What role in the discourse is served by the right-wing narrative that “China’s success came from capitalism?” The purpose of this deception is to numb the world’s workers out of taking any kind of action to assert their class interests, because supposedly if we keep the capitalist system then we’ll become like China through the right reforms. This is the only way that bourgeois dogmatists can still defend capitalism after the PRC has surpassed all of the world’s capitalist countries in so many respects. The framework of history that they present is a flat line where no matter how much evolution happens, capitalism must always be the prevailing system.
This view depends on completely obscuring the true character of China’s system, the distinction between capitalism and markets, and the fundamentally financial character that capitalism has had since the 19th century. Because the PRC exists outside of financial rule, and thereby has been able to utilize markets to enrich an economy that remains foundationally state-controlled, the premise of what these right-wing distorters say is demonstably wrong.
If we defeat this narrative in the popular consciousness, the workers will be exposed to a profound reality about what’s happening to today’s global civilization; a reality that can only be comprehended through recognizing China’s Marxist character. What China’s socialist development successes reveal is that a proletarian political structure can use markets to unleash the productive forces, in a way that the anarchy of production under capitalist rule could never do. Which shows that the accelerated monopolist consolidation and integration we’ve been seeing since the pandemic has created unprecedented means for the construction of socialism, bringing the entire globe closer towards replicating what China has achieved.
Right from the start of when capitalism gained predominance as the productive mode, and freed production from the old feudal constraints, there have been successful projects to use this historically unparalleled material power for the collective benefit—and in turn to further multiply the levels of wealth. This was what the industrialist Robert Owen did, as described by Engels:
The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal method of production — the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses — the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations, overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralisation of the working class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions. At this juncture there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29 years old…Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers…In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large fortunes quickly.
He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his favourite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than five hundred men in a Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton-mill at New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and with a success that made him a European reputation. A population, originally consisting of the most diverse and, for the most part, very demoralised elements, a population that gradually grew to 2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by carefully bringing up the rising generation.
The bourgeois mindset that Owen rebelled against is not capable of grasping why someone would want to reorganize the productive forces around lifting up the working masses. Many of those in Owen’s class respected him, but they didn’t want to re-create what he did; and as soon as Owen came out as a communist, they shunned him and took away his standing in business. They gave his revolutionary innovations credit, but only as long as they could claim these innovations belonged to their own ideology and their own system. In retrospect, many of them probably came to view his effort at repurposing production as a cautionary story about what can give rise to communism.
When China’s rise came, and came in the form of a socialist development project, the only way this class could respond was by asserting that this project isn’t really socialist. Otherwise they would have no argument, which in fact they don’t. There is no “defending” the capitalist mode of production when the more advanced this mode becomes, the more of a basis there is for communism. When the impact of the infrastructural expansions by today’s biggest, most rapidly growing corporations is to further outmode the properly “capitalist” model, where the system functioned through private competition.
This model died in 1929, when capitalist production could no longer work on its own terms and the system now had to be fundamentally run by the state. It was the inevitable conclusion of the exponential growth that the bourgeoisie’s victory brought. And in the post-Covid AI era, where human labor is being outsourced to machines at an unprecedented rate, this process is accelerating on an entirely new level.
“The new productive forces themselves can only be maintained and further developed by the introduction of a new mode of production corresponding to their present stage of development,” concluded Engels about the implications of introducing the system that made Owen’s society achievable. “That the struggle between the two classes engendered by the hitherto existing mode of production and constantly reproduced in ever sharper antagonism has affected all civilised countries and is daily becoming more violent; and that these historical interconnections the conditions of the social transformation which they make necessary, and the basic features of this transformation likewise determined by them, have also already been apprehended.”
The bourgeoisie could not bring this new productive capacity to humanity without humanity then seeking to use these tools to their full potential. China has made this leap in evolution, so the bourgeoisie claims China’s success comes from the designs of their own class. Which is objectively not true; these achievements came from the designs of a workers party and a workers state. When seeking to reconcile their dogmas with the realities that China has revealed, bourgeois ideologists obscure the difference between productive forces and productive mode, asserting that as long as the productive means of the post-industrial era remain in use, the operative system must still be capitalism.
It’s a dogmatism that says history stopped as soon as the capitalist mode of production came into being; which is the same absurd way that Owen’s peers could rationalize scorning his theories after they had admired the effects of these theories being put into practice. The bourgeois ideologists will remain in disbelief about the transformative nature of the productive mode they claim to love. The world’s proletariat will increasingly embrace this transformation as the conditions bring them into the class struggle.
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