Results 241 to 245 of 245
Yes, which is the reason why Marx didn't advocate proletarian revolution as a universal panacea in the 19th century. I don't really see how this is an argument that China was ready.
Since China never had a proletarian revolution, and generalized wage labor and commodity production persisted, it also seems to be the reality.
well that is a blatant Eurocentrism that verges on racism, the Asian peoples are too culturally backward for socialism. Well what empirical evidence do we have of the cultural superiority of the Western Europeans over the Chinese and Indians in the 20th Century?
The peoples who brought you two world wars, the colonial exploitation of Africa India and Indochina, the Holocaust, mass terror bombing of civilians are so much more civilised and socialistic than the Chinese, Cubans or the Vietnamese.
You damn the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, but what does the SPD strategy have to show. In its home nation Germany practically nothing : the most it ever achieved was in Sweden and the uK by the mid 70s, do you really claim that these countries were more socialist than China or the USSR were then?
No the argument as to why red political power could exist in China was not based on a reading of Marx, who knew nothing at all about early 20th century China, but on a concrete investigation into the class relations of Chinese society by the Chinese Communists.
If you bothered to read these analyses you would realise that you were talking nonsense when you speak of generalised wage labour existing in either pre or post revolutionary China. Even now, with an economy with very large state capitalist and private capitalist elements there is not generalised wage labour, a significant sector of the population is engaged in petty commodity production. In the 30s the middle peasants - who neither worked for wages nor employed wage workers were an even bigger section.
Forgive me, I'm not really an expert on economics, but how can there be any "capitalist elements" without generalized wage labor?
Surely there must be some level of generalized wage labor, especially if they still have those "special economic zones" for foreign capital. China is now even looking for sources of capital in Africa. Generalized wage labor exists in other capitalist countries, doesn't it? From what I've heard, the means of production were bought and sold as commodities under "Maoist" China, and national bourgeoisie kept up to 20% of the surplus value produced.
Last edited by Comrade Hill; 15th October 2012 at 04:41.
My point is that prior to the revolution only the poor peasants were engaged in wage labour and for many of them it was only part of the time - part of their labour was still on their own behalf. Secondly the vast numbers of middle peasants were engaged in production for their own families not, and their exploitation was not in the form of capitalist profit but the rent they had to pay to the landlord.
When discussing things post revolution you have to take into account that there was rapid change in social relations so that what is true of one period was not true a few years later. In agriculture, which was the greater part of the economy the movement was first to self sufficient peasant farms, then to cooperatives and then to communes during the Mao period. Subsequently there was a reversion to private peasant agriculture under Deng. But the Maoist policy was communes which were certainly not generalised wage labour in that:
1. There was collective ownership of the means of production
2. There was collective labour
3. Payment was in work points not money which were then redemed at the harvest against shares in the product - this system was loosely modeled on Marx's suggestions in Critique of the Gotha Programme
That form came in in the late 60s.
The national bourgeoisie did get interest payments in the 50s and early 60s but the state stopped paying these during the Cultural Revolution.
