On the destruction of Glenn Greenwald's partner's computers and data by the British government

An article in TechDirt gives a good general account of some of the democratic issues involved in the case of the British government's harassment of the Guardian journalist involved in the Snowden whistle-blowing affair, Glenn Greenwald and his partner, David Miranda.
TechDirt Data destruction orders direct from Cameron

Since the article ignored both historical and class perspectives I made the following comment rooted in the perspective of the Permanent Revolution, ie that the bourgeoisie as a class is totally incapable of taking society forward even to realize bourgeois democratic ideals that are incomplete or even quite absent, and that such ideals can only be achieved in passing by the working class when it achieves the broader goal of emancipating all humanity in a non-capitalist world run by associated producers on socialist lines:

Clear enough for an article lacking historical and class perspective. Should be enough to stimulate any remaining serious bourgeois democrats to take action. Ha-fucking-ha.
We should be clear that there will not be any massive bourgeois democratic response against this violation of fundamental bourgeois democratic rights. The only defenders of such democratic rights on a mass scale are organized socialist movements - workers and poor peasants fighting against the capitalists and imperialists who are daily ruining their lives with overwork in harsh conditions or enforced idleness, and the poverty accompanying both.
The only way to put an end to this kind of inhumanity - both the violation of rights and the brutal exploitation - is to replace capitalist society with a non-capitalist one. The great bourgeois democratic reforms (parliamentary rule, universal franchise, equal legal rights for all, universal education, national liberation) have been achieved in most places, and the bourgeoisie is quite satisfied now, thank you very much. Historical change is class-led, by the class with most to gain and nothing to lose. That used to be the bourgeoisie, from around 1500 to 1789, say. Now it isn't any more. It's the working class and the poor peasants who are one bad harvest away from dispossession and the megacity slums.
So any serious non-socialist radical democrats had better start reading up on history and class and put their effort behind creating an alternative society removing power from the worn-out, incompetent, brutal and incorrigible capitalist bourgeoisie.

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.

On the economic crisis which isn't really an economic crisis...

In response to Mike Roberts's blog about a Greek pensioner killing himself in despair outside the Greek parliament, and a couple of comments there, 

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/tsolakoglou/

I wrote the following:

Well, from this and your previous blogs it's obvious that humanity's crisis at the moment is less and less narrowly economic and more and more overtly political. The Political in Political Economy is coming to the fore. As I showed a couple of blogs ago with lots of quotes from ch 27 of Book III of Capital (on the role of credit in capitalism), by 1867 Marx already considered that capitalism had outgrown itself and was taking on more and more socialized forms of production and circulation, although remaining trapped and crippled within bourgeois relations of production. So the problems to be solved aren't economic as such - the preconditions for a non-capitalist society run by democratically associated producers (socialism) are there and have been there for one and a half centuries.

The problem, the deepest crisis of humanity, is political. As Trotsky formulated it in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938: "

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

You can't put it much clearer than that.

The leaderships of the working class on a mass scale are class traitors, from the Labour Party in Britain to the Socialist Parties in France, Spain and elsewhere, to various "revolutionary" left government parties in Latin America, to the Social Democrats of Sweden. Not to mention the counter-revolutionary regime running the non-capitalist Chinese state. The unions are as bad in their way, backing these governments, worldwide, and in the US even backing an openly bourgeois pro-plutocrat party.

In an economic perspective the most glaring symptom of this betrayal is the total capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the economic theory front. Nowhere among the working class leaderships is Marxist economics taken seriously - and hardly even among the more truly revolutionary (and small) parties.

So the working class is not just politically blind, in that it is force-fed bourgeois policies and whipped into the polling booths to vote for its own flaying, but it is economically blind as to the part it plays in creating society's wealth (flaunted by super-rich individuals and corporations) and running the whole system of production and distribution (against its own interests).

So basically if we are to resolve the deepest crisis of humanity we need to fuse the two aspects of social life, and bring more economics into politics and more politics into economics.

Someone once characterized Soviet citizens as "ferociously egalitarian", and what we need is to be "ferociously revolutionary" if we are to remove the capitalist system and create an egalitarian and democratically run society.

What causes a mode of production to change?

The discussion on China as a mode of production focused for a while on what lies behind the transition from one mode of production to another -- class struggle or the development of the means of production. That is, is it primarily an economic or a political question?

 http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/which-way-for-china-part-one/#comment-3839

'Waistline' wrote:

“Marx was quite clear about the antagonisms leading to the passing of one mode of production into another, including capitalism into socialism – they are *all* the product of class struggle. Relations between living people, not between dead things (ie not technology). To claim that new means of production bring about the final crisis of capitalism is a) to ignore the fact that human labour power is a means of production, and b) to fall into the trap of commodity fetishism attributing human qualities (living drives and aspirations) to dead things.”

In my opinion socialism is not a mode of production. It is precisely because socialism is not a mode of production that controversy existed over defining the economy of China and even that of the former Soviet Union. Socialism or rather industrial socialism in the past century was according to much of Marxism a transition society or the first stage of transition to a new mode of production. When Marx spoke of the bourgeois mode of commodity production (capitalism for short speak) he meant a specific form of property plus the industrial revolution. Means of production plus social relations of production, based on means and property form.

New means of production brings about the final crisis for every mode of production, not simply capitalism. By final crisis is meant “the condition of crisis – antagonism – that is transition to a new quality or the leap to a new quality. By antagonism I mean something different than “contradiction” or the unity and struggle of opposites.

Marx is clear. My view changed concerning the question of the law system immanent to capital and whether or not its crisis, understood as cyclical crisis, can usher in a new quality of means of production or a new mode of production. In his famous outline of transition from one mode of production to the next, Marx does not write about “class struggle” causing transition to a new mode of production. Let look at Marx again.

“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

“Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”

Further

“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

The last paragraph is the enigma. “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” In my opinion capitalism of the past century was not pregnant with socialism, precisely because socialism is a transition to something else. Further, there was still much room for development of the means of production based on the industrial revolution. In America we experienced destruction of the sharecropping system by the tractor, which changed the form of land tenure and the social organization of labor based on old implements of production. Determining how much “room is left in a social order” (does social order here mean mode of production) is tricky business Rosa L attempted to solve. I do not believe one can figure out how much “room is left in a social order” until new means of production actually appear and throw society into antagonism or a mode of destruction of the old society productive forces and social relations.

Without question history is about human beings, which we presuppose or there is no history. When Marx writes about the material power of productive forces he assumes the reader understands this material power is the product of the human, as they are productively active and form social groups and classes.

Class struggle most certainly plays a role. Specifically, there seems to be two distinct kinds of class struggle. The struggle between the two basic classes defining a mode of production, e.g. feudalism as serf and landowner/nobility, drives the feudal mode of production through all its quantitative boundaries. Then qualitatively new means of production enter the picture, the industrial revolution.

The struggle between the serf and nobility or all the classes defining the meaning of feudalism can never cause society to spontaneously leap to a new mode of production. To incite a leap to a new quality, something qualitative has to happen. A new quality has to be injected into the social process or something taken away that destabilizes the quality and set it into a qualitatively different kind of change cycle.

What happened in history was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution created new classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat as basic class constituting the foundation of what becomes a new mode of production). Stated another way, a new social organization of labor arose on the basis of the industrial revolution. The new classes are connected to and express the self-movement of qualitatively new means of production. Marx uses the steam engine as a bookmark, but I understand this bookmark to mean the entire technology regime implied in the steam engine and its continuous development.

In my reading of Marx, history and society moves in class antagonism and not simply class struggle. The antagonism is not reducible to the struggle between the primary classes, e.g. serf and nobility. The serf and nobility in this example are the decisive contradiction defining and driving the feudal system through its quantitative stages. Capitalist and proletariat evolved within the society of feudalism. However, the serf and capitalist are not “connected together” as the unity of the mode of production identified as feudalism. Serf and nobility is the unity of feudal production. The proletariat and nobility are not connected together as the unity of production or rather the unity of production relation defining feudalism. Serf and nobility as the landed property relations define feudalism in its property form. In its material power feudalism spans centuries from handicraft to manufacture and then the industrial revolution brings the world of feudalism to an end, or rather set the condition for the leap to a new mode of production. In this sense Marx writes the steam engines get you industrial capitalist.

I do agree that people are decisive in shaping the society formed on the basis of new means of production.

What happen in my opinion is that bourgeoisie and proletariat evolve in external collision – antagonism – with the serf and nobility as these old classes constitute the decisive contradiction defining the world of feudalism. The world of the serf and nobility is not industrial. Of course there is much more involved in transition from one mode of production to the next. For instance gold as an expanding form of wealth begins the breakup of the landed property relations or what is the same, society based on landed property as the primary form of wealth.

I think. 

Waistline

I replied:

Waistline, if technological progress is all that is needed for a new mode of production to arise, all we need to do is sit back on our arses and wait for the great day.

You are trying to get Marx to argue this. But he doesn’t. If Capital III isn’t good enough an illustration of this, then how about:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

[...]

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

“Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

“A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.”

[...]

“The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. [...]

“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”

[...]

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Surely this is clear enough? The forces of production grow – of course – but they grow because new relations of production, that is new class relations, replace old relations of production that strangled these forces. And the replacement of these all-important relations of production depends on the fighting out and resolution of class war – “open revolution” and “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie” laying the “foundation for the sway of the proletariat”.

Economic fatalism, “objectivism”, led many Marxists (like Ernest Mandel and his followers to imagine that the Soviet Union had means of production that were too highly developed to be stuffed back into the straitjacket of bourgeois property relations. The class struggle, with a misled and disorganized working class and a rampant imperialist bourgeoisie proved them wrong. But to stuff the non-capitalist baby back into the capitalist womb, the baby had to be chopped into bloody pieces.

Our concern right now is to figure out what is happening in China in this historical political economic perspective. Forcing the Chinese baby back into the devil mother’s womb will require grinding it up. Our discussion is about how much of this is capitalism, how much is a new mode of production in becoming, and who is doing what on which side of the class divide, and where, and how.

I might add that this discussion is of burning urgency for the masses of the Indian subcontinent, too. And India and China make up almost half of humanity. We aren’t just engaged in academic chit-chat.

China is different - but why?

Michael Roberts's latest blog is entitled "Which way for China - part one", and has some interesting ideas to offer. He discusses the following concerns of "mainstream economics":

"Mainstream economics is confused about which way the Chinese economy is going.  Some media and economists reckon Chinese growth is slowing fast from its double-digit pace seen in the last few years and indeed is heading towards a crisis or slump brought on by ‘over-investment’, a reversal of a credit-fuelled property bubble and a spiralling of hidden bad debts in the banking system. On the other hand, some economists reckon that economic growth may be slowing, but the Chinese authorities will be able to engineer a ‘soft landing’ through the easing of credit and financing of the writing-off of debt from cash reserves built up over past years. 

"Behind this debate on the immediate future also lies a debate on whether China can continue to grow fast through investment in industry, infrastructure and more exports or will need to switch to a consumer-led economy that imports more and supplies goods to a ‘rising middle-class’ like advanced capitalist economies supposedly do.  Mainstream economics reckons that this cannot be done without developing a more ‘market-based’ economy i.e. capitalism, because the ‘complexity’ of a consumer society can only work under capitalism and not under ‘heavy-handed’ central planning of government and state industries."

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/which-way-for-china-part-one

I made the following comment:

Yup. China is different. But why?

Given the usual total failure of "mainstream economists" to understand anything, even in the world imperialist system, we can dismiss their explanations as ravings when it comes to general economic principles and long-term economic prospects. So what else is there?

If China was capitalist, it would have stalled and crashed long ago. But if it's not capitalist, what is it?

For my money the answer is more historical and political than economic as such. But an economic inkling can be found in Eugene Preobrazhensky's mid-20s book "The New Economics", which dealt with a similarly contradictory political-economic contradiction - the nascent Soviet Union. He describes the setup as "proto-socialist" and the process involved as "primitive socialist accumulation".

Historically I think we're witnessing the long overdue transition of the world mode of production from capitalism to socialism. This can only be understood in an orthodox Marxist perspective (ie grounded in the analysis of the capitalist system in Capital, based on the Law of Value). Marx views the general development of the forces of production as irreversible, and often enough describes capitalism with a fully formed credit system as having developed as far as it could while still remaining capitalist. Social production had grown so much that private appropriation was nothing but a straitjacket preventing further development, in terms of principle. In other words "capitalism pregnant with socialism", or capitalism negating itself. And Lenin rubbed this in by entitling his book Imperialism - the *ultimate* stage of capitalism. Not so much the "highest so far", but the ultimate ie final.

Which is where the political aspect comes in.

The Soviet example showed that the transformation of the capitalist mode of production into a socialist mode of production doesn't happen peacefully, does happen country by country, and is dependent on conscious political action. It also shows (as is made explicit in Preobrazhensky's book) that there is a long road to travel from a non-capitalist (ie workers) state in one or a number of countries to what we can call a viable socialist state (ie one forming part of a world economy dominated by socialist relations of production.

The USSR also showed that the predictions of mainstream bourgeois economists regarding imminent  collapse were totally wrong. Despite the appalling political regime the system survived for seven decades, having started from next to nothing.

Well, China was able to start its proto-socialist career after three decades of an economically expanding workers state in the USSR, and together with many new non-capitalist states and anti-imperialist states. So we can assume that both historically and economically it has been much less vulnerable than Russia. It had a flying start.

Which brings me to what might be the greatest problem facing us today when it comes to understanding and explaining exactly what makes China tick. One Country, Two Systems. That is, how capitalist is China fundamentally?

How would you approach this problem, Mike?

---

'Waistline' commented on this, just the way a good blog discussion should take place!

"To shift to a comment from one reader concerning their interpretation of Marx, I would suggest a very different interpretation of Marx. It was stated:

“Marx views the general development of the forces of production as irreversible, and often enough describes capitalism with a fully formed credit system as having developed as far as it could while still remaining capitalist. Social production had grown so much that private appropriation was nothing but a straitjacket preventing further development, in terms of principle.”

"Marx speaks of a fetter on production rather than the halting of further expansion and development. In my view “capitalism cannot be pregnant with socialism.” While productive force accumulation is irreversible, this primarily applies to means of production. That is to say society cannot be de-evolved back into manufacturing with the impact of the long history of the industrial revolution somehow being negated. Manufacture as a configuration of means of production evolved from handicraft and these world no longer exist for society to go back to. Negation and sublation do not operate backwards as a law system. In this sense of means of production development, Marx spoke of people never relinquishing what they have won.

"Rather than speak of “social production” in conflict with private appropriation, let’s speak of the quantitative growth of industrial means of production in unity and conflict (contradiction) with their bourgeois – capitalist – integuments. Exactly what production beyond the stage of primitive communism is not inherently social or “social production?”

"A different reading of Marx is possible. The bourgeois mode of commodity production – capitalism – enters its final irresolvable crisis NOT ON THE BASIS OF ITS LAW SYSTEM IMMANENT TO IT. Capital is birthed in contradiction expressed as the primary classes of its productive relations; bourgeois and proletariat. Something else other than the basic classes constituting the mode of production causes capitalism to enter into antagonism. That something else is new means of production, the electronic revolution or as a new generation is starting to describe things; the robot economy. Max “Preface to a Contribution” can be read different than the understanding of previous generations of communist.

"This debate about what constitutes “the limit” of the bourgeois mode of commodity production is old. I believe the solution to the question is that qualitatively new means of production creates a new social organization of labor and brings the old system and classes connected to the old system to antagonism.

"At any rate, I look forward to reading more of this.

"Waistline

and I responded:

Hi Waistline, I should perhaps have written the "socialization" of production rather than "social" production - I thought I covered that by writing that it had grown too much to be developed any further under capitalism. Except maybe in so far as a fully developed baby could keep growing in the womb for months or years after nine months gestation. But this growth is not exactly "development". Everything necessary for a viable child is ready. Capitalist expansion is cannibalistic once a certain stage of development has been reached. Once this ultimate stage is reached - and tendency of the rate of profit to fall gives us a good barometer of this - then there is too much capital for the capitalist system to handle. For the rate of profit to rise, huge amounts of capital need to be rendered unproductive (incapable of producing surplus value). Hence war, the extreme growth of military spending (the ultimate capitalist luxury good), and the obscene expansion of unproductive sectors of the economy (lawyers, advertising, and a myriad other sterile ways of divvying up surplus value), and at the same time the appropriators of surplus value (unpaid labour) need to become fewer and fewer so the profit isn't diluted more than necessary. The contradictions are obvious.
Marx was quite clear about the antagonisms leading to the passing of one mode of production into another, including capitalism into socialism -  they are *all* the product of class struggle. Relations between living people, not between dead things (ie not technology). To claim that new means of production bring about the final crisis of capitalism is a) to ignore the fact that human labour power is a means of production, and b) to fall into the trap of commodity fetishism attributing human qualities (living drives and aspirations) to dead things. Commodity fetishism is one of the most fundamental concepts in Marx, it is crucial to understanding his whole analysis of the capitalist mode of production.
For Marx capitalism was pregnant with socialism in his own time, as is perfectly clear from Capital III -- not only pregnant but overdue. In the 1860s. Lenin just expresses Marx's conclusions with respect to the even more cataclysmic political and economic world of his day. One of Stalin's most appalling theoretical mistakes was to trumpet that Marx only wrote about free competition capitalism. He didn't.
Anyhow, if we don't get clarify the human relationships involved in the Chinese situation, ie the character of the class struggle taking place there, and the relationship between the economic system in China and the rest of the world, we'll be as confused by it as the mainstream economists, and make a very poor job of trying to change things for the benefit of living labour rather than dead capital.
Which is why I'm looking forward to what Mike has to say on this subject.

---

Commenter 'hydeparkspeakers' took the discussion forward with the two following contributions:

First a couple of minor issues.

The NPC is (nominally) the decision making body of ‘the people’ not the leadership, the leadership is vested in the Party hierarchy not in government institutions.
I think the exponential growth rate has to be seen in a longer-term context than the last decade. Why this is important? There are very few countries that have ‘caught up’ and modernized since the 1945, and of those no other country has achieved such a long period of such rapid growth as China has over 30 years. Its developmental growth is in a league of its own in a world-historical sense.

The World Bank, under the influence of Justin Yifu Lin, claims that sustained long term growth is primarily due to the exploitation of comparative advantage, (low cost labour -low capital intensity -export driven growth) backed by strategic support from the state to create the infrastructure to assist the private sector.

The reduction in target GDP for 2012 is not a reaction any newly changed conditions, but corresponds with the reduced GDP targets outlined in the 12th Five Year Plan (FYP) adopted by the NPC in March 2011.

The land sales are not all to private developers, state owned entities buy land off each other, there are various levels of state control over public land assets and a turf war between state owned entities characterizes the root of the land sales system. Only part of this is confrontation between the township and village, the lowest level of the state land hierarchy.
The economic impulse derived from the private purchase of apartments is replaced by state construction of low cost rental apartments in the 12th FYP. Local governments often rent out or sell land use rights (leases) that they acquire at below market rates (at agricultural land-use prices) to attract investment. They themselves also invest in creating the infrastructure for the investors to encourage growth, as meeting targets set by the FYP are the critera for ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of officials.

The infrastructure growth in China, is however, very much a state driven urbanization strategy, it has been compared to the Great Leap Forward, but one that is more or less matched by capacity, unlike its predecessor. Now the question is, will Chinese urbanisation continue to produce a significant growth impetus?

A second and connected question is, can the emulation of infrastructure, development and urbanisation models in the interior of China produce the same dynamics of growth as they have in Eastern China?

It seems to me that the private sector, and foreign capital is following the designs of the state planning system, which at the driving seat of economic growth, having all the key levers of the economy in its hands.

***

The motive forces driving the system determine its systemic characterisation. Any number of circumstances can produce rapid growth, but the specifics of Chinese growth are unique and extraordinary and certainly force the question of its systemic dynamics to the fore.

In think the systemic critera used by the Hungarian theorist Janos Kornai are useful, (regardless of his own view of China, or of Marxism and socialism).

1. What ownership form dominates the commanding heights?
2. Is the coordination system dominated by bureaucratic plan or markets?
3. Is the political regime hostile or friendly to capitalism?

If you study the details I think you will find that:

1. The commanding heights are overwhelmingly in state hands .

2. Factor prices are state determined and the planning system drives the economic dynamic. The five year plan drives the economy, not market forces, and the state economy is mobilised wholesale to attain state objectives.

3. The structure of power systematically favours bureaucratic forces over private forces; repressing private finance, indigenous private enterprise, imposing arbritary taxes, expropriations, and so on, as well as repressing any organised capitalist political opposition.

Although it is true that this is probably the most capitalist tolerant and friendly ‘planned economy’ in history- at present -the state and political regime is not in the hands or the pay of capital.

----

  

I added the following comment giving quotes from Capital to corroborate what I wrote in reply to 'Waistline' about Marx being 'perfectly clear about capitalism being pregnant with socialism':

I think the following quotes from a single short chapter of Capital III (Ch 27 ‘The role of credit in capitalist production’) are necessary to relate this discussion on China to Marx’s historical socio-economic perspective, ie to historical materialism. This chapter is practically ignored in discussions among Marxists, reformist or revolutionary, academic or political. It is however possibly the single most important chapter in III, and the most explosive, as it shows just how far behind Marx we still lag after 150 years – he wrote this before 1867 – and how overripe he considered capitalism to be for the transition to socialism, or as he called it the associated mode of production. Only Lenin in “Imperialism” and Trotsky in “The Revolution Betrayed” have this perspective at the core of their work.

Capital III, Ch 27 The role of credit in capitalist production:

III. Formation of stock companies. Thereby:

2) The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.

3) [… ] In stock companies the function [of management and administration] is divorced from capital ownership, hence also labour is entirely divorced from ownership of means of production and surplus-labour. This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property. On the other hand, the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions.

[… ] This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production.

IV. Aside from the stock-company business, which represents the abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself and destroys private industry as it expands and invades new spheres of production, credit offers to the individual capitalist; or to one who is regarded a capitalist, absolute control within certain limits over the capital and property of others, and thereby over the labour of others.[3] The control over social capital, not the individual capital of his own, gives him control of social labour. […C]entralisation of capital, […] expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter’s social property, much as they are their social products.

[…] The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves […] show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. […] The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.

So far we have considered the development of the credit system — and the implicit latent abolition of capitalist property — […]

[…] the credit system accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the establishment of the world-market. It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction — crises — and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production.

The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, […] to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production.

In response to Waistline I wrote: “For Marx capitalism was pregnant with socialism in his own time, as is perfectly clear from Capital III — not only pregnant but overdue.” As the quotes show, this is a gross understatement. He is not just ‘perfectly clear’, but he hammers the point home. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Count the number of times he uses the term ‘mode of production’. And note his explicit location of it in the context of transition from an old, worn-out mode of production — capitalism — to a new and superior mode of production of associated producers.

China and capitalist restoration

In a discussion on FaceBook (11 March 2012) Gerry Downing answers MT and takes the opportunity to  justify the idea that capitalism has been restored in China.
Gerald Downing FaceBook

I don't know why you think I think that China is a deformed workers state but you are wrong. In my view the date of transition was 1992, although that is arguable (Workers Power put it at about the same time). Here is what I think:Let us list the features of the Chinese economy and state to see which it is;1. The “iron rice bowl” is basically gone. Mao’s welfare state has been abolished apart from in a few places. The Gini Coefficient shows a sharply rising graph of income and wealth inequality in China since the early 1980s as in India, not yet as high as Brazil, Mexico and South Africa but getting there. 2. There is a thriving capitalist sector with its own class differentiated bourgeoisie and working class. China now has more millionaires than the UK, Germany or Japan, although at 450,000 it is still a long way behind the U.S. even though that fell by 2.5 million to 6.7 million in 2008. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states expropriated their capitalists and prevented that class arising anew. 3. There is a Stock Exchange and capitalist banks, although, a la Bismarck, Stolypin and Keynes, they are state controlled (unlike in Britain under Blair and Brown) to ensure the better development of capitalism. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states had/have no stock exchanges. This is not neo-liberal capitalism but it is capitalism nevertheless.4. The monopoly of foreign trade is gone but the state still retains strategic control over trade as good capitalist planners. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states had/have a state monopoly of foreign trade.5. They are developing as an imperialist power; their investments in Africa, South America and Sri Lanka, for example, are for purely commercial and strategic/military purposes. This is totally unlike the practice of the USSR where support and investment was to strengthen their hand and give them more pawns in the chess game of achieving peaceful cooperation and compromise with the world Imperialism. The USSR was prepared to sponsor, ideologically and materially, armed opposition to imperialism to this end, China arms its clients but has no ideological opposition to imperialism, however distorted, to offer. However China still retains strong elements of a semi-colonial state in its far-flung backward regions, which are prey to US/CIA interventions to begin the breakup of a developing rival. It is still a long way from a fully fledged imperialist power and history never proceeds in a straight line without wars and revolutions so its uninterrupted development is far from certain.Comrades, when we see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, we call that bird a duck. James Robertson had pragmatically seen the significance of the long swim of the capitalists from Cuba to Miami by 1966 but the International Committee of Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert refused to look at what had happened there after 1959. In his play Galileo Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo invites the leading scholars of Florence to peer into his telescope for the ultimate proof that Aristotle was wrong; but the men refused to look, instead making evasive, dogmatic speeches about why the telescope could not possibly show any such thing. A little more pragmatism and common sense would now assist comrades, before we progress to the more complex world of the Marxist dialectic. China is capitalist, look; it waddles and paddles and quacks, it’s a duck!.

I responded: 

Sorry, Gerry, I think your duck might turn out to be a swan - even though it's exceedingly ugly as a duckling ;-)

Your version of the history of the capitalist mode of production in the era of transition to socialism is impressionist because it ignores all the important historical questions. 

Most importantly it ignores the question of how modes of production develop and transform - from slave-ownership to feudal to capitalist etc. Despite occasional hiccups they don't head back. It's not straightforward, but it's irreversible. If the new mode of production breaks down, you get chaos and catastrophe - in our day formulated as socialism or barbarism.

So if imperialism is the ultimate stage of capitalism (ie can develop no further scientifically speaking, but just decay or metamorphose into something new and non-capitalist) and is essentially capitalism pregnant with socialism, we must ask what the direction of history is and why capitalism can so easily return to a country where its foundations were destroyed. Against the tide. This tide - clearly seen by Marx in the 1860s, where he states (in Capital III) that capitalism is socialized through and through in every respect except ownership and the direct consequences of ownership), and fully accepted by Lenin - is important for understanding the history of the 20th century. Especially the Soviet Union and its character.

First of all, it's the only possible explanation for the survival of revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union for seven decades. Trotsky recognizes this in the Revolution Betrayed where he attacks impressionist notions that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state in 1936. The political distortions in the Stalinist USSR were at least as great as the economic distortions in China today, if not greater - Trotsky didn't hesitate to draw direct parallels between the Stalinist regime and the Nazi regime in Germany. He characterized it as counter-revolutionary. But the foundations of the USSR were different. The capitalist "integument" had "burst asunder", and social economic productive forces were no longer constrained by private appropriation. The results of the newly unleashed productive forces were skimmed off by the bureaucrats, of course, but this isn't the same.

Right, so despite a counter-revolutionary regime that banned all political opposition and critical Marxist thinking, crushed oppositional organizations and individuals, didn't understand Marxist economics, and spread lies and confusion about socialism, the new workers state, crippled, weak and impoverished, survived for seven decades and put the imperialist world to shame on many fronts.

When the bureaucratic regime finally sold out to imperialism we got to see real economic counter-revolution in the mode of production sense. First and only time. No lessons have been drawn from this in relation to China. Impressionism talks as if real economic counter-revolution has taken place there too. This is making a nonsense of the category of counter-revolution. Both poltical and economic. Counter-revolution on this scale is spectacular. 1991 in Russia, however well prepared it was politically, and however eagerly and non-militarily embraced it was by imperialism, was not a reformist transition, an undramatic gliding over to capitalist ownership and management.

The urban and rural workers - trampled and despised under Stalinism - were stripped of what little they had left. But this little was HUGE - it was the fundamentally different relationship between a worker and the forces of production in a non-capitalist state. Every speck of inequality and meanness and brutalization in the USSR had arisen AGAINST the nature of a workers state, even a backward and isolated one in a world dominated by imperialism. Superficial analyses (eg the State Capitalist view) missed this aspect of the USSR completely. 

In China, however well prepared the political and some of the economic conditions might be, we have seen nothing approaching the devastation and barbarity of post-restoration Russia. The political chaos. The human destruction. Reversing a mode of production from non-capitalist to capitalist is non-trivial. It means (historically speaking) ramming a big bouncing baby back into a womb that was already too small before it was born. In Russia the only way the restoration has survived is by reshaping the womb, so to speak. The social scale of the forces of production could only be handled by the state taking over the role of capitalist - leading to a real state capitalism run by loyal oligarchs and powerful politicians. Foreign imperialism is nowhere. 

No one has bothered to envisage what might actually happen in China following a real restoration. We have lazily watched capitalist techniques being introduced and just nodded sagely saying: "look - restoration - goodness me..." This has also led to idiotic reinterpretations of "pre-restoration" such as "Mao's welfare state".

In the Revolution Betrayed Trotsky castigated those who treated the bureaucracy as one featureless mass. He pointed out that the class struggle doesn't vanish because its surface expression is suppressed. But the same error is being made in relation to China. And this is the second big problem of the China is Capitalist view. The Chinese bureaucracy is larger and more powerful and far more stable than the Soviet bureaucracy ever was, but it is just as riven by economic, social and political differences - the material interests of the lower, middle and upper bureaucracies are not the same, and often they are in complete contradiction. Lower bureaucrats would stand to lose everything in a restoration. Middle bureaucrats (as always) feel more secure with the status quo. Upper bureaucrats (the equivalent of the Soviet nomenclatura) would probably prefer restoration. Now - and this is BIG - for Marxists a state is an apparatus mobilizing violent force to maintain and defend a particular mode of production. The army, militias, and the elements making them up. Not just leaders but rank and file. Not just general staff but higher and lower officer castes, and the foot soldiers. This organized violence is inextricably bound up with the political and economic management of the state. 

So where does the army stand in relation to restoration? Well, bugger me, how should I know, is the answer, to judge by the total lack of inquiry into the question. 

In short, it's reasonable to assume that there are very powerful forces in China working in both directions - for restoration and against it. Much stronger and more contradictory than they were even in the Soviet Union, as China is a larger and more powerful nation.

Further, just as the USSR prospered (in spite of everything) during the 30s while imperialism was on its knees, China has been prospering during the loooong drawn out death rattling of the great capitalist crisis following the post-war reconstruction (etc) boom. Since say 1980 (when Thatcher and Reagan initiated a desperate reactionary assault on the core imperialist working class) China has been doing very well thank you.

Now, if I were a Chinese bureaucrat of any rank (particularly perhaps a top bureaucrat) I would be asking myself this question: "if imperialism is making such an intolerable mess of things, getting bogged down in expensive unwinnable wars, rotting away socially, lurching from one deep crisis to the next even deeper crisis... and I'm doing just fine with things the way they are here, getting kickbacks from my industrial and financial cronies... and my cronies are doing just fine being looked after by me... Why the fuck would I ever be stupid enough to give everything up and join a losing side? Why should I go aboard their sinking ship?? They are now coming to me with a begging bowl. Asking for bail-outs and handouts, begging for mercy. Nope, I'll carry on as I am for a bit, I think. So, as far as full frontal restoration goes, thanks, but no thanks."

These questions I raise are all fundamental. They can't be answered with trade figures or organizational charts. Economy is Political economy, not company economics, and the big political questions just aren't being asked.

If we hold with Trotsky, then we should move beyond the Revolution Betrayed (1936) to the Transitional Programme (1938), a much more general document assimilating the lessons worked out in the Revolution Betrayed and all of Trotsky's and the class's previous Bolshevik-Leninist experience.

The most important single sentence in the TP is the very first: "The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

We need to work out what this means ACTIVELY in relation to problems of capitalist restoration and the fate of Russia and China. It's not enough to passively sit around and bemoan "restoration" and counter-revolution without even considering this aspect of the matter. Because what is happening in Russia and China, obviously, is an expression of the class struggle today in a period of extreme imperialist putrefaction. If "restoration" can be brought about at the stroke of a pen, at the whim of some highly placed bureaucrats in Beijing, and does not depend on a social cataclysm involving a direct confrontation between the working class and the bourgeoisie, then we might as well go into "politics" and fight for a place by the trough in Brussels or Washington. There was no bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union when restoration occurred (which is one reason why it took so long to materialize), so the confrontation was far from straightforward and extremely mediated. There is no real bourgeoisie in China (no state power, no control of commanding heights or army etc etc) so there will be no straightforward confrontation there. 

What we have to do is to work out what social (ie class forces) will be involved in the decisive confrontation, how the bourgeois element will be mediated in China, and in what way we can bring an end to historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.

We can't do this by handing our enemies a walkover and letting them win by default. "Oh shit, capitalism just restored itself in China. Well, ain't that a shame. Still, it'll be our turn soon..."

I think if a political Galileo were to ask today's "scholars of Florence" to look into his telescope, the thing they would shrink from observing would be "capitalism pregnant with socialism", and a Chinese workers state whose social and economic fate is by no means decided yet.

This very ugly duckling might make quacking noises, but if we use Galileo's microscope (well, today's equivalent :-) we will see that the DNA is that of a swan.

The British riots - symptoms aren't causes

An article in the Guardian by Zoe Williams, who has her headed screwed on, discussed vigilanteism and its relation to a functional society.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-vigilantism-big-society
I made the following comment:

Zoe writes: "Big society might look like people on the streets with brooms or doner knives; but that's not what functional society looks like."
For a long time society has been very functional - for the bourgeoisie running a capitalist society for their own benefit and enjoying a monopoly of violence (army and police) and public judgement (ie condemnation, punishment and criminalization of their antagonists).
Now not even the bourgeoisie and its public representatives (damn near everyone in politics and the media) can run a functional society. "Those above can't rule, and those below can't be ruled".
Which leads to unofficial attack groups (ultra-right thugs, ultimately death squads) attacking the enemies of capitalism and the bourgeois state, and others who are singled out as scapegoats.
And since the rest of us need to mind our backs, we organize self-defence groups. An "invisible", organized and "orderly" class war breaks surface and becomes visible, 2-way organized (ie polarized) and "disorderly" from the rulers' perspective. And since organization, education about society and politics, creative and benevolent treatment has been cut out of the non-ruling body of those living and working (or jobless) in Britain, no one should be surprised when the social eruptions are disorganized, ignorant, anti-social, apolitical, destructive and malevolent. It happens in the slums of the US (LA) and France (Paris) and now (once more) Britain.
Given all this we should note that given the degree of damage to property there has been very very little damage to person, and given the number of the rioters the state response has been disproportionate, vindictive and divisive, to say the least. A typical image from the riots has been of a half-a-dozen heavily armoured, anonymous (super-hoodied), armed police, with leash-tugging dogs and armoured cars in the background standing over a single unarmed lad who's about to be carted off and done over (if not physically, then civically).
The howls of rage at the symptoms (sometimes ugly symptoms) are hypocritical and cynical given the wilful neglect of the causes underlying these symptoms.
And the causes are inseparable from this bourgeois capitalist society, and will only become more deeply rooted and virulent as this society becomes less and less functional even on its own terms.
Temporary alleviation was achieved with the New Deal and the Welfare State in the 30s and 40s. However, this only occurred in powerful countries after their bourgeoisies were threatened with extinction by colonial independence and revolution - oh, and after a world war that ended with ultra-imperialist Churchill being unceremoniously dumped by the workers who had fought his imperialist war for him.
So now New Deal or Welfare State for a while yet, just more of the same gouging out of living flesh. And more and more panicky squealing and scapegoating from defenders of the state as quo (with no quid).

The riots in Britain - London, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool so far

I made the following comment on the live coverage of the riots in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/09/london-riots-violence-looting-live)



Very briefly - it's not the government, it's the class they represent. The bourgeoisie has a monopoly of everything public in Britain Europe and most of the world today, and they're using this public authority to smash all public enterprise, goods, services and amenities they can. To put the profits from this into their own pockets (that's what profit is - private money after productive capital investment and unproductive military and ideological expenditure are taken care of). They're looting the general public (us) using the monopoly of public violence (military, police) their system gives them, not us.
Now the most reviled and criminalized and impoverished section of the general public - immigrant, slumdwelling working class lads are reacting in the way they have seen the ruling class acting towards reviled, impoverished and criminalized foreign countries - burning and looting. But they show none of the indiscriminate ruthlessness of the bourgeoisie on the rampage in the colonial wars of Britain and France, or the imperialist wars of the US.
They are a barometer showing the way the rest of us are feeling. They can react spontaneously this way because they aren't tied down by property debt, car and other loans, or a job to lose. And have the energy of youth. The rest of us don't challenge state (class) violence so lightly.
But when we do, it will need more than thousands of police to curb us. There are so many of us that we'll be kettling them, and occupying their lives the way they have been occupying ours.
And we'll be organized, and have a clear idea about what we need to do to get them off our backs for good, and tear public wealth out of their greedy, gory hands.