Is the PRC a dictatorship of the proletariat?

Here’s a surprise: this question isn’t actually that difficult to answer.

The PRC can either be a dictatorship of one class, or a dictatorship of another. Under capitalism, it can either be a dictatorship of the proletariat, or a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. If it is not one, then it cannot be anything but the other. So really, ask yourself whether a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would:

Let me respond in advance to three objections. First — no, you cannot excuse the predominance of ‘worker-friendly’ (to say the least) policies by saying that the PRC is a social democracy. Social democracies existed within specific social conditions (from the 1940s to the 1970s) within specific geographical areas (Europe and the settler-colonies of North America, Australia, and New Zealand), and often existed only for the settler/labour-aristocratic/petit-bourgeois classes. It was the displacement of exploitation from the First World to the Third — it was imperialism, plain and simple. Social democracy never represented a distinct articulation of capital, and has never, ever been a phenomenon in periphery countries. It’s funny because these are the same people who claim the PRC is a brutal hell-hole of rabid exploitation where workers have no power, and then do a rapid about-face and say that the Chinese government is just compromising with workers and doing all of this shit because reasons (i.e because they don’t know what social democracy actually is and they don’t understand how social democracy is financed by imperialist value-transfer).

Second — if you still think that when the cameras switch off, every one of the 88.76 million members of the CPC dons a black top hat, hi-fives their neighbour, and says ‘gee we sure fooled those folks into thinking we were dedicated Marxist-Leninists’ then you’re being silly. It’s an orientalist fantasy that the CPC gives enough of a shit about what Western leftists think of them, that they went to the effort of mandating courses in Marxism for every university student in the country just for show.

Third, if you think that the PRC was, at any point, a dictatorship of the proletariat, then you can’t claim that it’s now a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. To those people, if I asked you whether communists could simply get elected into power and turn the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie into an organ of proletarian class power, then you would say no. But then you have people going around and saying that a dictatorship of the proletariat can be reformed into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, when those same people know that in order for the bourgeoisie become the ruling-class, a sharp rupture is required in which the proletarian state is overthrown and supplanted by a bourgeois state. There has been no such rupture in China. There was a rupture in the USSR, a rupture in Yugoslavia, in Albania, and across eastern Europe — but no rupture in China.

In fact, the only basis for the claim — that a proletarian dictatorship can reform into a bourgeois dictatorship — is in the supposed case-example of China. It’s circular logic: China is a bourgeois dictatorship — how are we supposed to know whether this is possible? Well, according to our theory of revisionism, that cultural revolution is necessary to counteract the immanent embourgeoisifying processes which occur under socialism, which manifests itself in the ideological line struggle within the party apparatus, it is definitely possible. How do we know that this is true? How has this theory been validated? Well . . . China is capitalist now, isn’t it? That’s not to say that the MLM conception of revisionism is irredeemably false in every aspect, but that instead it has become overgeneralized to situations where it is genuinely inapplicable.

The fact that there has been no rupture, that the PRC which existed in the 1950s still exists today, alone should suggest that the PRC is a dictatorship of the proletariat.

But then again, the USSR was also proletarian dictatorship — but it was overthrown due to the prevalence of bourgeois forces which enjoyed a new social basis following Gorbachev’s reforms, paving the way for an unrestrained, total capitalist restoration. So there’s a new problem here: what if market reform has taken on a momentum that the CPC can’t control? Are they really ‘riding on the back of a dragon’ (as I heard someone describe them), or do they have a handle of the situation? Are they in a position where they can continue refining and enriching the basis for advanced socialism, enough to transition to it by 2049?

This brings us to the next question.