On 11/17/06, Martin Hart-Landsberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Many people continue to celebrate the Chinese experience, largely on the basis of the country's rapid and sustained industrialization and export successes. Some still call it a socialist success story, often on the basis of Chinese party claims or Chinese foreign policy initiatives which are seen as supporting Venezuela, Cuba, or other countries under US pressure. Unfortunately very few people have actually looked at the accumulation process underpinning Chinese growth, in particular its consequences for working people. Paul Burkett and I have been doing some work on this, and I want to share some information that I think raises important questions about how we understand success and socialism.
The ILO statistics shows that China has joined the rest of the capitalist third world, with a large and growing informal sector, which is an important and noteworthy fact. However, the paradox of China is this: it is China's workers and peasants' sacrifices that enable third-world countries like Venezuela, Cuba, etc. to resist US hegemony in particular and the power of the global North in general; China could have theoretically offered a few of the same foreign policy initiatives as a socialist power, but, in that case, China wouldn't be all that useful for third-world countries like Venezuela, Cuba, etc. (except for North Korea), for it is precisely China as an emerging _capitalist_ power guided by the nationalist power elite that is useful to such third-world countries, due to China's large and growing market, accumulating technological expertise, and source of investment capital (none of which socialist China could have made available to the rest of the world), all functioning as alternatives to the US-led global North. It's like another paradox: the Iraq War, which has and continues to sacrifice millions of Iraqis, has turned out to be good for Venezuela, Cuba, etc., leading to what the New York Times deplores as "The Age of Impunity" (12 October 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/opinion/12thu1.html>), potentially the beginning of the end of US hegemony. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
