Crisis in China? [Archive]

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 16:43

cyu

12th July 2015, 16:49

Both the USSR and PRC were duped by Western propaganda that capitalism was the perfect system (Western propaganda has had a lot of time to be perfected, since it had to work in a system with nominal "freedom of expression"). But joke's over - capitalism is a fraud, and they're both finding out the hard way. First life expectancy plunged in Russia, alcohol consumption shot up, people started leaving, and the ones who couldn't leave tried to become mail-order brides. And now the paper economy in China telling people they're rich, until reality sets in - not anything new to the West, but much more funny seeing others fall for the capitalist economic joke for the first time.

Creative Destruction

12th July 2015, 20:26

I noticed there hasn't been any discussions on the stock market meltdown in China:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/12/china-stock-market-turbulence-is-over-dont-count-on-it

For all we could know, this could be nothing, however I was wondering what those more savvy with economics think about the recent developments. A crisis in China, though it would most certainly be disastrous for the working people, on a strategic level might do well to dispel any myths about so-called "Asian capitalism", and do away with the dissonance between it and the west - what surprised me, however, was how dynamically, quickly and effectively the Chinese state responded to it in a way that would simply be unheard of in the west.

The reigning consensus seems to be that no one knows what's going to happen. The Western markets are too focused on what's going on in the Eurozone to really care about Chinese markets right now, not only that but the Chinese stock market has been in free-fall for the last 3 months and nothing has really taken on the Western markets. Domestically, and I'll see if I can try and dig up the article I read this at, most people in China seem to be going about their daily lives like nothing has happened, in large part because most people don't have anything invested in the stock market.

Tim Cornelis

12th July 2015, 20:53

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 21:18

With regard to the more efficient nature of "Asian capitalism" as it is manifested in the four Asian tigers, the authoritarian capitalist states in the east.

DOOM

12th July 2015, 22:25

It's an interesting development, but certainly not something that came outta nowhere. There were some indications that the chinese economy was crumbling.

There's no Asian capitalist myth in bourgeois economics as far as I know. At least, in college, already two years ago, I had some basic economic classes, where it was taught that there's three types of economic growth. I can't exactly remember them know, and can't find them so quickly, but they were, let's say, resource-driven growth (associated with underdeveloped countries, e.g. most of Africa); second, I don't know, but it was associated with China and had high average growth rates; third, there was innovation-driven growth which is associated with developed economies, the West, and growth rates would be low, 1-3%.
So the idea that the bourgeoisie has this model of Chinese 'state-capitalism' that they can implement to spur economic growth, as I've seen suggested previously by Marxists, and I think may be what you mean by "Asian capitalist myths", is contrary to bourgeois economic theory it seems.

Maybe China is associated with a buying power driven growth? Chinese economy is dependent on the west's buying power.

Sasha

12th July 2015, 22:28

the Chinese stock market has been a bubble waiting to burst for a while, whole companies closed down, fired all their staff, sold of their machines and invested all money in the stock market.
Problem for the Chinese regime is that not only the companies but also the Chinese people are gambling crazy and for years the stock market was a casino where every player won all the time, billions of poor and middle class Chinese pumped all their savings, their pensions and even borrowed money in stocks with full blessing of the "communist"party.
and while puncturing the bubble was possible a few years ago now the chinese government is in way too deep, even though the economy can probably take the crash (probably, no one really knows how deep the state and the central industries etc are in, it could become really bad) the party is scared shitless because if there is one thing they fear is social unrest. and because of this fear they handle social unrest very badly.
potentially a crash could set upheavals in motion that will put the whole world upside down (do not forget that the US economy is in huge debt to the chinese, if they would demand their money back... ), it will certainly make what is happening in greece look like a picnic in the park.

cyu

12th July 2015, 22:31

It's always easier to build major fraud on top of some kernel of truth. Back when Western companies were looking for cheap labor around the world, they found the large numbers of China, along with an authoritarian government able to control the working class. As a result, a great deal of Western manufacturing moved to China (weakening the fundamentals of Western economies, although the "owning class" remained in the West). This manufacturing was the kernel of strength that the stock market fraud was built upon - but you can only blow the Tulip bulb bubble so big before it comes crashing down.

hexaune

13th July 2015, 00:32

What I didn't know untill I read one of the articles on this in the guardian is that the majority of stocks are owned by individuals (somewhere around 80% iirc) as opposed to big institutions as is the case with the western stock markets. If this does turn into a catastrophic collapse the huge number of people that will be directly impacted could lead to some significant political unrest. Hence they have been pulling out all the stops to stabalise things (including banning sales by major shareholders for 6 months!).

Many listed companies have also voluntarily halted the sale of their shares to lock in the value of their companies in order to avoid breaking their loan covenants as they have they borrowed against the value of their shares.

This really could turn into a massive mess and with the recovery of western economies being pretty weak and built on shaky grounds, we could be in for turbulent times ahead!

cyu

13th July 2015, 00:47

When the bubble pops, people start doubting the basis of capitalism.

When the bubble inflates, people start ignoring the problems of capitalism.

When the bubble pops, people start doubting the basis of capitalism.

When the bubble inflates, people start ignoring the problems of capitalism.

When the bubble pops, people start doubting the basis of capitalism.

When the bubble inflates, people start ignoring the problems of capitalism.

Working Class Hero

13th July 2015, 01:30

What's even more concerning is the imminent ecological collapse of the country. Even though ecologists are guessing that China's CO2 output will level off by around 2020, their water use is insane and they are polluting huge swathes of the country. The REAL economy -not the speculative, capitalist economy- could collapse, which would be terrible for the entire planet.

MarxSchmarx

13th July 2015, 05:23

The indices in question rose over 150% in the last 5 months. That is simply unheard of, not sustainable, and clearly a sign of a speculation bubble. A correction of this sort was coming sooner rather than later, and it's sharpness only reflects the rapidity of the of the rise.

Stock market meltdowns of this sort are not unique to China; what is unique is the government's commitment to prop up the market. Beijing has deep pockets, and realizes what a mess their cheerleading of this bubble has created. Whereas a country like Germany, Hong Kong or America would have the government largely let the index "correct" as necessary, there are calculations that operate on a very different level in the Politburo.

In essence, intervention by the state becomes a form of a public works project, and the CCP views this as a public good to restore confidence in it's neoliberalism, sustain it's increasingly dubious legitimacy, and finally to continue to be able to brag to other countries (particularly America and Japan) that it's markets are doing better than theirs due to their superior system of god knows what.

This adds a dynamic that can be a real game changer here. If I were to guess, the reason the capitalist markets are largely indifferent has less to do with the fact that millions of small chinese investors being wiped out (after all, these are the promised chinese consumers who are the lifeline to western companies like Apple, Sony and Qantas), but more to do with the confidence in the interventionist state to stop the bleeding. There will be some equilibrium between massive state intervention to prop up the falling index and panic among middle- and upper-middle class Chinese. I suspect the reason markets outside China have been relatively unaffected by this ordeal is because most non-Chinese investors are quite confident Beijing won't let this devastate too many publically traded companies.

cyu

13th July 2015, 19:31

Bank Of England May Accept Stocks As Collateral

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-13/boe-may-accept-stocks-collateral

Use stocks as collateral. Get loan. Buy stocks. Stock prices go up. Use stocks as collateral. Get loan. Buy stocks. Stock prices go up.

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/6e/e9/ec/6ee9eca21f1d7c0385b696f83918c5d9.jpg

Comrade Jacob

14th July 2015, 15:01

This may cause a coup in China. If it does I hope it's a revolutionary coup that gets rid of the stock-markets.

willowtooth

15th July 2015, 02:24

China has to break their long term growth line, in order for this "crash" to be considered real, if you invested money last year in the Chinese market you would have a profit today, only 10% of the population even owns stock, and the government has incredibly tight controls over the stock market, margin debt is around 20% hardly indicative of a true crash.

there are just few speculative manufacturing concerns over the eurozone collapse and the rise of BRICS, but mostly the recent drop is from the wealthy Chinese jumping ship toward american Japanese and Australian debt markets. The Asia equity markets will correct themselves shortly

Chinese stock markets are fine

Now Somalia's stock market im not too sure about :wub:

cyu

15th July 2015, 05:33

The real correction will come when the working class in Third World countries stop accepting the overvalued currency of "wealthy" nations. The crash in "wealthy" countries that will come about because of that I think will be quite delicious. Then again, I fully expect capitalist forces will attempt to use violence to prevent that from happening.

Come see the violence inherent in the system. Indeed.

cyu

30th July 2015, 13:08

Bank Of England May Accept Stocks As Collateral

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/6e/e9/ec/6ee9eca21f1d7c0385b696f83918c5d9.jpgChinese banks were investigating their exposure to the stock market via wealth management products and loans backed by stock as collateral.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-30/chinese-stocks-tumble-close-trading-causing-panic-us-gdp-be-revised-higher-seasonal-

Just goes to show those in charge of the economy are basically just winging it, since after they get in power, they fully realize just how much of what they were taught in school was a total fraud. Pro-capitalist economists basically provide academic cover for what, behind the scenes, is just people running around with band-aids and plugging holes with their fingers. Some academic economists do this because they are corrupt, others because they are just plain stupid.

ckaihatsu

31st July 2015, 03:58

Chinese banks were investigating their exposure to the stock market via wealth management products and loans backed by stock as collateral.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-30/chinese-stocks-tumble-close-trading-causing-panic-us-gdp-be-revised-higher-seasonal-

Just goes to show those in charge of the economy are basically just winging it, since after they get in power, they fully realize just how much of what they were taught in school was a total fraud. Pro-capitalist economists basically provide academic cover for what, behind the scenes, is just people running around with band-aids and plugging holes with their fingers. Some academic economists do this because they are corrupt, others because they are just plain stupid.

Cyu, as usual your perspective is too ground-level.

This unfolding situation is reminding me of the subprime mortgage crisis, which started with an overall *lack of investment vehicles*. So those with capital lying around turned to riskier and riskier outlets, like those who wanted mortgages but who had a definite absence of collateral.

Here we're seeing the exact same thing, just of a different coloration, in that questionable (highly-leveraged) assets are being broadly regarded as okay, and over-valued for the sake of having some kind of investment opportunity to partake in.

Your ongoing characterizations of the players are dramatic and entertaining but at the end of the day the reality is that they're just following the herding instinct, with predictable results.

ComradeAllende

31st July 2015, 04:25

I noticed there hasn't been any discussions on the stock market meltdown in China:

For all we could know, this could be nothing, however I was wondering what those more savvy with economics think about the recent developments. A crisis in China, though it would most certainly be disastrous for the working people, on a strategic level might do well to dispel any myths about so-called "Asian capitalism", and do away with the dissonance between it and the west - what surprised me, however, was how dynamically, quickly and effectively the Chinese state responded to it in a way that would simply be unheard of in the west.

Well, all I know is that it won't have a major impact on the Chinese economy, since their stock market isn't as big as it is in Western countries. I personally think that an authoritarian model of capitalism would serve as an excellent showcase of capitalism's incompatibility with democracy and civil liberties, or at least partially refute Milton Friedman's assertion that capitalism is a prerequisite for political/social freedom.

cyu

31st July 2015, 04:53

ckaihatsu

31st July 2015, 05:16

The thing is, the rich think that by putting their investment in the "perfect" investment portfolio, they can protect their wealth. The reality is that nothing is safe. Whatever they put their wealth in becomes a bubble, since their wealth is derived from a bubble in the first place. They think "well, if I only find something that isn't overvalued, then I put my investments there, and my wealth will be safe." The reality is that it's all overvalued. If they put their money in stocks, stocks become overvalued. If they put it in bonds, bonds become overvalued. If they put it in commodities, commodities become overvalued. If they keep it as cash, cash becomes overvalued.

Yeah, granted, of course, but I also mean to say that this kind of dynamic is *structural* (perhaps as you're possibly alluding to) and is independent of the cartoonish actions of the players themselves.

I'll also note that it's not enough for any capitalist / investor to merely *safeguard* their wealth, though that *does* happen incidentally to gargantuan extents (offshore hedge funds) (non-circulating capital).

In fact, what is undervalued is the labor of the working class. If the working class decides that food is worth more than anything capitalists can give them, then capitalists will starve.

willowtooth

31st July 2015, 06:17

hey! who likes the fact that I was right?

Troika

31st July 2015, 16:09

There's no Asian capitalist myth in bourgeois economics as far as I know. At least, in college, already two years ago, I had some basic economic classes, where it was taught that there's three types of economic growth. I can't exactly remember them know, and can't find them so quickly, but they were, let's say, resource-driven growth (associated with underdeveloped countries, e.g. most of Africa); second, I don't know, but it was associated with China and had high average growth rates; third, there was innovation-driven growth which is associated with developed economies, the West, and growth rates would be low, 1-3%.
So the idea that the bourgeoisie has this model of Chinese 'state-capitalism' that they can implement to spur economic growth, as I've seen suggested previously by Marxists, and I think may be what you mean by "Asian capitalist myths", is contrary to bourgeois economic theory it seems.

If you could find your old books I'd be interested in this. Foucault -I think?- pointed out how the whole third-second-first world dynamics were a fraud that allowed economic colonization of weaker states by the "first" world. Neoliberalism hooray.

So I wonder what those numbers actually represent given the loan shark dynamic, or if it's a central theme at all in growth. Hell, I wonder if our economics even reflect what's going on at all or how this growth is actually charted. Is it GDP? If so that would realistically measure the capitalist's profit in a country like the US and have almost literally nothing to do with "innovation" outside of capitalists and bankers innovating new ways to buttfuck people. If it's GDP I guarantee you it would keep increasing through a recession in the US. It's hilarious that they would use such a loaded term like "innovation" to describe that growth.

Typifying the "third world's" growth as resource-driven is really interesting, considering the "first world" has spent the last few centuries building a global infrastructure/economic system to leech natural resources out of those places. It's almost tautological: This milking cow is there because it's a milking cow.

ckaihatsu

4th August 2015, 02:53

Loren Goldner on the Chinese Working Class and the Global Crisis

http://www.revleft.com/vb/loren-goldner-chinese-t193773/index.html

StromboliFucker666

4th August 2015, 07:40

The Intransigent Faction

25th August 2015, 07:39

The stock market rout gripping the world last week and today is bad news for just about anyone who uses money, but when the value of assets collapses, it’s the richest who lose the most.Take, for instance, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who lost $1.9 billion U.S. in a day’s trading on Friday; or Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos, who was down $1.8 billion; or famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway head Warren Buffett, who lost $1.7 billion.
And that was all last Friday — before Monday’s even wilder ride on the stock market.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/), the world’s richest 400 people lost $182 billion in wealth last week (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-21/world-s-richest-people-lose-182-billion-as-market-rout-deepens). It was the largest drop ever seen in the index, but it only launched last September.
The recent drop in stock markets around the world means the world’s 400 wealthiest people have in total lost money this year, with their combined net worth at $3.98 trillion, down $75 billion from the start of the year.
...

Of course, the world’s super-richest are also the people best equipped to handle a downturn. Zuckerberg’s loss of $1.9 billion last Friday was the largest among the rankings of the world’s wealthiest people, but the Facebook boss is still worth $37.8 billion U.S., so he won’t starve.
And all the research indicates the world’s wealth continues to concentrate in ever larger amounts at the top of the income ladder. An Oxfam report earlier this year predicted that the world’s wealthiest one per cent will hold more wealth than the other 99 per cent by next year (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/19/world-wealth-oxfam_n_6499798.html).
With the stock market rout hitting wealthy people’s investment portfolios more than it hits lower-income people with no portfolios, that trend of rich-getting-richer might just stall for the next little while.
But it’s likely to start up again, as soon as the markets recover. And a stock market crash is a pretty draconian path to greater economic equality … let’s hope there are better means to achieve that end.

I didn't see any threads about this, so I thought I'd make one. From what I've read, the aforementioned global "stock market rout" was directly linked to the stock market crash in China, which brings to mind this thread:

(http://www.revleft.com/vb/crisis-chinai-t193591/index.html?p=2842965#post2842965)
http://www.revleft.com/vb/crisis-chinai-t193591/index.html?p=2842965#post2842965

"Crisis in China?" seems to have become "Crisis in China!". So, what now? It's one thing not to give a damn about Mark Zuckerberg losing a small fraction of his net worth, but how deeply might the social unrest from this particular crisis reach? Can anyone here shed more light on what to expect, given the impact of China's crash on the global market?

ckaihatsu

25th August 2015, 08:22

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/22/pers-a22.html

Gunsmas

25th August 2015, 10:24

The vast majority of them if they were smart enough will have enough in assets to claw it all back when the bull market returns.

If the crisis kept getting worse in China I wouldn't be too shocked if the government were to panic and consider shutting it down completely.

Hatshepsut

25th August 2015, 13:50

At least in the USA, where the stock market has largely been decoupled from the so-called business cycle, I'm not even sure the moguls lose anything in these crashes. Unlike 1929, when a major market meltdown always led to severe recession, we've had big stock crashes in 1973, 1987, and 2000 without much effect on production and consumption levels. Only 1973, before warehousing and inventory accumulation had given way to "just in time," and before the mass offshoring of the manufacturing plant, did a recession occur and it wasn't nearly as serious as 1929-1933.

I don't know as much about China's opaque market, though the state probably enforces separation between Shanghai and Shenzhen and the core economic activities of China, so that a bear market doesn't bring the nation down. China can seize private assets anywhere in the country at will, giving its government much more power to intervene than Uncle Sam has. Financial blogs nowadays tend to blow the significance of market events way out of proportion: The day our global economic system really does tank will probably come without warning as it will be onset of a new dynamic the bloggers won't recognize from past experience. Although credit and currency issues involving China, as seen this month, are the likely source for a global collapse—another consequence of business cycle changes I mentioned at the start. China's economy is too big and too integrated with the outside for the rest of the capitalist world to retain the ability to compartmentalize its convulsions as it did with Thailand in the 1997 Asian currency crisis.

Still, Mark Zuckerburg, who's sold much of his Facebook stake to get a diversified portfolio, need not worry about the fluctuations. Most of his $30B+ is not in the form of cash money, it's in abstract valuations of his ownership interests in various things. His values can drop 80% and he won't have to give up a dime in actual cash over it. Instead, under the 401(k) system of pensioning U.S. workers, it is retirees who lose in market downdrafts, because how much they can withdraw in cash depends heavily on the valuations.

Currencies, contrary to what capitalists claim, are not like other commodities because they are freely exchangeable, for other goods or other currencies. Yet their prices are allowed to float in the supply-demand mill like other commodities, meaning that currency fluctuations lead to huge distortions in other markets. They are also more vulnerable to speculative assaults; it was traders with hedge positions against the baht attacking this currency that caused 1997. Because the currencies fell, exports from the affected countries suddenly became cheaper here, probably why the USA encouraged the crisis. A little background is at

Hill's view: http://www.wright.edu/~tdung/asiancrisis-hill.htm
IMF's view: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/1997/12/pdf/imfstaff.pdf

Comrade Jacob

25th August 2015, 13:50

Ceallach_the_Witch

25th August 2015, 16:54

if only it was possible to find some of it before they get it all back

Hatshepsut

25th August 2015, 17:12

...there are just few speculative manufacturing concerns over the eurozone collapse and the rise of BRICS, but mostly the recent drop is from the wealthy Chinese jumping ship toward american Japanese and Australian debt markets.

I personally think that an authoritarian model of capitalism would...refute Milton Friedman's assertion that capitalism is a prerequisite for political/social freedom.

I dunno. Stocks as collateral for loans, "buying on margin," was just 1929. Except today governments guarantee the solvency of banks and market reinsurers so that the crashes don't intrude into the production-consumption cycle as deeply as they did 90 years ago. China's decision to devalue its currency as a way of propping up its export manufacturing base seems the logical cause of its stocks going down. China is more leveraged than Greece is, with debt now well over 300% of GDP. So they are in real trouble with even a growth slowdown. This debt level might explain why rich Chinese are shuffling money out of the China deck.

Capital has indeed moved to preserve its ability to extract surpluses from labor, by confining the latter in-country while financial instruments and goods cross borders freely. That way the undervalued labor cannot follow investment as it moves around the globe. Unrest in rich countries is thus blunted by a consumerism whose cheap goods flow from a caged labor force held at subsistence elsewhere. This arrangement, which has been running full speed for 35 years, may be coming under strain.

Milton Friedman was 180 degrees off course. It's the other way around: Political freedom is the prerequisite for real capitalism. And it need not be freedom for all—Only the property owners need be freed from traditional social relations, so they can form a bourgeoisie; the landless need only be released from the land by technology so they can labor in the cities.

How the unrest equation for social change differs today is that disaffection may have to spread to police, military, and surveillance bureaucracies, not just workers as in the situations of 100 or 170 years ago. Control of the population by central government is far more effective today than it was then. When we note how much trouble revolutionaries experienced with overturning the relatively weak states of their day, we can conclude that an unaided worker's movement won't accomplish much now. The requisite conditions may arise when these force-wielding elements of capitalism are no longer getting paid, when one can hope to convert their loyalties. Even Lenin had to gain support from part of Russia's military for his project.

Patchd

25th August 2015, 23:15

Milton Friedman was 180 degrees off course. It's the other way around: Political freedom is the prerequisite for real capitalism. And it need not be freedom for all—Only the property owners need be freed from traditional social relations, so they can form a bourgeoisie; the landless need only be released from the land by technology so they can labor in the cities.

But aren't those examples you just gave contradictory to the statement that political freedom is the prerequisite for real capitalism? Or what do you mean by real capitalism?

In your example, I assume the property owners are the capitalists, and so there is already a capitalism as a social relation in existence, but simply they were bound to another and more hegemonic social relation in decay. I could be mistaken, just a bit confused by that statement.

Hatshepsut

26th August 2015, 13:51

...political freedom is the prerequisite for real capitalism? Or what do you mean by real capitalism?

Capitalism developed first in the Netherlands after its independence from Spain in 1575. Then it spread to England about 75 years later. Some people had to be free from ties to the land, and those who were going to become owners had to be free from answering to aristocracy. Which is why it happened early in Holland and England but not France. The Netherlands was a federal republic with an elected legislature. England had "limited" monarchy with a strong parliament after the Interregnum. France had despotic aristocracy until 1792.

The first capitalists were merchants who financed voyages overseas on letters of credit. This began as early as the 14th century but the big joint-stock mercantile outfits, the Dutch and British East India Companies, didn't start up until the 1600s. But Marx and Engels focused on manufacturing ca. 1800 because of its mass employment of landless labor, considering the colonial enterprises which employed relatively few people in Europe only from the perspectives of the mother countries. (Das Kapital treats these companies and their economic positions as monopolists in Vol. III, Chap. 18, and trade relations in general later in Vol. III.) The thing is, though, that these firms did effectively extract surpluses from labor in the colonized countries because of trade terms favoring Europe. Many peasants in the parts of India under British were on the plantations.

But Marx never recognized agriculture as productive; excepting the cash crops it had no value in his reasoning. This is probably because most agricultural goods came from small farmers and were consumed locally. I'm not the person to ask; yet I don't think this view is accepted academically anymore. Marx was interested in fostering revolution in the class of industrial workers and did not anticipate the peasantry would lead the way. The cotton for the mills was grown in Egypt, India, or the USA.

My apologies for using "real capitalism," a silly term. I probably should have said "capitalism as Marx understood it," meaning what we now call the Industrial Revolution. Division of labor itself began in the feudal guilds to a greater degree than Marx gives credit for. All this stuff is 20th century research and opinion, based on sources and texts not available to Marx. The definition of "capitalism," even among Marxist economists, has broadened over time, though it's still based on accumulation of surpluses for production and sale of commodities.

The early "democracy" in Holland, England, or America didn't include everyone. Only about 20% of the population qualified to vote; you had to be a white male and own at least some property on a tax roll. It was broad enough to keep aristocracy from having final say over everything; America never had titled gentlemen. Political freedom for 20% was a big advance over freedom for 1.5% as in feudalism. Capitalism is unlikely to evolve without such freedom since the needed laws and financial arrangements won't get passed otherwise. Notice that the freedom comes first; not the capitalism as Milton says.

Patchd

26th August 2015, 15:48

Capitalism developed first in the Netherlands after its independence from Spain in 1575 ... The first capitalists were merchants who financed voyages overseas on letters of credit ... Capitalism is unlikely to evolve without such freedom since the needed laws and financial arrangements won't get passed otherwise. Notice that the freedom comes first; not the capitalism as Milton says.

I appreciate your historical descriptive, a question though. Did the guilds, merchants and piratical ventures not exist prior to the guilds, merchants and pirates receiving royal seals of approval? I find it difficult to believe that it was political freedom granted which signified the beginning of this relationship, instead that this relationship pre-dated the political-economic freedom later granted by the dominant class in that historical context which synonymously benefited both the landed nobility and the aspiring capitalists.

This is not to say that political freedom didn't further energise the ability of capitalism to advance in what would otherwise have been a much more difficult economic setting, but that the economic base was already in existence (although not dominant) which required further social and political flexibility in order to develop into the capitalism of the industrial age.

Hatshepsut

26th August 2015, 16:18

Did the guilds, merchants and piratical ventures not exist prior to...receiving royal seals of approval?

My word on this doesn't substitute for going to the books. I don't even know what I'm talking about half the time!

Yes, it was probably a two-way street; the first medieval guild certainly predated anything we could call "political freedom." Royal monopolies were granted in England and analogous government licenses in the Netherlands which had no king. Yet in England it was Parliament which could pry those licenses out of the king's pen, often on behalf of MPs in the House of Commons who were not aristocrats, but gave MPs in the House of Lords a cut in order to secure their cooperation. As carrot & stick Commons wielded increasing powers of purse, to give or withhold money to finance constant royal wars. Then again, Parliament as institution a king might have to contend with goes back to 1265 and provisions from the Magna Carta. There was a following Plantagenet history where the Edwards were able to suppress Parliament and rule dictatorially. So, any linear historical narrative simplifies things to a considerable extent.

Yet greater political freedom is implicit in the very nature of capitalist social relations. In feudalism, even the Lords are bound to their lands, or are called to the court where the king can keep an eye on them. In capitalism the Captains of Commerce & Industry move about freely. I wouldn't say complete liberty came first and then capitalism; they developed hand in hand. I doubt whether capitalism is possible without some freedom, however. Division of labor and other innovations require independent decision-making that simply doesn't happen under absolute fealty.

Patchd

26th August 2015, 17:06

My word on this doesn't substitute for going to the books. I don't even know what I'm talking about half the time!

The same applies to me! Thanks for your honesty :P

I wouldn't say complete liberty came first and then capitalism; they developed hand in hand. I doubt whether capitalism is possible without some freedom, however. Division of labor and other innovations require independent decision-making that simply doesn't happen under absolute fealty.

Ok, I can accept this analysis. Not to mention it's somewhat pointless to just try and figure out whether the chicken or the egg came first, the point is that one cannot exist as a healthy actuality without the other. The point also that we are talking of bourgeois liberal morality.

Vladimir Innit Lenin

27th August 2015, 00:03

The problems for western economies are (mainly) two-fold:

1) Economies like the US have a lot of exposure to Chinese markets. As China has invested greatly in the dollar, an actual downturn in the Chinese economy (Which looks unlikely - the more likely scenario being lower but still impressive GDP growth in the Chinese economy) could prove disastrous for the health of the dollar, which in turn would have a knock on effect for emerging markets and Europe.

2) The western economies are stuck in a situation of low growth, low investment, and low interest rates. The fact that interest rates in the UK, for example, are stuck at close to zero indicate that 7 years after the initial crash, investors would rather put their money anywhere other than investing in the real economy, even if there is practically no cost of borrowing-to-invest. This is particularly worrying; even interest rates of nominal zero and a huge monetary stimulus programme (quantitative easing) has failed to increase investment in the real economy (as opposed to a return to investment in speculation in the financial markets) to an extent that leads to strong economic growth. One has to wonder whether the continuation of austerity politics will merely be the medium- to long-term continuation of a low-growth, low-interest rate economy, with all the negative outcomes that produces (bubbles, lower living standards punctuated by period of financial crashes).

ckaihatsu

27th August 2015, 03:49

---

the more likely scenario being lower but still impressive GDP growth in the Chinese economy)

While the official growth rate for the second quarter came in at 7 percent, near the government’s target, most independent analysts maintain that real growth is probably closer to 4 percent. The official 7 percent rate is itself a six-year low.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/12/pers-a12.html

Hatshepsut

28th August 2015, 18:19

2) The western economies are stuck in a situation of low growth, low investment, and low interest rates...

In fact we're moving to negative interest rates. The bank still makes money on the spread because savings are, say, -5%: Put $100 in today and your balance is $95 a year later. The interest rate on mortgages is, say, -2%, so if you borrow $100 now you owe $98 after a year. Of course, the late payment penalties and foreclosure still apply to keep customers from just watching their balance decline without paying.

The Bloomberg take, Apr. '15
http://www.bloombergview.com/quicktake/negative-interest-rates

It seems like capitalism is entering yet another phase where it attempts to extract surpluses without actually investing. It's possible to do that for quite awhile by running your productive infrastructure and capital into the ground. The U.S. doesn't bother to maintain or improve a large proportion of the plants it still keeps in service, and is offshoring everything that can be done elsewhere to avoid expensive American labor. Roads and utilities are repaired now, but expect that to fall off as budget squeezes come on. Even skilled work will go: programming and customer support to Bangalore, physicians imported from South America and pilots from Haiti so HMOs and airlines can pay two thirds less for the same expertise. Congress is unlikely to oppose this trend.

Gunsmas

29th August 2015, 00:09

willowtooth

29th August 2015, 01:27

Why do I seem to be the only one worried about the Somalian stock market?

Vladimir Innit Lenin

29th August 2015, 15:07

Chinese figures are almost all fabrications. The local governments must meet targets and are kicked out office if they do not meet them. Therefore they will do anything to ensure the numbers they write in the books are close to the targets, even if they are not.

Chinese GDP growth is probably even lower than 4% at this stage.

Evidence? Or is this intuition? Who is to say that figures in other countries are not 'massaged' too? Of course this is all speculation without evidence.

Gunsmas

29th August 2015, 17:43

Evidence? Or is this intuition? Who is to say that figures in other countries are not 'massaged' too? Of course this is all speculation without evidence.

There is lots of evidence, even a simple google search will show that they alter their gdp figures beyond belief. It's an extremely common Chinese cultural practice, it's a known as "launching a satellite'.

China always hits its targets dead-on. There is a reason for that. It's much harder for western nations to fake their GDP figures due to economy and society operating in a more free manner for independent organisations. Try to do some real research in China and you'll be arrested if you're a foreigner or taken down for "corruption" if you're Chinese

ckaihatsu

29th August 2015, 18:24

---

The official growth figures have fallen this year to 7 percent—well below the 8 percent level that the CCP long regarded as the minimum required for social stability. Many analysts, however, regard even 7 percent as significantly overstating actual growth. A recent Bloomberg survey of 11 economists put the median estimate of Chinese growth at 6.3 percent.

Others put the figure far lower. Analyst Gordon Chang told the Diplomat website that “influential people in Beijing” were “privately saying that the Chinese economy was growing at a 2.2 percent rate.” He pointed to other indicators of declining economic activity: rail freight (down 10.1 percent in the first two quarters of 2015), trade volume (down 6.9 percent), construction starts by area (down 15.8 percent) and electricity usage (up by just 1.3 percent).

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/28/chin-a28.html

Patchd

30th August 2015, 13:53

Why do I seem to be the only one worried about the Somalian stock market?

It might be because we don't really know much about it. Can you expand or was this a (+/- half) joke?? :p

Lord Testicles

30th August 2015, 14:06

I think it might be a joke considering that the website that Wikipedia gives for the Somalia Stock Exchange was only created at 7am this morning...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia_Stock_Exchange

https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=somalistockexchange.so

Patchd

30th August 2015, 14:30

I think it might be a joke considering that the website that Wikipedia gives for the Somalia Stock Exchange was only created at 7am this morning...

:( I am the saddest panda.

John Nada

30th August 2015, 17:49

Evidence? Or is this intuition? Who is to say that figures in other countries are not 'massaged' too? Of course this is all speculation without evidence.In some of the links in the article Hatshepsut linked to it quotes a Wikileaks of the Current Primer Li Kequiang saying it's bullshit. He considered railway volume, electricity usage and bank loans the most reliable statistics. http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/06/us-china-economy-wikileaks-idUSTRE6B527D20101206

Gotya

31st August 2015, 08:16

I think it's a blip for China. The US likes to play up the China falling thing, but it won't last. Just ups and downs, if anything. China's road is up while America's is down.

The Intransigent Faction

2nd September 2015, 02:08

I think it's a blip for China. The US likes to play up the China falling thing, but it won't last. Just ups and downs, if anything. China's road is up while America's is down.

That's an interesting point. However, let there be no doubt that China likes to play down the "China falling thing" as much as the U.S. likes to play it up. They don't typically advertise internal instability.

ckaihatsu

2nd September 2015, 02:27

---

The deluge of media commentary on the Chinese economy reflects the degree to which the world economy as a whole is dependent on continued growth in China. Speaking on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Lateline” program last night, Ken Courtis, chairman of Starfort Holdings, pointed out that “this year we’re expecting 35 to 40 percent of all the world’s growth to come from China.” If that did not happen, “then we have a real problem.”

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/28/chin-a28.html

Antiochus

2nd September 2015, 07:13

Hopefully China learns it's playing a dangerous game with "market socialism" and goes back to a planned economy.

Urgh, this is just stupid. China is a fully-fledged Capitalist economy. You can't expect them to "go back" to a planned economy anymore than you can expect the U.S to do so because they did so in WW2. In the coming years I expect the Chinese Communist Party to drop any mention of Marxism in general, maybe change its name. China and Taiwan are identical now in respect to their 'market principles'.

LeninistIthink

2nd September 2015, 13:25

Working Class Hero

9th September 2015, 17:51

Sperm-Doll Setsuna

9th September 2015, 20:03

ckaihatsu

9th September 2015, 23:07

As Howard Zinn said, the stock market isn't a reflection of the real economy. It doesn't affect most people exceptnfor their 401k, if they have one.

And I'm not sure if that value is even a big deal to some of these moguls.

Oh.

And here I went through all this trouble to get zombie-apocalypse ready, due to the stock market plunge....

= D

cyu

26th September 2015, 12:24

The only reason that the party clings to its name of "Communist" is that it is dependent upon the claim to build socialism as its raison d'être, for historical reasons. It cannot just throw this aside - even though obviously any pretences to socialism, even misguided Maoism, are long gone - so it will cling to the name for as long as possible. To give up on its name would be to give up power

Kind of like how America clings to the veneer of "democracy" despite all the loopholes to make the country a plutocracy. I guess every country needs its own kind of lipstick for their pig - still others might use some religion to justify their rule. But wherever the ruling class lives much better than the underclass, you'll find those at the top of the pyramid living lives of hypocrisy, despite all their pretense of ideals.

Emmett Till

30th September 2015, 22:02

Urgh, this is just stupid. China is a fully-fledged Capitalist economy. You can't expect them to "go back" to a planned economy anymore than you can expect the U.S to do so because they did so in WW2. In the coming years I expect the Chinese Communist Party to drop any mention of Marxism in general, maybe change its name. China and Taiwan are identical now in respect to their 'market principles'.

Sorry, that's just standard leftish propaganda trying to dissasociate itself from the Chinese government as it's so corrupt, generally unpleasant and even more importantly, disfavored in American public opinion. The barometer for what many so-called leftists use to determine what is "capitalist" is what Obama says. Since Obama and all other American politicians love to denounce China, it must be evil, and if you are an American leftist, that means it must be capitalist.

Fact is, as most serious economists will tell you, the invisible hand of Adam Smith does not control the still largely state-owned Chinese economy, it's the very visible hand of the Chinese Communist Party.

A stock market crash in America is disaster. The recent stock market crash in China was--really no big deal for the Chinese economy. Created panic among western investors, some of whom really didn't understand that China is not America, but was ended quickly. Frankly, the stock market is a sucker's game in China, which is why every so often you have demonstrations of stockbrokers against government mistreatment and oppression.

Bad for the large capitalist sector, dependent on exports abroad, not so important for the real Chinese economy that produces goods for China. It got the party bureaucrats nervous as they believe that favoring the capitalist class is the way to make China prosperous, i.e. they are Bukharinites not Stalinists. But they are in charge in China, not the capitalist class, and they are still basically the same party which took power in 1949, under Mao. Who wasn't exactly a capitalist politician.

In America, the bankers rule, as was demonstrated in 2008. In China, bankers do what the government tells them to, or lose their jobs.

Comrade Jacob

21st October 2015, 18:02

China dunt give a shit.

Antiochus

21st October 2015, 18:55

Sorry, that's just standard leftish propaganda trying to dissasociate itself from the Chinese government as it's so corrupt, generally unpleasant and even more importantly, disfavored in American public opinion. The barometer for what many so-called leftists use to determine what is "capitalist" is what Obama says. Since Obama and all other American politicians love to denounce China, it must be evil, and if you are an American leftist, that means it must be capitalist.

Fact is, as most serious economists will tell you, the invisible hand of Adam Smith does not control the still largely state-owned Chinese economy, it's the very visible hand of the Chinese Communist Party.

A stock market crash in America is disaster. The recent stock market crash in China was--really no big deal for the Chinese economy. Created panic among western investors, some of whom really didn't understand that China is not America, but was ended quickly. Frankly, the stock market is a sucker's game in China, which is why every so often you have demonstrations of stockbrokers against government mistreatment and oppression.

Bad for the large capitalist sector, dependent on exports abroad, not so important for the real Chinese economy that produces goods for China. It got the party bureaucrats nervous as they believe that favoring the capitalist class is the way to make China prosperous, i.e. they are Bukharinites not Stalinists. But they are in charge in China, not the capitalist class, and they are still basically the same party which took power in 1949, under Mao. Who wasn't exactly a capitalist politician.

In America, the bankers rule, as was demonstrated in 2008. In China, bankers do what the government tells them to, or lose their jobs.

lol :-)

When exactly has the "invisible hand" governed anything? YOu do realize its little more than the Capitalist Deist god meant to ideologically justify capitalist control, right?

China is, functionally, identical to Taiwan or other State-CApitalist economies throughout Asia (Korea, Singapore etc...). You're parroting off the same bullshit that idiot who claims the USSR collapsed because it had 'reached the final stage of communism".

Emmett Till

22nd October 2015, 09:52

lol :-)

When exactly has the "invisible hand" governed anything? YOu do realize its little more than the Capitalist Deist god meant to ideologically justify capitalist control, right?

China is, functionally, identical to Taiwan or other State-CApitalist economies throughout Asia (Korea, Singapore etc...). You're parroting off the same bullshit that idiot who claims the USSR collapsed because it had 'reached the final stage of communism".

Really? Somebody said that? Well, here on Revleft anything is possible. That's even wackier than what you are trying to argue.

The "invisible hand" is the classic metaphor from classical economist Adam Smith for the lawful workings of the capitalist market. And yes, it governs everything, absolutely everything, not just "anything," in a capitalist economy.

Marx, building on the foundations laid by Smith, Ricardo and other classical bourgeois economists, who before a working class movement arose tried to understand how their capitalist system actually works, spent a lot of time writing books about that, working out just what those laws were. You should check 'em out. It's not the usual opinion to think that Marx worshipped the gods of capitalism, but hey, knock yourself out.

Of course, the "neo-classical" epigones of the Smiths and Ricardos, the Marshalls and Keyneses and whatnot, were ultimately more concerned with defending capitalism against socialist attack than scientific analysis.

And then you get the "monetarists" like Milton Friedman and his ilk, who really do just worship the gods of capitalism, sacrificing mathematical equations on the altars, and who really have no understanding at all of how their system works, as they almost hilariously demonstrated in 2009.

But that doesn't mean that a scientific, lawful understanding of the workings of the economy is impossible, which is what you seem to be implying. And to dub China as "capitalist," you have to throw just about everything Marx ever wrote about capitalism right out the window.

You think South Korea and Taiwan are "state capitalist"? That needs to be explained to all those billionaire industrialists there who tell the state what to do rather than the other way around.

State capitalism has been known to exist, especially in Third World countries that got political independence from a colonial power before a capitalist class really came into existence, like a number of African countries. The extreme example being Burma, where at one point virtually all industry was in the hands of the state. i.e. the Burmese generals, who ran and still run the Burmese state, and got industry handed over to them on a silver platter as soon as it was developed well enough so that it was profitable.

But Taiwan and South Korea? Uh uh. Is there a state sector there? Sure, the CIA insisted on it, the local capitalists after WWII, such as they were, all being Japanese collaborators. But if that's "state capitalism," so is the US post office.

Here's a good analysis of what is actually going on in China economically right now.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1076/china.html

hexaune

22nd October 2015, 18:40

Really? Somebody said that? Well, here on Revleft anything is possible. That's even wackier than what you are trying to argue.

The "invisible hand" is the classic metaphor from classical economist Adam Smith for the lawful workings of the capitalist market. And yes, it governs everything, absolutely everything, not just "anything," in a capitalist economy.

Marx, building on the foundations laid by Smith, Ricardo and other classical bourgeois economists, who before a working class movement arose tried to understand how their capitalist system actually works, spent a lot of time writing books about that, working out just what those laws were. You should check 'em out. It's not the usual opinion to think that Marx worshipped the gods of capitalism, but hey, knock yourself out.

Of course, the "neo-classical" epigones of the Smiths and Ricardos, the Marshalls and Keyneses and whatnot, were ultimately more concerned with defending capitalism against socialist attack than scientific analysis.

And then you get the "monetarists" like Milton Friedman and his ilk, who really do just worship the gods of capitalism, sacrificing mathematical equations on the altars, and who really have no understanding at all of how their system works, as they almost hilariously demonstrated in 2009.

But that doesn't mean that a scientific, lawful understanding of the workings of the economy is impossible, which is what you seem to be implying. And to dub China as "capitalist," you have to throw just about everything Marx ever wrote about capitalism right out the window.

You think South Korea and Taiwan are "state capitalist"? That needs to be explained to all those billionaire industrialists there who tell the state what to do rather than the other way around.

State capitalism has been known to exist, especially in Third World countries that got political independence from a colonial power before a capitalist class really came into existence, like a number of African countries. The extreme example being Burma, where at one point virtually all industry was in the hands of the state. i.e. the Burmese generals, who ran and still run the Burmese state, and got industry handed over to them on a silver platter as soon as it was developed well enough so that it was profitable.

But Taiwan and South Korea? Uh uh. Is there a state sector there? Sure, the CIA insisted on it, the local capitalists after WWII, such as they were, all being Japanese collaborators. But if that's "state capitalism," so is the US post office.

Here's a good analysis of what is actually going on in China economically right now.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1076/china.html

Surely to not dub china as capitalist is throwing everything he wrote about capitalism out of the window? There's generalised commodity production for sale on a market, capital is accumulated out of profits generated on the back of workers who are exploited through the same wage labor system that operates throughout the capitalist world. Yes they have more control over their banks and their industry but so could the UK or the US but they would still be capitalist.

Antiochus

22nd October 2015, 19:03

Rafiq

22nd October 2015, 19:28

Rafiq

22nd October 2015, 19:30

IT's so cute how people try and defend China. Is there that little hope?

Do people have to cling on some big powerful leviathan to have some sense of guarantee that Socialism is alive and well today? China should inspire nothing more than despair for us - unless we're talking about rising worker's militancy there.

Emmett Till

23rd October 2015, 23:26

Emmet what you fail to understand is that since the 1930's there is no such thing anymore as an "invisible hand" - a beautiful term has been used since then to describe modern capitalism, not only in China, Singapore and South Korea, but even in the "free market" United States - scientifically planned capitalism.

That is right - the US is state-capitalist too, I mean, are you aware of how much the state-bureaucratic corporate apparatus exploded, the level of coordination and planning that goes on here? This isn't 1850's Britain. This kind of "capitalism" died a long time ago, which is why we use the term "late capitalism" or "imperialism" to describe the present epoch.

I'll stick with Lenin's monopoly finance capitalism as the best descriptor for how things work nowadays. You had very high levels of state planning during WWI, especially in Germany, which is why Lenin talked about state capitalism as a German model which he actually wanted to imitate to some degree in the inevitable transition period between capitalism and socialism in Russia, given Russia's economic backwardness.

And then even more so during WWII, not least in the USA.

But that just reflects what happens during all-out total war, when capitalist survival means that the state has to come to the fore, disciplining individual capitalists for the "common good."

After WWII (but not after WWI!) statist measures continued for a while, due to the Cold War and the necessity to make concessions to the working class that individual private capitalist corporations would be unlikely to make. But as working class insurgency was brought under control, and especially after the collapse of the USSR ending the Cold War, you had a worldwide tendency to reprivatization, and desultory toying here and there with state planning came to an end.

So the "invisible hand" functions nowadays with virtually no state interference in the capitalist world. For proof, just look at the pathetic failure of efforts of the more intelligent capitalists to do something about global warming to prevent disaster for everyone, capitalists included.

Who holds the levers that control the economy? The states? Don't be silly, it's the banks. Imperialist monopoly capitalism is dominated by finance capitalism as Lenin explained a century ago. And banks are organically incapable of thinking about anything except their profits, they don't even have the limited ability to do some longterm economic planning big corporations have. It's the flow of bank investment seeking maximum revenues that is the realtime physical mechanism of the "invisible hand" nowadays.

All of this occurs under the backdrop of the increased socialization of labor. So how much the state intervenes or takes care of its population is a mater of politics and policy making, not matter of qualifying it as different systemically. Finland has more of an extensive social-services network than the United States because the political pressure to have this here did not old out, while it might have in Finland to an extent. In China, of course, the main difference here is the absence of a formal bourgeois democracy and control by a technocratic elite. This is a tendency that we are seeing more and more in the United states and Europe (as well as Japan) - it's what we're transitioning to at the present moment. All the major political decisions are now made behind closed doors while we all wage "cultural" wars at an open level.

All major political decisions in America are made according to the quest for capitalist profit, and it makes very little difference who is elected and which clique's thinktanks provide the advice the government follows--usually quite out in the open by the way, closed doors are needed only for various forms of dirty work, not basic policy questions.

All political decisions in China are made by the CCP, like all Stalinist parties balancing between foreign imperialists (and in China domestic capitalists) and the workers and peasants in whose name they rule. The tremendous social and industrial progress in China of the last few decades, and the remarkable rise in the popular standard of living recently, could never have happened if China was actually a capitalist state. That kind of social progress is impossible for an underdeveloped country in the era of imperialism.

Emmett Till

23rd October 2015, 23:51

More nonsense. The meaning of State Capitalism was, generally applied, to the "Prussian" state. Was the Prussian economy controlled by the state and not by the "millionaires", off course not. This isn't some prequisite, its just an abstraction you came up with in your head to justify Chinse capitalism, which is astoundingly naive.

Except it doesn't. The invisible hand does not exist. Markets don't simply "self-regulate", which is what the metaphor implies. Markets don't reach "optimum equilibrium" and such. The metaphor is clearly intended to ward off interventionism within the economy, nothing more. The birth of Capitalism was AS State Capitalism. The original 'companies' (V.O.C; British East India Company etc...) were funded and heavily supported by their respective states.

There are numerous empirical examples of why the invisible hand (and all it entails, with pricing and competition) is bullshit. From the internet, to the monopoly of giants like Standard Oil; Walmart etc...

Oh right, lets pretend as if there aren't hundreds of millionaires and billionaires in China that simultaneously hold positions in the state. As a marxist (or whatever it is your pretending to be), you should realize economy holds primacy over politics (i.e they don't exist without the other). You can't have a "state" telling billionaires what to do as IF the billionaires don't control policy anyway.

And China has an income inequality comparable to Colombia, I'd love to hear your mental gymnastics as to why that isn't "Capitalism" and why its some sort of bizarre "Socialism".

On "state capitalism," see my other posting. The concept that markets just "self-regulate" and never lead to crises and depressions and whatnot isn't Adam Smith, it's Jean-Baptiste Say and his epigones, not least latterday epigones like Friedman and the monetarists. At least Keynes and his school realise that is nonsense.

Of course the invisible hand of the market regulates capitalism, but instead of leading to Say's happy equilibria, it leads to the boom-bust cycle, which, because of the law of the falling rate of profit (not original to Marx by the way, though he greatly improved earlier formulations) leads with inevitability to depressions, immiseration, war, etc. etc.

China has a higher level of income inequality than Columbia? Quite possible, according to Trotsky as of 1937 the Soviet Union had a higher level of income inequality than the New Deal USA.

Why is this possible? Simple. Capitalism is about capital, not income, as the word itself should make obvious.

In Stalin's time, unlike contemporary China, all capital was in the hands of society, all capitalists were in exile, dead or in the gulag. Same true in China under Mao.

The extreme income disparities in the USSR under Stalin, which by the way were abolished under Khrushchev, merely reflected the extreme privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy, whose nearest American equivalent would be the extreme privileges of the Teamster bureaucracy under Jimmy Hoffa. The reason for them is that initially almost all Stalinist bureaucrats were former revolutionaries, and this was a giant bribe to get them to be loyal to Stalin. By Khrushchev's time this was no longer necessary.

The socialist society of the future will operate under the rule of "from each according to his ability, to each according to need." In any transitional society in between capitalism and socialism like Cuba or the USSR or People's China that is not possible, some social privileges for engineers, technicians, skilled workers, etc. are inevitable.

But not for political leaders! The true moment when the Soviet Union degenerated bureaucratically, from a purely sociological viewpoint, was when the Leninist rule of the "party maximum," that no party member could draw a salary higher than that of a skilled worker, was abolished. Early '30s formally, but in practice much earlier.

Are there billionaires in the CCP? Yes there are, and the Chinese leadership is currently purging the most corrupt as a sop to public opinion. But no, they don't run the CCP. The CCP can get away with having billionaires in its ranks because of the tremendous progress China has made and the huge increase lately in the popular standard of living, which enables the CCP to make the claim that its policies, billionaires included, are what the workers and peasants need.

Certainly working people in China are better off under its current market-oriented leaders than in the Mao era, which did so much to discredit communism and radicalism in China. At least, no famines now!

Rafiq

24th October 2015, 01:48

I'll stick with Lenin's monopoly finance capitalism as the best descriptor for how things work nowadays. You had very high levels of state planning during WWI, especially in Germany, which is why Lenin talked about state capitalism as a German model which he actually wanted to imitate to some degree in the inevitable transition period between capitalism and socialism in Russia, given Russia's economic backwardness.

Had only Lenin "stuck" with old forms of logic in the midst of new developments of his time, as you do today. It is the epitome of irony - Lenin was a heretic, and you want to play the conservative today in his name? Lenin, had he been alive today, would have recognized that the world changed quite a bit since the first world war.

There was no such thing as globalization during his time. There was no United Nations. There was no world state apparatus. There was no Empire. Do not blasphemize Lenin by "sticking" with him. Lenin would have wanted his followers to regularly and always think critically about new developments, not lazily cling, and subsequently conform existing circumstances to an assessment of ENTIRELY DIFFERENT conditions.

Finally, Lenin might have wanted to "emulate" this model, but the difference was that this was under the backdrop of such a prerogative being taken up by an actual proletarian dictatorship. Did the Paris Commune abolish private property? Did the ten planks of the Communist manifesto call for the immediate abolition of capitalism by decree? No, they didn't. Our argument qualifying China as capitalist, then, should be axiomatic to you, becuase Lenin would not have been so STUPID To think the state had transcended capitalist relations during the NEP. "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is almost fucking cynical.

The question does not boil down to "Wut du we call da China so we know what to tink about it", the question is a political one: Is china a proletarian dictatorship? It is not. End of story.

you had a worldwide tendency to reprivatization, and desultory toying here and there with state planning came to an end.

What you fail to understand is that "scientific capitalism" as some ironically call it is a definite historical stage that the state couldn't just whimsically abandon. You speak of a worldwide tendency to reprivatization. There are many issues with the implications of this notion.

Firstly, as far as the west is concerned, reprivatization was a political act, and what is ironic is that despite the reprivatizations, the increased socialization of labor and the state bureaucracy in every advanced capitalist nation exploded. the level of intervention the state has in the capitalist economy, no matter the country, is today unprecedented in history: The point is to what ends these interventions are made in.

That's why I said it is simply a political matter and a matter of governance. There is no "invisible hand" today - the market is pure superstition. For the record, where it counts, there is just as much an "invisible hand" in the Chinese economy as there is in the United States, the point is that China is unbound by any constitutionalism and is governed by 'experts'.

Finally, regarding "re" privatization, in "developing" countries these measures facilitated capitalist development.

So the "invisible hand" functions nowadays with virtually no state interference in the capitalist world. For proof, just look at the pathetic failure of efforts of the more intelligent capitalists to do something about global warming to prevent disaster for everyone, capitalists included.

That there is no interference on behalf of the common welfare of society sais nothing about the level of state interference as a whole. I challenge you to point to me a period in the history of capitalism wherein the state had a more extensive, pivotal and essential role in the reproduction of capitalist relations as today.

Who holds the levers that control the economy? The states? Don't be silly, it's the banks. Imperialist monopoly capitalism is dominated by finance capitalism as Lenin explained a century ago. And banks are organically incapable of thinking about anything except their profits, they don't even have the limited ability to do some longterm economic planning big corporations have.

The argument insinuates there is an antagonism between "The banks" and the state, while in reality there is a level of coordination between them that is - again, unprecedented in the history of capitalism. You have no idea of what you are talking about. Banks are incapable of long term planning? Have you been hiding under a rock for the past 100 years, or what? Of course, banks do not exist "independently" from the state, the state does not exist "independently" from industrial enterprises, these do not exist "independently" of corporations, and the list goes on.

Your argument really rests on a very juvenile understanding of how these roles are fulfilled. The "state" has no independent interests. It serves to perpetuate the conditions of profit. So what are you trying to say when you mockingly accuse me of claiming "the states" control the levers of the capitalist economy?

All major political decisions in America are made according to the quest for capitalist profit,

Thank you, obnoxiously cliche'd Left platitudes are not necessary here. We all know this. The point is that long term planning, state-corporate bureaucratic planning, is utilized for the sake of capitalist profit.

All political decisions in China are made by the CCP, like all Stalinist parties balancing between foreign imperialists (and in China domestic capitalists) and the workers and peasants in whose name they rule.

I see, so Fascist Italy is not a capitalist state either, interesting. I wonder where else we here prattling of "balancing" interests between different classes.

But nevermind this. The state cannot exist as an independent entity. You cannot "balance" interests between different classes. Whatever "antagonism" exists between the Chinese bourgeoisie and the Chinese state (and for the record, there is none - as far as the real oligarchic capitalist class is concerned) is no more an antagonism than that which existed between the Nazi state and the German bourgeoisie, who were constantly threatened with nationalizations if they did not comply. Approaching capitalism so cynically is painfully stupid - it literally hurts.

People, for example, do not want "profit" because they cynically want to live large and lavishly. All of these things are rituals, which reproduce the conditions of life and production. Production exists for its own sake - so it doesn't matter, even if the Chinese state regularly executed members of the bourgeoisie, it would still be a bourgeois state and a bourgeois dictatorship, because it serves Chinese capital - which may come at odds with the stupidity or short-shortsightedness of individual capitalists.

I already went over this in previous threads.

The tremendous social and industrial progress in China of the last few decades, and the remarkable rise in the popular standard of living recently, could never have happened if China was actually a capitalist state. That kind of social progress is impossible for an underdeveloped country in the era of imperialism.

So explain to me South Korea, Singapore, India, Brazil, Thailand, Chile, Malaysia and I can go on.

"Oh, but there's still so much poverty, destitution and misery in those countries" he'll say.

China might have a word with you.

Rafiq

24th October 2015, 01:55

Are there billionaires in the CCP? Yes there are, and the Chinese leadership is currently purging the most corrupt as a sop to public opinion. But no, they don't run the CCP. The CCP can get away with having billionaires in its ranks because of the tremendous progress China has made and the huge increase lately in the popular standard of living, which enables the CCP to make the claim that its policies, billionaires included, are what the workers and peasants need.

This garbage is so depressing. Oh my god - "forgiven" he sais, the self-proclaimed Marxist.

Marxists do not use scientific terms as cannon-fodder for 9 year old moral judgements. That the Chinese leadership is scared of its public, which constitutes a large and growing, very militant working class, supplemented by an enraged precariat not even living on the breadcrumbs of this "progress" in the countryside is to mean what to us?

Shame on you for defending the Chinese state. Shame on you. The bourgeois revolution is over in China. There is no feudal reaction. So you defend the Chinese state against the possibility of a political Chinese proletariat and NOTHING MORE.

Emmett Till

24th October 2015, 02:40

This garbage is so depressing. Oh my god - "forgiven" he sais, the self-proclaimed Marxist.

Marxists do not use scientific terms as cannon-fodder for 9 year old moral judgements. That the Chinese leadership is scared of its public, which constitutes a large and growing, very militant working class, supplemented by an enraged precariat not even living on the breadcrumbs of this "progress" in the countryside is to mean what to us?

Shame on you for defending the Chinese state. Shame on you. The bourgeois revolution is over in China. There is no feudal reaction. So you defend the Chinese state against the possibility of a political Chinese proletariat and NOTHING MORE.

Eh? There never was any feudalism in China, the old Chinese mode of production was nearly as far from feudalism as it was from capitalism. As for a bourgeois revolution, China never had one, unless you consider 1911 such, I suppose it's fair to describe Sun Yat-sen as a bourgeois revolutionary.

So Rafiq, the Chinese state you erroneously claim I am "defending" came into being in 1949. Just what do you think Mao and his state represented? The bourgeoisie? Feudalism? Aliens from outer space?

BTW, I did not use the word "forgive" or "forgiven" in any of my postings, so what were you trying to quote?

The "precariat" is not treated well by the bureaucracy, but they are certainly better off than their parents, peasants up to their knees in pigshit and the "idiocy of rural life," working seven days a week dawn to dusk for sheer survival, and whose own parents may have narrowly escaped starvation as a result of Mao's insane irresponsible "Great Leap Forward."

Rafiq

24th October 2015, 03:10

Eh? There never was any feudalism in China, the old Chinese mode of production was nearly as far from feudalism as it was from capitalism. As for a bourgeois revolution, China never had one, unless you consider 1911 such, I suppose it's fair to describe Sun Yat-sen as a bourgeois revolutionary.

The old Chinese mode of production was qualified as feudal insofar as it was dealt with as feudal. A mode of production can be qualified by its negation. That is another story, however.

Replace 'feudal' with old, traditional bonds, and the point would remain. China did indeed have a bourgeois revolution, and this revolution was the destruction of these old traditional bonds. A bourgeois revolution does not have to be led by an actual bourgeoisie, as understood by Marxists including your Trotsky. The social transformations in China had the same character as any bourgeois revolution, this can be understood not only as far as assessing the nature of them goes on a material level, but their representation at the level of art, music and rhetoric.

In addition, following the reforms, the transition to a "market economy" was rather seamless, even on a cultural level this held true.

The "precariat" is not treated well by the bureaucracy, but they are certainly better off than their parents, peasants up to their knees in pigshit and the "idiocy of rural life," working seven days a week dawn to dusk for sheer survival, and whose own parents may have narrowly escaped starvation as a result of Mao's insane irresponsible "Great Leap Forward."

Your argument is a worthless one. Do we seek to go back to the pre-Dengist era? No, that is not possible - there are social forces present today in China, like the proletariat and precariat, which were not even around during the Mao era. Mobilizing them to march backward would be a futile task. Socialists in France weren't seeking a return to 1789 in the 19th century either. So what is your point that living standards have increased (and for many people, just barely if any increase at all?)? What political point are we supposed to get from it? That we owe the CCP for something?

In fact, you prattle of the Great leap forward, but such measures were absolutely necessary for the destruction of old bonds which impeded capitalist development. And no, it is laughable to think most Chinese people "narrowly escaped" starvation during the Great leap forward. During the GLP there were 600 Chinese citizens. During the GLF the death rate was around 23/1000 people, the same as in Indonesia, India among several other countries at the time. The only reason it's worth a shit about mentioning for most is because it was "man made", and historians will directly admit this. It's their superstitious sensitivities which lead people to talk about "Mao's insanity" while dis-acknowledging the gains made by the Chinese state in the early 50's.

The idea that the Chinese state, as it exists today, the idea that Deng's reforms could have been made as early as 56, nay, as early as the late 60's, is laughably stupid. For those reforms to have been implemented, a level of social and cultural development was necessary - these were brought about by both GL forwards and the cultural revolution.

Emmett Till

24th October 2015, 03:34

Had only Lenin "stuck" with old forms of logic in the midst of new developments of his time, as you do today. It is the epitome of irony - Lenin was a heretic, and you want to play the conservative today in his name? Lenin, had he been alive today, would have recognized that the world changed quite a bit since the first world war.

There was no such thing as globalization during his time. There was no United Nations. There was no world state apparatus. There was no Empire. Do not blasphemize Lenin by "sticking" with him. Lenin would have wanted his followers to regularly and always think critically about new developments, not lazily cling, and subsequently conform existing circumstances to an assessment of ENTIRELY DIFFERENT conditions.

Has the world changed since 1917? Yes, lots of changes, and most of them relate in one way or another to what Lenin was up to in 1917. The rise and fall of the Soviet Union *was,* essentially, the history of the 20th century.

"Globalization"? Pre-WWI, Britannia ruled the waves and there was at least as much "globalization" as nowadays. After WWI, you had a period of capitalist autarchy, partially ended by WWII and totally ended with the collapse of the USSR, which gave US imperialism a level of world dominance equal or superior to what England had prior to WWI.

Finally, Lenin might have wanted to "emulate" this model, but the difference was that this was under the backdrop of such a prerogative being taken up by an actual proletarian dictatorship. Did the Paris Commune abolish private property? Did the ten planks of the Communist manifesto call for the immediate abolition of capitalism by decree? No, they didn't. Our argument qualifying China as capitalist, then, should be axiomatic to you, becuase Lenin would not have been so STUPID To think the state had transcended capitalist relations during the NEP. "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is almost fucking cynical.

And so was kindly ol' uncle Joe's concept of "socialism in one country," which Marx and Lenin would have seen as absurd.

Not sure what you're trying to say here. I don't think you're claiming that revolutionary Russia was capitalist, but that's about the only way I can read the above.

The question does not boil down to "Wut du we call da China so we know what to tink about it", the question is a political one: Is china a proletarian dictatorship? It is not. End of story.

Was the USSR a proletarian dictatorship? In sociological terms yes, the Soviet state objectively furthered the social interests of the working class, despite all its bureaucratic deformations and crimes. In purely political terms, it was hardly the rank and file workers in charge, it was the bureaucrats.

Same is true for China, if anything Deng and his successors have done a better job at furthering the social strength and living standards of the Chinese working class than Mao ever did. The Chinese working class is now the most powerful and perhaps the most militant proletariat on planet earth. And the Chinese bureaucrats do indeed live in fear of their power.

What you fail to understand is that "scientific capitalism" as some ironically call it is a definite historical stage that the state couldn't just whimsically abandon. You speak of a worldwide tendency to reprivatization. There are many issues with the implications of this notion.

Firstly, as far as the west is concerned, reprivatization was a political act, and what is ironic is that despite the reprivatizations, the increased socialization of labor and the state bureaucracy in every advanced capitalist nation exploded. the level of intervention the state has in the capitalist economy, no matter the country, is today unprecedented in history: The point is to what ends these interventions are made in.

That's why I said it is simply a political matter and a matter of governance. There is no "invisible hand" today - the market is pure superstition. For the record, where it counts, there is just as much an "invisible hand" in the Chinese economy as there is in the United States, the point is that China is unbound by any constitutionalism and is governed by 'experts'.

So according to you we have a whole new state of capitalism, "globalization" and "scientific capitalism." Pseudo-Marxists like to invent new stages of capitalism from time to time to justify one form or another of opportunism. When I was a kid it was "neo-capitalism," all the rage in the '60s and '70s, and now nobody even remembers it.

Finally, regarding "re" privatization, in "developing" countries these measures facilitated capitalist development.

That there is no interference on behalf of the common welfare of society sais nothing about the level of state interference as a whole. I challenge you to point to me a period in the history of capitalism wherein the state had a more extensive, pivotal and essential role in the reproduction of capitalist relations as today.

As Lenin predicted in that pamphlet which now you think is old hat and outmoded. And there is absolutely no antagonism between the banks and the state, because the state always does the bidding of the banks. As Lenin also explained.

If 2009 did not prove that, what has gone down in Europe lately certainly should have.

The argument insinuates there is an antagonism between "The banks" and the state, while in reality there is a level of coordination between them that is - again, unprecedented in the history of capitalism. You have no idea of what you are talking about. Banks are incapable of long term planning? Have you been hiding under a rock for the past 100 years, or what? Of course, banks do not exist "independently" from the state, the state does not exist "independently" from industrial enterprises, these do not exist "independently" of corporations, and the list goes on.

Your argument really rests on a very juvenile understanding of how these roles are fulfilled. The "state" has no independent interests. It serves to perpetuate the conditions of profit. So what are you trying to say when you mockingly accuse me of claiming "the states" control the levers of the capitalist economy?

Thank you, obnoxiously cliche'd Left platitudes are not necessary here. We all know this. The point is that long term planning, state-corporate bureaucratic planning, is utilized for the sake of capitalist profit.

I see, so Fascist Italy is not a capitalist state either, interesting. I wonder where else we here prattling of "balancing" interests between different classes.

But nevermind this. The state cannot exist as an independent entity. You cannot "balance" interests between different classes. Whatever "antagonism" exists between the Chinese bourgeoisie and the Chinese state (and for the record, there is none - as far as the real oligarchic capitalist class is concerned) is no more an antagonism than that which existed between the Nazi state and the German bourgeoisie, who were constantly threatened with nationalizations if they did not comply. Approaching capitalism so cynically is painfully stupid - it literally hurts.

The idea of a state balancing between different classes is Marx's idea, it's what he called "Bonapartism." Are you unfamiliar with it? You need to do more reading and less Internet scribbling.

Of course, he did *not* believe that the state could be independent of social classes, it is always based on class rule. Thus both the original Napoleon and his nephew Louie, as "emperors," ruled ultimately on behalf of the French bourgeoisie, suppressing individual bourgeois, throwing them in jail and even killing them at pleasure, but maintaining their personal rule by balancing among the capitalists, the workers and especially the peasantry, their biggest supporters.

Actually all military dictatorships are Bonapartist, as the rule of the sword cannot maintain itself without support in society.

So, whereas a Napoleon was a bourgeois Bonapartist, defending the social interests of of the bourgeoisie but depriving the bourgeoisie of any political power, Stalin and Khrushchev and Mao and now Mao's epigones are Bonapartists ultimately resting on the support or at least the tolerance of the Chinese working class and peasantry.

And just as Napoleon or modern day equivalents, Peron, Chavez in Venezuela, maneuver with the lower classes in their country to maintain their power, Stalinist bureaucrats always maneuver with foreign imperialism, that's what "socialism in one country" is really all about, and in the case of Bukharin in the USSR or the "Dengists" nowadays, with domestic capitalist classes as well.

People, for example, do not want "profit" because they cynically want to live large and lavishly. All of these things are rituals, which reproduce the conditions of life and production. Production exists for its own sake - so it doesn't matter, even if the Chinese state regularly executed members of the bourgeoisie, it would still be a bourgeois state and a bourgeois dictatorship, because it serves Chinese capital - which may come at odds with the stupidity or short-shortsightedness of individual capitalists.

I already went over this in previous threads.

Production for its own sake? Profit as a ritual? This is oldstyle New Left silliness, far from Marxism.

There is a very distinct capitalist class in China, and the Chinese bureaucracy favors it, for the same reason that Bukharin's advice to the kulaks was "get rich." But it does not dominate China either economically or politically. To you, "Chinese capital" is an etherial abstraction, not the very real Chinese capitalist class, which is more and more discontented with the continued rule of the CCP. And of course let us not forget the capitalists of Hong Kong and Taiwan, exploiting Chinese workers with the permission of the CCP.

So explain to me South Korea, Singapore, India, Brazil, Thailand, Chile, Malaysia and I can go on.

"Oh, but there's still so much poverty, destitution and misery in those countries" he'll say.

China might have a word with you.

Brazil unlike China is in ever mounting economic crisis, its brief period of social progress is over.

South Korea, and one can add Taiwan, owe their relative prosperity to generations of US subsidy as barriers against "Red China." I have little knowledge of Thailand, but I do know that during the Vietnam War, Thailand was practically one big American air base. Presumably Thailand was getting big subsidies too.

Had there been no revolutions in China and Vietnam, Korea and Thailand would still slumber in extreme colonial poverty.

Singapore isn't a country, it's a city-state conveniently located right on the most important world trade routes. Its prosperity is unsurprising.

India? What a joke. The level of childhood malnutrition in India exceeds that of most countries in Africa. The living standard of the Indian workers and peasants is far, far below the Chinese level, whereas before the Chinese Revolution it was higher.

Essentially, India has benefitted from the outsourcing of large parts of the American service sector, now that technology has made that possible. As India was a British colony and students learn English in college, computer companies and so forth can use Indian college graduates to try to answer service calls, at miserably low wages by American standards, but quite high by Indian. A rather precarious basis for economic development.

Well, I admit I know absolutely nothing about Malaysia.

Emmett Till

24th October 2015, 03:42

The old Chinese mode of production was qualified as feudal insofar as it was dealt with as feudal. A mode of production can be qualified by its negation. That is another story, however.

Replace 'feudal' with old, traditional bonds, and the point would remain. China did indeed have a bourgeois revolution, and this revolution was the destruction of these old traditional bonds. A bourgeois revolution does not have to be led by an actual bourgeoisie, as understood by Marxists including your Trotsky. The social transformations in China had the same character as any bourgeois revolution, this can be understood not only as far as assessing the nature of them goes on a material level, but their representation at the level of art, music and rhetoric.

In addition, following the reforms, the transition to a "market economy" was rather seamless, even on a cultural level this held true.

Your argument is a worthless one. Do we seek to go back to the pre-Dengist era? No, that is not possible - there are social forces present today in China, like the proletariat and precariat, which were not even around during the Mao era. Mobilizing them to march backward would be a futile task. Socialists in France weren't seeking a return to 1789 in the 19th century either. So what is your point that living standards have increased (and for many people, just barely if any increase at all?)? What political point are we supposed to get from it? That we owe the CCP for something?

In fact, you prattle of the Great leap forward, but such measures were absolutely necessary for the destruction of old bonds which impeded capitalist development. And no, it is laughable to think most Chinese people "narrowly escaped" starvation during the Great leap forward. During the GLP there were 600 Chinese citizens. During the GLF the death rate was around 23/1000 people, the same as in Indonesia, India among several other countries at the time. The only reason it's worth a shit about mentioning for most is because it was "man made", and historians will directly admit this. It's their superstitious sensitivities which lead people to talk about "Mao's insanity" while dis-acknowledging the gains made by the Chinese state in the early 50's.

The idea that the Chinese state, as it exists today, the idea that Deng's reforms could have been made as early as 56, nay, as early as the late 60's, is laughably stupid. For those reforms to have been implemented, a level of social and cultural development was necessary - these were brought about by both GL forwards and the cultural revolution.

So then, you think that the 1949 Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and Mao was a bourgeois revolutionary.

Somebody should have explained that to the Chinese bourgeoisie, then they would not have had to flee to Taiwan.

Rafiq

24th October 2015, 05:55

Has the world changed since 1917? Yes, lots of changes, and most of them relate in one way or another to what Lenin was up to in 1917. The rise and fall of the Soviet Union *was,* essentially, the history of the 20th century.

Only insofar as they also relate to numerous other changes - what is your point? That one thing leads to antoher is supposed to mean what? For example, is it not possible to make the case that the 20th century is reducible to the first world war and its effects, the rise of American hegemony, and so on?

What we Marxists, true to Hegel's tradition, recognize is that this is not a scientific means by which the essence of historical development is located - not even in terms of absolute idealism. Rather history is understood, world history that is, at the level of social antagonism and most importantly at the level of production - not simply the production of commodities, but the production of everything that separates us from animals (which, in our postmodern consumerist society, "Marxists" often forget). The world has changed, but what you fail to understand most importantly is that these changes require acknowledgement that we are in a different period of capitalism. It is not that Lenin was "wrong", the point is that Marxists are not in the business of making over-reaching historical predictions that are outside the scope of events as they present themselves. So Lenin was correct, but Lenin made no pretenses to being some trans-historical seer - there are multiple different trajectory paths that are possible for history, history can only be read backwards in that sense. Especially when it comes to Communists, wherein (given, of course, material considerations unique to capitalist society) it all boils down to will and appropriating one's own historic destiny.

"Globalization"? Pre-WWI, Britannia ruled the waves and there was at least as much "globalization" as nowadays. After WWI, you had a period of capitalist autarchy, partially ended by WWII and totally ended with the collapse of the USSR, which gave US imperialism a level of world dominance equal or superior to what England had prior to WWI.

Time and time again we are told that globalization is "nothing new". It is only "nothing new" if we locate its essential basis of existence in opportunistic abstractions. To extend this logic even further, nothing at all is new under the sun, and there is no qualitative difference between capitalism and any other previous historic epoch. Globalization IS most certainly a new phenomena, because when "Britannia ruled the waves", control of world markets was at the level of direct political dominance, this was not globalization, it was Britanniaization. Today, the international bourgeoisie transcends national loyalties, aligns itself at the level of political blocs (which are LED BY, not necessarily 'directly dominated' by the United States or Russia), based on their own condition of existence.

Not sure what you're trying to say here. I don't think you're claiming that revolutionary Russia was capitalist, but that's about the only way I can read the above.

The proletarian dictatorship does not immediately abolish capitalism. My point was precisely that the NEP, which was by the way enacted precisely synonymously with the acknowledgment that the proletarian dictatorship could not survive (taking into account the decimation of the actual proletariat) - is historically incomparable with Deng's reforms. The NEP did not solve the problem of pre-capitalist social bonds that pervaded the countryside, it was meant as a temporal measure to actually establish actual social basis in society that was susceptible to large scale state planning. Following the civil war Russia experienced almost a level of total societal collapse. We Marxists have a term - the increased socialization of labor. What happened in the Russia was the increased particularization of labor, i.e. labor that served purely egoistic activity that was worthless at the level of society and large scale production. War Communism was not synonymous with Stalin's collectivization or the new economic organization brought forth during the Mao era with its agricultural communes - it was purely raw, direct and bare expropriation of peasant grain to feed the cities.

Only at the level of opportunistically playing with abstractions can Deng's reforms be comparable to the NEP. It's even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that China never even experienced a proletarian revolution or a proletarian dictatorship to begin with, THE social basis of the Chinese revolution, learning from Russian experiences, was the rural petty bourgeoisie, who were proletarianized (or at least prepared for proletarianization) by the CCP in a matter that was not nearly as politically catastrophic as Stalin's collectivization. In fact it is precisely because the Chinese were not burdened with the structural legacy of a proletarian revolution that capitalist development was so "easy" in China as opposed to Russia, which is still plagued with deformities. At the onset of Deng's reforms, the "transition" to capitalism was literally seamless - the proletarianization of the general masses of people was seamless. That is because all of the actual 'dirty' work occurred decades before with old traditional bonds being destroyed by the romantic bourgeois revolution.

Was the USSR a proletarian dictatorship? In sociological terms yes, the Soviet state objectively furthered the social interests of the working class, despite all its bureaucratic deformations and crimes. In purely political terms, it was hardly the rank and file workers in charge, it was the bureaucrats.

My god. What was the "working class" in the Soviet Union? There was no proletariat in the Soviet Union, if there was a Soviet proletariat, so too was there a Soviet bourgeoisie - and there was not, as you probably acknowledge. Bordiga poetically described the bourgeoisie existing in the "crevices" of production, and this is true - there is no bourgeoisie in the crevices of production struggling to actualize itself in a proletarian dictatorship.

In "sociological terms", he says. What does that even mean? No, entertain me, what does that even mean? By what methods of sociological analysis do you come to the conclusion that the USSR was a "proletarian dictatorship"? And to provoke you, there are plenty of capitalist states which "furthered the social interests" of the general masses, and the working class. Marxists do not qualify things so vaguely and unscientifically, however - the "social interests" of the working class are real, direct, immediate cosnciosu aspirations - which is the whole point of class-cosncsiouesns.

To speak about some kind of objective criteria of a "standard of living" rests upon the assumption that there is a human nature with fixed, trans-historic aims. That is unfathomably stupid. Of course, let's play with dialectics here - if the state wanted to implement measures which would give the Chinese proletariat the same living standards it experienced in the 1960's, then we would whole heartedly oppose this measure, and so would the Chinese proletariat. That does not mean they owe the state anything for the increase in the standard of living that occurred at this time, it simply means that China, which prostituted its working classes to international capital, experienced a level of social, technological development that would have otherwise been impossible at its previous state of development. In the process of doing this, it had a new relation to a new world totality. So the implications of reverting to the standard of living in the 1960's, and the actual standard of living IN the 1960's, ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT and have ENTIRELY DIFFERENT connotations at the level of struggle. This is basic dialectics.

The proletariat always experiences somewhat of a rise in its standard of living compared to old feudal bonds - you see this, for example, in Iran. Did the Iranian state "objectively further the interests of the Iranian working class" and furthermore, does this qualify it as, "in sociological terms" a proletarian dictatorship? I mean what you say is surprising even for a Trotskyist. Really? A state is a proletarian dictatorship insofar as it "furthers the social interests of the working class", which are defined by what exactly, in scientific terms? The reality is that the Soviet Union, like China during the Mao era, cannot be qualified self-sufficiently. Historically, it can only be qualified in relation to what it was becoming, and what it was transitioning to, which is why the term I have used in the past is a prolonged Jacobin phrase of development.

The Soviet Union's existence was always precarious, and the only thing that kept it moving forward was its historical tendency to move closer and closer to political collapse.

Same is true for China, if anything Deng and his successors have done a better job at furthering the social strength and living standards of the Chinese working class than Mao ever did. The Chinese working class is now the most powerful and perhaps the most militant proletariat on planet earth. And the Chinese bureaucrats do indeed live in fear of their power.

Deng's reforms would not have been possible without Mao's romantic bourgeois revolution, this is what you fail to understand. The old social bonds that existed in China could have NEVER followed a "natural" course of development. Even if we take Tawain as an example, the only reason the land reform was made possible was because the landowners were largely Japanese settlers, and the same went for South Korea. This wasn't true for China, which had its own distinct traditional social bonds that were nationally self-sufficient. It took something as aggrandous and - 'dramatic' as the cultural revolution or Great leap forward to uproot these.

Finally, a proletarian dictatorship acts in a self-conscious manner. Deng's reforms were not implemented, and the Chinese state does not exist today to serve the Chinese proletariat - if it did, then it would always side with them as far as labor disputes are concerned, which it does not. Are you literally arguing that the Chinese state is a proletarian dictatorship? How? Because there has been an increase in the standard of living? Do I even need to fucking explain how this is not an actual qualification for what constitutes a proletarian dictatorship? I have a headache just from taking this seriously - really? Are you trolling?

So according to you we have a whole new state of capitalism, "globalization" and "scientific capitalism." Pseudo-Marxists like to invent new stages of capitalism from time to time to justify one form or another of opportunism. When I was a kid it was "neo-capitalism," all the rage in the '60s and '70s, and now nobody even remembers it.

I keep getting this "so according to you". O.K., that you are unfamiliar with actual Marxism as it developed in the past decades is not my problem. You don't approach such ideas critically, instead, you dismiss them because they sound "strange".

This is pure philistinism, plain and simple. The notion that capitalism did not undergo an irrevocable change after new deal in the United States is literally just ignorance. The level of socialization that has occured since then is unprecedented in the history of capitalism. Typing on this computer alone is testament to the fact, and I don't - no, I really don't have to go into the various examples. Someone with a RUDIMENTARY understanding of history, even non-Marxists, should know what I'm talking about - we're talking about the foundations of modern state institutions themselves, social services, and so on. If you don't know what I'm talking about, your head is literally in your ass.

Yes, globalization is just an opportunistic term invented by Marxists to justify their opportunism. Nevermind the fact that globalization exists objectively, its social, cultural and political effects are felt at a level so pervasive that it is not even possible to debate about whether globalization is qualitatively new or not - it simply is. And scientific capitalism is a term used ironically - capitalism can never be managed scientifically, but mind you - it can be managed. Ultimately the stupidity of your argument is to constnatly point to how "Well, da banks n da capitalists r still in power", but you fail to understand that the very nature of the capitalists has changed in coincidence with the rise of monopolies, increased socialization/centralization of production, and so on. Without the level of coordination and planning they have with the state now, they could not even exist - literally their existence would not even be sustainable.

As Lenin predicted in that pamphlet which now you think is old hat and outmoded. And there is absolutely no antagonism between the banks and the state, because the state always does the bidding of the banks. As Lenin also explained.

K cool, so let's stop saying that "The state serves profit" when there is no reason to say it - it is a tacitly accepted truism by anyone who is not an idiot. I have never insinuated otherwise, and that's the end of story. My point is that - that the state serves profit DOES NOT MEAN THERE EXISTS AN "INVISIBLE HAND", THE POINT IS THAT THE STATE SERVES CAPITAL AT THE EXPENSE OF THE COMMON WELFARE OF SOCIETY. Thge extent to which the state provides for its citizens, or its workers, is a matter of POLITICS and POLICY MAKING, NOT qualitative differences in its being. So no, Finland does not have a bigger state than the US, in fact, the US, the biggest "free market" economy in the world, has probably the largest, most powerful and most extensive state on the planet - and that is being said directly with regard to China.

The idea of a state balancing between different classes is Marx's idea, it's what he called "Bonapartism." Are you unfamiliar with it? You need to do more reading and less Internet scribbling.

In fact Marx never used this term. It's so irnoic that you accuse me of not "reading" while literally talking out of your ass and making baseless inferences.

The fact of the matter is that what Marx described in the 18th brumaire was an abandonment of the logic of direct class representation. You conveniently ignore this point when you speak of the Chinese bourgeoisie who fled to Tawain, but we'll get to that later. You claim that my notion of capital is an "etherial abstraction", but it is precisely Marx who conceives class in this manner in the 18th brumaire. For example, when Marx speaks of the petite bourgeoisie here:

Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.

So this is the point - the Chinese bourgeoisie as INDIVIDUALS may not directly dominate the Chinese state, but the Chinese state, and its functionaries do not get beyond in their minds what the Chinese bourgeoisie do not get beyond in life. Class ALWAYS works like this, save for the proletariat. No propertied class is capable of class-consciousness, the ruling classes ALWAYS express their class interests in terms of transcendent, extra-class interests. Even in caste societies wherein everyone knew their "class", these formations were understood in terms of natural balance, divine will, and whatever you want. The state, as you acknowledge later, might "balance out class interests", but it can only do this insofar as it is a bourgeois state.

Your logic is opportunistic and plainly idiotic when you say:

So, whereas a Napoleon was a bourgeois Bonapartist, defending the social interests of of the bourgeoisie but depriving the bourgeoisie of any political power, Stalin and Khrushchev and Mao and now Mao's epigones are Bonapartists ultimately resting on the support or at least the tolerance of the Chinese working class and peasantry.

To insinuate that these were proletarian dictatorships. That they rested on the support or tolerance of the workers and peasants (and it is the latter which were the substantial basis of every one of those societies) is just as significant as the fact that the Jacobins relied on the support of the Sans Culottes to retain their power. This did not qualify their social-historical character as of the small artisianal petty bourgeoisie.

Stalinist bureaucrats always maneuver with foreign imperialism, that's what "socialism in one country" is really all about, and in the case of Bukharin in the USSR or the "Dengists" nowadays, with domestic capitalist classes as well.

The NEP lasted less than a decade, existed in entirely different circumstances (once we start actually taking into consideration distinct material realities rather than abstractions about "well dey had to develop") calling the NEP proto-Dengism is actually just stupid. You prattle of opportunism but it is only cynical "Marxist" opportunists like Tito, and Deng, who have whimsically bastardized it with such silly comparisons.

The CCP is no more bonapartist than the South Korean, Tawainese and Singaporean state.

Production for its own sake? Profit as a ritual? This is oldstyle New Left silliness, far from Marxism.

"Far from Marxism" you say? My fucking god. It's this level of confidence which fascinates me - where do these leftists get it from? Talking out of their ass like this...

Rather than being "far from Marxism", the notion of production existing for its own sake has been pervasive in Marxism since Marx himself, and if not then, since the time of the Young Hegelians and arguably even Hegel. Production does exist for its own sake, because production constitutes a definite form of human existence and human life. So when we say production exists for its own sake, we only mean this insofar as life itself only exists for its own sake, there is no ulterior 'purpose' for an organism. There is likewise no ulterior purpose or reason for the existence of a mode of production.

Money is not the supreme good because it maximizes resources (or any other stupid ecological notions, which Trotskyists are dangerously flirtatious with) or allows people to do as they please, it is the supreme good because it signifies ritualistic obedience to the prevailing conditions of production, it is the means by which humans express their degree of worth IN RELATION to it. You can say "production exists to satisfy human need", but there is no trans-historic "human need". It did not take humans 150,000 years to discover what they really, essentially wanted all along deep down. Instead human need is relative to the society which defines the conditions of human life. Would you mind telling me what profit is, if it is not a ritual? Are you a cynic, then? WHAT IS PROFIT, EMMETT? Do you ACTUALLY fucking think capitalists seek profit for egostic or personal reasons? What the FUCK does a billionaire need all of this money for? Will he spend even a fraction of it? Furthermore, do most profits go into the pockets of CEO's? No, they are re-invested back into their companies or enterprises. If such stupid, cynical notions of profit were true, then every bumfuck idiot would just retire upon getting rich. But that's never what happens. So yes, profit is not only a ritual, it is a theological category, and numerous, numerous Marxists have written about this - any IDIOT with common sense can see that capitalists are willing to sacrifice their immediate egoism, even their lives, for the sake of capital and profit. When capitalists say "I'm not doing this for the money, I'm doing it for the game" or whatever, they are being honest. Capitalism defines one's conditions of life. This is what it means to be a human in capitalism. There's nothing more to it.

I can't believe I have to explain all of this to a self-proclaimed Marxist. This is how deeply pervasive philistinism is among "Marxists" today - this barren wasteland, this intellectual balckhole of a society we live in. Like what else does production exist for? "Human nature"? Do you even understand Marx's method of analysis of capitalism? it is always a processional, organicist interpretation - Marx understands capitalism as a PROCESS which REPRODUCES itself, which is why to speak of some kind of "definite" ends as far as profit goes is so hilariously stupid, profit has no ends, not retirement, not "getting rich", not "maximizing resources" and what have you- many idiots who don't get this have found "fatal" flaws like the transformation problem myth. What is disgusting is the fact that the TSSI model that is used to counter it IS NOT EVEN A NEW ONE. IT WAS A TACIT AXIOM FOR MARX, it just goes to show how disgustingly lazy some "Marxists" are - we Marxists are always forced to re-vitalize and re-introduce into this thresher of a world the power of Marxism.

Please fucking kill me though. Actually do it. "Old style" silliness he sais, the self-proclaimed "Orthodox Trotskyist".

There is a very distinct capitalist class in China, and the Chinese bureaucracy favors it, for the same reason that Bukharin's advice to the kulaks was "get rich." But it does not dominate China either economically or politically.

The Kulaks were never capable of revolutionizing agricultural relations. The allowances given to them by the Soviet state, which lasted less than a decade before they were annihalated as a class, are incomparable to the relationship between the CCP and the capitalist class, which many capitalists belong to themselves. The CCP itself does not retain a transcendental, independent identity - it is a capitalist institution which is shamelessly and directly utilized as a means of fomenting business connections, and so on.

Is the Chinese bourgeoisie revolutionizing agricultural relations? Is the Chinese bourgeoisie destroying the remnants of feudalism? The Chinese proletariat already exists, and asf ar as the excluded and aggrandous Chinese precariat goes, there is no sign of them becoming a part of the industrial proletariat at all - they are simply left out. It's so hilarious that you talk of the "independent" achievements of the Chinese state, and yet China owes everything it does to globalization and at the outskirts of this blessing is the worst misery and destitution. Do you even know why things like the Chengguan came into existence?

To you, "Chinese capital" is an etherial abstraction, not the very real Chinese capitalist class, which is more and more discontented with the continued rule of the CCP

Don't ignore me here: What about the bourgeoisie of Fascist Germany and Italy? They HARDLY dominated the state. I guess when Trotskyists run into a dilemna they just throw around "bonapartism" like it doesn't mean shit.

The very real Chinese class is largely loyal to the CCP and plays the game right. That certain sections are discontented iwth its 'continued rule' sais nothing about the Chinese capitlaists as a whole, who are irrevocably a part of the political, financial, and business networks overseen by the CCP. Most capitliasts undersatnd there is no new China without Communist party, that some short-sighted and egoistic capitalists are disgruntled by the actions of the Chiense state in its long term prerogatives only means that the Chinese state is better at taking care of its bourgeois than individual capitalists themselves are. When has the Chinese state acted IN SPITE of the bourgeoisie as a whole, at the level of long term interests? Ask yourself that question.

Brazil unlike China is in ever mounting economic crisis, its brief period of social progress is over.

And China is forever after immune from crisis? There is no reason to think this. You claim the period of "social progress" is over.

South Korea, and one can add Taiwan, owe their relative prosperity to generations of US subsidy as barriers against "Red China."

And China owes its prosperity to pulling "progress" out of its ass. Never mind globalization, shifting of manufacturing enterprises and labor, never mind a thousand other considerations. It was cuz China was da socialism and da socialism is good unlike da bad capitalsim. Such is the power of Marxism: "Capitalism is da bad", thus began and ended Kapital, which was actually just a piece of paper with one sentence on it.

Had there been no revolutions in China and Vietnam, Korea and Thailand would still slumber in extreme colonial poverty.

That is impossible to infer. That is because those revolutions weren't historically external phenomena - they were integral in shaping the neoliberal, globalized world that would emerge afterwards in the late 70's and 80's. The anti-colonial revolutions were arguably inevitabilities from this point of reference, they were necessary in shaping the world as it would become. Beyond that NOHTING can be said.

As far as we're concerned here, no, direct colonialism is not beneficial for global capitalism today, and given the opportunity advanced capitalist states would not "colonize" any country as it was before. This is what makes globalization distinct, the rise of emerging independent national bourgeoisies.

Singapore isn't a country, it's a city-state conveniently located right on the most important world trade routes. Its prosperity is unsurprising.

It's a proletarian dictatorship then? If you're insinuated that China does not owe its propsierty to any external conveniences outside of its control, you are plainly fucking wrong.

India? What a joke. The level of childhood malnutrition in India exceeds that of most countries in Africa. The living standard of the Indian workers and peasants is far, far below the Chinese level, whereas before the Chinese Revolution it was higher.

Yet there has been a relative increase in the standard of living for many workers, undoubtedly "in their interests". So India too is a proletarian dictatorship. Mind you, what is the point of mentioning the specifialities of each country's development? What are you trying to say? That "Dey owe dere success to da capitalsim while China owes it to da socailism". HOW? The minute we extend such an analysis to China your whole argument falls apart.

Somebody should have explained that to the Chinese bourgeoisie, then they would not have had to flee to Taiwan.

Someone should have told the non-bourgeois leader Chiang Kai-Shek, whose nationalist armies expropriated and fell into disfavor quite often with the individual Chinese capitalists in the 30's. Of course, this bourgeoisie was incapable of leading the necessary social changes that would make NATIONAL capitalist development in China actually possible.

This is why they were referred to as the compardor bourgeoisie, rather than patriotic bourgeoisie. You fail to understand that they couldn't have led the bourgeois revolution becuase it was not in their interests on an individual level to. Let me put it this way: During the English civil war, many capitalists, most especially the powerful and successful ones, sided with the monarchy against Cromwell. Yet it was still a bourgeois revolution. That is becasue they developd, as INDIVIDUALS, and owed their success to their relationship to absolutism.

Class interest is not synonymous with egoistic individaul interest. It is a historic category and concerns PRODUCTION.

Emmett Till

24th October 2015, 09:09

Only insofar as they also relate to numerous other changes - what is your point? That one thing leads to antoher is supposed to mean what? For example, is it not possible to make the case that the 20th century is reducible to the first world war and its effects, the rise of American hegemony, and so on?

What we Marxists, true to Hegel's tradition, recognize is that this is not a scientific means by which the essence of historical development is located - not even in terms of absolute idealism. Rather history is understood, world history that is, at the level of social antagonism and most importantly at the level of production - not simply the production of commodities, but the production of everything that separates us from animals (which, in our postmodern consumerist society, "Marxists" often forget). The world has changed, but what you fail to understand most importantly is that these changes require acknowledgement that we are in a different period of capitalism. It is not that Lenin was "wrong", the point is that Marxists are not in the business of making over-reaching historical predictions that are outside the scope of events as they present themselves. So Lenin was correct, but Lenin made no pretenses to being some trans-historical seer - there are multiple different trajectory paths that are possible for history, history can only be read backwards in that sense. Especially when it comes to Communists, wherein (given, of course, material considerations unique to capitalist society) it all boils down to will and appropriating one's own historic destiny.

Time and time again we are told that globalization is "nothing new". It is only "nothing new" if we locate its essential basis of existence in opportunistic abstractions. To extend this logic even further, nothing at all is new under the sun, and there is no qualitative difference between capitalism and any other previous historic epoch. Globalization IS most certainly a new phenomena, because when "Britannia ruled the waves", control of world markets was at the level of direct political dominance, this was not globalization, it was Britanniaization. Today, the international bourgeoisie transcends national loyalties, aligns itself at the level of political blocs (which are LED BY, not necessarily 'directly dominated' by the United States or Russia), based on their own condition of existence.

The proletarian dictatorship does not immediately abolish capitalism. My point was precisely that the NEP, which was by the way enacted precisely synonymously with the acknowledgment that the proletarian dictatorship could not survive (taking into account the decimation of the actual proletariat) - is historically incomparable with Deng's reforms. The NEP did not solve the problem of pre-capitalist social bonds that pervaded the countryside, it was meant as a temporal measure to actually establish actual social basis in society that was susceptible to large scale state planning. Following the civil war Russia experienced almost a level of total societal collapse. We Marxists have a term - the increased socialization of labor. What happened in the Russia was the increased particularization of labor, i.e. labor that served purely egoistic activity that was worthless at the level of society and large scale production. War Communism was not synonymous with Stalin's collectivization or the new economic organization brought forth during the Mao era with its agricultural communes - it was purely raw, direct and bare expropriation of peasant grain to feed the cities.

Only at the level of opportunistically playing with abstractions can Deng's reforms be comparable to the NEP. It's even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that China never even experienced a proletarian revolution or a proletarian dictatorship to begin with, THE social basis of the Chinese revolution, learning from Russian experiences, was the rural petty bourgeoisie, who were proletarianized (or at least prepared for proletarianization) by the CCP in a matter that was not nearly as politically catastrophic as Stalin's collectivization. In fact it is precisely because the Chinese were not burdened with the structural legacy of a proletarian revolution that capitalist development was so "easy" in China as opposed to Russia, which is still plagued with deformities. At the onset of Deng's reforms, the "transition" to capitalism was literally seamless - the proletarianization of the general masses of people was seamless. That is because all of the actual 'dirty' work occurred decades before with old traditional bonds being destroyed by the romantic bourgeois revolution.

My god. What was the "working class" in the Soviet Union? There was no proletariat in the Soviet Union, if there was a Soviet proletariat, so too was there a Soviet bourgeoisie - and there was not, as you probably acknowledge. Bordiga poetically described the bourgeoisie existing in the "crevices" of production, and this is true - there is no bourgeoisie in the crevices of production struggling to actualize itself in a proletarian dictatorship.

In "sociological terms", he says. What does that even mean? No, entertain me, what does that even mean? By what methods of sociological analysis do you come to the conclusion that the USSR was a "proletarian dictatorship"? And to provoke you, there are plenty of capitalist states which "furthered the social interests" of the general masses, and the working class. Marxists do not qualify things so vaguely and unscientifically, however - the "social interests" of the working class are real, direct, immediate cosnciosu aspirations - which is the whole point of class-cosncsiouesns.

To speak about some kind of objective criteria of a "standard of living" rests upon the assumption that there is a human nature with fixed, trans-historic aims. That is unfathomably stupid. Of course, let's play with dialectics here - if the state wanted to implement measures which would give the Chinese proletariat the same living standards it experienced in the 1960's, then we would whole heartedly oppose this measure, and so would the Chinese proletariat. That does not mean they owe the state anything for the increase in the standard of living that occurred at this time, it simply means that China, which prostituted its working classes to international capital, experienced a level of social, technological development that would have otherwise been impossible at its previous state of development. In the process of doing this, it had a new relation to a new world totality. So the implications of reverting to the standard of living in the 1960's, and the actual standard of living IN the 1960's, ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT and have ENTIRELY DIFFERENT connotations at the level of struggle. This is basic dialectics.

The proletariat always experiences somewhat of a rise in its standard of living compared to old feudal bonds - you see this, for example, in Iran. Did the Iranian state "objectively further the interests of the Iranian working class" and furthermore, does this qualify it as, "in sociological terms" a proletarian dictatorship? I mean what you say is surprising even for a Trotskyist. Really? A state is a proletarian dictatorship insofar as it "furthers the social interests of the working class", which are defined by what exactly, in scientific terms? The reality is that the Soviet Union, like China during the Mao era, cannot be qualified self-sufficiently. Historically, it can only be qualified in relation to what it was becoming, and what it was transitioning to, which is why the term I have used in the past is a prolonged Jacobin phrase of development.

The Soviet Union's existence was always precarious, and the only thing that kept it moving forward was its historical tendency to move closer and closer to political collapse.

Deng's reforms would not have been possible without Mao's romantic bourgeois revolution, this is what you fail to understand. The old social bonds that existed in China could have NEVER followed a "natural" course of development. Even if we take Tawain as an example, the only reason the land reform was made possible was because the landowners were largely Japanese settlers, and the same went for South Korea. This wasn't true for China, which had its own distinct traditional social bonds that were nationally self-sufficient. It took something as aggrandous and - 'dramatic' as the cultural revolution or Great leap forward to uproot these.

Finally, a proletarian dictatorship acts in a self-conscious manner. Deng's reforms were not implemented, and the Chinese state does not exist today to serve the Chinese proletariat - if it did, then it would always side with them as far as labor disputes are concerned, which it does not. Are you literally arguing that the Chinese state is a proletarian dictatorship? How? Because there has been an increase in the standard of living? Do I even need to fucking explain how this is not an actual qualification for what constitutes a proletarian dictatorship? I have a headache just from taking this seriously - really? Are you trolling?

I keep getting this "so according to you". O.K., that you are unfamiliar with actual Marxism as it developed in the past decades is not my problem. You don't approach such ideas critically, instead, you dismiss them because they sound "strange".

This is pure philistinism, plain and simple. The notion that capitalism did not undergo an irrevocable change after new deal in the United States is literally just ignorance. The level of socialization that has occured since then is unprecedented in the history of capitalism. Typing on this computer alone is testament to the fact, and I don't - no, I really don't have to go into the various examples. Someone with a RUDIMENTARY understanding of history, even non-Marxists, should know what I'm talking about - we're talking about the foundations of modern state institutions themselves, social services, and so on. If you don't know what I'm talking about, your head is literally in your ass.

Yes, globalization is just an opportunistic term invented by Marxists to justify their opportunism. Nevermind the fact that globalization exists objectively, its social, cultural and political effects are felt at a level so pervasive that it is not even possible to debate about whether globalization is qualitatively new or not - it simply is. And scientific capitalism is a term used ironically - capitalism can never be managed scientifically, but mind you - it can be managed. Ultimately the stupidity of your argument is to constnatly point to how "Well, da banks n da capitalists r still in power", but you fail to understand that the very nature of the capitalists has changed in coincidence with the rise of monopolies, increased socialization/centralization of production, and so on. Without the level of coordination and planning they have with the state now, they could not even exist - literally their existence would not even be sustainable.

K cool, so let's stop saying that "The state serves profit" when there is no reason to say it - it is a tacitly accepted truism by anyone who is not an idiot. I have never insinuated otherwise, and that's the end of story. My point is that - that the state serves profit DOES NOT MEAN THERE EXISTS AN "INVISIBLE HAND", THE POINT IS THAT THE STATE SERVES CAPITAL AT THE EXPENSE OF THE COMMON WELFARE OF SOCIETY. Thge extent to which the state provides for its citizens, or its workers, is a matter of POLITICS and POLICY MAKING, NOT qualitative differences in its being. So no, Finland does not have a bigger state than the US, in fact, the US, the biggest "free market" economy in the world, has probably the largest, most powerful and most extensive state on the planet - and that is being said directly with regard to China.

In fact Marx never used this term. It's so irnoic that you accuse me of not "reading" while literally talking out of your ass and making baseless inferences.

The fact of the matter is that what Marx described in the 18th brumaire was an abandonment of the logic of direct class representation. You conveniently ignore this point when you speak of the Chinese bourgeoisie who fled to Tawain, but we'll get to that later. You claim that my notion of capital is an "etherial abstraction", but it is precisely Marx who conceives class in this manner in the 18th brumaire. For example, when Marx speaks of the petite bourgeoisie here:

Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.

So this is the point - the Chinese bourgeoisie as INDIVIDUALS may not directly dominate the Chinese state, but the Chinese state, and its functionaries do not get beyond in their minds what the Chinese bourgeoisie do not get beyond in life. Class ALWAYS works like this, save for the proletariat. No propertied class is capable of class-consciousness, the ruling classes ALWAYS express their class interests in terms of transcendent, extra-class interests. Even in caste societies wherein everyone knew their "class", these formations were understood in terms of natural balance, divine will, and whatever you want. The state, as you acknowledge later, might "balance out class interests", but it can only do this insofar as it is a bourgeois state.

Your logic is opportunistic and plainly idiotic when you say:

To insinuate that these were proletarian dictatorships. That they rested on the support or tolerance of the workers and peasants (and it is the latter which were the substantial basis of every one of those societies) is just as significant as the fact that the Jacobins relied on the support of the Sans Culottes to retain their power. This did not qualify their social-historical character as of the small artisianal petty bourgeoisie.

The NEP lasted less than a decade, existed in entirely different circumstances (once we start actually taking into consideration distinct material realities rather than abstractions about "well dey had to develop") calling the NEP proto-Dengism is actually just stupid. You prattle of opportunism but it is only cynical "Marxist" opportunists like Tito, and Deng, who have whimsically bastardized it with such silly comparisons.

The CCP is no more bonapartist than the South Korean, Tawainese and Singaporean state.

"Far from Marxism" you say? My fucking god. It's this level of confidence which fascinates me - where do these leftists get it from? Talking out of their ass like this...

Rather than being "far from Marxism", the notion of production existing for its own sake has been pervasive in Marxism since Marx himself, and if not then, since the time of the Young Hegelians and arguably even Hegel. Production does exist for its own sake, because production constitutes a definite form of human existence and human life. So when we say production exists for its own sake, we only mean this insofar as life itself only exists for its own sake, there is no ulterior 'purpose' for an organism. There is likewise no ulterior purpose or reason for the existence of a mode of production.

Money is not the supreme good because it maximizes resources (or any other stupid ecological notions, which Trotskyists are dangerously flirtatious with) or allows people to do as they please, it is the supreme good because it signifies ritualistic obedience to the prevailing conditions of production, it is the means by which humans express their degree of worth IN RELATION to it. You can say "production exists to satisfy human need", but there is no trans-historic "human need". It did not take humans 150,000 years to discover what they really, essentially wanted all along deep down. Instead human need is relative to the society which defines the conditions of human life. Would you mind telling me what profit is, if it is not a ritual? Are you a cynic, then? WHAT IS PROFIT, EMMETT? Do you ACTUALLY fucking think capitalists seek profit for egostic or personal reasons? What the FUCK does a billionaire need all of this money for? Will he spend even a fraction of it? Furthermore, do most profits go into the pockets of CEO's? No, they are re-invested back into their companies or enterprises. If such stupid, cynical notions of profit were true, then every bumfuck idiot would just retire upon getting rich. But that's never what happens. So yes, profit is not only a ritual, it is a theological category, and numerous, numerous Marxists have written about this - any IDIOT with common sense can see that capitalists are willing to sacrifice their immediate egoism, even their lives, for the sake of capital and profit. When capitalists say "I'm not doing this for the money, I'm doing it for the game" or whatever, they are being honest. Capitalism defines one's conditions of life. This is what it means to be a human in capitalism. There's nothing more to it.

I can't believe I have to explain all of this to a self-proclaimed Marxist. This is how deeply pervasive philistinism is among "Marxists" today - this barren wasteland, this intellectual balckhole of a society we live in. Like what else does production exist for? "Human nature"? Do you even understand Marx's method of analysis of capitalism? it is always a processional, organicist interpretation - Marx understands capitalism as a PROCESS which REPRODUCES itself, which is why to speak of some kind of "definite" ends as far as profit goes is so hilariously stupid, profit has no ends, not retirement, not "getting rich", not "maximizing resources" and what have you- many idiots who don't get this have found "fatal" flaws like the transformation problem myth. What is disgusting is the fact that the TSSI model that is used to counter it IS NOT EVEN A NEW ONE. IT WAS A TACIT AXIOM FOR MARX, it just goes to show how disgustingly lazy some "Marxists" are - we Marxists are always forced to re-vitalize and re-introduce into this thresher of a world the power of Marxism.

Please fucking kill me though. Actually do it. "Old style" silliness he sais, the self-proclaimed "Orthodox Trotskyist".

The Kulaks were never capable of revolutionizing agricultural relations. The allowances given to them by the Soviet state, which lasted less than a decade before they were annihalated as a class, are incomparable to the relationship between the CCP and the capitalist class, which many capitalists belong to themselves. The CCP itself does not retain a transcendental, independent identity - it is a capitalist institution which is shamelessly and directly utilized as a means of fomenting business connections, and so on.

Is the Chinese bourgeoisie revolutionizing agricultural relations? Is the Chinese bourgeoisie destroying the remnants of feudalism? The Chinese proletariat already exists, and asf ar as the excluded and aggrandous Chinese precariat goes, there is no sign of them becoming a part of the industrial proletariat at all - they are simply left out. It's so hilarious that you talk of the "independent" achievements of the Chinese state, and yet China owes everything it does to globalization and at the outskirts of this blessing is the worst misery and destitution. Do you even know why things like the Chengguan came into existence?

Don't ignore me here: What about the bourgeoisie of Fascist Germany and Italy? They HARDLY dominated the state. I guess when Trotskyists run into a dilemna they just throw around "bonapartism" like it doesn't mean shit.

The very real Chinese class is largely loyal to the CCP and plays the game right. That certain sections are discontented iwth its 'continued rule' sais nothing about the Chinese capitlaists as a whole, who are irrevocably a part of the political, financial, and business networks overseen by the CCP. Most capitliasts undersatnd there is no new China without Communist party, that some short-sighted and egoistic capitalists are disgruntled by the actions of the Chiense state in its long term prerogatives only means that the Chinese state is better at taking care of its bourgeois than individual capitalists themselves are. When has the Chinese state acted IN SPITE of the bourgeoisie as a whole, at the level of long term interests? Ask yourself that question.

And China is forever after immune from crisis? There is no reason to think this. You claim the period of "social progress" is over.

And China owes its prosperity to pulling "progress" out of its ass. Never mind globalization, shifting of manufacturing enterprises and labor, never mind a thousand other considerations. It was cuz China was da socialism and da socialism is good unlike da bad capitalsim. Such is the power of Marxism: "Capitalism is da bad", thus began and ended Kapital, which was actually just a piece of paper with one sentence on it.

That is impossible to infer. That is because those revolutions weren't historically external phenomena - they were integral in shaping the neoliberal, globalized world that would emerge afterwards in the late 70's and 80's. The anti-colonial revolutions were arguably inevitabilities from this point of reference, they were necessary in shaping the world as it would become. Beyond that NOHTING can be said.

As far as we're concerned here, no, direct colonialism is not beneficial for global capitalism today, and given the opportunity advanced capitalist states would not "colonize" any country as it was before. This is what makes globalization distinct, the rise of emerging independent national bourgeoisies.

It's a proletarian dictatorship then? If you're insinuated that China does not owe its propsierty to any external conveniences outside of its control, you are plainly fucking wrong.

Yet there has been a relative increase in the standard of living for many workers, undoubtedly "in their interests". So India too is a proletarian dictatorship. Mind you, what is the point of mentioning the specifialities of each country's development? What are you trying to say? That "Dey owe dere success to da capitalsim while China owes it to da socailism". HOW? The minute we extend such an analysis to China your whole argument falls apart.

Someone should have told the non-bourgeois leader Chiang Kai-Shek, whose nationalist armies expropriated and fell into disfavor quite often with the individual Chinese capitalists in the 30's. Of course, this bourgeoisie was incapable of leading the necessary social changes that would make NATIONAL capitalist development in China actually possible.

This is why they were referred to as the compardor bourgeoisie, rather than patriotic bourgeoisie. You fail to understand that they couldn't have led the bourgeois revolution becuase it was not in their interests on an individual level to. Let me put it this way: During the English civil war, many capitalists, most especially the powerful and successful ones, sided with the monarchy against Cromwell. Yet it was still a bourgeois revolution. That is becasue they developd, as INDIVIDUALS, and owed their success to their relationship to absolutism.

Class interest is not synonymous with egoistic individaul interest. It is a historic category and concerns PRODUCTION.

Whew! Rafiq, you suffer from logorrhea. It isn't usually infectious, but I may have a lower immunity than most Revleft posters, so it is dangerous for me to respond to you. I've written some pretty long posts myself, but I'm not in your league yet thank goodness.

Well, the essence of what you are arguing here is the notion that "globalism" is a new stage of capitalism. That, it seems to me, is the keystone on which your theoreticall arch rests.

So, rather than crafting a point-by-point detailed response to your ever lengthening postings, I will provide a link to an excellent fullblown pamphlet vs. that concept, which indeed is as you say not unique to you. It is polemically directed primarily at the allegedly "orthodox Trotskyist" globalization theorists of the wsws website, which no doubt you have heard of.

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/pamphlets/Imp_Global_Econ_Labor__Reformism.pdf