ANDREW
Nana once asked for my opinion on the PRC. People often ask me about China, and I rarely give an answer that isn’t couched in a thick layer of irony. I blare ‘The East is Red’ in the background as I answer their question in such a way that they won’t make me defend it. In truth, I know very little about the PRC, but I choose to believe in the possibilities of the Communist Party of China (CPC). When Nana asked me, I tried to give a more genuine answer, I didn’t want to offend her – she had recently put a little blue square on her Instagram for the Uyghurs – so I told her what I think is as close to the truth as possible. China is building socialism and it will be complete by 2050, but we won’t know if it’s true or just propaganda until then. I genuinely believe that the CPC is pushing China towards socialism, the Stalin and Mao eras taught us that a capitalist period of development – a NEP – is necessary and Deng is probably right about that. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Trotskyists don’t like it either. In the few Socialist Alternative meetings I’ve attended China was regularly denounced as capitalist-imperialism with red aesthetics. It’s not, China is doing great things and I hope that, by 2050, we will have a bright socialist stare to look towards.
ERIK
We most certainly can say whether the CPC has been successful, on its own terms, in pursuing its goal of establishing a moderately prosperous society. The CPC has laid out quantitative metrics for assessing whether they have met their development goals, such as doubling GDP and disposable income per capita between 2010 and 2020, a goal they have achieved. Your retreat into mysticism, your insistence that we cannot possibly augur the effects of Chinese development until all the causes are in place, is helpful to no one, least of all the masses undergoing these changes in China.
Any discussion of China in the Anglosphere is hampered by a poverty of reliable sources, partially due to the intimate relationship between Xinhua and the CPC, but more so because of the blatantly propagandistic nature of western reporting on China in the mainstream media. That neither of us is literate in Mandarin means that we are limited solely to our choice of hearsay and journalistic gossip about the goings-on in China, be it from party organs or screeching Trotskyites. This basic fact prevents us – the western viewer – from getting a clear picture of what is really going on in China, especially regarding the administrative changes in several of China’s autonomous regions.
China is self-consciously engaging in capitalist development as a necessary step towards the eventual erection of a socialist society. To tar this process as “capitalist-imperialism with red aesthetics” is baseless, and greatly underrates the long-term developmentalist perspective of Xi Jinping and his predecessors, namely Hu Jintao and Deng Xiaoping. Xi Jinping’s genuine commitment to the eventual establishment of socialism is given credence by his recent spate of reforms and his longstanding anti-corruption campaign, which has spared neither billionaires nor party cadre. The Chinese path towards socialism is not perfect, nor should we expect it to be. But the fact of the matter is threefold. The Chinese socialist project actually exists; the Chinese method of development has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of the most desperate poverty, and the Chinese path towards socialism is succeeding on its own terms. With these three material considerations in mind, you can take a view of China that is both realistic and positive without resorting to the fetishization and projection that is so common among baizuo. China is not some mystical land, shrouded in the deep mists of the Orient, an exotic kingdom of Prester John that exists solely as a font of inspiration for baizuo like you and me. On the contrary, China is a real place populated by real people with real concerns and real hopes and dreams. Falling into fawning orientalism does nothing to advance the cause of socialism in China or in America. Obfuscating the metrics of Chinese material, economic, and social development with ill-informed orientalism can only make difficult the humanistic solidarity that could serve as a foundation for amity and cooperation between the working people of China and the working people of this country.
ANDREW
I feel like we’re all Trotskyists now. One hundred years ago you were a member of the socialist party or the communist party, but you were a member of the party. The tragic collapse of the Soviet Union ripped us away from meaningful parties and action. Instead, we theorize, tinkering with Marx’s theories as though getting a perfect score on our dialectics homework means we get a dictatorship of the proletariat star. You’re right that China is doing something and that it might certainly be ideologically based but damn it they are doing something! You’re right, the PRC exists! I can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right now! Andrew (Weeks) has been to East Berlin, he was allowed through the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, but I have never been to China. I am afraid to be proven wrong. What if the Trotskyists are right? Andrew (Weeks)’s father-in-law, a good communist, once traveled with his family to Ceausescu’s Romania. There, he was able to ignore all the significant problems just outside his car window. A world of suffering but he could only see a proletarian paradise. I genuinely respect that. I wish I could do the same. At least then I would believe in something.
ERIK
In claiming that, “we’re all Trotskyists now,” you wrongly make a universal claim of what is really a particular problem. Yes, the once flourishing landscape of worker’s parties in the west has dried up. We are indeed unmoored from the once familiar institutions of party and state. But this only holds water if your conception of “we” starts in California and has its eastern terminus at the Ural Mountains. Without making any moral evaluation of its policies, the CPC is undoubtedly a strong party. The wheels of history, as you yourself understand them, still turn in China as once they did in the USSR. It helps no one, least of all the workers of a polity, to ignore the desolation of a place, often brought on by crash industrialization, compressing centuries of brutal economic restructuring into lightning-quick five-year plans. The collapse of the USSR was a tragedy because it caused a massive lurch downwards in life expectancy and quality of life in the former Soviet republics, not because it derailed some socialist-historical demiurge.
If you cannot find the spirit of solidarity in some far-off, fetishized country – be it in an Albanian bunker or a Parisian café – find it in yourself; share and kindle that flame with your friends and relations, and let it light your path as you make your way through this life. Share in your fraternity, your joy, your love of life. Do not rely on some stodgy bureaucrat in Tirana, Beijing, or Bucharest to kindle it for you. You will not feel whole and fulfilled if grain output in Sichuan rises 3% per annum rather than 2%. Your unfulfilled desire for belonging, the one you lamentingly claim makes us all Trotskyites, is a human desire, one that can only be filled by organic human connection. When that august day comes and China unveils their “Socialism: Mission Accomplished” banner, a switch will not flip inside of you from “unfulfilled” to “fulfilled.”
A political and economic program might be sufficient to create the conditions for a socialist society, but a robust social and cultural program is needed also, for a socialist society requires socialist people. The enemies of the working classes have shattered our lines and torn our banners. The field is theirs, this much is indisputable. But the spirit of solidarity lives on in the hearts of free men. The left’s retreat from prominence is disheartening, as any retreat can be. But, even on the retreat, huddling together in a muddy scrape in the ground, the spirit of solidarity flickers still. Every loaf of bread broken, every stranger’s cigarette lit, every earbud shared, reminds us that a different world, a better world, is possible and that the flame of liberation smolders on.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche) & Erik (Lynch)
Normal Thoughts 