Re sub-imperialism

Fred Feldman posted a contribution to the Green Left discussion group on Yahoo on the use of "sub-imperialism" to characterize a number of countries today, such as China, Russia and India.

I replied as follows:


--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "Fred Feldman"  wrote:

> Actually, if Green Lefters defend China as an oppressed nation against
> imperialism (not just "oppose an attack" but SOLIDARIZE WITH CHINA against
> an attack), that would be adequate since there is a basis for reasonable
> Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state. But in fact the
> trend seems to be toward proclaiming China an imperialist power (perhaps
> with the highly subjective category of "sub-imperialist" as a transitional
> characterization), which clearly implies no defense against anybody anytime.
>
> Thus a war between China and the United States or China and Australia would
> be an inter-imperialist war with "a plague on both your houses" as the
> indicated political stance.
>
> If Green Left's Marxism still includes "revolutionary defeatism" in a war
> between China and Australia, that would mean considering the defeat of
> Australia as the lesser evil in a war with China from the standpoint of
> making a socialist
> revolution in Australia.  From this standpoint, Chinese revolutionaries
> would be expected to take the same stand - defeat of their "imperialism" as
> the lesser evil.  Chinese people who took the side of their country against
> US, Japanese, and/or Australian imperialism would be regarded as traitors to
> socialism.

This shows how important the question of the character of the Chinese state is to revolutionary Marxists. Because it's so important it's crucial not to play fast and loose with the terms in which the characterization is made. To speak of a "trend" towards considering China imperialist while at the same time claiming that "there is a basis for reasonable Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state" is to play fast and loose with terms like "imperialism" and "Marxism", not to mention "reasonable".

Marxism would not "trend" towards a characterization in this way. Some Marxists might, but then the question would be how far a trending impressionist agrees with Marxist economic analysis, and whether this is "reasonable". Let's be clear. There is disagreement, even among serious revolutionary Marxists, about the class character of the Chinese state. But so far this has not been the subject of any serious large-scale debate. A key issue for those who originally held with the characterization of Deformed Workers' State seems to be how far the reforms of 1979 constitute a restoration of capital. But the bullet in this debate hasn't yet been bitten.

Why was the situation different in the mid-1930s regarding the Soviet Union? For this argument it's enough to say there was a revolutionary Bolshevik current in the USSR and the world that was strong enough and confident enough in its Marxism and place in the class struggle to bite the bullet and consider the hugely contradictory situation that had arisen after October succeeded in overturning the capitalist state of Tsarist Russia, but where this new non-capitalist state had either become capitalist once more or remained non-capitalist while displaying blatantly anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary characteristics.

I'm referring, obviously, to the Left Opposition and the embodiment of its Bolshevik leadership in Trotsky and those closest to him.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky came down firmly, Marxist-style, on the side of the most contradictory alternative - a state which was at the same time non-capitalist, anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary. He did this because it best fitted the facts, and his presentation of these facts and his reasons for interpreting them as he did convinced the non-Stalinist revolutionary left that was moving towards the foundation of the Fourth International after the catastrophic defeat of the workers movement in Germany.

The closest thing this movement has had to a similar decisive intervention concerning the character of a state is Peng Shuzi's work on The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party (www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm) and the debate leading to the characterization of Deformed Workers' State.

Neither Peng nor the Fourth had the theoretical or organizational authority of Trotsky or the pre-war Left Opposition, so there was little to deter impressionist non-revolutionary Lefts like Tony Cliff from proclaiming early in the 50s that The Revolution Betrayed had been mistaken, that the USSR was capitalist and that China was too. Their Marxism couldn't stand up to the combined pressure of bourgeois witch-hunting and Stalinist propaganda.

The problem for us today is that this has been happening by default within the genuinely revolutionary tradition of the Fourth and closely allied movements. The bitter contradictions digested in The Revolution Betrayed have not been understood as such. It could even be argued that the bitterness and scale of the contradictions inherent in the Chinese state and regime are even greater than those in the Soviet Union.

Whatever the case, the contradictions have not been confronted openly and massively, so the trial is not just not over, it hasn't even started.

Which presents us with a huge and responsible task.

Including the main reason for my present contribution, which is to disagree flatly regarding the term "sub-imperialism".

Fred declares that the category is "highly subjective" and used as a "transitional characterization". Maybe he meant "impressionistic" - in which case he should have said so. But "subjective" can be compared to "objective" and related to facts, which Fred doesn't do. As for "transitional", well, things change, powerful states and economies become weak and vice versa, so there is a case for terms describing such change to be labelled transitional. Trotsky and the Fourth labelled their programme "transitional" for good reasons.

Fred writes:

> The sub-imperialist category is misleading because it effectively eliminates
> the qualitative distinction between imperialism and not-imperialism,
> oppressed and oppressor nations, and it is infinitely expandable and
> basically un-scientific. If China is imperialist or sub-imperialist, why not
> Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, or even Vietnam? If India is imperialist or
> sub-imperialist, why not Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia?

But this is not so if sub-imperialism has been defined clearly in terms of transition from less powerful to more powerful, and its preconditions have been set out. In the first place, it is misleading to lump together "imperialism and not-imperialism,
oppressed and oppressor nations", simply because imperialist oppression is not the same as any old oppression of one nation (or entity) by another. So we'll ignore that, although it forms the basis of most of the arm-waving examples Fred gives. It is not in the least intrinsically "infinitely expandable", as that depends on the definition and preconditions.

For instance, sensible definitions of sub-imperialist would have to include such empirical qualities as great size, great population, and economic and military viability on a grand scale. The military viability would include things like complete impossibility of total invasion and occupation. The history of Russia gives an indication of the kind of countries that might come into consideration here. The "sub" would have to include the transitional element of not yet big enough and ugly enough to face down the US in an open confrontation, despite a desire to do so and probable capacity to put up a good fight.

There is nothing strange about any of this, and in fact the definition would enable a good description of the relative strength of such acknowledged imperialisms as Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, etc.

Lenin takes relative change between imperialist countries for granted when he writes of "aspiring imperialisms" such as Japan and Germany and compares them to the old established imperialist powers of Britain and France. And in 1900, the US was the biggest aspiring "sub-imperialism" of them all.

And the definition given here, preliminary as it is, would be able to handle the status of Korea, Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia without pausing in its stride.

Fred concludes by writing:

> The tendency is to envision an almost exclusively imperialist world - one in
> which almost every state not directly controlled by imperialism economically
> and politically like the Marshall Islands or Puerto Rico or Chad tends to
> "rise" to imperialist or subimperialist status, becoming a challenger to
> "old" imperialist powers for re-dividing the world (like Germany in the two
> world wars) and thus one of the driving forces toward world war.  This is
> not theoretically impossible, but highly improbable in anything like the
> near future.      

Which of course is as impressionistic as the approach he is criticising. Much as most governments would dearly love to elbow their way closer to the fleshpots and bury their snouts in the trough with the US, it is farcical for them, or us, to dream of such a thing, let alone "envision" it. Put this generally, it is in fact "theoretically impossible" - at least for a Marxist Marxist - and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not one or two of the most powerful and expansive non-acknowledged imperialist countries (say Russia and India, leaving China and Brazil aside for the moment) are in a position to challenge or actually even in the course of challenging the currently hegemonic imperialist power(s).

As I understand it, "sub-imperialism" refers to imperialist potential in a country that for a variety of reasons is still clearly 'sub'ordinate to the leading imperialist countries. Some countries might make it all the way, and watch once leading countries eat their dust as they fall by the wayside. Some might just hover mid-league for ever, so to say. But we have to acknowledge change as it happens, and do our best to grasp what's going on and why. That is our duty both to the working class as revolutionary socialists and to science as thinking citizens.

Some discussions prompted by Einstein's 1949 essay "Why Socialism?"

My translators' discussion list is grappling with some fundamentals of social development and history at the moment. The perspective is lost in a fog of confusion - appalled at the lies and brutality of power in general, especially in the overt cruelty of authoritarian regimes in the small hangers-on of imperialism (like Eritrea, for instance), but unable to differentiate between societies in different stages of historical development (the US versus China versus Cuba, for instance), and totally unwilling to look beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy for a way forward. Totally unwilling to see any difference between the valuable aspects of bourgeois democracy (due process and freedom of association and expression, for instance) and the criminal abuse of power by bourgeois democratic governments who would dearly love to do away with due process and freedom of expression.

PF posted Albert Einstein's excellent essay  Why Socialism? Monthly Review 1, May 1949  to stir the flames a bit. He introduced it with some remarks that reappear later in this post.

The article is quite stunning in its historical context of postwar US paranoia and disbelief in relation to the growth and to the bourgeoisie inexplicable resilience and strength of the non-capitalist world. Written in the year of the victory of the Chinese Revolution in Asia and just a few months before the outbreak of McCarthyism in the USA, it is very simple, very clear, and very restrained. 

I made the following comment. 

The beauty of this beautiful essay is that Einstein starts from first principles. He doesn't argue from authority. He tries to describe the way human society works in terms of things we can see if we look where he points. He mentions one name - Veblen - to emphasize that humanity is still in a "predatory phase" of development. Wealth - in land or goods - goes to those who own the means of producing it, and that ownership is gained and maintained by conquest and coercion, not free voluntary informed consent. 

His goal is a society run by mutually consenting human beings, consciously planned for the benefit of all. 

To achieve this he wants a "free and unhindered discussion of these problems", which was (and still is to a huge extent) "under a powerful taboo". Which is why he agreed to write this essay for the first issue of the Monthly Review.

P, we should note that he doesn't discuss socialism in the terms you start off with - "never been realized", "never been given a chance", "a de facto failure". He discusses it in the terms of how society works when it produces wealth and in its political management of this wealth. He points to factors here that should be redressed if commonly celebrated human and social values are to be upheld. Part of the free and unhindered discussion involves describing the way different societies and mass movements and parties work in relation to these factors. Basically, is a society good, and how? If not, why not and to what degree? If something needs changing, how can this be done? Notice that Einstein doesn't ask if the predatory aspects of society should be changed. He takes that for granted as a matter of first principle - unlike the man he quotes who is indifferent to the well-being and even survival of humanity.

I've got a question. What actual impact can an essay like this have in changing the world (human society) for the better?

 DV raised the issue of central planning. I decided to whack this bogey on the nose, even if it's more of a conditioned reflex than a reasoned objection (or perhaps - given the character of the discussion and its context - precisely because it's a thoughtless automatic defence response). I wrote: 

Central planning is what every capitalist applies with extreme rigour within his own sphere of control. Ever heard of "synergy"? That's benefits of central planning. 

If central planning is applied to a whole society, we get the ultimate in synergy. There are no "externalities" distorting social costs in relation to company costs. All the life-cycle and indirect costs of say the automobile or nuclear industries are computed directly within this sphere of production. It makes a big difference to the calculations, and the kind of decisions taken. (This is not quite true, actually, unless "whole society" is the world economy - until we get there, there will be some externalities between different societies.)

Rejecting "central planning" as a communist evil is pure shibboleth. Utterly meaningless. If a single mother refuses to "centrally plan" her resources, she will not only suffer and watch her kids starve, but she'll be attacked viciously by the goons who police the behaviour and morals of poor people.

A central plan decided by free universal participatory democratic means is a good idea.

It should also be obvious by now to everybody that capitalist anarchy (ideologically rigid adherence to NO rational democratic central planning) is a catastrophic failure, that not even capitalists believe in any longer. They all scream out for planning (except the Economist which believes in Adam Smith's hidden hand the way the Archbishop of Canterbury believes in Jesus) - but it's always planning that serves their interests. And as we see in the EU, this is a ludicrous delusion.

Einstein is worth taking seriously.

 D insisted: 

So how to go about centrally planning, to use one specific example, home washing machines?

Or do we centrally decide no one needs their own washing machine, a horrible waste of resources?

Or do we centrally plan creating thousands of competing models?

Or a Ford-style, East German-style, you can have any color you want, as long as it is black?

What centralized democratic process can make this specific decision?

How much does my washing machine cost me? How do you determine the price? (You could measure in worker hours, but the number of unit-hours will depend on centrally-planned quantity.)

I think you'll probably steer me towards some vague everything-will-work-out-after-the-revolution answer. I don't need "the" answer. But I would like some idea of how this central planning "could" work in a very specific case.

I responded:

First you see how urgent various things are. Once you've decided priorities together, you get down to tackling them.

And you don't look at the techniques or machines before you look at the problems you have to solve. If you have a big problem (a priority) then you throw it out to be debated and sorted out at meetings, conferences etc at all levels, from street to neighbourhood to workplace to city, region, etc. 

Washing clothes might be such a problem. Brainstorming will have produced preliminary approaches and proposals and perspectives. Water usage, energy consumption, chemicals, health issues, location issues etc will have been considered, and will be thrashed out further.

Assuming a residential area with largish households (4+) and small dwellings it's very likely that a system of communal laundry facilities would be alternative number one. In Rinkeby in Stockholm there's a world-famous laundry facility with dozens of excellent modern machines for fast, efficient washing and drying, generous booking parameters, a cafe, a shop, several attendants, etc. It replaced a system of smaller, reasonably efficient but not very pleasant or friendly laundry rooms, that could get run down and messy and cause conflicts. In addition to such facilities, some heavy-duty washing (sports, work) could be managed by providing on-site laundries.

Assuming there's a case to be made for individual machines (convenience, space, plenty of water and energy) then the task would be designing a range of machines to a range of specifications. For this committees consisting of producers, consumers, etc would thrash out some alternatives. There would quite likely be several machines ready for production - by different producers, in different regions, say - so these could be thrown on a market and consumer choice deployed to whittle things down to a manageable selection. 

It's likely that a lot of consumer requirements could be met by just varying colours on offer for one type of machine. Or variable spin speeds in one machine.

The big thing will be that the process is far less blind than it is today. And since today is secretly socialist under the scabby capitalist skin anyhow, what with planning and consumer/stakeholder consultation in many cases, then the cultural dislocation won't break anyone's neck (еxcept the profiteer's). 

But we really don't have to give orders to freely cooperating people as to how they settle on solutions or decide things. We know how we would like to do it, and our job is to ensure it happens the way we think is best.

Whenever people have been liberated from traditional oppressive constraints regarding how to improve living conditions and make a neighbourhood better to live in, however, the results have always been above expectations - inspirational. Examples like improving the slums in Santiago de Chile under the short-lived Allende regime, for instance, which wasn't even socialist, but liberated an awful lot of creativity and constructive activity on the part of young people. Public hygiene, elementary sewage facilities, literacy campaigns, schooling, public murals...

What far too many "non-political" people worry about as consequences of socialism are as often as not consequences of capitalism. We project our own nightmares on to others - this is the basic situation of US culture today as seen in horror movies, dystopias and the kind of behaviour the films make the bad guys do but that the writers have learnt all about here at home. 

They're also the consequences of the rule of counter-revolutionary thugs who have usurped non-capitalist systems - the Stalinist and Maoist bureaucracies, for instance. Nothing to do with socialism.

Or the antics of bourgeois union leaders (Jimmy Hoffa or whoever) who use classical authoritarian domination strategies to strangle democracy and socialism.

Given the difficulties of preparing for freedom in advance (most people are very empirical and will dismiss the possibility of freedom as utopian until it bites them in the arse) then David's "everything-will-work-out-after-the-revolution" answer is quite likely the most adequate one. I mean, I could carve what I've just written in gilded letters on tablets of stone and insist that everyone obeys me after the revolution, couldn't I? And they all would, wouldn't they :-D

 P returned to his introductory remarks: 

If Einstein is worth taking seriously, then the questions he chooses
to end his essay with are worth taking seriously: "how is it possible, in view 

of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to

prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How
can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a
democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"

Your response to this essay passes over these key questions. And from
an empirical point of view, the issues I introduced the essay with,
namely that some argue that socialism has never been practiced and
others that wherever and whenever it has been practiced it has proven
to be a failure are of crucial importance. The question of central
planning is closely related to that of the "centralization of
political and economic power" mentioned by Einstein and also to the
danger of an "all-powerful and overweening" bureaucracy that tramples
the "rights of the individual" also mentioned by Einstein at the close
of his essay.

I wrote: 

Bureaucracies flourish in periods of decline and stagnation, politically speaking. When masses are mobilized and fighting for shared demands, bureaucrats are like fish out of water. So the best answer is to never stop fighting for shared demands. This way those best at fighting for the demands will take the lead (by example, selection, re-selection etc) and bureaucrats will organize things like printing leaflets and handing them out.

If conditions lead to an ebb in mobilization and momentum is lost, then there is a period of conflict between healthy democratic leadership and bureaucratic leadership. This is a sensitive period and we have very very little experience of dealing well with its challenges. 

A classic measure that always works, however, is to make every elected position subject to the right of instant recall. You screw up, you get replaced. An even more powerful measure is to restrict the payment made to elected officials to an average experienced worker's income. Nothing deters careerists more than an absence of privilege and the possibility of being knocked off the ladder.

However, these measures must first be put in place to work. And careerists and bureaucrats hate them, so getting them in place isn't easy. And careerists and bureaucrats work non-stop to dilute or remove them.

In bad times, bureaucrats and careerists will have been in control for ages and their privileges and routines of organizational control will be deeply entrenched. And it is very difficult to make any progress during such periods, of course. 

I did deal with the question of socialism in practice in relation to Einstein's essay. He looks at real-life, currently existing social practice and whether it's acceptable. He thinks it isn't, and needs replacing. Current practice in his essay is overwhelmingly capitalist. The world system. He sees it as systematically coercive and unjust, separating privileged individuals from human society as a whole. For him there is no alternative to abolishing capitalism if we want a just, cooperative society. And socialism is the planned, democratic alternative. Public ownership of land and production, democratic, cooperative planning and work.

We can't just sit back and let others build socialism for us, though. If we don't get stuck in, others will, and their interests will trump ours. 

Above all we can't accept imperialist capitalism as a natural and inevitable condition we have no control over. We make our own history. But not in conditions of our own choosing. Our job is to make our conditions as favourable as possible for realizing our desires. 

Bureaucratic counter-revolutionaries like Stalin and Mao didn't rise to power by magic. Every step they took resulted from a struggle between competing interests and group decisions. Their interests were narrow and not very attractive, and the decisions were all hard fought. It didn't have to happen the way it did.

Today there is a dual challenge facing humanity.

Socially the great challenge is capitalism. Remove it, and society immediately becomes viable and beneficial.

Politically the great challenge is the non-socialist leadership of the great masses of humanity - the working class especially. Remove the Social-Democrats and Stalinists (including Maoists) from the leaderships of labour parties, trade unions, and non-capitalist states, and the strength and energy of the working people will be channelled into removing capitalism.

Einstein was writing about the social challenge above all. If you don't accept the need for a socialist human society there's no point in even considering the political questions relating to bureaucracy and the trampling of human rights. You can whinge about injustice and arrogance etc, but the history of the past seventy years (say since world war 2) shows that you're pissing into the wind for all the good it does.

Next P raised the question of "free lunches" and "getting people to work and live

together without monetary incentives and private ownership".

I continued:

The strong force that binds human society together is the quid-pro-quo. When it comes to producing stuff we need to live, all day every day (and a lot else), the four fundamental formulas of Roman Law hold:

Do, ut des -- I give that you give; 

Do, ut facias -- I give, that you do; 

Facio, ut des -- I do, that you give; and 

Facio, ut facias -- I do, that you do.

If we do something and don't receive an equivalent back, we get extremely pissed off, and can kill people. If someone takes without giving back, the same goes. There is absolutely nothing wishy-washy or fluffy about human interchange when it comes to creating and exchanging wealth (necessities plus surplus). 

Each society has its own norms of value to judge equivalence by, and these norms are rooted in the economic and cultural level of development of society, and its hierarchical structure. They are stronger than most taboos. 

This is why only Marx has been able to grasp the whole process of economics as a system of organizing the production and distribution of wealth from nomadic family groups at the mercy of extreme scarcity and necessity through tribal forms to agriculture and urban civilizations, slavery, feudalism and capitalism, and projecting forwards to socialism. 

This is one of the reasons for calling Marxism scientific socialism. It sees the workings of a mode of production in precisely the most elementary fundamental terms required. Work and reward, in terms of equivalence. In bourgeois society the equivalence is measured in terms of value, more precisely exchange value - the amount of labour expended in society to produce the commodities it needs to consume in order to survive and reproduce itself, and to accumulate. You can't produce more value than the total work done by humanity in a given period of time. If you produce more goods in a given period, they have correspondingly less value each.

Basing himself on insights in Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx showed how these fundamentals gave rise to the whole system of capitalist economics - and how the process was irreversibly moving towards its own dissolution. The profit drive spurring capitalist production proved to be a more powerful stimulant to production than the various kinds of greed for power or goods under slavery and feudalism, so the capitalist system outgrew them and swept them aside. And produced productive capital on such a scale that it became impossible to employ it fully and retain a sufficiently high rate of profit to stimulate further investment. Marx knew this, and observed and described the process in the mid-1860s, writing the third volume of Capital. The greater the capital employed, the smaller the rate of profit in any surplus value generated. Remember - the value in a society (economy) is ever and always the total of useful human labour expended. In other words it's damn near constant. The capital used, however, which represents lots of old, used labour (big machines lasting many years) grows and grows. Profit is measured by surplus value in relation to capital. Profit has to shrink. Unless you reduce the capital - by destroying it - which means devaluation or war.

Now, class society has given rise to the bourgeois political set-up - society is run by the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, in its own interest (maximizing profit) against  the antagonistic interests of the proletariat, the working class (whose main interest is to own what it produces so it is no longer just dependent on selling its ability to work, its labour power, to stay alive).

And since society - always based on the exchange of equivalents - has developed to a point where the profit motive is acting against the interests of humanity as a whole - ie the production and exchange of wealth is deliberately held back by a few to the detriment of the many - a rage is rising in humanity at the violation of the taboos of equivalent exchange. Humanity wants to produce, and it finds itself frustrated - by unemployment, lack of material opportunity, etc - and it wants to exchange its produce for a variety of useful equivalents, in which it is also frustrated. 

However, the rage of the billions of producers (whose labour is being exploited or deliberately prevented) against the tiny percentage of owners of wealth (exploiters and suppressors) runs up against the resistance of these owners, who use their wealth to arm huge forces of killers and slave-drivers against their unarmed class enemy.

And this is where we're at, politically speaking, today.

The bourgeoisie looks very strong, because it is armed to the teeth and because its opponents are unarmed (just watch the news any night - from Greece, say - to see half-a-dozen heavily armed and armoured cops kicking and beating a single unarmed opponent, or in South Africa, shooting unarmed opponents down in cold blood in Marikana). It also has a virtual monopoly on public debate regarding how society works, what justice is, what history is, and so on.

If you consider how much money and how many people and how much effort is expended to keep these mind-forged manacles in place, however, or to keep the lid on the boiling pot to stop it boiling over, you'll agree that the bourgeoisie is getting a very bad deal for its money. So far it has been able to keep the lid on the pressure cooker, just about. But it's less and less a pressure cooker and more and more a huge steel boiler at a power plant that's already glowing red hot and is trembling ominously.

It's about to rupture, historically speaking. You can see the steel bulging and weakening, so to say, in North Africa and the Middle East. Ruptures have previously occurred in other parts of the plant (Russia, 1917, Yugoslavia 1945, China 1949). Cracks have appeared throughout the colonial world since world war 2 - in Africa and Asia in particular. 

Human society cannot operate on a systematic basis of non-equivalence for any great length of time. A greater degree of inequality has regularly been exchanged (after a period of violent change) for one of less apparent inequality. And when this in turn becomes intolerable it in turn is replaced. 

Someone once described Soviet citizens as ferociously egalitarian. I think this applies to the whole of humanity. Not stupidly equal as in "everyone must have one green jacket and two pairs of red jeans", but deeply equal as in "all men and women are born equal", or  "I do my bit, and it helps you. Now you do your bit, so it can help me."

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" represented a tremendous advance of egalitarianism in relation to feudal economic relations. He was part of the Enlightenment's great battle for justice and knowledge and prosperity against the aristocracy and religion. Once the aristocracy and the church were smashed as ruling forces in society, the weaknesses of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie in relation to universal equality became painfully obvious, and the bourgeoisie was no longer the leading force for progress, as became clear in the revolutions of 1848. 

So, all in all, the way to grow past the destruction and crippledom of our present bourgeois society is NOT to think up utopian enclaves of small farmers and craftsmen minding their own business far from the madding crowd. What we need to do is to break the chains binding us as a class. We are like the slaves rowing a galley for some Roman general and slave-owner. If we break our chains we can throw the slave-owner and his slave-drivers overboard (or put them to work alongside us) and take the ship where we want, to do the carrying we need. 

The capitalists have the power, and are abusing it, demeaning us and covering humanity with blood and filth. We need to take this power from them, clean away their mess, and use the power to make ourselves a world of creative abundance. 

 P insisted some more:

the question of bureaucracy and human rights is
the first to be tackled by anyone purporting to build socialism. Every
de facto attempt to build socialism has been a dismal failure

And I wrote:

Unfortunately for your perspective, Paul, these questions are not the first on the agenda of anyone involved in revolutionary upheavals. The first questions are whose side are you on, and what are you doing to defeat the enemy? 

Your questions are important, and grow in importance as the big questions of power and who holds it and for whose benefit are settled. But they are not the first. The documented history of the October Revolution shows that both Lenin and Trotsky were well aware of the dangers for socialism of bureaucratic despotism. But awareness of a problem doesn't automatically translate into capacity to implement a solution. 

The Cheka, and Kronstadt for that matter, are both red herrings in this regard. Presenting your naked throat to an enemy wanting nothing better than to slice through it is not a policy anyone in a life or death struggle will opt for. 

The forces encouraging the growth of bureaucracy and injustice in the Soviet Union after the end of the civil wars and the repulsion of the imperialist invasions were stronger than the forces operating against them. And they led to a bureaucratic victory that instituted a counter-revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union,  despite the non-capitalist economic foundations. Which in turn distorted the development of the revolutionary workers movement in the world. Leading to innumerable defeats in revolutions (China in the late 20s, Germany and Spain in the 30s, Italy, France and Greece in the 40s, Indonesia, Chile, Iran, etc etc) and in particular the distortions in the regimes running the non-capitalist states that were created in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959. 

The record of de facto non-capitalist societies so far is no indication of any necessary bureaucratic character inherent in any non-capitalist society. The very first thing to note is that none of these de facto societies represents a genuine attempt to build socialism. A non-capitalist economy, yes, a socialist society, no. 

We should at least give a new mode of production as much slack as its immediate predecessor. In the case of socialism, that means capitalism, bourgeois society. In terms of time this would mean roughly a couple of centuries if we take the late medieval city-states of southern Germany and northern Italy as early examples of bourgeois societies. A century hasn't yet passed since 1917.  

The second thing to note is that socialism by generally accepted definition is a worldwide mode of production predicated on a level of production and productivity equal to developed capitalism. We are not there yet, so all non-capitalist states so far have been based on a material foundation inadequate to to socialism. We can speak of proto-socialism, but not socialism as such. It's a bit like expecting a computer using vacuum tubes to perform as well as one using transistors. It can carry out the same operations, sure, but it is slow, inefficient, and frustrating. It doesn't show us what computers are really capable of.

Socialism is the road to the future of humanity. Not seeing this is blinding yourself to the future of humanity. Groping in the dark. And incidentally tying yourself (reluctantly or not, as the case may be) to the coat-tails of imperialist capitalism. In other words flapping around with a close-up view of the Devil's arse.

"No one's ever shown us a long-term working alternative to capitalism"

On a discussion group GA just wrote:

"nobody has hitherto managed to show in practice an alternative to a society harnessing the forces of capitalism that works, works in the long run, and works without serious side effects like dictatorship or other disproportionate limitations in the freedom of people to lead their lives"

I replied:

Well, it's not surprising, really, cos the history of human society doesn't work this way. The place of experiment has to be taken by real life commitment, on a huge scale. Comparing results needs an appropriately huge perspective both as regards time and place. 

We have seen perfectly clearly however that capitalism - as a long-term mode of production - does not work smoothly or beneficially for the mass of humanity. It proceeds from crisis to crisis, and the trade-offs in terms of health and well-being versus riches and technical advances are not worth making - from the point of view of the massive majority of people who merely produce the wealth rather than get to own and enjoy it. If today, after all these centuries, capitalism can do no better for the less well-placed than it's doing in Greece and Spain, let alone Haiti or Honduras, or South Africa or Rwanda, then it's an obvious failure. It is also totally incapable of systematically making use of the benefits of planned cooperation to apply available knowledge and techniques for the betterment of the majority of humanity. It can't even do this in the US (South Bronx, East LA), or the EU, let alone West Sahara or Eritrea. 

We have seen that certain important aspects of social progress - infrastructure, literacy, education, general (if basic) provision of health and education are much better managed in non-capitalist states, like the USSR, Yugoslavia, or China. This is quite amazing, historically speaking, given that the advantages became apparent so very rapidly. And given that the disadvantages inherent in the genesis and life of these states (non-hegemonic economic status, undemocratic governance removing the vast mass of the working people from planning and decision-making) are so very destructive and make them so vulnerable to aggressively hostile policies from more powerful capitalist rivals.

The road to social and  economic change and improvement will be created not by a small group of technocrats in an editorial office or library but by ordinary people getting together to run their own affairs free of exploitation and slave-driving, using free open cooperation with anyone they want using any ideas and techniques they want regardless of profits or patents. To do this, people will need ideas regarding political and economic and social organization, and they will have to fight to get their hands on these, since one of the major preoccupations of capitalism today is the stifling and extermination of these ideas and the organizations bearing them.

So, if you want a pre-validated successful non-capitalist society, you can forget it. Which means you either sigh, sit back and drink a resigned toast to really existing capitalism - Here's to Bhopal, Marikana, the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan! - or you get stuck in to making better alternatives than the ones that have half-worked in really existing (but far from optimal) non-capitalist societies. Or get swirled about in the wind with the sands on the bank of the Styx - a fate Dante wished upon the congenitally indecisive trimmers who never made a choice and never took sides. These poor sods never even got let into Hell - Charon felt too much contempt for them. Blowing through cold, dark, empty streets for all eternity. 

The state of affairs at the moment

On a mailing list, GA posted the following, linking to an article in a Swedish daily ("We are living in the biggest bluff in history"):

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/nyheter/varlden/vi-lever-i-historiens-storsta-bluff_7636778.svd#xtor=AD-500
One highlight from the article (translated on the fly):
"The IMF calculated the other year that the group of Americans that turned 65 in 2012 can count on the state paying out 333 billion dollars more than they paid in taxes. This jackpot is 17 higher than what those 25 year old at the time will have to make do with.
Europe isn't any better. A report issued by the EU Commission shows that with the welfare systems intact, the average member country's state debt will amount to 477% of the gross national product in 2060."
FWIW. Sorry I don't have the time to translate the rest. I hope GT will make a halfway decent job of it.

BR

GA 

I commented:

In other words -  either capitalism survives, or we do...

And capitalism is no bluff. It's very real. Its alleged benefits are all a bluff, but that's another matter altogether. 

What it really does is condemn most of humanity to a daily life of misery and pain and anxiety and insecurity. And that's those of us with work and an income. Shit, it can't even keep translators feeling bubbly, let alone people working in a factory or a sweatshop or a mine. Or scratching at debt-ridden soil. 

Meaningful daily activities, food, shelter and health - forget it. Food and shelter if you're lucky, maybe. If you're displaced or unemployed, tough luck.

What capitalism does do is waste an awful lot of the wealth produced by those working for it (let's call them "workers" :-) on things that are directly intended to repress, enslave and kill these workers. Armies and weapons. Not only intended, either, but doing it all day every day throughout the world. It also wastes an awful lot of our wealth on things intended to deceive us and brutalize us - advertising, media garbage (films, radio, tv, press).

It directly engenders its mirror image in mass organized crime - the arms, drugs and sex industries. No capitalism in America, no drug wars horrors in Mexico or Colombia. The freer a country is from US/imperialist influence, the freer it is from the arms drugs and sex industries..Just compare Guatemala and Cuba.

Capitalism is now so over-ripe and rotten it's liquefying. It still stands because it and its treacherous (for the workers) henchmen Social-Democracy and Stalinism have deliberately and brutally smashed anti-capitalist working class political and economic alternative leaderships. Capitalist China in 1948, for  instance, was as flimsy (as Peng Shuzi wrote) as a wooden house full of dry rot - one good kick and it would fall. The Chinese Communist Party led by Mao was still capable (despite the counter-revolutionary orders/advice it received from Moscow) of delivering such a kick, and it did. Castro's army did the same in 1959 in Cuba. But since then mass mobilizations have kicked out regimes (Nicaragua and Iran in 1979, Spain and Portugal in the mid-80s, Egypt and Libya today) but they have been leaderless with regard to the economic system which is at the root of all the trouble. So fascist and comprador regimes have been replaced by still bourgeois, still capitalist regimes with little hope to offer the workers for a qualitatively better life, including political, cultural and economic power. The same process but in an even more perverted fashion took place in the Soviet bloc in 1990, when the rage of the masses flung out the oppressive Stalinist regimes - and simultaneously destroyed the non-capitalist foundations of the state. Bringing in equally or more oppressive regimes, along with new and horrific economic and cultural inequalities and destitution.

So that's the state of affairs at the moment. And the multiplying newspaper reports like this one just rub it in a little bit more painfully with every new day it's allowed to continue.

As Marx said, we don't make history in conditions of our own choosing, but we do make our own history - and it's time we started doing it again and with a sense of purpose. 

And that purpose should be: 

Out with capitalism 
In with socialism.

Ramaphosa, the ANC, and "the left"

John Game on FaceBook made a sensible but indirect and rather dead-end comment on Ramaphosa's open hostility to the Marikana mineworkers (25 October 2012, 9.56am). I commented:


Well,  not just "remains" within the bounds of  capitalism but is forcibly and murderously constrained within the bounds of capitalism. John, you're right about the logic of *bourgeois* national liberation. Not about national liberation as such - the class contradictions can drive national liberation if the leaders of the mobilization are conscious of the class logic of the permanent revolution.
If you want to  lead the working class and poor peasants to emancipation and prosperity you can only do it by leading them to power in society and this means removing the bourgeoisie and landlords and their property rights (your property wrongs  ;-). Mandela never wanted this class emancipation. His Congress (like Gandhi's in India) never wanted this. The Freedom Charter sat even less convincingly on the ANC than Clause 4 did on the Labour Party. Marikana is Mandela's Sharpeville. The Stalinist ANC bourgeoisie is uglier than the apartheid regime because it is based on lying and treachery.
The ANC (and the PAC, and every other fighting organization) deserved the unconditional support of working class revolutionaries during the war against apartheid, but this did not entail support for their anti-socialist programme, their counter-revolutionary perspectives or corrupt bureaucratic organization. It's the same situation as with the Saddam regime in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And of course it was the same situation with regard to the Korean war and facing up to US imperialism, which is why the Cliffite, state capitalist tradition is so lost when the chickens start coming home to roost.
Supporting forces like the Taliban doesn't mean capitulating to them politically. Even Mao understood this in practice when he allied the CCP with the Kuo Min-Tang during the war against the Japanese imperialists. The CCP, almost against its own desires, retained control of its policy-making and above all its command structure. (See Peng Shuzi's report on the Chinese revolution and the CCP http://www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm). "The left" - a really crap political category, by the way - has made capitulation and tailing political forces hostile or indifferent to the working class into its major strategic principle since the 1930's turn from ultra-left adventurism to Popular Frontism. Time to dump both "the left" as a worthwhile political agent and opportunist sniffing around for exciting bandwagons to jump on. We're not poodles looking for a good post to pee on.

China and the law of value

In his latest blog post Mike Roberts looks at the contradictory character of the Chinese economy, and concludes that whatever it is it's not predominantly capitalist. Among other things he discusses the role of the law of value in China.

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/which-way-for-china-part-two

I made the following comment:

Thanks, Mike. You've opened a door here that has been very firmly shut for far too long. A door on a China where capitalism has not been restored, and where a restoration would make no economic sense. As you say about the World Bank report: "The report is also totally blind.  It wants China to abandon its current economic model and publicly-controlled financial system, which brought it successfully through the world financial crisis, and instead adopt the very model that led the US and Europe into disaster." Not to mention the Soviet Union - Russia is still recovering from its restoration, and two decades have passed.

So I'll stick my foot in the door and ask you for some clarification. You write: "So the Chinese economy is affected by the law of value.  That’s not really surprising.  You can’t ‘build socialism in one country’ (and if a country is under an autocracy, by definition).  Globalisation and the law of value in world markets feed through to the Chinese economy.  But the impact is ‘distorted’, ‘curbed’ and blocked by bureaucratic ‘interference’ from the state and the party structure to the point that it cannot yet dominate and direct the trajectory of the Chinese economy." You also write: "But the vast majority of employment and investment is undertaken by publicly-owned companies or by institutions that are under the direction and control of the Communist party. The biggest part of China’s world-beating industry is not foreign-owned multinationals, but Chinese state owned enterprises."

Is public ownership of the vast majority of companies and institutions and control of these by a single party enough to make a country non-capitalist?

If not, what else is required?

Is the only thing blocking the operations of the law of value in China interference by the state and party? If so, can a mode of production be changed and preserved by political decree?

As I understand it, the law of value operates most powerfully when the whole of an economy (pre-eminently the world economy, but to some extent a national economy) is commoditized. Land, means of production, labour power. Surplus value is generated by every (productive, market-oriented) interaction between labour and the means of production, and this surplus value is transformed into various kinds of capitalist surplus (rent, profit, interest) over the whole economy and equalized out into chunks proportional to capital invested. So where do the boundaries go between commoditized and non-commoditized production in China?

And what happens with surplus that isn't transformed into profit? Assuming normal conditions of production won't this mean that wealth equal to the average rate of profit (on the whole) remains within the system of production to be reinvested, or distributed as revenue not on the basis of ownership of a certain amount of capital but on quite other grounds? How do you view this "invisible" surplus? Disappearing completely into corrupt political and management pockets? Being ploughed back into production to a degree unmatched in capitalist economies?

Or, and this could be even more important, serving to pump up a credit system backed by real wealth in a way that is totally incomprehensible to mainstream economics (let's make that "to all economics except orthodox Marxism"). For decades now bourgeois economists have been gaping in disbelief at the "bad debts" incurred by non-capitalist economies like the Soviet Union and China, and predicting their imminent implosion. It hasn't happened.

One last thought in relation to all this... If underdeveloped and constantly embattled non-capitalist economies like the Soviet Union and China can easily outperform their underdeveloped and embattled peers (Indonesia, Brazil, India, for instance) over decades (not to mention the example of Cuba in relation to its peers in Central America and the Caribbean), and beyond this challenge the developed and "embattling" imperialist countries (the US, Europe, Japan) enough to keep them on their toes, mind their behaviour and strive to compete... well, if this is the case, what kind of impact would a non-capitalist state have if it arose in a relatively advanced and strategically robust country? Like Britain or Sweden?

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'Waistline' persisted in his technological fetishism, but also made a point about the law of value that I commented on:

Waistline, please give us the relevant quotes from the GP. 

You write: "As I understand things Marx directly states that the law of value will still operate under socialism, but not communism. This is stated in Critique of the Gotha Program." But "operating under" and "dominating" are not the same thing. And Marx never thought they were.

Under slave-ownership the law of value operated wherever commodity production and exchange were present. Notable in manufacture for the market, commerce, and money-lending. But it didn't determine the whole economic process. It was even more strongly present under feudalism, most especially in the capitalist enclaves of the city states (ex-Roman municipalities) like Florence, Venice or Augsburg. (Henri Pirenne is good on this.)

Under capitalism the law of value determines the whole process (and we can sharpen this to say that if you deny the viability of value as the fundamental theoretical concept underlying the economic analysis of capitalism, you're floating free in space untethered from reality, and might as well be a marginalist instead of a shame-faced pseudo-Marxist).

As the development of the forces of production make the class struggle more and more a desperate rear-guard action by the bourgeoisie, as they fight like cornered rats to keep the proletariat from power and the forces of production from developing unfettered by the constraints of bourgeois production relations, then the law of value becomes sidelined to an extent varying with the degree of oligopoly, the impermeability of political economic barriers between countries, and most particularly with the presence of countries based on a non-capitalist (proto-socialist) mode of production. 

Mike is one of the few professional economists in a position to help us determine the progress of this tug-of-war between production and circulation on the basis of the law of value, and production and circulation beyond it, on the basis of cooperative planning in the perspective of a whole economy run and operated by freely associated producers. To determine the proportion of the world economy driven by the one or the other system of organizing the social production of humanity.

Understanding the character and trajectory of China today is as important for the emancipation of the working class worldwide and thus humanity as understanding the Soviet Union was after 1917. 

Which is why this discussion we are having right here and now is so crucial.

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Waistline later provided a useful quote from the Gotha Programme:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.Hence, equal right here is still in principle — bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case. In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

I replied: 

Waistline, thanks for the quote from the Gotha Programme.

What I'd like to point out here is that the remarks here are against utopian anarchist dreams of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" the day after the setting up of a proto-socialist society. There are two axioms underlying everything Marx wrote. One is "Nothing comes of nothing" (no profit out of thin air for insubstantial things like "abstinence" or "responsibility") and the other is "Like exchanges for like" (in capitalist society based on the law of value, in aggregate, all commodities produced are exchanged against commodities of equal value).

Which means, in relation to the quote from the Gotha Programme, that the "deductions for the common funds" are equal to the surplus value of the whole of social production measured using the bourgeois yardstick of socially necessary labour time. This surplus value is gigantic, equivalent to the total profit appropriated by capitalists (and their governments) and "reinvested" (often in luxury buildings, the pyramids of our day), consumed as revenue (and how), or destroyed in war. So although associated workers "only" receive the equivalent for their labour power seen as a commodity, in part their labour power brings them much more wealth under the associated mode of production, and in part they receive vast wealth from the common funds in the form of education, health care, culture, public amenities etc etc.

In the initial stages of the non-capitalist mode of production, this pattern of production and distribution will be hugely distorted (birthmarked, gory, deformed) by the relative lack of development of the forces of production and by the immense superiority in terms of wealth and power of the remaining imperialist countries dominating the world economy. We saw this in the Soviet Union, and we are seeing it in China.

But since the capitalist mode of production is fighting an historically losing war against the socialist mode of production, our proto-socialist system is far stronger than decaying imperialism, DESPITE ALL APPEARANCES TO THE CONTRARY. These appearances are peddled by all bourgeois ideologists (including economists) as the truth. Our task as revolutionary Marxists is to expose this surface lie and prick it like a bloated wobbly bubble of sewer gas. The stench will be awful, but the view will be clear.

Waistline then added:

Choppa Morph, if you are not a police agent then stop your insults and personal attack. I suggest not using the weapon of personal insult on this blog. Since you started this cop, you really do not want to engage men in a contest of personal insults . . . .Cop Morph. 

And I responded:

Thanks for calling me a cop ;-) Next time back up your problems with my style with quotes and not just impressions. 

And when the hell did you ever see a cop argue about Marx's economic theory at this level in these terms??? And if you do find one, recruit the bastard!

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Raved commented:

Getting back to China. Marxists who deny that the law of value prevails in China are proposing a hybrid economy where the LOV is subordinated to the plan. This is possible briefly in a healthy workers state. Not so in a bureaucratically degenerate workers’ state. There can be no efficient allocation of labour time when the plan is managed by a bureaucracy. Stagnation follows. Hence the bureaucracy’s interest is to convert itself in a capitalist class by opening up to the LOV operating on the global market. Once the state officially allows the LOV to enable global prices to apply to China capitalism is restored. Since that state is already centrally organised and can manage to combine cheap labour with advanced technology the rate of exploitation and accumulation is extraordinarily high. Only on that basis can we explain China’s remarkable growth rate and expansion into the global economy. China is not only capitalist, it is super-capitalist, and hence imperialist.

I then responded to him and Waistline:

Waistline - It's not a question of you and me "simply having different points of view", it's a question of you and Marx having different theoretical understandings of the relationship between means of production and modes of production.

Raved (and I'm sorry I got swept past your first comment, so to say) - In China (as was the case in the Soviet Union) we have proto-socialism - a situation in which the mode of production is fundamentally non-capitalist, but in which (to use Preobrazhensky's term) primitive socialist accumulation is taking place in the teeth of political and economic aggression from an imperialism that still dominates the world economy. The process is further distorted by political and economic aggression WITHIN the new state where the interests of imperialism are promoted by its counter-revolutionary agents in the bureaucratic regime - as Trotsky spells out in The Revolution Betrayed. However, as long as the bureaucracy (and its twin the military) as a whole is predominantly dependent for its power and privileges on the non-capitalist state, it will defend this state. It is tearing itself to pieces this way and will either be dissolved by a resurgent revolutionary socialist workers movement or capitulate to imperialism and consummate the political counter-revolution with full restoration, that is a socio-poltical counter-revolution, as happened in the USSR/Russia. Trotsky makes this alternative very clear in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International.

You write that this view holds that China is "a hybrid economy". That is correct as long as we remain clear that this involves a single dominant socio-economic system incorporating elements of another system within it. That is, not so much a mongrel, as a root system and stem with an alien organism grafted onto it. You also write that in this view "the LOV is subordinated to the plan". This, however, is nonsense if you equate a non-capitalist society with a smoothly functioning plan. If a non-capitalist society is equal to your idea of "the plan" as the "efficient allocation of labour time", then imperialist corporations are non-capitalist because they allocate labour time with extreme efficiency (within certain bounds), and we have never ever seen a non-capitalist society of any description because we have never seen such efficient allocation of labour time in any existing society.

This is perverting both Marx and the evidence of our own eyes.

First our own eyes - we see China allocating labour time more efficiently than comparable capitalist countries (eg India) and even than imperialist countries, while avoiding (as Mike R and Hydeparkspeakes note) the catastrophic crises of overproduction these other societies have suffered. Not very efficiently compared to a perfectly efficient allocation, but MORE efficiently. As a whole.

And secondly Marx, because as I showed by the quotes from Capital III ch 27, he already saw the non-capitalist character of the operations of joint-stock companies before 1867. That is, a hybrid economy dominated by one mode of production (capitalism) but with a new and superior mode of economy grafted on to it (or growing within it), that is the economy of associated producers. So he had no problem whatever envisaging this kind of setup. If imperialism is a duck with a swan grafted on to it (or a dragon pregnant with a unicorn ;-), then non-capitalist societies, proto-socialist systems, are swans with ducks grafted on to them (or unicorns still fighting their way free from the stinking placenta and rotting remnants of the dragon they have emerged from).

This is the economic side of things. The political is very important too. Despite all appearances and a judgement that a political counter-revolution had been carried out in the USSR, Trotsky in the Revolution Betrayed insisted that it is still a workers state, ie non-capitalist. While others were claiming it was fascist or state capitalist. (Or if they were Stalinist stooges, fully-fledged socialism.) We have since seen a genuine socio-economic counter-revolution in Russia, and the convulsions involved. There is no principled difference between Trotsky's insistence that the Soviet Union was still a workers state and our insistence today that China is still a workers state. Neither you nor anyone else has yet demonstrated that a socio-economic revolution has taken place in China. Capitalist techniques including certain legal entitlements to profit, sure, but nothing turning the country inside out as happened and is still happening in Russia.

Until you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that this has happened then either you hold that China was never a non-socialist society, or you are wrong about its recent history.

So convince me.

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