Post by xveganx on May 9, 2005 11:01:55 GMT -5
China in the Contemporary World Dynamic of Accumulation and Class Struggle: A Challenge for the Radical Left
by Loren Goldner
Everyone recognizes the growing importance of China both for world capitalist accumulation and for the remaking of the international working class. But the variety of approaches to the question in the broader “left” are as diverse as the old gamut of viewpoints on the “Russian question”, and ultimately flow from the same theoretical frameworks. The old Maoists and “Marxist-Leninists” argue for a return to the pre-1978 system of Mao. Those who see China as state-capitalist (as I do) or scattered “bureaucratic collectivists”, or orthodox Trotskyists, all favor the removal of the Stalinist bureaucracy by working-class revolution (although for the Trotskyists such a revolution would be merely “political”, not social). These different takes on the dynamic of China today, and how it got there, lead to different conceptions of the practical tasks.
All of these debates are tied up with the potential emergence of China as a future “hegemon” of the world capitalist system. Such debates uncannily and eerily echo the 1980’s debates about “Japan as No. 1”, and may well find themselves in the same dustbin down the road. The very formulation of the problem in this way leads to a briar-patch of further questions. Foremost is the 80-year old Marxist debate about the “decadence” or “decay” of capitalism as a global system, and how that analysis can explain and interpret the undeniable major development of the productive forces in East Asia in the past 35 years (in South Korea, Taiwan, and China, as well as in the “flying geese” such as Malaysia, Thailand, etc.) and finally in the broader “emerging economies” (e..g. Brazil, Russia, India) that are currently growing rapidly. Most judgements about contemporary China stand or fall depending on how one comes down on this question of “decadence”.
China undeniably has a long way to go before it can be a first-tier capitalist power in any sense of the term. GDP is still ca. $500 per capita (compared to $350 in India). Total GDP recently passed that of …Belgium. Yes, China surpassed the U.S, in 2004 as the top national recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI), and last year foreign capital earned approximately $10-15 billion net returns on investment. But global capital earned roughly the same amount in…Australia. So far the post-1978 turn to the “socialist market economy” has mainly improved the lot of about 200 million people in the coastal regions, and of them, approximately 50 million enjoy “middle-class” living standards. But one overriding social question in China today is what is going to happen to the other 900 million people (overwhelmingly peasants) as yet unaffected positively or affected negatively by the market reforms. There are an estimated 100 million people in the floating population that migrates from city to city in search of work. A “rust bowl” has emerged in the northeast, particularly in Manchuria. A net 20 million industrial jobs have been lost, as the large “SOE’s” (state-owned enterprises) are downsized and looted by their managers. (At the party congress of 1997 that consecrated his replacement of Teng shao-peng, Xiang Zemin announced 100 million layoffs for the coming 10 years.) The banking system is reportedly filled with “non-operating loans”, and the Western capitalist press openly worries about a deflationary bust that would be as bad as or worse than the bursting of the Japanese bubble in 1990.
In this context, the political and social situation seems in serious ferment, if not yet outright explosive. Riots of workers, the unemployed and retirees robbed of their pensions seem to have become commonplace, particularly in the northeast, even if they have rarely gone beyond a local framework. A recent New York Times article ( Dec. 2004) recounted a riot of several days in a medium-size town touched off by an incident between an arrogant yuppie and a worker, The article went on to say that 60,000 such incidents had occurred in the past year. Any attempt at independent labor organization (i.e. outside the government-controlled unions) is met with serious repression, including prison, labor camps and outright execution of militants. (China Labour Bulletin, coming out of Hong Kong, is a useful source on these developments, but one must keep in mind that it is funded by northern European Social Democracies and the British Labour Party, undoubtedly hoping to see a Solidarnosc-type union movement arise in China as a battering ram against the still-entrenched Stalinist hard-liners in the party apparatus. ) Documents recently came to light about a meeting in 2003 between top U.S. government officials and the AFL-CIO to discuss the labor situation in China and what to do about it, and there are allegations (which seem to make perfect sense) that China Labour Bulletin has received serious funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was behind the coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2003.
The position and role of the Chinese “hard-liners” (essentially, people hostile to the post-1978 market reforms from a Maoist viewpoint) is, for different assessments, a major focus of contention. While some people on the far-left and ultra-left glibly assume that the emergence of full-blown capitalism in China is already irreversible, I think (as the above assessment already shows) that it is highly problematic, and that both factions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) know they are riding the whirlwind. The pro-reform faction would like to make China into a giant Taiwan or even Singapore, but the huge peasant question (something faced by neither Taiwan and still less Singapore) strikes me as a nearly-insuperable obstacle to such a dream. The sophisticated Western capitalist think tanks and financial press remain acutely aware that the non-convertibility of the renminbi and the state monopoly of foreign trade (two factors that made China immune to the 1997-98 Asian financial meltdown) have to be dismantled to complete the integration of China into “globalization”. A non-convertible currency, the state monopoly of foreign trade and nationalization have nothing intrinsically “socialist” about them, and all three existed in Nazi Germany (nationalization being of course more muted but very real). The Stalinist old guard seems to be the main constituency for maintaining them, and currents such as orthodox Trotskyists point to them as proof of the lingering “socialist” character of China. Thus a state-capitalist, bureaucratic-collectivist or orthodox Trotskyist analysis of the nature of Chinese society leads to different appraisals of both the social dynamic and of the factional situation within the party elite. And such appraisals lead us right back to the question of capitalist “decadence”.
Read the rest of the article here.
by Loren Goldner
Everyone recognizes the growing importance of China both for world capitalist accumulation and for the remaking of the international working class. But the variety of approaches to the question in the broader “left” are as diverse as the old gamut of viewpoints on the “Russian question”, and ultimately flow from the same theoretical frameworks. The old Maoists and “Marxist-Leninists” argue for a return to the pre-1978 system of Mao. Those who see China as state-capitalist (as I do) or scattered “bureaucratic collectivists”, or orthodox Trotskyists, all favor the removal of the Stalinist bureaucracy by working-class revolution (although for the Trotskyists such a revolution would be merely “political”, not social). These different takes on the dynamic of China today, and how it got there, lead to different conceptions of the practical tasks.
All of these debates are tied up with the potential emergence of China as a future “hegemon” of the world capitalist system. Such debates uncannily and eerily echo the 1980’s debates about “Japan as No. 1”, and may well find themselves in the same dustbin down the road. The very formulation of the problem in this way leads to a briar-patch of further questions. Foremost is the 80-year old Marxist debate about the “decadence” or “decay” of capitalism as a global system, and how that analysis can explain and interpret the undeniable major development of the productive forces in East Asia in the past 35 years (in South Korea, Taiwan, and China, as well as in the “flying geese” such as Malaysia, Thailand, etc.) and finally in the broader “emerging economies” (e..g. Brazil, Russia, India) that are currently growing rapidly. Most judgements about contemporary China stand or fall depending on how one comes down on this question of “decadence”.
China undeniably has a long way to go before it can be a first-tier capitalist power in any sense of the term. GDP is still ca. $500 per capita (compared to $350 in India). Total GDP recently passed that of …Belgium. Yes, China surpassed the U.S, in 2004 as the top national recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI), and last year foreign capital earned approximately $10-15 billion net returns on investment. But global capital earned roughly the same amount in…Australia. So far the post-1978 turn to the “socialist market economy” has mainly improved the lot of about 200 million people in the coastal regions, and of them, approximately 50 million enjoy “middle-class” living standards. But one overriding social question in China today is what is going to happen to the other 900 million people (overwhelmingly peasants) as yet unaffected positively or affected negatively by the market reforms. There are an estimated 100 million people in the floating population that migrates from city to city in search of work. A “rust bowl” has emerged in the northeast, particularly in Manchuria. A net 20 million industrial jobs have been lost, as the large “SOE’s” (state-owned enterprises) are downsized and looted by their managers. (At the party congress of 1997 that consecrated his replacement of Teng shao-peng, Xiang Zemin announced 100 million layoffs for the coming 10 years.) The banking system is reportedly filled with “non-operating loans”, and the Western capitalist press openly worries about a deflationary bust that would be as bad as or worse than the bursting of the Japanese bubble in 1990.
In this context, the political and social situation seems in serious ferment, if not yet outright explosive. Riots of workers, the unemployed and retirees robbed of their pensions seem to have become commonplace, particularly in the northeast, even if they have rarely gone beyond a local framework. A recent New York Times article ( Dec. 2004) recounted a riot of several days in a medium-size town touched off by an incident between an arrogant yuppie and a worker, The article went on to say that 60,000 such incidents had occurred in the past year. Any attempt at independent labor organization (i.e. outside the government-controlled unions) is met with serious repression, including prison, labor camps and outright execution of militants. (China Labour Bulletin, coming out of Hong Kong, is a useful source on these developments, but one must keep in mind that it is funded by northern European Social Democracies and the British Labour Party, undoubtedly hoping to see a Solidarnosc-type union movement arise in China as a battering ram against the still-entrenched Stalinist hard-liners in the party apparatus. ) Documents recently came to light about a meeting in 2003 between top U.S. government officials and the AFL-CIO to discuss the labor situation in China and what to do about it, and there are allegations (which seem to make perfect sense) that China Labour Bulletin has received serious funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was behind the coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2003.
The position and role of the Chinese “hard-liners” (essentially, people hostile to the post-1978 market reforms from a Maoist viewpoint) is, for different assessments, a major focus of contention. While some people on the far-left and ultra-left glibly assume that the emergence of full-blown capitalism in China is already irreversible, I think (as the above assessment already shows) that it is highly problematic, and that both factions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) know they are riding the whirlwind. The pro-reform faction would like to make China into a giant Taiwan or even Singapore, but the huge peasant question (something faced by neither Taiwan and still less Singapore) strikes me as a nearly-insuperable obstacle to such a dream. The sophisticated Western capitalist think tanks and financial press remain acutely aware that the non-convertibility of the renminbi and the state monopoly of foreign trade (two factors that made China immune to the 1997-98 Asian financial meltdown) have to be dismantled to complete the integration of China into “globalization”. A non-convertible currency, the state monopoly of foreign trade and nationalization have nothing intrinsically “socialist” about them, and all three existed in Nazi Germany (nationalization being of course more muted but very real). The Stalinist old guard seems to be the main constituency for maintaining them, and currents such as orthodox Trotskyists point to them as proof of the lingering “socialist” character of China. Thus a state-capitalist, bureaucratic-collectivist or orthodox Trotskyist analysis of the nature of Chinese society leads to different appraisals of both the social dynamic and of the factional situation within the party elite. And such appraisals lead us right back to the question of capitalist “decadence”.
Read the rest of the article here.