this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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and the clamp down on information and minority groups into labor camps doesnt look too good either, along with plain old imperialism.
You'd think for r/Marxism, they would adopt a more Classically Marxist stance, not an Ultraleft or Maoist one.
Trotskyists call themselves Marxists all the time. Ultras love to take that title for whatever reason.
it's the most general one and maybe they don't expect people to know what a trot is?
For an individual to call themselves that, this makes sense. But Trot groups identify their entire orgs as Marxist and don't say Trotskyist. I think they're really trying to do two things:
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Imply that they are the main inheritors of the label.
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Obfuscate their org as Trotskyist.
Similarly, marxists.org, which has many good materials, is actually a Trotskyist website. It alwways feels a little weird how cagey they are about openly identifying themselves.
It's not even new tactics, it was first used by Bernstein and since then we have layers upon layers of deviationists calling themselves just "marxists", sometimes with prefixes like "real" or "orthodox".
They just seem themselves as the only legitimate heirs of the tradition. They also call themselves leninists sometimes even though the book on that was literally written by Stalin.
Does anyone have any counters to what they're saying? I have a tough time with China too sometimes figuring out whether they're going forward or backwards sometimes.
The difference is I still support them because they're the only possible counter balance to the US at this point in time.
A material argument I like to go for is that a socialist economy requires having access to all the raw resources you need. China is a net importer of oil, importing 70% of its supply. Gas too. Just to name two things.
In order to get these resources, it needs international trade. In order to participate in international trade, it needs to give a concession to international capitalists in order to appease them. If it does not, it gets locked out of international trade (Cuba/DPRK) because there's nothing in it for the capitalists.
USSR had every resource it needed inside its own borders.
Current situation in the world is that there simply are not enough socialist countries for socialism to operate solely within itself, it needs access to western markets, and some incentive is required for the capitalist in order to get that access.
Since we are talking about Marxism, I think a handy thing to point out is that Marx advocated for revolutionary governments to nationalize only the large firms and key industries, and keeping private property for the smaller ones to allow them to develop more rapidly. Marx made it clear that development of the productive forces is the primary task of the revolutionary government, and that public ownership and planning works best at these larger firms.
Marx believed you couldn't get rid of private property by making it illegal, but by developing out of it. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't go for a more publicly owned economy like the Soviet Union was, but if we are speaking about adherance to Marxism classically, the PRC better fits that. The large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly publicly owned and controlled, while the private sector is dominated by underdeveloped small firms, cooperatives, and sole proprietorships. China has uneven development, and rapidly developing the rural parts of China has been a key focus in the last decades to counter this unequal development.
Awoo's comment is also good information as well, even if we wanted a fully publicly owned economy in China now, they would still need to have trade with other countries for key resources and thus commodities to trade.