Its not about universal values at all but about what the Chinese People want and what the party determined is the interests of their communist goals. I don’t love that China treats Israel as anything other than the fascist government it is, but the biggest difference is locality/direct influence. Russia is directly affected by the fascists at their border, because their fascism is directed eastward. China isn’t impacted by the Israeli fascism and therefore has no direct interests.
Maybe you call this classic liberalism, but the analysis here begins in a materialist position. China just takes the very minimal-conflict path within their material position. This means that great evils occurring elsewhere do not trump their need to develop and become strong enough to become communist. Once those evils are aimed towards them, they react and sometimes not perfectly, but in the way which is protectionist. Hopefully, from their example, we can learn to be better at exporting revolutions like the USSR but without destroying ourselves, like the USSR allowed itself to be destroyed (the phrasing here isn’t meant to indicate systemic intent, but it wasn’t prevented obviously). I hope we can be better at internationalism than China but they’re surviving and influencing the world while every other communist led country has been marred by a sort of irrelevance to the rest of the world if they didn’t get destroyed.
I don’t know how many times this needs to be said but I’ll say it again: Marxism is a univeralist (at least applied to human history and societies) scientific theory and set of revolutionary normative principles of thought and action that emerged in modern Europe as the Proletarian stage of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
If people want to do historical relativism of value based on nationalist considerations, then they’re basically a postmodern fascist whose view is identical to the basis of Dugin’s ideology. Dugin himself thinks that’s he’s synthesized and gone beyond liberal capitalism, communism and fascism here, by identifying the material interests of individual people’s with their national identity. Ofc this is just postmodern strasserism.
There are also several distinct questions here: firstly to what extent the Chinese people have actual democratic control over the CPC and the PRC, which I’d say is little, and which is different to whether or not the policies of the CPC are in their interest (to a great degree, I’d say yes), and is also different to the question of whether or not they have objectively high approval ratings (also genuinely very high compared to any other society that comes to mind).
I agree with you that there is a locality/directness factor that is imporant, but the two examples are not fully analogous because in the one case we are talking about whether Russia’s invasion is understanding from the pov of Russia’s interests, whereas in the other we are not talking about invasion, but about whether China should be supporting fascists. It answers why China might be excused from not intervening in Ukraine more directly but it doesn’t answer why they should be economically supporting Israel. Ofc, perhaps they want economic leverage to eventually pull Israel away from the US orbit based on Irsael’s perception of its own interests. I don’t know. I’m not saying we should unilaterally and unequivocally condemn China on a purely detached ‘moralist’ basis here. The final judgement has to be in terms of whether or not their actions contribute positively or negatively in the long-term to world communist revolution.
The way you’ve phrased it would suggest that China’s interests are those of the realist modern nation-state. These are inevitably part of them, but China is not the nation state. The latter is the state of the society, which is part of but not identical to the society itself. The Chinese working classes interests are ultimately those of a transition to socialism and world-revolution. Your phrasing also suggests that Israel is not in their direct interests. I think you need to make clearer what you mean by direct interest. Do you mean no interest at all if not direct? Or can they still be of indirect interest if not direct? But Israel is a bulwark of American influence in the middle east and key source of black ops and intelligence operations. No-one is better at killing radicals than Israel. It is also in the interest of China as a society, again, to contribute to a world revolutionary situation. How is the Chinese government doing this? If so, is it intentional? If not, then why is this not a problem, given that intentions are our guide to what China’s power structure would do in any future potentially revolutionary situation. If they were not an interest at all, then they wouldn’t be trading and helping the IDF to arm itself.
This is important because communism is not, I repeat not, possible without a world revolution.
I’m saying that the mental manouver justifying the position in one that is common in liberalism. I’m not even necessarily saying it’s wrong. But I’m asking for clarification why it’s justified to make that move when talking and thinking about China, and not about other states. Which states are not reasoning in terms of their materialist position? They all are, more or less, when looked at from a Marxist pov. This is explanation. It’s not justification. Justification in the Marxist revolution is always, first and foremost, what most likely contributes in the long-term to a world-proletarian revolution. This is always the end goal (although the end goal of the revolution is the production of conditions for real fulfilling and ethical life and advancement of the species).
Just replying to your splitting it into 3 questions: this is in direct opposition to democratic centralism and is a liberal absurdity to think that these should be considered separately. It doesn’t really impact the rest of your comment though, so that’s below.
Also Marxism is a universalism based in a scientific approach, not based in a set of principles i think. Unless you mean by principles here: dialectical approach and materialist basis.
By direct and indirect, I mean primarily that its immediate. I should use that word, and that’s a good critique of my phrasing for sure. But it’s immediacy does not negate the eventual interest, a direct but not immediate interest, in revolution in Israel. I mean I can forgive eventuality for immediacy if this is part of the scientific learning process of world transition. Why I justify it for China is that I believe there is a clear communist party interested in the highest levels of focus and learning for the sake of communism doing this. I think their track record is clear in this sense despite mistakes.
I’m not absolutely sure what you mean by the first sentence.
It seems pretty clear to me that you’re confusing the fact that the questions have things in common, whether they are about similar topics, or whether one question is relevant to another because implies consequences that determine or influence our answers to the other questions, with the idea that they are the same single question. The fact that China’s government has very high approval by all measures, is not proof that the government is democratically run in a socialist sense. Indeed we know it’s not, because Chinese workers do not have direct control over the means of production. So it’s not sufficient for it to be democratic. However it’s almost definitely a necessary condition, so you would need it, and it is evidence in favor in the weak sense that it does not refute the idea that China is democratic by itself. But there is other evidence not in favor.
But historical materialism is not mystical nonsense where suddenly everything connected or with any property in common in suddenly identical. It’s not a metaphysical calculator you can use to answer every question.
Democratic Centralism is a theory about how a party should be organized. It has no bearing on a linguistic or semantic question. End of. What it implies, which you seem to me to be confusing with the idea that these are the same question, is that the questions practically have to be considered together, or that you can’t answer one without one or more of the others. I completely agree in the latter case. As evidenced by this very discussion, it will be difficult to enter into a discussion where you discuss one but you don’t discuss the others. But they are not the same thing, and saying they are is just a logical error (which dialectical materialism or democratic centralism have nothing to do with) which ends up with us treating China as closer to socialism than it actually is, which is a massive failure on our part as Marxists. For Marxists more than any else, we have a duty to be clear, because the truth is on our side and we are not in power.
Okay but if but now I need to ask the exact same question about the word ‘immediate’. This seems to be a synonym for ‘direct’ here, so it doesn’t necessarily make it more clear to me what it means. In a dialectical context it is difficult to make any sense of the concept of directness or immediately (unless it is meant relatively), due to the omnipresence of mediation. I’m assuming therefore that you don’t mean it in that more philosophical or meta-theoretical sense as used in the Marxist tradition. I’m guessing you just mean that practically it is more important or pressing for China’s interests if it is more direct, in that it should be given priority as an objective.
In that sense I don’t completely disagree with you, but there’s also a difference between not having an aggressive policy towards Israel and actively funding it’s settler-colonial apartheid project. Why is the latter sometimes treated as absolutely and necessarily unjustifiable in some cases but not here?
