Like the title says, I'm new to Marxism and have only read a couple works relating to socialism. I don't think I know enough about Marxism to firmly define myself into any "type" (although council communism sounds pretty interesting.) Second Thought and Yugopnik are what got me into Marxism, but more recently I've been listening to Socialism For All's audiobooks and reaction videos while driving. In his reaction video to The Deprogram's China Episode, he makes some interesting points about how China could become "social imperialist" and succeed the US/NATO as the new imperialist global hegemon, among some other things. From an outsider's perspective, I don't consider the current China socialist because of the fact that private property and many other capitalist elements still exist within it, but I do appreciate how much it has been able to develop over the past few decades, like poverty reduction and massive infrastructure projects that wouldn't be possible with typical liberal democracies. People excuse the private property and "restricted" capitalism as necessary evils until China has the conditions to create socialism, but I have doubts about whether China's still even working towards socialism or whether the Chinese proletariat actually hold power over the bourgousie. China doesn't support communist movements internationally, and the liberalized economy has gone on far longer than the NEP in the soviet union despite both being created for the same reason, and I can't seem to find a good reason why it's lasted this long. (I also have concerns about privacy and the fact that access to the outside internet is restricted, although that's not really related to this topic.) I'd stumbled across this reddit thread a while ago, and while I know reddit isn't the best place for serious discussion, I think that the person in the video does make good points, as do the people in both the r/TankieTheDeprogram and r/ultraleft threads and I honestly don't know what to think or who to take seriously in that discussion. I would appreciate if anyone could give me a genuine response to these concerns, thanks.
Edit: Thank you all so much for the responses! I've learned quite a bit reading them, although I haven't had a chance to check out the links people have sent yet. I'll try to update this post with any new questions and respond to comments whenever I have time.
Whether or not the NEP occurred has no relevance to what I am talking about. What I am talking about was already the well-established dominant position among Marxists prior to the Stalin model. It was the position advocated by Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc, if you read Hilferding's "Finance Capital" he talks about how early stage socialism will look and basically describes modern China to a T.
Equating modern China to NEP is a bit misleading because it implies (1) the policy is a development by Lenin, which Lenin did add a lot to Marxism, but what I am talking about is just classical Marxism and would be true even if Lenin never exited and can be found throughout Marxist writings prior to Lenin, and (2) when Lenin implemented the NEP, at the time, the country was so obscenely underdeveloped that national enterprises were few and far between did not even have a dominant position in the economy, which is why Lenin described NEP Russia as "state capitalist" and not socialist. While the dictatorship of the proletariat nationalized the largest enterprises, the largest enterprises objectively were insufficient to actually control the economy. The economy was largely still autonomous, overwhelmingly ran by small private producers.
That is not the state of modern day China, nor what earlier Marxists like Marx and Engels themselves, or other early Marxists like Hilferding were advocating. Lenin saw the NEP as a temporary transition period to lay the foundations for the large-scale enterprises which would then serve as the basis of socialism, but, at least according to Lenin's own analysis, at the time, those did not sufficiently exist, and so it was explicitly not a form of socialism at all, not even an early stage of socialism, but of capitalism, due to the extraordinary levels of underdevelopment, even control of the largest enterprises did not translate itself to a dominant position of the "heights" of the economy.
Lenin also described the NEP as a "temporary retreat" precisely because it was state capitalist and not socialist.
When people equate modern day countries like Vietnam, China, Cuba, etc, to just doing the NEP in the modern era, it is very misleading. It implies these countries are not socialist but state capitalist, that they are not following the by-the-books development model suggested by Marxian political economy but are in a "temporary retreat" implementing a form of capitalism for the meantime. It also implies that this is an explicitly Leninist position, when it is not.
China already had a state capitalist phase and that had ended. The mistake was not that the state capitalist phase needed to be extended forever to all eternity in an endless NEP. The mistake was that the NEP should have gradually transitioned into a lower stage of socialism, which would then proceed to gradually transition into the higher stage of socialism, but the Stalin Model tried to jump directly from the NEP to the higher stage in one stroke. It was correct to move beyond state capitalism, just not in that way.
Ah, understood. We are on the same page, then, I misunderstood the wording. I can see the confusion that can arise by placing it on Lenin, rather than Marx, by referring to it as similar to the NEP. The Marxist basis of the NEP and China's socialist market economy is both in Marx, not Lenin, agreed.