In my view, the recent article "Toward a Marxist State Theory of the Socialist Market Economy", by Theryn Arnold, is not a Marxist analysis of the political-economic situation in contemporary China, and serves to justify and apologize for capitalist-imperialist exploitation, so long as this exploitation is not carried out at the hands of the US ruling class or other Western imperialists. The question of how to evaluate the political character of China today is extremely contentious in the US left, so any treatment of it demands a rigorous analysis of the class contradictions, production and social relations, and dominant ideological trends in Chinese society. This letter is not the place to carry that out (I would recommend N.B. Turner’s Is China an Imperialist Country? as a starting point for those looking to learn more), but I do want to highlight some of the obvious discrepancies between Arnold’s positions and the basic tenets of the Marxist theory of the state.

Any “Marxist state theory” necessarily has to start from Lenin’s State and Revolution, which remains the canonical Marxist text on this topic, and where, in addition to reiterating the essential and decisive points from the historical writings of Marx and Engels about the state, Lenin also builds on their theories to describe the features of the state in the era of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. As such, the general principles Lenin lays out in this book about the historical existence and development of the state remain essential for us to understand today as communists in the US.

Just as Lenin sought to apply Marx and Engels’ theories to a new historical context while preserving their revolutionary content, so should we use Lenin’s works to understand modern-day capitalist society, so as to be better equipped to overturn it. However, as Lenin remarks in State and Revolution, we must at the same time guard against petit-bourgeois and bourgeois intellectuals who:

… hallow [the names of past revolutionary thinkers and leaders] to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter” while at the same time they “omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul … push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie.

It is striking that out of three recent pieces published on the topic of how to evaluate the contemporary Chinese state (Arnold’s article, "Letter: The Meaning of China Debates” by Kieran Morgan, and “Heat and Light: A Critique of “Toward a Marxist State Theory of the Socialist Market Economy”” by Ewan Tilley), none of them contains a single reference to State and Revolution. This speaks to the extent to which the US left has largely lost touch with fundamentals of Marxist theory. Steeped for decades in the dominant ruling class ideology of US imperial omnipotence (the “end of history” narrative promoted after the fall of the USSR, and so on), the left and the working class movement broadly in this country have turned away from Marxism and towards all manner of bourgeois philosophical trends, whose real effect, regardless of the intention of the individuals to follow these trends, is to keep us weak, dispersed, and subservient to this cruel and oppressive society. If communists today wish to take advantage of the opportunities that are certain to arise from the rupture in the previous order of US imperialist hegemony, it is absolutely imperative that we take up study of the foundational lessons of Marxism.

In that spirit, let us turn to the basics of what Lenin wrote in State and Revolution:

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

Notably, Lenin defines the state in negative terms: it arises because – and only because – of the fact that class antagonisms cannot be reconciled. Its function, which it cannot ever carry out in totality, is to impose order over a situation whose very existence is conditional upon precisely that which makes its stability impossible – namely, class antagonisms. As Alain Badiou writes in his book Being and Event: “the State is not founded upon the social bond, which it would express, but rather upon un-binding, which it prohibits.”

Arnold characterizes the so-called “socialist market economy” in China as: “as a specific contradictory configuration in which socialist state form and capitalist market relations are in structural tension.” This outlook is not compatible in any way with Lenin’s description. It is rather an expression of the bourgeois revision of Marxism which attempts to cast the state as “an organ for the reconciliation of classes” (one of the viewpoints Lenin polemicizes against in State and Revolution); in other words, as a positive expression of the “social bond” between classes.

Even under socialism, the character of the struggle to remain on the socialist road and reject the capitalist road is not one of containing and managing “tension,” but of confronting and combating the irreconcilable class antagonism that persists between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and actually intensifies in new ways after the proletariat has seized political power. To be clear, I think China today is capitalist, but even putting aside that major difference in views, we can see that Arnold’s entire analytical framework is based on a patently non-Marxist understanding of the state.

Now, what does Lenin say about the state in the era of imperialism?

“In analyzing Marxist teachings on the state, the criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Programme, sent by Engels to Kautsky … cannot be ignored; for it is with the opportunist views of the Social-Democrats on questions of state organization that this criticism is mainly concerned.

We shall note in passing that Engels also makes an exceedingly valuable observation on economic questions, which shows how attentively and thoughtfully he watched the various changes occurring in modern capitalism, and how for this reason he was able to foresee to a certain extent the tasks of our present, the imperialist, epoch. Here is that observation: referring to the word “planlessness,” used in the draft programme, as characteristic of capitalism, Engels wrote:

"When we pass from joint-stock companies to trusts which assume control over, and monopolize, whole industries, it is not only private production that ceases, but also planlessness."

Here was have what is most essential in the theoretical appraisal of the latest phase of capitalism, i.e., imperialism, namely, that capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism. The latter must be emphasized because the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called "state socialism" and so on, is very common. The trusts, of course, never provided, do not now provide, and cannot provide complete planning. But however much they do plan, however much the capitalist magnates calculate in advance the volume of production on a national and even on an international scale, and however much they systematically regulate it, we still remain under capitalism—at its new stage, it is true, but still capitalism, without a doubt.”

This excerpt immediately exposes the fictive foil Arnold presents between the “liberal market economy” and “socialist market economy.” In fact, all the traits he claims are characteristic of the latter and antithetical to the former (“real institutional constraint on market relations, a genuine concentration of planning capacity and political insulation from domestic capital;” “governance of state-owned enterprises, development finance insulated from profitability requirements, five-year planning, sectoral coordination”) are perfectly compatible with what Lenin describes vis-a-vis the capitalist state in its highest stage of development. Supporting examples abound even in the supposed “free market” period of neoliberal policy in the US, from the Consolidated Rail Corporation of 1976-99, to extensive government subsidies that have propped up major monopoly corporations like Amazon, SpaceX, and Tesla throughout the 2000s.

The crux of most of the arguments in Arnold’s article can be found in his statement that “state direction of markets can produce qualitatively different outcomes from market self-regulation.” Lenin’s writings from over a century ago make it exceedingly clear that such “qualitatively different outcomes” can still lie entirely within the regime of the capitalist mode of production. Arnold avoids dealing with this crucial point in any capacity, and concludes that the correct stance for leftists to take towards the Chinese state is one of “critical solidarity without illusions” – which is to say, solidarity (since real solidarity neither precludes criticism nor requires the maintenance of illusions). Bearing in mind that the state “is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class” (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State), Arnold is putting forward that we should stand in solidarity with the ruling class of China, who are capitalists.

In his response, Ewan Tilley disagrees with Arnold’s stance, though timidly: “The [Chinese] party-state’s strategic selectivities … point toward a state whose reproduction is structurally entangled with the accumulation regime it manages, whose institutional capacities serve specific class interests, and whose relationship to the Chinese working class is not one of structural favouring.” Tilley also distorts the elementary lessons in State and Revolution, writing that “the state condenses class forces. The condensation thesis is not a description of an abstract structural relationship between the state and capital-in-general. It is a claim about what specific class forces, with what specific organisational capacities, are present in the condensation at a given historical moment.” While somewhat better than Arnold’s framework (which papers over class contradictions altogether), this still misses the central point made by Engles, that the economically dominant class inevitably becomes the politically dominant class (i.e. controls the state apparatus). Tilley thereby leaves the question of the state in a partial shroud of fundamental unknowability, in the style of the “Neo-Kantian agnostics [who] say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself” (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

Evidently, part of why Tilley is so shy in his assertions is because he believes that China, while capitalist, is still a progressive anti-imperialist force on the international stage (“Where the structural determination is refused, the geopolitical frame fills the practical political gap, not as a crude assertion that China’s anti-imperialism settles its socialist character, but as the only available basis for orientation once the class determination has been suspended”). The political-economic analysis and anecdotal accounts in Turner’s book (cited above) of Chinese mining enterprises in Africa and South America help to show why this position is fundamentally misguided. Another recent example, not covered in that text, is the Chinese state’s material support for the Sri Lankan military in its genocidal massacre against the Tamil population there in 2009.

Lastly, Kieran Morgan’s letter evades the responsibility to come to any conclusion whatsoever on the class character of the Chinese state today by invoking the maximally fatalist position that: “even if Chinese workers would organize themselves to topple the state (and that’s a big if), I would think that they would soon be organizationally overpowered by forces organized and financed by the West.” Morgan would do well to study the history of the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were able to lead the USSR to victory in the post-revolution civil war – even though their bourgeois opponents were “organized and financed” by all the major imperialist world powers at the time combined – precisely because of the organization and dedication to the revolutionary cause of the overwhelming majority of the Russian workers and peasants. As communists, if we want to avoid falling into the type of dead-end thinking exhibited in Morgan’s letter, we must uphold, in the face of the most daunting obstacles, the same non-naive confidence in the infinite creativity of the masses as the Bolsheviks did.

Kat