On 7/6/21 9:31 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
https://louisproyect.org/2018/06/11/is-china-socialist/
Richard Smith comments:
There’s nothing socialist about China and never has been. There’s no
denying that Mao Zedong organized and led a stunningly successful and
novel national liberation revolution, one that succeeded where both the
bourgeois nationalist revolution of 1912 and the workers revolution of
1925-27 had failed. What’s more, his formula inspired and served as the
model for the entire wave of party-guerrilla army anti-colonial and/or
nationalist revolutions that swept the Third World from the end of WWII
through the 1970s in countries where working classes and bourgeoisies
were too small or weak to lead their own revolutions. The problem is,
instead of socialism, those substituionist party-armies installed new
class societies — either bureaucratic collectivism as in China, N.
Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos etc. or state capitalism as in Algeria,
Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and so on.
The historic gains of the Chinese revolution – abolition of capitalism
and private property, nationalization of the means of production, job
security and so on — would certainly be important components of a
socialist economy and society but they’re hardly sufficient. The key
ingredient is missing. The essence of socialism is workers’ democracy,
mass popular democracy on the model of the Paris Commune. China’s
workers played no role whatsoever in Mao’s party-army “substitutionist”
revolution and they have never enjoyed any kind of democracy nor played
any role in governing the party-state. China has never been any kind of
workers’ state. Same with the rest. See for example, Gioconda Belli,
“The crushing of the Nicaraguan dream” in today”s New York Times.
Indeed, in my view, the single greatest impediment to building a Marxist
socialist Left in the West during the Cold War was that when right-wing
ideologues pointed to Stalin’s and Mao’s totalitarian dungeons and said
“that’s socialism,” sycophantic Western Stalinist and Maoist apologists
replied “yes, that’s socialism.” A gift to the Right that keeps on giving.
Nationalized property isn’t necessarily socialist unless society owns
the state. In China society owns exactly nothing. There is no such thing
as “public property” in China. All property is owned by the state the
state is exclusively owned by the Communist Party.
Economic planning isn’t necessarily socialist either. It all depends.
Planning by whom, for whom? In China, as in Stalin’s Russia, the economy
has always been planned from the top-down by the party-bureaucracy for
the party-bureaucracy while China’s workers, peasants and everyone else
have been completely shut out of decision-making about the economy or
about anything else in China.
There was nothing necessarily socialist about those “iron rice bowl”
jobs guarantees either. Under Mao, workers had the “right” to work, but
their entire lives were lived in conditions of unfreedom from birth to
death with every aspect of their lives minutely controlled by the police
state — where they worked, where they could live, when and with whom
they could marry, when or if they could have children and how many, what
to read, what say, what to think, what to wear, etc. etc. — like North
Korea today. As I explain elsewhere (my PhD thesis and my next book, The
Trump and Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 2022) Mao had good reason
for his full-employment program, but it had nothing to do with
socialism. Xi Jinping likewise has good reasons to keep China’s workers
working producing piles of unsaleable steel, aluminum, glass, cement,
empty trains, ghost cities and planet-destroying coal-fired electric
power plants. But this has nothing to do with socialism either.
After all, Nazi Germany had a largely planned economy and full
employment too. The formal name of Hitler’s party was National Socialist
German Workers’ Party. But German workers had no more say in their
“workers’” party than China’s workers have had in the CCP or its
state-imposed trade union. Indeed, one of Hitler’s first acts in May
1933 was to ban strikes, ban their unions, imprison their leaders,
confiscate their union treasuries and replace independent unions with a
single national state-run union, the German Labor Force. Instead of
defending worker interests against the bosses, Hitler’s national “trade
union” harnessed them to work harder to support the patriotic and
military goals of the party-state while the party’s “Strength Through
Joy” program dispensed subsidized holidays, cheap theatre tickets and so
on to win their support. If this sounds like Mao’s suppression of
China’s independent labor unions and workers’ militias in 1949, like how
his state-imposed All-China Federation of Trade Unions harnessed China’s
workers to toil for the glory of the country, the Communist Party, and
the Great Helmsman, that’s because fascism and Maoism have a lot in common.
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