i usually call those anarcho-libs. fake leftists is good too.
The question you gotta ask yourself is “why the fuck would you replace one imperialist scum with another imperialist scum”?
https://spectrejournal.com/one-should-not-camouflage-capitalist-and-imperialist-china-as-socialist/
My polish nationalist friend we meet again.
Pröbsting and Spectre belong to what should be called the Western-compatible left: third-camp, Trotskyite, anti-AES, anti-communist “Marxism” that dresses itself in revolutionary vocabulary while arriving, again and again, at conclusions useful to the imperialist centre. Their role is ideological: to discipline the left away from actual anti-imperialist politics and back into a sterile moral equivalence where the China, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, and every state that breaks from imperial obedience is reduced to “authoritarian capitalism” or “campism.” Pröbsting is a charlatan in this precise sense: he uses Marxist language to empty Marxism of its concrete historical content.
The first deception is the framing. “One Should Not Camouflage Capitalist and Imperialist China as Socialist.” This is not an investigation. It is a verdict written before the trial. China is declared capitalist and imperialist in advance, and then every fact is forced into that frame. Private capital exists? Therefore capitalism. Chinese firms operate abroad? Therefore imperialism. China has inequality? Therefore socialism is fake. This is not dialectics. It is checklist formalism. It takes surface phenomena, tears them out of historical motion, and calls the result Marxism.
Pröbsting’s argument depends on confusing the existence of capitalist forms with the rule of the capitalist class. Marxism has never meant that socialist transition abolishes every market relation overnight. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng, and every serious revolutionary tradition understood that socialism emerges out of inherited conditions, not fantasy blueprints. The real question is not whether commodity production, private firms, wages, inequality, or markets exist. The real question is: which class holds state power, which forces command the commanding heights, what is the direction of development, and whether the economy is subordinated to imperial finance capital or to a sovereign socialist project.
On this decisive question, Pröbsting evades. He treats China’s socialist market economy as if it were simply neoliberal capitalism with red flags. But China’s system is not governed by Wall Street, the IMF, NATO, the World Bank, or a comprador bourgeoisie. Land remains publicly owned. The banks remain owned by the state. Strategic sectors remain under state control. Capital is allowed to develop in secondary sectors, but it is also disciplined, subordinated, purged, broken up, redirected, and politically contained when it threatens the broader line. Chinese billionaires do not command the Party; they fear it. That fact alone makes nonsense of the claim that China is just another capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
His misuse of Lenin is even worse. Lenin’s theory of imperialism is not “large economy plus foreign investment equals imperialism.” Lenin analyzed a world system dominated by monopoly finance capital, colonial division, superexploitation, and the domination of oppressed nations by a handful of advanced capitalist powers. Imperialism is not a moral insult. It is a concrete relation of domination. To call China imperialist in the same sense as the United States, Britain, France, Germany, or Japan is to erase the entire colonial and semi-colonial structure of the modern world.
China did not build its rise through the Atlantic slave trade, colonial genocide, the partition of Africa, the looting of India, unequal treaties, NATO bombing campaigns, CIA coups, IMF structural adjustment, or dollar hegemony. China itself was a victim of imperialism: carved up, humiliated, invaded, semi-colonized, and devastated. Its revolution was a national liberation revolution and a socialist revolution. To pretend that China’s development today is equivalent to the imperialist rise of Britain or the United States is pure historical illiteracy.
Pröbsting also twists the meaning of capital export. Lenin identified capital export as one feature of imperialism, but not in isolation. Capital export becomes imperialist when tied to monopoly finance domination, political subjugation, military coercion, and the extraction of superprofits from dependent nations. Chinese loans, infrastructure projects, trade relationships, and investments may contain contradictions. But they are categorically not IMF debt traps or in any meaningful way similar to French control over African currencies, US sanctions regimes, NATO military occupation, or British colonial extraction. To flatten these differences is to assist imperialism ideologically.
His treatment of multipolarity is equally dishonest. Pröbsting calls it “multi-imperialism,” as though the weakening of US hegemony has no progressive content for oppressed nations. This is abstract moralism. Multipolarity is not socialism. BRICS is not the Comintern. Trade between sovereign states is not proletarian internationalism. But the collapse of unipolar US domination creates space for national development, resistance to sanctions, alternative financing, technological sovereignty, and political breathing room for the Global South. Only a Western leftist insulated by imperial privilege can look at the weakening of US hegemony and sneer that it makes no difference.
This is where the “compatible left” truly reveals itself. Claiming to oppose all imperialisms equally, but in practice spending its energy attacking the enemies of the main imperialist bloc. Its function is to tell workers and oppressed peoples that there is no meaningful difference between the boot on their neck and the hand helping them stand up.
The article’s treatment of China’s private sector is another example of vulgar formalism. Yes, China has private firms. Yes, China has billionaires. Yes, market reforms produced contradictions, inequality, corruption, speculation, and ideological danger. But Pröbsting cannot explain why, if the bourgeoisie rules China, the Chinese state repeatedly disciplines capital in ways no bourgeois state in the imperialist core would tolerate. Why were tech monopolies checked? Why was private tutoring smashed? Why are capitalists compelled to align with national planning? Why are Party cells embedded in firms? Why was the housing bubble purposefully deflated? Why does the state retain decisive control over finance, land, energy, infrastructure, heavy industry, transport, telecommunications, and strategic planning? In a bourgeois dictatorship, capital disciplines the state. In China, the state disciplines capital.
The existence of billionaires proves contradiction. It does not prove capitalist class rule. A Marxist must examine contradiction concretely. A charlatan waves at a rich man and declares the revolution dead.
Pröbsting’s argument also misunderstands socialist transition. China does not claim to have achieved communism, nor even a fully developed socialism free of class struggle. It describes itself as being in the primary stage of socialism. That reflects the material problem of building socialism in a huge formerly oppressed country, with uneven development, rural poverty, technological dependence, hostile encirclement, and the legacy of semi-colonial underdevelopment. The task is not to perform purity for Western Trotskyites but to survive, develop the productive forces, maintain Party rule, avoid Soviet collapse, defeat absolute poverty, and build the material basis for further socialist advance.
This is what the compatible left cannot forgive. China did not collapse. China did not submit. China did not become another comprador state. China did not allow shock therapy to loot its people the way Russia did in the 1990s. China used markets without surrendering state power to the market. It absorbed foreign capital without becoming politically colonized by foreign capital. It entered the world market without accepting permanent dependency. That is why imperialism hates China. And that is why the Western anti-AES left must invent theories proving that China is secretly the same as its enemies.
Pröbsting’s discussion of inequality is also opportunistic. Inequality is real. But he uses it one-sidedly. He does not seriously weigh the historic eradication of extreme poverty, the transformation of rural infrastructure, mass literacy, public health gains, industrial upgrading, housing expansion, transport development, food security, or the sheer scale of human development achieved under CPC leadership. For him, inequality proves capitalism, while poverty reduction proves nothing.
His approach to the state is particularly anti-Marxist. Marxism does not analyze the state by reading stock market data alone. The state is an instrument of class power. If China is capitalist, Pröbsting must explain the class character of the CPC, the PLA, state ownership, planning institutions, cadre discipline, capital controls, land relations, and the recurring campaigns against corruption, monopoly, separatism, financial disorder, and ideological liberalization. He does not do this adequately because his conclusion requires skipping the hard question: why does China behave unlike a normal bourgeois state?
A normal bourgeois state protects the independent political power of the bourgeoisie. China does not. A normal bourgeois state allows capital to dominate parties, media, courts, academia, elections, and foreign policy. China does not. A normal capitalist state treats private property as sacred. China does not. A normal imperialist state exports crisis through war, coups, sanctions, regime change, and military occupation. China does not. These differences are clearly not merely cosmetic or rhetoric as many compatible leftists would attempt to argue.
The article’s attack on pro-China Marxists as “camouflaging capitalism” is projection. It is Pröbsting and his acolytes and peers who in fact camouflages imperialist hierarchy by hiding it behind abstract equality of condemnation. He treats the imperial core and the anti-hegemonic periphery as if they occupy the same historical position. They obviously do not. The United States maintains hundreds of overseas military bases, weaponizes the dollar, sanctions entire populations, dominates global finance, backs settler colonialism, overthrows governments, and encircles China militarily. China builds ports, railways, grids, factories, hospitals, schools, and telecommunications. These are again clearly not materially equivalent.
This does not mean every Chinese project abroad is pure charity. Only children think geopolitics works that way. China pursues national interest, secures resources, competes, and at times makes hard bargains. But the actual question is whether China’s global role reproduces the colonial-imperialist structure or weakens it. And here reality is obvious: China regularly restructures debts, has cancelled or forgiven loans in multiple cases, and does not attach the classic IMF and Western conditionalities of privatization, austerity, deregulation, public-sector cuts, or political subordination. That is precisely why so much of the Global South prefers Chinese finance to IMF or Western-backed finance: not because China is charity, but because it offers room to build infrastructure and preserve sovereignty without handing the state over to foreign capital. On balance, China’s rise has weakened the monopoly of the imperialist core, expanded options for the Global South, and made it harder for Washington to dictate terms to the planet. This is precisely why the imperialist bloc has identified China as its central strategic threat.
Pröbsting’s method is also deeply Eurocentric. He looks at China from the standpoint of Western left purity politics, not from the lived history of oppressed nations trying to develop under siege. For rural people, minorities, peasants, workers, and colonized peoples, development is not an abstraction or something that can be glossed over. Roads, electricity, schools, hospitals, railways, food security, technological sovereignty, and national dignity are all matters of up most importance. Western Trotskyites can afford to sneer at these things because they inherit the infrastructure of imperial plunder. People from countries that were colonized, invaded, sanctioned, or kept poor do not have that luxury.
His use of the term “social-imperialism” is especially cheap. In the Marxist tradition, social-imperialism means socialism in words, imperialism in deeds. But words are not enough to prove deeds. Where are China’s colonies? Where are China’s regime-change wars? Where are its NATOs, its Iraqs, its Libyas, its Haitis, its Congos, its Chiles, its Palestines? Where is the Chinese global sanctions machine starving children to force privatization? Where is the Chinese military occupation network? Where is the Chinese equivalent of the IMF structural adjustment regime? Pröbsting cannot provide equivalence, so he substitutes analogy.
The same distortion appears in his attack on Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster, Immanuel Ness, and Qiao Collective. His complaint is not merely that they make errors. His complaint is that they refuse to join the imperial chorus against China. This is the real crime for the compatible left: not bad theory, but bad alignment. They cannot tolerate Marxists who identify US imperialism as the principal enemy and understand China as a contradictory but historically progressive force in the present world struggle.
A serious Marxist critique of China would start from contradiction: socialist state power using markets; public ownership alongside private capital; national development under imperialist pressure; anti-poverty success alongside inequality; ecological transition alongside industrial strain; unity of a multiethnic state alongside real governance problems; international cooperation alongside strategic self-interest. That critique would be useful. Pröbsting however does not offer anything of the sort. He offers only a prosecution brief designed to collapse contradiction into condemnation.
The accusation that China is “capitalist” also ignores directionality. Capitalism in the imperial core is moving toward deeper monopoly rule, privatization, financial parasitism, austerity, militarism, and social decay. China is moving through state-led industrial upgrading, poverty eradication, infrastructure expansion, ecological planning, technological sovereignty, and increasing Party intervention into capital. These are not the same trajectory. To pretend otherwise is to replace historical materialism with static labeling.
His arguments also depend on a childish view of socialism as immediate purity. But every socialist revolution has had to retreat, maneuver, compromise, and use inherited forms. Lenin introduced the NEP. The Bolsheviks used concessions, trade, specialists, wages, markets, and state capitalism under proletarian dictatorship. Lenin did not conclude that the existence of markets automatically abolished Soviet power. He asked who controlled whom. That is the question Pröbsting avoids because the answer in China is inconvenient: capital exists, but it does not rule.
And here we reach the decisive point: Pröbsting’s Leninism is verbal, not methodological. He quotes categories but abandons concrete analysis. Lenin always began from the world situation, the principal enemy, the chain of imperialism, the division between oppressor and oppressed nations, and the strategic tasks of revolutionaries. Pröbsting begins from moral symmetry. That is why his conclusion is so useful to the West. He tells the left that opposing China is just as revolutionary as opposing Washington. In the real world, that means disarming anti-imperialism.
The compatible left always says: “We oppose both Washington and Beijing.” But Washington is the one encircling China with bases. Washington is the one arming Taiwan separatism. Washington is the one sanctioning countries across the world. Washington is the one backing Israel. Washington is the one that destroyed Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and countless others. Beijing is not doing this to the world. A Marxism that cannot distinguish the arsonist from the firefighter because both have smoke on their clothes is not Marxism.
I find it ridiculous that anyone could accept Pröbsting’s framing, Spectre as a neutral Marxist source, the third-camp trick of equating the imperial core with the states resisting its domination, the flattening of Lenin into a checklist, the reduction of socialist transition to purity tests written by Western Trotskyites whose politics have never built, defended, or governed anything.
China is not beyond criticism. No socialist project is. But criticism must serve the people, the revolution, and the struggle against imperialism. Pröbsting’s article serves confusion. It arms the reader with suspicion toward actually existing socialist and anti-hegemonic forces while leaving the main imperialist structure conceptually intact. It belongs firmly to the compatible left. Its radicalism is hollow. And beneath the footnotes and Lenin quotations, it is not serious Marxism but pure anti-communism.
excellent
I don’t disagree with anything you wrote. I greatly appreciate your perspective and clarity of writing and learned a lot.
I am interested in your view on BRICS and other multilateral non-UN multipolar institutions in relation to building a multipolar or at least non US-dominated world. Especially any follow up readings on the matter.
Its obvious that the People’s Republic of China is playing an irreplaceable and honorable part in the global revolution against US led imperialism-capitalism-zionism, and the CPC is clearly on the side of the global proletariat in this global class war. 🫡
But I feel as if BRICS+ and SCO have been dangerously overhyped. One consequence of the overhyping leads to a lot of reactionary narratives (like the one you are refuting) gaining more strength in narrative war.
From my perspective, the power structures in countries like India and South Africa are ultimately aligned with US-israel-NATO even against the interests of the “national interest” and definitely their own people and despite any soft political posturing. Pakistan is its own issue… Egypt and the UAE (Saudi too but idk if they accepted BRICS?) are completely captured by the enemies of humanity and will happily sacrafice all their own “national interest” when and if Uncle Sam asks it. An official BRICS basket of currency will never happen as long as these countries are now participating.
This is what I am thinking.
man, I just wanna say you rock for this. This is like a whole essay, I started reading before work & now I’m savoring this text all day. Like I literally haven’t finished reading it yet & that’s gonna save me from scrolling 2 much today so thank you
Thank you. Always glad when people enjoy/find what I have to say interesting.
Yet another zionazi lib
“If we can’t make things perfect we might as well maintain the status quo”
based on everything other than jin jiyan azadî, because the whole point it is to promote secularism and women’s rights, against a regime that punishes both (but it is still the USes fault because it wouldn’t be happening if they didn’t coup Mosaddegh)
“regime”
no real arguement
The government of Iran has its own contradictions, as all do. No doubt. But using “regime” as a descriptor of the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially in 2026, is a zionist framing and language.
The US-israeli-NATO backed “Women Life Freedom” riots in 2022 were a color revolution attempt based on a fabricated story about a young woman Mahsa Amini killed many Iranians including women and children (see the massacre in Shah e Cheragh shrine). It is a slogan and movement backed by the CIA. So of course those defending it are using zionist language.
ohh, I was not aware of that can you please provide some sources, I would like to learn more so I can un-capitalist-propogandaise my geopolitical views and language
