On Wednesday 26 February, Friends of Socialist China and Renmin University of China’s School of Marxism held a bilateral online seminar on the theme of Promoting and developing Marxism in the 21st century. The event was attended by around 50 people, and featured contributions on topics such as: key developments in Marxist theory in recent decades; communicating the principles of Marxism-Leninism to the young generation; Marxist education in China; Marxist perspectives on the digital economy; and the role of Chinese Marxists in consolidating and translating the complete works of Marx and Engels.
Carlos Martinez, Fiona Sim and Roger McKenzie made contributions on behalf of Friends of Socialist China, while professors Zhao Yulan, Wang Li and Ma Shenxiao spoke on behalf of Renmin University. The presentations were followed by a lively Q&A session, and the event concluded with a discussion of future collaboration between the two organisations.
The following is the text of Carlos Martinez’s contribution to the seminar, taking up the overall theme of promoting and developing Marxism in the 21st century.
The task of promoting and developing Marxism in the 21st century is an urgent one.
From the point of view of addressing the existential threats that humanity faces – most notably climate breakdown, nuclear conflict and pandemics – and meeting the needs of the people of the world for peace and development, the diffusion, application and development of Marxism is of critical importance.
It was 110 years ago that the heroic Polish-German revolutionary and theoretician Rosa Luxemburg popularised the idea that humanity faced a stark choice: between socialism and barbarism. And in fact she was citing Engels from a generation before. So this notion of socialism or barbarism is not new, but today it resonates louder than ever.
The capitalist system is increasingly becoming a hindrance to human progress, and a threat to human survival. The capitalist countries no longer constitute the major driving force in the development of the productive forces, and the capitalist system is beset by intractable problems and insuperable contradictions: economic crisis, rising poverty, declining life expectancy, declining rate of profit, widening inequality, expanding unemployment, breakdown of social cohesion, war, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction.
And yet there is nothing inevitable about capitalism’s collapse being followed by the construction of global socialism. As the Danish Marxist Torkil Lauesen points out in his The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, recently released on Iskra Books: “Capitalism could collapse in a brutal, chaotic endgame of wars and natural disasters. To avoid this is our task; and to accomplish that task, we must fulfil the transition to socialism. To do this, we need to learn from the past and mobilise, organise, and develop a strategy for future struggles.”
In my view, this concisely encapsulates the tasks facing those seeking to develop Marxism in the 21st century.
It’s important to remember that the global socialist movement, in spite of setbacks, has scored remarkable successes, from 1917 onwards, and these should be studied and understood. The global working class must take ownership of its own history.
Reviewing the progress made by the Soviet Union since its formation in 1922, Yuri Andropov, then the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said in 1982 that “history perhaps has never known such a spectacular advance from a condition of backwardness, misery and ruin to the grandeur of a modern great power with highly advanced culture and steadily growing welfare of the people.”
This was not simple hyperbole or hubris. Soviet socialism wiped out feudalism; defeated European fascism; built the world’s first comprehensive welfare state; made unprecedented advances in terms of building equality for women and supporting national rights; provided a bedrock of support for anti-colonial liberation movements; and modernised the country. And unlike in the advanced capitalist countries, this modernisation was achieved without recourse to colonialism, imperialism and war.
Writing about the experience of state socialism in the Soviet Union, China, the DPRK, Cuba and elsewhere, Michael Parenti observes that “state socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernised societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.”
It’s a great historical tragedy that socialism was dismantled in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. And yet the surviving socialist states – China, Vietnam, Laos, the DPRK and Cuba – along with a new wave of countries oriented towards socialism – including Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia – continue to forge new paths.
In Friends of Socialist China, we consider that China’s size and level of development give it an objectively indispensable role in the global transition to socialism. Then secretary of state Madeleine Albright famously referred to the US as being the “indispensable nation”. Whilst Albright’s statement made sense from the standpoint of the imperialist world order, from the standpoint of the working and oppressed people of the world, and the global socialist movement, it is an objective fact that this position can only be occupied by China at the present time.
It’s no accident that China has emerged as by far the global leader in renewable energy, electric transport, biodiversity protection and afforestation. It’s no accident that China has carried out the most extensive and successful anti-poverty campaign in history. It’s no accident that China both set the standard in handling the Covid-19 pandemic at home and in responding to it on a world scale. It’s no accident that China is pioneering an approach to artificial intelligence based on open collaboration and production for the global common good. It’s no accident that China is leading the world in the majority of key future technologies.
And it’s no accident that China’s fundamental orientation is towards peace and cooperation; that China’s modernisation is built on its own efforts rather than on exploitation and domination. As President Xi Jinping has remarked: “China will neither tread the old path of colonisation and plunder, nor the crooked path taken by some countries to seek hegemony once they grow strong.”
China’s extraordinary accomplishments, and its orientation towards peace, can only be explained on the basis of China’s social system; the fact that, again in the words of Xi Jinping, “socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism and not any other kind of -ism”.
It should be obvious that it’s the socialist world that’s in the vanguard of the project of developing Marxism; that it’s the states, movements and parties engaged in the process of building socialism that are doing the most to build humanity’s collective understanding of how to carry out the task that history has placed before for us: completing the transition to world socialism. As Mao Zedong famously put it in his essay ‘On Practice’, “if you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.”
Nevertheless, many Marxists and progressives in the West are reluctant to take their lead from China and the socialist world. Their Marxism is the Western Marxism described by the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo.
In their introduction to the English translation of Losurdo’s book on the subject, Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill observe that “Eastern and Western Marxism … refer to two different political orientations… One of them is dedicated to the difficult and drawn-out process of building socialism in a capitalist-dominated world and, in particular, across the Global South, which has been the principal site for such endeavours thus far. The other is generally dismissive of such practical undertakings, often belittling concrete struggles against imperialism because they do not live up to an imagined standard of theoretical or moral purity.”
Too many Marxist academics in the West view China through a lens of utopianism, dogmatism and idealism – in short, their analysis has very little to do with Marxism.
Because private capital exists in China, because China has billionaires, because China is integrated into capitalist global value chains, it is too often written off as having reverted to capitalism. Such a simplistic narrative ignores the tremendous gains that have been made for the Chinese population; it ignores the fact that China is, in the words of the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin, “the only authentically emergent country”, in the sense that it is developing from a state of extreme backwardness to being the world’s largest economy and a science and technology powerhouse. It also ignores the fundamentally liberatory role that China plays in the Global South, sharing the fruits of its development, and, as Xi Jinping has explained, providing a point of reference for those countries that also wish to rapidly develop their economies while preserving their independence.
As Losurdo wrote, China “is the country that more than any other is challenging the international division of labour imposed by colonialism and imperialism, and furthering the end of the Columbian epoch — a fact of enormous, progressive historical significance.”
The good news is that an increasing number of Marxists and progressive people in the West are building a better understanding of Chinese socialism and of the contributions to the science of Marxism-Leninism that have been made, and are being made, by the socialist countries. At least in part, this is a manifestation of China’s leadership in the fight against climate breakdown and its honourable role in international relations – at a time when the major capitalist powers are increasingly orienting towards both ecocide and genocide.
Our objective is that this growing understanding should stimulate the working classes of Europe and North America to meaningfully participate in the global united front against imperialism, for multipolarity, and for socialism.
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