Now you've gone off the track, Marvin. I was never a fan of Maoism to begin
with, thought the "Cultural Revolution" was in fact a pre-emptive
counterrevolution, manipulated by Mao to destroy his opponents in and out of
the party under the slur of "capitalist roaders," a manipulation Mao had
brought to its end when workers began to self-organize against the
predations of the Red Guards.
The Cultural Revolution, IMO, consolidating Mao's power, eliminating his
opponents, allowed him to pursue the "Great Opening" with the west, and take
the first steps on the course that brought us to the Guangdong and about
$500 billion in FDI.
Anyway, in going off the track you duplicate the error of LW, confusing
"growth" with "development," "development" with "capitalist development,"
the means of production with the conditions, relations of production, and
ultimately, use value with the production of exchange value.
Talk about useless, abstractions, LW's "what would a real workers' and
farmers' govt. do" is about as useless as you can get. First, why would a
revolutionary struggle in China result in a "real workers'" government in
what is already claimed to be a "workers and peasants state"? Such a
government is purely an abstraction, as the struggle in China will
inevitably require the expropriation of property-- what's left of the state
owned property, and expropriation of the growing private sector.
Such a workers', urban and rural, state, would certainly face a tremendous
onslaught from the bourgeoisie within and without its borders, and so the
question of "breaking" with the US by abolishing that connection of
purchasing US Treasury instruments will not be a question at all, as the US
will immediately embargo sales to China, and will refuse, probably to redeem
the instruments that the "real workers' state" finds in its possession.
But there is another issue that needs to be addressed. What constitutes
economic development? Historically, for capitalism, development is
constituted in the organization of wage-labor in the overall production
processes, but the expulsion of wage-labor from any particular process.
Development is measured by the change in the organic composition of capital,
and capitals, with the increase of the technical basis. China clearly has
adopted and adapted to this capitalist form of development. Whether or not
you agree with LW's and Nestor's fantasy --that somehow the CCP is using
capitalism to build socialism, and that sooner or later, the CCP will pull
its great big trump card out of its sleeve, and laugh all the way to the
Peoples' Bank--, for the last 30 years, China has overtly, explicitly,
directly, adopted and adapted to the development of private property in the
means of production, to capitalist development.
So having adopted and adapted to that, the question of capitalist
development requires us to look at exactly how China is engaging and
experiencing the laws of that development-- and the law of simultaneous
aggrandizement and expulsion of wage labor from the production process.
Thus, when China's largest steel producer, produces the same volume or value
of steel as a steel maker in Japan, but BaoSteel requires 6 times the labor
force, then we have a productivity gap, which can survive for a period of
time due to the dramatically reduced wages of the laborers in China.
However, overproduction and declining profits bring that end.
Prior to a drop in profitability, the situation of the less productive
BaoSteel is parallel to that of a small agricultural producer in that as
Marx puts it in Vol 3
"For the small farmer the limit of exploitation is not set by the average
profit of the capital, if he is a small capitalist, nor by the necessity of
making a rent, if he is a landowner. Nothing appears as an absolute limit
for him, as a small capitalist, but the wages which he pays to himself,
after deducting his actual costs. So long as the price of the product cover
these wages, he will cultivate his land, and will do so often down to the
physical minimum of his wages....
In order that that the small farmer may cultivate his land... it is
therefore NOT NECESSARY [emphasis added], as it is under normal capitalist
production, that the market price of his products should rise high enough to
allow him the average profit....Therefore it is not necessary that the
market price should rise, either as high as the value or as high as the
price of production of his product. THIS IS ONE OF THE CAUSES WHICH KEEPS
THE PRICE OF CEREALS LOWER IN COUNTRIES WITH A PREDOMINANCE OF SMALL FARMERS
THAN IN COUNTRIES WITH A CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION...THIS LOWER PRICE IS
ALSO A RESULT OF THE POVERTY OF THE PRODUCERS AND BY NO MEANS THE
PRODUCTIVITY OF THE LABORERS {emphasis added, obviously}"
Marx, Capital Vol 3 Part 6 Chapter 37 Sub-section V Metaire and Small
Peasants' Property.
Now this is an incredible passage, identifying the process of agricultural
involution that defined rural production in China's past-- the use of labor
at reduced wages to maintain or increase agricultural input, at the cost of
declining productivity, and overall rural and urban stasis.
But I think the passage can also be applied to China's direction in
undertaking capitalist development based on its cheap labor policy for
foreign producers, and its state/collective enterprises, like steel
production, where productivity is so low.
While so low productivity, low wage, excess labor inputs can of course bring
lower prices, they cannot bring development, either capitalist or socialist.
The Chinese leadership clearly sees itself as playing a large and growing
role in the existing capitalist world order. To do that it has to scrap,
quite literally, its current organization of agricultural and domestic
production. [For the "real workers' state" to play a role in the expansion
of revolution, it too would have to fundamentally reconfigure, alter, these
proportions, ratios of living labor to the past accumulated labor of the
machinery].
This is not an argument for unemployment. It is just the opposite, the only
way social labor can develop is through its replacement in production by
machinery, so that the social labor can be directed brutally by capital, in
search of exchange value; rationally by the social laborers themselves in
the satisfaction and creation of new needs.
So productivity matters, it matter more in capitalist development; it
matters the MOST in a socialist society.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marv Gandall" <marvgand...@videotron.ca>
To: "David Schanoes" <sartes...@earthlink.net>
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] China's high speed rail plans
>
>?
> ======================================
> Of course not. And I think we could also agree that China's reverting to
> Maoist autarchy at this stage of it's historic development is also not the
> best course to follow, which is what Artesian seems in effect to be
> proposing.
>
>
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