By Robert Griffiths, from the Morning Star
In one enormous hall in a tower block near Tiananmen Square, Beijing, Communist Party of China central committee member He Yong and other officials were welcoming a deputation of communist parties from western Europe.
In another part of the building, Chinese government and party leaders were meeting US Vice-President Joseph Biden.
The Western communists were expressing varying degrees of admiration, solidarity and concern about economic and political developments in the world’s most populous society.
The imperialist politician from the world’s wealthiest country had come to Beijing to beg for more Chinese investment in US industry.
China’s socialist state is already the biggest owner of US Treasury bonds, helping to fund the biggest national debt in the world.
Now Chinese funds are sought to create jobs in the US’s productive economy.
On his first day in the Chinese capital, Biden had made a detour from his schedule to attend a “friendly” basketball game between a local team and their US visitors.
The match had to be abandoned during an almighty brawl — an example, it might be said, of an antagonistic contradiction.
The public relations fiasco was fully covered in China’s mass media, most of which are in the public sector, just as — contrary to Western media claims — the July 23 Wenzhou bullet train disaster was widely reported, including by the state-owned People’s Daily Railway newspaper.
The scale of economic and social transformation taking place in that country has to be seen to be fully appreciated.
The figures are impressive enough on paper — annual growth rates of 10 to 14 per cent and, between 1981 and 2004, more than 600 million people lifted out of absolute poverty (defined by the World Bank as an income of less than $1.25, or 78 pence, a day).
But to see the forest of cranes in city after city, the new office and residential apartment blocks, shopping centres, civic and business parks, railway stations and airline terminals under construction or newly opened, to travel along the new eight-lane motorways or ride in modern trains with enough leg-room to swing several cats, is something more.
A modern, industrial and predominantly urban society is being built in China without foreign conquest and colonies, without a slave trade, without shoving children up chimneys or down coal mines.
This is happening in a country the size of a continent, with a population of 1,346m bigger than Africa (1,033m), Europe (733m) and north America (352m).
It is being done on the basis of state economic planning, a mixed economy and Communist Party rule.
Private capital from emigre, foreign and now domestic sources has been utilised, under licence by the state, to drive investment, employment and technological advance.
Many such arrangements will be renewed into the middle of the 21st century at least.
Although Chinese communists are not comfortable with the analogy, this strategy is akin to Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s in Soviet Russia, but on a vast scale and over decades rather than years.
A native Chinese capitalist class has been created over the past two decades, although it is small.
As yet it has no political voice outside the Communist Party, although its economic concerns are expressed in sections of the press, by some academics and — within the context of the party’s strategy and policy — by business owners who are now allowed inside the CPC itself.
There are eight other political parties in China, mostly based on intellectual, peasant or emigre circles and founded before the People’s Republic in 1949.
They supported the national-democratic and socialist revolutions and participate in the National People’s Convention and other representative bodies.
Potential threats to the revolution do not come from any existing political forces.
They arise from the very forces of economic development unleashed by the CPC itself.
Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain. You can donate to the Morning Star’s fighting fund here.
Photo shows some of the 500000 new public sector owned appartments being built this year in Chongqing, southwest China, for rent to low and middle income families. Source www.gov.cn
frank on said:
An interesting article, and, in limited space deals with some key ponts very well.
One of the key issues not addressed is how the Cinese economy powered through the recession, losing no output and increasing by about 30% over 3 years. Yet all the main capitalist economies have not even recovered to their former pre-recession peak in activity.
This is because the overwhelming majority of the commandig heights of the economy are in capitalist hands in those countries while key industries, most large-scale transport and the banks are in Chinese state hands. As a result, the CCP was able simply to instruct them to increase their investment. In the capitalist countries, it is the refusal of the private sector to invest which accounts for the recession.
Of course, this means that the proportion of the economy in State hands in China is increasing as the state led the investment upsurge (although the private also increased it own investment). By contrast, in the capitalist economies the intention is to hand over public sector functions (like the NHS) to the private sector so that their profits can be restored.
guo jin min tui
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/guo-jin-min-tui/
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redscribe on said:
“A modern, industrial and predominantly urban society is being built in China without foreign conquest and colonies, without a slave trade, without shoving children up chimneys or down coal mines.”
Not quite sure how ‘shoving children up chimneys is relevant’ today with modern heating. As to Chinese mines, I seem to remember some bloody terrible disasters with hundreds of men dying that make what happened in Wales last week look minor by comparison. China’s mine-safety record is appalling, the worst in the world in fact. Possibly they don’t use kids on the Dickensian scale (but who knows, with a monopoly of political power you can cover up virtually anything) but the death toll of Chinese miners is a bloody scandal and proof of the voracious nature of Chinese capitalism.
See for example
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11497070
One of many pieces of information on this that can be found with a little research.
This is cynical Stalinist hogwash, from people who are so desperate to find something to counterpose to capitalism somewhere without actually having the guts to actually fight capitalism themselves, that they have to invent a Chinese socialist paradise when the reality is state-enforced wage-slavery without a ‘human face;. Or as Deng Xiaoping said, ‘To get rich is glorious’! So much for ‘socialism’.
We need a proper analysis of China, and some of the programmatic implications of Chinese capitalist development – for that is what it is – are quite profound and challenging for revolutionary socialists. But this sub-Sydney Webb bullshit is worse than useless.
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Anonymous on said:
However appalling the human rights situation in China is the Chinese do appear to have come up with an alternative to neoliberalism. Their capitalism seems to work better than our capitalism as a result.
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Terry Townsend on said:
For more on the discussion around China’s economic and political development, see the articles collected at http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/53
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jock mctrousers on said:
Griffiths makes a worthwhile point, which I agree with, about the benefits of state-planning under a continuous authority, supposedly not for sale to the highest bidder like in Western ‘democracies’, BUT… the big question is obviously: in whose interest is this development taking place?
Is it in the interest of a strong, independent China, to secure the Chinese people from the predations of imperialism? Or is it just the traditional ( and some new) Chinese elites re-asserting themselves and using the ‘communist’ authoritarian structure to enrich themselves and strip away whatever democratic and health (for instance) advances conferred by the Mao period?
Does this ‘more than 600 million people lifted out of absolute poverty’, for instance, mean that peasant farmers who had little relationship with any monetary economy, but had a sufficient lifestyle, and good communist healthcare, are now sleeping in the streets in the (unsustainable?) new cities, looking for work at $1 a day and a bullet in the back of the head if you complain, with no healthcare?
The cost of all this development on the environment is well-known but not taken seriously enough yet.
And what do the elites get out of this? On the face of it, a lot of money owed to them by the USA who can in no way ever be compelled to pay it to them. And a few trinkets – just like the Saudis and the rest.
Maybe the Communist party has a long term strategy that will defeat international imperialism, for the good of the Chinese and the world; but it’s just as likely that the future will be in the tradition that gave us hundreds of years of foot-binding, and the offering-up of first-born sons for beheading to clear a debt.
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Edmund Schluessel on said:
I work with Rob, I respect him, but I must basically disagree with his analysis. Of course the Chinese capitalist class has a political voice — when the state relies on wealth the capitalists control, the state is not a workers’ state and the capitalists need no political party. Yes, figures are impressive, if you care about figures alone. No amount of figures can change the fact of millions of Chinese workers being put out of work as factories close nor of the miserable conditions under those in the factories slave under. Nobody doubts the planned economy has achieved great things: China went from a country of little literacy to quite high literacy rates in just two generations. China went from a colonial playground to a world power in the same time. But we do not forget Stalin’s betrayal of the Chinese industrial proletariat in 1926 nor the abuses of human rights and the new imperialism which China advances today. Keep the gains, for certain — but without a plan for democracy, a plan for genuine socialism, they mean little in the long run.
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Vanya on said:
“But we do not forget Stalin’s betrayal of the Chinese industrial proletariat in 1926″.
How does remembering specifically that episode in history (whether or not your description of it is accurate) help us to analyse what is happening today? Quite a few things have happened since then.
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Marko on said:
The interesting question is whether China’s economic model of strategic planning mixed with ‘liberal’ economics now presents a superior alternative to the dogma of ‘free market’ bourgeois liberalism or whether China just represents protectionism on a grand scale. The dogma of the West I think is here to stay for some time, and whether China can continue on its merry way is open to question.
Much will be made of China’s negatives in order to preserve the dogma. The left must take a more sober and objective stance. Which probably means Socialist unity need to take a more critical stance.
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Louis Proyect on said:
Although Chinese communists are not comfortable with the analogy, this strategy is akin to Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s in Soviet Russia, but on a vast scale and over decades rather than years.
—
Exactly. As everybody knows, Bukharin was just one of hundreds of CP’ers who had become a millionaire during the NEP. There’s a famous photo of him trying on a mink coat in Harrod’s. Just go to http://www.bolshevikmillionares.com/bukharin_mink.jpg to see for yourself.
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whatawaytorunacountry on said:
You would think that with the close fraternal relations between the Brits and the Chinese CPs that the Chinese Communists would bung the Morning Star a few quid to help it out.
The truth is that the Britcoms are irrelevant and the Morning Star could scoop most of the Eye prizes in the Getsmuchworse and Indescribably Boring categories. It even has, or used to, have the front to describe itself as ” The Lively Left”. Mind you that was when Ken was writing for it.
Communist China is a massive slave camp which locks up dissidents and executes more people every year than any other country in the world. Workers are treated worse than in Victorian England and the whole shebang is run by a massively corrupt kleptocracy. In other words just the kind of country that SU wants to transform this one into. No chance.
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whatawaytorunacountry on said:
Ref #9. Didn’t save him did it?
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kieran on said:
‘millions of Chinese workers being put out of work as factories close’
Actually tight labour conditions creating very big wage increases.
http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/101129
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Marko on said:
As I said what we need is sober and objective analysis. Difficult to do that when confronted with the noisy shit trumpets of the likes of Whatawaytorunacountry.
But done it must be.
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anon no longer on said:
If China is a communist society I’d rather stick with what we’ve got at the moment.
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Andy Newman on said:
#14
but you aren’t starting from where they started.
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Jellytot on said:
@10 Communist China is a massive slave camp
Really ?!
You must be refering to a different China than I’ve visited 8 times in the last decade.
Maybe you’re confusing it with the DPRK?
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Jellytot on said:
@2 Or as Deng Xiaoping said, ‘To get rich is glorious’!
A man who help enact policies that have lifted 100′s of millions of his compatriots out of real and grinding poverty over the last two decades.
If that’s failure…show me success.
But then again, actually improving workers and peasants material conditions doesn’t much matter to some on here.
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christian h. on said:
I wonder if the CPC has special party officials designated to meet with Western CP delegations and humour them. Because most of the actual party officials are much more similar to my filthy rich West L.A. neighbours than the workers they supposedly represent. They certainly don’t think of themselves as socialists. All this is not to say that as a form of developmental capitalism, the Chinese model hasn’t been successful. It has. But the kind of pathetic adulation displayed by Griffith for what he (but not the Chinese) claims is a “socialist society” is embarrassing.
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Jellytot on said:
@18 pathetic adulation displayed by Griffith
I don’t think it is. Any article that showed slavish devotion to the CPC and its line would not end:
“Potential threats to the revolution do not come from any existing political forces.They arise from the very forces of economic development unleashed by the CPC itself.”
@18 Because most of the actual party officials are much more similar to my filthy rich West L.A. neighbours than the workers they supposedly represent. They certainly don’t think of themselves as socialists.
While not officials, my in-laws are long standing members of the CPC. They certainly view themselves as Socialists.
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Vanya on said:
# 18 But the Chinese CP does describe China as a Socialist country.
Also, if they didn’t why maintain all the trappings?
You know, the red flags, the Internationale, the name of the Party etc etc.
What benefit is there in maintaining such a huge discrepency between form and content?
Surely not just to pull the wool over the eyes of people like the author of this piece?
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Andy Newman on said:
#18
Well there are 70 million members of the CPC, and party membership doesn’t always bring benefits, for example the one child policy is enforced more strictly with party members than with non-members. Workplaces often have party cells for employees who are members, and many officals of the party have modest income.
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Jellytot on said:
@20 Surely not just to pull the wool over the eyes of people like the author of this piece?
I don’t think there is any wool pulling by anybody. The Chinese consider their country as a “2nd World” one very much still in development. This development is uneven as it effects the mass of China’s staggeringly large population.
Anybody who gets away from the glazed skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai and enter the countryside can’t but be struck by the challenges ahead and the progress that still needs to be made. Contradictions, problems and exasperating bureaucracy abound but we shouldn’t be blinded as the the progress already made and real betterment of conditions either.
The CPC retains it’s Party culture and traditions, hence the Red Flags, Internationale etc. (no New Labour style marketing make-over wanted there, thank you very much) and it’s is rightly enormously proud of it’s role in the Anti-Japanese war, while recognising the serious errors made in the 50′s and 60′s.
@21 for example the one child policy is enforced more strictly with party members than with non-members
And non-Han ethnic minorities are exempt from it – you know, the minorities that the Government are constantly accused of discriminating against.
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Vanya on said:
#22 I was being ironic.
I have always found it interesing how people can at the same time hold to the view that the dominant ideology is that of the ruling class and at the same time suggest that countries that proclaim their fealty to proletarian revolution etc and that “Party Culture” of which you speak have nothing whatsoever to do with socialism.
Much of that culture I probably have less time for ironically than those who put forward the view that they were / are all just nasty capitalists as bad as those in the west.
What’s the difference between standing at the end of the SWP conference, left fist in the air singing the Internationale, surrounded by posters from the Russian revolution and red banners, and doing pretty much the same at the Congress of the CCP?
However horrible aspects of those countries were/ are, in my view we are all part of the same family so as to speak. And while you can choose your friends…
You can’t have THAT much separation between form and content.
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Nick Wright on said:
for the second part of the Communist Party’s delegation report on China’s development go to
http://21stcenturymanifesto.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/china-report-part-2-the-challenges-facing-chinese-socialism/
(and buy tomorrow’s Morning Star)
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redscribe on said:
#17
“A man who help enact policies that have lifted 100’s of millions of his compatriots out of real and grinding poverty over the last two decades.
If that’s failure…show me success.
But then again, actually improving workers and peasants material conditions doesn’t much matter to some on here.”
Similar claims are made by purveyors of the market all over the world. No doubt anyone who knocks Mandelson’s similar pungent statement as to how Labour should be ‘intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich’ should also be accused of sneering at such so-called ‘improvements’.
Deng was glorifying inequality, not equal shares for the workers but the voracity of the priveleged. He certainly wasn’t saying that the workers and peasants were to become rich!
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Andy Newman on said:
#25
“He certainly wasn’t saying that the workers and peasants were to become rich!”
Actually Deng was explicitly arguing that a small numbee of people becoming rich was a small price to pay for economic development that would give a better life to millions.
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christian h. on said:
Not all party members are upper level functionaries. It’s the latter who pay $40k+/year so their kids can study at US universities, and who in my experience have no commitment whatsoever to socialism. They don’t even pretend to have any. Obviously there is a selection bias in my observations – there may well be lots of people in the middle and upper echelons of the party deeply committed to socialism. Those would presumably be the ones meeting with CPB delegations.
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christian h. on said:
Indeed Andy (26.). Which is of course precisely the argument the defenders of capitalism always make. And they may well be right. Just don’t pretend it’s somehow a different argument when made by the CPC.
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Andrew Grace on said:
It is easy to make hubristic critical ‘points’ about weaknesses and failures. A read of Marx’s ‘Capital’ will show you that the conditions of the working classes in Britain in the early 19th century were appaling beyond the imagination of any of us lucky enough to have been born in the West today. Life expectancy was below 30 in many areas. Brickworks, mines, ironworks, transport systems and engineered power sources were responsible for thousands of death. Marx shows that Capital creates a bedrock based on past labour. I was fortunate to have family in the Rhondda Valley and made many visits as a child. The TB hospitals still stood on the hilltops and the sound of miners lung could easily be heard in the streets. We too easily forget how the industrial working class emerged, literally forged in the fires of indusrtial revolution. That revolution continues to provide our taken-for-granted conditions and possibilities today. No-one should make light of the struggles of the miners. It is not Chinese capitalism. It is capitalism. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE.
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redscribe on said:
“Actually Deng was explicitly arguing that a small numbee of people becoming rich was a small price to pay for economic development that would give a better life to millions.”
Yup. The ‘trickle-down’ theory in other words.
Did he not pinch it from Milton Friedman though?
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redscribe on said:
“Although Chinese communists are not comfortable with the analogy, this strategy is akin to Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s in Soviet Russia, but on a vast scale and over decades rather than years.”
It goes much further than NEP. Are SEZ’s anything like NEP? Economically, they are more like the concessions of pre-revolutionary China, but now without the imperialist occupying forces. That role is now the preserve of the Chinese state, which is much more efficient at doing such things than any ‘foriegn’ power could be.
A better comparison is Bismarck’s use of the state for industrialisation in Germany in the 19th Century, though on a much larger scale and with elements of re-directed colonial-type practices that were absent in Germany, carried out by the home-grown Chinese state. And here also we see how in articles like this, the ‘state socialists’ in the Communist Party tradition effectively reject Marx in favour of Lassalle.
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frank on said:
30. I think Lenin and Trotsky (and Preobazhensky and Bukharin) all predated Milton Freedman. They introduced NEP. This included offering ‘concessions’ (factories built for free by the Sovet state for the capitalists to make money). The purpose of the NEP was to revive the economy by increasing production by increasing the rate of investment.
” We are now forming mixed companies—I shall have something to say about these later on—which, like our state trade and our New Economic Policy as a whole, mean that we Communists are resorting to commercial, capitalist methods”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm
This Chinese course has been rather more successful than the NEP largely, I think, because of more favourable international conditions.
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Louis Proyect on said:
DELETED. POSTING ENTIRE NYT PIECES TAKES UP SPACE. IN FUTURE POST LINK INSTEAD.
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Harsanyi_Janos on said:
“A better comparison is Bismarck’s use of the state for industrialisation ”
Similar policies of state-directed private enterprise augmented with state-owned firms was carried out by such socialist beacons as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.
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The voice of reason on said:
34# Talking about Singapore, are the Chinese next door in Malaysia still held in penned villages?
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Harsanyi_Janos on said:
I think they’ve swopped the “strategic hamlets” of the Malaya emergency for lower key but insidious anti-Chinese racism and discrimination. Plenty of state-led development though so they must be alright in some peoples’ books.
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Anonymous on said:
#32 “The disasters that befell us in the past year were, if anything, even more severe than those of the preceding years. It seemed as if all the consequences of the imperialist war and of the war which the capitalists forced upon us had combined and hurled themselves upon us in the shape of famine and the most desperate ruin. These disasters have as yet been far from overcome; and none of us expects that they can be overcome soon.” Lenin, from the same speech, explaining the desperate plight which had forced the Bolsheviks to introduce the NEP.
China in 1949 was in a comparable economic crisis; China in 1979, not so much.
Lenin in the
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Vanya on said:
#37 The important point is that where capitalism has not already created sufficient economic progress for socialism to be built it is never a good idea to base your economic programme solely on an economy which is wholly centralised and state owned .
Remember that the NEP was a massive turn away from its opposite which was also a measure taken because of the desparate situation.
(As I have suggested before there is in my view a question as to whether the situation that came about was so desparate as to put into question the wisdom of the October revolution itself, as initially counselled by the majority of the Bolshevik leadership, but that as they say is another story).
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Regular reader on said:
According to the Morning Star, there are another three articles to come in this series – so it may be a little premature to complain that the author has failed to deal with this or that issue, whether adequately or at all.
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Jim Denham on said:
Isn’t capitalism wonderful? Especially when you can be a millionaire *and* a member of something calling itself “The Communist Party”!
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Vanya on said:
Isn’t the British left wonderful? Especially when you can be a supporter of a racist colonialist state and of imperialist military intervention *and* a member of something calling itself “The Alliance for Workers Liberty”!
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Omar on said:
#38
“The important point is that where capitalism has not already created sufficient economic progress for socialism to be built it is never a good idea to base your economic programme solely on an economy which is wholly centralised and state owned .”
Excellent point,Vanya, and one that many wishful-thinking socialists often forget. It is far easier to make the transition to a socialised economy when the productive capacity of capitalist industry can be harnessed.
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Nick Wright on said:
More good sense on China’s development
http://21stcenturymanifesto.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/china-report-part-3-the-chinese-alternative-to-capitalist-crisis/
You can see the print version in tomorrow’s English language daily organ of proletarian dictatorship
price 80p from your newsagent
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Jim Denham on said:
“It is far easier to make the transition to a socialised economy when the productive capacity of capitalist industry can be harnessed”: that’s dialectics for you, and isn’t it wonderful? China becoming the most exploitative, anti-working class, turbo-capitalist economy in the world is, if you understand these things…in fact…a major step towards…(and get this)…SOCIALISM!!!
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Omar on said:
#44
If you actually read your Marx correctly you would recognise such a basic socialist concept. However, given you belong to the wingnut’s-wingnut “party” (read:cult),the AWL, I presume your position of achieving socialism with American/Israeli bombs is much more realistic?
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Vanya on said:
#45 Well said Omar. I must admit that you have favoured him with a more political reply than I would have. He thinks we’re all “scum” after all doesn’t he?
As he’s only here to annoy people my temptation is simply to suggest he rearange 2 words into a well known phrase or saying.
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lone nut on said:
Now guess who said this? “The possibility of socialism is predicated upon the development of advanced capitalism. Imperialism is an advanced stage of capitalism. It is (or at least, was) objectively progressive in that it helped create the objective conditions for socialism.”
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Jim Denham on said:
I strongly agree with Marx’s position (outlined in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere) that capitalism plays a progessive role in laying down both the material conditions for socialism, and in creating its grave-diggers: that’s a quite different proposittion to cheer-leading the viciously anti-working class Chinese ruling class in 2011 – and, in particular, pretending that Chinese turbo-capitalism is a step towards socialism or comparable in the slightest to the temporary, short-term and conscious retreat of the NEP!!!
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Omar on said:
from Nick Wright’s link @ #43:
“Here, not all is precisely as it seems.
Private capital in China does not operate as elsewhere in the capitalist world.
Credit is largely controlled by the state.
So is land and sectoral economic development.
Some of the biggest Chinese private companies have been developed by party cadres acting as party cadres.
Every firm, Chinese or foreign, with more than 100 employees is required to recognise a trade union and provide facilities for a Communist Party branch.”
I’m no expert, and Andy may hammer me with some counter-arguments,but it’s arguable that the reason Maoism suffered many of the problems it did was because China wasn’t sufficiently industrialised ( and therefore lacked the distribution infrastructure that usually accompanies this) to complete it’s transformation to a well-functioning socialist economy. That foundation is, hopefully, being laid with the new Chinese model. It’s not the enrichment of individual capitalists that I’m cheering about, but the potential for the utilisation of their productive capacity by the State toward the betterment of China as a whole.
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lone nut on said:
#48 “capitalism plays a progessive role”
Actually you specifically say that “imperialism” plays a progressive role. So imperialism, presumably, is not viciously anti working class, since you would never be found cheerleading for it were it so.
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redscribe on said:
#32
” I think Lenin and Trotsky (and Preobazhensky and Bukharin) all predated Milton Freedman. They introduced NEP. This included offering ‘concessions’ (factories built for free by the Sovet state for the capitalists to make money).”
We are not talking about limited concessions to capitalism, always intended to be temporary, to revive a shattered economy in the aftermath of a ruinous civil war. In any case, since when did the actions of Lenin etc in such conditions become a necessary blueprint for what socialists should do today?
We are talking about a strategic project of Chinese Stalinism , of state capitalism (though not in the spurious Cliff sense), consciously aimed at creating a new big bourgeoisie intertwined with an already existing bureaucratic state apparatus. In which there is not the slightest semblance of workers control or democratic management. No socialism, and no workers organisations allowed either. Just a dictatorship of the employers guaranteed by the Stalinist regime. No wonder you get statistics like China having 40% of world coal production but 80% of the world’s mining fatalities in industrial accidents.
Any kind of compromise with capitalism forced upon socialists in power would hopefully look something like the better social-democratic model, albeit with a different centre of gravity, with extensive workers control, health and safety, proper regulation, decent pay and conditions, you name it. The Chinese Stalinist record in mining safety, or rather the complete opposite of it, suggests to the contrary something like the worst capitalist regimes. Such as the regime suffered by mainly black miners in apartheid South Africa, or perhaps Chile under Pinochet. NEP that ain’t.
A situation that has gone on for decades, hardly a temporary or forced retreat like NEP. Lenin would have regarded Deng’s statement that ‘to get rich is glorious’ as simply obscene.
As for the AWL’s intervention in this debate, all I can say is that their bile against those who have a wrong position on Chinese Stalinism far exceeds their bile against their own ruling class. People whose bile is always directed against their own ruling class’s enemies have no ground on which to speak of socialism or to criticise even those misguided people who look to China. If the pro-Beijing crowd are guilty mainly of wishful thinking, at least they are thinking of some need for an alternative. Better that than people who want their own ruling class to ‘liberate’ the world. But we need something better than both these things, of course.
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chjh on said:
#49 “It’s not the enrichment of individual capitalists that I’m cheering about, but the potential for the utilisation of their productive capacity by the State toward the betterment of China as a whole.” Except it’s not *their* productive capacity, is it? The Chinese economy isn’t booming because the CCP have cracked the problem of how to get the bourgeoisie to put in a shift – it’s booming because the accumulated capital from the exploitation of tens of millions of migrant workers is being (fairly) intelligently invested by a collective ruling class with the ability to take a long-term view. But it’s still capitalism, and it still rests on the exploitation of the working class.
The first anonymous at #3 was on the money when he said that “Their capitalism seems to work better than our capitalism as a result.”
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Andy Newman on said:
#49
I think you are largely right, the economic ans social development under mao – taken in the round – was hugely progressive; but it was a model that was running out of steam.
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Omar on said:
#52
Fair point but it is a system that is overseen by a party whose ideology recognises the role of it’s working class as a catalyst for the transition to a socialist economy and that they are, by definition, exploited. Based on that article that Nick linked to at #43 ,amongst others, clearly it’s not simply the level of exploitation endured by the Chinese w/c that has driven growth but the tight controls on capitalist excess (which doesn’t properly exist in the West) and the social product being redistributed to the w/c to allow for a rapid increase in living standards and a blunting of any recessionary effects. Of course there are major problems still to overcome, especially in the mining sector as another commentator has noted, but there are lessons to be learned in the fight against neo-liberalism from the Chinese model.
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Jim Denham on said:
“their bile against those who have a wrong position on Chinese Stalinism far exceeds their bile against their own ruling class”: whoever wrote that (about the AWL), you’re simply mad and/or ignorant.
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Andy Newman on said:
#55
“you’re simply mad ”
Jim, why do you use insults using disparaging language related to mental distress?
Don’t you have any awareness at all about equality issues?
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Jim Denham on said:
“Don’t you have any awareness at all about equality issues”? Yes I do, Andy. And I still insist on calling mad people, er, mad.
Btw: There is no imperialism in China. No one mention Sudan, Mozambique, Angola, Laos, Burma, Tibet or–oops I just did. Silly.
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Jellytot on said:
@53 social development under mao – taken in the round – was hugely progressive
Yep….My wife’s grandmother had bound feet. Her mother, born post 1949, and obviously herself, didn’t.
Go figure !
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chjh on said:
#53 “the economic and social development under Mao – taken in the round – was hugely progressive”. I presume that ‘taken in the round’ means ‘if you ignore the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution’.
#54 There’s a very timely article in today’s Guardian about the reality of working class life http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/20/china-migrant-workers , which rather contradicts the oficial ideology.
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Jellytot on said:
@59 I presume that ‘taken in the round’ means ‘if you ignore the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution’
Both those events, particularly the latter, were mass movements, and not every facet of them was controlled from above. Initatives and pressure from below, from rank-and-file activists, workers and peasants was stark and vital to moulding their course. Obviously, machinations and shenanigans at the top were evident but the mass participation and obvious idealism of the Red Guards shouldn’t be ignored.
These were not “brainwashed” subjects blindly following some Party line.
Both the Leap and the Cultural Revolution must be set against China’s then recent history of Warlordism and foreign occupation, the grinding poverty of the peasantry,the Sino-Soviet split, Cold War and China’s almost complete isolation.
The CPC today regards the Cultural Revolution as “ten lost years” and recognises the short-comings of Mao in the Leap.
Liu Shaoqi (a man who’s memory I have massive respect for) and obviously Deng have been rehabilitated and vindicated.
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Vanya on said:
#55 No, simply accurate.
One of the reasons that so many on here who are usually at each other’s throats are in accord in their contempt for Denham and his sect.
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Vic Wallace on said:
#61 But believe me nobody in the real world is any more enamoured with your brand of Stalinist apologetics, Gadaffi-loving, anybody but the working class crap than Denham’s pro-imperialism and Zionism.
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chjh on said:
#60 My point was more simply that both the Great Leap and the CR resulted in economic destruction, not construction.
Yes, there was mass participation and idealism at the start of the CR, though even at the start that resulted in persecution of individual students and teachers. But the Great Leap, no – that was imposed pure and simple.
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Jellytot on said:
@63 Both have to been seen in the context of the times and the state of China’s development after decades of foreign intervention, take-over and aggression.
Also, what will colour your view towards them is your position regarding the birth of a New China on 1st October 1949.
If you, unlike me, regard that event as retrograde then that will skew your opinion as to everything that occured afterwards, possibily up to and including the present day.
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Mystic Meg on said:
Jobs for the UK, Europe and China!? Be careful for what you wish for, because there will soon be plenty of jobs heading for these shores – the kind of jobs that millions of chinese are at present enduring. Our time will come, not long before yuanshops in chinese malls are flooded with cheap tat bearing the ubiquitous Made in UK label. I can hear the well-heeled chinese shopper saying: “Why the fluck is everyfing made in the flucking UK”.
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Mystic Meg on said:
obs for the UK, Europe and USA!?
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