't think this was correct, and in fact a pretty catastrophic failure of grasping counterfactual class antagonism, but it is what it is.

China's model is officially called (among other things) "state socialism", so named because the primary role of the state is not to nullify and supplant the capitalist class but rather to subjugate it at the direction of the proletariat. We can say in a looser sense that things like it's public enterprise in oil are "state capitalist", but the PRC overall is not a state capitalist entity.