Dialectical and Historical Materialism Against Frozen Quotations: Michael Parenti, China, and the Dogmatic Petty-Bourgeois Idealism of the 'Ultra-Left’ Critique Bisharat Abbasi

(Note: This essay is dedicated to the enduring legacy of our beloved comrade Michael Parenti, whose dialectical materialist method remains a weapon against imperialism and bourgeois ideology. It is simultaneously a ruthless critique of those who, in a state of theoretical decomposition, selectively disinter the words of great Marxist thinkers. These zombie-like epigones wrench quotations from their living historical and textual context, mummifying dynamic analysis to propagate a filthy, dogmatic, and ultimately anti-materialist creed. Their practice is not scholarship, but a form of ideological necromancy that betrays the very science it claims to serve.)

The contemporary imperialist stage, characterised by the acute crisis of hegemonism and the undeniable resurgence of socialist-oriented states as poles of geopolitical and economic power, has occasioned not a strengthening of revolutionary theoretical clarity within certain petty-bourgeois strata of the Western ‘Left’, but rather a retreat into the most barren forms of metaphysical dogma. This retreat manifests as a peculiar but persistent intellectual pathology: the reduction of Marxist critique to a sterile museum of decontextualised quotations, where fragments of analysis, violently torn from the living tissue of their historical moment and concrete conjuncture, are embalmed as sacred relics and paraded as eternal, unchallengeable verdicts on dynamic social processes. This practice, a form of theoretical necromancy, achieves its most consummate and politically damaging expression when it cloaks itself in the borrowed authority of serious Marxist thinkers whose work is, in fact, dialectical and historical to its core. The case of Michael Parenti is here paradigmatic. His incisive writings on empire, fascism, and the contradictions of post-revolutionary states are now routinely subjected to a vulgar, ahistorical plundering, with lengthy excerpts from works such as Against Empire (1995), Blackshirts and Reds (1997), and his essay “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” (2007) presented not as contributions to a specific historical analysis, but as frozen tablets of law delivering a final condemnation of contemporary China. This is not scholarship, nor is it polemic; it is, in essence, a form of intellectual dishonesty that substitutes the easy certitudes of dogma for the demanding labour of materialist analysis, and in so doing, actively obstructs a scientific understanding of the most significant socialist project of our epoch.

To comprehend the profundity of this distortion, one must first recover Parenti’s authentic method, which was resolutely historical, conjunctural, and materialist. He was never a metaphysician of politics, trafficking in abstracted moralisms, but a sharp analyst of imperialist political economy and the gritty, contradictory realities of class struggle. His examinations of China in the 1990s and early 2000s were precisely that: examinations of a specific, turbulent, and highly contradictory phase in China’s post-reform trajectory. This period was objectively marked by the explosive, uneven forces unleashed by market-oriented reforms: rampant commodification, the creation of vast new property-owning and managerial strata, severe regional and social inequality, endemic bureaucratic corruption, and profound ecological degradation. Parenti’s work captured the intense friction between the persisting socialist superstructure—the Party, the state, the PLA—and the rapidly expanding base of capitalist relations of production. To lift his descriptions of this fraught moment from their historical context and proclaim them as timeless, definitive judgments on the Chinese social formation as a whole is to commit a fundamental category error. It is to deny history itself, to petrify a moment of motion and contradiction into a static caricature. True Marxism, as Lenin tirelessly emphasised, demands the concrete analysis of concrete conditions; it proceeds not by embalming reality but by tracing its ceaseless motion, its internal contradictions, its ruptures, and its emergent counter-tendencies. To fossilise Parenti’s snapshot of the 1990s is therefore not to apply Marxism but to annul its very epistemological foundation.

Nowhere is this inversion clearer than in the grotesque misuse of Parenti’s seminal work, Against Empire. The central thrust of that text was not a moralistic denunciation of China, but a forensic excavation of the structural logic and hypocritical ideologico-political superstructure of U.S. imperialist policy. His illustrative comparison between Cuba and China served to expose the raw class content beneath liberal humanitarian rhetoric. The United States maintained a punishing blockade against Cuba precisely because its revolution refused integration into the imperialist world-system on capitalist terms, whereas it embraced—or at least tolerated—market reforms in China because, at that specific juncture, they appeared to open a colossal new frontier for capital accumulation and the potential restoration of capitalism through internal corrosion. Parenti’s analysis was a lesson in the relativity of imperialist ‘principle’ to the objective of class domination. To pervert this into an argument that China had therefore irrevocably ceased to be a socialist state is to stand Parenti on his head. It replaces his clear-eyed class analysis, which located agency in the structures of imperial power, with a passive, metaphysical judgement on China’s ‘essence’. It is a textbook example of bourgeois idealism masquerading as radical critique.

A similar and equally telling distortion plagues the citation of Blackshirts and Reds. Parenti’s observation that China had experienced a significant capitalist restoration within a communist political framework was a diagnosis of a complex, ongoing contradictory process, not a funeral oration for socialism. His crucial, and analytically decisive, distinction was between the catastrophic collapse of the socialist state in the USSR and Eastern Europe—where the Party and state apparatus were dismantled—and the Chinese situation, where these instruments of proletarian power remained intact, albeit under severe strain. For any Marxist worthy of the name, this distinction is not incidental; it is everything. The form of state power is the concentrated expression of class relations. Capitalist relations developing under the ultimate political authority of a socialist state, a state constitutionally committed to the leadership of the working class through its Communist Party and backed by a People’s Liberation Army, exist in a qualitatively different field of force than capitalist relations established after the smashing of that state. The former contains within it the constant possibility of political correction, restriction, and reversal; the latter represents a definitive class defeat. To blur this distinction, to pretend China’s path was merely a slower version of the Yeltsin shock therapy, is not merely incorrect; it is an abandonment of the most basic Marxist-Leninist teaching on the nature of state power.

The most glaring empirical void in these fossilised polemics is any serious engagement with the profound transformations that have characterised the Chinese political economy since 2012. Historical materialism is impossible without rigorous periodisation. The China of the rampant, often anarchic market expansion of the 1990s is not the China of the present day. The consolidation of a new political line, emphasising Party discipline, the recentralisation of strategic state authority, an anti-corruption campaign of unprecedented depth and scope, the explicit reassertion of state and Party control over the commanding heights of the economy and financial system, the successful mobilisation to eradicate absolute poverty on a civilisational scale, and a marked shift towards ecological planning and green industrial policy—these are not minor adjustments. They represent a significant rebalancing of the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, a deliberate political project to re-subordinate capital to socialist objectives. One can, from a Marxist standpoint, critically interrogate the limits, contradictions, and potential reversals of this project, but to dismiss it a priori by brandishing twenty-year-old quotations as magical talismans is to retreat from materialist analysis into theological incantation. It is to declare reality invalid because it contradicts a rigid dogma.

The social and ecological contradictions Parenti documented with such clarity—the environmental degradation, the exploitation of migrant labour, the regional disparities—were not secret scandals unknown to the Chinese Party-state. They were the manifest, and indeed predicted, antagonisms generated by a particular developmental strategy adopted under conditions of extreme external pressure and internal backwardness. The Marxist question, however, is not whether such contradictions arise in the arduous transition from scarcity to abundance; they necessarily must. The scientific question is whether the political superstructure has succumbed entirely to the economic base it helped to transform, or whether it retains sufficient autonomy, coherence, and coercive capacity to regulate, constrain, and ultimately redirect that base in accordance with long-term socialist goals. To claim that the mere existence of capitalist forms, labour discipline in low-tech sectors, or environmental damage automatically negates the socialist character of the project is to adopt a liberal-utopian conception of socialism as a state of spotless moral purity, not a Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism as a protracted, bitter, and contradictory stage of class struggle conducted under the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is to prefer the comforts of a clear conscience to the difficult task of analysing actual power dynamics.

The manipulation of the Tibet question exemplifies this theoretical confusion raised to the level of emotional propaganda. Parenti’s demolition of the ‘friendly feudalism’ myth was a necessary intervention against Western romanticism, a stark materialist expose of the theocratic-slave social formation that existed prior to liberation. His warning that capitalist development without socialist regulation risked generating new forms of alienation was a conditional, prescient critique aimed at the reform process, not a lament for the lost ‘paradise’ of serfdom under the Dalai Lama’s theocracy. To twist this into an implied nostalgia for feudal barbarism is a grotesque misreading. It represents a wholesale rejection of Marx’s fundamental historical schema, which posits that humanity progresses through determinate socio-economic stages, propelled by the development of the productive forces, not according to the aesthetic or moral preferences of petty-bourgeois intellectuals sitting in imperial metropoles.

Beneath these specific distortions lies a deeper, more systemic theoretical failing: a refusal, or an inability, to think dialectically about the process of socialist construction within a savagely hostile world system. China did not develop in a laboratory. Its path has been shaped at every turn by relentless imperialist encirclement, crippling technological embargoes, financial warfare, and the traumatic collapse of the Eastern block and the Soviet Union . To insist that socialism under such conditions of siege must conform to an abstract, ahistorical, and pacific ideal-type—an ideal drawn overwhelmingly from the historical experience of the advanced West—or else be declared fraudulent, is to abandon science for sentiment. It is to substitute a comforting moralism for the hard truths of political and military struggle. Marxism-Leninism, in contrast, understands that transitions between social systems are never linear, pure, or guaranteed. They are uneven, reversible, saturated with risk, and defined by constant struggle between the emergent and the moribund, between the forces of socialist construction and the immense, persistent pressure of global capital. Socialism is not a finished condition to be achieved; it is, as Lenin and Mao taught, a living process of struggle, a relentless battle on economic, political, and ideological and cultural fronts.

The supreme irony of selectively citing Parenti to attack China is that this method perfectly mirrors the liberal anti-communist technique he devoted his life to dismantling: the isolation of negative phenomena, the systematic erasure of their historical causation and imperialist context, and their presentation as conclusive proof of systemic illegitimacy. A genuinely Parenti-inspired, and thus genuinely Marxist, analysis would proceed from entirely different questions, questions of power and class: Which class, in the final analysis, holds state power in China? Which class commands the army and the means of violence? How is the motion of capital politically constrained and channelled by the Party-state? What are the specific counter-tendencies within the system that work against wholesale capitalist restoration? And most critically, how has the balance of these internal and external forces shifted over the past decades? These are the materialist questions.

To treat China as a static, fossilised object, forever defined and condemned by a curated selection of quotations from the 1990s, is not evidence of radicalism. It is the hallmark of intellectual stagnation and political sterility. Historical materialism, as a scientific tool of the working class, imposes upon us the duty to analyse China as it actually is: a living, dynamic, and fiercely contradictory social formation, shaped in the fiery crucible of its own immense internal class struggle and the relentless, corrosive pressure of a global imperialist system. Any analysis that shirks this duty, that prefers the dead letter of decontextualised text to the living reality of struggle, is not Marxism. It is its petty-bourgeois caricature, and objectively, it functions as an ideological auxiliary to the very imperialist forces it claims to oppose. The task is not to agree blindly with every policy, but to analyse with methodological integrity. Marxism does not fear complexity and contradictions; it is the only tool capable of mastering them. To weaponise the words of Michael Parenti against the dialectical heart of historical materialism is, therefore, to betray both the man and the method.