Introduction

China has risen to the second largest economy, in terms of nominal GDP, in the world. Politicians and media commentators drone endlessly about its successes – GDP growth, technological development, green industry – or its failures – human rights violations, authoritarian governance, geopolitical aggression. On the left, the debate takes a different but equally repetitive form. Fierce polemics divide those who affirm China as an authentically socialist project from those who dismiss it as capitalism with Chinese characteristics, or straightforwardly state-capitalism. Nevertheless, what unites these otherwise opposed positions is a shared theoretical weakness: neither has an adequate account of the state, nor of what markets do as social relations. The campist position^[1]– those that view it as genuinely socialist – locates China's socialist character through public ownership and CPC intent; the state-capitalist position derives its capitalist character through the presence of, primarily, exploitation and market relations. Both of these positions, generally, treat the state as an instrument – either wielded for socialism or captured by capital – rather than as a specific historical form with its own structural logic.^[2] And neither grapples seriously with what markets produce beyond the allocation of goods and services.

Drawing on Marxist state theory and the philosophy of internal relations, this essay argues that the “socialist market economy” (“SME”) is a contradictory configuration in which socialist state form and capitalist market relations are internally related as dialectical opposites whose contradictions cannot be resolved through institutional design or political will alone. Only by grasping the state and the market as moments of a dialectical totality -- rather than as logically independent variables -- can we adequately assess what the SME is, what it produces, and what it means for socialist politics today.

The Socialist Market Economy on Its Own Terms

The socialist market economy did not emerge from a theoretical blueprint. As Brødsgaard and Rutten document, it was the product of a specific and contested historical process unfolding across four decades of reform.^[3] The 1978 Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee inaugurated substantial economic reform, and in doing so, opted to retain central planning as a primary mechanism of development. By 1984, the Twelfth Central Committee's Decision on Economic Restructuring introduced the concept of "planned commodity economy" – the first official acknowledgement that commodity relations were compatible with socialism. The 1987 Thirteenth Congress produced the formula "state regulates market, market guides enterprises."^[4] After a period of retrenchment between 1989 and 1991, Deng Xiaoping's 1992 Southern Tour and the Fourteenth National Congress established the socialist market economy as the official goal. The SME was not theorized in advance and then implemented; it was rationalized in the course of being built, under conditions of political contestation and ideological revision.^[5]

The theoretical edifice constructed to justify this process is more sophisticated than its critics typically acknowledge. Liu Guoguang, one of the main theorists of the theory of SME, makes a definitive argumentative move by stating that “planning” and “market” are economic regulators rather than characteristics of social formations.^[6] This formulation, which Deng's Southern Tour speeches crystallized as official doctrine, dissolves the apparent contradiction between socialism and markets by relocating the distinction elsewhere. What makes the SME socialist, on Liu's account, is not the absence of markets but the dominance of public ownership, distribution of goods according to work as the principal form, and common prosperity as the normative goal. The "socialist" modifier is not decorative, metaphorical, or rhetorical because it specifies the class content and institutional framework within which market mechanisms operate. Liu further identifies five structural market failures requiring state intervention: public goods, natural monopoly, distributional equity, ecological damage, and macroeconomic instability. State direction of the economy is not a distortion of the market but a necessary complement to it.

It is worth pausing here to distinguish the SME from the market socialist tradition with which it is sometimes confused. Market socialism – in the versions associated with Bardhan and Roemer, or with Schweickart's Economic Democracy – is fundamentally a normative-institutional project. This means these scholars try to figure out how to design a socialist economy that retains market mechanisms for efficiency while subordinating them to socialist property relations.^[7] The market is an instrument to be engineered within a socialist framework. The SME inverts this relationship. It does not propose to subordinate a market to a socialist design; it proposes to derive the socialist character of a market economy already in operation through public ownership dominance and party direction. These are structurally inverse projects, and conflating them obscures what is theoretically distinctive about each.

The most sophisticated contemporary version of SME affirmation is found in Jabbour, Dantas, and Espíndola, who argue that the Chinese development process over the past four decades has produced a genuinely new socioeconomic formation.^[8] On their account, the continuous technical progress achieved by state-owned enterprises, combined with proactive industrial policy, has generated new and superior forms of economic planning that transcend the planning-market dichotomy inherited from Cold War debates. They describe this as a "new projectment economy" – a re-emergence of planning not as mandatory directive allocation but as strategic coordination of investment and production through the capacity of state-owned enterprises. For Jabbour and his collaborators, the SME is not a transitional compromise but an original institutional achievement whose theoretical implications have yet to be fully grasped.

What these accounts share – Liu's theoretical synthesis, Jabbour's new socioeconomic formation thesis, and the broader School of New Marxist Economics associated with Cheng Enfu – is a serious and non-trivial attempt to theorize the compatibility of socialism and markets within a Marxist framework.^[9] This deserves engagement rather than dismissal. The historical record of the SME includes real achievements in poverty reduction, industrial development, and increasingly in green transition that cannot be explained away as mere capitalist accumulation. The theoretical claim that state direction of markets can produce qualitatively different outcomes from market self-regulation is not inherently implausible.

The limit of this body of work, however, is that it provides a normative account of the state rather than a structural one. The socialist character of the SME is derived by what the CPC intends, what ownership forms dominate, and what goals are officially declared. This is ultimately voluntarist: if the party directs the economy toward socialist ends and public ownership is dominant, the system is socialist. But this framework cannot ask whether the Chinese state's own reproduction has become structurally dependent on capital accumulation through market relations, or whether those market relations introduce pressures that operate regardless of CPC intent. It treats the state as an instrument – a very powerful and well-directed instrument, but an instrument nonetheless – rather than as a specific historical form with its own structural logic. It is precisely this gap that a Marxist theory of the state must fill.

What the Left Gets Wrong: Two Inadequate Positions

The two dominant left positions on China are mirror images of each other. Campist affirmation treats the SME as a genuinely socialist achievement on the basis of public ownership dominance, CPC direction of the economy, and China's anti-imperialist foreign policy.^[10] State-capitalist critique treats it as capitalism with Chinese characteristics on the basis of wage labour exploitation, market competition, and integration into global accumulation circuits.^[11] Each position captures something real. The campist position is correct that state ownership and party direction produce institutional capacities that differ meaningfully from liberal market economies. The state-capitalist position, on the other hand, is correct that exploitation persists and that market relations generate structural pressures regardless of political intent. But each position's strength is also its limit: by seizing on one feature of the SME – ownership and intent on one side, exploitation and markets on the other – both camps mistake a partial truth for the whole picture.

The campist position, associated with Dengist and broader anti-imperialist currents on the left, essentially reproduces the CPC's self-description in Marxist language. Since the party-state owns strategic sectors, directs industrial policy, and declares socialist goals, the SME is socialist.^[12] The argument has the virtue of taking the socialist question seriously rather than dismissing it, but it purchases this seriousness at the cost of critical distance. As we saw in section II, even the most sophisticated internal accounts provide a normative rather than structural account of socialist character. The campist position on the broader left typically doesn't even reach this level of sophistication; it tends rather to infer socialist character from geopolitical alignment and a supposed anti-imperialist (anti-American) posture rather than from any analysis of social relations.^[13] This produces a politics of solidarity, a politics without analysis – useful for resisting Western imperialism's ideological offensives against China, but incapable of accounting for the real contradictions the SME generates, including for Chinese workers.

The state-capitalist position makes the opposite error. By identifying capitalism with the presence of wage labour, market competition, and surplus extraction – all of which are present in China – it dissolves the socialist question entirely. China is simply capitalist, the CPC is a ruling class faction, and the SME is an ideological fig leaf. This position has the virtue of taking exploitation seriously and refusing the mystifications of the official Chinese political economy. But it commits, in reverse, what Ollman identifies as the fundamental error of market socialist thinking: rather than identifying capital with its current embodiment in private ownership, it identifies capital with market relations as such, failing to grasp that capital as a relation of production can be variously configured – and that its specific institutional configuration matters enormously.^[14] The Chinese party-state is not the same as the Canadian or American state; treating them as functionally equivalent because all three preside over wage labour and market exchange, in many ways, sacrifices analytical precision for theoretical tidiness. The state-capitalist position, like the campist position, has no theory of the state, and it has a theory of capitalism that the state is then read into.

A third position, less common on the left but influential in academic political economy, is the developmentalist account. Wade, Medeiros and Majerowicz, Dent, and others in the developmental state tradition correctly identify something both camps miss: the Chinese state's relationship to markets is not purely ideological but, rather, institutional.^[15] The party-state has specific organizational capacities – the governance of state-owned enterprises, development finance insulated from profitability requirements, five-year planning, sectoral coordination – that produce markedly different outcomes from liberal market states.^[16] Medeiros and Majerowicz are right that the party-state's relative autonomy from its domestic capital allowed China to resist neoliberal pressure in ways South Korea or Taiwan could not.^[17] But the developmentalist account evacuates the class content of these institutional capacities entirely. China becomes the latest and most successful developmental state; in other words, China, for these scholars, has simply become Japan or South Korea with better political insulation and a larger domestic market. The socialist question disappears not because it is answered but because it is never asked. For example, Wade's "governing the market" framework is in essence liberal institutionalism; here, the state is a technocratic agent that deploys institutional capacities to manage market outcomes, and whether those capacities serve socialist or capitalist ends is a matter of political choice rather than structural determination.^[18] This misses two things. First, it ignores the class content of development: accumulation for whom, under what conditions, and who bears the costs? Second, it treats state capacity as politically neutral, a variable that can be dialled up or down independently of the class relations that produced it and that it reproduces.^[19]

What all three positions share – and this is the crucial point – is an inadequate theory of the state and an inadequate theory of what markets do as social relations. The campist and developmentalist positions treat the state as an instrument, as powerful, as well-directed, and as capable of producing socialist or developmental outcomes if wielded correctly. The state-capitalist position treats the state as a transmission belt for capital's interests. None of them ask what the state is in Marxist terms – that is, what specific historical form it takes, what structural pressures its own reproduction generates, and how those pressures interact with the class forces that contest it. And none of them seriously engage with what markets produce beyond the allocation of goods and services – the ideological effects, the structural pressures, the reproduction of capitalist social relations that Ollman identifies as operating regardless of ownership form. It is to these two questions – the state and the market as social relations – that we now turn.

The Market as Social Relation

Bertell Ollman's contribution to the market socialism debate, published in the 1997 volume he co-edited with Schweickart, provides the theoretical resources to move beyond the impasse identified in section III. Ollman is not a market socialist – he is one of its sharpest critics from within the Marxist tradition, and his critique cuts directly against both the SME affirmation position and the state-capitalist dismissal, though in ways neither camp has fully registered.

Ollman's central argument is that the market is not simply an allocative mechanism but a social relation that produces its own ideological effects. Through daily participation in buying and selling, people acquire a distinctive way of understanding the world. This way of understanding is atomistic, individualist, focused on exchange rather than production, naturalizing competition and greed as qualities or components of human nature. This is not primarily a matter of false consciousness imposed from above – it is produced by people's actual experiences in the market, repeated daily from early childhood, reinforced by every successful act of purchase and sale. "The mystifications associated with the market," Ollman writes, "result mainly from people's experiences of buying and selling."^[20] The market teaches its own lessons more effectively than any propaganda apparatus precisely because those lessons appear to be confirmed by experience every time we go to the shops or sell our labour power.

The most important mystification the market produces is the occlusion of production. In other words, the mechanisms of the production process are obscured – the market presents exchange as a self-contained world; products appear already on the shelves, their origins in the labour process invisible, the class relations of production hidden behind the apparent equality of buyer and seller. This is, ultimately, structural – the vantage point of exchange systematically prevents us from seeing what occurs in production, and with it, exploitation, alienation, and class. Marx called production the "hidden abode" of capitalism precisely because market ideology seals the door between exchange and the social relations that make it possible.^[21] Without grasping production, exploitation can only appear as individual unfairness rather than a systematic class relation; alienation becomes a vague personal feeling rather than the structural separation of workers from their productive activity, its products, and their fellow workers; and class itself disappears, replaced by individual consumers making free choices in a market that appears to work for everyone.

The political consequences are severe. If class is invisible, or indeed invisibilized, class interests are invisible, and with them the political subject of socialist transformation – the proletariat. Ollman is unsparing: "market mystification serves as the main ideological defense mechanism of capitalist society."^[22] This means that, for Ollman, the capitalist class rules not primarily through lies or distortions deliberately propagated by ruling class ideologists, but through the unremarkable daily experience of buying and selling that anyone living in a market society undergoes.

This analysis bears directly on the SME. The Chinese Marxist economists, as we saw in section II, locate the socialist character of the SME through public ownership dominance, party direction, and normative goals. What they do not address is the ideological effects of market participation on Chinese workers and citizens. If Ollman is right – and there is no reason to think market mystification operates differently in China than elsewhere – then the daily reproduction of market exchange in the SME generates structural pressures on the consciousness of people regardless of the intent of the CPC or its official ideology. The "socialist" modifier in SME theory names a political project and a set of institutional constraints, but it cannot simply override what people learn through their experiences as buyers and sellers of commodities and labour power.

More damaging still for the SME affirmation position is Ollman's structural argument about capital. The fundamental error of market socialist thinking, he argues, is "to identify capital with capitalists, the current embodiment of capital, and not see that capital, as a relation of production, can also be embodied in the state or even in workers' cooperatives."^[23] Capital is self-expanding value – wealth deployed not to satisfy wants but to produce more wealth.^[24] What is decisive is not who owns it but how it functions, writes Ollman, "[o]wnership may be transferred to the state or to workers' cooperatives, but if the market remains essentially intact, so too will most of the problems associated with capitalism."^[25] This is the structural argument Liu Guoguang's normative account cannot answer because the relative dominance in China of public ownership does not dissolve capital-as-relation if the imperatives of the market remain operative – if enterprises must compete, generate surpluses, respond to price signals, and discipline labour in the service of accumulation. In other words, the "socialist" modifier cannot do the theoretical work of abolishing capital-as-relation merely by transferring ownership to a socialist state.

Nevertheless, Ollman's verdict on China itself is brisk: it represents "a dictatorial form of savage capitalism, with socialist trimmings."^[26] This is where his analysis, for all its power, reaches its limit. The market mystification framework is devastating as a critique of the SME's ideological self-presentation, and the capital-as-relation argument correctly punctures the veil of what may be called ownership-form fetishism. But Ollman's conclusion is too quick precisely because he has no theory of the state. Without one, the CPC's direction of the economy can only appear as a superficial overlay on top of fundamentally capitalist social relations – the "socialist trimmings" on top of savage capitalism. But this cannot account for the real institutional differences between the Chinese party-state and liberal market states, the veritable variation in outcomes that developmentalist scholars like Medeiros and Majerowicz document, or the structural constraints the party-state places on market relations that a purely market-driven accumulation regime would not. Ollman knows what markets do but not what states are.^[27] It is this gap that Marxist state theory must fill.

Toward a Marxist State Theory of the SME

The argument so far has established a double limit. The SME affirmation tradition has a normative but not structural account of the state; it cannot explain what structural pressures market relations introduce into the Chinese party-state, regardless of CPC intent. Ollman provides the structural account of markets that the affirmation tradition lacks, but without a theory of the state, his verdict on China collapses into a dismissal that cannot account for real institutional variation. What is needed is a Marxist state theory capable of holding both insights together – one that takes seriously both what markets do as social relations and what specific state forms introduce as constraints and capacities.

The foundation for such a theory lies in a distinction between state form and state function that cuts against both instrumentalist and structuralist accounts.^[28] Against instrumentalism, which reduces the state to a tool of dominant class fractions and against structuralism, which treats it as an automatically functioning mechanism of capitalist reproduction, this distinction insists that the capitalist state is best understood through the dialectical relationship between the two. State form, the institutional configuration through which state power is organized, sets parameters on what is institutionally possible without mechanistically (one-sidedly) determining state action. The function of the state (what states actually do in response to accumulation imperatives, class pressures, and ecological constraints) cannot be read off the form of the state alone. In other words, the relationship between form and function is non-reductive; it must be investigated rather than assumed.

Two features of this framework are essential for the present argument. First, the state is not a neutral instrument but a specific historical configuration that is internally connected, or more precisely, related to, capital as a class relation. The capitalist state's fiscal dependence on accumulation, its juridical structure of citizen-subjects, its separation of political authority from economic relations, et cetera, are not accidental features that could be reformed away while leaving the state intact. They are constitutive of what the capitalist state is. In other words, the capitalist state must create the general conditions of production and exchange; it is structurally compelled to act in ways that reproduce the conditions of accumulation even when individual state actors intend otherwise.^[29]

Second, there exists a crucial distinction that bears directly on the SME: state-market relations – how states interact with market mechanisms through planning, pricing, allocation, and distribution – are analytically distinct from state-capital relations – how states relate to capital as a class relation involving surplus extraction, ownership structures, and accumulation imperatives. This distinction is routinely collapsed in both the developmentalist and state-capitalist literatures. Developmentalists like Wade analyze state-market relations – how the state governs the market – without analyzing state-capital relations – whether and how the state's own reproduction is entangled with capital accumulation. The state-capitalist position makes the opposite move insofar as it identifies capital accumulation as the defining social character without analyzing the specific form through which state-market relations are organized. We must insist both must be held together.

Bob Jessop's strategic-relational approach complements this by demonstrating that state institutions are, rather than neutral arenas, structured terrains that favour certain actors, interests, and strategies over others.^[30] Strategic selectivities are not the product of conspiracy or deliberate design; they are built into the institutional form of the state and produce tendencies in state action that can nonetheless be contested and modified through class struggle. Thus, the capitalist state does not simply execute the interests of the capitalist class; it is a condensation of class forces in struggle, which means its action is always the outcome of contestation within structurally constrained parameters.^[31] Applied to the SME, this framework produces an analysis that is more precise than any of the positions surveyed in section III. The Chinese party-state's fiscal revenues depend substantially on enterprise profitability and economic growth; its industrial competitiveness depends on labour productivity; its integration into global capitalism subjects it to accumulation imperatives that operate regardless of party intent. This is to say, they are structural features of a state whose reproduction has become entangled with, and embedded through, market social relations through four decades of reform. In this sense, Ollman is right to say state ownership does not dissolve capital-as-relation if market imperatives remain operative, and the SME's market relations generate ideological and structural pressures that the "socialist" modifier cannot simply override.

But the specific form of the Chinese party-state also introduces real constraints on those market relations that a liberal market state does not and institutionally cannot. The distinction between state-market relations and state-capital relations is here empirically visible in a way it is not in liberal market economies: the Chinese party-state simultaneously commands market processes and owns significant capital, collapsing a separation that liberal market states institutionally maintain. State Owned Enterprise governance insulates strategic sectors from short-term profitability requirements; development finance can be deployed without the zero-sum fiscal trade-off between subsidizing capital and maintaining social spending that liberal market states face; the Party direction of industrial policy introduces a political logic into accumulation that is not reducible to market imperatives – though neither is it immune to them.^[32] The state is thus shaped by two types of balance of power between fractions of capital, and between the people and the business world and the state that assists it. In the Chinese case, the specific institutional form of the party-state shapes both balances in ways that differ structurally from liberal market states – not necessarily in kind, but in the specific configuration of constraints and capacities that result.

The SME is therefore neither a neutral instrument in socialist hands nor simply capitalist restoration. It is a specific contradictory configuration in which the socialist state-form and capitalist market relations are in structural tension. This allows one to claim the "socialist" modifier in Liu Guoguang's account is not decorative because it names a real institutional constraint on market relations, a genuine concentration of planning capacity and political insulation from domestic capital that produces different outcomes from an LME. But Ollman's structural argument about capital-as-relation is equally real – the market relations introduced into the SME generate their own pressures, their own ideological effects, their own logic of accumulation that the party-state must navigate and cannot simply direct at will.

This brings us to the NEP question that Poulin's comparative analysis raises.^[33] Is the SME a transitional form in the Marxist sense Lenin intended – a strategic retreat that maintains socialist political form of the state while deploying market relations under workers' state supervision, with the expectation that those relations will be progressively constrained and eventually superseded? Or has it stabilized into something else, say, a distinct socioeconomic formation, as Jabbour et al. argue, whose institutional character is no longer transitional but settled?^[34] This framework cannot answer this question in advance, and nor should it. What it can do is specify what answering it would require; namely, an analysis of whether the structural pressures market relations introduced into the Chinese party-state are being progressively constrained by expanding socialist institutional capacities, or whether the logic of capital accumulation is progressively subsuming the party-state's own reproduction.^[35] This is an empirical and theoretical question, not one to be settled by checking ownership forms or declaring geopolitical allegiances. It is, however, exactly the question that a Marxist state theory of the SME is positioned to investigate – and that neither campism, state-capitalism, nor developmentalism can even properly formulate.

Implications for Socialist Politics

The argument developed in this essay is not, and cannot be, merely theoretical. If the SME is a specific contradictory configuration in which socialist state form and capitalist market relations are in structural tension, rather than either a socialist success or a capitalist restoration, then the political conclusions that follow differ substantially from those of the dominant left positions – and the differences matter for how socialists today think about China, about markets, and about the possibilities and limits of state-led transition.

The first implication concerns how the left relates to China politically. The campist position produces a politics of uncritical solidarity. How? As the argument goes, since China is socialist, criticism of the SME's contradictions is either naive or objectively anti-communist.^[36] The state-capitalist position produces a mirror politics of dismissal. Here, since China is capitalist, solidarity with Chinese workers means opposing the CPC rather than engaging seriously with what the SME produces and for whom.^[37] Both positions are politically disarming. The campist position cannot account for the real costs that the SME's contradictions impose – on Chinese workers subject to market discipline; on the ideological effects of market mystification Ollman identifies; on the structural pressures accumulation imperatives introduced into party-state governance, et cetera. The state-capitalist position cannot account for the very real institutional differences between the Chinese party-state and liberal market states, or explain why those differences matter for socialist strategy globally.

A Marxist state theory of the SME enables a different politics. It means critical solidarity without illusions and critique without capitulation to anti-communist ideology. This means taking seriously both what the Chinese party-state's specific institutional form makes possible (the planning capacities, the insulation of strategic sectors from short-term profitability, the relative autonomy from domestic capital), and what the structural pressures of market social relations impose, including on workers. It means resisting the temptation to read geopolitical alignment as a proxy for socialist character, while equally resisting the temptation to read the presence of exploitation and market competition as settling the question of China's class character.

The second implication concerns markets under socialist conditions more broadly. Ollman's analysis establishes that markets are not neutral instruments that socialist states can deploy without consequence. The market mystification he identifies: the occlusion of production; the naturalization of competition and greed; the atomization of workers as buyers and sellers, operates through daily experience regardless of who owns the enterprises involved. This is a structural argument with structural implications, as any socialist project that retains significant market relations must grapple seriously with what those relations produce and not merely assume that socialist ownership or political direction can override them. The Soviet NEP, the Yugoslav self-management experiment, and the SME; all represent historically specific attempts to manage this contradiction, and all generated, and continue to generate their own specific tensions between socialist political form and market social relations. The lesson is not that markets can never be used under socialist conditions, as Lenin's own analysis of the NEP as a strategic necessity under specific historical conditions remains instructive. Rather we should understand that using markets under socialist conditions requires a clear-eyed account of what structural pressures they introduce, and active institutional mechanisms to constrain those pressures rather than assuming political will is sufficient.^[38]

Conclusion

This essay has argued that the dominant left positions on China's socialist market economy – campist affirmation and state-capitalist dismissal – share a common theoretical weakness: an inadequate account of the state and of what markets do as social relations. By drawing on Marxist state theory, and on Ollman's structural critique of market mystification, it has tried to develop a framework capable of holding together what each position separately grasps: that the Chinese party-state's specific institutional form produces real capacities that differ from liberal market states, and that the market relations introduced into the SME generate structural pressures that socialist ownership and political direction cannot simply override.

The SME is neither a neutral instrument in socialist hands nor simply capitalism with Chinese characteristics. It is a specific contradictory configuration in which socialist state form and capitalist market relations are in structural tension -- a tension that cannot be resolved by checking ownership forms, declaring geopolitical allegiances, or asserting the party's socialist intent. Marxist state theory provides the theoretical tools to analyze this tension rigorously: to ask what the Chinese state's reproduction depends on, what structural pressures market relations introduce into party-state governance, and what specific constraints the party-state's institutional form places on those pressures in return.

The question this framework generates – whether the SME represents a transitional form in which socialist institutional capacities are progressively constraining market relations, or whether accumulation imperatives are progressively subsuming the party-state's own reproduction – cannot be answered in advance. It is an empirical and theoretical stake, not a premise. But it is the right question, and formulating it correctly is itself a political achievement. A left that cannot pose the question rigorously cannot answer it – and a left that cannot answer it is poorly equipped for the political challenges the SME's contradictions will continue to generate, on the terrain of socialist politics, and indeed beyond.

Ollman ends his critique of market socialism with a warning: market socialists have mistaken the market for a can opener, when it really functions more like a meat grinder.^[39] The warning applies equally to any socialist project that treats market relations as neutral instruments to be deployed at will. The SME's historical achievement is real; so are its structural tensions. Taking both seriously – without the consolations of campism or the false clarity of state-capitalist dismissal – is the minimum that Marxist analysis requires, and the starting point for a socialist politics adequate to the present moment.

1. The term "campist" is used here descriptively rather than pejoratively. By using it, I am referring to a tendency on the left that organizes its political analysis primarily around geopolitical blocs; in this case, treating China's opposition to US imperialism as a sufficient basis for political solidarity and identification as socialist, rather than as one consideration among others to be weighed against an independent analysis of social relations.

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2. Some readers may recognize an echo of Block or Skocpol here. This author does not adhere to either position; the formulation simply means that the state's structural logic is determined by the class relations of the mode of production in which it is embedded, not by the intentions of those who wield it.

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3. See Brødsgaard, Kjeld Erik, and Koen Rutten. 2017. “The Emergence and Development of the Socialist Market Economy (1992–2003).” In From Accelerated Accumulation to Socialist Market Economy in China. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004330092_005.

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4. See Yue, Jianyong. 2018. “Chinese Reform and Development in the 1980s.” In China’s Rise in the Age of Globalization: Myth or Reality?, edited by Jianyong Yue. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63997-0_3.

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5. For a rich collection of recent Marxist perspectives on the character of the Chinese socialist project and its historical development, see the special issue "Socialism and China: On the 75th Anniversary of the Chinese Revolution," guest edited by Zhun Xu, Zhongjin Li, and Nana Liu, Science & Society 89, no. 4 (October 2025).

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6. See Liu, Guoguang. 2021. On the Theory of Socialist Market Economy. With Sun Weiwei. Paths International.

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7. See Bardhan, Pranab K., and John E. Roemer. 1993. Market Socialism: The Current Debate. Oxford University Press; Schweickart, David. 1993. Against Capitalism. Cambridge University Press. For the Marxist critique of market socialism, see Ollman, Bertell. 'Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies.' In Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, edited by Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart. New York: Routledge, 1997.

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8. See Jabbour, Elias, Alexis Dantas, and Carlos José Espíndola. 2022. “On The Chinese Socialist Market Economy And The ‘New Projectment Economy.’” World Review of Political Economy 13 (4). https://doi.org/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.13.4.0502.

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9. On Enfu, see Dagkas, Alexandros, and Roula Tsokalidou. 2025. “Socialist Market Economy: Experiences of Western Scientists from the Economic Thought of Professor Cheng Enfu during the Initial Steps of China within the World System of the Market.” World Marxist Review 2 (2): 111−122-111−122. https://doi.org/10.62834/jkd9v881.

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10. See Gu, Hailiang. 2021. “The Process and Logic of China’s Socialist Market Economy from Mechanism to System.” International Critical Thought 11 (3): 341–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2021.1947032.

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11. See Hart-Landsberg, Martin, and Paul Burkett. 2005. China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle. Monthly Review Press and Camfield, David. 2023. Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left. Fernwood Publishing.

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12. See Yingjie, Liu. 2025. “China’s Socialist Market Economy: A Great Invention.” China Economist (Beijing, China) 20 (6): 2–34. https://doi.org/10.19602/j.chinaeconomist.2025.11.01.

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13. While Marxism is necessarily anti-imperialist, anti-imperialism need not be necessarily socialist, or indeed Marxist.

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14. Bertell Ollman, "Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies," in Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, ed. Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart (New York: Routledge, 1997), 95.

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15. See Wade, Robert. 2004. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton University Press; Medeiros, Carlos Aguiar de, and Esther Majerowicz. 2022. “Developmentalism With Chinese Characteristics.” International Journal of Political Economy 51 (3): 208–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/08911916.2022.2146388.; Dent, Christopher M. 2018. “East Asia’s New Developmentalism: State Capacity, Climate Change and Low-Carbon Development.” Third World Quarterly 39 (6): 1191–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1388740.

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16. For a good overview, see Beck, Kasper Ingeman, and Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard. 2022. “Corporate Governance with Chinese Characteristics: Party Organization in State-Owned Enterprises.” The China Quarterly 250 (June): 486–508. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741021001351.

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17. Medeiros, Carlos Aguiar de, and Esther Majerowicz. 2022. “Developmentalism With Chinese Characteristics.” International Journal of Political Economy 51 (3): 208–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/08911916.2022.2146388.

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18. It is worth noting that Wade in particular never addresses the question of socialism. See Wade, Robert. 2004. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton University Press.

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19. Exactly what ‘state capacity’ means is never addressed.

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20. Bertell Ollman, "Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies," in Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, ed. Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart (New York: Routledge, 1997), 82.

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21. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 279.

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22. Bertell Ollman, "Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies," in Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, ed. Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart (New York: Routledge, 1997), 107.

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23. Ibid., 95.

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24. The terms are used loosely here following Ollman's own formulation. Strictly speaking, capital is self-expanding value – the circuit M-C-M' in which value is advanced in order to extract surplus value. "Wealth" in the colloquial sense is not identical to value in Marx's technical sense, which refers specifically to socially necessary abstract labour time. The conflation is Ollman's rather than Marx's.

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25. Bertell Ollman, "Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies," in Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, ed. Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart (New York: Routledge, 1997), 95.

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26. Bertell Ollman, "Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies," in Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, ed. Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart (New York: Routledge, 1997), 102.

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27. While Ollman engages questions of the state elsewhere – most notably in the chapter on the state in Dance of the Dialectic (2003) – his analysis of China and market socialism relies primarily on the capital-as-relation argument and does not develop a structural account of how specific state forms mediate the pressures market relations introduce. It is in this more limited sense that the claim is made.

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28. This distinction builds on the Open Marxist state theory of Simon Clarke; see Clarke, Simon, ed. The State Debate (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), and Clarke, Simon. "The State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital." Kapitalistate 10/11 (1983): 113–130. For a recent systematic development of this framework, see Raju J. Das, Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State: Theoretical Considerations (London: Routledge, 2022).

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29. Raju J. Das, Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State: Theoretical Considerations (London: Routledge, 2022).

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30. Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). See also Jessop, Bob. 2017. “Nicos Poulantzas on political economy, political ecology, and democratic socialism.” Journal of Political Ecology 24 (1). https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20794.

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31. Indeed, Jessop's works build on that of Poulantzas.

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32. See Brodsgaard, Kjeld Erik, and Koen Rutten. 2017. “From Accelerated Accumulation to Socialist Market Economy in China: Economic Discourse and Development from 1953 to the Present.” In From Accelerated Accumulation to Socialist Market Economy in China. Brill. https://brill.com/display/title/33433.

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33. Poulin, Maxence. 2021. “Comparative Analysis of the Economic Structure of the Socialist Market Economy of China and the New Economy Policy.” International Critical Thought 11 (4): 519–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2021.2007502.

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34. Jabbour, Elias, Alexis Dantas, and Carlos José Espíndola. 2022. “On The Chinese Socialist Market Economy And The ‘New Projectment Economy.’” World Review of Political Economy 13 (4). https://doi.org/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.13.4.0502.

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35. This formulation deliberately holds open a question that the dominant positions discussed in section III foreclose in advance.

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36. I would include Rockhill's argument in Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025), which exemplifies the campist tendency to derive socialist credentials from anti-Western positioning rather than from an independent analysis of social relations.

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37. Of course, this also is in part the Sinophobia seen in much of left-discourse.

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38. Lenin, V. I. n.d. “The New Economic Policy And The Tasks Of The Political Education Departments.” Accessed Dec 14, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm; cf. Poulin, Maxence. 2021. "Comparative Analysis of the Economic Structure of the Socialist Market Economy of China and the New Economic Policy." International Critical Thought 11 (4): 519–534.

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39. Bertell Ollman, "Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies," in Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, ed. Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart (New York: Routledge, 1997), 125.

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