Honggweilo
12th December 2007, 13:17
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0907kotz.htm
Here a piece from the monthly review. The author of the article participated in a state organized forum at the“International Conference on Ownership & Property Rights: Theory & Practice,” in Beijing where as the participants where as differce as from chinese entrepeneurs, party school officials and foreign delegates from european left parties (like for example the PDS die Linke).
The reason i bring this up is for the balantly neo-liberal rethoric some of the pro-market reform participants bring up, which are boldly social-democratic and mostly out right neo-liberal and pro western-capitalism. The worse examples (the text between brackets are comments from the author;
The nature of ownership of the enterprises has no bearing on whether a country is capitalist or socialist. Enterprises should always be privately owned and operated for profit. What makes a country socialist is that the government taxes the surplus value and uses the proceeds to benefit the people through pensions and other social programs. [Along with justifying privatization, this implies that, as China’s economy becomes much like those of the United States and Western Europe, China is not abandoning socialism since, by this definition, all of the industrialized capitalist countries are actually socialist.]
The United States has companies with millions of shareholders, which is a far more socialized form of ownership than anything that exists in China.
The CCP followed the correct approach, in line with classical Marxism, during the period of New Democracy [i.e., the period directly following the 1949 liberation, when the party said it was completing the bourgeois democratic revolution but not yet trying to build socialism]. The change in policy after that period [when the party shifted its aim to building socialism] was an error, and instead the New Democracy policy should have been continued. [This was spookily similar to the widespread argument in Moscow in 1989–91 that the Soviet Communist Party should have stayed with the New Economic Policy of 1921–27, which called for a mixed economy with a significant role for private business and with market forces playing the main coordinating role.]^ hail the new kulaks
Its so hilarious, it almost negates the utter sad reality..
Luckily there where still Chinese marxists (not sure if they where CPC members) defending marxism left in the conference with some reasonable arguments
A thorough study of the original German versions of Marx and Engels’s writings on communism shows that they clearly viewed communism as involving the abolition of private property. Those who have argued that this idea arose from a mistranslation of Marx and Engels’s works are mistaken. We should not distort Marxism to justify current policies. [Some “Marxists” in China have been arguing that Marx and Engels never actually wrote that communism would involve abolition of private property.]
Here a piece from the monthly review. The author of the article participated in a state organized forum at the“International Conference on Ownership & Property Rights: Theory & Practice,” in Beijing where as the participants where as differce as from chinese entrepeneurs, party school officials and foreign delegates from european left parties (like for example the PDS die Linke).
The reason i bring this up is for the balantly neo-liberal rethoric some of the pro-market reform participants bring up, which are boldly social-democratic and mostly out right neo-liberal and pro western-capitalism. The worse examples (the text between brackets are comments from the author;
The nature of ownership of the enterprises has no bearing on whether a country is capitalist or socialist. Enterprises should always be privately owned and operated for profit. What makes a country socialist is that the government taxes the surplus value and uses the proceeds to benefit the people through pensions and other social programs. [Along with justifying privatization, this implies that, as China’s economy becomes much like those of the United States and Western Europe, China is not abandoning socialism since, by this definition, all of the industrialized capitalist countries are actually socialist.]
The United States has companies with millions of shareholders, which is a far more socialized form of ownership than anything that exists in China.
The CCP followed the correct approach, in line with classical Marxism, during the period of New Democracy [i.e., the period directly following the 1949 liberation, when the party said it was completing the bourgeois democratic revolution but not yet trying to build socialism]. The change in policy after that period [when the party shifted its aim to building socialism] was an error, and instead the New Democracy policy should have been continued. [This was spookily similar to the widespread argument in Moscow in 1989–91 that the Soviet Communist Party should have stayed with the New Economic Policy of 1921–27, which called for a mixed economy with a significant role for private business and with market forces playing the main coordinating role.]^ hail the new kulaks
Its so hilarious, it almost negates the utter sad reality..
Luckily there where still Chinese marxists (not sure if they where CPC members) defending marxism left in the conference with some reasonable arguments
A thorough study of the original German versions of Marx and Engels’s writings on communism shows that they clearly viewed communism as involving the abolition of private property. Those who have argued that this idea arose from a mistranslation of Marx and Engels’s works are mistaken. We should not distort Marxism to justify current policies. [Some “Marxists” in China have been arguing that Marx and Engels never actually wrote that communism would involve abolition of private property.]