A normal bourgeois state protects the independent political power of the bourgeoisie. China does not. A normal bourgeois state allows capital to dominate parties, media, courts, academia, elections, and foreign policy. China does not. A normal capitalist state treats private property as sacred. China does not. A normal imperialist state exports crisis through war, coups, sanctions, regime change, and military occupation. China does not. These differences are clearly not merely cosmetic or rhetoric as many compatible leftists would attempt to argue.

The article’s attack on pro-China Marxists as “camouflaging capitalism” is projection. It is Pröbsting and his acolytes and peers who in fact camouflages imperialist hierarchy by hiding it behind abstract equality of condemnation. He treats the imperial core and the anti-hegemonic periphery as if they occupy the same historical position. They obviously do not. The United States maintains hundreds of overseas military bases, weaponizes the dollar, sanctions entire populations, dominates global finance, backs settler colonialism, overthrows governments, and encircles China militarily. China builds ports, railways, grids, factories, hospitals, schools, and telecommunications. These are again clearly not materially equivalent.

This does not mean every Chinese project abroad is pure charity. Only children think geopolitics works that way. China pursues national interest, secures resources, competes, and at times makes hard bargains. But the actual question is whether China’s global role reproduces the colonial-imperialist structure or weakens it. And here reality is obvious: China regularly restructures debts, has cancelled or forgiven loans in multiple cases, and does not attach the classic IMF and Western conditionalities of privatization, austerity, deregulation, public-sector cuts, or political subordination. That is precisely why so much of the Global South prefers Chinese finance to IMF or Western-backed finance: not because China is charity, but because it offers room to build infrastructure and preserve sovereignty without handing the state over to foreign capital. On balance, China’s rise has weakened the monopoly of the imperialist core, expanded options for the Global South, and made it harder for Washington to dictate terms to the planet. This is precisely why the imperialist bloc has identified China as its central strategic threat.

Pröbsting’s method is also deeply Eurocentric. He looks at China from the standpoint of Western left purity politics, not from the lived history of oppressed nations trying to develop under siege. For rural people, minorities, peasants, workers, and colonized peoples, development is not an abstraction or something that can be glossed over. Roads, electricity, schools, hospitals, railways, food security, technological sovereignty, and national dignity are all matters of up most importance. Western Trotskyites can afford to sneer at these things because they inherit the infrastructure of imperial plunder. People from countries that were colonized, invaded, sanctioned, or kept poor do not have that luxury.

His use of the term “social-imperialism” is especially cheap. In the Marxist tradition, social-imperialism means socialism in words, imperialism in deeds. But words are not enough to prove deeds. Where are China’s colonies? Where are China’s regime-change wars? Where are its NATOs, its Iraqs, its Libyas, its Haitis, its Congos, its Chiles, its Palestines? Where is the Chinese global sanctions machine starving children to force privatization? Where is the Chinese military occupation network? Where is the Chinese equivalent of the IMF structural adjustment regime? Pröbsting cannot provide equivalence, so he substitutes analogy.

The same distortion appears in his attack on Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster, Immanuel Ness, and Qiao Collective. His complaint is not merely that they make errors. His complaint is that they refuse to join the imperial chorus against China. This is the real crime for the compatible left: not bad theory, but bad alignment. They cannot tolerate Marxists who identify US imperialism as the principal enemy and understand China as a contradictory but historically progressive force in the present world struggle.

A serious Marxist critique of China would start from contradiction: socialist state power using markets; public ownership alongside private capital; national development under imperialist pressure; anti-poverty success alongside inequality; ecological transition alongside industrial strain; unity of a multiethnic state alongside real governance problems; international cooperation alongside strategic self-interest. That critique would be useful. Pröbsting however does not offer anything of the sort. He offers only a prosecution brief designed to collapse contradiction into condemnation.

The accusation that China is “capitalist” also ignores directionality. Capitalism in the imperial core is moving toward deeper monopoly rule, privatization, financial parasitism, austerity, militarism, and social decay. China is moving through state-led industrial upgrading, poverty eradication, infrastructure expansion, ecological planning, technological sovereignty, and increasing Party intervention into capital. These are not the same trajectory. To pretend otherwise is to replace historical materialism with static labeling.

His arguments also depend on a childish view of socialism as immediate purity. But every socialist revolution has had to retreat, maneuver, compromise, and use inherited forms. Lenin introduced the NEP. The Bolsheviks used concessions, trade, specialists, wages, markets, and state capitalism under proletarian dictatorship. Lenin did not conclude that the existence of markets automatically abolished Soviet power. He asked who controlled whom. That is the question Pröbsting avoids because the answer in China is inconvenient: capital exists, but it does not rule.

And here we reach the decisive point: Pröbsting’s Leninism is verbal, not methodological. He quotes categories but abandons concrete analysis. Lenin always began from the world situation, the principal enemy, the chain of imperialism, the division between oppressor and oppressed nations, and the strategic tasks of revolutionaries. Pröbsting begins from moral symmetry. That is why his conclusion is so useful to the West. He tells the left that opposing China is just as revolutionary as opposing Washington. In the real world, that means disarming anti-imperialism.

The compatible left always says: “We oppose both Washington and Beijing.” But Washington is the one encircling China with bases. Washington is the one arming Taiwan separatism. Washington is the one sanctioning countries across the world. Washington is the one backing Israel. Washington is the one that destroyed Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and countless others. Beijing is not doing this to the world. A Marxism that cannot distinguish the arsonist from the firefighter because both have smoke on their clothes is not Marxism.

I find it ridiculous that anyone could accept Pröbsting’s framing, Spectre as a neutral Marxist source, the third-camp trick of equating the imperial core with the states resisting its domination, the flattening of Lenin into a checklist, the reduction of socialist transition to purity tests written by Western Trotskyites whose politics have never built, defended, or governed anything.

China is not beyond criticism. No socialist project is. But criticism must serve the people, the revolution, and the struggle against imperialism. Pröbsting’s article serves confusion. It arms the reader with suspicion toward actually existing socialist and anti-hegemonic forces while leaving the main imperialist structure conceptually intact. It belongs firmly to the compatible left. Its radicalism is hollow. And beneath the footnotes and Lenin quotations, it is not serious Marxism but pure anti-communism.