Introduction

We here at Negate! are, in a word or two, supremely iconoclastic. That is to say, we have no gods, saints, preachers, mystics, holy texts, et cetera, and we are very invested in seeing the demolition and deposition of all such childish things. We do not believe in ghosts, banshees, spectres, the ontological will–or, inasmuch as any of this ought relate to politics. I cannot truthfully speak for my colleagues’ personal interiorities; being oppressed creatures, they may sigh in some certain fashion or another, and in some cases that sigh may take the form of God.

Alas, cruel reality sheds light through the window, and one day we must take up the working assumption that the saints we hang up there are simply icons, and there is nothing holy in the depictions strung above.

This is because our materialism is negative. We do not take capital for its poltergeists, but for its working mechanism; we do not create a teleology of the present from a future position, but develop our understandings with the living doctrine of our time. We are abolitionists.

Positive materialism, however, is presented with a problem here: for any abstraction they deem worthy of use, ‘reification’ and ‘fetishism’ is essentially the same thing.

‘Reification’ being the process by which a real thing is articulated as an abstract concept; ‘fetishism’ being the process by which the thing is treated as that concept. Please defer to our good friend Plato about how this essentially means all instances of that thing descend from the One True Thing (to rule them all, and in the Textwall bind them).

When a positive materialist concocts an abstraction, the materialist must then have it all make sense in an academic stratum; to codify it, in the Glorious History of Ideas. This, in turn, is then strung, through precedent, peer review, into a ‘scientific socialism’ that, over time, comes to address only the reified abstractions.

Once this grotesque sophistry has been finalised and put to paper, we may now instantly regard the form itself, and have a bunch of dead academics do all the heavy-lifting of fetishism for us.

This Deviance is presented to the Sensitive Communist Youth as real thinking, real science; that the perverted mystic, in the guise of intelligentsia, actually understands the fetish object better than the philistines.

No more does this confound the positive materialist than the state. These people profess to have read Marx (who readily and bluntly addresses the state as a mere idea), and then play with the idea itself in lieu of the other ideas behind it; addressing the other ideas, as Lenin did, makes a precarious approach toward the real world.

One might possess a working state theory, hidden in the background, communicating through the Ley Line of History, but at some point the abstraction turns to air when discussing it. In any case, because the liberal ontology presents its state as something equivalent to God, and yet we are told Communism is stateless, so the defeat of God becomes a battle, not his passive dismissal by modernity; we may find workarounds to the ‘state’ monad, and its attendant noumena, but we tie ourselves into knots when we come back to Karl Marx, that hideous Prussian oaf, who defeated both.

We here at Negate! do not consider the state-category useless for analyses. But we refuse to treat it as anything but its appearance.

This is not so for some people!

Enter the lauded Cosmonaut Magazine. I have long been infatuated with this particular Church, but their sermon drones on to the point of boredom, no matter how much money they put on offer. I will tell you how I have quite literally prostituted myself in dire financial straits; but I have never, as of yet, debased myself so far as to submit an article to Cosmonaut in pursuit of money.

Beneath the ‘Neo-Kautskyist’ auspices of the Notorious Donny P (the American Left’s very own pícaro), this magazine has yet again assailed our senses with a new article: Toward a Marxist State Theory of the Socialist Market Economy, by Theryn D. Arnold (a candidate PhD in Geography; we wish our mystic well in this regard). You can read it on Cosmonaut here.

Father Arnold seems an affable enough chap. But make no mistake, he is a priest, a mystic! This particular Smart Cookie, successfully gaslit into the Church of the Position by the self-selecting myopia of the Sensitive Communist Youth, now provides his analysis of China’s ‘socialist market economy’; and alike the enlightened centrist, he implores that we move beyond our present, banal understandings of China as ‘capitalist’ or ‘AES’, and move forward, into his own blinding light! His critique of the theory involved is necessarily idealist, and is based on dialogue surrounding the left, and the correction of some of China’s ‘critics’ and ‘supporters’.

Now it is apparent that China’s ostensible ‘socialism’ is in fact not a mystical property passed down through the Tao Te Ching and Confucius, nor some tautological claim about the collectivism of rice farming, we attempt to understand it again. This lies, however, in the ideas, states, princes; never the social relations!

To our shock and horror, the priests, their churches demolished by Xi Jinping’s gelatinous fist, now turn, in trembling awe, to lay the founding stones of another.

We must not let up! We must not hesitate! Peoples across the world have, in that noble Jacobin tradition, littered history with the corpses of priests and preachers. So let us continue, rifles held forward, in the spirit of the Bolsheviks, Catalans, Red Guards, and all the rest of those who, with a noble and terrible sense of duty, took it in their hands to smash every church and temple they could find.

I

The Idealist Conceit

This response will be cut into three parts: critique of Father Arnold’s idealist dialectical framing, addressing the vagaries of his criteria, and the inadequacy of his resolution.

I would wager any one of these is enough to reject the premises of his gospel outright.

Let’s start with the first.

Father Arnold, as an academic, is prolific in the merchandise of ideas. The entire premise of Cosmonaut is the development of a scientific socialist space; one that is intelligent, academic in tone, with citations, reasoned critique, et cetera.

The article in question is a ‘critique’ of the discourse surrounding Chinese political economy. It is (allegedly) scientific, intelligent, academic indeed. Father Arnold, furthermore, suggests his state theory on China is a Marxist one. This is a bold assertion! If this is the case, then he will have provided a materialist critique.

Let us review his case then.

Father Arnold tells us that there are two dominant Marxist stances on China’s political economy: the ‘campists’ (who uphold China as socialist) and the ‘state-capitalist critics’ (who do not). He sees both as substantial positions in this day and age, but they are products of the same error; ‘mirror images’, so he claims. Both get something right, but it is this error, this single error of thought, makes both distinct from the real truth. If this is rectified, the two outlooks can be synthesised into a truly Marxist state theory.

We must assume that Fichte is the principal saint of Father Arnold’s parish.

Father Arnold first paints us a picture of the ‘socialist market economy’ as it emerged in the eighties. This, which Father Arnold assures us did not emerge from a theoretical blueprint (as opposed, presumably, to those famed economies which were simply wished into existence by a theoretical blueprint), is distinct from ‘market socialism’:

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. 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.

What Father Arnold is saying here is effectively that the egg comes before the chicken; that the SME is distinct from the market socialism we know, because it is about a market deriving its Socialism Particles from existing state and party control, as opposed to the persistence of market mechanisms under socialist property relations. Here, socialist property relations refers to ‘worker ownership of the means of production’; co-ops, people owning their otherwise marketised workplaces.

What’s interesting is the cases invoked for ‘market socialism’; in lieu of existing examples of market socialism in practice, Father Arnold angles for the theories of Pranab Bardhan and John E. Romer, or those of David Schweickart.

All of the models proposed by these people do invoke the traditions of past market socialist experiments; Schweickart proposes a model in common “with Yugoslav socialism, with Japanese capitalism and with Mondragon [a collective in the Basque region of Spain that began under Franco’s regime] cooperativism” (Schweickart 1992, p. 18). The resulting proposal, as the Sensitive Communist Youth will probably intuit, resembles something rather fascist.

A problem with all proposals cited is that none of them have ever existed in fully-fledged practice, as China’s ‘SME’ has, and yet Father Arnold uses them as his comparison here; certainly, one could take the case of Yugoslavia’s ‘socialist self-management’, a system that actually existed (with similarities and differences to China’s own situation, albeit warped by scale), that can be measured via its outcomes, but Father Arnold at present seems deliberately unconcerned with the real world. He does sort of mention Yugoslavia, and other market socialist experiments, but as scarcely more than a footnote, much later in the article; as with all priests, heaven remains more important than Earth.

In any case, to take his claim seriously, Father Arnold’s statement here is that the ‘socialist market economy’ is not a normative-institutional project at its foundations. But China’s political economy, he wagers, requires a structural framing, not a normative one; i.e., one that does not simply address the premises of Chinese party ownership as articulated, but its existence as contextualised by the way all the systems link together.

In effect, what Father Arnold is telling us is: you cannot understand China simply as a party-state, but as a party-state with a state-directed market economy.

Fucking groundbreaking. Take the salt from your tears of joy, and shape it to a medal for Father Arnold.

The ‘campist’ position, Father Arnold astutely observes, is largely contextualised by understanding China on its normative claims: that because “the party-state owns strategic sectors, directs industrial policy, and declares socialist goals”, it is, in fact, socialist. This, says Father Arnold, cannot possibly be a full analysis. Praising the position for its ‘virtue’ in ‘taking the socialist question seriously’, he still nevertheless says it fails to take account for how the Chinese state could possess an operation independent of Party intent.

Of course, the ‘state-capitalist’ position must invert this error, so says Father Arnold:

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.

You read that correctly, friends. This ‘state-capitalist’ position permits the profanity of identifying capitalism with the presence of capitalism, and thus concluding socialism cannot be in evidence. As good Hegelians, we could never accept this.

Now, let’s give Father Arnold a chance to explain himself. According to him, this position adopts the following stance:

China is simply capitalist, the CPC is a ruling class faction, and the SME is an ideological fig leaf.

To start with, the argument attacked here is one that proposes China as simply capitalist, with the CPC as a ruling class faction that seems to deliberately offer the SME as an ‘ideological fig leaf’ and no more.

One of the sources provided for this understanding–David Camfield’s Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left–curiously resists this sort of scrutiny, because it doesn’t actually propose the SME as the initial exponent of Chinese capitalism. Rather, it claims China has never been transitioning to communism at all:

Without question, though, in spite of what CCP leaders have maintained, China has never been in transition to communism. The Chinese Revolution ended semi-colonial domination and unified almost all of the territory of the former Qing Empire under CCP rule. It established a one-party state that implemented social reforms and industrialized and modernized the country. This laid the basis for the extraordinary development of productive forces that has happened since the late 1970s, which has given China’s rulers great global influence. These are major changes in social arrangements. However, none of them have involved direct producers themselves taking charge of society and beginning to democratically plan production to meet their needs. None have eroded class exploitation and state power.

This is important, because it shows that Camfield’s analysis begins not at the SME, but at the social relations upon which the development of productive forces occurred. His criteria for ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ is lacking (the book itself is kind of dogshit all the way through), but contra Father Arnold, he does in fact have a criteria for socialism.

Such digs at the heart of the question; one that Father Arnold expertly dodges at every opportunity. At the end of the day, a lot of ‘state-capitalist’ critiques of China’s SME are not about the SME at all. Rather, they are about the conditions laid before the SME; they address in real terms the procedures behind its emergence, and use those to diagnose a socialist character or lack thereof.

This does not necessarily lead to an analysis of Chinese political economy that is necessarily over-fixated on the past and not the present; nor does it preclude the notion that some people in the CPC may well have been working toward something they deemed socialist. It simply suggests that any ‘socialism’ in evidence cannot be seen as a quantity of economic phenomena, but an outcome of base-level social relations around which the state must necessarily take form.

Or, in other words, it simply means we do not need to belabour ourselves with justifications as to why China isn’t socialist to any extent we may justify any other state; its politics may be unique, its economic policy may be unique, its state structure may be unique, but yes, the CPC is a boutgeois, ruling class faction, and the ‘SME’ does not need to exist principally as ‘an ideological fig leaf’ but simply as the means of its own perpetuation.

We do not need to argue on any basis here other than the CPC’s own words and deeds, where Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents have already rationalised the bourgeoisie’s presence in the party as an integral part of the party-state.

This will not do for Father Arnold! When China tells us: “we would like the bourgeoisie to help us manage our market society”, and then indeed, has the bourgeoisie manage its market society, this cannot be simply capitalist! There must be something else, something hidden, something within which we can discern a truer character, beyond the work of any prior theorist.

And if we go further beyond; to say, as many have said, that China did not in fact build a socialist economy at all to begin with, as Father Arnold’s own sources for the critiqued position explicitly comment, then we are in fact left with this critique of air, this shadow-boxing of people who do not entertain the very premises upon which Father Arnold argues.

Here, we have an issue far beyond the notion of the present-day market economy, which is simply that any justification of a modern-day Chinese socialism must emerge from the premises of a previous Chinese socialism. For a working ‘state theory’, this would require a fundamental addressing of what came before, of the function of the Chinese revolution. It would require a comprehensive addressing of several priors.

Father Arnold does not make clear his position on previous ‘Chinese socialism’, and as such he cannot actually address the critiques he himself claims to be in the process of surpassing. He would do much better if he addressed a Maoist critique–one that takes Mao’s China as authentically building socialism, and later developments as rightist deviations toward a capitalist road–but this is a framing he never addresses. Instead, he takes two irreconcilable positions, and attempts to find a common ground for them, to synthesise them into something workable.

This, for what it’s worth, is entirely possible in the world of pure thought. It is not really possible in the programme of workable socialist politics, which demands a coherent position. In this department, Father Arnold’s recommended liturgy is particularly unsatisfactory (something to be elaborated on in Part III).

Father Arnold critiques the ‘state-capitalist position’ as it relates to an understanding the SME as a perversion of socialist character, but does not address the state capitalist position that understands the SME as an elaboration of an already capitalist character. This is ultimately the framing used by the ‘state-capitalist critic’ Camfield, who does not use ‘socialism’ as a category in and of itself, but instead attempts to frame social developments as occurring on top of prior social developments; who dismisses the ‘SME’ not out of incuriosity for its ‘socialist’ character, but on an assumption that the prior social relations are more important for the historical development toward communism, which, assuming communism remains the goal, socialism itself must find its evidence within.

And I do not agree with the specifics of Camfield’s framing; but this is because I have read and internalised the thesis proposed on its own terms, as relates to a programmatic communist advocacy of praxis. I disagree with his praxis, I disagree with his understanding of communism as a politics to be adopted and not a real force to be harnessed, but I can address these on their own terms, because they are about practice.

By divorcing himself from this historical paradigm, ostensibly to provide lucidity toward the SME as it exists, Father Arnold instead is incapable of addressing the SME on anything other than its intellectual priors; on predicating his understanding on bourgeois economics to elaborate a socialist character.

For this, he invokes the theology of a particular Bishophric: Copenhagen Business School. His Excellency Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, alongside Koen Rutten (scraped out of a Dutch phalanstery), delivers a critical assessment of China’s economic development, in a chapter largely about the earlier history of China’s economic ‘modernisation’.

But if we are to be building a ‘Marxist’ state theory (a task Cosmonaut might deem Promethean, but is in fact Sisyphean), we cannot simply adopt bourgeois priors with regards to the history and hope we still arrive at an approximation of the Truth, as far as it may exist for our purposes. That’s not science! That’s religion! Introducing more sources might address this prima facie, but all you’re really doing is belabouring the theology.

At the end of the day, ideas are merely ideas; analyses, merely analyses. For Father Arnold, the work of ‘campist’ proponents, and their ‘state-capitalist’ critics, must be reconciled on the terms they provide as relate to the subject alone, and as such strips both down to principles divorced from what is actually being argued. This must necessarily emerge from a byzantine web spun by the positive bourgeois intelligentsia, not a continuation of a Marxist doctrine. Even in his attempts to provide nuance with a tertiary ‘developmentalist’ analysis, he only belabours the process more, makes its ridicule clear.

Father Arnold has addressed nothing, proposed nothing, critiqued nothing, and provided nothing in the way of solutions. What he has done is produced a Textwall; a manifestly useless Textwall, which reads with nuance, but delivers us absolutely nothing of substance as relates to the pure ideas reduced out of practical programmes: the ‘campists’ for their support of China, the ‘state-capitalist critics’ for their opposition, and for Father Arnold a mere essay with nothing to offer.

Let Father Arnold speak as he may. We, personally, prefer Marx:

All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

Theses on Feuerbach, VIII

II

In Search of Socialism

When addressing a ‘socialist’ form of production (or perhaps, productive character), as positive Marxists are wont to do, we are left with the necessary task of suggesting criteria under which a society can be deemed socialist in character.

For ‘socialist’ criteria, the distinction at first appears:

1. ‘Socialism’ as a degree of government intervention in the economy, through welfare spending, state regulation of business, and taxation policy.
2. ‘Socialism’ as a measurable relation within society.

The former is a purely quantitative assessment that treats socialism as an essence gradually fulfilled; such vulgarity is thankfully absent from even Father Arnold’s sermon.

The latter itself must, however, qualify for socialism; at its most basic, the “worker ownership of the means of production”, or through the control of the economy by something ultimately beheld to the workers; a party, a state machinery, et cetera.

Of course, as taught, positive Marxists are well aware that dialectical contradictions may produce certain oddities within society; that there may be a big old conflict happening between parts of the state with socialist character and parts of the state without socialist character. This sort of nonsense is a stone’s throw from Bernsteinism, but it’s frustratingly common!

Nevertheless, Father Arnold, here, is somewhat confused, because he does not actually explain what socialism is, to him. Faced with the need to, at some level, defend some socialist element or another within China, he does not actually define what socialism is to him. Instead, he critiques given analyses on their ability to comprehend socialist character in China; completely refusing to elaborate on how socialist character in China ought be comprehended.

Take how he addresses the ‘campist’ argument:

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.

Interestingly, the fact that the CPC’s own commitment to ‘socialism’ might be in jeopardy is never even brought up. This framing is important, because Father Arnold invites us to regard the CPC as a centripetal force posed to work against the centrifugal force of the state’s capital accumulation; that the CPC itself, with its almost metaphysical intent, is a force poised to work toward ‘socialism’. As such, the question becomes the CPC’s agency over the state structure, and the bubbling contradiction therein.

This is the fetishism to which positive Marxism must necessarily take itself; if nature is built on dialectical contradiction, there must be a contradictory element between competing forms. Such, we abstract our analysis to heaven, where we simply have ‘the Party’ (God), and ‘the State’ (the Demiurge), and treat the party and the state as contradictory to each other, unbothered by the affairs of Earth.

As I’ve already discussed, we do not need to ask on our own terms whether the CPC itself is a bourgeois class organ; they have told us this themselves, and now pursue a path in beautiful, class-collaborationist lockstep with classical fascism–‘harmonious’ development.

Of course, addressing the stated intent of the CPC is not, in and of itself, part of Father Arnold’s sermon here. His job is to simply assume the existence of a ‘socialism’ manifest in the CPC, and its intent, and work from there.

He gives us a very elementary dressing-down of why market relations are contrary to ‘socialist development’:

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 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.

[…] What [the Campists] 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. […]

Here, is perhaps the sharper point of Father Arnold’s sermon; his stance here is from an essay by Bertell Ollman, titled Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies.

Ollman provides a thoroughly humanist account of market economies, and it is actually rather dogshit; but the concern here that Father Arnold raises is valid, in a sense. At the end of the day, his take is:

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.

This would answer why the apostate Ollman gave us this banger:

The real choice for these societies, therefore, would seem to be between a dictatorial form of savage capitalism, with socialist trimmings (China), and a progressive, egalitarian, anti-imperialist dictatorship, with different socialist trimmings, that is neither capitalist nor socialist (Cuba). If the political dictatorship is not too severe, I favor the latter option, if only because social and material benefits are shared more equally under such regimes, other problems associated with the market are either missing or minimal, and the anti-imperialist foreign policy that these regimes generally follow creates difficulties for the world-wide rule of capital.

Ollman’s critique necessarily fails to address the state, and as such only makes moralistic claims manifestly useless for materialist critique. But Father Arnold does not see this; he sees a puzzle, incompleted. He sees the humanist allegation against capital as something to be put into a bigger picture. Here, we finally see what Father Arnold is trying to do:

1. The ‘campists’ don’t get market relations.
2. His particular selected ‘state-capitalist’ critics aren’t taking into account the Chinese state.
3. As such, we need to understand the Chinese state, in a new, more perfect way, with socialism as some hidden secret buried in the discourse.

The notion that illusions of ‘socialism’ needn’t factor in whatsoever is completely absent. Father Arnold discusses at length the ‘different capacities’ of China’s bourgeois institutions, but is hamstrung by his own idealism into failing to introduce falsifiable criteria. This is because Father Arnold, being a prevaricating bloviator, is terrified of being proven wrong. He honestly seems to believe that by praising people for addressing “the socialist question” correctly, he absolves himself of the need to address it himself.

‘Socialism’, for Father Arnold, is a mystery. It is something that may well forsake itself in the path of the hand of God.

This, again, is a quintessential property of his idealism; that there is actual, substantive, corporeal Truth being assembled through some discursive science or another, that he needs to take apart and address, through his own sermon. He can select the rational truth in all of those he critiques, but only so long as he builds his work on people, alike His Excellency Brødsgaard, who do not really concern themselves with justifying a ‘socialism’.

For Brødsgaard, the task is a rationalisation of Chinese political economy; he uses socialism as a simple hedging character to polarise against markets, because Brødsgaard does not discuss Marxism as the perspective by which things are measured. His analysis is not Marxist.

Father Arnold, summoning the folk wisdom of his elders, demands we find a socialism in evidence in claims made by self-professed socialists, all left to be found in the gospel of someone completely unconcerned with the premises of “socialism in evidence”. His own pyramid of ideas refuses to stand on its own grounds.

In the world of Father Arnold, ‘socialism’ may well not be a measurable quality at all. Alike Deng Xiaoping, he sees it as only a black or white cat to be pursued without regard for a character of its own, which is fundamentally unknowable as ordered by his own premises. But unlike Deng, his cat doesn’t even catch mice!

III

What Is To be Done?

So far, Father Arnold has:

1. Established an idealist framing.
2. Refused to introduce falsifiable criteria into his own framing.

His supposedly ‘Marxist’ state theory is thus elaborated:

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.

Let’s break this down:

1. The SME is not a neutral socialist instrument, but neither ‘capitalist restoration’ (again, this shadowboxing of the Maoists while refusing to address the arguments he himself presents).
2. The ‘socialist state-form’ (the heavenly, perfectly socialist state, as distinct from the state itself) is in tension with capitalist market relations.
3. Socialism, therefore, is not ‘decorative’, but a ‘real institutional constraint on market relations’.
4. The ‘socialist’ party-state has to deal with the consequences of a market economy if it wants to stay socialist.

Has this guy ever fucking heard of dirigisme? His state theory is predicated upon the fundamental understanding that state direction of markets is inherently socialist; the state is thus fetishised to a thing atop its own existence, a socialist state form which we must assume in theory, but never search for in practical evidence. Let us, again, see the state-form for Father Arnold:

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.

Utterly bonkers. I re-iterate: Father Arnold honestly expects us to believe that there is socialism in evidence through the mere structural overcoming of Humanism; that the ‘state-form’, socialist only because it has been described as such, has now leapt onto the stage of history, and can finally be graciously addressed by this sermon.

This is completely fucking ridiculous. I am fucking insulted on behalf of Thinking Humanity that this got published. My tone in response to this nonsense is necessarily ridiculing, because I refuse to wrestle with this swine in its own mud.

By selecting his own critics to critique, and never, ever addressing even one the herd of elephants in the room–again, refusing to concretely define his socialist state form, which we cannot understand through anything but air–Father Arnold creates his own, mystical world of an unknowable epsitemology, where all is perfect and God is real.

When, from his gorgeous, heavenly perch, this snake-oil salesman finally deigns to offer us filthy meat-people a response, he does so through implications (never diagnoses of action; the task of praxis is left to those interpreting Father Arnold’s new translation of the KJV Bible), and they are twofold.

As relates to China:

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 idea here is that if we allow ourselves to settle China’s class-character, to essentialise it for a class programme, we are somehow assailing its socialist state-soul. Our geopolitics therefore cannot be aligned around the interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie, as they readily advance to make deals with formerly hostile powers in the wake of a self-destructive Trumpism; we cannot see the hand of Chinese markets moving to imperialise Africa, we cannot oppose China, which only really means ‘the Chinese bourgeoisie’, because Mao planted a seed of socialism in their source code, a hidden Textwall, sent by God.

Everywhere, the international collusion of the bourgoisie (who are by far better internationalists than any proletarian movement at present) moves to make itself transparently obvious to all those of us with eyes. We cannot trust our eyes, says Father Arnold. They can’t detect the Socialism Particles! We need his dialectical Geiger counter!

And as relates to markets in general:

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.

As such, when us poor little socialists finally get our turn in the sun, says Father Arnold, what China shows us is that actually we need to remember the humanist account as relates to structuralist economies; that actually, Ollman’s critique is haunting us like some spooky fucking banshee we need to be terrified of.

This must be understood, one assumes, in the context of China, where the socialism-soul has made itself evident in pure thought, and therefore can teach us things our eyes and ears cannot. We must build more theories! More understanding! More positions. Advance, advance, advance, towards a theory. Throw yourself on the bayonets of contradiction, in this brilliant world of purest thought!

Do you not see how fucking stupid this is? The basis for our conditional solidarity with the Chinese bourgeoisie must also inform our understanding of markets; not the markets themselves. I feel as if this bit was just slapped on to pad out time and fill space, something I do with my polemic diatribes but do not pretend is anything else.

In Father Arnold’s world, he does not fetishise socialism, because socialism does not exist; as a proselytising priest, he is indeed in the business of robbing us poor natives of our fetish objects. No, as he rolls through our village on a tide of colonial typhoid fever, he exclaims: the real Truth is in no object at all! We must all subordinate ourselves to a higher power, one we cannot, will not ever know!

Look to the skies, o’ children of Christ, the LORD, he says. Find freedom in your ignorance.

The only answer to this is ridicule.

Conclusion

I do not dislike Father Arnold. I do not even dislike the priests of Cosmonaut. I’m too kind-hearted; I love my fellow human beings too much. And anyone in the business of trying to figure out a Communism has their heart in the right place.

But the concern here is positive Marxism. Cosmonaut understands the present intelligentsia is bourgeois, but works towards its development rather than its abolition; the Notorious Donny P himself in a rife contradiction with his task of abolishing civil society and his task of seeming like a Very Clever Boy within it.

And these guys are all Very Clever Boys. They’ve got a handful of Very Clever Girls as well. But Cosmonaut, as it stands, is a simple decorative ornament on the wall of positive Marxism; there is no negation, no realisation of a Communist principle. It remains, as always, a scientific socialism; one that, if it proves itself of any use at all, will only be useful to the bourgeoisie, to bourgeois science. The idea that science itself is a social property, that can be measured by its utility to society, passes over their heads.

But when they do something as disgustingly Deviant as this sermon, when they demand we are deaf to the evidence of our ears, and blind to the evidence of our eyes; when they, in turn, provide something so manifestly un-scientific even by the programme of positive academia, they produce a perversion too ridiculous to even attempt addressing on its own term.

We ought not gaslight ourselves into pretending this practice deserves respect. We must hold true to the tradition of ridicule, of telling these people just how stupid they are being, how they use their impressive intellects to build nothing more than religious sermons, then we never, ever stand a chance of having them realise that, in their heart of hearts, they ought be destroying temples, not building new ones.

As Communists, our goal is destruction, not production; destruction of civil society, of class, of the social division of labour that demands rigid strata systems between physical and mental labour in the first place.

You cannot run from the society you live in, Father Arnold. Tear off those robes and put on a decent fucking outfit, and throw your bible on a bonfire.

Come with us, into the real world.