But they engage in massive censorship among other issues and I just can’t see how there can be a democracy (which I consider the most important component to make something socialist) with that degree of control
Maybe they do, maybe that’s mostly the propaganda we’re fed. I’m sure that at least some of the “censorship” is the Chinese State keeping foreign capitalist enterprises from dominating China’s indigenous internet.
The state has control over all the means of production in the country and I believe it uses it for its own benefit.
I do think that is predominant (though there are also worker co-ops & individual projects). If China is a democratic socialist state, then the “it” in “its own benefit” is largely the working class. This is in contrast with a bourgeois democracy like the US, where the “it” is largely the capitalist class. Our votes are somewhat effective when they don’t conflict with the capitalists, but otherwise not so much. We get fed a lot of propaganda about socialist states having an authoritarian “ruling class,” analogous to our capitalist class, living high on the hog at the expense of the people, but is that really so, or is it projection?
I guess I’m just an anti-authoritarian first […] I’ve always been more inspired by anarchist philosophy and go by Libertarian-socialist if forced to pick a name.
Quite understandable: I came from that place. It took a lot of convincing, because my heels were pretty dug in to a Noam Chomsky/Mark Fisher position. I think one of the quicker/easier ways to seeing arguments on why this position has never and can never succeed, and why the “authoritarianism” of communism has succeeded and is a necessary step on the path to socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. It’s a short book and as such doesn’t—on its own—provide a whole lot of backing evidence; it’s a jumping-off point for further inquiry.