--- 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
