People these days know that capitalism sucks. Communism and socialism aren’t the dirty words they used to be. It no longer works to try to convince people that socialism isn’t good. The new propaganda strategy is to convince people that any viable form of socialism “isn’t real socialism.” Hence the belief in “state-capitalism.” For the same reason, people now call communists “tankies” instead of commies.

If you think about some other terms liberals use, it’s not surprising at all, they always have the problem of confusing the tool with the wielder.

Also of course by calling socialism that, they reinforce their own ideological purity as the keepers of the “true socialism” - that’s for the westolefto. As for openly antisocialist libs, they think it’s a gotcha.

Communism is when the state does stuff.

Decades of lies spread against communist countries, painting them as a totalitarian surveillance state. Like, when’s the last time your vote counted? Hell, when’s the last time there was a candidate that actually represented you? I’m not even gonna start on the TLA’s.

Projection and political illiteracy

Bad thing = Communism. Good Thing = State-capitalism.

Very simply, they don’t want to acknowledge any socialist successes, so they have to find a way to rebrand any country’s success as being due to capitalism.

The rationale there is that you’re still using capitalist mechanics, but instead of the capital being owned by private individuals, it’s in the hands of the state. However, the key difference in my view is with the respective incentives created by both approaches.

When the capital is in the hands of private individuals then they’re able to use this capital for direct personal benefit. This creates incentives for exploitation of the workers by capitalists in order to get the best return on their labour. The primary goal of labour becomes producing value for capitalists with any other benefits being strictly incidental.

On the other hand, when the capital is owned by the state then nobody is directly profiting from the labour, and the only incentive is to reinvest the capital back into developing the productive forces of the country.

The one valid criticism we can make of state owned industry is in terms of labour organization where it often follows top down corporate structure. However, that is obviously not an inherent problem associated with having state run industry.

Never saw something like that, but it’s probably because they have no idea what both of these terms mean

Because using words is hard when you don’t have a clue as to what they mean.

Because they think the “capitalism” part proves it’s not socialist. Every so often a Marxist term gets noticed by libs, then adopted and diluted by their surface level understanding until it becomes functionally meaningless. See also: tankies.

I talked with a communist the other day, who was advertising for a communist newspaper he, I’m guessing, works for. Well he asked me if I am organised, to which I said yes and we started talking. At some point I said smth positive abt China and he was like: “uh… So China is socialist to you?”. That’s when I took a deep breath and started having a discussion with him.

I stated that there are only like 24 capitalists in the bottom part of the Party, which consists of thousands of people. I also said that the government is known to support workers on strike. But he in turn argued that the Chinese gov may support strikers, but since it’s “state-capitalism” they still have to bend in the direction of the companies, cuz of the profits and so on. He also said that their economy is sure to collapse soon. I just thought abt the metric shitload of videos that comes out every year claiming China’s economy will collapse any second now My guy cited the fact that Evergrande, a company that according to him makes up a rly big part of their economy, filed for bankrupcy in the US or so.

Well quite frankly I was standing there, I’d say a pretty good understanding of China, but I couldn’t outright refute his claims or present a compelling counterargument. So I’ve been looking forward to talking with any comrade abt that so that I could learn abt how to deal with this in the future, and to learn abt valid counter arguments as well.

Words are easy to use.

Books are hard to read though.

Because state capitalism is a real term used in Marxist theory, notably by Engels and Lenin. That and a conflation of state capitalism with state developmental capitalism (Which is understandable), an economic doctrine which China has inarguably embraced.