I have just returned from one of the best conferences I have attended, at the Renmin University Summer Institute on Theology and the Humanities in Beijing. More on that later, especially since I will be spending a good deal of time in China over the next few years. But as I was there, the USA showed another sign of unravelling (I never thought I would see its actual decline), the riots broke out in London and then across the UK (social unrest is always a sign of profound economic shifts), the Eurozone finally showed that it is on the brink. Meanwhile, the planned economy of China is motoring ahead.
10 August, 2011
Two universes?
Posted by stalinsmoustache under economics | Tags: China, Eurozone, planned economy, UK riots, USA |[35] Comments
10 August, 2011 at 12:18 pm
I was waiting for you to make some comment about how the Big Society is faring these days.
But is China’s economy really socialist at all (besides being largely planned/centralized, which isn’t even necessary for a socialist economy)? Is it really the best for which we can hope?
10 August, 2011 at 2:33 pm
It always seemed to me that Marxists should be able to do better at capitalist market patterns than any would be capitalist. All the same, from what I have seen, it is not communism quite as we have seen it before. Perhaps the closest analogy is the new economic plan in the first couple of decades of Soviet Russia: state controlled use of capitalist know-how and limited market relations in order to give the very backward Russian economy a leg-up. It seemed to work. There is a strong sense among the people I discussed that it is a unique path they are trying to follow.
10 August, 2011 at 7:14 pm
1. The New Economic Policy (not ‘plan’) ran March 1921 until the start of the first Five year Plan in 1928.
2. Lenin characterised The New Economic Policy (NEP) as a ‘retreat’ (you should know the relevant quote). It was introduced because the economy had collapsed and there was serious unrest (e.g. Kronstadt). This aspect of restoring the market economy was very important in the early stages of NEP.
3. Using overseas trade and concessions to foreign capitalists to develop ‘the very backward Russian economy’ become more important in the later years of NEP. The concessions to foreign capitalists never developed to the extent that Lenin envisaged.
4. Use of capitalist know-how to develop the Soviet economy was a consistent theme of Soviet economic policy after the end of NEP. Arguably, it was far more important in the pre-war Five Year Plans than it ever was under NEP.
5. NEP was abandoned because it exhausted its potential and became unworkable. In the factories massive new investment was required that only state planning could provide (foreign capitalists would not oblige). In the countryside NEP made the food supply for the towns too dependent on kulak farmers.
10 August, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Oh, come on, there are tens of thousands of disturbances (which includes riots) across China every year, including the recent events in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. There’s a reason the Chinese government is emphasizing the harmonious society.
10 August, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I agree, although I mistrust most stuff in western presses. You’d wanna hope that the benefits of the growth can be make available to those in areas who haven’t felt the benefits as yet.
10 August, 2011 at 7:18 pm
Let the trickle down trickle. Let the flying geese fly. The “planned” economy can’t be “Marxist” in any meaningful sense because it’s the exact policy initiated earlier by right-wing authoritarian regimes in South Korea and Taiwan. I’ve been reading some stuff by Wang Hui the ‘new left’ figure who pops up in NLR now and again and it’s remarkable how his work, along with a few good round eyes journalists, matches the situation in the middle east – not least in the tendency for riots sparked by state violence Nathaniel pointed out, as well as the routine corruption of Party-led economic initiatives.
10 August, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Do you want the Feudal God-King Dalai Lama / Tsar / Farmer Jones back, comrade Nathaniel? Of course not. Take pride in the fact that Chinese state enterprises produce the finest armored personnel carriers in the world.
Hint.
Hint.
Comrade.
10 August, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Most definitely ‘one universe.’ Australia likes very much to be part of Chinese “planning.” The Chinese ‘third way’ is right through the heart of the world’s resources. And I don’t think that includes ‘human resources’ (as ludicrous as that notion is). They did skip the ‘bourgeois stage’ of development though, which would please Trotsky no doubt. I see more hope in the ‘other universe’ emerging from beneath the surface of Tottenham. Though you need messianic glasses to see the hope in it.
10 August, 2011 at 8:03 pm
Steve, you might have plenty to criticise about China’s approach, but as I comment below, the construction of communism is infinitely more complex than capitalism. It is easy enough to theorise before the revolution; bloody tough to do the hard work afterwards. From my own experience, it is thoroughly refreshing to find Marxism/communism part of the normal pattern of debate rather than some quaint position held by fringe groups and lefty academics.
10 August, 2011 at 8:23 pm
No, I don’t have plenty to criticise, in fact, my knowledge is partial at best. I do see the Chinese infrastructure going into Africa, and I can see the benefits, and the costs of possible new dependencies. It will be interesting to see whether China moves in an ‘internationalist’ direction in terms of ‘solidarity’ or whether it pursues a nationalist agenda over the coming years. I know the Chinese ministry of religion was recently in Kenya spending time with the Anglican Church of Kenya to talk partnerships in development and culture, so who knows! I’m glad you’re enjoying the open milieu of marxist debate. Would be great to experience one day.
10 August, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Come to China. I’m going via container next time.
10 August, 2011 at 7:56 pm
Nathaniel, actually, my first response was really lame. It is fashionable among the left to be cynical about China, citing a mixed up David Harvey among others to bolster their position. As Lenin pointed out, constructing communism is infinitely more complex than capitalism. And the hard work begins after the revolution. I am no expert on China or Chinese history, but from what I have seen and discussed over a number of visits is that communism is refreshingly part of of everyday debate and there is a full awareness that China’s prosperity is the result of a planned economy – which may actually be traced back to Mao bringing China out of one of the most backward economic states a little over 60 years ago.
10 August, 2011 at 7:57 pm
BY, see my comment about about fashionable left responses. Plus, any good revolution needs a strong army. And forget the Middle East comparisons; they simply don’t work.
10 August, 2011 at 9:04 pm
Hundreds of rioters in a southern Chinese city battled with police into the early hours of Wednesday morning after a disabled fruit vendor died while being beaten by Chinese officials on the street in broad daylight.
Your right. Nothing like the Middle East. What was I thinking? Bouazizi wasn’t disabled. And the Tunisian police didn’t kill him. I’ll go and stand in the fashionable leftists corner nao…
10 August, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Wrong link. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/95320b90-b857-11e0-8d23-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1UQnjFB6jc
10 August, 2011 at 9:32 pm
That’s the Financial Times, dude. Don’t send me to the FT!
10 August, 2011 at 9:46 pm
A city management officer was detained by police on Thursday as the result of a probe into a street vendor’s death in the city of Anshun in Southwest China’s Guizhou province. The detainee, Wang Sheng, is suspected of beating street vendor Deng Qiguo during a dispute, according to police investigators. The beating might be linked to the man’s death, they added. Hundreds of protesters gathered on Zhonghuanan Street in downtown Anshun on Tuesday afternoon, accusing city management officers of beating the vendor.
10 August, 2011 at 7:59 pm
George, thanks for the corrections on the NEP. I had 1938 in mind, incorrectly. However, the NEP did its job after WWII and then the ‘civil’ war – really a sustained effort by the USA et al to overthrow the Soviet state. For China, I would hazard that Lenin’s dialectical statement may well hold: using capitalist market mechanisms (in a world stil dominantly capitalist) to build communism.
10 August, 2011 at 9:11 pm
But do you really think that it’s more productive to analyze Chinese economic development thru the lens of the early USSR rather than thru the lens of its similar later industrializing, export-focused neighboring states? Was it was only a coincidence that after 1978 China pursued the same policies as the rival economies on its borders and that its economic and social development has basically paralleled theirs?
10 August, 2011 at 9:30 pm
Ah now, my fashionable lefty, you have forgotten at least one crucial factor: apart maybe from Vietnam, none of these states is communist. And ‘paralleled’ is really pushing it.
10 August, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Well, that’s the broader issue bubbling under here; whether China is communist. Below that is how you define it and what evidence you base that on. I say that it’s an authoritarian state capitalist regime that systematically denies basic rights to its workers, such as the right to form an independent union, found in even liberal capitalist societies. That it’s economic development – like that of South Korea, Taiwan, etc. – is based on systematic exploitation of its workers and is fundamentally capitalist in nature. Hence the developments of the contemporary PRC mirror South Korea in many significant ways across the social spectrum, from student uprisings, to “synthesizing” technology from places further west, to the explosion of Pentecostalism and shit pop music.I’m influenced by the analysis of guys like Martin Hart-Landsberg who’s published a lot of good material in Monthly Review as well as Wang Hui. And interestingly the Chinese ‘new left’ come across as bourgeois social democratic reformists. They want an end to corruption, and introduce basic democratic structures and basic economic protections (which means eliminating the registration system even if it means losing the advantages of a floating exploitable surplus population). These aren’t debates that go on within a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist regime, but exactly the ones that went on in authoritarian South Korea and are going on now in countries like Egypt where the ruling party has been dissolved and its senior economic and political figures on trial for corruption and political violence.
11 August, 2011 at 4:07 am
Dear Stalinsmoustache
I really enjoy your blog. Part of the charm of it is that we live in such completely different worlds. For example, I can’t imagine you confusing Elishah and Elijah the way I do.
As to China, I have never been there though over the last six years I have a number of members of the CPC. Interestingly, I have never met any Chinese communists.
Enjoy your trip
George
10 August, 2011 at 9:27 pm
Let me know the details and I’ll be on the boat…
10 August, 2011 at 10:40 pm
BY, that’s pretty much the same as the image in the western media and much the sense I had before four trips (so far) to China. From extensive discussions with people from across China and from a fair bit of travel on the ground – I will do more later this year and next – my perceptions have been blown out of the water. It remains a planned economy, for all its faults, and is following a rather unique path. And the ruling ideology is Marxism. That puts it as some distance from South Korea. Also, it is a bit condescending to say that China looked at its neighbours and thought what they were doing might be a good idea. Do you think they are not aware of what’s happening globally?
10 August, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Fine, but I imagine your trips to China were like mine to Korea; we stayed in similar hotels and friends’ houses and met with people of similar class and educational backgrounds. Probably meeting in the lobby of our respective Marriots. Neither of us have toured the Foxconn factories of the Pearl River Delta. Not even to impart Kim Jong-Il style ideological direction.
Claiming that an analysis mirrors what the ‘western’ media says is not a proper argument, especially when it’s a similar argument presented by left scholars like Hart-Landsberg or Wang. And quite different from the hard right media in the west who view China much as you do; as a still communist at odds with the west (rather than directed by a ruling class integrated into the global economy as much as the USA or Romania is), getting one over naive globalists who can’t see the true nature of the Marxist threat.
How is it “condescending” to claim that after 1978 the PRC adopted export-led, foreign investment focused growth strategies that were the basis of the East Asian ‘miracle’? Of course they were aware of what was going on globally; that’s exactly the point – it’s a pragmatic development strategy that owes more to implementing policies that produced massive economic growth but maintained authoritarian control (though that latter point eventually failed in both South Korea and Taiwan and is slipping in Malaysia and Singapore), rather than adhering the polices of Lenin. Unless, with a sack heavy of the Desire Called Marx, the Lenin Event touched Park Chung-Hee, too.
10 August, 2011 at 11:37 pm
You forget that my accustomed way of living and travelling is very far from the way you have become accustomed to live. As far as condescension is concerned, I’ve found that non-Chinese, mainly from Europe and the USA, who I’ve met in China often have a subtly superior attitude to China, as though it is catching up but has a long way to go to really become equal to us. Then again, the often have the same approach to Australia.
10 August, 2011 at 11:46 pm
I confess, I couldn’t pass up the Guus Hiddink hotel in Gwangju.
10 August, 2011 at 11:07 pm
Been in China the last 3 weeks, my third visit since December. Actually, several capitalisms coexist in China today. The most prominent one, authoritarian state capitalism, is alluded to here by many posters. However, in China the pace of economic growth has exceeded the speed at which the legal system has developed, so alongside the authoritarian capitalist state is a kind of wild west capitalism, only publicised when a scandal breaks out (death-dealing tainted infant formula, water melons exploding on supermarket shelves because they had been pumped-up with too much chemical growth additive, etc). The wild west entrepreneurs appear to be one step ahead of the regulators. But in-between these extremes are others: groups of people who operate market gardens so they can be assured of the quality of their food, cooperatives of other kinds, and innumerable varieties of small business.
As Roland acknowledges, the picture is not entirely rosy, but there is a level of basic care for the common people, and a willingness to experiment with the mode of production, that I don’t see in the US and western Europe.
Only time will tell, but for now the experiment should not be written off.
10 August, 2011 at 11:34 pm
That’s precisely the sense I get when talking with people: it is an experiment and the outcome is still anyone’s guess. And they are certainly aware that the model of US-western Europe capitalism is one they don’t want to emulate, nor indeed what happened in eastern Europe, which has been a complete disaster.
10 August, 2011 at 11:17 pm
the experiment should not be written off
Particularly because one of the examples of student and worker-led democracy movements in Korea (the parallel of the ’1989 movement’ in the PRC that Wang Hui writes within the legacy of) is that dramatic changes from below can occur very quickly. Precisely the reason why incidents of popular insurrection that Nathaniel and I mention are so important.
10 August, 2011 at 11:39 pm
It’s always easier to romanticise before the revolution; bloody difficult to get things working afterwards – as I said before.
10 August, 2011 at 11:41 pm
Actually, I will correct myself. I use a rule of thumb: when the children are taught the Marxist theory of value at school, then communism has arrived.
11 August, 2011 at 12:03 am
[...] in the most communist of intellectual intercourses with the non-unionized Workers & Peasants of The Stalin’s Moustache Delta. The Esteemed Berlusconi Youth was objectively correct about the nature of the authoritarian state [...]
11 August, 2011 at 7:12 am
I haven’t got time for a full post now (it will come), but another dislocation is the popular left description of the Chinese govt as an ‘authoritarian state capitalist regime’ or even a ‘dictatorship’. I have had a few windows into the communist party – my work has even been discussed in some govt circles and official party agencies arrange for translations of my stuff etc – and those terms seem far from what goes on. More later.
12 August, 2011 at 11:27 am
[...] a comment to an earlier post on ‘Two Universes’, Ken Surin took up BY’s description of the Chinese government as an ‘autocratic state [...]