Michael Roberts on China
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Michael Roberts has a following for his blog on economics https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/
Sometimes his economic analysis is ok. Other times it’s not.
But his politics are all over the place as this summary of a talk on China he gave the other day shows:
“Find below the video from Thursday’s illuminating session on the relationship between the USA and China with renowned Marxist economist Michael Roberts. The comrade explained that China could ride out the 2008/9 economic crisis, because most of its companies are run by the state ‘and do not have to make a profit’. He explained that this does not make Chine state capitalist, let alone socialist or even democratic. Still, should the US orchestrate a war, for example over Taiwan, socialists would probably come out in defence of China, he said.”
Yes, Michael Roberts’ politics truly are all over the place. Among other things, like other so-called ‘Marxists’ (e.g. Richard Wolff), he has a soft spot for China imagining its authoritarian form of state capitalism as somehow less dire than that of the West and therefore not to be wholly condemned. In fact here he’s even saying that China is not capitalist at all.
China does not have so many cheerleaders like during 1960-1980 when they created the Mao Tse Tung thought, and many organizations in the so called third world adopted Maoism, they sold millions copies of Mao Tse Tung collected works, and Peking Review , had Peking Radio which was listened in most third world countries using shortwave radio and transmitters, it was the competition of Moscow Radio and Habana Radio
China was against the so called soviet social imperialism, and then Albania took a big chunk of the Maoist movement, they created what was known as the Albanian tendency conducted by Enver Hoxha, they also sold millions of copy of the collected works of Hoxha, Albania Today and they had Tirana Radio which was also widely listened in the third world countries.
The competition for all of them was the Voice of Americas financed by the USA government, it was the station of the right wingers, but they had better broadcasting than all the stations of our time, it was an ideological battle among the differents tendencies
Maoism and Hoxhaism were widely propagated in the third world countries, and most young peoples supported both world tendencies and right wingers were not so popular like in our time, on the contrary, it was a shame to be a right winger, everybody knew that China and the Soviet Union were capitalists countries
There were more theoreticians in that epoch than now. China lost many supporters when they propagated the so called Theory of the three worlds and many Maoists rejected that theory, specially went they started to support anti soviet dictatorships
The ones that exist in our time they are amateur cheerleaders
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