Chinese Imperialism (Split from "Anti-Imp of Fools")

[Crux]

That's bullshit. First off, I do not believe that "Chinese imperialism" is actually a thing and even if it was, it is no where on the level of NATO's imperialism.

I mean holy fuck, do you not see what JUST happened to Libya???
You're serious aren't you? Have you any idea what Chinese imperialism is doing in Africa and latin america? See marcyite U.S-centrism is showing off for the umpteenth time.

[Leftsolidarity]

You're serious aren't you? Have you any idea what Chinese imperialism is doing in Africa and latin america? See marcyite U.S-centrism is showing off for the umpteenth time.

I don't have the time to discuss this in full right now and this is diverging from the topic of this thread. If you split this or create a thread on "chinese imperialism" I would gladly join and debate when I have the time. Seeinge a this will likely be a very heavy debate that should involve a lot of facts, it might be hard for me to respond frequently but I will try.

[A Marxist Historian]

Are you suggesting that the US/NATO Powers are the only imperialists on the planet? The regime staying in power is also in the interests of imperialism, imperialism of the Russian and Chinese variety.

Well, there's also the Japanese.

Russia would like to be an imperialist power, but so far it's only able to fill that role in its immediate back door, in former Soviet republics. Chechnya etc. There are no significant Russian economic investments in Syria, or anyplace else yet outside the former bourdaries of the USSR really.

Imperialism is an economic phenomenon, economic exploitation of colonies and semi-colonies by a ruling country, and has been since Imperator Julius Caesar, who invented the idea and even the word in the first place. Any other concept of imperialism is just liberal moralism, unworthy of revolutionaries and socialists.

China does indeed invest overseas, but its investments really don't have an imperialist character. Chinese investment in Africa, unlike US investment, is beneficial to African countries by and large. Which is why China unlike the US does not need to back its investments with military force.

Overseas investments by Chinese private capitalists are notorious for mistreatment of the workers, and could easily turn into standard imperialist investments if the CCP collapses. But the state sector still dominates the Chinese economy, and overseas investments by state owned companies, who don't have to worry about dividends for the investors and profit margins, usually pay the workers in Africa and elsewhere much better than do those of imperialist US and multi-national corporations.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/987/china-africa.html

-M.H.-

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Thread split. If you guys feel like discussing the Imperialist nature of China (or lack-of) than please use this thread and not the "The Anti-Imperialism of Fools" thread in the Arab World Struggles forum. Thanks.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Well, there's also the Japanese.

Russia would like to be an imperialist power, but so far it's only able to fill that role in its immediate back door, in former Soviet republics. Chechnya etc. There are no significant Russian economic investments in Syria, or anyplace else yet outside the former bourdaries of the USSR really.

Imperialism is an economic phenomenon, economic exploitation of colonies and semi-colonies by a ruling country, and has been since Imperator Julius Caesar, who invented the idea and even the word in the first place. Any other concept of imperialism is just liberal moralism, unworthy of revolutionaries and socialists.

China does indeed invest overseas, but its investments really don't have an imperialist character. Chinese investment in Africa, unlike US investment, is beneficial to African countries by and large. Which is why China unlike the US does not need to back its investments with military force.

Overseas investments by Chinese private capitalists are notorious for mistreatment of the workers, and could easily turn into standard imperialist investments if the CCP collapses. But the state sector still dominates the Chinese economy, and overseas investments by state owned companies, who don't have to worry about dividends for the investors and profit margins, usually pay the workers in Africa and elsewhere much better than do those of imperialist US and multi-national corporations.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/987/china-africa.html

-M.H.-


I would say first off that your argument still boils down to Russia and China being small imperialists or maybe would-be imperialists and that this somehow justifies ‘critical’ support for them and their friends. From an opportunist perspective that’s fine but from a position that is opposed to imperialism its total bullshit and I believe that alone invalidates any sort of constructive argument. That being said I appreciate the response so I will try to reciprocate.

I don’t see why Chinese investments being economically favorable for African states in any way changes the character of the underlying motivations of China. Would such investments take place at all if they were not profitable for the Chinese in some fashion? Even if only to deny market access to their competitors?

In any case I’m still working under the impression that the state serves the interests of the ruling class. I am in opposition to the ruling class so I don’t care much for what serves their institutions. The issue of higher wages paid by Chinese firms vs. American firms also sounds like a problematic argument for reasons that I think should be obvious.

I can certainly see from your post that China is less of an Imperial power than America, what I don’t understand is why I should give a fuck?

[Tim Cornelis]

Chinese imperialism is undeniable to anyone familiar with the facts.

Chinese state-backed businesses are exploiting African and Latin American workers and China is participating zealously in land grabbing on the former continent. China is moreover engaged in ridiculous territorial claims as depicted in the following image:

http://econintersect.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/south_china-sea_466.gif

And as explained in the following video, the underlying motivation is often natural resources:

8JS4VZbCWj8

[Crux]

China does indeed invest overseas, but its investments really don't have an imperialist character. Chinese invest ment in Africa, unlike US investment, is beneficial to African countries by and large. Which is why China unlike the US does not need to back its investments with military force.

Overseas investments by Chinese private capitalists are notorious for mistreatment of the workers, and could easily turn into standard imperialist investments if the CCP collapses. But the state sector still dominates the Chinese economy, and overseas investments by state owned companies, who don't have to worry about dividends for the investors and profit margins, usually pay the workers in Africa and elsewhere much better than do those of imperialist US and multi-national corporations.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/987/china-africa.html

-M.H.-
So if Chinese corporations perepetuate identical crimes, backed by the chinese government, that U.S corporations do, backed by the U.S government, only one is imperialism because you maintain that china is a deformed worker's state? Even if I agreed with you that china is a deformed worker's state that's quite a logical leap you're doing there.
I see the spart article is written in your typical parodic style and usual filled with lies so blatant they hardly needs countering.
Your strict defence of the chinese regime, while amusing in it's fake orthodoxy, is of course ultimately completely insgnificant so I'll leave that to the side together with your lies about the CWI. If you and your handfull of fellow sparts want to keep deluding yourself for another bunch of decades, be my guest. I'm sure the chinese regime appreciates your "critical support".


It's good to see that amid the foaming of the mouth stuff at least the Sparts acknowledge that:
"In plain English, “peacekeeping tasks” translate to bloody repression and the imposition of imperialist diktat. China has criminally lent its own military and police forces to such “peacekeeping,” from Haiti to Sudan. As Chris Alden noted in China in Africa (Zed Books, 2007), “The majority of Chinese peacekeepers, in fact, are based in Africa, making China the largest contributor of all the permanent member states of the UN Security Council to peacekeeping operations.” As proletarian internationalists, we demand that China end its participation in UN military missions."

Of course that doesn't mean China is actually imperialist, just behaving exactly like an imperialist state to fuirther the national interests of their ruling politicians and economic elite. Which is nothing like imperialism at all.
:rolleyes:

The article also goes on to state:

"China’s business agreements come with the “political condition” that Beijing do nothing to upset its bourgeois trading partners. Thus the Chinese Stalinists help prop up the capitalist order that keeps the masses of African workers and peasants in abject poverty.
[...]
Directed by the Beijing bureaucracy’s narrow national interests, overseas state investment often pits Chinese firms and managers against the workers they employ. Along with the Chinese-financed mines, oil facilities and construction projects that have sprung up throughout Africa has come evidence of workers abused through discriminatory hiring practices, low wages and outright union-busting. One study cited by Deborah Brautigam in The Dragon’s Gift found that Chinese construction firms in Namibia violated minimum wage laws and “affirmative action” training requirements while also failing to pay social security and other benefits. Chinese workers in Africa have waged their own battles against mistreatment. According to Brautigam, when some 200 Chinese construction workers in Equatorial Guinea went on strike in March 2008, a clash with local security forces resulted in two workers being killed."
Bold in original. Of course only stupid CWI fake Trotskyists would call this imperialism. :rolleyes:

[Clarion]

I don't think much is achieved by trying to force countries into the camps “imperialist” or “non-imperialist,” and worse still “colonial” or “anti-imperialist.” The idea that a country is either imperialist or not smacks of black and white thinking.


Presumably nobody will deny that there is capital in China and that capital will follow the laws of capital, regardless of the will of any political authority. Imperialism, in the modern sense, being little more than the internal need for capital to expand given form internationally, will doubtless find expression there.


Imperialism is no more a subjective thing than is capitalism. Debates as to whether or not Chinese business activities in Africa are imperialism or investment are fruitless, they are both.

[Teacher]

China is a rival capitalist hegemon to the United States that realizes they can curry favor with the developing world by helping them grow their economies. The fact that they are not as rapacious as U.S. imperialism is a matter of strategy and global circumstances. The Europeans and Japanese are not as militaristic nowadays because they have the United States to police the world for global capital.

It is true that China makes a big deal out of the "win-win" nature of many of its overseas investments, but I don't think you can make a case for China today as being anything other than a capitalist country, with all the consequences that capitalism entails.

China does not even pretend to be "market socialist" anymore. It is a capitalist country, period. I think the emergence of China as a rival hegemon of the United States presents possibilities for global conflict, which may open up new opportunities for the radical left the same way WWI and WWII did.

[Grenzer]

China does indeed invest overseas, but its investments really don't have an imperialist character. Chinese investment in Africa, unlike US investment, is beneficial to African countries by and large. Which is why China unlike the US does not need to back its investments with military force.

Overseas investments by Chinese private capitalists are notorious for mistreatment of the workers, and could easily turn into standard imperialist investments if the CCP collapses. But the state sector still dominates the Chinese economy, and overseas investments by state owned companies, who don't have to worry about dividends for the investors and profit margins, usually pay the workers in Africa and elsewhere much better than do those of imperialist US and multi-national corporations.

How can a "workers' state" even have private capitalists? Doesn't the entire idea of defense of workers' state rest on its progressive character via the abolition of private property and expropriation of the bourgeois class? Not even Russia during the NEP had bourgeoisie. In fact China doesn't even really have any of the characteristics which Trotsky ascribed to a "degenerated workers' state" which made it worthy of defense.

The ICL and all those Trotskyists who have yet to acknowledge China for what it is -an ordinary bourgeois state- have completely thrown Marxism down the toilet. At the rate you guys are going, all that will be needed is for a country to have red banners before it becomes a "workers' state" worthy of 'unconditional support'.

Your defense of China reeks of supreme hypocrisy, and like your usual politics, could literally be applied in the defense of other neo-colonial powers such as the United States.

In addition, your hypocrisy on the matter of imperialism should be rather stunning, but is on par with what we have come to expect from your behavior. You use one definition of imperialism as it suits you, and discard it in favor of another when the time is right. The definition of imperialism which you have provided is in stark opposition to, as you yourself put it, "scientifically defined imperialism" per Lenin. The definition of imperialism you have provided could easily be fit to several Stalinist states, historical and contemporary; unless you are going to persist in your delusional thesis that Chinese capital investment is "non-exploitative".

[islandmilitia]

Imperialism is an economic phenomenon, economic exploitation of colonies and semi-colonies by a ruling country, and has been since Imperator Julius Caesar, who invented the idea and even the word in the first place. Any other concept of imperialism is just liberal moralism, unworthy of revolutionaries and socialists.

Imperialism is not an "economic phenomenon" in the Leninist conception, it is obviously based around economic imperatives in the last instance, because in any capitalist society the economy is decisive in the last instance, but its effects and structures encompass politics and culture as well, and the economic imperatives are mediated in complex ways - for example, following Said, it is impossible to understand large sections of popular and intellectual culture since at least the nineteenth century without reading that culture in the context of the colonial encounter, because of how much culture has been inflected with the ideological dimensions of imperialism and the role that culture has played in giving legitimacy to the imperialist project. Just to see imperialism as a matter of foreign investment and the repatriation of profit, or worse, as the invention of Julius Caesar, misses much of what Lenin understood by imperialism being the highest stage of capitalism.


China does indeed invest overseas, but its investments really don't have an imperialist character.

To some extent you might be right in saying that past Chinese investment in Africa does not match the typical form of repatriating surplus value, because the main part of Chinese investment has involved securing the raw materials which have been so necessary for China's own growth rates and rapid industrial expansion. That has had implications which are characteristic of dependent development, such as enhanced primary product dependency, especially when resource extraction is combined with China dumping imported goods on the same African countries, and when infrastructure development uses imported Chinese labour, but it is actually only recently that there have been signs of Chinese investment taking on a fully or classically imperialist character in the form of production being based in Africa and Africa being the recipient of Chinese loan capital (source (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/18/us-china-africa-idUSBRE86H0E520120718?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FworldNews+%28Reuter s+World+News%29)). Even as far as resource extraction is concerned, however, this extensive extraction has, in the first place, been carried out to some extent by private companies (most importantly, the Collum coal mine in Zambia at which a Chinese manager was recently killed was privately owned) and more importantly has been deemed necessary in order to provide China with energy security, which is itself necessary for China's ability to have a more autonomous geopolitical and military role in regions like the South China Sea, so in that sense China's resource-based activities in African countries cannot be understood apart from China's aspirations as an emergent world-imperialist power with advanced military capacity. This is a classic example of how it's necessary to understand particular economic processes in relation to a larger totality in order to determine their fundamental character.

I have already taken up the debate about China being capitalist and China's relations with other countries in this (http://www.revleft.com/vb/chinas-growth-slows-t173679/index.html) thread but you did not bother to respond.

[A Marxist Historian]

I would say first off that your argument still boils down to Russia and China being small imperialists or maybe would-be imperialists and that this somehow justifies ‘critical’ support for them and their friends. From an opportunist perspective that’s fine but from a position that is opposed to imperialism its total bullshit and I believe that alone invalidates any sort of constructive argument. That being said I appreciate the response so I will try to reciprocate.

I don’t see why Chinese investments being economically favorable for African states in any way changes the character of the underlying motivations of China. Would such investments take place at all if they were not profitable for the Chinese in some fashion? Even if only to deny market access to their competitors?

In any case I’m still working under the impression that the state serves the interests of the ruling class. I am in opposition to the ruling class so I don’t care much for what serves their institutions. The issue of higher wages paid by Chinese firms vs. American firms also sounds like a problematic argument for reasons that I think should be obvious.

I can certainly see from your post that China is less of an Imperial power than America, what I don’t understand is why I should give a fuck?

What is imperialism? Is one country doing business in another country "imperialism"? That is a narrow-minded noninternationalist petty bourgeois notion. We're seeking a socialist world, where there will be no national boundaries? Aren't we?

Imperialism is when one country economically exploits and oppresses another, for its benefit. Economic imperialism has taken many forms over the centuries, but the current dominan form is as Lenin described it in his famous pamphlet, investment overseas to reap surplus profits off superexploitation and looting the country in general for the benefit of the colonial power, trapping "neocolonial" countries into backwardness and subjection to the IMF and World Bank, a subjection backed up by military intervention as needed.

That's a perfect description of what the USA or France or England do in Africa, and has little or no resemblance to the Chinese investments in Africa, which have benefitted China and the African countries involved equally.

If you have any doubt of that, you should read the article in link I provided, which lays it all out very nicely.

So Chinese investments aren't "small imperialist," they are simply not imperialist period. The lackey private capitalists in China would like to turn them into something like that, but to do so first they would have to overthrow the CCP and turn China into just another Third World capitalist state like India.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Chinese imperialism is undeniable to anyone familiar with the facts.

Chinese state-backed businesses are exploiting African and Latin American workers and China is participating zealously in land grabbing on the former continent. China is moreover engaged in ridiculous territorial claims as depicted in the following image:

http://econintersect.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/south_china-sea_466.gif

And as explained in the following video, the underlying motivation is often natural resources:

8JS4VZbCWj8

Yes, the economic motivation for Chinese investments is indeed usually to obtain raw materials for Chinese industry. But what's wrong with that, as long as the contracts are reasonably fair? In Marxist terms, they are not seeking to extract exchange value, but obtain use value.

In a socialist world, why would things be any different? You'd still have raw materials produced in lesser developed areas, and shipped to factories in more industrially developed areas. Merely changing from a capitalist to a socialist or communist system would not necessarily change that one bit.

Of course, in a socialist world, there would be lots of economic aid from the more developed to the less developed parts of the world to help them catch up. But in fact, in a bureaucratically distorted and chauvinist fashion, that is more or less the Chinese role with respect to Africa.

As for land grabbing, I have not noticed any Chinese troops marching in to protect Chinese investors in Africa. The closest thing to that is Chinese participation in "UN peacekeeping," which is a bad thing but is essentially Stalinist style Chinese collaboration with the actual imperialists, not Chinese imperialism.

As for Chinese claims over the South Chinese sea, that is some pretty stupid stuff and I don't support that kind of petty Stalino-nationalist bickering, the sort of thing the USSR under Stalin was famous for. Especially when it means conflicts between China and Vietnam, also a noncapitalist state.

But what's really behind all that is Chinese resistance to US imperialism and its puppet states, which the Vietnamese, understandably still pissed about China's invasion of Vietnam in alliance with the US in 1978, giving the Chinese some of their own Maoist medicine. Here's another very good analysis of the recent South China Seas affair.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1005/china.html

But even by Stalinist standards, much less bad than the kind of things that Stalin did in Eastern Europe, which did in fact, unlike Chinese behavior, have an element of economic resource transfer, kind of Lenin's model of imperialism in reverse, capital import as reparation for East European invasion of the USSR instead of capital export.

Fortunately, Khrushchev put an end to all that, and in fact after the fright he got from the Hungarians and Poles in 1956, from then on the USSR was giving aid to Eastern Europe instead of extracting resources.

-M.H.-

[Leftsolidarity]

Well "A Marxist Historian" has pretty much laid out all the arguments that I would have if I had the time so thank you. You also stated it in a much better fashion than I probably could have.

[A Marxist Historian]

How can a "workers' state" even have private capitalists? Doesn't the entire idea of defense of workers' state rest on its progressive character via the abolition of private property and expropriation of the bourgeois class? Not even Russia during the NEP had bourgeoisie. In fact China doesn't even really have any of the characteristics which Trotsky ascribed to a "degenerated workers' state" which made it worthy of defense.

You are absolutely wrong about the NEP. Yes, there was a very considerable capitalist class in NEP Russia, at its peak some 40% of trade was in the hands of the NEPmen and the kulaks more and more dominated the countryside, and the original issue of the Left Opposition was its fear that the pro Nepman and pro kulak policies of Stalin and Bukharin could lead to capitalist restoration.

And is exactly why when Bukharin and Stalin split, Trotsky was utterly unwilling to ally with Bukharin against Stalin, but was willing in certain circumstances, and properly so, to ally with Stalin vs. Bukharin if Stalin was willing and the alliance was an honest one, which he most certainly wasn't.

Which is exactly how Bukharinite Gorbachev helped restore capitalism in the USSR so many decades later, so the Left Opposition was prophetic.

In fact, the policies of the CCP are just about exactly Bukharinism on steroids.



The ICL and all those Trotskyists who have yet to acknowledge China for what it is -an ordinary bourgeois state- have completely thrown Marxism down the toilet. At the rate you guys are going, all that will be needed is for a country to have red banners before it becomes a "workers' state" worthy of 'unconditional support'.

Your defense of China reeks of supreme hypocrisy, and like your usual politics, could literally be applied in the defense of other neo-colonial powers such as the United States.

Really? If you think that, then you are confused, to put it mildly, about the role of the United States and other Western powers in the world. The role of US imperialism has been to soak the colonial world in blood to loot and ravage the Third World economically.

Ever hear of the African slave trade? Or of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa? Or of what the Brits did to Kenya?

Or the destruction of Somalia by the USA? Or of what the American oil companies have done to Nigeria?

Or of how the World Bank sets up famines in Africa by compelling semicolonial countries to produce for export instead of growing food?

If you think any of that is remotely comparable to the Chinese role in Africa, or think any of that could be "defended" by saying "the US was just investing to help out economically," then you are soft on US and Western imperialism, which you are back handedly justifying.



In addition, your hypocrisy on the matter of imperialism should be rather stunning, but is on par with what we have come to expect from your behavior. You use one definition of imperialism as it suits you, and discard it in favor of another when the time is right. The definition of imperialism which you have provided is in stark opposition to, as you yourself put it, "scientifically defined imperialism" per Lenin. The definition of imperialism you have provided could easily be fit to several Stalinist states, historical and contemporary; unless you are going to persist in your delusional thesis that Chinese capital investment is "non-exploitative".

Really? You're saying that economic exploitation of one country by another is a definition "in stark opposition" to Lenin's ideas?

Lenin said that monopoly capitalism was the highest stage of capitalism, and that capital export seeking superprofits and an economic system of imperialism resulting from that and military conquest of colonial countries to back it up corresponded to that.

Do you really think Lenin was saying that the empire of ancient Rome and the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British empires of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries were "not imperialist"? That would be a bad joke and an insult to Lenin.

As for the charge of hypocrisy, you're the true hypocrite. Everyone knows that what is behind the big US, Japanese and European propaganda campaign against China, which is backed up by the US army and navy ringing the country, including of course in the South China Sea, is Western imperialism seeking to take back and ravage China.

You are backhandedly supporting US imperialism's assault on China, and claiming to be a socialist. That is true hypocrisy.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

...
I have already taken up the debate about China being capitalist and China's relations with other countries in this (http://www.revleft.com/vb/chinas-growth-slows-t173679/index.html) thread but you did not bother to respond.

Sorry, have had health problems lately plus being busy at work, and had to pick and choose which threads to participate in. Will respond there, and to this post as well, shortly.

-M.H.-

[Tim Cornelis]

Yes, the economic motivation for Chinese investments is indeed usually to obtain raw materials for Chinese industry. But what's wrong with that, as long as the contracts are reasonably fair? In Marxist terms, they are not seeking to extract exchange value, but obtain use value.

The same could be said for modern imperialism in the nineteenth century: the European powers merely sought to obtain "use value" for their growing industry.


In a socialist world, why would things be any different?

We wouldn't exploit workers, grab land at the expense of local communities, and there wouldn't be any exchange value involved at all.


You'd still have raw materials produced in lesser developed areas, and shipped to factories in more industrially developed areas. Merely changing from a capitalist to a socialist or communist system would not necessarily change that one bit.

Wrong abstraction (see above).


Of course, in a socialist world, there would be lots of economic aid from the more developed to the less developed parts of the world to help them catch up.

No there wouldn't. There wouldn't be any financial and market constraints.


But in fact, in a bureaucratically distorted and chauvinist fashion, that is more or less the Chinese role with respect to Africa.


As for land grabbing, I have not noticed any Chinese troops marching in to protect Chinese investors in Africa. The closest thing to that is Chinese participation in "UN peacekeeping," which is a bad thing but is essentially Stalinist style Chinese collaboration with the actual imperialists, not Chinese imperialism.

So grabbing land is not imperialism if no army is necessary?


As for Chinese claims over the South Chinese sea, that is some pretty stupid stuff and I don't support that kind of petty Stalino-nationalist bickering, the sort of thing the USSR under Stalin was famous for. Especially when it means conflicts between China and Vietnam, also a noncapitalist state.

facepalm.jpg

Indeed, how is a state with parliamentarianism, social classes, generalised commodity production, wage-labour, and predominantly private ownership of the means of production capitalist. No, indeed neither China nor Vietnam are capitalist...

facepalm.jpg

China and Vietnam are not socialist, not a workers' state, they are not even Stalinist as you imply.


But what's really behind all that is Chinese resistance to US imperialism and its puppet states, which the Vietnamese, understandably still pissed about China's invasion of Vietnam in alliance with the US in 1978, giving the Chinese some of their own Maoist medicine. Here's another very good analysis of the recent South China Seas affair.

No, it's about natural resources.


What is imperialism? Is one country doing business in another country "imperialism"? That is a narrow-minded noninternationalist petty bourgeois notion. We're seeking a socialist world, where there will be no national boundaries? Aren't we?

Again, a useless abstraction. You imply as if in your socialist world there would be businesses exploiting workers, and seeing how you describe China and Vietnam as "noncapitalist" this may very well be accurate.


Economic imperialism has taken many forms over the centuries, but the current dominan form is as Lenin described it in his famous pamphlet


investment overseas to reap surplus profits off superexploitation and looting the country in general for the benefit of the colonial power,

That could apply to China.


trapping "neocolonial" countries into backwardness and subjection to the IMF and World Bank,

This could apply to China as well. The World Bank's top three most powerful countries in terms of voting power are the US, China, and Japan. China is also the third largest country in the IMF in terms of voting power.


a subjection backed up by military intervention as needed.

Armed involvement is hardly ever necessary in contemporary imperialism. But in any case, China has proven willing to deploy armed forces in Africa as evidenced by the fact that it has deployed circa 300 soldiers in Somalia to protect shipments.


which have benefitted China and the African countries involved equally.

By what standard has Chinese investments been equally mutually beneficially that cannot be applied to Western imperialist powers?

So let's summarise: Investments from China into Africa (as well as Latin America) are based on asymmetrical relations. Chinese businesses exploit foreign workers from these asymmetrical relations. It engages in land grabbing at the expense of local communities and is engaged as well in territorial feuds over natural resources. It moreover holds large stakes in imperialist, neoliberal organisations the IMF and World Bank.

Clearly there are qualitative differences between Chinese imperialism and Western imperialism, but to deny the growing imperialism of China is simply wrong.


The lackey private capitalists in China would like to turn them into something like that, but to do so first they would have to overthrow the CCP and turn China into just another Third World capitalist state like India.

Why would it require the overthrow of the CCP? The CCP is a bourgeois/capitalist party.

Shouldn't you consider India socialist as well? It had a centrally planned economy up until the 1980s if I'm not mistaken, and have not, by means of "overthrowing" or "revolution" changed this, but rather through reform.

India is still socialist since it introduced central planning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries

From wikipedia:


The government abides by constitutional checks and balances. The Constitution of India, which came into effect on 26 January 1950,[147] states in its preamble that India is a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.[148]

How can any Marxist claim in all seriousness that China is "socialist" or a "workers' state" when it has every characteristic Marx ascribed to the capitalist mode of production? This should be no controversy.

[islandmilitia]

Sorry, have had health problems lately plus being busy at work, and had to pick and choose which threads to participate in. Will respond there, and to this post as well, shortly.

My apologies for being pushy, then - get well soon! Obviously we have sharp disagreements but I have found your posts well-written and productive.


Economic imperialism has taken many forms over the centuries, but the current dominan form is as Lenin described it in his famous pamphlet, investment overseas to reap surplus profits off superexploitation

On this point we can agree, that whether a country is imperialist or not can be determined largely by whether it exports capital in order to reap profits. But in your last post you seem to assume that this cannot possibly be the case when it comes to China and African countries because the larger part of Chinese investment is carried out by SOEs. In the first place, I've looked beyond the article I quoted in my last thread, and according to this (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/NH09Cb01.html) more recent article (which, incidentally, was also sent out via the CSG list) article, of the "more than 2,000 Chinese enterprises [that] have invested or started businesses across the continent", the majority are private - obviously it is not clear from that figure what these firms are actually doing or how different kinds of economic activity are distributed between private and state-owned firms, or even the average size of private and state-owned companies, but for the purpose of factual accuracy, we should avoid the impression that there is no Chinese private enterprise in Africa, because there evidently is, the Collum mine being an important individual case study of that, as I pointed out in my last post. We would obviously need to determine whether these firms have invested in production (whether it be resource extraction or manufacturing) or whether they are more involved as export and import houses, in which case it would be more difficult to speak of the transfer of surplus value, as opposed to simply monetary profits which do not arise from production.

In the second place, though, I don't understand why SOE investment straightforwardly excludes the possibility of surplus value being transferred - as I pointed out in the other thread, even the remaining SOEs have to a large extent been commercialized, they have been made dependent on commercial loans, they sell to the market, and they have, more recently, engaged in acquisitions of other companies, especially in Europe. Why are these companies necessarily not constitutive of an imperialist presence, simply because they are state-owned? In connection with that, what do you think about Chinese loan capital? If Chinese loan capital carries interest, is it not also basically the same in character as the debt relationship between Africa and the West?


That's a perfect description of what the USA or France or England do in Africa, and has little or no resemblance to the Chinese investments in Africa, which have benefitted China and the African countries involved equally.

I don't think it's possible to adopt formulations like China and African countries benefiting equally because, whatever the social character of China, we can agree that African countries are class societies, in which case we cannot simply adopt the category of the nation or the country, as if to suggest that there exists within African countries a community of interests, instead, we need to consider the ways in which China's presence in Africa (encompassing import and export trade, investment, and loan capital, at least) has reshaped class relations and affected different classes in different ways. Based on the article quoted in my last post, it would seem that Chinese trade has accentuated conflicts within the ruling class, in that it has benefited those sectors involved in resource extraction (where, due to demand from China and the other BRICs, there has been a long-term rise in prices) whereas manufacturers have suffered as a result of the import of Chinese manufactured products. I think any analysis of imperialism and global capitalism has to bring in the reshaping of class relations, and simply talking about countries benefiting equally (or even one country benefiting more than the other, which still accepts the country or nation as a meaningful unit of analysis) does not do that. This is true even if we do not identify China as an imperialist power.

[DaringMehring]

First of all China is a capitalist country which you can tell by the process of accumulation that occurs within it. It has a capitalist class and the capitalist class is the ruling class. The Marxist Historian's claim that Chinese enterprises do not extract surplus value is false as even SOEs have for-profit shareholders, for instance you will see shares of China Airlines, China Telecom, etc. listed on stock exchanges.

Imperialism is an economic relationship first and we see Chinese capital being exported and accumulating based on the social relations and economic laws of capitalism in foreign countries. China is imperialist.

The activity of armed forces of China may lag behind what we would expect of a traditional imperialist power, due to the particular configuration of world power that existed in the last decades, where the USA was the sole superpower and essentially exercised violence to enforce the prerogatives of all world capital. But dialectics teach us that everything is in a process of constant change and it doesn't take a swami or a mystic to see that China will become increasingly violent and territorial as we would expect of a traditional imperialist power -- that is a given due to the laws of capitalist accumulation.

[RedTrackWorker]

I think China is able to enact imperialist policies vis-a-vis some other weaker powers, but I don't think that if one looks at imperialism as a global system, it is an imperialist power.

As an article posted on the LRP website recently said (http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/chinarulers_occupy.html):

Today, China occupies a contradictory place in this hierarchy of capitalist states. Ruling a nation long victimized by imperialism, China’s fake-Communist (really capitalist) rulers have been able to offer “their” people to the imperialist nations’ corporations as a massive pool of super-exploitable labor in return for a subordinate share of the profits. Thanks to its centralized control of the economy, the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy has been able to accumulate tremendous wealth and with it global influence and military that make it appear like an imperialist rival to superpowers like the United States. In its relations with poor countries whose natural resources it exploits, China even acts imperialistically.

However China has not overcome its history as a victim of imperialism. The backwardness and poverty of rural areas is a necessary background for its prime advantage in the international market: cheap labor. And China’s industrial base, while vast and growing, still fundamentally exists as a repository for relatively backward industry and as an assembly stage for more technically advanced enterprises in imperialist countries. All this means that overall, despite the gains in industrial development that China has made, industrial production there still serves to transfer value from China to the imperialist economies – a typical characteristic of a national economy still exploited by the imperialist powers.

[A Marxist Historian]

On this point we can agree, that whether a country is imperialist or not can be determined largely by whether it exports capital in order to reap profits. But in your last post you seem to assume that this cannot possibly be the case when it comes to China and African countries because the larger part of Chinese investment is carried out by SOEs. In the first place, I've looked beyond the article I quoted in my last thread, and according to this (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/NH09Cb01.html) more recent article (which, incidentally, was also sent out via the CSG list) article, of the "more than 2,000 Chinese enterprises [that] have invested or started businesses across the continent", the majority are private - obviously it is not clear from that figure what these firms are actually doing or how different kinds of economic activity are distributed between private and state-owned firms, or even the average size of private and state-owned companies, but for the purpose of factual accuracy, we should avoid the impression that there is no Chinese private enterprise in Africa, because there evidently is, the Collum mine being an important individual case study of that, as I pointed out in my last post. We would obviously need to determine whether these firms have invested in production (whether it be resource extraction or manufacturing) or whether they are more involved as export and import houses, in which case it would be more difficult to speak of the transfer of surplus value, as opposed to simply monetary profits which do not arise from production.

Actually, I think you misread me a bit. Are there private Chinese capitalists investing abroad, in Africa and other places? Yes. And imperialism is indeed the highest stage of capitalism. So you can if you like reasonably describe private Chinese capitalist investors investing in Africa as "imperialist." And Indian and South Korean as well. In fact, the investors with the very worst reputations are the Indians and South Koreans, who operate on more of a shoestring than Americans or what have you, and therefore tend to be utterly ruthless with the workers.

But India is not an imperialist country, it's a semi-colonial country, whose compradors ape their imperial big brothers, even to the point of investing abroad to garner superprofits.

And the Chinese state is not, unlike in America or England or Greece or wherever, run by the Chinese capitalist class, it's run by the CCP. And state enterprises in a state like China, unlike private enterprises, do not necessarily operate with profit as their first consideration, and therefore are capable, to benefit Chinese diplomacy if nothing else, of making fair economic agreements with other Third World countries. And, by all accounts, they usually do. Most unlike the genuine imperialists, or their Indian and South Korean lackeys as well.

And when Chinese private investors get out of hand and piss too many people off, the Chinese bureaucrats step in and slap them on the wrist, and they have to obey, or at least pretend to, or bad things will happen to them. China is still the same country that regularly executes capitalists found guilty of poisoning the food etc., something you don't exactly see every day in America.



In the second place, though, I don't understand why SOE investment straightforwardly excludes the possibility of surplus value being transferred - as I pointed out in the other thread, even the remaining SOEs have to a large extent been commercialized, they have been made dependent on commercial loans, they sell to the market, and they have, more recently, engaged in acquisitions of other companies, especially in Europe. Why are these companies necessarily not constitutive of an imperialist presence, simply because they are state-owned? In connection with that, what do you think about Chinese loan capital? If Chinese loan capital carries interest, is it not also basically the same in character as the debt relationship between Africa and the West?

No, it isn't, for the most simple and obvious reason, for which there is no need to delve into abstract theory.

Loans from imperialist countries to the Third World invariably have the character of loansharking. US imperialism got its start in the Caribbean and Central America with Teddy Roosevelt sending the Marines out as Mafia hitmen to collect the debts.

Hell, look at Greece for that matter. Look at what the terms are for the loans of the European bankers! You don't have to look very far that these are not loans, something Greece could definitely use right now on decent terms, but bankster gangsterism.

By contrast, the Chinese I heard a while back actually offered Greece some loans on reasonable terms, which PASOK had to reject because the Eurobankers ordered Greece to turn them down.

Now, could the SOEs get turned into regular imperialist style multinationals? Quite possibly, that's what happened in Russia. But the obstacle to this is the CCP, which has no moral objections to this, but a very concrete practical one, namely that if this happened the CCP control over the economy and therefore the country would be broken and China would collapse into chaos like Russia did.

And as long as the CCP, a Stalinist political organization historically rooted in the Chinese Revolution, runs the country, then "politics is in command" as Mao put it, and the country will be run according to the CCP political program, not by the invisible hand of Adam Smith that runs most of the rest of the world these days.



I don't think it's possible to adopt formulations like China and African countries benefiting equally because, whatever the social character of China, we can agree that African countries are class societies, in which case we cannot simply adopt the category of the nation or the country, as if to suggest that there exists within African countries a community of interests, instead, we need to consider the ways in which China's presence in Africa (encompassing import and export trade, investment, and loan capital, at least) has reshaped class relations and affected different classes in different ways. Based on the article quoted in my last post, it would seem that Chinese trade has accentuated conflicts within the ruling class, in that it has benefited those sectors involved in resource extraction (where, due to demand from China and the other BRICs, there has been a long-term rise in prices) whereas manufacturers have suffered as a result of the import of Chinese manufactured products. I think any analysis of imperialism and global capitalism has to bring in the reshaping of class relations, and simply talking about countries benefiting equally (or even one country benefiting more than the other, which still accepts the country or nation as a meaningful unit of analysis) does not do that. This is true even if we do not identify China as an imperialist power.

Here I have to disagree. Yes, imperialism is dependent on class relationships and is economically based, as is everything else in human society, but ultimately it reflects the relationship between one country and another. That is the generally accepted meaning of the term, which Lenin like everyone else took for granted. He simply wanted to explain its economic roots in the current historic period.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

The same could be said for modern imperialism in the nineteenth century: the European powers merely sought to obtain "use value" for their growing industry.

And back then, most liberal capitalists were actually against imperialism firstly, had serious doubts about whether conquering foreign countries was even profitable, and secondly, Marx initially thought that European imperialism in India etc. was a good thing that should be supported. After a while, he figured out that this was incorrect, given the way Britain was ravaging India, and especially Ireland.

So hey, I'll concede that China's policy is "imperialist" if you will concede that it is a good thing that deserves support;)



So grabbing land is not imperialism if no army is necessary?...

Er, what landgrabbing are you talking about? If the Chinese flag flies over anyplace in Africa, I am highly unaware of that. For that matter, the Chinese don't have flagless effective control anywhere either, after the model of Exxon in Nigeria. The Chinese, unlike western imperialists, are not running around hiring ex-South African mercenaries and whatnot to push the people around and kill them if they protest.



Again, a useless abstraction. You imply as if in your socialist world there would be businesses exploiting workers, and seeing how you describe China and Vietnam as "noncapitalist" this may very well be accurate.
...

What on earth do you mean? Chinese SOE's are state sector, they are not private businesses. If we have world socialism, then obviously there will be no private capitalism, no businesses, no stock markets, no dividends, no banks, no loans, and in fact no money, just labor certificates.

Now, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, in a society in transition between capitalism and socialism, then yes, private businesses can exist and even play a useful and necessary role, as in NEP Russia. This sort of thing has definitely gotten out of hand however in China, but the CCP is still in command, not the huge and growing business sector. So far anyway.



This could apply to China as well. The World Bank's top three most powerful countries in terms of voting power are the US, China, and Japan. China is also the third largest country in the IMF in terms of voting power.

Ha! Which means absolutely nothing. China is in the IMF and World Bank strictly on sufferance, for as long as it votes like the western imperialists want it to, and not for a second longer. The second China tries to play an independent role, tries to veto IMF or World Bank decisions that harm Third World interests (and the Chinese bureaucrats, if they believe anything, still believe they are the leaders and guardians of Third World interests) would be out on their asses in seconds.

The Chinese have been given these meaningless prestige seats merely to lure them further on the road of capitalist restoration. Otherwise, they mean nothing whatsoever.

I mean, hey, do you actually thing the IMF or the World Bank are some sort of vehicle for worldwide capitalist democracy or something? Hardly.



Armed involvement is hardly ever necessary in contemporary imperialism. But in any case, China has proven willing to deploy armed forces in Africa as evidenced by the fact that it has deployed circa 300 soldiers in Somalia to protect shipments.

That's the funniest thing you've said yet. Just what do you think has been going on in Iraq? And Afghanistan? And Libya? Seems like the imperialists don't agree with you as to whether armed involvement is necessary these days.

As for Somalia, if the Chinese have send a few soldiers to protect themselves against Somalian pirates, that's not imperialism, it's common sense. Anybody these days on a boat off the Somalian coast who doesn't have somebody along to protect them is a fool.

Now, in Somalia, we have a country that was literally destroyed by US imperialist intervention. Hell, watch "Blackhawk Down" and get the racist US imperialist version of how they destroyed the country. Comparing a few Chinese soldiers to protect Chinese doing business in a country turned into a chaotic violent mess by real imperialists just does not compare.



By what standard has Chinese investments been equally mutually beneficially that cannot be applied to Western imperialist powers?...

By the standard of something you seem totally unacquainted with, namely actual African reality.

As Lenin liked to put it (quoting Hegel as it happens) "truth is concrete."

I will skip over your absurd abstract summary.




Shouldn't you consider India socialist as well? It had a centrally planned economy up until the 1980s if I'm not mistaken, and have not, by means of "overthrowing" or "revolution" changed this, but rather through reform.

India is still socialist since it introduced central planning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries

From wikipedia:

Ah yes, India is socialist because...Wikipedia says so! Classic.

How about Nazi Germany during World War II. It had central economic planning too, as did the USA under Roosevelt for that matter. Both socialist countries, right? Indeed Hitler even said Germany was socialist. Nazi is short for "National Socialist" after all.

If you could get your nose out of playing games with theoretical abstractions and try to learn something about the real world in general and India in particular, you might find out that "socialist" India was ruled by a ruling class of landlords who exploited the peasantry with the utmost viciousness, and still do. "Socialist" India was where the peasants regularly starved to death, until the "Green Revolution" meant that extreme poverty no longer meant death. Though half of all children in India still grow up malnourished.

In China on the other hand, there was a peasant revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party, and the landlords were all expropriated, and those who did not flee to Taiwan often ended up dead at the hands of the peasants, or at best in CCP reeducation camps, learning to live like peasants.

The historical memory of the Chinese Revolution, one of the greatest events in human history, is what gives the CCP its continued authority in the eyes of the people of China, despite everything.



How can any Marxist claim in all seriousness that China is "socialist" or a "workers' state" when it has every characteristic Marx ascribed to the capitalist mode of production? This should be no controversy.

Because it doesn't. But that has been addressed elsewhere in other threads, best to not get bogged down and stick to the issue we have here.

-M.H.-

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

First of all China is a capitalist country which you can tell by the process of accumulation that occurs within it. It has a capitalist class and the capitalist class is the ruling class. The Marxist Historian's claim that Chinese enterprises do not extract surplus value is false as even SOEs have for-profit shareholders, for instance you will see shares of China Airlines, China Telecom, etc. listed on stock exchanges.

Imperialism is an economic relationship first and we see Chinese capital being exported and accumulating based on the social relations and economic laws of capitalism in foreign countries. China is imperialist.

The activity of armed forces of China may lag behind what we would expect of a traditional imperialist power, due to the particular configuration of world power that existed in the last decades, where the USA was the sole superpower and essentially exercised violence to enforce the prerogatives of all world capital. But dialectics teach us that everything is in a process of constant change and it doesn't take a swami or a mystic to see that China will become increasingly violent and territorial as we would expect of a traditional imperialist power -- that is a given due to the laws of capitalist accumulation.

Yes, it's true, they sell stock etc., but in a capitalist country, a corporation is owned by the stockholders. Not in China, everyone knows that the stock market is a fool's game there, strictly a way for the Chinese government to extract money from wannabe capitalists. You've even had angry protest marches by ripped off stockholders.

No, the Chinese investors overseas don't operate like multinational corporations, except in meaningless formal senses. When Exxon invests in Nigeria, it's to make a profit by extracting surplus value by paying extremely low wages, and hiring mercenaries to kill anyone that gets in the way. And ruin the environment in the process too.

Chinese investments formally can look the same, but in practice are different affairs. Why? Because they are directed by the Chinese state, not the Chinese stock market, and the Chinese government certainly doesn't mind if they turn a profit, but that simply isn't the main motivation, the main motivation being to obtain necessary raw materials not available in China. And, also, improve Chinese diplomatic relations abroad, something it has been very successful with. Both of them perfectly desirable goals in principle.

If the Chinese economy really did operate according to the laws of capitalism, you would be right, inevitably these investments would turn into something else on the Exxon-Nigeria model, and Chinese troops as enforcers would not be far behind. But since that is not the case, your crystal ball is foggy--fortunately. And, unless and until something like what you imagine actually happens, the facts are against your analysis.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I think China is able to enact imperialist policies vis-a-vis some other weaker powers, but I don't think that if one looks at imperialism as a global system, it is an imperialist power.

As an article posted on the LRP website recently said (http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/chinarulers_occupy.html):

Well, here at least a small note of reality sneaks in. The LRP is not quite as utterly deluded as most of the "state caps" about China.

As for China pushing around smaller countries in the South China Sea (notably Vietnam, basically in class terms a smaller version of China, the others are just cat's paws for Obama), I think the Spartacist analysis works extremely well, as in the link I posted.

-M.H.-

[Per Levy]

And as long as the CCP, a Stalinist political organization historically rooted in the Chinese Revolution, runs the country, then "politics is in command" as Mao put it, and the country will be run according to the CCP political program, not by the invisible hand of Adam Smith that runs most of the rest of the world these days.

you do know that the ccp allows the bourgeoisie to be part of the ccp right? you also do realize that just because something calls itself "communist" doesnt mean it, in some kind of fashion, is. most of the communist partys of this world today are as bankrupt and corrupt as their social democratic counterparts, who all in their party programs want to achieve some kind of socialism, but just as the ccp never actually try to do when they have power. also adam smith wasnt the free market libertarian kind of guy. just saying.


By contrast, the Chinese I heard a while back actually offered Greece some loans on reasonable terms, which PASOK had to reject because the Eurobankers ordered Greece to turn them down.

yeah but the chinese ruling class did so not because out of generosity, but because of 2 reasons. 1: because it wants more influence in europe and greece is week, giving it a loan "saving" greece would give china foothold in the eu. 2: china was and is afraid about what could happen if greece go bankrupt and the euro falls, wich would hurt china a lot and would destabilize the eu and more regions of the world, and china seeks stable sitiations, ergo a status quo. or to say it differently they want that capitlalism reigns supreme.

so a "marxist historian"(both of these terms i wouldnt use to describe you but whatever) thinks in general that chinese imperialism is not really imperialsim(just a bit but not really, because sparts say so) and therefore must be supported.

[A Marxist Historian]

you do know that the ccp allows the bourgeoisie to be part of the ccp right? you also do realize that just because something calls itself "communist" doesnt mean it, in some kind of fashion, is. most of the communist partys of this world today are as bankrupt and corrupt as their social democratic counterparts, who all in their party programs want to achieve some kind of socialism, but just as the ccp never actually try to do when they have power. also adam smith wasnt the free market libertarian kind of guy. just saying.

Actually, Stalinism and Social Democracy have been pretty much equivalent since the 1930s. Sometimes the Social Dems were worse, and there were times Stalinists were worse than Social Dems, notably in the '30s, in the Spanish Civil War for example.

Stalinism is a disgusting phenomenon. I'm not defending the CCP, I'm defending the Chinese Revolution, the baby that "state caps" want to throw out with the Stalinist bath water.

And yes, I'm perfectly aware that the CCP is allowing capitalists to join. But they don't dominate the party.

This is not unprecedented. During the NEP. at its true Bukharinist height in the middle-late '20s, most party cells in the countryside, 90% of the Soviet Union at the time, didn't just let kulaks join, they were dominated by kulaks. And a kulak is simply a petty rural capitalist, and by the time of the so called "grain strike," sometimes not so petty. That's why Stalin had to purge the rural party apparatus so thoroughly and brutally when he made his zigzag to ultraleftist rural policies.



yeah but the chinese ruling class did so not because out of generosity, but because of 2 reasons. 1: because it wants more influence in europe and greece is week, giving it a loan "saving" greece would give china foothold in the eu. 2: china was and is afraid about what could happen if greece go bankrupt and the euro falls, wich would hurt china a lot and would destabilize the eu and more regions of the world, and china seeks stable sitiations, ergo a status quo. or to say it differently they want that capitlalism reigns supreme...


Ad hominem crap deleted.

The Chinese don't offer fair loans because they are saints, but because their objective social position as Stalinist bureaucrats and not capitalists make it possible for them to offer fair loans, when it is convenient for them. As it was in Greece.

The IMF and the World Bank simply couldn't even if they wanted to, the dynamics of the workings of monopoly imperialist capitalism prevent that in the overwhelming majority of situations. And that the Chinese reps are sitting there on the boards helplessly voting for whatever the real powers there want is, well, just typical Stalinist sycophancy for world imperialism.

Thus in Greece, if the Americans were to step in and offer loans on decent terms, the bankers would be horrified, and slap Obama down immediately. Anyone who doesn't understand that the banks ultimately control America wasn't awake during the 2008 financial collapse.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

...also adam smith wasnt the free market libertarian kind of guy. just saying...



Hmm? Sure he was. Have you read Wealth of Nations? I have. Interesting book.

He wouldn't go along with current stupidities of those who call themselves free marketeers, just like Marx would be horrified by a lot of our contemporary so-called "Marxists."

But if you use free market libertarianism as a description, not a cuss word, that's exactly what he was. Indeed, he was the foremost fighter for free market ideas vs. protectionism and mercantilism, and very much an advocate of personal liberty, supporter of the American Revolution, opponent of slavery, etc. etc.

-M.H.-

[freethinker]

Hmm? Sure he was. Have you read Wealth of Nations? I have. Interesting book.

He wouldn't go along with current stupidities of those who call themselves free marketeers, just like Marx would be horrified by a lot of our contemporary so-called "Marxists."

But if you use free market libertarianism as a description, not a cuss word, that's exactly what he was. Indeed, he was the foremost fighter for free market ideas vs. protectionism and mercantilism, and very much an advocate of personal liberty, supporter of the American Revolution, opponent of slavery, etc. etc.

-M.H.-


You have a sick mind, you are as much as an historian as A.T Forneko..

When will you wake up, it docent matter what kind of symbols they carry or what their name is, you say they were an historically Stalinist organization? Well in that case they were simply state capitalists, of course whether the CCP was Stalinist before Deng Xianpang that is it's own discussion.

Though I can argue with you logically as others so kindly done I am just going to provide you with some links, but I guess as long they bear a name they are a type of "good guy bourgeois" am I right?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/12/chinese-foxconn-workers-threaten-mass-suicide-over-xbox-pay-dispute/

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/new-imperialism-china-angola

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC7XjXQVDiA

All of these are things that seem to characterize a right wing imperialist state

I guess it's all propaganda somehow is int it?

It's things like you that give the left a bad name.

You know I am reading the Wealth of Nations right now so I am not going to comment further on that

[A Marxist Historian]

You have a sick mind, you are as much as an historian as A.T Forneko..

When will you wake up, it docent matter what kind of symbols they carry or what their name is, you say they were an historically Stalinist organization? Well in that case they were simply state capitalists, of course whether the CCP was Stalinist before Deng Xianpang that is it's own discussion.

Though I can argue with you logically as others so kindly done I am just going to provide you with some links, but I guess as long they bear a name they are a type of "good guy bourgeois" am I right?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/12/chinese-foxconn-workers-threaten-mass-suicide-over-xbox-pay-dispute/

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/new-imperialism-china-angola

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC7XjXQVDiA

All of these are things that seem to characterize a right wing imperialist state

I guess it's all propaganda somehow is int it?

It's things like you that give the left a bad name.

You know I am reading the Wealth of Nations right now so I am not going to comment further on that

So, since Forbes magazine, the voice of US capitalism, says that the Chinese capitalists are evil, unlike our wonderful US capitalists who are all secular saints, then they must be right.

After all, this is the same Forbes magazine that lent Mikhael Gorbachev its famous private jet with "capitalist tool" painted on the side so he could give the valedictory speech for the opening of the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, one year after the Rodney King rebellion set off by the cops who beat Rodney King being let off by a white cop jury in Simi Valley.

Yeah, they're the best source on China, for sure.

But anyway, corrent me if I'm wrong for sure, but isn't Foxconn a private company, not state owned? In any case, as everyone knows they are practically a subsidiary of Steve Jobs's Apple corporation. Now, Steve Jobs, that was another capitalist saint I do recall.

And then you have the World Affairs magazine, one of the voices of academic US imperialism, saying that the Chinese are imperialists!

This is exactly all part of that worldwide capitalist propaganda campaign against "totalitarianism" in China that you are lending your voice to.

Just to be clear, I support the Foxconn workers in their struggles 100%, regardless of who owns the place. But in China, unlike in the USA, the wave of labor struggles of the last few years has won huge concessions and damn near a doubling of average wage rates.

Meanwhile Obama has managed to cut the wages of auto workers, new hires at least, in half, essentially breaking the United Auto Workers union, which is why the US auto industry, on the rocks a few years ago, is surging back.

-M.H.-

[black magick hustla]

I read all of MH's post on the nature of chinese imperialism, and I don't really swallow it. I don't see why state owned enterprises wouldn't engage in super-exploitation to for capital accumulation and infrastructure in china. Even if we, for the sake of the argument, assume china is not capitalist, the interest of every nation-state is to build up their capital and political power. The whole idea that chinese investment "benefits" other nation-states is wishy washy and subjective. There is nothing that shows that it is against chinese interests to super exploit periphery states for the buildup of chinese capital. There are all sorts of empirical studies and arguments that american imperialism has benefited, to certain degree some third world countries too. South Korean and Japanese infrastructure where built upon the american dollar.

[black magick hustla]

Just to be clear, I support the Foxconn workers in their struggles 100%, regardless of who owns the place. But in China, unlike in the USA, the wave of labor struggles of the last few years has won huge concessions and damn near a doubling of average wage rates.

-M.H.-

Even if this is true, this probably says more about the nature of the chinese working class than the chinese state. The chinese working class is one, if not the most, militant working class of the world. China has been exploding with wildcat strikes, uprisings that have overthrown the party temporarily in towns, riots, etc. The chinese proletariat is miles ahead its western counterpart

[black magick hustla]

http://en.internationalism.org/wr/299/china-africa

[A Marxist Historian]

I read all of MH's post on the nature of chinese imperialism, and I don't really swallow it. I don't see why state owned enterprises wouldn't engage in super-exploitation to for capital accumulation and infrastructure in china. Even if we, for the sake of the argument, assume china is not capitalist, the interest of every nation-state is to build up their capital and political power. The whole idea that chinese investment "benefits" other nation-states is wishy washy and subjective. There is nothing that shows that it is against chinese interests to super exploit periphery states for the buildup of chinese capital. There are all sorts of empirical studies and arguments that american imperialism has benefited, to certain degree some third world countries too. South Korean and Japanese infrastructure where built upon the american dollar.

Rational points, the discussion is elevating.

Might Chinese state owned enterprises engage in superexploitation abroad? In fact by and large they don't, but might they? Sure. I do not believe Stalinists are saints. And, in fact, in the very first months of the post-WWII period when briefly before the Cold War broke out the Allies were all supposed to be buddy buddy, Molotov proposed at the UN that Libya be made a Soviet colony (er, pardon me, "protectorate,") and the USSR was occupying Northern Iran and doing some dubious stuff in the oil industry.

But that's optional for Stalinists, not compulsory as with capitalists. And is usually not done by Stalinist regimes for the simple reason that it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of colonial peoples, and Stalinist regimes need allies on the world scale to hold off imperial pressure a bit, if only so they can compromise with imperialism on better terms.

Very much like union officials who mouth words of local and even international labor solidarity, but cut private deals with capitalists when they can.

South Korea and Japan? And Taiwan too? Yeah sure. But why? Because of the Chinese Revolution, which all the "state caps" want to flush down the toilet. US imperialism felt deeply threatened by the Chinese Revolution, and wanted to build up an iron ring around China to smash the Revolution, and was willing to spend lots of American dollars for this purpose.

Without the Chinese Revolution, South Korea and Taiwan would still look like Bangla Desh or something, and Japan would still be in the state of crisis and collapse MacArthur deliberately shoved it into in '45, occupied by US troops acting like real occupiers more than likely, till Truman's abrupt 180 degree course reversal on Japanese policy as soon as it started looking like Mao would win.

These are exceptions to the general rule that Third World countries are totally screwed in an imperialist world that only prove the rule. As a quick look at the map should demonstrate.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Even if this is true, this probably says more about the nature of the chinese working class than the chinese state. The chinese working class is one, if not the most, militant working class of the world. China has been exploding with wildcat strikes, uprisings that have overthrown the party temporarily in towns, riots, etc. The chinese proletariat is miles ahead its western counterpart

True. But why is this?

Because Chinese workers, unlike workers in the rest of the world, have not been demoralized by the collapse of the USSR. Why? Because Peoples China is not just surviving but thriving.

Or, to put it another way, because China, for all its bureaucratic deformities, is a workers state, and the workers know it, and feel confident to put demands on their state to straighten up and fly right, no matter how much Stalinist repression they are hit with--which lately they are sometimes just rolling right over.

BTW, I'm no reformist about China. The Stalinist regime has to be overthrown, not reformed. But by the workers, not by the capitalists. The last thing China needs is "democratic dissidents" backed by Obama, or mealy mouthed feudalists like the Dalai Lama, or worst of all, traitorous Lech Walesas in the factories.

-M.H.-

P.S.: I've heard that the workers are getting more militant lately in Vietnam too, a regime that is also a success story lately, unlike Cuba, to say nothing of North Korea.

[islandmilitia]

And state enterprises in a state like China, unlike private enterprises, do not necessarily operate with profit as their first consideration


Now, could the SOEs get turned into regular imperialist style multinationals? Quite possibly, that's what happened in Russia. But the obstacle to this is the CCP, which has no moral objections to this, but a very concrete practical one, namely that if this happened the CCP control over the economy and therefore the country would be broken and China would collapse into chaos like Russia did.

I think it would be productive to zone in on this area of disagreement because I actually find many of your other formulations quite convincing - you are right to say that a country being the origin of foreign investment is not enough in itself to make that country part of the imperialist bloc, just as a country being the recipient of foreign investment does not make it a victim of imperialism (after all, one of the most basic empirical critiques of the Leninist theory of imperialism is that a large amount of foreign investment takes place between the most advanced capitalist countries rather than just between advanced countries and the periphery). I would argue that what really makes the difference is not an empiricist comparison between the net quantities of inwards and outwards investment but rather the political dimension, insofar as what makes a country imperialist is when its relation to the world economy are structured in such a way that it exhibits the political dimensions of an imperialist country, including the existence of a labour aristocracy, as well as a militarist role towards other states. That's part of the reason why, in one of my earlier posts, I emphasized the need to avoid seeing imperialism as something solely economic in nature.

So, on that basis, I would say that China's current status as an imperialist power is very much ambiguous. Nonetheless, based on your formulations so far, you seem to say that as long as the CPC remains in power, Chinese investment cannot assume a fundamentally imperialist character and China cannot become an imperialist state, because the CPC punishes those private firms which try and assume an imperialist role, and because, with the CPC in control, SOEs do not operate according to capitalist laws of motion. What I really object to in this set of formulations is the idea that, with SOEs and the state sector more generally, there is a situation of politics in command, so to speak. I would argue that the different stages of the reform process since 1978 have led to the SOEs being regulated by basically capitalist logics to the extent that they are no longer subject to the autonomous political priorities of the CPC, if that were the case under Maoism. This was true already to a large degree as a result of the reforms that were introduced in the 1980s. As a result of those initial changes, SOEs were no longer assigned responsibility for meeting specific plan targets, and no longer had their profits artificially engineered through state-determined prices and elaborated central plans, rather, there emerged a situation where an increasing proportion of the output of SOEs was sold according to market prices, rather than according to a plan (the Chinese term being "growing out of the plan", because the proportion of output that could be sold outside of the plan, including to other SOEs, was extended over time) and the enterprises themselves were increasingly dependent not on direct government plans, but on independent financing and bank loans for which they had to repay interest. I would see these changes, the shift towards loan financing especially, as a fundamental change in the logics governing these enterprises.

In fact, it was precisely as a result of these changes and their consequences (e.g. the accumulation of debts by SOEs under the new financing conditions) that the second stage of reforms was introduced in the 1990s, when the actual ownership status of SOEs became the key concern. As part of this second stage, you had the outright privatization of huge numbers of small SOEs, often by local and provincial governments, but perhaps more important is that, outside of a small number of key economic sectors, those larger SOEs which were not privatized outright were converted into joint-stock corporations, so that they were listed in the Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen stock exchanges. Reading through the thread, someone already pointed this out, or hinted in this direction, and your response was to say that private ownership stakes in these joint-stock corporations is largely seen as a joke in China, because the state does not honor their investments, and remains in basic control. However, the evidence would not suggest this is the case, because as part of its ongoing process of reforming the state sector, the Chinese government has actually raised the proportion of shares that are available for purchase by private entities (it stood at one-third for most of the 1990s but was raised in 2000) and the result of this has been that not only individual or small-scale domestic entities but also international financial parasites like Goldman Sachs (i.e. a ruthless operator, not some individual chump in China) have been able to develop heavy ownership stakes, which has sometimes led to changes in the identity of the single biggest shareholder, in the direction of majority private ownership, even whilst the state remains significant stakes. There have, as a result, for the joint-stock or corporatized sector, emerged enterprises which are primarily subject to private ownership, with implications for who makes the decisions within these enterprises. That this process has involved firms like Goldman Sachs underlines the extent to which these enterprises are now bound up with the global economy. My source for all these trends, in case you are interested, is the 2008 article 'Reforming China's SOEs: An overview', by Weiye Li & Louis Putterman (source (http://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/compes/v50y2008i3p353-380.html)) which I've found to be a concise summary of how SOEs have evolved during the reform period, though obviously rooted in bourgeois economics.

In broad terms, then, across the past three decades, you have seen a fundamental change in the way China's state-sector operates, encompassing changes in management, financing, and ownership, this particular area of change being one component of a much broader process. The shift in ownership has been the most visible dimension of SOE reform, but I would actually argue in stronger terms that even when you are dealing with actors whose formal status is such that they remain under direct state control, simply looking at this formal status alone hides the extent to which these actors too have been integrated into the world economy and subordinated to capitalist logics. So you are dealing, in my view, with a process that has involved every sector and sphere of the Chinese economy being penetrated by the world economy and the capitalist logics that go along with that, regardless of changes or stability in ownership status. I pointed in this direction in the other thread when I said that even in the "commanding heights" state enterprises where the scope for non-state ownership is very small or non-existent the role of those enterprises has been to provide infrastructure for a growth model based around attracting foreign investment, but an even more interesting issue is the banking sector, and the Chinese central bank, which we would presumably expect to see as a strong example of the economy still being controlled according to the political criteria and political aims of the CPC. In the past month the People's Bank of China has cut its interest rates (source (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18723170)) and the stated reason for this is to encourage domestic consumption and investment. The point here is that the only way you can understand this decision is with reference to the world economy and the ways in which China's growth model of attracting foreign investment has been undermined as a result of the downturn in consumer demand in the advanced capitalist countries, in that the interest rates have been lowered in order to try and rectify the prolonged absence of domestic demand, given that demand for China's exports can no longer function as a key driver of growth. Against this background, I don't think it's at all feasible to say that any sector of the Chinese economy is driven according to autonomous political criteria, because even when it comes to the central bank, the world economy exerts a decisive influence over the kinds of decisions that are possible and desirable. In this respect, China does not differ from other countries, including in the content of that central bank decision, because other central banks have also tried to cut interest rates in order to pull themselves out of the capitalist crisis.

So, I would ask, given that, in the 1980s, you saw fundamental changes in the way SOEs were financed and managed, preceding vast changes in ownership in the 1990s, and given that, today, the decisions of directly state-contorlled entities like the central bank can only be explained in terms of China's position in the world economy, where is the evidence for the economy being controlled according to autonomous (i.e. autonomous from the world economy and the capitalist logics it exerts) political criteria? I think many of these issues are the same as those raised in the other thread, so feel free to answer only in this thread, with references to my posts in the other one if you wish.


Or, to put it another way, because China, for all its bureaucratic deformities, is a workers state, and the workers know it, and feel confident to put demands on their state to straighten up and fly right, no matter how much Stalinist repression they are hit with--which lately they are sometimes just rolling right over.

There are two responses I would make to this. Firstly, some of the most important recent struggles have been remarkable precisely because they have involved workers shifting away from posing their demands to the state and instead seeking to confront state power in very active ways - the Wukan Uprising is the most important example of this, because there you had the peasants (keeping in mind that the peasant-worker distinction is problematic in China, on account of the scope of migrant labour) literally driving local cadres and police forces out of the village as part of their occupation and setting up independent administrative bodies and delegate committees in order to handle the impact of the state blockade. So on an empirical level, if the Chinese working class is militant (which it is, inspiringly so) then that militancy is beginning to be shown in their willingness to confront the state rather than their confidence in launching demands that assume that the state can and should represent their interests. Secondly, to the extent that workers do continue to see the state as having the ability and the desire to represent their interests, that is not evidence of the Chinese working class being conscious, much less of the Chinese state and economy actually having a non-capitalist social character, it is evidence of one of the strategic weaknesses in the current praxis of the Chinese working class, because it still has illusions about the existing state and its ability to strike against capitalism.

I would actually see this issue as being much more complex insofar as a large part of the ideological weaponry of the Chinese working class (especially older workers in former SOEs, in the "northern rustbelt", to use Ching Kwan Lee's terms) involves the invocation of the memory of Maoism or a particular representation of what Maoism meant for workers as the basis for critique, but that process is an appeal to historical legitimacy rather to the state's own ideological basis or social character, because the state has, since 1978, and more particularly since 1981, been concerned with distinguishing itself from the more radical dimensions of the Mao period. Most importantly, though, when and where Chinese workers do look to the state (in some ways this is more common amongst migrant workers insofar as a large part of migrant protest is orientated towards using the legal system to win their rights) this underlines the importance of having a revolutionary party that will not sow illusions about the character of the Chinese state and will be able to develop the spontaneous militancy of the class into an organized challenge to Chinese state-capitalism.

[Leftsolidarity]

Tl;dr

Can u summarize for those who don't have the time to fully read?

[islandmilitia]

Tl;dr

Can u summarize for those who don't have the time to fully read?

Sure. China is capitalist, on account of its integration with the world economy, which imposes capitalist logics and laws of motion on its entire economy. Though, maybe you should accept that having serious discussions requires more than pithy exclamations and does sometimes necessitate extended posts.

[black magick hustla]

Might Chinese state owned enterprises engage in superexploitation abroad? In fact by and large they don't, but might they? Sure. I do not believe Stalinists are saints. And, in fact, in the very first months of the post-WWII period when briefly before the Cold War broke out the Allies were all supposed to be buddy buddy, Molotov proposed at the UN that Libya be made a Soviet colony (er, pardon me, "protectorate,") and the USSR was occupying Northern Iran and doing some dubious stuff in the oil industry.
Again, this is all subjective and eye of the beholder stuff. From that ICC article,


hina’s oil operations in Sudan are so extensive it takes 70% of the country’s oil exports. One of the reasons for the more than $10 billion dollars worth of investment in Sudan is the defence of Chinese oil interests. It has a military force in place in Sudan to guard 1506 kilometres of pipeline, a refinery and a port all built by Chinese labour. 10,000 Chinese workers were brought in to work on the project, it was widely rumoured that prisoners were used, many of whom “may have perished from disease in the inhospitable swamps and baked savannahs” (Human Rights Watch November 2003).




Rational points, the discussion is elevating.

But that's optional for Stalinists, not compulsory as with capitalists. And is usually not done by Stalinist regimes for the simple reason that it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of colonial peoples, and Stalinist regimes need allies on the world scale to hold off imperial pressure a bit, if only so they can compromise with imperialism on better terms.

This is all very subjective and doesn't help much. What you are basically saying that once upon a time, due to a geopolitical strategy, can't screw over colonized people. This is riddled with problems, because for one, you are basically giving a vague description of what the cold war consisted of. The cold war is also what precipitated marshall plan american "benevolent" imperialism. However today, we don't live in the cold war anymore and china geopolitically is different from the USSR.





South Korea and Japan? And Taiwan too? Yeah sure. But why? Because of the Chinese Revolution, which all the "state caps" want to flush down the toilet. US imperialism felt deeply threatened by the Chinese Revolution, and wanted to build up an iron ring around China to smash the Revolution, and was willing to spend lots of American dollars for this purpose.

So what, the reason USSR was funding natlib movements was to counter american domination.





These are exceptions to the general rule that Third World countries are totally screwed in an imperialist world that only prove the rule. As a quick look at the map should demonstrate.

-M.H.-

Yes, and all the countries were china exerts an influence are shitholes too.

[black magick hustla]

True. But why is this?

Because Chinese workers, unlike workers in the rest of the world, have not been demoralized by the collapse of the USSR. Why? Because Peoples China is not just surviving but thriving.

Or, to put it another way, because China, for all its bureaucratic deformities, is a workers state, and the workers know it, and feel confident to put demands on their state to straighten up and fly right, no matter how much Stalinist repression they are hit with--which lately they are sometimes just rolling right over.


Your arguments always flow from the idea that "the state thinks, this and workers do this or that because they think this", rather than looking at concrete situations at hand. It's all a bit idealist.

the reason why the chinese are very militant has nothing to do with the CPC being a worker' state. That whole area is very militant in general, including south korea, and india - the latter where bosses are murdered routinely and workers have all out clashes with the police.

The reason why that area is v. militant is that it has been suffering a superindustrialization of sorts, where the whole narrative experienced by early 20th century industrial western workers is being experienced by chinese and southeast asian workers. Has nothing to do with the workers having "high expectations from the cpc" or other sort of equally idealist nonsense.

[Leftsolidarity]

Sure. China is capitalist, on account of its integration with the world economy, which imposes capitalist logics and laws of motion on its entire economy. Though, maybe you should accept that having serious discussions requires more than pithy exclamations and does sometimes necessitate extended posts.

I'm just lurking for the most part while organizing for the DNC. I'm interested in this discussion (obviously) and am trying to stay mildly in the loop while not being able to fully respond.