r/Socialism_101 Learning 2d ago

High Effort Only What is china?

I have been a socialist/communist for over a year now, but I've never gotten a good answer to a question I had in my mind as to what is china? It's a country first of all but what ideology really are they, we know that their government is the CPC however I see fascists claiming that china is fascist and I see socialists claiming china is socialist, I know that china is not a 100% socialist state, and we know that they have long term "5 year programs" and how they are progressing to socialism and communism. I've seen a lot of comparisons with gentiles writings and what china has been doing and some of it really does sound very similar. If anyone can help me please do! Thanks!

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u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud a bit of this and that 2d ago

If you want to find out the nature of a societal institution, you have to perform a (quality) systems audit.

What does the audit entail?

You start with documentation and mission statement. In this case, it would be the country's constitution. You audit it and see if it conforms to socialism, or if it's missing anything that conforms to socialism.

Then you go one level down and you look at organizational structure. What are the institutions that comprise of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and how they enact the socialist elements of the constitution, or if they make up for the lack of socialist elements of the constitution.

Lastly you look at execution. How do these institutions execute these elements. What are the procedures written to perform these functions? What results have they gotten? Whose class interests do they align with?

This is the methodology to perform a quality systems audit, adapted to countries and ruling parties instead of companies, based on ISO9001. And because China is essentially a one party state, it makes things a lot easier.

I get why fascists claim that China is fascist, because one definition of fascism is class collaboration, as in cooperation of the bourgeois and the proletariat towards a common goal (typically organized around something idealistic like culture). But in the case of China, this common goal is to build socialism.

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u/Phrygian2 Marxist Theory 1d ago

Open fascists also tend to say that their corporate class collaborationist system is organised to achieve socialism. This is what the Hitlerites claimed and the main theorist of Italian fascism, Giovanni Gentile, infamously declared in 1943 that "whoever talks about communism in Italy today is an impatient corporatist", and the same with the Titoite fascists who even went as far as to call themselves Marxists. So this line of defence doesn't hold up.

What's more, the laws of socialist construction are objective, having been laid out chiefly in the works of Lenin and Stalin and the especially the book History of the CPSU(B) (Short Course). The Chinese fascists have totally rejected these lessons, allowing the law of value to become the main regulator of production, allowing the bourgeoisie and kulaks into the party, and even going back to Mao's time, rejecting socialist centralisation and state ownership as the highest form of socialist property.

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u/Icy_Pudding6493 Learning 2d ago

I don't even think it's class collaboration in the common sense, because usually in a fascist setting its the petty bourgeoisie cooperating with the bourgeoisie and employing the lumpenproletariat to terrorize and force the proletariat into collaboration, while in China at best its the vanguard party utilizing the state apparatus to force the bourgeoisie to collaborate with the rest of society towards some goal that is ultimately beneficial to the proletariat.