But at what cost?”: Nihilism as anti-communist propaganda.
Posted by Ken Waldron on October 25, 2025, 12:14 am
But at what cost?”: Nihilism as anti-communist propaganda
The question, "but at what cost?", often used to discredit China, reflects the capitalist ruling class's anxieties about its own demise.
Pawel Wargan Oct 24, 2025
In the past decade or so, the West has exhumed its old manuals of anti-communist propaganda and directed their dusty contents at the People’s Republic of China. The assault has been all-encompassing. The Chinese people are variously presented as genocidaires, colonisers, and occupiers. When their mosques are empty, they are engaged in campaigns of cultural erasure. When they are full, they are putting on Potemkin displays for credulous foreigners. When the Chinese people organise to oppose a government policy, they demonstrate the illegitimacy of the political system. When they overwhelmingly support the state, they are captive to communist propaganda. As Michael Parenti wrote in his reflections on the Cold War, “the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.”
Amid a torrent of salacious and crude atrocity propaganda, a subtler current has emerged, which has sought to taint the successes of Chinese development with the implication of a hidden cost. “China pumps up Cambodia’s economy, but at what cost?” asked Reuters. “China has avoided the grim US Covid toll. But at what cost?” asked The Guardian. “China’s economy looks to be stabilising, but at what cost?” asked France 24. “China is getting smarter - but at what cost?” asked the BBC. “Wuhan one year on: The city that appears safe from Covid - but at what cost?” asked The Telegraph. The qualifier — “but at what cost?” — has been so overused that it has become a meme. But there is a real ontological claim underlying its use. It suggests that, in the process of bettering one thing, another thing must necessarily worsen — that there is a concealed, sinister cost that underpins and irreparably taints the march of progress.
This narrative is not new. In fact, it was pervasive during the Cold War. The Soviet Union’s world-historic housing program, which gave free homes to all its people, was dismissed because the apartments were small and “box-like”. The derisive view of “socialist architecture” continues to be advanced by reactionaries today, even though capitalism condemns hundreds of millions to slums, homelessness, or various forms of precarious living. In the 1950s, the AFL-CIO — the largest trade union confederation in the US, which has operated as a key instrument of imperialism in the US labor movement — distributed a map to tens of thousands of schools, churches, and unions around the world. The map, titled “Gulag—Slavery, Inc.” was funded covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency. It sought to make the case that the Soviet Union’s industrial achievements were built on the back of slave labor. This ignored, of course, that it was the United States’ economy that was founded and sustained by slave labor, later transferred to the prison-industrial complex through Jim Crow and other instruments of the carceral state. Similarly, revolutionary Cuba’s historic 1961 literacy campaign was dismissed as an instrument of “communist propaganda”, and its model of free universal healthcare was attacked for its alleged poor quality and shortages — even though these deficiencies were largely caused by the US embargo and the fact that, at that time, Cuba had only existed as a sovereign political subject for under a decade.
These narratives reveal two anxieties within the Western capitalist ruling class. The first anxiety is of an epistemic character. As much as the West remains steeped in Sinophobia, the superiority of the Chinese system is largely apparent to the rest of the world. “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries,” Cuba’s Fidel Castro said in 2004, and later called Xi Jinping one of the world’s “most capable revolutionary leaders”. States around the globe look to China’s development model as an alternative to the underdevelopment imposed on them by imperialism. By combining central planning and intervention with robust and heavily-decentralised grassroots governance helmed by the Communist Party of China (CPC), the People’s Republic has created conditions that produce far superior development outcomes to those possible in the West. China has succeeded in staving off major crises, modernising at a historically-unprecedented rate, and dramatically improving the lives of its people. This is not the result of capitalist goodwill, but of generations of work by the CPC. This fact, no doubt apparent to capitalists everywhere, calls into question the social legitimacy of the capitalist model itself. If the people of China can look to the CPC and not to private capital as the guarantor of stability and prosperity, then why do any of us need capitalists?
The second anxiety is material. It is true that there is a real cost associated with development and improvements in the lives of working people. Who bears that cost? For over a century, capitalists have insisted that the working class could not raise its wages as a whole, because increasing the wages of some workers would necessarily require a decrease in the wages of others. In the mid-19th century, this claim was put forward by Ricardian socialist John Weston. Weston argued that increases in wages would be detrimental both to industry, by raising production costs, and to workers themselves, by producing inflationary currents that nullify any increases in income. Karl Marx offered a rebuttal in a speech delivered to the First International and later published as the pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit — perhaps the first account of the inverse relationship between wages and profits. Marx showed that workers could, indeed, increase their collective wages by organising and taking from the profit margins of the capitalists. This, Marx showed, would not affect the price of commodities because their total value remains unchanged — all that changes is how the pie is divided between workers and owners.
Marx’s retort remains relevant because the question of wages remains live within capitalist societies. The idea that workers seeking higher wages are the primary drivers of inflation continues to be advanced by defenders of capitalism today. As in Weston’s time, this argument operates as a weapon in the hands of the capitalists. If capitalism, as Marx wrote, “loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist”, the inverse is also true: socialism gains for society what it takes from individual capitalists. We know that increased public control over the means of production can enable surplus to be redirected towards socially useful investments like healthcare, housing, infrastructure, or education. But in presenting the economic and political demands of workers as futile or harmful to their interests, arguments like Weston’s seek to depoliticise and disorganise the working class, providing an ideological bulwark for private capital accumulation. The idea that the lives of workers can improve at the expense of capitalists is methodically excised from the realm of political possibility. All that remains for workers is submission to their lot — or the projection of their anxieties onto some external totem, for example the refugee or migrant.
In many ways, the zero-sum dynamic imposed on our imaginations holds true for people living under capitalism. For many, the idea of “all boats lifting at once” is simply inconceivable. Increasingly, growth and social advancement for the few come at the expense of the many — a process visible in millions of ways throughout capitalist society. But as Marx predicted, the organised power of the working class can and has upset that equation. It was class struggle that gave shape to the social democratic consensus that emerged in the first part of the 20th century and reached its apex after World War II. This historic concession to the working class was possible only because of the militant organization of workers and the threat of revolution inspired by the nascent Soviet Union. Data from the early 20th century has shown a direct relationship between the expansion of social policies in the West and the perceived threat of revolution — measured by the participation of national communist parties in the Communist International. The greater the threat, the more significant the social reforms observed.
Within capitalist states, such gains emerge through processes of class conflict. The capitalists seek to maximise their profits by deepening the oppression of the working class. The workers seek to chisel away at the instruments of oppression that the capitalist class has consolidated within the state apparatus. And if an organized and militant working class can extract greater concessions from the capitalists, socialist revolution inverts that equation of power altogether. The working class seizes the state, transforming an antagonistic relationship into a collaborative one: the state now works with the grain of popular needs rather than against them. It is through the process of consolidating popular power within the state that the CPC was able to lift 800 million people out of poverty, and now advances towards the goal of “common prosperity” — a term denoting a set of policies that seek to grow the economic pie while ensuring more equal distributive outcomes. The effects of that process are plain to see across the country, from its largest cities to its smallest villages.
If the workers of Manchester or Detroit could witness the rapid improvements in the lives of Chinese people, the regimes in London and Washington might not survive very long. That is one reason why capitalists work so hard to discredit the socialist path. The function of the mantric repetition of that question — but at what cost? — is to deepen and entrench two forms of nihilism that are already pervasive in Western societies. The first is a national nihilism that has long been constitutive of Western Marxism. This is the reduction of national struggles in the global periphery to mere questions of survival — the people fight because they want to eat. This elides the rich tapestry of concerns — from language to culture to national identity — that are constitutive of the national question. And it generates a political orientation that can be observed clearly in Palestine today, with many confining themselves to expressions of sympathy while falling short of support for substantive national liberation. A similar pattern is at work in the case of China: The Western left may not want the Chinese people to suffer, but they refuse to endorse the national project of socialist construction that guarantees their wellbeing.
The second form of nihilism is internal to the left project in Western societies. This is a belief that, however bad things get under capitalism, conditions must necessarily be worse under socialism. There can be no alternative, and anyone suggesting otherwise has been subject to brainwashing or propaganda. This is the default dismissal — preached loudly from the citadels of moral haughtiness in which much of the Western left has sealed itself. It reflects a vision of society that is dehestoricized and free of class contradiction. Any failings in revolutionary struggles are reduced to some inherently degenerate qualities within societies and their leadership, rather than the historical and material contradictions with which they contend. This, to adapt a Losurdian concept, is herrenvolk socialism — an ideology steeped in imperial supremacy and isolated from the intellectual tradition it purports to represent. And it produces a political culture that is profoundly incapable of generating positive visions for the future, methodologically ill-equipped to organize for them, and pathologically hostile to political sincerity. Enthusiasm is for the propagandised; nihilism is for the enlightened.
The capitalist ruling class has a more realistic assessment of the epistemic and material threat posed by socialism’s demonstrable superiority. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote out in The Communist Manifesto, “Communism is already acknowledged by all [global] powers to be itself a Power.” The “spectre of Communism” remains a source of anxiety for the ruling classes because it gives name to the historical movement towards the demise of their order. In fact, it is one prong in Rosa Luxemburg’s fork: socialism or barbarism. Both the destruction of humanity by imperialism and the emergence of socialism will end the capitalist mode of production. The mantric invocation of that qualifier — “but at what cost?” — by the editorial boards of Bloomberg or The Economist seeks to deny us the horizon of socialism and tip the balance towards barbarism. The phrase operates as a weapon designed to temper our aspirations and conceal the cold fact that it is they, the capitalists, who will ultimately bear the cost of our collective progress. Indeed, this is what is happening in China, where Communist Party rule ensures that no capitalist sits above the state, and the benefits of the country’s rapid development are increasingly shared among its people.
I seem to remember Jason Hinkle on GG describing China as 'Communism with Confucian characteristics'.
I've just been reading a book pointing up the anarchistic (anti-Statist, anti-Confucian) aspects of Daoism. A minority tradition in China but there nonetheless.
What are we supposed to fear most in the West? Russian tanks rolling up Tunbridge Wells High Street? Islamism taking over Europe (replacement theory)?
Or the Chinese outpacing the West economically and technologically (and politically and militarily)?
To the ruling elites the threat of an example (allowing markets but under state control for the benefit of the people) of a system more successful (however measured) than western neo-liberalism?
Russian tanks rolling up Tunbridge Wells High Street
They're welcome to it. ;O)The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
on October 25, 2025, 12:14 am