Invent the Future

Hawks dressed as doves: the Guardian’s case for a harder line on China

In the following article, written for the Morning Star, our co-editor Carlos Martinez takes apart a recent Guardian column by Simon Tisdall whose complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China but that it has not been aggressive enough.

Carlos works through the column point by point: the claim of Western “debilitating fatalism” towards a country already facing a tariff war, semiconductor export bans, AUKUS, the Quad, RIMPAC and a chain of US bases from Japan to Australia; Tisdall’s unfortunate choice of Wales as an analogy for language rights; the assertion of “brutal re-education camps” offered without evidence, source or argument, resting on the discredited work of Adrian Zenz and the arms-industry-funded ASPI; and the verdict that Xi is an “unelected autocrat”, delivered without reference to the five levels of People’s Congresses, the consultative apparatus that precedes their votes, or the satisfaction ratings that no Western government has approached in living memory.

The article’s conclusion is that this is liberal hawkishness in its purest form – deploring Trump in one paragraph and demanding his policy in the next – and that it is more dangerous than the honest belligerence of the right, because it recruits people of genuine conscience to a war they would otherwise oppose.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

Simon Tisdall’s latest column in the Guardian is a remarkable document. Its complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China, but that it has not been aggressive enough.

“A debilitating fatalism has taken hold in the west about China’s behaviour”, Tisdall writes. It is “as though Xi’s China is now seen as simply too big, too economically powerful and too militarily threatening to influence, let alone contain or control”. Britain, “culpably silent on human rights”, has failed to articulate a coherent China policy.

Sunlight against the blockade: China and Cuba’s solar revolution

China has delivered a second consignment of 5,000 photovoltaic systems to Cuba, destined for rural communities, health centres, day nurseries and bank branches – the latest instalment in what has become one of the fastest energy transitions anywhere in the world. With Chinese equipment, finance and technical support, Cuba has installed around 1,000 MW of new solar capacity in two years, with 92 medium-sized parks due for completion by 2028, while Chinese solar exports to the island have risen from $3 million to $117 million in as many years. All of this is taking place against a grid pushed towards collapse by Washington’s energy siege, with available capacity at times barely a third of peak demand.

The following article by Carlos Martinez sets out why this amounts to considerably more than an infrastructure project: oil tankers can be intercepted, suppliers threatened and banks sanctioned, but sunlight cannot be blockaded.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

China has delivered a second consignment of 5,000 photovoltaic systems to Cuba, destined for rural communities, health centres, day nurseries and bank branches. Receiving them, President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Cuba “deeply appreciates this gesture by the Chinese people and government, which adds to the efforts Cuba is making to change its energy mix, amid the genocidal blockade”.

The donation is a small part of what has become one of the fastest energy transitions anywhere in the world. Over the past two years, with Chinese equipment, financing and technical support, Cuba has installed around 1,000 MW of new photovoltaic capacity. This forms the first half of a programme to construct 92 medium-sized parks, each generating approximately 21.8 MW, with a combined capacity approaching 2,000 MW by 2028. Alongside this credit-financed programme, China is donating a further 120 MW through a network of smaller parks. Solar supplied roughly 10 percent of Cuba’s electricity over the course of 2025; during daylight hours its contribution is now considerably higher, at times approaching half of national generation around midday.

The scale of this expanding cooperation can be read in the trade figures. Chinese exports of solar equipment to Cuba came to $117 million in 2025, against just $3 million two years earlier. Havana furthermore has scrapped tariffs on photovoltaic systems, solar water heaters, wind turbines, biodigesters and renewable-powered air conditioning.

What was so special about Fidel Castro?

Fidel Castro was born on 13 August 1926. On the centenary of his birth, Carlos Martinez asks: what was actually so special about Fidel? Not the myth, but what he concretely did and understood that so few others did.

This video looks at four aspects: the unswerving revolutionary, who saw the possibility of overthrowing a US puppet dictatorship, defeated a CIA invasion in 72 hours, and then refused to follow Gorbachev when 85 percent of Cuba’s trade vanished overnight. The principled and undogmatic Marxist, who insisted that Marxism could not be conceived of as a church with its Rome and its Pope, who backed Allende’s peaceful road and the Bolivarian governments alike, and whose 1993 assessment of Chinese socialism put him decades ahead of most of the Western left. The consummate internationalist, who sent 375,000 troops to help defeat apartheid South Africa in Angola and took nothing in return, and whose “army of white coats” has now put more than 600,000 Cuban health workers into 165 countries. And the man of the people – the literacy campaign, the confrontation with racism, the early warning at Rio in 1992.

Then the video turns to why this centenary matters so urgently. Cuba is facing the gravest threat since 1959: a Trump administration reportedly working to bring the government down by the end of the year, a fuel blockade that has produced six national grid collapses in 2026 alone, a reported plan for a naval blockade, and an assault on the Cuban medical missions. Honouring Fidel means giving Cuba our firm solidarity.

Sources and further reading:

To honour Fidel Castro means to continue his work of fighting imperialism and building socialism

Fidel Castro on Chinese socialism (1993) – the full text of the remarks quoted in this video

Cuba: siege socialism or barbarism – earlier video

Cuba Solidarity Campaign

Cuba is not a failed state – it is a besieged state (Morning Star)

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

This Thursday, 13 August, Fidel Castro would have been a hundred years old. Cuba has designated this the Year of the Centenary of the Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, and there are events taking place all over the world to mark the event.

So, what was so special about Fidel? What, concretely, did he do and understand that so few others did?

The question matters particularly now, when Cuba faces its gravest threat since 1959.

When Engels stood at Marx’s graveside in Highgate Cemetery in 1883, he said that Marx was “before all else a revolutionist”, whose real mission in life was to contribute to the overthrow of capitalist society and to the liberation of the modern proletariat. And that description fits Fidel just about as well as it has ever fitted anybody.

What he attempted was extraordinary. In the 1950s, Cuba was ninety miles from the United States — economically dominated by it, politically supervised by it, culturally saturated by it, and ruled by Washington’s man, Fulgencio Batista. This was the height of McCarthyism. There was no model of revolution to copy. There was no collapsing empire leaving a power vacuum, no Red Army arriving over the border.

Cuba’s existing communist party, the Popular Socialist Party, was a serious organisation with real roots in the working class, but it didn’t believe that the moment had come. Its leader, Blas Roca, was honest about this afterwards. For a long time, he admitted, the party “failed to take any practical steps” towards armed struggle, because it assumed that the struggles it was leading would culminate in insurrection more or less spontaneously. Fidel recognised the potentially revolutionary situation and then did the practical work: preparing, training and assembling people who were prepared to fight.

Responding to left criticisms of China’s foreign policy

In this discussion with Radhika Desai, Carlos Martinez confronts the charge, common even on parts of the left, that Beijing does far too little for Palestine, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

The conversation traces China’s foreign policy from the internationalism of Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, through its rapprochement with Washington and entry into the world economy, to its pursuit of a Global Community of Shared Future.

Transcript

Radhika Desai: Hello, viewers and listeners. Welcome to the Geopolitical Economy interview, a series in which I speak with prominent intellectuals, scholars, politicians, journalists, activists and public figures to illuminate the fast-changing political economy and geopolitical economy of our times.

I’m Radhika Desai and you’re watching Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist. Today’s topic is China’s foreign policy towards the United States and the West on the one hand, and the oppressed — and I should say oppressed and embattled — nations such as Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran on the other, in the broader context of rising multipolarity. How should the left make sense of it, particularly given that sections of the left have criticised China for not doing enough for precisely these countries?

I can think of few people better qualified to address this question than Carlos Martinez, who joins me today. Welcome, Carlos.

Carlos Martinez: Hi, Radhika. Lovely to see you. Good to be with you.

Radhika Desai: It’s really great to have you today, Carlos. Let me tell our audience that you are an independent scholar and researcher, co-editor of the increasingly important and influential Friends of Socialist China website, and author and editor of many books on China and on socialism — including the one on China, which is called The East Is Still Red, and the wonderfully titled book on the demise of the USSR, The End of the Beginning. You meant, of course, that this was just the end of the beginning of world socialism.

Carlos, can you begin by addressing the criticisms of China’s foreign policy that are quite widespread in some sections of the left — in a sort of overall, summary fashion — before we go on to investigate its particular aspects, and China’s foreign policy towards particular countries?

Carlos Martinez: Sure. I think there are a couple of broad strands of criticism of China’s foreign policy on the left. One of them is more or less hostile; one of them is more or less friendly and sympathetic. The hostile one is that China is an imperialist country, that it’s a state-capitalist country, that its companies pursue private profit as their central motive, and that China’s foreign policy reflects that. This is essentially the United States State Department position, adopted by parts of the left.

So there’s lots of talk about debt traps. There’s lots of talk about expansionism. There’s lots of talk about China being an imperialist power and engaging in inter-imperialist rivalry with the US, with the West. That’s the position of the Greek Communist Party. That’s the position you’ll typically find in Jacobin and other elements of what might be referred to as the compatible left. Then you’ve got a sort of sympathetic critique.

Radhika Desai: And sorry, just to clarify — compatible with what?

Carlos Martinez: Compatible with capitalism.

Radhika Desai: Continue, please.

Carlos Martinez: I mean, I’m painting in very broad strokes there, and perhaps being a little bit unfair, but we can get into that later if you want. And then there’s a sympathetic critique, which comes a lot of the time from people who are pretty close to us politically, who accept China’s socialist foundation, but who express a disappointment that China’s foreign policy isn’t good enough — that China’s not aggressive enough in pursuit of justice, that it’s not doing enough for oppressed nations, that it’s not doing enough for countries under attack.

And they compare it unfavourably with the Soviet Union in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. They compare it unfavourably with, for example, Cuba’s intervention in Southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. In terms of this first strand — that China is an imperialist country — I think we don’t need to dwell on it too much here. That’s quite an easy question to deal with, and it’s dealt with at some length in a chapter in a forthcoming book on China’s foreign policy that Keith Bennett and I have put together, and that you very kindly wrote an endorsement for. That should be out in August.

Who opened the border at Ceuta?

In late July, tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, and at least 72 died. Carlos Martinez asks who really opened the border – and why the resulting crisis fitted so neatly into a wider campaign to punish Spain for its independent stance on Palestine, Iran and China.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

On 30 and 31 July, something in the region of 60,000 Moroccans crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. At least 72 died on the Spanish side of the border, drowned in the Mediterranean or crushed in the attempt. Within days, the great majority had returned to Morocco, many of them voluntarily, on account of Ceuta having no work, food or shelter to offer them.

They were overwhelmingly young, poor and unemployed. “Everyone came because there is no work in Morocco”, one 24-year-old told the New York Times. They were not “invaders”; they were workers looking for work, and dozens of them died for it. They deserve our sympathy and our solidarity.

But this was no ordinary movement of people. Tens of thousands do not converge on one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders in a matter of hours by coincidence. The immediate spark was a flood of online messages falsely claiming that a Spanish Supreme Court ruling meant anyone reaching Ceuta by sea would receive papers and employment. The ruling said no such thing.

Besides, rumours alone do not open a militarised border. The decisive factor was the conduct of the Moroccan state. Its normally formidable border apparatus stopped functioning; the authorities failed to warn Madrid about the online mobilisation; and numerous accounts suggest that Moroccan officers actively encouraged people to cross. Indeed, Spanish intelligence has reportedly concluded that Rabat permitted and exploited the crossing.

There is a precedent. In 2021, Morocco relaxed its border controls and thousands entered Ceuta after Spain admitted Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front (Western Sahara’s liberation movement), for medical treatment. Rabat was using desperate people to punish Madrid over Western Sahara.

The provocation this time was very similar. On 20 July, just ten days before the crossing, Pedro Sánchez travelled to Algiers to announce a “new phase” in relations with Algeria, Morocco’s principal regional rival and the main supporter of the Sahrawi struggle for self-determination. Algeria is also Spain’s largest supplier of natural gas this year, giving the rapprochement considerable economic and strategic weight.

Rabat, then, had reasons of its own to open the border. But the resulting crisis fitted seamlessly into a wider campaign against Spain’s increasingly independent foreign policy.

Madrid recognised the Palestinian state in May 2024 and intervened in support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. It has described the destruction of Gaza as genocide, imposed an arms embargo, banned imports from illegal settlements and repeatedly called for European sanctions against Israel.

Spain also refused Washington the use of the jointly operated Rota and Morón bases for attacks on Iran, subsequently closing its airspace to US aircraft involved in a war it described as illegal. It was alone within NATO in rejecting Donald Trump’s demand for military spending to rise to 5 percent of GDP. And on China it has been almost alone in Europe in resisting the tariff war, opposing the EU’s duties on Chinese electric vehicles and treating Beijing as a partner rather than a threat. For a medium-sized member state, this is a remarkable degree of insubordination – and it has not gone unpunished.

Washington’s response has been explicit. Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain over its refusal to facilitate the attack on Iran. After the Ceuta crossing, he and JD Vance immediately presented the episode as an “invasion” caused by “weak and very liberal laws”, instructing the US right to turn the deaths into a domestic political weapon. Italy’s quasi-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni suspended Schengen arrangements with Spain and demanded its expulsion, regardless of the fact that Ceuta and Melilla are not part of the Schengen zone.

The Israeli response was also revealing. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, used the crisis to taunt Spain over its “colonial enclaves”. Pro-Israel commentators had already advocated a new Moroccan “Green March” into Ceuta and Melilla as a means of punishing Sánchez and strengthening an ally controlling the entrance to the Mediterranean. Such interventions demonstrate how neatly the resulting crisis aligned with the strategic interests of Israel and the United States.

Morocco has been drawn ever more deeply into that system of strategic interests. In December 2020, it normalised relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The price was US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over occupied Western Sahara, overturning decades of international consensus. Israel followed with its own recognition in 2023, while Israeli drones, air-defence systems and surveillance technology have become pillars of Morocco’s armed forces.

Washington has now begun applying pressure directly to the status of Ceuta and Melilla. In April, a US House appropriations committee described them as cities “under Spanish administration” but “located in Moroccan territory”. This was not the adoption of a new US policy, still less an outbreak of anti-colonial principle. The same administration recognises Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara and maintains its own colonial possession at Guantánamo Bay – not to mention a global empire of military bases, alliances and client states.

It is of course the case that Ceuta and Melilla are colonial enclaves, relics of the Iberian conquest of North Africa. Like the six counties of the north of Ireland, the Malvinas and the Chagos Islands, they are unfinished business that will eventually have to be settled. But the colonial question must not be reduced to an instrument for disciplining a government that has broken ranks over Palestine and Iran.

The external pressure, moreover, has a domestic twin. For two years the Spanish right has sought to bring the Sánchez government down by means other than the ballot box. A judiciary that the country’s transition to democracy left substantially intact – the same courts that pursued Catalonia’s elected leaders into prison and exile – has opened a cascade of investigations into the prime minister’s wife, his brother and his attorney general, on transparently political charges. The neo-fascist Vox party has made common cause with an international far right movement which cannot tolerate the kind of independent, mildly redistributive government that Sánchez represents. A “mass immigration crisis” is the perfect tool for presenting the government as weak, incompetent and incapable of protecting Spain’s borders.

Morocco has shamelessly exploited the poverty of its own people for its immediate geopolitical purposes, while the US, Israel and the European right are exploiting the resulting spectacle against Spain. None of them care about the lives of the young workers who died in the Mediterranean, nor about the thousands that have lost their lives in the wars the Sánchez government has stood up against.

Solidarity is not terrorism: the persecution of Fergie Chambers

US activist and philanthropist James ‘Fergie’ Chambers is being held in Spain, facing extradition to the United States for the ‘crime’ of funding humanitarian relief in Gaza. Carlos Martinez examines a coordinated offensive – from Fergie’s arrest to the proscription of Palestine Action and the anticommunist crackdown on both sides of the Atlantic – that seeks to recast solidarity as terrorism.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

On 10 July, US political activist and philanthropist James ‘Fergie’ Chambers was arrested by police while driving in Ibiza, Spain, with his family. He has been held without bail ever since, awaiting possible extradition to the United States on charges of “international money laundering” intended to provide “material support” to Hamas. If extradited, he could well face decades in prison.

Chambers is not the typical target of Washington’s counter-terrorism apparatus. Heir to the Cox Enterprises media and automotive empire, in 2023 he cut ties with his family, sold his stake for a reported $250 million, and set about giving much of it away to humanitarian and social causes.

Over the course of the last three years, Chambers has donated over a million dollars to humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, including a quarter of a million dollars to the Sameer Project, funding a bakery that turns out 3,600 free loaves a day, a desalination plant supplying 150,000 litres of clean water daily, and a free clinic in Jabalia treating up to 300 patients a day, with a further $100,000 for the mental-health care of orphaned children. The British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta calls him “a vital supporter for the provision of care for children wounded in the genocide”.

Closer to home, Chambers bankrolled the movement against Atlanta’s “Cop City” police mega-base, paid the bail and legal fees of jailed activists, and covered the costs of the direct-action group Palestine Action USA. This is the “material support” for which Washington now wants him locked away.

The indictment is sealed, but by the account of those who have seen it, it offers no evidence that a single cent reached any “terrorist organisation” – only that Chambers moved money from US banks to banks in Tunisia, where he lived since late 2023, and where he has invested in local businesses and even bought the Club Africain football club, one of the longest established and most popular in the north African country. It is the first time the US has sought to extradite anyone for supporting the Palestinian cause. Strip away the absurd vocabulary of counter-terrorism, and what remains is the story of a man being hunted across borders for the crime of solidarity.

A coordinated offensive

Chambers was seized on the very day US Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened ministers from more than 60 countries to confront what his administration now calls “transnational far-left terrorism” – with its counter-terror officials briefing that the entire left constitutes a single terrorist network. Days later the State Department published a hundred-page report, grandly titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, which recasts everyone from Black Lives Matter to the campus encampments against the Gaza genocide as fronts and “fifth columns” for Havana. And at home, Donald Trump reserves his ugliest language for the socialist left, calling communism a “cancer” to be “cut out” and resharing calls to deport New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani and other “hardcore communist bastards”.

All of this constitutes a single, coordinated offensive by the resurgent hard right – one that seeks to redefine dissent itself as terrorism, and solidarity as subversion.

Britain down the same road

Britain is moving down the same road. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 – the first time a protest group has ever been so designated. Membership or support is now a criminal offence, and hundreds of people have been arrested for nothing more than peacefully holding a placard, in what the United Nations’ own human-rights chief called a “disturbing” misuse of counter-terrorism powers.

This July the government widened the net further, proscribing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an arm of a sovereign state. Meanwhile in April, Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition – organisers of the largest demonstrations Britain has seen in a generation – were convicted of breaching police conditions on a march, in what Jeremy Corbyn described as a “dark day for civil liberties”.

The test for Spain

It is against this backdrop that Spain’s position becomes so fraught. The government of Pedro Sánchez has done more than any other in Western Europe to resist this tide: not only recognising the state of Palestine but passing emergency measures against the Gaza genocide, and refusing to let Washington use Spanish soil to attack Iran.

However, the decision on Fergie Chambers will not rest with Sánchez, or the executive branch alone. It rests first with the Audiencia Nacional (high court) – and the Spanish judiciary is one institution the country’s sometimes fraught and partial transition to democracy left largely untouched. The same courts that will weigh Chambers’s fate are those that hounded Catalonia’s elected government into prison and exile for daring to hold an independence referendum. This is lawfare with a long pedigree – indeed Sánchez himself and members of his family are in the sights of just the same judicial and security establishment, as is former social democratic prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

The court has 40 days to rule. If it refuses the extradition, the matter ends there; if it consents, the final decision passes to the Council of Ministers – to the government itself. Should it reach that point, the communists and the other left and progressive forces on whose votes the Sánchez government depends for its survival would surely be right to make their continued support conditional on refusing to hand Chambers over. For Sánchez the logic ought to be fairly plain: a government that allows a largely unreconstructed Francoist judicial machine to deliver a solidarity activist to Trump does not tame that machine; it feeds it and increases its appetite.

Spanish MPs from across the left – Podemos, Sumar, Izquierda Unida, along with the CUP, ERC, and EH Bildu, from Catalonia and the Basque Country, together with others – have already written to ministers demanding that the extradition be refused, warning that solidarity with Palestine, in a context of genocide and occupation, cannot be criminalised as terrorism. If a government can extradite someone for funding a bakery in Gaza, then every donation, every convoy, every act of humanitarian solidarity becomes a potential terrorist offence.

Solidarity is not a crime. Spain should say so, and let Fergie Chambers go home to his family.

‘But at what cost?’: the Yangtze edition

The Economist has reported a striking piece of good news: fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline, with a rare sturgeon spawning in the wild for the first time in two decades and finless porpoise numbers climbing again. The turnaround – confirmed by a peer-reviewed study – followed the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted, the closure of thousands of chemical factories, mass reforestation, and the compensation and retraining of some 200,000 fishermen.

Yet, as the following article argues, the magazine could not resist straining to make an ecological triumph sound sinister – branding China’s approach “eco-authoritarian”. It is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form: the reflex of a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West on both ecological and economic performance.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

The Economist has reported a remarkable and very welcome piece of news. Fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline. A rare sturgeon has been observed spawning in the wild for the first time in twenty years. Finless porpoise numbers are up from a low of around 1,000 in 2017 to more than 1,400. And this is not Chinese state media talking: it comes from a study, published in the journal Science, by researchers in China, Canada, the United States and France.

How was it done? Through a ten-year commercial fishing ban across the river, its major tributaries and the lakes of its basin – the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted. Thousands of chemical factories were closed or relocated. Forests were planted on the upper reaches to hold the soil. Cities were “spongified” with artificial wetlands and permeable surfaces to absorb rainfall and filter stormwater. And some 200,000 fishermen were taken off the water, compensated and retrained for other work. A river that was being killed is coming back to life.

The Yangtze programme is one component of China’s ecological civilisation strategy – written into the country’s constitution in 2018 and pursued through the same instruments that have sustained China’s economy: long-term planning, massive public investment, and a state with the capacity to override short-term private interest in the name of a collective good. It is the same capacity that has made China the world’s undisputed leader in renewable energy, reforestation and electric transport.

But at what cost?

Having reported all this, the good people of the Economist search desperately for a way to make it sound sinister. “The Chinese Communist Party, once famous for pillaging from the natural world, has set to protecting parts of it”, the magazine concedes – before warning that the country’s “eco-authoritarian” approach, “top-down and intolerant of resistance”, “deserves scrutiny before being imitated”. This absurd framing drew an immediate backlash.

China is condemned for not listening to the fishermen – who wanted to carry on fishing – and to environmentalists – who want fewer dams. The complaint about dams is telling: hydropower is not only low-carbon but dispatchable, able to be ramped up on demand and, through pumped storage, to balance the wind and solar that cannot – which is precisely why it does work that would otherwise fall to coal. To oppose it in the abstract, without saying what should generate the electricity instead, is to lean in practice towards fossil-fuelled generation. So are we to understand the Economist would be happier with the status quo of a dying river, a collapsing fishery, a species on the brink of extinction, and a climate crisis that is accelerating because of the failure to decarbonise?

Such a line of reasoning brings to mind Michael Parenti’s observation, in Blackshirts and Reds, about the absurdity of Cold War propaganda:

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skilful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.

If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

The article notes, almost in passing, that the fishermen who lost their livelihoods were given compensation and retraining. It does not mention that this is an awful lot better than what Britain’s coal miners got in the 1980s, or what the cod fishermen of Newfoundland got in the 1990s – communities that their own governments simply abandoned to their fate once they had ceased to be useful.

This is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form. China eliminates extreme poverty; but at what cost. China builds the world’s largest high-speed rail network; but at what cost. China brings its greatest river back from ecological death; but at what cost. The real cost, evidently, is to Western hegemony – and to a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West in both ecological and economic performance.

China has billionaires and stock markets. Is it still socialist?

After nearly half a century of market reforms – with billionaires, stock exchanges and world-famous private brands – can China seriously still be described as a socialist country? This video examines the case against, the record any serious analysis must explain, and above all the political question the sceptics too rarely ask: which class holds state power?

It is based on the notes for a talk Carlos Martinez gave on 23 July 2026 to the Croydon Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group at Ruskin House. A report of the meeting is available on the Croydon Communists site.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

In 1989, Deng Xiaoping met with Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian president, and told him: “So long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.”

The implication was that the fate of socialism as a global project – the project of a world without exploitation, poverty or imperialism – was bound up with the fate of socialism in China. The reverse is also true. If socialism has collapsed in China – if the world’s largest socialist experiment has quietly dissolved itself into just another capitalist power – then the implications for the left everywhere are pretty bleak.

The question, then, is whether China is still socialist? After nearly half a century of market reforms, of billionaires and stock exchanges and branches of McDonald’s in every major city – can the People’s Republic seriously still be described as a socialist country?

It is a serious question, asked in good faith by many people on the left. Any convincing answer has to acknowledge what the sceptics get right, identify what they miss, and establish what actually determines whether a country is socialist.

The case against

If you’re a socialist in Britain, the United States, or the West in general, there’s a lot about modern China that doesn’t feel like the world we’re trying to build.

China has been carrying out market-oriented reforms since 1978 – that’s coming up on half a century. It has several hundred billionaires and significant inequality – between rich and poor, between the coastal cities and the inland countryside. It has globally famous private brands: Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, BYD. It has stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen. It has a market economy in which private capital operates, in which the profit motive operates, and in which – let’s say it plainly – the exploitation of labour takes place. Wage workers in private enterprises produce surplus value, and a portion of that surplus value is appropriated by capitalists.

None of that sounds like the socialism we signed up for. The world we’re fighting for is a world without exploitation, without poverty, without billionaires: a world based on planning, public ownership, solidarity and the common good. And when we reach for real-world reference points, we tend to think of the Soviet Union – a society that essentially did away with private capital altogether.

Should China “lessen the role of the state”?

In the latest of the Financial Times’ periodic lectures to Beijing on how to run its economy, the Brookings Institution’s Eswar Prasad urges China to reduce its reliance on public investment, move away from manufacturing and – above all – “lessen the role of the state”. In the following article, Carlos Martinez takes the prescriptions in turn.

He finds them to be not a serious diagnosis but an invitation to dismantle the socialist foundations of the most successful economic development in human history, in favour of a model that is visibly failing the countries that practise it.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Every so often the Financial Times publishes its periodic instruction to China on how to run its economy. The latest comes from Eswar Prasad of the Brookings Institution, and it follows the established template: concede the achievements in a subordinate clause, then explain that catastrophe looms unless Beijing adopts the policy mix of the countries currently growing at a third of its rate.

China, we learn, is “in serious trouble” – while growing at about 4.3 percent, a figure no G7 economy has come close to in years, and roughly double the US rate. Inflation has turned positive after a deflationary spell; industrial profits are rebounding. In any other country this would be reported as a soft landing. For China it is presented as calm concealing catastrophe.

Let us take the prescriptions in turn.

First, China must “reduce reliance on public investment and exports”.

But since around 78 percent of China’s growth derives from capital inputs, cutting investment means cutting growth. This is simply the United States inviting China to engage in economic self-harm. Public investment is the key mechanism through which China has built its infrastructure, energy, transport and industrial base. It is also the mechanism through which it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. And it is the mechanism through which it has built a high-tech economy that now competes with, and even out strips, the West across the board.

As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has repeatedly shown, it is high levels of productive investment, not the debt-fuelled consumption favoured in the West, that drive sustained growth and rising living standards over time – exactly the relationship mainstream commentary is determined to invert.

A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

Greg Godels has published a thoughtful response in ML Today to Carlos Martinez’s recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Godels argues that the exploitation of the many by the few remains a central driving force of the Chinese economy, and questions whether China’s market reforms and its billionaire class can be squared with a socialist trajectory.

In the article below, Carlos argues that the decisive Marxist question is not simply whether wage labour and surplus value exist, but which class holds state power and in whose interest the economic surplus is directed. On that test – the class nature of the state – China’s billionaires answer to the state rather than command it; its reforms were a conscious strategy to develop the productive forces and build the material basis for a more advanced socialism; and China provably does not participate in imperialist super-exploitation.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Greg Godels has written a considered response in ML Today to my recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Unlike much of what passes for left commentary on China, Godels writes as a comrade, not a Cold Warrior. He admires the Chinese revolution, insists that China’s fate must be decided by the Chinese people, and closes by affirming that, whatever its difficulties, “it is China’s road”. On all of that we agree. Where we part company is over a question that Godels, for all his fidelity to the classics of Marxism, never quite poses: which class holds state power?

State and revolution

Godels’s central charge is that the debate over China too rarely invokes “the exploitation of the many by the few”, and that when I ask for exploitation to be “contextualised”, I am really relativising and rationalising it. He is right that exploitation belongs at the centre of any Marxist analysis. But there is a second important category that is missing from his account entirely: the class nature of the state.

For Marx and Lenin alike, the question of whether a society is advancing towards socialism was never settled simply by cataloguing the presence or absence of wage labour and surplus value at the point of production. It was settled principally by asking which class holds power, and in whose interest the state directs the economic surplus. This is the whole point of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of Lenin’s insistence, throughout the period of the New Economic Policy, that market mechanisms within a workers’ state are something categorically different from capitalism under a bourgeois state.

Under the NEP in the Soviet state, private capital, wage labour, rich peasants and market relations all flourished. Lenin did not conclude that the October Revolution had thereby been cancelled. He concluded that the proletarian state would make use of capitalist forms, on its own terms and under its own control, in order to build the material foundations of socialism.