Is China Really Marxist? Bernie's AI Ban, China's AI Push, and What Marx Actually Said

Is China really Marxist?

Short answer. In doctrine and in how it is governed, yes. In how its economy runs, only partly. The Chinese Communist Party still names Marxism-Leninism as its guide and communism as its "highest ideal and ultimate goal." Its constitution calls the economy a "socialist market economy" in which public ownership is "dominant" and the state sector is "the leading force." But private firms produce most of China's output and employ most of its urban workers, and markets set most prices. Serious scholars call the result state capitalism, market socialism, or political capitalism. The Party calls it the primary stage of socialism.

That last phrase is the key to the whole puzzle, including why a Marxist party would race to build AI while an American democratic socialist tries to slow it down.

Two socialists, one machine

On September 23, 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. It would permanently ban building AI that surpasses human cognition, pause advanced AI development until a new cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence writes safety rules, and push for a worldwide ban by treaty. NBC News reported that violators could face up to 20 years in federal prison, which Sanders compared to the penalty for unlawfully building nuclear weapons.

Thirteen months earlier, on August 27, 2025, China's State Council issued its "AI Plus" guideline. It sets targets for AI agents and intelligent devices to reach more than 70 percent of the economy by 2027 and 90 percent by 2030. Its opening, in English translation, promises that AI will "promote a revolutionary leap in productivity and profound changes in production relations."

Productivity. Production relations. Those are not accidental words. They are the two load-bearing terms of Marx's theory of history.

To see why one socialist wants to jail AI builders and the other wants to accelerate them, you have to go back to what Marx actually said.

What Marx actually said about capitalism coming first

The most famous summary of Marx's theory of history is two sentences from his 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

"No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society."

Productive forces are the tools, machines, skills and science a society can produce with. Relations of production are who owns them and who works for whom. For Marx, capitalism's historic job was to build the productive forces to a point where scarcity could end. Only then could a new social order take over.

So the idea that Marx expected socialism to grow out of mature, industrial capitalism is broadly right. The Communist Manifesto (1848) praises the bourgeoisie for creating "more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." And in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx describes communism arriving in two phases: a first phase still "stamped with the birth marks of the old society," and a higher phase whose motto is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

But "every country must first become capitalist" is too strong. Late in life Marx was asked exactly that question about Russia, a peasant country with village communes. In his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, he said the "historical inevitability" in Capital was "expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe." In the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto, he and Engels allowed that the Russian commune "may serve as the starting point for a communist development," if a Russian revolution sparked one in the West.

Marx left the door open. Lenin walked through it.

Socialists and communists: a family feud

"Socialists and communists were mortal enemies in the Russian Revolution" is half right, and the half that is wrong is the interesting part.

In 1917 nearly everyone in the fight was a socialist. The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were two factions of the same Marxist party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which had split in 1903. The Socialist Revolutionaries were agrarian socialists. They fought each other because they disagreed about how to get to socialism: the Mensheviks, reading Marx strictly, thought Russia first needed a bourgeois capitalist stage; Lenin's Bolsheviks decided a disciplined vanguard party could skip ahead.

The enmity came after the Bolsheviks won. They dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, renamed themselves the Russian Communist Party that March, and by 1922 had banned the Mensheviks and put leading Socialist Revolutionaries on trial. In 1919 Lenin founded the Communist International, whose conditions for membership, set in 1920, split socialist parties across Europe. In Germany the split turned lethal: under a government led by the Social Democrats, paramilitaries murdered the communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, and from 1928 the Communist Party denounced the Social Democrats as "social fascists."

So the modern labels come from that split:

Marx and Engels themselves had used "communist" to separate their movement from the "socialists" of their day. As Engels put it in 1888: "in 1847, Socialism was a middle-class movement, Communism a working-class movement."

Lenin's shortcut, and the markets he kept

Lenin did not abolish markets overnight. After civil war and famine he introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, which brought back private trade and small private business under the Party's control. He had already argued, in May 1918, that "state capitalism would be a step forward" for Soviet Russia.

Hold on to that idea. Sixty years later it became China's.

Deng: markets are a tool, not a religion

Mao Zedong tried to leap straight to communism. The Great Leap Forward ended in famine. After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping's reforms reintroduced markets, private farming and foreign investment, and the Party needed a Marxist justification.

It found one in Marx's own theory of stages. In 1987 the Party declared that China was in "the primary stage of socialism," a stage that would last a century from the 1950s, because its productive forces were still too backward for anything more. Developing them came first. In his 1992 Southern Tour, Deng said it plainly:

"A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too."

In 1993 the "socialist market economy" was written into the constitution.

(Deng almost certainly never said "To get rich is glorious." Nobody has found a source for it. The phrase was popularized by the title of Orville Schell's 1984 book about China, and Schell later said it simply "grew out of the zeitgeist.")

The results are measurable. In October 2018, Vice-Premier Liu He put the private sector's weight in five numbers, now known in China as "56789": more than 50 percent of tax revenue, 60 percent of GDP, 70 percent of technological innovation, 80 percent of urban employment, and 90 percent of new jobs and new firms.

Xi: Marxism back at the center

Under Xi Jinping the Party has leaned harder into Marxism, not away from it. Its constitution names "Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory," and several later doctrines, ending with "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era," as its guides to action. A 2018 amendment added a line to Article 1 of the state constitution: "Leadership by the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics."

And Xi gave the Party's technology drive a Marxist name. In September 2023 he began speaking of "new quality productive forces," and in January 2024 the Politburo held a full study session on the idea: advanced technology, above all AI, as the productive forces of the next stage.

That is why the AI Plus guideline talks about "production relations." In the Party's reading of Marx, the way to socialism runs through the productive forces, and whoever controls their development controls the transition. Building AI fast, under Party direction, is not a betrayal of Marxism. It is the most orthodox thing a Marxist-Leninist party can do.

China does not leave AI unregulated. Its 2023 rules for generative AI require providers to uphold "core socialist values," and since September 2025 AI-generated content must be labeled. China regulates what AI may say. It does not try to stop AI from being built.

Bernie: a welfare state, not a planned economy

Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, but his program is closer to what Europeans call social democracy. In a 2015 speech at Georgetown he said: "I don't believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production." His models are the Nordic countries, which their own leaders describe as market economies; Denmark's prime minister told a Harvard audience in 2015 that "Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."

The Democratic Socialists of America, a separate organization that has backed Sanders, states longer-term aims of social ownership that go beyond his platform. The two are often blurred together, including in arguments like the one that prompted this page.

So "Bernie wants capitalism regulated to fund a welfare state" is essentially correct. He does not want the phase-out of capitalism that the Chinese Party says it is working toward.

So why would a socialist ban AI?

Because the American left and the Chinese Party start from different questions.

The Party asks: how do we develop the productive forces fastest, under our control?

Sanders asks: who owns the machines, and who pays when they replace workers? His bills frame AI as a technology controlled by "AI oligarchs," and the superintelligence ban adds a safety argument: that no one, including its builders, can control a system smarter than humans.

Both positions can quote Marx. In Capital, Marx wrote that under capitalism "the instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself." That is Sanders's worry. But Marx also believed the same machines, under different ownership, were the material basis of a free society. That is Beijing's bet.

What Sanders's bill does not do is jail people for using AI. It targets the development of systems it defines as superintelligent, or showing precursor capacities such as helping design weapons of mass destruction, deceiving humans, or improving themselves.

Does the left hate AI?

Not all of it. One current on the left sees automation as the road past capitalism, not a threat to be stopped. In Inventing the Future (2015), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams called for full automation, a universal basic income and a shorter working week. In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), Aaron Bastani argued that automation, cheap clean energy and abundant information could end scarcity itself, which is the condition Marx thought communism required.

They can quote Marx too. In a notebook passage from 1857 and 1858, now known as the "Fragment on Machines," Marx imagined a point where machinery and the "general intellect" of science become the main force of production, and measuring wealth in hours of labour stops making sense.

So the split is not simply "the left hates AI." It is a split over who owns the machine, and whether anyone can be trusted to build it safely. Sanders fears the owners and the machine. The accelerationists want the machine with new owners. The Chinese Party wants the machine under the Party.

What the evidence supports

Secure

• The Chinese Communist Party officially names Marxism-Leninism as its guide and communism as its ultimate goal.
• China's constitution defines a "socialist market economy" with public ownership dominant and a leading state sector.
• Private enterprise produces a majority of China's GDP and urban employment.
• Marx tied the end of a social order to the development of its productive forces.
• The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were rival factions of one Marxist party.
• Sanders proposes regulated markets and a larger welfare state, not state ownership of the means of production.
• The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act targets building superintelligent systems, not using AI.
• China's AI Plus guideline frames AI in the Marxist vocabulary of productive forces and production relations.

Contested

• Whether China is best called socialist, state capitalist, or something new.
• Whether Marx believed every society must pass through industrial capitalism (he said it about Western Europe, and hedged about Russia).
• Whether the Party's Marxism shapes policy or mainly legitimizes Party rule.
• Whether banning superintelligence is a socialist position or a safety position that happens to have a socialist sponsor.
• Whether AI could make a post-capitalist economy possible, as left accelerationists argue.

Not supported

• That China has abolished capitalism, or is already communist in Marx's sense.
• That Sanders wants a Soviet-style planned economy.
• That Deng said "To get rich is glorious."
• That the Nordic countries are socialist planned economies.

The question Marx left open

Marx thought machines would decide the argument. Build enough productive power and the old relations of production could not hold.

More than two centuries after his birth, the most powerful machine yet built is being argued over by two movements that both claim him. One wants it stopped until humans can control it. The other wants it everywhere, as fast as possible, on the Party's terms.

Which of them is the Marxist is a better question than it sounds.

Sources

Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), and Engels's preface to the 1888 English edition; Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), part I; Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), chapter 15, section 5; Marx, letter to Vera Zasulich, March 8, 1881; Marx and Engels, preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto; V. I. Lenin, "'Left-Wing' Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality" (May 1918); Deng Xiaoping, talks in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai (January to February 1992); Constitution of the People's Republic of China (1982, amended 2018), articles 1, 6, 7 and 15; Constitution of the Communist Party of China (2022), General Program; State Council, Guideline on Implementing the "AI Plus" Initiative (August 27, 2025); Cyberspace Administration of China et al., Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services (2023); Xi Jinping, remarks at the 11th collective study session of the Politburo (January 31, 2024); Bernie Sanders, speech at Georgetown University (November 19, 2015); Office of Senator Sanders and Representative Casar, "Sanders, Casar Introduce Legislation to Create New Federal Agency to Ban Artificial Superintelligence, Pause Advanced AI Development" (September 23, 2026); NBC News and Roll Call reporting on the bill (September 23, 2026); Lars Løkke Rasmussen, remarks at Harvard Kennedy School (October 31, 2015); Liu He, interview with Chinese reporters (October 19, 2018); Marx, Grundrisse (1857 to 1858), the "Fragment on Machines"; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (2015); Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019); Orville Schell, To Get Rich Is Glorious (1984).