Oh God, oh shit, I said I wasn't going to do it. I said I wasn't going to start a China struggle session. Already getting flashbacks to the Discord.
But something just doesn't sit right with me and wanted to get some clarification here...
My question is this: why does China ban labor organizing/unions?
Is this yikes/intentional/actually a good thing?
(Yeah, I do know that labor unions are not always unequivocally good and sometimes they act more like middle management than as representatives of the workers... but democratizing the workplace seems like a no-brainer for any socialist project.)
Thoughts?
For all the people who still believe that the Chinese state is a revolutionary anti-capitalist force, I'll quote the statements made by the overwhelming majority of Chinese scholars at a state-sponsored conference in this article (shared by other ppl down below): https://people.umass.edu/dmkotz/articles/State_of_Official_Marxism_07_05.pdf
-- When an SOE is turned into a joint-stock corporation with many shareholders, it represents socialization of ownership as Marx and Engels described it, since ownership goes from a single owner to a large number of owners [among others this was stated by someone from the Central Party School].
-- If SOE's are turned into joint-stock corporations and the employees are given some shares of the stock, then this would achieve "Marx's objective of private ownership of property."
-- In dealing with the SOEs, we must follow "international norms" and establish a "modern property rights system." [As in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, the terms in quotes were euphemisms for capitalist norms and capitalist property rights.]
-- Enterprises can be efficient in our socialist market economy only if they are privately owned. [This statement, voiced by several people, comes from directly from Western "neoclassical" economic theory.]
-- SOE's exploit their workers and are state capitalist institutions, and SOEs often have a very high rate of exploitation. [The point was that privatizing SOE's will not introduce exploitation or capitalist relations since both are already present in SOEs.]
-- The nature of ownership of the enterprises has no bearing on whether a country is capitalist or socialist. Enterprises should be always be privately owned and operated for profit. What makes a country socialist is that the government taxes the surplus value and uses the proceeds to benefit the people through pensions and other social programs. [Along with justifying privatization, this implies that, as China's economy becomes much like those of the U.S. and Western Europe, that would not mean China is abandoning socialism since, by this definition, all of the industrialized capitalist countries are actually socialist.]
-- The USA has companies with millions of shareholders, which is a far more socialized form of ownership than anything that exists in China
-- "[After World War II] Capitalism not only gave up its fierce antagonism to labor, but even began combining with labor...Modern capitalism ... is gradually creating a new type of capitalism that is more like socialism."
-- The CCP followed the correct approach, in line with classical Marxism, during the period of New Democracy [i.e., the period directly following the 1949 liberation, when the party said it was completing the bourgeois democratic revolution but not yet trying to build socialism]. The change in policy after that period [when the party shifted its aim to building socialism] was an error, and instead the New Democracy policy should have been continued. [This was spookily similar to the widespread argument in Moscow in 1989-91 that the Soviet Communist Party should have stayed with the New Economic Policy of 1921-27, which called for a mixed economy with a significant role for private business and with market forces playing the main coordinating role]
-- Besides current labor and past labor [the latter the Marxist term for the labor required to produce the means of production], there is a third type of labor, namely "risk labor." Marxist theory should take account of this third type of labor, which is expended by those who take risks through entrepreneurship. [The obvious point was that "entrepreneurs" i.e., capitalists are a type of worker, and hence it is correct that they are allowed to join the Communist Party
HAHAHAHAHA
You’ve quoted the right leaning party members at a conference during the height of privatisation. Ofc there’s gonna be some dumb shit said.
If you’re assessing China, you need to look at its direction presently, under Xi Jingping, not it’s direction thirteen years ago under Hu Jintao, especially given that the Shanghai Clique of Jiang Zemin only started to lose power in 2006-2007.
Instead, let’s look at some of what Xi says.
Here’s a document distributed to all high level cadre outlining ideological trends to be wary of.
Not to mention this hilarious headline: China’s Latest Crackdown Target Is Liberal Economists.
Alright, so there’s at least some ideological pushback. But what about reality? After all, didn’t they privatise a bunch of stuff like those economists wanted?
Well, the holding entity for state owned entities is the largest economic entity in the world at approximately 7.6 trillion USD, so whatever they’ve privatised, there’s clearly a hell of a lot they haven’t.
But what about the general trend? And what good are those entities if they’re just running according to market principles?
Well, let’s just check the news:
So what we see is that SOEs were better able to respond in a pandemic situation, where market allocation just wasn’t going to cut it, and use value needed to be pushed to the fore.
No one’s denying there are capitalists in China, or that they haven’t been allowed to flourish. What’s important is that they remain under the control of the Party, and that the Party retains its control over police, military, and the commanding heights of the economy. It says a lot that even at the height of their power, the capitalists had to couch their arguments for privatisation in Marxist terms.
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This article is implying Chinese economists are politically dumber than an American economists which was currently the lowest bar. Someone please follow up on its sources just to confirm its not some wild disinfo.
It's not that they're dumb, it's that the political speech the state endorses must be Marxist, so anything these economists say, even if it is neoliberal, ends up getting couched in Marxist language as newspeak.
They are no dumber than Americans.
Pushing neoliberalism is dumb.
It is dumb, just saying that these economists are not just misinterpreting Marx somehow. They are are purposefully using Marxist language because it's essentially a newspeak inside the party, almost anything is fine to say as long as you can say it with Marxist words.
It's by a Marxist academic. He published it in Monthly Review, which is a well known socialist magazine. https://monthlyreview.org/2007/09/01/the-state-of-official-marxism-in-china-today/
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It looks like they can no longer criticize Donald Trump then, since he did so much risk labor with his multiple failed enterprises held up only by the safety net of his parent's wealth & his connections to the rich and powerful, something that can never be compared to means of production that are privately owned. No. Never.
... oh
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