Is China a socialist country? For a long time I assumed it wasn't. When I lived there for four months in 2005, I saw a diverse market economy with obvious economic inequalities. The idea that China could be socialist seemed bizarre to me - obviously there wasn't comprehensive economic planning on the Soviet model. And if there wasn't planning, or even a move towards more planning, then what right did the Chinese state have in claiming to be socialist? Besides, socialism for me meant the extension of democracy more generally, not brutal repression of dissent. Hope for a socialist alternative, then, seemed better placed in countries like Venezuela.
I witnessed many people congratulating Venezuela on this or that reform. Recently, someone said that 20% of Venezuela's banking sector was now state-owned. I couldn't help but think of China's banking sector, which is almost entirely state-owned and controlled. In fact, most of China's strategic sectors are controlled directly by the state. Foreign investment is largely channeled through state firms which are monitored by Chinese authorities. Of private investment in general, most of it comes from Chinese nationals – including Hong Kong citizens – and is not parasitic in the same way that foreign control used to be for China. If anything, China now controls strategic amounts of American debt.
In 1978, what were the main problems facing China? It was a poor and isolated country. It wasn’t well positioned to fight a modern war. It needed to build its productive capacity and raise its level of technology. Could it have plodded along with a Soviet-style economy? Possibly, but even the Soviet Union was showing cracks and sluggish performance. Meanwhile, in the countryside, many moves away from leftism were bearing fruit, such as allowing small plots. The average person in China was demanding economic growth and pragmatic policy-making based on the facts. If China’s government had veered further left of the population, what would have happened to China?
In any event, what did happen is that Deng Xiaoping allowed decollectivization of agriculture, restructured firms to create a rudimentary market, started encouraging cultural exchange, worked to modernize the military and moved towards a more pragmatic style of governance. As this policy began to show successes, the Soviet Union and its allies collapsed, narrowing the space for socialist economics in a globalizing world. China decided to continue its reform efforts while maintaining its status as a socialist country, led by a mass socialist party with tens of millions of members. The results have been fairly clear: Most people in the country are much better off, and some people are better off beyond most expectations. Isn’t it time we shed our racist assumptions and congratulated China?
Isn’t it time we shed our racist assumptions and congratulated China?
Speak for yourself, any nation and people that has developed at that pace deserves respect regardless of the arcane political theory.
tpaine posted:hu is the President of the People's Republic of China
lol
tpaine posted:i don't know how anything works
what about magnets
swirlsofhistory posted:Socialism works. You just need bottomless wealth to support it.
is this what marx meant by "vulgar economics"? the author doesn't seem to understand that money represents a claim on all of society's produce rather than something with its own value
Crow posted:http://return2source.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/actually-existing-socialism-in-vietnam/
what about the zapatistas!!!!!
Crow posted:http://return2source.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/actually-existing-socialism-in-vietnam/
i read this. proletarians dont own the means of production. fail article
fleights posted:Crow posted:http://return2source.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/actually-existing-socialism-in-vietnam/
i read this. proletarians dont own the means of production. fail article
maybe this is more your speed http://www.deankoontz.com/trixie
jeffery posted:i read that in a child-like voice
Out loud?
Private ownership is still considered by the CPC as non-socialist. However, the introduction and the existence of private ownership does not mean the existence of capitalism in China according to party theorists. It is argued that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of communism, never proposed the immediate abolishment of private ownership. According to Engel, in the book Principles of Communism, the proletariat can only abolish private ownership when the necessary conditions have been met. In the phase before the abolishment of private ownership, Engels proposed progressive taxation, high inheritance taxes, and compulsory bond purchases to restrict private property while using the competitive powers of state-owned enterprises to restrict to expand the public sector. Similar measures were proposed by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto in regards to advanced countries, but since China was backward economically, party theorists called for flexibility regarding the CPC's handling of private property. According to Liu Shuiyuan, a party theorist, the New Economic Policy program initiated by Soviet authorities in the aftermath of the war communism program is considered a good example regarding flexibility by socialist authorities.
Party theorist Li Xuai concedes that private ownership inevitable involves capitalist exploitation. However, he regards private property and exploitation as necessary in the primary stage of socialism, claiming that capitalism in its primary stage used remnants of the old society to build itself. Sun Liancheng and Lin Huiyong argue that Marx and Engels, in their interpretation of the Communist Manifesto, criticized private ownership when it was owned solely by the bourgeoise but not individual ownership in which everyone owns the means of production and hence, can't be exploited by others. Individual ownership is consistent with socialism since Marx wrote that post-capitalist society would entail the rebuilding of "associated social individual ownership".
All absolutely true points.
the brics in general are all part of a contradiction in the capitalist world-economy which is historically and systematically off the charts and the ripples its going to cause are barely being told because its basically going to force the system to its knees
to me this is what an actual crisis looks like in its systemic undoing of everything just the actual snap that comes about when those contradictions do unwind has not actually found itself yet not least because the crisis in the core has barely begun to set in as its still going through the actual capitalist crisis which is going to produce its own future with the contradictions necessary to cause a major crisis but its probably only in that where you will be able to see what the fuck china has planned for its own future since so far it runs a line so confusing it beyond any concrete label produced from history so far