--- Message Received ---
From: Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 19:54:53 -0600
Subject: [PEN-L:21620] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: reform and rev

Carrol I like your thinking here but you probably will not like my addition to it.

Carrol:
"If I had to guess, I would say that the bulk of the support for the
revolution was not socialist but that aspect of it expressed in Mao's
first speech on Tenyan (w?) Square: China has stood up. There was a
socialist streak there, and I still regard Mao as a major Marxist
thinker that we can learn from if we abstract correctly, but the
essential drive was Chinese patriotism."

Not only the nature of the support but also the whole nature of what was in fact 
historically possible.


I rate the Chinese revolution a great success, but not for the socialism that it 
achieved, but for the very situation that China now finds itself (oddly enough).

My superficial understanding of the history of China does not give this important 
place a lot of choice in what needed to be done. No Chinese revolution would have been 
inconcievable, China would have developed into warring states, mass never-ending 
famine, and the people into virtual slaves of capital and the most reactionary 
landlords. 

Whatever troubles now beset it, China has stood up and a significant proportion of 
humankind have a better basis for a real future then they would have had under any 
other imagined circumstances.

In this both the "mistakes" of the past (recent and further back) at least take place 
within a country with a significant working class and a modern infrastructure which 
however ill developed is at least present.

The proletarianisation of China (still with a large peasant population) despite all 
that has happened is a mark of its historical success as a revolution. 

The socialist road of China could never have been and in my understand is not 
presently anything other then state-capitalism taking on a rather impossible task and 
achieving much of it. The character of the state, derived from Chinese history has 
also developed because of this.

At this point of time the very process of China standing up has exhausted the 
possiblities of its birth. The problems it is now faced with exceed the ability of 
this country to continue down the path which got it to this point in the first place. 
Where is the future of China, well to put no gloss on this questioin at all, it is in 
its integration with world capitalism where new contradictions will arise and a new 
struggles emerge.

At least China now is able to participate in this as a viable state, this would have 
been denied them if history had not taken the course it did. The Chinese revolution 
was a necessity, but if the good things about are not to be washed away altogether it 
is up to us outside China to wrought those changes that can produce a better world.

China's CP, state and society in general, does not have at this moment the resources 
to do otherwise than it is, its position is peculiar and derives from the particular 
role the state has played in the past and is quite incapable of playing any longer.

If the state and all that this presently entails collapses China will be a mess, 
however the state in order to maintain itself is also caught up in the contradictions 
of capital (from which it never was free), meanwhile the working class finds itself in 
struggle against the state and capital and is all too aware of the peculiar position 
China is in at the moment.

If international state to state relations could become more "civilisied" the Chinese 
state would have more room for development, if the world economy could be forced to 
encounter the world working class as an emerging power, the workers of China would 
find more room to move.

It is not that China is socialist that is the question, but how China typifies the 
condition of the world as a whole (as it should seeing one third of humanity lies 
within its borders). China is not a question which calls for any singular views on 
what should and can be done, rather it points to the criticial importance of 
internationalism as a focus of struggle and the role that states and the working class 
must play in this.

The disintegration of China (real possiblity) would make the dissolution of the USSR 
look like a minor hiccup. If one third of human kind is faced with barbarianism, the 
rest may not be too far behind. China is our barometer of world social health, and it 
is a contradictory one.


Greg Schofield
Perth Australia

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