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.
Wow, I've seen you everywhere across lemmy! Thanks for the response, but I feel like there's a mismatch in how we define socialism. I've been using "worker ownership of the means of production" as my definition and I feel like the state being controlled by a communist party does not necessarily fit this, since what's stopping the state and bureaucracy from becoming its own ruling class (or being used/infiltrated by the old bourgeoisie), given it holds all the power? Doesn't the existence of private property whatsoever automatically contradict the fact that workers own the means of production? That's why council communism and direct worker democracy seems more appealing to me, although I guess it hasn't had the chance to be tested like leninism/vanguardism. The other thing is, it makes sense to me that public property can exist in capitalism, and that this is called mixed economy or social democracy. However, is vice versa really true? If private property exists in socialism, that means that there is a bourgeoisie, and if there is a bourgeoisie, it's in their interest to undermine the power of the proletariat, and they will slowly chip away at workers' rights. Haven't we reached social democracy, but with extra steps? I doubt that socialism "contains elements of capitalism and elements of communism" in the way you mention, socialism seems to me an entirely independent economic system with communism as its most developed stage, where the only elements it has in common with capitalism is the existence of the state and money. TBH, I'm still processing @pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 's comment, it feels kind of mindblowing lol
(Sorry this comment is kind of sloppy, I'm tired right now)
“Worker ownership of the means of production” is not really a definition of socialism. It is a slogan, and a very compressed one at that. It does nothing to answer the decisive questions of ownership through what institutions, under which class power, backed by which state, etc.
Socialism is not an ideal model where all capitalist forms vanish overnight. Socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and communism. It begins when the proletariat seizes state power and uses that power to suppress the old exploiting classes, reorganize production, develop the productive forces, and gradually abolish the material basis of class society.
Here it is important to distinguish the state from the government. The government is the administrative apparatus needed to manage a complex society. The state, in the Marxist sense, is the instrument of class rule: courts, army, police, coercive institutions, legal order, and the political supremacy of one class over another. Under capitalism, even public property serves the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Under socialism, even when private or market forms still exist, they operate within a state whose class character is proletarian, provided the communist party maintains proletarian political leadership. (This is why when talking about communism as stateless it's not no government it's no state).
This is why comparing China to social democracy misses the central issue. Social democracy leaves the bourgeoisie in command of the state. It nationalizes some sectors, regulates capital, and redistributes part of the surplus, but the political power of capital remains intact. The bourgeoisie can reverse reforms, discipline labour, move capital, capture parties, and restore austerity when conditions change.
In China, the decisive question is not whether every enterprise is formally state-owned or collectively owned at this exact historical moment. The decisive question is which class commands the state, which class sets the strategic direction of development, and whether capital is politically sovereign or politically subordinated. A bourgeois state with public property is still bourgeois. A proletarian state with controlled private capital is still a proletarian state, so long as capital is not allowed to command the state.
Private property under socialism is a contradiction, yes. But socialism is made of contradictions. It is not communism. It inherits backward productive forces, commodity production, uneven development, peasant agriculture, world-market pressure, imperialist encirclement, technical dependency, and the habits of the old society. The question is not whether contradictions exist. The question is which force is principal within the contradiction.
A bourgeoisie can exist under socialism. That is precisely why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary. If the bourgeoisie disappeared the moment the revolution succeeded, there would be no need for a socialist state. The continued existence of bourgeois elements does not disprove socialism. It proves the need for class struggle under socialism.
This was one of Chairman Mao’s central contributions. The danger of capitalist restoration does not only come from old landlords and capitalists. It can also come from new bourgeois elements inside the party, the state, and the planning apparatus. Bureaucracy can become a vehicle for bourgeois right. Technocrats can elevate production over politics. Party members can become detached from the masses. This is why socialist construction cannot be reduced to nationalization. It requires continuing class struggle, mass supervision, ideological struggle, rectification, and mechanisms that prevent the party and state from separating themselves from the people.
But the council communist answer does not solve this. It imagines that direct worker democracy, by itself, can substitute for the organized class rule of the proletariat. The problem is that isolated councils do not abolish the need for centralized power. They still face civil war, sabotage, famine, foreign invasion, uneven consciousness, uneven development, and coordination across an entire economy. Without a revolutionary party and a proletarian state, councils either get crushed, isolated, co-opted, or forced to recreate authority without admitting it.
It is also not true that councilist forms have never been tested. The Paris Commune was not identical to later council communism, but it was the classic historical example of a direct proletarian political form without a centralized proletarian state apparatus. Marx praised it deeply, but he and Engels also drew many lessons from its defeat. It did not move decisively enough against the old state, did not centralize revolutionary authority sufficiently, and was crushed. Later council experiments faced similar problems. The issue is not that they were morally worse. The issue is that they failed to solve the concrete problem of proletarian power.
The mistake is to treat “workers’ ownership” as a purely formal property relation. In reality, ownership is a question of power. A worker in a cooperative inside a capitalist market can still be ruled by capital through competition, credit, prices, supply chains, and the bourgeois state. Meanwhile, a worker in a state-owned enterprise under a proletarian state may not personally vote on every managerial decision, but the enterprise can still be part of a broader system where production is subordinated to social need rather than private accumulation.
Of course, this does not mean every policy of every socialist state is automatically correct. A proletarian state can make errors. Bureaucracy can grow. Inequality can widen. These are real dangers. But they are contradictions within socialist construction, not proof that socialism does not exist. To analyze them properly, we have to ask whether the state is struggling to subordinate capital to the people, or whether capital has already subordinated the state to itself.
Socialism is not an independent static system sitting neatly between capitalism and communism. It is the historical transition from one mode of production to another. That means it necessarily contains elements inherited from capitalism and elements developing toward communism. Commodity production, money, bourgeois right, wage differentials, markets, and even limited private capital can persist for a time.