I was reading this passage of Rothbard’s
“In fact, Lenin, almost without knowing it, accomplished more than this. It is common knowledge that “purifying” movements, eager to return to a classic purity shorn of recent corruptions, generally purify further than what had held true among the original classic sources. There were, indeed, marked “conservative” strains in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves which often justified the State, Western imperialism and aggressive nationalism, and it was these motifs, in the ambivalent views of the Masters on this subject, that provided the fodder for the later shift of the majority Marxists into the “social imperialist” camp. [9] Lenin’s camp turned more “left” than had Marx and Engels themselves. Lenin had a decidedly more revolutionary stance toward the State, and consistently defended and supported movements of national liberation against imperialism. The Leninist shift was more “leftist” in other important senses as well. For while Marx had centered his attack on market capitalism per se, the major focus of Lenin’s concerns was on what he conceives to be the highest stages of capitalism: imperialism and monopoly. Hence Lenin’s focus, centering as it did in practice on State monopoly and imperialism rather than on laissez-faire capitalism, was in that way far more congenial to the libertarian than that of Karl Marx. In recent years, the splits in the Leninist world have brought to the fore a still more left-wing tendency: that of the Chinese. In their almost exclusive stress on revolution in the undeveloped countries, the Chinese have, in addition to scorning Right-wing Marxist compromises with the State, unerringly centered their hostility on feudal and quasi-feudal landholdings, on monopoly concessions which have enmeshed capital with quasi-feudal land, and on Western imperialism. In this virtual abandonment of the classical Marxist emphasis on the working class, the Maoists have concentrated Leninist efforts more closely on the overthrow of the major bulwarks of the Old Order in the modern world.”
The market is generally pretty accepted in China. And many Chicago School and even Austrian scholars are welcome there. And in some ways the State is more honest in China in that their legitimacy derives entirely from their ability to deliver the economic goods, as the Communist dream is gone.
And yet officially the CPC still clings to the idea of the eventual withering away of the state, and yet like all Marxists they are very vague on what this will look like. Since Marxist theory is so ignored, they are even less explicit than previous Marxists.
So as nominal Leninists they both are very supportive of the efficiency of the market, yet at the same time have a vague notion of the state withering away. In this anarcho-capitalism could provide the answer.
Without officially abandoning Marxist theory, the CPC could set as its goal a form of stateless Communism that would be similar to voluntary mutualism. Of course that would be only for ideological purposes. While it is theoretically possible that an anarcho-capitalist society could be entirely communistic as long as it was voluntary, as Nozizk showed in his libertarian utopia, it is unlikely that people would chose to.
Anyway embracing some variant of Left-Rothbardian Anarcho-capitalism, might be a way for the CPC to peacefully evolve towards a less authoritarian state.
Please not that I’m not necessarily advocating the superiority of left vs right anarchism, but only saying that since China is starting off from a Leninist state it would be easier to evolve in a left-mutualist direction at least for purposes of ideology. Although the end result might very will be Right-anarchism.