this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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i don't think "that wasn't true communism" belongs with the rest. saying Russia good , USSR good and China good requires you to pretend they are true communism, isn't that what tankies do?
i think this is more what actual leftie/communist people say about those countries because they think the authoritarian regimes don't reflect communism, not to mention the fact that Russia and China are capitalist countries in everything but name.
Russia hasn't been anything resembling Communist since perestroika and the subsequent dismantling of the USSR. Might as well call France a monarchy or complain about Japanese Imperialism.
The long struggle session over "Is China Communist?" has been tilting back in the "Enthusiastic Yes!" column for years, as Xi's abandoned the Dengist market integration strategy and increasingly put his chips on a new Third-World Export model for Chinese aid and trade (incidentally, much more in line with the USSR peace dividend strategy circa 1950s/60s). If nothing else, Xi's proposal to have a housing sector that is 30% public (up from the current 5%) would be the AES guy's wet dream.
Russia after '91 spend a solid decade under the Shock Doctrine mass sell off of domestic assets. Its rapid transition to capitalism had more in common with a pillaging than any economic reform. The Russian state was never fully integrated into the European trade model. And it was always held at arms length by NATO military advisers, limiting the possibility of fully internationalized markets. After the second failed "Russian Reset" under Obama, the state has begun re-nationalized a host of traditionally private assets as multi-national industries abandoned the country.
Chinese single-party state administered economic policy - the Five Year Plan model that's been building steam since the 1950s - is about as far away from the Western Laisse-Faire model of capitalism as you can get and still plausibly cling to the name. If China is capitalist, it is doing capitalism in a way wholly alien to any Chicago School economics professor or McKinsey consultant.
You might be able to shoehorn their economies into the broad definition of profit-seeking private ownership. But in both form and function, they look radically different from a US, German, or Japanese private economy.
I think you may have missed the word "pretend" there
They'll make both arguments, but yeah you're right otherwise