>>2616862>So where is the capitalism? Where?>Can you show me the capitalist class—as a political body—appropriating surplus via wage-work? In regards to Deng, you answered your own question with the definitions in your post. China does indeed openly have a capitalist class.
The capitalist elites in China operate and manage various commodity producing corporations, both private corporations and those technically owned by the state as SOEs. In exchange their workers receive wages for their labour.
The fact that they have to call themselves the people's capitalists, or the notion that they are technically on paper loyal to the state, doesn't change the material processes of capitalist mode of production taking place.
A capitalist saying he is doing free market capitalism for the benefit of a future socialist state doesn't transform the nature of his mode of production or the realities of wage labour.
Even the most genuine loyalty to the CPC by a Chinese businessman doesn't have the power to transmutate the nature of economic principles by which he operates.
China post-Deng is a market economy, with a fully operational stock exchange for Marx's sake.
The Dengist case really doesn't even need addressing in any serious capacity given how glaring it is.
Now, in regards to the USSR during the era of Stalin, we do not have billionaire businessmen operating in the same sense as modern Dengist China, but you still had the massive accumulation of commodities and a system of wage labour.
Again, that in itself is the capitalist model of production you yourself identified.
If you want evidence for it, then you only need to look at any record of how the Soviet Union traded in goods it produced in surplus on the international scale, and how it made use of wages paid in Rubles to workers in exchange for labour, with surplus value going to the state.
As I said in my earlier post, this isn't inherently a problem for communists. In fact this is exactly what anyone to the right of anarchists and communization theorists would expect in the immediate period after a revolution. It isn't bad socialism in any sense, because it isn't yet socialism at all.
You surely understand, you need to build up appropriate conditions for transitioning to a socialist economy. Lenin recognised this and introduced the NEP specifically to push back the socialist model of production to a later date so the Soviet economy could recover first.
The issue lies in when you nationalise capitalist production and have no plans to ever move towards socialism, but pretend as to call the nationalisation itself as the socialist mode of production. As is exactly what happened under Stalin.
Your arguement appears to rest on the notion that without a distinct class of capitalists within the economic structure of a society, there can be no capitalist mode of production present.
But it is immediately evident to anyone with a functioning brain that this is incorrect.
How so? Because a state can nationalise it's capitalist production and put the reigns of control in the party, and it is still capitalist production.
Even the Italian Fascists (may ᴉuᴉlossnW's bloated corpse rot in piss), engaged in major nationalisation - that doesn't make them socialists however does it?
Likewise a directly worker owned organisation may still produce goods within a capitalist framework, merely because it's structure has removed the capitalists from the top position in the business doesn't change the mode of production.
This is how cooperatives can function under a capitalist framework and still be capitalist - because management structure and methods or production are distinct.
The absence of a CEO in a top hat smoking cigars is not equal to socialism. The presence of nationalisation isn't equal to socialism.
It has been over 100 years since Stalin took power, 34 since the USSR fell, and still MLoids fail to grasp this most basic of ideas… This is why any future revolution led by them will fall into the same traps as every other ML state and fail the same as all other ML state.
It is why we must crush the rightist deviation prevalent in this thread and the broader online left every time it shows itself.
It is not a sin to learn from the past. You do not owe eternal loyalty to market economies with a red flag or failed regimes that no longer exist, you owe loyalty to the struggle of the proletariat of future generations, and as such understanding this and getting this shit right for the next time there is an opportunity for revolution - whenever that may be - is fundamental.