Memes

This new article is again garbage. It repeats the same fundamental errors as the last one: it abandons dialectical and historical materialism for mechanical economism and abstract moralism. To break with the method of scientific socialism is to break with socialism itself. Pröbsting reduces the question of China's class character to a tally of billionaires and Fortune 500 rankings, which is bourgeois sociology dressed in Marxist phraseology. As I established in the previous reply, imperialism is defined by the qualitative enforcement of unequal exchange and the extraction of super profits from the periphery to the core, not by counting rich people. Pröbsting ignores this entirely, substituting a schematic checklist for the concrete analysis of concrete conditions that is again the living soul of Marxism.

The claim that China restored capitalism in the 1990s rests on a vulgar understanding of the socialist transitionary period. Yes, China retains contradictions. Yes, market mechanisms operate. Yes, inequality has grown. But none of this proves capitalist restoration when analyzed dialectically. The commanding heights remain under public ownership, the Communist Party retains the leading role, and development is subordinated to long-term social stability rather than short-term monopoly profit maximization (mass poverty alleviation, massive public infrastructure investment etc. all non monetarily profitable) . This is not "socialism in textbooks only" as Pröbsting sneers. It is actually existing socialism navigating the contradictions of hostile imperialist encirclement. To declare that any use of market tools equals capitalist restoration is to abandon historical materialism for a purist idealism that has never existed nor will ever exist in any successful revolution.

Pröbsting's characterization of China as imperialist repeats the same false equivalence I dismantled in the previous reply. He points to Chinese FDI in the Global South and declares this proof of imperialist extraction, ignoring the qualitative difference between infrastructure investment that builds productive capacity and the predatory loan conditions, structural adjustment programs, and military coercion that define Euro-Amerikan imperialism. As noted before, China's engagements operate within a framework of non-interference and sovereign partnership that, however imperfect, creates space for development outside Western conditionality. To conflate these distinct modalities is to abandon the dialectical method.

The article's reliance on tables of billionaire counts as "proof" of imperialism is the same economistic error I identified in the RCIT piece. Modern imperialism is defined through the fusion of bank and industrial capital, the export of capital superseding commodity export, and the territorial division of the world among monopoly alliances. Applying this today requires examining how value actually flows through the global circuit of capital. Pröbsting's tables prove that China has wealthy individuals and large corporations. They do not prove that China extracts super profits from the Global South through unequal exchange. In fact, numerous studies show that terms of trade between China and African nations have improved relative to the pre-2000 period, and that Chinese investment has contributed to industrialization in ways Western capital systematically avoided. This is not apology. It is insistence that historical materialism analyzes concrete social formations, not abstract labels.

The political conclusion Pröbsting draws, that socialists must "oppose all equally," is the same abstract internationalism I criticized before. Detached from dialectical analysis, this slogan collapses into centrism that objectively upholds the hegemony it claims to reject. As I argued in the previous reply, to declare neutrality between an empire with eight hundred overseas bases and states that merely seek to weaken that empire's stranglehold is not principled internationalism. It is a refusal to analyze the concrete balance of forces, and in practice it aids the stronger power. Lenin criticized this centrism as the highest form of opportunism because it cloaks passivity in revolutionary phraseology.

Underlying all these errors is the Trotskyist method I identified in the previous reply: a sectarian refusal to engage with actually existing struggles in favor of a pure, abstract schema. Pröbsting demands that anti-imperialist movements be led by perfectly conscious proletarian forces before they deserve support, which isolates revolutionaries from the masses they seek to lead. This is the "infantile disorder" Lenin warned against. Scientific socialism requires us to start from material conditions, not doctrinal purity. Multipolarity is not an end-state to be celebrated or condemned in the abstract. It is a contradictory terrain within which class struggle must be advanced. The task is not and has never been to stand outside denouncing all equally, but to engage it, to build proletarian independence within anti-hegemonic movements, and to push multipolarity beyond bourgeois limits toward genuine internationalism. To do that, you must return to the method that makes socialism scientific: the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Anything else just dogma dressed in revolutionary phraseology.

The article is complete garbage, picked apart well by the other reply you had.

Not least because it spouted off the Uyghur genocide bullshit to smear China.

"Like it's the bible." You are a fucking idiot. Trotskyists call shit imperialist then when you point out that they are wrong and don't even understand the book that they pulled the term from you get accused of quote mining. Get a grip.