4/5/23, 11:18 AM How Communist is China? https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-Communist-is-China.php 1/9 *** HOW COMMUNIST IS CHINA? T.S.Tsonchev *** The Montréal Review, April 2011 *** Today, when we talk about socialism or communism, we are usually talking about the economy. Human rights and the political system always come second, mainly because in the twentieth century the real competition between the two systems - the communist bloc and the capitalist "free world" - was in the field of economics (and, of course, geopolitics). Moreover, Marxist theory, orthodox socialist theory so to speak, was based primarily on the economic analysis of capital accumulation and on a critique of the existing labour relations of the nineteenth century. Marxist theory had no ambition, and indeed no ability, to explain the political organisation of the future socialist/communist society; it had only vague prophecies that the future communist societies, purged of the owners of capital, would be stateless, i.e. apolitical. (1) There are no communist states today. There never have been. The former communist countries, such as the Soviet Union or East Germany, were twentieth-century modifications of old Oriental despotisms. Yet today, strangely enough, the ruling elites of the world's second economic power argue and insist that their country is a communist state. Moreover, they use Marxist rhetoric and communist symbols to define their regime, and the political organisation of their country is a one- Share Tweet