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The nationalist origins of Chinese Marxism

12/18/2017

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     In Mao’s China and After, Maurice Meisner makes clear that Chinese Marxism from the beginning was formulated in a context of an anti-imperialist nationalism.  This is consistent with the general pattern of Third World revolutions, which have been anti-colonial revolutions seeking national liberation as well as a social transformation that would end exploitation by a national bourgeoisie that colludes with foreign interests. 

     In China in the 1890s, responding to the inability of the traditional Confucian sociopolitical order to respond effectively to Western commercial and military penetration, there emerged an intellectual tendency among the youth of the dominant landlord-gentry class to reject Confucian values and institutions.  These defectors from their class were influenced by Western ideas, such as the notion that human progress, interpreted as economic development and the conquest of nature, occurs on a basis of individual initiative (Meisner, 1999:10-13).  However, their rejection of Confucianism was not without mixed feelings, for they “retained a deep emotional tie to traditional Confucian moral values” (1999:13).  

     In spite of their critique of traditional Chinese values and institutions, the disaffected intellectuals were highly nationalistic.  They were reacting to the imperialism of Japan and the European colonial powers, which were aggressively threatening China with territorial dismemberment.  Their writings and protest activities reflected “a new nationalist commitment to China as a nation-state in a world dominated by predatory imperialist nation-states.”  They hoped “to build a strong Chinese state and society that could survive and prosper in a hostile international arena” (Meisner, 1999:12).

     After the fall of the monarchy in the Revolution of 1911, Confucianism was discredited further by its ties to the government of the republic, which was politically and socially conservative and corrupt.  In the period 1915 to 1919, the New Culture Movement emerged, characterized by a total rejection of Confucian values and institutions.  The movement had faith in Chinese youth, who were less corrupted by traditional values, and who were to be the bearers of a new Chinese culture.  In addition, the Movement believed in the power of ideas to change social reality, in spite of limitations established by social and economic conditions.  Its foremost proponent was Chen Duxiu, an ardent defender of French democracy and culture. The New Culture Movement, however, was socially isolated and politically powerless (Meisner, 1999:15-16).

     Political developments in 1919 enabled the intellectuals to overcome their social isolation and political impotence.  In that year, the Western powers decided at the Versailles peace conference to transfer the German concessions in the Chinese province of Shandong to Japan.  The decision provoked a demonstration on May 4 of more than 3,000 university students in Beijing.  Violent confrontations with police and arrests inflamed nationalist sentiments, such that an anti-imperialist movement by students, professors, workers, and merchants emerged.  During what came to be known as the May Fourth Movement, popular demonstrations, strikes, boycotts of foreign goods, and violent confrontations swept the cities of China (Meisner, 1999:17).  

     In the context of this political turmoil, many intellectuals experienced an intellectual conversion.  They no longer looked to the “democracies” of the West as the ideal model; they turned away from Western liberal ideologies, which sanctioned the existing imperialist world order.  They looked for guidance to Western socialist ideas and Marxism, which provided Chinese intellectuals with a perspective for rejecting both Confucianism and Western imperialism.  In addition, the intellectuals were transformed into militant and politically active nationalists, seeking to organize the people and lead them to effective political action.  Lenin’s thought and the example of the Russian Revolution empowered Chinese intellectuals, for they provided the basis for a concrete program of political action to propose to the people (Miesner, 1999:17-18).

    In late 1919, Chen Duxiu, the leading intellectual of the New Culture Movement, converted to Marxism.  In 1920, he and other Chinese Marxists organized small communist groups in the major cities of China.  They sought to become a political voice in defense of the needs and interests of peasants and workers and to lead them to new forms of political action.  In their conversion to Marxism, they continued to embrace many of the ideas of the disaffected and socially isolated intellectual class from which they emerged, including its anti-imperialist nationalism (Meisner, 1999:11-12, 15, 19-21).   

     In 1921, Chen and another professor at Peking University, Li Dazhao, established the Chinese Communist Party, with the assistance of a representative of the newly formed Third Communist International.  Initially, most of the Chinese Communist Party members were the student followers of Chen and Li.  Among the young revolutionary activists was Li Dazhao’s library assistant at Beijing University, Mao Zedong, who would become the principal leader and theoretician of Chinese Marxism (Meisner, 1999:15, 19).  

     Conditions in China were not favorable for a bourgeois revolution or a proletarian revolution as conceived by Marx.  Although a modern Chinese bourgeoisie had emerged in China as a consequence of Western imperialism, it was small and economically weak.  It was primarily a commercial and financial bourgeoisie, and not an industrial bourgeoisie.  It was dependent on foreign capitalism, in that it functioned as an intermediary between the Chinese market and foreign capitalist enterprises.  Similarly, the proletariat was small.  Most workers were employed in small shops, and they lacked proletarian class consciousness (Miesner, 1999:5-6)

     Therefore, Mao adapted Marx to Chinese conditions, and he conceived the peasantry as central to the socialist revolution.  Even though peasants constituted the great majority of the population, they were a politically weak class, unable to formulate their grievances and defend their interests.  With their experience largely limited to the local, peasants possessed a provincial outlook.  However, the peasantry possessed resentment at the exploitation and abuse of the landlord gentry proprietors.  Accordingly, Mao discerned that the peasants possessed a revolutionary spontaneity that could be channeled into effective political action, if they were organized and led by committed activists with revolutionary understanding and consciousness from other social classes (Meisner, 1999:8, 26, 31-33, 37-50).

     From 1921 to 1949, the Nationalist Party, first led by Sun Yat-sen and later by Chiang Kai-shek, was the principal competitor of the Chinese Communist Party in attaining the support of the people.  The two political forces to some extent shared the same goal of building a strong, modern state that would defend the nation in a hostile international environment dominated by colonialist and imperialist powers.  In given political situations, they were allied; and in others, they were in conflict.  Their conflict was rooted in the fact that the communists were committed not only to national unity and to national independence, but also to a social transformation that would emancipate the peasants from the landlord class and the workers from the comprador bourgeoisie.  During its period of rule of China from 1927 to 1949, the Nationalist Party discredited itself by its collusion with foreign powers; its complicity with a declining and increasingly parasitic landlord gentry; its incapacity to respond to Japanese occupation during World War II; its lack of administrative control over its territory; and its notorious levels of corruption.  Meanwhile, the Communists surged in popular support with effective administration of the countryside under its control and with guerrilla resistance to Japanese occupation.  These dynamics paved the way for the taking of national political power by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 (Meisner 1999:20-50).

   In subsequent posts, we will examine the Chinese Communist Party in power, reflecting on its achievements and its contradictions.  For the moment, let us reflect on its taking of power, which it accomplished twenty-eight years after its establishment.

     First, we should take note of the decisive role of political events in creating new possibilities for understanding.  Reflecting on the popular uprising provoked by the Versailles treaty, many intellectuals experienced what the philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1955) called an intellectual conversion, which occurs when a person seeking to understand discovers previously unasked questions that are relevant to the issue at hand.  In a situation of political turmoil, Chinese intellectuals in 1919 turned to previously unknown socialist, Marxist, and Leninist sources for guidance, transforming their understanding.

     Secondly, we should emphasize that two middle-aged university professors founded the Chinese Communist Party, and its initial members were mostly young students of the professors.  They immediately proceeded to organize the party in various cities, forming small groups.  In his writings, Mao taught that all party members should study political theory and history, and they should meet weekly for discussion in groups of three to five persons.  In accordance with this commitment to the popular education, Mao and several other party leaders collectively wrote in 1939 a 37-page textbook, The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, for the education of party members and the people (Mao, 2009:71-72, 111-48, & 174-75).

     Thirdly, we should note that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party intelligently adapted Marxism and Leninism to Chinese conditions, avoiding a distortion of their understanding that would have occurred, if they had embraced literally concepts formulated by Marx and Lenin under different conditions.  Their adaptation was based on a study and analysis of Chinese historical, economic, political, and social conditions, including the class formations in China and the actual and possible levels of consciousness in each class. They called for a democratic revolution of a new type, required for the colonial and semi-colonial situation (Mao, 2009:111-48). 

     Fourthly, in spite of their wholesale rejection of Chinese values and institutions, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in no way presented an image of themselves as un-Chinese or as indifferent to Chinese interests.  To the contrary, they formulated a nationalist vision, as the basis for the formation of a modern nation-state that could defend Chinese interests against imperialist powers.  Their formulation was based on an understanding of the reasons for the decline of China since the early nineteenth century (see Mao, 2009:117-24).

      Fifthly, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were nationalist but not ethnocentric.  They had studied Western political theories.  They had learned from the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions of the West, and they appropriated from them in the formulation of their vision for China.

     For intellectuals and activists in the United States, in the context of the relative decline of the USA and the structural crisis of the world-system, are there not lessons to be learned from the relatively rapid taking of power by the Chinese Communist Party?  Such lessons for U.S. intellectuals and activists perhaps include the following.  (1)  We need leaders who do intellectual work, which includes study of revolutions in other lands; and who have the creative insight to adapt the lessons of these experiences to U.S. conditions.  In our time and context, such study surely ought to include the national and social revolutions of China and the Third World during the last 100 years.  (2)  We need to formulate a nationalist project, based on historical and social scientific study of the nation and the world-system, which includes explanation of the sources of the U.S. decline, and which points to a more dignified road for the nation.  It is not enough to criticize the nation for its imperialist, exploitative, and oppressive policies; an alternative and more just and democratic road must be formulated.  (3)  We need to form an alternative political party, which organizes and educates the people with respect to its internationalist nationalist project, and which works on developing strategies for the taking of political power in twenty-five years or so.  Organizing protests enables the people to vent their frustrations and to voice their indignation.  But it is not enough, and revolutions in other lands demonstrate that more can be done, and that more is being done.  

     We will continue in subsequent posts with reflections on the Chinese Revolution.


References
 
Lonergan, Bernard.  1958.  Insight.  New York:  Philosophical Library.
 
Mao Zedong.  2009.  Collected Writings of Chairman Mao, Volume One: Politics and Tactics.  Edited by Shawn Conners,  Translated by Foreign Language Press, Peking.  El Paso, Texas: El Paso Norte Press, Special Edition Books.
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.
 
 
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Caricom-Cuba & South-South cooperation

12/12/2017

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​     On December 8, 1972, the leaders of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and Guyana, which had attained their independence a few years earlier, announced their decision to establish diplomatic relations with the Cuban revolutionary government.  The decision was received with alarm in Washington, inasmuch as the United States had been attempting to destroy the Cuban Revolution through a policy of economic and political isolation.  Indeed, the decision can be seen as the first step in a forty-five year process of breaking the U.S. imposed Cuban isolation from Latin America and the Caribbean, culminating instead in the political isolation of the United Sates (Gómez 2017).

     On the thirtieth anniversary of the historic decision, Fidel Castro proclaimed:
Probably, the leaders of those countries, considered the founding fathers of the independence of their nations and of Caribbean integration, Errol Barrow, of Barbados; Forbes Burnham, of Guyana; Michael Manley, of Jamaica; and Eric Williams, of Trinidad and Tobago, in deciding on the establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba, understood that they were crafting the road for what would later be the foreign policy of the Caribbean Community, which today has three fundamental characteristics: independence, courage, and united action (quoted in Gómez, 2017:5).
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     The Caribbean Community (Caricom), established for the purpose of promoting integration and cooperation, was initiated by the Treaty of Chaguaramas in 1973.  Caricom today has fourteen member nations: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Granada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Surinam, and Trinidad and Tobago.

     In 2002, December 8 was declared the day of Caricom-Cuba, and the first Caricom-Cuba Summit was held in Havana.  Subsequent summits have been held every three years, always on the date of the historic 1972 decision.  During these last fifteen years, Cuba and Caricom have been seeking to develop cooperation and commerce between Cuba and Caricom and between Cuba and each of the nations.  Cooperation has especially occurred in areas in which Cuba has much to offer, such as health, education, sport, culture, and construction.  Today, 1,762 Cuban “internationalists” are working in the countries of Caricom, 83% in the health sector.  In addition, 5,542 Caribbean youths have been educated in Cuba, and 732 are presently studying in Cuban universities.    

     The Sixth Caricom-Cuba Summit was held in Saint Mary, Antigua and Barbuda, on December 8, 2017.  In the opening ceremony, Gaston Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, observed that Cuba has contributed to the elevation of its neighbors through the donation of health services, the training of professionals, and the provision of consulting services with respect to disaster preparation, agriculture, and sport.  He described these contributions as a consequence of the lasting legacy of Fidel, whose ideals of equality and social justice “will endure to the extent that we strive to advance in the socio-economic development of our countries.”  The Prime Minister further observed that the Caribbean finds itself in uncertain times, characterized by “the dangers of terrorism, protectionist and mercantilist policies, and the construction of walls,” and facing threats resulting from the region’s vulnerability to natural disasters.

     Raúl Castro, in his address to the Summit, recalled the historic decision taken forty-five years ago by four prime ministers of the English-speaking Caribbean.  “We will never forget that decision, which constituted a fundamental step for the breaking of the diplomatic and commercial barrier around Cuba.  And it permitted the deepening of relations among the peoples of Our America, united by centuries of history and culture.”  He further declared, “We Cubans profoundly thank our Caribbean brothers and sisters for their unalterable position of respect toward our country.”   

     Raúl described Fidel as the initiator and foremost proponent of the idea of political ties and cooperation among the countries of the Caribbean.  He cited Fidel’s speech of December 8, 2002: “The only way out for our countries is integration and cooperation.”

      Like Prime Minister Browne, Raúl Castro referred to the dangerous international situation, which he described as “the profound economic, social, political, and environmental crisis that the hemisphere and the world is undergoing.”  He maintained, “The dangers for the survival of the human species are increasing.”  He observed that the powerful states of the world utilize concepts that are not universally accepted, like “humanitarian intervention” and “responsibility to protect,” “in order to hide interventionist and aggressive actions that threaten international security and peace.”  The centers of transnational financial capital seek to impose further obstacles to social and economic development, singling out nations as supposed threats, including them in unilateral and spurious lists.  In the context of this international situation, the countries of the Caribbean, Raúl sustained, ought to confront the challenge of social and economic development through a unity that respects diversity and through integration and cooperation.  

     The Sixth Caricom-Cuba Summit issued the Declaration of Saint Mary.  Reaffirming the historic commitment of the Third World to the true independence of nations in the face of the interventions of the global powers (see “The Third World Project, 1948-79” 7/20/2016), the Declaration proclaims:  “We commit ourselves to lend our unrestricted support to the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination of each nation, and to the principle of non-intervention in their internal affairs.”  In addition, the Declaration asserts that attention to the negative consequences of climate change is an urgent priority for the region, and it declares the commitment of the nations to work together to strengthen capacity to reduce risk from disasters.  The Declaration reaffirms the commitment of the nations to develop further the regional infrastructure for air and sea transportation, in order to strengthen economic and commercial relations.  The Summit also signed an agreement of cooperation with respect to tourism, including the development of multiple-destiny tourism in the Caribbean. 

     South-South cooperation is a historic goal of the Third World.  South-South cooperation confronts enormous obstacles, because colonial economic, commercial, and transportation structures were designed to ensure unequal North-South trade, and not mutually beneficial trade among the newly independent nations of the Third World; and because, in the neocolonial world-system, nations that seek to exercise the sovereignty necessary for the transformation of these structures are attacked.  Caricom and the Carcom-Cuba relation represent one of many efforts on the part of Third World peoples and nations to transform neocolonial structures and to establish the basis for cooperation and mutually beneficial relations among nations, so that a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system can be developed.  

     Cuba and Caricom have taken modest but important steps toward this end.  In the addition to the benefits to the region that derive from the advanced level of Cuban education and knowledge and from the internationalist spirit of Cuba, commerce within the region is growing, as are sea and air connections.  At the present time, tariff preferences are in place for more than 300 Cuban products sold in the Caribbean, and for dozens of Caribbean products sold in Cuba.  The Cuban government reports that commerce among the Caribbean nations has grown significantly in the last three years.

     The Cuba-Caricom relation is part of a Third World project to construct, in theory and in practice, step-by-step, a more just world, in recognition of the fundamental fact that cooperation and solidarity among nations is the only possible road for ensuring the survival of the human species and for the establishment of a sustainable political-economic-cultural world-system.


Sources
 
Castro, Raúl.  2017. “Un Caribe cada vez más próspero, equitativo, seguro, sostenible y unido es posible: Discurso pronunciado en la Sexta Cumbre Caricom-Cuba,” Granma (December 9):3-4.
 
Gómez, Sergio Alejandro.  2017. “El Caribe, los desafíos de la integración en la frontera imperial,” Granma (December 7):5.
 
Menéndez Quintero, Marina.  2017. “Caricom-Cuba: una relación ejemplar y única,” Juventud Rebelde (December 7):4.
 

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The historic contradiction of socialist states

12/7/2017

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      In The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy, Minqi Li projects the immanent collapse of the capitalist world-economy.  Li is a Chinese intellectual who migrated to the United States in 1994 and now teaches economics at the University of Utah.  Li believes that China in the epoch of Mao had important gains with respect to the protection of the basic needs of the people (see “Does socialism work?” 12/4/2017).  He maintains, however, that with the death of Mao in 1976, there was a coup d’état that resulted in the triumph of a bureaucratic counterrevolution, which made possible a transition to capitalism in China, beginning in the 1980s and consolidated in the 1990s.  He further sustains that the rise of China since 1980 is intensifying the tendencies that are causing the disintegration of the capitalist world-economy (Li, 2008:55-65).

      With an understanding influenced by world-systems theory, Li has arrived to understand important facts with respect to the capitalist world-economy.  First, he understands that the capitalist world-economy historically has expanded economically through the conquest of new lands and peoples.  In the development of the capitalist world-economy, workers (converted peasants, artisans, and serfs) acquired the capacity to organize themselves in defense of their interests.  As a result, labor costs and taxes rose over time, thus reducing the rate of profit.  Capitalists responded to this problem by acquiring new territories and attaining control over cheaper labor resources.  However, this process of economic expansion through successive geographical expansions ended during the twentieth century, as the capitalist world-economy reached the geographical limits of the earth.  In addition, Li correctly understands that the superexploitation of labor, in which the laborers are paid less than what they need to live, limits the capacity of the global consumer market to expand (Li, 2008:12, 15).

     Clearly, the world-system needs to reform, inasmuch as the world-economy can no longer expand through territorial expansion, and given that the global dual-wage structure limits economic expansion.  Indeed, the popular movements of the world demand such reform.  In the core states, the movements call for a return to the pre-1980 protection of wages, worker’s rights, health care, and education.  In the Third World, the popular movements seek true sovereignty, so that states can act to protect the social and economic rights and needs of the people.  However, as Li discerns, the system is not able to reform.  Financially, it cannot afford to concede to the demands of the popular movements without reducing the rate of profit for capitalists.  A global new deal is not politically possible, given the power of global interests that would stand opposed to such a reformist project (Li, 2008:17, 121). 

     Inasmuch the system cannot reform itself, Li concludes that that a global socialist transformation is necessary.  He projects that by the year 2050 there will be various socialist governments, brought to power by the growing proletarianization of labor and by increasing working-class consciousness.  The future socialist governments will confront various serious problems that are the legacy of a world-system dedicated to the endless accumulation of profit rather than to providing human needs and conserving the ecological balance of the earth.  The socialist governments, accordingly, will have an interest in an alliance that creates a socialist world-government, thus creating an alternative socialist world-system that would replace the present capitalist world-economy, already showing clear signs of disintegration (Li, 2008:23, 139-73, 179-82, & 187-88).

    Li believes, however, that the socialist states that emerged during the twentieth century and that exist today have confronted a basic contradiction that results from the fact that they have had to survive in the context of a capitalist world-economy.  In order to protect themselves, the socialist states have had to compete militarily and economically with the global powers.  This requires them to adopt capitalist structures for the organization of labor, thereby giving greater political space and legitimacy to privileged bureaucrats and technicians that defend particular interests.  A new bureaucratic-technocratic elite forms that is able to take control of the socialist revolution, directing it to the defense of its particular interests and ignoring the needs of the workers.  Accordingly, in the context of the capitalist world-economy, socialist states have a tendency to fall to a bureaucratic counterrevolution, which subsequently invokes intellectuals to defend policy changes with justifications that are framed as an evolution of revolutionary socialist ideology in light of new conditions (Li, 2008:50-65).

     I concur with Li on basic points.  The capitalist world-economy has contradictions that the global elite is unable to resolve.  There are various possible scenarios, including neofascism, various regional world-systems, or chaos.  And possibly, there could emerge an alternative socialist world-system, which would be based on cooperation, solidarity, universal human values, and harmony with the earth; and which is the best hope for humanity.

       However, I am not convinced by Li’s claim that the current socialist states generally fall to bureaucratic counterrevolutions.  To be sure, I have been inclined to believe, since my reading of Trotsky and the British Trotskyite Ted Grant, that the Russian Revolution fell to a bureaucratic counterrevolution with the death of Lenin (see various posts in the category Russian Revolution).  However, if it is true that something similar has occurred in China, we should not conclude that the triumph of a bureaucratic counterrevolution is a pattern for the Third World.  We should keep in mind that Russia and China were both empires, and both were only partially peripheralized by the European powers during the rise of the European-centered world-economy.  In these fallen empires, the remnant industrial and agricultural bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy would constitute a powerful force, able to unify as a bureaucratic counterrevolution.  But the Third World has had a different historical experience.  The most advanced of the Third World kingdoms and empires were far more limited in territory and in structures of domination and exploitation than were the Russian and Chinese empires.  And the Third World peoples and societies were conquered, colonized, and peripheralized in a form more penetrating than the partial peripheralizations of Russia and China.  As a result, in the Third World colonial situation, the national bourgeoisie possessed interests in common with the majority of workers and peasants, and it often played a key role in the most radical struggles for national and social liberation.  In the context of the Third World revolution for national and social liberation, a counterrevolution by the petit bourgeoisie, the technocrats, and the bureaucrats is a phenomenon, but it has limitations, and it can be contained by the formulation and dissemination among the people of a socialist ideology.  In the Third World, when triumphant popular and socialist revolutions fell, it principally was a consequence of imperialist interventions.

      Moreover, in the case of China, I am not yet convinced that the revolution fell to a bureaucratic counterrevolution following the death of Mao.  I note, for example, that Li is persistently unclear in his description and definition of the “bureaucratic capitalists” who supposedly now rule China (see 2008:27, 106).  Moreover, he maintains that the transition to capitalism involved the opening of cheap Chinese labor as peripheral labor in the world-economy, thus generating new profits and facilitating the rise of China (2008:70-72, 109). However, in the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the world-economy, low-wage export manufacturing does not facilitate the rise of a nation.  Thus, questions emerge.  Did China’s incorporation in the world-economy in the 1980s and 1990s have characteristics different from the general phenomenon of peripheral low-wage export manufacturing?  If so, were these unique characteristics conceived by the Chinese Communist Party as part of a strategy for the long-term economic development of the nation?  Would not such a strategy be consistent with a project of national and social liberation?

     I will keep these questions in mind as I continue to study the Chinese Revolution, which stands as an important historic example in the current historic moment.  The peoples of the world, experiencing the negative effects of a world-system in terminal crisis, are increasingly arriving to consciousness of the need to construct socialist nations and a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system.  Therefore, it is important for us to understand the gains and limitations of the historic socialist projects.  Moreover, China is especially important, because the renewed Third World popular movements tend to view China as playing a cooperative role in the emerging alternative project for a more just world.  They view China’s foreign policy as fundamentally different from that of the imperialist powers of the European-centered world-system.


​Reference
 
Li, Minqi.  2008.  The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.
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Does socialism work?

12/4/2017

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     In his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 19, 2017, Donald Trump asserted:  “From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.  Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.”

     Standing in contrast to the assertions of Trump are the views of Minqi Li, a Chinese intellectual who migrated to the United States in 1994 and obtained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts, and who now is Professor of Economics at the University of Utah.  In The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy, he notes that from the early nineteenth century to 1950, China experienced a significant economic decline.  He writes that China’s GDP accounted for one-third of the gross world product in the early nineteenth century, but it had fallen to less than five percent by 1950.  Similarly, the gap in per capita income between China and the leading states of Western Europe was 2:1 in the early nineteenth century, but it had widened to 20:1 by 1950.  “China was reduced to being one of the poorest populations in the world” (Li, 2008:24).

      But the triumph of socialism in China in 1949 established the political conditions for creating an alternative reality.  A transformation was accomplished through the nationalization of industry and the establishment of state ownership of industrial enterprises; and through an agrarian reform program that confiscated the property of landholders and distributed it to landless and poor peasants.  As a result, China’s long decline was reversed, and the basic human needs of the people were met.  In the Maoist period of 1950 to 1976, China’s growth rate surpassed that of the major Western powers and was significantly better than the world average.  Moreover, a system of centralized planning facilitated the development and diffusion of industrial and agricultural technologies that enabled the subsequent rise of China that began in the 1980s (Li, 2008:30-38).

      In Li’s view, the achievements of the Chinese Revolution during the Maoist period demonstrated the superiority of socialism over capitalism in providing for the basic human needs of the people in a social and economic situation defined by high levels of poverty. 
​The achievements of Revolutionary China in advancing people’s physical and mental potentials were nothing sort of a spectacular success and demonstrated convincingly the superiority of socialism over capitalism from the working people’s point of view, in the context of peripheral and semi-peripheral countries.  These achievements were not simply the outcome of redistribution of income which sometimes some capitalist states could also accomplish, but resulted from the systematic operations of a socio-economic system that was oriented towards the basic needs of the working people rather than profitmaking (Li, 2008:35, 37).
​
​     Li maintains that socialist states in general have demonstrated a capacity to provide for the basic human needs of their populations. 
The Soviet Union, Revolutionary China, Cuba, and other historical socialist states represented a distinct form of state organization.  These states were the historical product of great workers’ and peasants’ revolutions, and their internal economic and political relations were relatively favorable for the working people.  It was in their abilities to meet the “basic needs” of the greatest majority of the population that China and other historical socialist states distinguished themselves from the rest of the peripheral and semi-peripheral states in the capitalist world-economy (Li, 2008:31).
​
​     Li quotes Vicente Navarro, who undertook a comparative study of the health conditions in capitalist and socialist countries:
At least in the realm of underdevelopment, where hunger and malnutrition are part of the daily reality, socialism rather than capitalism is the form of organization of production and distribution of goods and services that better responds to the immediate socioeconomic needs of the majority of these populations (cited in Li, 2008: 31).
​
     Located in Cuba, I can affirm the validity of the observations of Li and Navarro.  In socialist Cuba, as a consequence of the triumph of a popular socialist revolution in 1959, there has been developed an alternative political process of popular democracy, which ensures that the decision-making process in the political, economic, educational, cultural, and informational institutions are under the authority of the elected delegates of the people.  From this political reality other things follow: free and high-quality educational and health care systems; state support for needs with respect to nutrition, housing, and transportation; a public discourse that is free of distortions and manipulations; state support for culture and the arts; and safety in the streets.

     The opinion of Donald Trump is widely held in the United States and other nations of the North.  However, it is not necessarily a view that is based on empirical observation of the historical social-economic reality in which the political project of socialism has been forged.  Nor is it based on personal encounter with the social movements of the neocolonized peoples of the earth, whose insights into the global structures of domination and into the possibilities for their emancipatory transformation require the serious consideration of all who seek to understand.

      For more reflection on the Cuban Revolution and its meaning for the world-system, please see my book, The Evolution and Significance of the Cuban Revolution: The light in the darkness.


​References
 
Li, Minqi.  2008.  The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.
 
Navarro, Vicente.  1993.  “Has Socialism Failed?  An Analysis of Health Indicators under Capitalism and Socialism.”  Science & Society 57(1):6-30 (Spring).
 

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    Author: Charles McKelvey

    Retired professor, writer,  and Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist revolutionary

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