councilor.org
| Source | John Gulick |
| Date | 08/02/22/11:39 |
| Ken Hanly snarked:
The Chinese working class is growing by leaps and bounds and is confident that eventually it will achieve the American dream with Chinese characteristics. John Gulick sez: Well, yes... and no. The widespread embrace of consumer capitalist values in China is stunning, but I think there is a tendency for the "Western" (I hate that term) media and "Western" observers to generalize from limited observations that suggest this is the case, because it satisfies their smug belief that deep within every alien soul is an inner American (as if there is anything peculiarly American about consumer capitalism, another provincial conceit). On the other hand, China has a long and proud tradition of the "right to rebel"... and since the Taiping Rebellion this has been aimed at not only toppling illegitimate regimes, but also illegitimate social systems. Of course for reasons both laudable and suspect, Mao celebrated and stoked this tradition. For a civilization imbued to a greater or lesser degree with Confucian values, there is a tremendous amount of conflict, dissension, and fighting in China. That is what gives me hope that the bad shit will not last forever in China. But then again... what really troubles me is that even those of us who know better, those of us who factually know and emotionally intuit that global accumulation cannot and will not proceed apace in the face of ecological stresses, too often forget to factor this immutable reality into our consideration of China's hegemonic ascent. This recent winter of discontent episode (railway bottlenecks/energy shortages/food price inflation) is just a taste of the nasty future. CB: I basically agree too. Whenever we have these left "who lost China?" debates, I think, on Marxist fundamentals, there was not enough capitalism in pre-revolutionary China to "make" socialism right away. China didn't take the name "Socialist", but "Peoples's" Republic , I thought for this reason. There was a slogan regarding " the road to socialism by passing capitalism". Experience taught that it was not possible to bypass capitalism in getting to socialism, in the world as it is, with imperialism still dominate, and willing to commit super-genocides to destroy countries trying to avoid capitalism, etc. JG: Charles, this is just ex post facto nonsense, archly geared to validate your embrace of the CCP's current orientation. I don't even know where or how to begin. First of all, yes, in the early years of the PRC (1949-1955) the CCP permitted small landholders and private capitalists to coexist side by side with state enterprise, but this was done not only in the name of building the productive forces but also in the name of building the CCP's political authority, that is to lay the groundwork for a rapid transition to communism. As you surely know but deliberately occlude, by 1955, with Mao as the prime mover, a decisive move was made to advance toward communism with the compensated expropriation of private industry and the headlong rush from peasant cooperatives to rural communes. You can doubt both his wisdom and his sincerity, but one of Mao's justifications for so doing was his belief that there was an inherent connection between ideological mobilization and economic productivity... that is, that communism cannot be defined alone by the advancement of the productive forces, and that in any event it is sheer dogma to equate the building of productive forces with the capitalist harnessing of productive forces. And this of course unleashed 20 years of factional warfare that became so severe that for a short period of time (early 1967) it appeared that workers' committees were actually going to rule the country (a condition that none of the CCP factions could tolerate, of course, all of them agreeing that the PLA must squash the unfolding anarchy). After 20 years of inter- and intra-class warfare, to make it sound as if there was a polite discussion with a rational conclusion -- "experience tells us that you cannot bypass capitalism en route to socialism" -- is such a ruse. So too is your insinuating that there is some kind of undisturbed lineage from 1949-1955 to the Deng Xiaoping era and afterwards. Perhaps party intellectuals differed on the pacing and the extent of the move toward full-blown communism, but it was always understood in the 1949-1955 period that the petty capitalists would soon be bought out or fused together in cooperatives. The main debate revolved around how much to ape the Soviet model and how much to squeeze the rural producers, not how much to use capitalism to build socialism. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho