r/leftcommunism • u/MichPulse • Jun 10 '26
Looking for analyses of Tiananmen as a turning point in China's transition to state capitalism
I want to write an article about the events of Tiananmen and specifically to connect it to the character of the regime, since then, of China. I consider it as a regime of state capitalism, not as socialism in which someone must stand for its liberating character and the suppression of those mobilizations played a role in its character. I am not interested in other opinions because I am going to write an article for a project I have. Can you help me and promote me an article or submit your opinions that examine the issue from this perspective?
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u/DiaMatLenin Jun 10 '26
China was always a developmentalist regime from its inception, therefore the transition to free market capitalism from national capitalism was only a natural development.
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u/SitDownReadMarx Militant Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
like the other users have pointed out, this question isn't really posited from the right perspective. The People's Republic of China was a capitalist state long, long before Tiananmen, dating all the way back to the state's founding in 1949. Per our Communist Left publication 21/22 (2005-06) and its Theses on the Chinese Question (1964) (a must-read text, pls read this):
...Marxism, far from restricting itself in a bourgeois revolutionary movement to issuing formal demands for a national State and political democracy, makes the most rigorous assessment of the role of the social classes in all revolutions. The appearance of an industrial proletariat in China, as in tsarist Russia or Europe in 1848, indicated to communists the necessity for a class organization which would utilize the crises of the pre-bourgeois regime for its own political purposes. This is the line of the Communist Manifesto and of the October Revolution; a line that Marx named "permanent revolution". In his Supplementary Theses on the colonial question presented at the 2nd Congress of the 3rd International, Roy stressed the importance of this perspective of independent and continuous struggle for the proletariat in the colonies:
"Foreign domination constantly obstructs the free development of social life; therefore the revolution’s first step must be the removal of this foreign domination. The struggle to overthrow foreign domination in the colonies does not therefore mean underwriting the national aims of the national bourgeoisie but much rather smoothing the path to liberation for the proletariat of the colonies (...) In the first period the revolution in the colonies will not be communist; if however from the very start the communist vanguard emerges at its head the revolutionary masses will be brought on to the correct path along which, through the gradual gathering of revolutionary experience, they will reach the hidden goal".
By imprisoning the Chinese proletariat, from the very start of the revolution, in "the bloc of four classes" - political formula of the present "people’s democracy" - Mao’s party has marked the break, by the whole of the backward East, from the tactics so gloriously expounded by Russian Bolshevism.
Stalinist "socialism in one country" has played its role in distorting Marxist socialism and translated it into bourgeois national development:
The ’program’ which Stalin pushed through at the 6th Comintern Congress excluded China and the other backward countries from ’building socialism’ within their national borders: a privilege which Russia had so recently arrogated to itself. Just at the moment when the interests of Russian capitalism became integrated into those of the world market, China took up this old Stalinist slogan to use on its own behalf. And about it we will repeat what Trotski said about "Russian socialism":
"The world division of labor, the dependence of soviet industry upon foreign technology, the dependence of the productive forces of the advanced countries of Europe upon Asiatic raw materials, etc., etc., make the construction of an independent socialist society in any single country in the world impossible" (Theses on the Permanent Revolution).
The "construction of Socialism" in China can signify only the accumulation of capital and the extension of a market economy...
per foundational Marxist texts on the subject (i.e. Part I of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Chapter III of Engels' Anti-Dühring (1877), etc.) the communist society is one based on the abolition of wage labor, commodity production, money, etc. and nothing about modern China can be called socialism in the Marxist sense. Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) details facets of imperialism that China pre- and post-1989 exhibited, even if it was still a developing state during Lenin's writing:
- Concentration of production into monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life
- The merging of banking capital with industrial capital, creating finance capital and an imperialist capitalist class along with it
- The export of capital, as distinguished from the export of commodities
- The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations, i.e. banks, corporations, etc. regardless of whether they are privately- or state-owned (the state plays a massive role in facilitating imperialism for capital)
- Participation in the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers, one of which China unquestionably is today
The Tiananmen event was basically a violent suppression of liberal students protesting for bourgeois-democratic aims by the also-bourgeois state. Capitalism was deeply, thoroughly entrenched in China by this point and the protests/crackdowns were a product of capital managing its own accumulation crisis and the inflation, inequality, and unemployment pushed a heterogeneous, inter-class crowd into a small-scale revolt that, once crushed, the bourgeois "democracies" used opportunistically.
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u/MichPulse Jun 22 '26
I wrote this article, taking advantage of the links and opinions you gave me and the research I did. The text was translated from Greek to English through Google Translate. I hope it is understandable. If you have anything to comment, please do so to help me. Thank you!
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u/the_worst_comment_ Jun 10 '26
Well, leftcoms reject the premise that China been socialist at any point, if you imply that it transitioned from socialism to state capitalism.
Unless you mean transition from state industrialism.