Transition Without Transformation

On Socialist Transition Theory

Below is a response to popular voices (RevolutionaryThot, MochaYappuccino, RedPen, Madeline Pendleton, the Deprogram/Second Thought) regarding what socialism and socialist transition are, which they tie implicitly and explicitly to the Chinese experience post-1976.

These arguments tend to share a common structure: critique is reframed as moralism rather than analysis, dissent is collapsed into accusations of ultra-left purity fetishization, and the burden is shifted such that criticism is dismissed unless it presents a fully realized alternative in advance, ignoring the myriad historic and ongoing revolutionary struggles which have added to our body of knowledge in the past hundred years and up to today.

---

---

A common but unscientific position is to reduce socialism to developing productive forces under state control, treating markets as neutral tools. This detaches relations of production and class struggle from the transition, opening the door to capitalist restoration.

The claim is simple: the productive forces determine everything. Build first, relations follow. Transforming the relations of production is assumed to occur automatically at a later stage.

But Marx’s actual formulation is contradictory, not linear: “At a certain stage [...] the material productive forces [...] come into conflict with the existing relations of production [...] Then begins an era of social revolution.”¹

Relations of production are not something you adjust after development. They are the foundation to be transformed from the beginning of the socialist transition and continuously advanced alongside any development of productive forces. The question is not how much is produced, but rather what kind of social relations are doing the producing. And whether those relations are being deepened or eroded through the process of development itself.

Markets do not cease to be capitalist simply because the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (DotP) holds power; rather, they become a contradictory terrain within that dictatorship, a site of class struggle whose outcome is not guaranteed. This does not mean that socialist transition consists in the immediate abolition of all commodity exchange nor does it deny the necessity of transitional measures under conditions of scarcity and uneven development. Lenin’s point is that where capitalist relations persist, they must be recognized and subjected to conscious struggle, restriction, and transformation.

For Marx as well, exchange is never a neutral mechanism. Marx clearly states that forms of exchange are forms of social relations.² Markets are not neutral tools, they are relations in motion, processes that organize production and, over time, differentiate classes via the accumulation of value. This is why neither formal ownership nor material outcomes can serve as decisive criteria. Both obscure the underlying question.

The issue is not who formally owns enterprises or means of production, nor the quantity and quality of material outcomes, but how production is actually organized and reproduced. We know the reproduction of the relations of production occurs through institutions and practices, which Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), not through legal ownership. This reproduction is not merely economic. The material need for consumption, security, and social stability normalizes and reproduces existing relations. In other words, material outcomes within an existing system bind people to existing relations. They make existing relations feel natural, necessary, and desirable regardless of their underlying character.³

If production is organized through the (capitalist) logic of markets, profit, wage labor, and competition, then capitalist relations are reproduced regardless of whether ownership is in the hands of private capital or state-held. State ownership and planning do not, in themselves, determine class character. State ownership and planning can coexist with, and even facilitate, the reproduction of capitalist relations. State direction over capital does not abolish capitalist relations because production remains governed by the law of value, regardless of legal ownership or juridical form.

Is this merely theoretical speculation? No. It is confirmed by historical experience. Post-Mao reforms (and the documented positions & efforts at reform of the anti-Mao clique well before Mao’s death) were directed at activities such as replacing permanent workers with contract labor, dismantling collective guarantees, and reintroducing profit as the regulator of production.⁴ These changes were justified in the name of “developing productive forces,” but what was transformed was not just output, but the relations of production themselves.

This transformation can be observed concretely by comparing the organization of production before and after the reforms. For instance, under Mao, large sections of agriculture were organized through communes, which abolished private landholding and subordinated production to collective planning. In industry, the “iron rice bowl” system guaranteed stable employment and collectively guaranteed basic needs. Production units were embedded within broader social structures that linked workers’ livelihoods to collective institutions rather than primarily to market competition.⁵

Following the reforms, these relations were systematically dismantled. The Household Responsibility System replaced collective farming with household-based production tied to market exchange, with the vast majority of rural households adopting it by the early 1980s. At the same time, state-owned enterprises were reorganized through contract labor systems, wage differentiation tied to productivity, and expanded managerial autonomy over output and pricing.⁶^,⁷

This transformation is reflected not only in communal agricultural policy but in the formal structure of labor relations themselves. Employment increasingly took the form of contractual wage labor: workers entered into formally voluntary agreements specifying wages, conditions, and duration, which could be terminated by either party under defined conditions. Employment was no longer guaranteed, but contingent, and mediated through contracts rather than secured through collective institutions.⁸

In what meaningful way does this differ from generalized wage labor under capitalism? Particularly when contrasted with the system of collectively guaranteed employment and basic needs that existed prior to Mao’s death.

This was not merely an increase in output or efficiency. It marked a shift from collectively mediated production toward production governed by market dependence, profit incentives, and differentiated access to the means of subsistence. The result was the re-emergence of class differentiation and growing inequality, alongside China’s deeper integration into global capitalist markets. In other words, what changed was not only the level of development, but the underlying relations through which that development occurred.

As Mao says, “Our basic task has changed from unfettering the productive forces to protecting and expanding them in the context of the new relations of production.”⁹ The task is not simply expanding the productive forces, but transforming and continually defending the new relations that make the process of socialist development possible. When development is made the primary criterion and relations are treated as secondary, that contradiction resolves in the opposite direction: capitalist relations reassert themselves through the very process meant to overcome them.

The DotP is not a guarantee that capitalist relations cannot re-emerge. It is merely the political form through which the proletariat struggles to transform and suppress capitalist relations. If the relations of production are not revolutionized, then the material processes of production will reproduce class differentiation inside the socialist state itself. Hence the need for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to reform, revise, or recreate the existing capitalist ISAs, transforming them into socialist ISAs which will reproduce robust, resilient, socialist relations of production. Self-reproducing socialist relations eventually lead to the withering away of the DotP.¹⁰

A scientific socialist does not rest on abstract claims that a society is “on the way” to socialism, nor reduce this disagreement to a question of timelines, formal state ownership, or differing perspectives on how fast socialism develops. Nor does a scientific analysis defer to national context or self-description. Class character is not determined by what a state calls itself, nor by who governs it, but by the relations it reproduces.

This confusion becomes clear in appeals to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which are often used to justify the neutrality of markets. Appeals to the NEP argue that markets are not capitalist, misreading the purpose of the NEP. Lenin says explicitly “Exchange is freedom of trade; it is capitalism.”¹¹ The reintroduction of market exchange was not proof that markets are neutral, but recognition that capitalism had re-emerged within the transition. Lenin characterized the NEP as a retreat in an ongoing war: either these forces are subordinated or they will overthrow the workers’ state. Lenin defined the NEP by instability, struggle, and the danger of capitalist restoration. It is not a stable transition model. We must “direct the capitalism”¹²

A transitional economy necessarily contains “elements [...] of both capitalism and socialism.”¹³ The question is not therefore whether transition exists, but which elements are expanding and which are being restricted? What is the direction of motion? Is the overall motion of society reinforcing or dissolving socialist relations of production?

The existence of both elements does not compel us to suspend judgment. Rather, a system in transition must have a trajectory. A concrete analysis of this trajectory begins from how production is organized and reproduced. These relations form “the real foundation” of society.¹⁴ To replace this analysis with appeals to “different paths,” “different conditions,” or cultural particularity is not materialism but relativism. It substitutes description for explanation and evades the question of which class relations are actually being reproduced.

Reducing socialism to economic growth (“produce more now, transform relations later”) reverses this entire framework. But Marx shows that relations are the foundation of social production, Lenin shows that markets reintroduce capitalism as a force to be struggled against, and both theory and historical experience demonstrate that if production is organized through the form of markets, profit, wage labor, and competition then these capitalist social relations will re-emerge under socialist rhetoric. Material improvements alone do not determine the class character of a system.

Capitalism itself can produce rapid development while reproducing exploitation. To treat such development as proof of socialism is to substitute outcomes for relations. Relative improvements over other capitalist-imperialist or crisis-capitalist systems do not change their class character; instead, they reflect different forms of managing the same underlying relations. If what is to be built is socialism, then the question cannot be how to replicate such outcomes while adopting capitalist mechanisms since those very outcomes can stabilize, reproduce, and obscure those mechanisms. Production was already sufficient and growing magnificently in China 1956-1976 to have enough use-values to distribute; to feed, house, and clothe everyone; to help everyone find happiness, satisfaction, and solidarity.¹⁵

The decisive question is not whether development occurs, but under what social relations it occurs. Any framework that treats development as primary and relations as secondary ultimately dissolves socialism into growth alone. If the relations being reproduced are capitalist, then the process being described is not a transition to socialism, but the restoration of capitalism under a different name, even when it presents itself through real material improvements.

Without that criterion, “socialist transition” ceases to describe a real, objective process and instead becomes a subjective and unfalsifiable label, retroactively justifying whatever path development has already taken.

References:

1. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

2. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1976. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

3. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

4. Han, Dongping. The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and Their Impact on China’s Rural Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008.

5. Ibid.

6. Hinton, William. The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978–1989. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990.

7. Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic. 3rd ed. New York: Free Press, 1999.

8. Diamant, Neil J., Stanley B. Lubman, and Kevin J. O’Brien, eds. Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

9. Mao Zedong. “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 5. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm

10. Zhang, Chunqiao. “On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie.” Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. https://www.marxists.org/archive/zhang-chunqiao/1975/x01/x01.htm

11. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “The Tax in Kind.” In Collected Works, vol. 32. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

15. Han, Dongping. The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and Their Impact on China’s Rural Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008.