Does it look like the workers own the means of production in China or is it a mix of government and private capitalists? If so, that's state and private capitalism. If the workers own the means of production it means they literally are the managers of the factories in a democratic fashion. You wouldn't see much useless overtime if that happened.
That is the joke. The communist government, that was supposed to liberate the people, created this situation. It didn't work like it was supposed to did it?
My point was that the joke is common but incorrect. If someone is telling workers what to do (the government) you've just replaced private rulers with public ones. That could be considered a step up or a step down, but we haven't gotten to real democracy and real freedom. Just because the Chinese call themselves socialist doesn't make it so, just as you might criticize American capitalists for taking subsidies from the government for not really being a free market.
China is not communist, it's state socialism! No one has ever tried communism.
(Except that they obviously tried state socialism, which is supposed to be the precursor to socialism, which itself is a precursor to communism, but going through the precursor steps to communism doesn't count as trying communism because... reasons.)
This is not quite right. The socialists and communists both believe in the overthrow of capitalism, and may have similar ideas about the endpoint, but their means are different. Socialists are peaceful parliamentarians while communists believe in forceful revolution. They have been even more constrained in the wake of the USSR where Lenin advocated the idea of a vanguard party and due to their initial success, other communists modeled their revolutions on them.
The idea Lenin expressed in "State and Revolution" was the idea of the wilting of the state into nothing as it becomes useless without class antagonisms to subdue.
If you follow Marx, the only universal, the step that both China and the USSR skipped which might be why they ended up the way they did, was that Socialism is supposed to evolve from advanced capitalism which produces the abundance of tools and facilities that make a new more equitable highly developed civilization possible.
The interesting lede here is that the USA is, unlike a poor peasant country, in a state of advanced capitalism and is the most wealthy country in world history. It is also the imperial power that oppresses the rest of the world rather than vice versa. These unique circumstances raise the possibility that Marx's vision might be best fulfilled here, not over there.
When I look at my health care coverage and deductibles, and the cost of tuition, and the prevalence of 30-year mortgages to purchase housing, and the rate of change in measures of wealth inequality, I feel confidence in saying, "not bloody likely".
You're not getting a worker's paradise here unless you shove some people up against the wall.
