This is the fourth entry in our ongoing series attempting to give straightforward answers to frequently asked questions about China. In this entry, we summarize some of the main themes from our journal article “Sorghum & Steel,” the first in a three-part economic history of China. Readers interested in the details of any of the arguments presented here should refer to that piece.
Compared to other entries in this series, this answer is slightly longer and focuses a bit more on what will seem to be specialized topics, but we feel this is necessary to provide sufficient context for the previous two entries, as well as for clarifying our position as communists in relation to that of the Chinese Communist Party at different points in time and popular images of China’s “communism” under the socialist developmental regime. Like parts 2 and 3 but in contrast with part 1, this response is collectively authored, though it includes a few individual responses by Chinese members and friends as well.
As always, we encourage readers to reformat these answers for use across platforms. If you’ve designed pamphlets, infographics or other media using these materials, please send them to us (e-mail: [email protected]) so that we can archive them here and repost on social media!
This question involves two common misunderstandings. First, “communist country” is an oxymoron: communism requires the end of nation-states, so it would be impossible for China or any other country to be a communist island floating in a capitalist sea. This wording actually comes from the Cold War, when the US had a geopolitical interest in conflating “communism” with the social systems that actually existed in the USSR and China. Second, it is generally not a good approach to try and periodize history through the deeds of “great men.” But this is especially common in accounts of Chinese history, where the mass revolutionary fervor of an entire generation is reduced to the decision-making power of a single leader. Ultimately, Mao Zedong’s rule is not the best way to demarcate the different periods of China’s changing relationship to capitalism and the global communist movement. We offer an alternative method in part 1 and part 2 of our economic history of China. So, the simple response to the question is: No, China was not a communist country under Mao.
But wasn’t it a communist revolution? And wouldn’t that imply that the society built after the revolution was a “communist” one?
These common follow-up questions require some more detailed history: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did emerge from the global communist movement of the early 20th century, and arguably could have played a positive role in any social revolution that had gotten past the stage of local, short-lived proletarian uprisings like those in Shanghai in 1927 or Barcelona in 1936—in both of which Chinese communists participated.[1] But by the late 1930s, the CCP had already begun to subordinate its communist goals to those of national liberation in the face of immediate threats from Japan, the US, and later the USSR. Once the party came to power in 1949, it continued to prioritize the establishment of a Chinese nation-state as a supposedly necessary precursor to the creation of communism. This was a stark reversal of the basic communist strategy earlier in the century, which had prioritized the global character of revolution. But it was in line with events in Russia and Europe, where the defeat of the international revolution was rationalized as a new strategy to build “socialism in one country.” This position soon came to define the political orientation of all parties aligned with the USSR.
It’s important to remember, however, that neither the USSR nor China ever claimed to have implemented communism. In China, the “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s briefly popularized talk of a “transition to communism” that would begin with the collectivizations and social experiments happening throughout the countryside.[2] We could debate whether such a transition would have been possible under those conditions, and the extent to which such notions of “communism” differed from our own, but those experiments ended in three years of disaster, never to be revived. Then in the mass-mobilization phase of the Cultural Revolution (1967–1968), some participants took actions (general strikes, weapons seizures) and wrote manifestos pointing toward the beginning or renewal of a communist revolution, but even the “leftist” faction of CCP leaders (including Mao) denounced such “ultra-leftists” as a threat to state power and brutally suppressed them.[3] Moreover, none of the participants in the Cultural Revolution understood the society they lived in to be a communist one—even if some thought that a new revolution led by communists was emerging.
This is part of the confusion: “communism” as the name for a political project is often used to describe the activities of communists, including their many parties and political interventions throughout history, including successful revolutions. But this is not the same thing as “communism” as a form of social organization. The communist project is obviously aimed at establishing communism. But that doesn’t mean that it has been successful. Obviously it hasn’t, since we all still live in a capitalist society. The key thing is not to confuse the existence of communists with the existence of communism.
So, if China was not communist, then what was it?
By 1949, after decades of protracted war in which the communist faction gradually won more and more territory from the retreating Japanese and the US-backed Nationalists, the CCP and its supporters had won decisive territorial control over most of the area once claimed by the Qing Dynasty. It’s important to emphasize here that this wasn’t an “authoritarian” seizure of power that went against the will of the populace. It was a legitimately popular revolution with deep roots among the country’s peasant majority, especially in the more populous ethnically Han areas—though support among minority populations along the Qing dynasty frontier was more uneven. The first few years following this victory were spent unifying the nation and reviving production, often using whatever inherited administrative mechanisms were at hand in the newly-won territories—including the collaboration of remaining capitalists in the southern cities and the adoption of planning mechanisms first developed by the Republican government or even by Japanese colonial administrators.
Soon after, these new administrative systems were put to the test in staving off the US invasion of Korea. By 1956, wartime mobilization had given way and the early elements of what we call “the socialist developmental regime” began to generalize across the country. This regime halted China’s capitalist transition that had begun by at least the 19th century, but it never cohered into a distinct mode of production (see below) and soon began to unravel under the weight of its own contradictions coupled with continued international pressures. By the 1970s, the party leadership (including both Mao and leaders from ostensibly opposing factions), faced with mounting protests and disaffection among peasants, workers and students, had initiated a series of diplomatic and market-oriented measures intended to save the developmental regime, but which soon took on a life of their own. These reforms would unleash domestic waves of capitalist development and, at the same time, slowly link China to the global market. Altogether, these trends revived the capitalist transition that had been stalled by the revolution and subordinated China to the global law of value.[4]
What is communism?
Before outlining the socialist developmental regime and clarifying how it differed from communism, we want to emphasize that, as a collective project, we might differ somewhat in our opinions on many of these details. Here we feel it’s important to highlight the voices of our Chinese members and friends, then move on to a more general review, so we’ll begin with a few individual responses to the question “Wasn’t China a communist country under Mao?” from the same subset of respondents who answered the first question in this series:
Kaixuan: No.
Xiao Hui: Depends how you define communism, but I would say no.
Ruirui: This term “communist country” itself is an oxymoron. I think the Mao era saw the replacement of private property with an economy based on public ownership in a state controlled by a bureaucracy.
Cheng Yang: Technically China under Mao didn’t ever call itself communist, but you could say leadership back then was (partly) trying to push forward what they thought of as communism, with the limited experience and lessons they could possibly have, and according to their existing model.
Qianxun: I think that Mao was one of the 20th century’s many failed experiments at using political power to push toward communism. I don’t think there has ever been an ideal communist power. Mao’s political power was similar to those other powers (to extremely varying degrees), with some successes in redistribution along the lines of gender, class and region (and maybe even ethnicity for a short time), but also alongside countervailing tendencies of bureaucratic hierarchy, urban-rural disparity (the “scissors effect”), etc.
Lao Niu: Strictly speaking, China never said it was a communist country, but that we could enter communist society only after a series of struggles, through “continuous revolution” while limiting bourgeois rights under proletarian dictatorship. Of course in American eyes, or those of the Soviet Union, they might think that China was a communist country, applying this label under the influence of geopolitics.
Xian Yu: Depends on your definition. If you use Marx’s definition in The German Ideology, “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things,” then no, because communism is not a state of affairs, much less a polity. If you use the one in the Manifesto “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, then no, because there was no free development of each. If a country is communist because its leaders say it is, then no, because the CCP never called China communist. Hm, weird, I guess the answer is no regardless of your definition after all.
One recurring point to note here is that even the CCP has never claimed that China was communist, but only that it has been “building socialism” as a precondition for an eventual transition to communism. Moreover, the CCP’s few schematic descriptions of communism do seem generally consistent with our own sense of the term, but it’s also notable that these descriptions (and, in fact, all mention of communism) have become much more rare over time in official party documents. The party’s current constitution (revised in 2017) does not define communism at all, but its founding manifesto from 1921 opens with a clear three-part definition:
- On the economic level, communists call for society’s common ownership and use of the means of production: machines, factories, raw materials, land, instruments of transportation and communication, etc. When the means of production fall under common ownership and use, private property and the wage system will disappear, as will the exploitation of people by people, because the content of exploitation—surplus-value—will no longer have a place to be extracted.
- On the political level, communists call for the abolition of political power, including all state institutions and governments. Political power, armies and courts are instruments for protecting the interests of the minority and oppressing the majority—the laboring masses—so they are necessary when the means of production are privately owned by the minority. Obviously there will be no need for political power, armies or courts when private property and the wage system are abolished.
- On the social level, communists call for society to have only one class—the class of the laboring masses. (In other words, there will no longer be any classes.) Private property is the root of all privilege in our current society, so if no one is able to accumulate property, there will no longer be any privileged classes.[5]
This is basically consistent with the various definitions currently in widespread use by communists today, as well as those of 19th century communists such as Marx and Engels, and those used by early anarcho-communists such as Kropotkin, alongside the earliest Chinese communists[6] such as He-Yin Zhen and Liu Shipei (who published some of the first translations of Marx and Engels into Chinese). Usually, definitions of communism are negative, mostly describing what communism will not be, and then offering minimal positive guidelines emphasizing free association, universal social support and collective, cooperative control over production. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx and Engels wrote:
If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Another popular formulation missing from both these quotations is the slogan, popular in mid-19th century French communist circles and embraced by Marx, “From each according to ability, to each according to need.” This too was adopted by the CCP and became widely used as a shorthand definition of communism learned by schoolchildren: anxu fenpei (按需分配). For 21st century communists, this principle is often expressed using Thomas Müntzer’s 16th century Latin slogan omnia sunt communia, or its English counterpart “everything for everyone.”[7]
The main way current conceptions of communism differ from those of Müntzer, Marx or the CCP is that the abolition of classes is now more explicitly accompanied by a similar emphasis on the abolition of all social separations of humans into genders, races, etc., and the elimination of society’s estrangement from the non-human world. These ideas actually draw from the work of Marx and other early communists, who sometimes observed that such separations functioned as essential features of capitalist society, but did not always articulate the need for their abolition as a core component of communist revolution.
So communists across the board, and even former communist organizations such as the CCP, are generally in agreement about the definition of “communist society,” and no one claims that China was ever communist—except in the sense that it is ruled by a party that once proclaimed communism as its ultimate goal (and today rarely speaks of it). Instead, the CCP has argued, since the mid-1950s, that China is “socialist,” and that socialism is a necessary “transitional stage” on the way to communism, during which economic development is the main priority. The exact conception of socialism and the nature of such a “stage” have changed over time. Today, the CCP officially claims that China is still in the “primary stage of socialism,” where a “socialist commodity economy” exists, mixing elements of capitalist production with state-ownership.[8] When this argument was initially formulated, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was based on observations of an economy where market imperatives were still held at bay. As the decades passed, however, this ceased to be the case. Today, there are no realms of life in China (including the realm of the state) where the law of value does not operate.
We already discussed the concept of “socialism” and the present character of the Chinese economy in part 2 and part 3 of this FAQ. For now, we can just emphasize that: (a) the socialist developmental regime ended many years ago, and (b) that regime, in retrospect, did not serve as a transition to communism.[9]
What was the socialist development regime, if it wasn’t communist?
This argument is laid out in detail in Sorghum & Steel, our economic history of that period. What follows is a simplified summary. Throughout the 1950s–1960s, what we call China’s “socialist developmental regime” supplanted the communist project as more and more was sacrificed to the bottom line of building a national economy. The term “regime” highlights our argument that the various administrative mechanisms and methods of production never cohered into a mode of production, and instead represented the breakdown of any such mode. Its constituent elements were often disjointed, coming together only through the constant (and constantly intensifying) effort of the state, if at all. For example, the rural agricultural and urban industrial economies were increasingly divided from each other during this period. They were effectively local autarkies, meaning closed-off spaces that reproduced themselves without much outside support. The integration between these units occurred only through state institutions, such as the state monopoly on the purchase and sale of grain to feed workers at industrial enterprises, the rationing and plan-apportionment systems for all but the most basic consumer and producer goods, the household registration (hukou) system, and the urban work-unit (danwei). These relationships were all constructed around the goal of siphoning grain surpluses from the countryside to the city in order to feed the developmental push. Social and productive life was “collectivized,” but it was never centralized or socialized, since life remained limited to autarkic and atomized local productive units. At the height of the system, migration (particularly urban-to-rural) was basically stagnant, aside from a few state-led industrial settlement campaigns.
Probably the most common point of confusion in this argument is the idea that a mode of production did not exist during the socialist developmental regime.[10] Understanding this point requires a quick clarification of the basic terms: a “mode of production” is when particular methods of production and reproduction are all united by a shared social “totality” capable of reproducing itself independent of the intentional intervention of any individual. So it is a set of general social relationships—think of things like the relationship between worker and boss or between emperor and peasant—including relationships with the non-human world, that are passed down from generation to generation and which determine how the production of goods and reproduction of the human species occur. Modes of production can be categorized according to the nature of these social relationships, which tend to define many aspects of everyday life well beyond the productive sphere. By definition, a mode of production is relatively stable over time, or at least has the clear capacity to reproduce itself over many generations.
When modes of production collapse or are overthrown, there is often a long period in which no mode of production is able to cohere. Instead, the social relations that once defined production are shattered and society scatters out into relatively small-scale, atomized and disjointed productive units that don’t have any set way of interacting with one another—or they are forcibly incorporated into the social relations of an invading society.[11] In the Chinese case, we argue that a slow process of local crisis and commercial growth, combined with competition, invasion and colonization from the rising capitalist system taking root in Europe and Japan, had led to a situation in which the decaying social relationships of the old imperial system (represented by the late Qing dynasty) were being overcome by the capitalist mode of production, evident in both domestic commercial activities and the pressure of foreign powers. At a key point in which both the decaying mode of production and the emergent one were both particularly weak (an extremely chaotic time colloquially understood as the “century of humiliation”), political forces emerged that sought to either spur on the incorporation of the territory into global capitalism (this was the program of both the Nationalists and the occupying Japanese) or to halt the transition and avert it (this was the program of the CCP).
Through successful revolution, the transition was effectively halted. Under the developmental regime, the competitive markets in labor, land and goods that had taken shape receded, decommodifying Chinese society to a great extent. While it is true that many urbanites (a small minority of the population) were “paid” in both “wages” and wage-like ration tickets, for the most part these were not set by a competitive market, but rather by state decree. Often, the “wage bill” was simply determined after the fact and written in a ledger without any money actually passing into the hands of the workers. More importantly: unlike the wage under capitalism, the money that was given to workers was not the primary means by which they acquired fundamental necessities. Only token rents were paid, with the state paying the majority of housing costs. When money was used to buy food, it was usually used alongside allotted grain tickets. Many enterprises also distributed additional locally harvested food for free to all members (for example: coastal enterprises often set up fishing teams). Overall, the ad hoc nature of the system meant that the exact methods differed substantially by place and time, making it difficult to generalize. But, even for the non-grain food that had “prices,” these prices were not set by competition between enterprises or food distributors, but were instead planning calculations based on quantity and scarcity, which were converted to monetary units after the fact. The main points are simply that: first, if you didn’t receive your wage, you weren’t subject to starvation or homelessness; and second, there was no market character behind any of these monetary exchanges, nor was there enough coherence to the system to accommodate any systematic bureaucratic competition over planning resources (as some argue was the case in the USSR).
Even if money was not required for subsistence, work was. The vast majority of people in China in this period worked on rural collectives, gaining workpoints (gongfen) for labor completed. But even these workpoints did not amount to a “wage,” market or not. Workpoints simply entitled one to receive a certain percentage of the total amount of goods produced by the collective, mainly grain. The exact methods by which workpoints were set varied by place and time. In certain cases, they were set collaboratively, in community meetings. In others, they were effectively just dictated by higher levels of government. Similarly, the exact relationship between workpoints and labor contribution differed. In certain times and places, they may have had a quantitative relation to labor time. Elsewhere, it was simply an indicator of whether or not someone was actively participating in collective labor in the village, graded only according to gender and age. While localities were encouraged by local cadres to meet (sometimes quite high) grain quotas, these quotas were not set by market competition, nor were there any real incentives to increase productivity beyond the quota.
Although the CCP proclaimed equality between men and women and in some ways improved women’s conditions, in other ways the socialist developmental regime merely adjusted the gendered division of labor into new but still highly unequal roles—especially in the countryside. This adjustment, championed as “women holding up half the sky,” was considered a necessary means for mobilizing the female workforce in the national drive for industrialization. It effectively amounted to a siphoning of additional labor from women, both in the form of recognized labor (allotted workpoints, with fewer points almost always assigned to women than men by the way tasks were categorized) in fields and factories and unrecognized labor (not allotted workpoints or otherwise socially acknowledged) in the form of housework, clothing production, etc. Though some of this labor was briefly socialized during the Great Leap Forward, the trend, over time, was for more and more work to fall back on the shoulders of women. This gradually weighed down gains that had been made in women’s lives after the revolution, even if some of these gains remained substantial (such as vastly expanded educational access).
Overall, however, the exact details of how local production was organized in this period tend to evade summary because of the amorphous character of the system. The only constant was the fact that grain was being extracted to fuel urban industrial centers, which required that peasants be fixed in place on the land through strict internal controls on migration. It is the amorphous and ad hoc character of production that indicates the lack of any totalizing mechanisms that spanned the entire country. While some forms of local competition certainly existed—particularly bureaucratic competition between some cadres in some places, but not as an effective structuring principle for the entire bureaucracy—they tended to either be suppressed or die off over time. In any case, the mere existence of scattered competitive activities does not make a system capitalist. Similarly, the extraction of surplus from the countryside in the form of grain, which implies the existence of something like a basic class divide, does not indicate a specifically capitalist class system. If these features were unique to capitalism, then we’d have to concede that the East Asian mainland had always been ruled by capitalist production, since it had vibrant local examples of commercial trade for millennia, alongside systematic taxation in grain designed to siphon surplus from the countryside into the imperial core. But these local commercial activities never grew to dictate the productive activities of the entire society. Similarly, the existence of a forcibly extracted surplus product is not the same as the existence of surplus value. Even compared to these previous polities, the socialist developmental regime saw far fewer markets and far less competition between productive units.
Under these conditions there was no law of value that could emerge to subordinate social reproduction to its dictates. There was no generalization of market relations, and thus no market imperative to produce more efficiently—a key dynamic of capitalism. But there were also no organic social relationships capable of generalizing across society and ensuring its reproduction (as had existed in the previous dynastic systems). This meant that, even though the transition to capitalism was halted, it was not effectively diverted toward a different mode of production. Instead, it got caught in a limbo where social relationships had shattered into small autarkies that had no established conventions for coordinating with one another. In such a condition, the CCP used all the resources at hand to force through coordination manually, establishing a system whereby the state’s meager administrative power was used to accomplish a few simple goals: siphoning grain from the countryside to urban productive units, funneling resources into key industrial projects, and building up the capacity for military defense against the continuing threat of global imperialism. The problem was that, because the system had no organic ability to produce totalizing social relationships to reproduce itself, it had to rely more and more on direct state interventions. Meanwhile, these interventions had to become more and more aggressive, since the state itself was subject to the same dampening effects, growing more immobile and less responsive over time (a process we call “ossification”). This was a major part of why the developmental regime collapsed.
Throughout this period, there were, of course, direct imperatives to produce more. It was only these state-led strategies of development that pushed forward the expansion of productive forces in general. We therefore use the term “developmental” to point out the very different dynamics of this regime compared to those of both capitalism and earlier social systems. It indicates that the state was primarily interested in an increase in absolute production of specific goods. In other words, the state wanted the production of more steel and more grain, but not the accumulation of surplus-value, as in capitalism. “Value” simply did not exist as the social form of wealth under the developmental regime.[12] The goal of absolute production was tied to international defense against capitalist powers and the USSR, and the interests of the nation-state stood above any possibility of a transition to communism. Meanwhile, China was not integrated into the global market. By the mid-1960s, even the minimal trade that had existed with the Soviet bloc had all but ceased. Central and regional planning (both as quotas and through set quantities that were post facto converted into “prices”), together with decentralized political command and mass mobilization campaigns, were used to push material developments. No stable incentive system guided industrial organization or new rounds of development and investment, even as much of the state ossified into a rigid bureaucracy. Chaotic fits and starts were the dominant tendency as a bricolage of makeshift responses were posed against an accumulation of myriad local crises. The result was that no mode of production fully cohered, and when the state began introducing new types of measures (including market-oriented ones) to save the regime from continuing shortages and popular unrest in the 1970s, those measures gradually took on a life of their own that would revive the capitalist transition. That transitional period is documented in detail in the second part of our economic history, “Red Dust.”
毛的中国不是共产主义国家吗？——常见中国问题解答系列
这是我们对中国相关的常见问题给出的简短共产主义回答。本期总结了我们期刊文章《高粱与钢铁》[13] 中的一些主要线索，它是我们中国经济历史上下三部的第一部。对本文中任何一个论点的细节感兴趣的读者，请查阅《高粱与钢铁》。
与本系列其它期相比，此回答稍长，更侧重于看似专业的话题，但是我们觉得，为了给前两期提供足够的背景，以及澄清我们作为共产主义者的立场（对比于中国共产党在不同的历史时刻以及中国在社会主义发展模式下的“共产主义”的形象），这是有必要的。和第二、第三期一样，区别于第一期，本回答是集体创作的，但也包含了一些中国成员与朋友的个人回答。
和以往一样，我们鼓励读者用其他格式把这些回答转发到各个平台。如果您利用这些材料设计了小册子或者信息图表，请发送一份给我们（邮箱：[email protected]），这样我们就可以留个存档，并且在社交媒体转发！
这个问题涉及到两个常见的误解。首先，“共产主义国家”自相矛盾：共产主义需要民族国家的终结，所以中国或者随便哪个国家不可能是漂浮在资本主义大海中的共产主义孤岛。这个措辞实际上源自冷战，当时美国出于地缘政治的利益关系，将“共产主义”与苏联和中国实际的社会系统相混淆。第二，试图将历史按照“伟人”名迹分期一般不是个好主意。但是这在编写中国历史中尤其普遍，一代人的群众革命热情被减缩成一个领袖的决策权。说到底，毛泽东的统治不是给中国与资本主义和全球共产运动之间变化的关系分段的最佳方式。在我们的中国经济史第一、第二部分里提出了另一个方式。所以，对这个问题的简单回答是：不，毛的中国并不是共产主义国家。
但是它不是共产主义革命吗？这难道不就意味着革命后建设的社会是“共产主义”的吗？
这些常见的追问需要一些更详细的历史：中国共产党的确在二十世纪初全球共产主义运动中出现，也可以说它或许能在一个超越了地方性的、短暂的无产阶级起义（比如1927年的上海或者1936年的巴塞罗那——都有中国共产主义者的参与）阶段的社会革命中发挥了正面作用。[14] 但是到了30年代末，面临日本、美国及之后苏联的直接威胁，中共已经开始将它共产主义的目的置于民族解放目的之下。党在1949年掌权后，继续偏重于建设中国民族国家，所谓建立共产主义的必要前驱物。这完全反转了世纪前期着重革命的全球性质的基本共产主义策略。但是它与俄罗斯和欧洲发生的事件合拍。在那些地方，国际革命的失败被合理化为一个建设“一国社会主义”的新战略。这个立场很快成为了所有与苏联站队的政党的立场。
然而，我们不能忘记，无论是苏联还是中国都从未自称已经实现了共产主义。在中国，50年代末的“大跃进”短暂地使“向共产主义过渡”的论调流行起来。这个过渡将从农村到处开展的集体化和社会实验开始。[15] 我们可以辩论此般过渡在那样的条件下是否可能，以及这些“共产主义”观念与我们自己的差别有多远，但是那些实验以三年的灾难告终，再也没有尝试过。接着在文革的群众动员阶段（1967–1968），一些参与者采取的行动（总罢工、夺取武器）、撰写的宣言指向一场共产主义革命的开始或者重生，但是即便是中共领导中的“左派”（包括毛）也因他们威胁国家力量谴责了这些”极左分子“，并以暴力镇压。[16]再者，没有一个参与文革的人认为他们身处于共产主义社会之中——即使有些人觉得一个共产主义者领导下的新革命正在出现。
这是困惑缘由的一部分：作为政治规划之名的“共产主义”常常被用来描述共产主义者的活动，包括他们历史上林林总总的党派和政治干预，包括成功的革命。但这和作为社会组织形式的“共产主义”是两码事。共产主义规划当然以建立共产主义作为目标，但这并不意味着它成功了。它显然没有成功，因为我们还生活在资本主义社会里。关键的是不能把共产主义者的存在与共产主义的存在相混淆。
那么，如果中国那时不是共产主义国家，它是什么呢？
1949年，在几十年的持久战之后，其间共产主义派系逐渐在撤离的日军和美国支持的国民党手中赢得更多的地盘，中共与支持者终于决定性地控制了大多数清朝曾经统领的疆域。要强调的是，这并不是一个违背民众意志的“专制”夺权。它确实是大众革命，深深地植根于中国的多数农民中，尤其是在人口较密集的汉族地区——但是在清朝边疆附近的少数民族人口中，支持程度则参差不齐。胜利后最初的几年花在了统一国家和重建生产上，常常在新得的地域上使用继承下来的任何行政机制——包括与南方城市里遗留的资本家合作，采用民国政府或甚至是日本殖民行政人员建立的计划机制。
很快，这些新行政系统接受了抵抗美国入侵韩国的考验。到了1956年，战时动员已被取代，我们所说的“社会主义发展模式”的早期元素开始在全国范围内普及。这个制度打断了中国至少从19世纪就开始了的资本主义过渡，但是它未能贯通为一个独特的生产方式（参见下文）并很快开始在自身的矛盾和持续的国际压力下崩溃。到了70年代，党的领导人（即包括毛也包括看似对立派系的领导）在农民、工人和学生的抗议和持续增长的不满之下，启动了一系列的外交与面向市场的举措，意在挽救发展模式，但它们很快就不受控制了。这些改革将启动国内资本主义发展浪潮，同时慢慢地将中国与国际市场相联接。总之，这些势头重启了革命推迟的资本主义过渡并将中国被国际价值规律所支配。[17]
什么是共产主义？
在简要介绍社会主义发展模式，并阐明它与共产主义的区别前，我们想强调一点：作为一个集体项目，我们对很多细节上的观点或许不一致。在这里，我们觉得把中国成员和朋友的声音放在前面很重要，然后再进行一个更宽泛的回顾，所以，我们首先呈现一些对“毛的中国不是共产主义国家吗？”的个人回应（他们也回答了本系列的第一个问题）：
凯旋：不是。
肖慧：要看你怎么界定共产主义，但是我会说不是。
睿睿：“共产主义国家”这个讲法就是自相矛盾的吧……我认为毛时代是消除了私有制，建立了官僚掌权的公有制经济为主体国家。
程阳：严格来说，毛泽东时候的中国没有自认为是共产主义过，不过也可以说，那时候的领导层是按照当时现存的模范，（一部分）真心希望推动他们认为的共产主义，只是经验和教训都不足。
千寻：我的观点是，毛是二十世纪诸多失败的以共产主义为方向的政权实验之一——我想还没有过任何一个存在过的理想的共产主义政权。毛的政权就像其它那些政权一样（当然程度非常不同），有过在性别/阶级/地域（也许还短暂地包括民族）等平等再分配的一些成就，也有官僚等级/城市农村剪刀差的种种与理念相悖的。
老牛：严格意义上来说，中国其实没有说过是共产主义的国家，而是说的是需要更多的“继续革命”，在无产阶级的专政下限制资产阶级的法权，还有一系列的斗争之后我们才能够进入共产主义的社会……当然在美国人的眼里面，或者在苏联人的眼里面，可能会觉得它是一个共产主义国家，在这种地缘政治的影响下，它会贴上这样的标签。
咸鱼：取决于你的定义。如果你用马克思在《德意志意识形态》里的定义“消灭现存状况的现实的运动”，那么不是，因为共产主义不是一个可以确立的状况，更不是政体。如果你用《共产党宣言》里的“一个联合体，在那里，每个人的自由发展是一切人的自由发展的条件”，那么不是，因为每个人未得以自由发展。如果一个国家是不是共产主义社会按照它的领导说了算，说是就是，说不是就不是，那么不是，因为中共从没号称中国是共产主义社会。哎，奇怪，说到底好像无论用什么定义，答案都是否定的。
这里反复提到的一点是即便中共也从未号称中国是共产主义国家，只是说它在“建设社会主义”，作为最终向共产主义过渡的前提条件。并且，中共对共产主义的概要描述与我们自己的理解并不一致，但是也要注意这些描述随着时间的推移越来越罕见（实际上，这点对任何共产主义的提及都成立）。党的最新宪章（修订于2017年）完全不给共产主义下定义，但是它1921年的成立宣言开头就给了一个清晰的定义，分三个部分：
- 对于经济方面的见解：共产主义者主张将生产工具——机器工厂，原料，土地，交通机关等——收归社会共有，社会共用。要是生产工具收归共有共用了，私有财产和赁银制度就自然跟着消灭。社会上个人剥夺个人的现状也会绝对没有，因为造成剥夺的根源的东西——剩余价值——再也没有地方可以取得了。
- 对于政治方面的见解：共产主义者主张废除政权，如同现在所有的国家机关和政府，是当然不能存在的。因为政权，军队和法庭是保护少数人的利益，压迫多数劳动群众的；在生产工具为少数人私有的时候，这是很必要的。要是私有财产和赁银制度都废除了，政权，军队和法庭当然就用不着了。
- 对于社会方面的见解：共产主义者要使社会上只有一个阶级（就是没有阶级）——就是劳动群众的阶级。私有财产是现社会中一切特殊势力的根源，要是没有人能够聚集他的财产了，那就没有特殊阶级了。[18]
这与当下共产主义者常用的各种定义基本一致，与马克思、恩格斯等19世纪共产主义者一致，也和克鲁泡特金等早期无政府共产主义者一致，也与何殷震、刘师培（两位最早将马恩翻译成中文的人）等最早的中国共产主义者[19]一致。通常，共产主义的定义都是否定性的，主要描述共产主义不是什么，然后提出少许肯定性的指引，强调自由联合、普世社会支持和对生产的集体、合作控制。比如，在《共产党宣言》中，马克思和恩格斯写道：
如果说无产阶级在反对资产阶级的斗争中一定要联合为阶级，如果说它通过革命使自己成为统治阶级，并以统治阶级的资格用暴力消灭旧的生产关系，那么它在消灭这种生产关系的同时，也就消灭了阶级对立和阶级本身的存在条件，从而消灭了它自己这个阶级的统治。代替那存在着阶级和阶级对立的资产阶级旧社会的，将是这样一个联合体，在那里，每个人的自由发展是一切人的自由发展的条件。
另一个流行的表述在这两段引言中没有出现，在19世纪法国共产主义者圈子里很火，也被马克思信奉：“各尽所能、各取所需”。它同样被中共采用，“按需分配”成了对共产主义的简略定义，教给了学童。对21世纪共产主义者而言，这个原则常常用托马斯·闵采尔16世纪的拉丁口号omnia sunt communia（万物为公），或者用英文everything for everyone（一切归于一切人）来表达。[20]
当下对共产主义的认识与闵采尔、马克思或者中共的区别主要在于，如今对阶级的消灭，会更明确地加上、并以类似方式强调对所有人类的社会分离（如性别、种族等）的消灭，以及对社会与非人类世界的隔阂的消除。这些想法实际上借鉴了马克思和其它早期共产主义者的成果，他们有时观察到这些分离充当了资本主义社会本质特征，但没能持续阐明消灭这些分离是共产主义革命的必要组件。
所以，各式各样的共产主义者，甚至如中共这样的前共产主义组织，在“共产主义社会”的定义上有大致的共识，也没有人声称中国曾是共产主义国家——除非意思是中国被一个曾把共产主义作为最终目标（而且现在极少提及）的党统治着。相反，自1950年代中期起，中共称中国是“社会主义”国家，并且社会主义是共产主义道路上必经的“过渡阶段”，在此期间经济发展是重中之重。对社会主义和这个“阶段”的本质的确切理解已随着时间的推移而变化。如今，中国官方表示中国仍处于“社会主义初级阶段”，存在着一个“社会主义商品经济”，将资本主义生产与国家所有制相结合。[21]当这个论点在70年代末80年代初最早被提出时，它是基于对市场动机仍被克制的经济的观察。然而，随着年岁的推移，这一点不再成立。今天，价值规律在中国所有的生活领域（包括国家领域）中发挥作用。
我们已经在这个问答系列的第二、第三部分中讨论了对“社会主义”的理解以及中国经济当下的特征。在这里，我们只想强调两点：一、社会主义发展模式很多年前就停止了；二、现在看来，社会主义发展模式并没有发挥向共产主义过渡的作用。[22]
社会主义发展模式如果不是共产主义，那它到底是什么？
在我们关于那个时期的经济史《高粱与钢铁》中，我们详细地论证了这一观点。接下来，我们会给出一个简化的梗概。1950年代到60年代，我们所说的中国“社会主义发展模式”取代了共产主义规划，其间为了建设国民经济而牺牲得越来越多。“模式”一词强调了我们的观点，即各种行政机制与生产方法从未贯通成一个生产方式，而是代表了如此生产方式终将崩溃。它的各个要素常常脱节，只是在国家恒常（也恒常加强）的努力下才勉强合作。比如，农村农业经济与城市工业经济在这一时期愈发地相互分离。它们实际上成了地方的自给自足体，意思是无需依赖很多外部支持就能自我再生产的封闭空间。这些单元之间的整合完全依赖于国家建制，比如国家通过垄断粮食购销来为工业企业的工人提供口粮；除却最基本的消费与生产品以外，一切商品的配给、计划划定系统；户口系统，以及城市的单位。这些关系的构建都围绕一个目的：让城市从农村吸取粮食剩余，补给发展的驱动。社会与生产生活被“集体化”，但是从来没有被中心化、或社会化，因为生活始终局限于自给自足的、原子化的地方生产单元中。这个系统最盛行的时候，人口迁徙（尤其是从城市到农村）基本停滞，一些国家推动的工业定居运动除外。
对这个论点最常见的混淆或许是这一点：社会主义发展模式下不存在一个生产方式。[23]要理解它前，有必要简短澄清一些基本术语：“生产方式”意味着特定的生产与再生产方法被一个共有的社会“总体”所统一，这个总体能够不受任何个体的刻意干预而实现自我再生产。所以它是一般的社会关系的一个集合——像工人与老板之间，或者皇帝和农民之间的关系——包括与非人类世界的关系。这些关系代代相传，决定了物品如何生产，人类物种如何再生产。生产方式可以依照这些社会关系的性质分类，而这些关系所划定的日常生活的许多方面常常超出了生产领域。按照定义，生产方式在一段时间内相对稳定，或者至少在许多代的时间内有明确的能力实现自我再生产。
当生产方式崩溃或被推翻时，常常有很长一段时间，没有一个生产方式能够贯通。相反，曾经决定了生产的那些社会关系被砸烂，社会支离破碎，成为相对小规模的、原子化的、脱节的生产单元，它们没有固定的交往方式——或者它们被强行纳入入侵中社会的社会关系中。[24]在中国这个案例里，我们认为，地方危机和商业增长的缓慢进程，加上上升中的扎根于欧洲与日本的资本主义系统所带来的竞争、侵略与殖民化，导致了这么一个局面：旧帝制（以晚清为代表）衰败的社会关系正被资本主义生产方式超越，这在国内的商业活动与外国势力的压力之中暴露无遗。在衰败和新兴的生产方式都特别软弱的关键节点（这个极其混乱的时期被通俗理解为“丧权辱国的百年”），出现了许多政治力量，要么试图成为全境融入全球资本主义的推手（这是国民党和侵华日军的纲领），要么试图中止或逆转这个过渡（这是中共的纲领）。
由于革命成功，这个过渡实际上被中止了。在发展模式之下，已经成型的劳动、土地和商品竞争市场倒退了，在相当程度上将中国社会去商品化了。虽然许多城市人（占人口少数）确实拿到了“工资”和类似工资的粮票，但是大多时候设定这些东西的不是竞争市场，而是国家的法令。“工资单”常常是事后决定的，入账的时候并没有钱真正流入工人的手中。更重要的是，和资本主义的工资不同，给予工人的钱不是他们获得基本必需品的主要手段。他们只用支付象征性的房租，住房成本的大头由国家支付。用钱买食物的时候，一般要连同粮票一起使用。许多企业还额外免费分配本地收成的食物给所有员工（比如沿海的企业常常设立捕鱼小队）。总的来说，这个系统的特事特办性质意味着，确切的方法会因时因地产生巨大的变化，使其难以一般化。但是，连那些有“价格”的非粮食商品，设定价格的也不是企业或食品分销商的竞争，而是根据数量和稀缺进行的计划运算，然后事后换算成货币单位。其重点在于：第一，如果你拿不到工资，你也不会挨饿或无家可归；第二，任何这些货币交换的背后不存在市场的性质，这个系统也没有足够的连贯性，可以容纳任何争夺计划资源的系统性官僚竞争（某些观点认为这是苏联的情况）。
即使货币不是生计的必需，工作仍是。这一时期中国的绝大部分人在农村集体里工作，用完成的劳动挣工分，可是不论市场存在与否，这些工分都不能算作“工资”，只不过让人可以获得集体生产的商品总量之中的某个百分比，当中粮食为主。设定工分的确切方法因时因地而异。在某些情况下是通过集体会议协作设定的，而在其他情况下，实际上是上级政府宣示下来的。同样，工分和劳动贡献之间的确切关系也有不同，在某些时间和地方，可能与劳动时间存在量的关系，而其他时候，不过是衡量某人是否积极参与村里的集体劳动的一个指标，评分的标准不过是性别和年龄。虽然地方干部鼓励当地人达成（有时候相当高的）粮食指标，但是这些指标不是通过市场竞争设定的，也不存在增加生产率超出配额的真正动力。
虽然中共宣布男女平等，这在某些方面改善了妇女的条件，但社会主义发展模式在其他方面仅仅将性别化的劳动分工调整为新的但依然高度不平等的角色——特别是在农村。这种调整被歌颂为“妇女能顶半边天”，被认为是动员女性劳动力大军投身国家工业化驱动的必要手段，实际上被用来向妇女吸取更多的劳动。吸取的形式既有农田与工厂里（能分工分的）被承认的劳动（由于任务的分类使然，妇女分得的工分几乎总是比男性少），也有家务、制衣等形式的（不能分工分的）不被承认的劳动（或不被社会普遍认同）。虽然这些劳动有一些在大跃进期间被短暂社会化，但随着时间推移，这种趋势变成了越来越多工作落到妇女的肩上。这逐渐削弱了革命之后妇女生活所取得的利益，虽然其中仍存有一些实质性的利益（比如大幅扩大的受教育渠道）。
然而总的来说，因为这个系统的无定形性质使然，这一时期的地方生产如何被组织起来的确切细节往往鲜有概论。唯一恒常的，是粮食被抽取去供给城市工业中心，而这需要通过对人口迁徙进行严厉的内部管控，将农民固定在土地上。正是生产的无定形和特事特办性质，表明了整个国家缺乏一个总体化的机制。虽然某种形式的地方竞争确实存在——特别是某些地方的某些干部进行的官僚竞争，但这不是整个官僚制有效的结构性原则——但随着时间推移，这些形式要么被镇压，要么消亡。无论如何，一个系统仅仅存在零碎的竞争活动是不足以具备资本主义性质的。同样，以粮食的形式从农村抽取剩余，这暗示存在着类似基本阶级差距的东西，却不能说明存在一个特定的资本家阶级系统。如果这些特点是资本主义所特有的，那我们只能退让，承认东亚大陆一直被资本主义生产所统治，因为它有着上千年商业贸易这个鲜活的地方性个例，并且还有系统性的征粮制，设计目的就是从农村抽取剩余到帝国的核心。但是，这些地方性的商业活动从来没有壮大到界定整个社会的生产活动的程度。同样，存在强行抽取剩余产品，不等于存在剩余价值。即使和此前的政体作对比，社会主义发展模式的市场和生产单元之间的竞争都少得多。
在这些条件之下，没有能够站出来使社会再生产听命于己的价值规律。没有市场关系的一般化，因此也没有增加生产效率的市场动机——这是资本主义的关键动力。但是，也没有有机的社会关系能够在社会范围一般化，从而保证自我的再生产（这在此前的动力系统里存在过）。这意味着，资本主义过渡即使被中止了，实际上也没有转移到另一种生产方式。相反，过渡陷入了窘境，这里的社会关系支离破碎，成为小型的自给自足体，没有互相建立协调的传统。在这种条件下，中共使用了手头上所有资源，人工强行协调，所建立的系统是利用国家贫瘠的行政力量达成少数简单的目标：从农村吸取粮食到城市的生产单元，将资源输送到关键的工业规划，面对持续的全球帝国主义威胁而建立军事防御能力。问题是，因为这个系统没有有机的能力去生产总体化的社会关系并实现自我再生产，所以它不得不越来越依赖直接的国家干预。与此同时，这些干预不得不变得越来越极端，因为国家本身也受制于这个萎靡的效应，随着时间推移变得越来越笨拙，反应越来越迟钝（我们称这个过程为“僵化”）。这是发展模式崩溃的一大原因。
当然，这个时期前后有增加生产的直接动机。只有这些国家引领的发展战略在一般层面上推进了生产力的扩大。所以我们用了“发展”一词，目的是指出这个模式的动力与资本主义和此前的社会系统都有不同。这个词说明，国家的主要利益点是增加特定商品的绝对生产。换句话说，国家希望生产更多钢铁和粮食，而不是像资本主义那样积累剩余价值。“价值”在发展模式之下就不是作为财富的社会形式而存在的。[25]绝对生产的目标与针对资本主义势力和苏联的国际防御捆绑在一起，民族国家的利益凌驾于任何共产主义过渡的可能性之上。与此同时，中国没有被融入到全球市场。到1960年代中期，连此前存在的和苏联阵营的最低限度贸易也近乎归零。中央和地区计划（既有配额，也有事后转化为“价格”的数量指标），加上去中心化的政治挂帅和群众动员运动，都被用来推动物质发展。即便国家大部分僵化为坏死的官僚制，也没有稳定的激励系统来指引工业组织和新一轮的发展与投资。为了应对各式地方危机的积累而出现应急措施的大杂烩，于是今天打鱼明天晒网的乱局成了主流的趋势。结果，没有一种生产方式能够充分贯通，当国家在1970年代开始引入新型措施（包括市场导向的措施），挽救发展模式于持续的短缺和民众动乱之中的时候，这些措施逐渐具备了自己的生命，复活了资本主义过渡。这个过渡时期在我们经济史的第二部分《红尘》里有翔尽的记录。
[1] On the Shanghai uprising of 1927, see Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927-1937 by Patricia Stranhan (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Shanghai on strike: The politics of Chinese labor by Elizabeth Perry (Stanford University Press, 1995); The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold Isaacs (1938 edition online, revised 2010 edition from Haymarket); and The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927 by Jean Chesneaux (Stanford University Press, 1968). On Chinese participation in the Spanish Civil War, see The Call of Spain: Chinese Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) by Nancy Tsou and Len Tsou (Renjian Chubanshe, 2001), reviewed here: “Duo shines new light on role of Chinese volunteers in Spanish Civil War” (China Daily, 2021).
[2] See our account of the Great Leap Forward in “Sorghum & Steel,” Chuang journal, issue 1: Dead Generations (2016). For a detailed case study, see “A Commune in Sichuan?”
[3] See our account of these communist actions and writings in “Sorghum & Steel” part IV: “Ruination.” This makes use of detailed archival research and interviews with participants by Yiching Wu in Cultural Revolution at the Margins (Harvard University Press, 2014).
[4] This transition process is documented in our article “Red Dust,” Chuang, Issue 2: Frontiers. Note that by “law of value” we refer not to Ricardo’s “labor theory of value,” but to the capitalist value-form’s subordination of the world as a whole to capital’s need for endless self-expansion, such that even political parties attempting to regulate the market for some social or ecological ideal end up yielding to capital’s authority if they want to mitigate economic disaster. It’s not parties or legislators that make the ultimate laws of our world, but value. This understanding of the value-form is explained throughout “Red Dust,” but we also recommend Michael Heinrich’s Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, recently translated into Chinese as 政治经济学批判：马克思《资本论》导论（著：米夏埃尔·海因里希，译：张义修 、房誉），南京大学出版社，2021。
[5] Translated from 中国共产党宣言 (composed in November 1920, submitted to the Comintern in 1921), from 《中共中央文件选集》 第一册（1921—1925年）.
[6] Until the 1920s, the Chinese term for “communist” (共产主义者) referred by default to anarcho-communists, since they were the first to embrace that term and translate texts by Japanese and European anarchists and Marxists into Chinese. Several founders of the CCP were anarchists, and the distinction between anarcho-communism and Marxism was not clarified until a series of debates throughout the 1920s, documented in Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution by Arif Dirlik (University of California Press, 1993).
[7] In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate that the modern concept of communism, including the notion that individual freedom can only be achieved through social equality, also owes a great deal to European encounters with indigenous American societies since the 17th century, and subsequent discussions about their implications for the transformation of European society along the lines already proposed by earlier proto-communists of the Radical Reformation such as Müntzer. “Since the early nineteenth century, there have been lively debates about whether there was ever a thing that might legitimately referred to as ‘primitive communism’ [where] ‘communism’ always refers to communal ownership, particularly of productive resources.” While many indigenous American societies were ambiguous in this regard, combining communal with individual ownership or switching back and forth over time, most did exemplify “the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’”—an arrangement that “guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life—or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom” (2021, pages 47-48).
[8] Though Mao is often credited with coining the term, this idea was not developed until the late 1970s and early 1980s, in a series of ideological debates within the Party. Xue Muqiao is often credited with being the first to systematically theorize the “primary stage of socialism” in his book China’s Socialist Economy, first published in 1979 and then substantially revised in 1983 to account for the many changes that had occurred in the intervening years.
[9] We don’t, however, turn around and take the opposite position, arguing that socialism was merely part of China’s long and tortuous transition to capitalism. This is an equally deterministic argument that is inconsistent with a communist approach to history. It also contradicts many of the evident facts about the nature of the socialist developmental regime, which was unstable and doomed to be replaced—if not by capitalism then by a global communist revolution (in which militant Chinese workers and even some CCP members might have played a role), or some other social formation—but it was only through a series of historical contingencies that the transition played out as it did.
[10] Sometimes, this confusion is caused a minor definitional issue where people think that “mode” just refers to any “way” of producing things. But for Marx and communist thinkers more generally, the term “mode of production” has always had a more specific meaning and should not be confused with the concrete methods of production.
[11] This doesn’t mean that all seemingly small-scale or local societies have no mode of production, however. The key thing is whether or not there are prevailing, “total” social relationships that define the way that humans relate with one another and with the non-human world to produce goods. The argument here is deeply influenced by the work of the communist historian Jairus Banaji, whose book Theory as History covers the debates on the mode of production in extensive detail. Similarly, the theoretical framework was informed by current scholarship on the nature and extent of the feudal mode of production in the European Middle Ages.
[12] This also means that the system was not “state capitalist,” since it was not “capitalist” in the first place. Others might argue that there existed a distorted or degenerated form of value, insofar as the developmental drive was induced by defensive geopolitical conflict with the capitalist world (and, later, with the USSR as well). But this is simply to say that areas not yet subsumed into capitalism feel its pressure. On the one hand, the point is mundane. On the other, it muddies analytic clarity about the nature and pace of the transition to capitalism since it implies that a society becomes capitalist as soon as it begins to feel any pressure from external commercial interests.
[13] 《高粱与钢铁》中文译版大概会在2023年发表于《闯》网中文译版页，期间可以先读英文原文：“Sorghum & Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China,” Chuang 1: Dead Generations (2016).
[14] 关于1927年的上海起义，见 Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927-1937 by Patricia Stranhan (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Shanghai on strike: The politics of Chinese labor by Elizabeth Perry (Stanford University Press, 1995)（中译本为裴宜理，《上海罢工：中国工人政治研究》，江苏人民出版社，2001）; The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold Isaacs (1938 edition online, revised 2010 edition from Haymarket)（中译本为伊罗生，《中国革命的悲剧》）; 以及The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927 by Jean Chesneaux (Stanford University Press, 1968). 关于中国参加西班牙内战，见倪慧如与邹宁远的《橄欖桂冠的召喚：參加西班牙內戰的中國人(1936-1939)》，人間出版社，2001或《当世界年轻的时候：参加西班牙内战的中国人(1936-1939)》，广西师范大学出版社，2013. 书评见 “Duo shines new light on role of Chinese volunteers in Spanish Civil War” (China Daily, 2021).
[15] 见我们在《高粱与钢铁》，《闯》第一期：Dead Generations (2016)里关于大跃进的论述。详细的案例研究见〈蜀中建公社？——由《紅土地》引發的思考〉（英文原文：“A Commune in Sichuan?”）。
[16] 见我们在《高粱与钢铁》第四部分“Ruination”里关于这些共产主义行动与写作的论述。该论述利用了吴一庆详细的档案研究和访谈，见Yiching Wu in Cultural Revolution at the Margins (Harvard University Press, 2014).
[17] 这个过渡过程在《闯》第二期《红尘》里有翔尽记录。注意我们说的“价值规律”所指不是李嘉图的“劳动价值论”，而是资本主义的价值形式支配整个世界，满足资本无穷的自我扩张的需要，以至于连出于某种社会或生态理想而试图监管市场的政党，它们如果想平息经济灾难，最后也只能向资本的权威屈服。构成我们世界的最终规律的不是政党或立法者，而是价值。《红尘》全文解释了如此对价值形式的理解，不过我们还推荐最近翻译成中文的政治经济学批判：马克思《资本论》导论（著：米夏埃尔·海因里希，译：张义修 、房誉），南京大学出版社，2021。
[19] 在1920年代以前，“共产主义者”默认指无政府共产主义者，因为他们是第一批接受这个提法、将日本与欧洲的无政府主义者与马克思主义者的文本翻译成中文的人。中共的建党人当中有一些是无政府主义者，而无政府共产主义和马克思主义之间的区分，要到1920年代前后的一系列争论之后才有明确，相关记录见《中国革命中的无政府主义》阿里夫·德里克 著，孙宜学 译（广西师范大学出版社，2006）。
[20] 大卫·格雷伯（David Graeber）和大卫·温格罗（David Wengrow）在The Dawn of Everything（《万物的黎明》）里表明，现代的共产主义概念，包括个人自由只能通过社会平等实现的观点，相当程度要归功于17世纪以来欧洲人与美洲印第安诸社会的遭遇。此后讨论这些遭遇如何影响了欧洲社会转型的时候，这些讨论延续了更早的激进宗教改革派当中的早期共产主义者思路，比如闵采尔：“19世纪初以来，对于是否存在这么一个可以合理地称作‘原始共产主义’的东西一直有激烈争论，这里的共产主义总是指公有制，特别是生产资源公有制”。虽然许多美州印第安社会在这个方面模棱两可，把公有制和个人所有制结合起来或者假以时日不断摇摆，但大多还是成了“‘各尽所能各取所需’原处含义”的典范，“互相保证了通往自主生活的手段，或者说至少保证了没有人会受支配。我们要讨论共产主义的话，它并非存在于个人自由的对立，而是支持之中。” (2021, pages 47-48).
[21] 虽然这个词的出现往往被归功于毛，其实这个想法要到1970年代末和1980年代初，才在党内一系列意识形态论战之中发展而成。人们往往将“社会主义初级阶段”的系统性理论化归功于薛暮桥，他的《中国社会主义经济问题研究》初版于1979年，1983年大幅修订后再版，涉及了前些年发生了的许多变化。
[22] 然而，我们没有转向相反的立场，以为社会主义不过是中国漫长动荡的资本主义过渡中的一环。这样一种论点同样是决定论的，不符合共产主义者的历史路径，并且与许多关于社会主义发展模式性质的明显事实相悖。这种模式并不稳定，注定要被替代——替代它的若不是资本主义，就是全球的共产主义革命（中国工人，甚至一些中共党员在其中可能能够发挥作用），又或者其他某种社会构成——但是，这种过渡只能通过一系列历史偶然，才能成为今天的样子。
[23] 有时候，这种混淆是由一个定义上的小问题引发的，以为生产“方式”只不过是生产东西的所有“方式”。但是对马克思和更广泛的共产主义思想家来说，“生产方式”一词一直具备更特定的含义，不能混淆为具体的生产方法。
[24] 然而，这不意味着一切表面小规模或地方性的社会都没有生产方式。关键在于，是否存在压倒性的“总体”社会关系去界定人类生产产品的时候如何互相联系，如何与非人类世界联系。此处的论点受到共产主义历史学家贾留斯·巴纳吉（Jairus Banaji）的深远影响，他的《作为历史的理论》（Theory as History）一书翔尽涵盖了关于生产方式的争论。同样，当代学者在论述欧洲中世纪的封建生产方式性质与程度的时候，也承认了这个理论框架。
[25] 这也意味着，这个系统不是“国家资本主义”，因为它始终都没有资本主义的基本特点。其他人可能会认为，与资本主义世界（随后还包括苏联）发生防御性的地缘冲突能够推演出发展的驱动，由此来看存在某种扭曲或退化的价值形式。但这不过是在说，尚未从属于资本主义的地区感受到它的压力。一方面，这种论点流于世俗，另一方面给分析资本主义过渡的性质与速度所应有的清晰搅了浑水，因为这样做是在暗示，一个社会一旦开始感受到外部商业利益的压力，就变成资本主义的了。
