China is Capitalist
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An interesting essay rebutting the argument that China’s economy is some sort of non-capitalist system.
The author raises the concept that we have encountered many times of what he calls “transferred nationalism.”
A website linked to [https://chuangcn.org] describes China as once having something called a “socialist developmental regime”, a uniquely Chinese system
Rubbish.
As in Japan and Russia, the capitalist revolution was not led by the bourgeoisie itself, unlike in Europe.
In China it was the peasants who carried it off, led by Mao, himself a peasant.
Hence his admiration of the Taipings a century earlier and his identification with them.As for the weak Chinese bourgeoisie, excepting those tied to Chiang, most moved their industries to the Red areas during the civil war.
TM, I don’t think you really read their definition of what a socialist development regime is.
I tried but it is a very nuanced interpretation so I don’t claim to have an understanding.
I can’t dismiss the explanation without a lot more study of their description of it on their website
Some economic historians have indicated that capitalism should have started in China instead of England but all the internal and external wars did not allow its development. Chinese capitalism is soviet state capitalism adapted to China like Cuban capitalism is soviet state capitalism adapted to the local conditions. He has described the same conception as Leon Trotsky who claimed that the Soviet Union was socialist because the state owns all the means of production even though the soviet state was exploiting and killing workers, some Maoist is also saying that china is a mixed economy of socialism and capitalism. China is a capitalist nation like any other capitalist nation, and it is not a carbon copy of US capitalism
“The Chinese Stalinists led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) developed a particularly demented version of Stalinist doublespeak. “Capitalism” ceased to mean a concrete form of property relations; “following the capitalist road” became an epithet to be thrown at Mao’s opponents in the bureaucracy. Students were hailed as “proletarian revolutionaries” while being cynically mobilized to break workers strikes during the intrabureaucratic war known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” In Mao-speak, the struggle against supposed “Soviet social-imperialism” justified China’s rapprochement with the real American imperialists at the height of their dirty, losing war against the Vietnamese Revolution.
The bureaucrats who rule in the Forbidden City continue to call themselves “Communists” as they scramble to enrich themselves and their progeny and seek to become part of a new class of capitalist exploiters on the Chinese mainland.” (Spartacist, no. 53, Summer 1997).Students do not make revolutions, they claim reforms, the working class is the one that will lead a revolution.
Most of the so-called communist parties that existed in Latin America were populated and administered by students, and most of them were based on Mao Tse Tung because it is a third-world ideology. I do not know how some Europeans and American communist parties would apply Maoism to fully developed capitalist countries
they did not have any incidence within the working class, most of their activities were at universities campus, they were detached from the working class, and most of them vanished from the face of the earth, even more, some who have graduated from the universities have said that communism was a movement for young people, it is not for them now that they are professionals workers.
Most organizations were also based on Blanquist conceptions and the only solution was thru armed struggles, that is the reason why so many guerrillas groups emerged in the mountains and jungles, and some had urban guerrillas, similar to the Castroist guerrillas, for some of them was easy to switch from Castroism to Maoism
Mao was a Stalinist more extreme than Stalin himself, and it was a fanatic religious conception, even more, After Enver Hoxha broke with China he wrote that Maoism ( or Mao Tse Tung thought ) was the modern version of Confucianism.
Whoever has read the collected works of mao including his military writing will not find anything about Marxism, it is more Chinese nationalism than anything else, and since China was an agrarian society everything is related to the peasants, it is like the Russian populist movement.
It was a bourgeoise revolution without the bourgeoise, the new leadership became the bourgeoise.
During the French bourgeoise revolution, the new french bourgeoisie used the peasants to take the political and economical power. China before the revolution was based on an Asiatic despotic mode of production, it was not feudalism.
I have studied the notebooks of Marx on the Asiatic mode of production and it was a system similar to the soviet state capitalism, that is the reason why the Institute of Marxism Leninism did not want to dig deeply into Marx’s notebooks
PS. Some historians have said that Ernesto Che Guevara was a Maoist, and probably he was because his ideas are based on the peasant’s movement
In fact, in France the peasantry was mostly royalist. It was the nascent urban working class of the towns who joined the bourgeoisie and became its force.
Of course, a section of the bourgeoisie of France had married into the aristocracy and been ennobled. They emigrated. Sade refers to them as the upstarts ennobled since Louis XIV, whom they paid for titles. They were called the noblesse de robe.Those terms are correct and the analysis is correct too
I am reminded that Marx in his analysis made it clear he was being eurocentric and did add caveats that there existed an Asian mode of production based much on state control of water and irrigation (as MS has explained).
While we look for general similarities in social systems we shouldn’t ignore important differences that have an effect on historic development.
Can the course of Indian history neglect the influence of class alone and not take into consideration caste?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/ethnographical-notebooks/notebooks.pdf. Marx Ethnological Notebooks
https://monthlyreview.org/2020/02/01/marx-and-the-indigenous/. Marx and the Indigenous
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41855631 Marx and Engels on India
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=econ_workingpapers
Despite of what the Bolivarian have said about Marx lacking understanding of Colonialism, both and Marx and Engels wrote extensively on Colonialism what shocked them was the letter wrote about Simon Bolivar, but besides that they ask workers to read the works of Marx and Engels
At the beginning of their life they were Eurocentric but then they expand their investigations to other places around the world, probably the new MEGA publication will show many new discoveries. The new edition will beyond the already published 50 volumes
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