China (and a little bit of Zizek over there in the corner)

Hi AA,

Bit by bit this time...

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009, AA wrote:

Choppa,

You got it ass backward again. China is a hypercapitalist rightwing
dictatorship. Much more capitalist than Taiwan and Singapore were in
the 1970s. China is a hypercapitalist country in which the corrupt
party-government-industry-and-business elite controls the economy and
brutally quashes dissent.

No such thing as hyper-capitalism. The driving mechanisms of capitalism are the same everywhere capital exists. The differences between capitalist societies are all a question of regime or the proportion of holdover economic forms (common land, subsistence farming by individual peasants, etc) or pre-socialist forms (general health care or education under state ownership) sticking in the gullet of universal capitalist privately owned production for profit. NB not production for a surplus, for more wealth than went into the production process in the first. This kind of production is universal to human society.

There are early forms of capitalism under states run a feudal ruling class, and even under slave-owning ruling classes (like Rome and Ancient Greece). And there are late forms of capitalism developing in states with a bourgeois-capitalist ruling class. Like monopoly capital (breaking the free market, individual ownership of the classic pattern). In our day this is so late it's turning rotten, and rotting the world as it goes. And then there are holdover forms of capitalism in non-capitalist states, like the USSR and Yugoslavia used to be. These include small businesses or peasant production owned by private individuals, but on sufferance. And, most interesting in China, joint ventures with capitalist monopolies. Where the foreign capital is also on sufferance. This is obvious because as soon as one of these corporations becomes non grata it gets kicked out. Hell, this even happens in capitalist countries like post-USSR-Russia. Look at what happened to BP in Kamchatkca. Or India which still has a law requiring national ownership of 51%.

Unprofitable businesses are allowed to go
under. The gap between rich and poor is huge and it's growing. China's
Gini coefficient is, in fact, higher than the U.S.A's and the U.K.'s
(the real income gap is higher than the Gini index, which is based on
official statistics, suggests:
<https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html>).
There's no health care system except for those who can afford it, and
many can't. Education is for those who can afford it, and many can't.

All true, except maybe for strategically important state enterprises. But this doesn't define a mode of production. It describes a regime that must be removed by hook or by crook.

Read that again, AA, in case you think I'm an apologist for the present legacy Maoist bureaucratic regime. Removed by hook or crook. By violent revolution. I think that goes farther than any programme you would propose or support for China. The current regime is worse for socialism than Hitlerite fascism was for capitalism. Nazism didn't threaten the capitalist basis of society. Whereas the rotten Chinese regime actually poses an acute threat to the non-capitalist basis of the Chinese system. Like the Russian bureaucracy did in the USSR. Rather than let power pass to the workers producing the wealth they handed it over to imperialism. But Russia being what it is, the Nomenklatura hung on grimly enough to its positions of privilege and control to ensure that the power came into its hands even by legislation and the economic imperatives of capitalism. And boy did they enrich themselves. Since post-Soviet production was so concentrated to start with, the oligarchs sprang up like mushrooms. Built-in monopoly distortion.

If China goes the same way you'll see this even more dramatically. But it hasn't got there yet. It can be stopped by a revolution that smashes the power of the bureaucracy. The conditions for a violent uprising on a national scale are there already - it's already happening on a local scale. And the loyalty of the rank and file troops is very unreliable. But the conditions for a real political revolution removing the politically rotten bureaucracy and replacing it with democratic workers power are not in place. The theoretical schooling about socialism, about the Russian revolution, about revolutionary Marxism, and about the Stalinist counter-revolution is flimsy to say the least (though it should be borne in mind that the Chinese should never be underestimated - Trotskyists were among the most valued aides of Chou En Lai, and hid their political loyalties. You'll know what a degree of political intelligence and diplomatic skill that requires, Paul!). So the betting at the moment is on an even more grotesque betrayal of socialist principles than happened in Russia, riding on the back of a much more extensive explosion of popular anger.

The government is very popular in China because export-led industry is
extremely productive, the average income of the middle class is
growing, and so is the size of the middle class as a whole.

Popular among the "middle class" maybe - I'd call it the labour aristocracy/bureaucracy. Big quasi-private plutocrats in China are a weird hybrid in class terms.

The thing is, that China (like the USSR in its day) exists in a world economy still dominated by imperialist juggernaut powers like the US. The rulers in the USSR finally buckled under this pressure after seven decades of survival. The situation has been called living in the shadow of imperialism, and the greater the pressure, the darker the night.

Better get some work done.

Yeah... ;-)

Zizek writes a lot of nonsense, particularly (in the last couple of
years) about Confucianism and Chinese history. But he strikes me as
very intelligent and essentially honest, which is rare for a public
intellectual of his stature, and entertaining, which is even rarer.

Honesty has got nothing to do with it, really. The truth is more powerful than sincerity or authenticity ("I'm American/Chinese, so I know what's happening in the US/China better than you, foreign devil!" Compare my sig: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." - they don't know it, but they do it.)

As for intelligence, I give you Henry Kissinger, or any of the guys working on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, or any of the reactionary historians or economists or whatever working at any prestigious university. Or any US lawyers worth their million dollar fees.

I'll grant you entertaining - if you like that kind of entertainment ;-) ("This is the kind of book that will be liked by people who like this kind of book")

"A lot of nonsense" - well, no disagreement there.

Chops