On 11/18/06, John Gulick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
1) Many protestors in the PRC – especially idled SOE workers in their 40's and 50's, but also some unofficial peasant associations – explicitly frame their grievances in terms of the disappearance of socialist entitlements and the loss of an egalitarian ethos. There is thus an implicit demand among an unmeasured segment of ordinary people for some combination of a "return to (a) state socialist past... or progress to a new democratic socialist future." Scholars ranging from Elizabeth Perry (fairly mainstream academic Sinologist) to Robert Weil (reconstructed Maoist) have documented this. This sentiment may not be universal, coherent, or in possession of an independent organizational vehicle, but it is unmistakably there.
One can say that there is an implicit demand in many workers' and peasants' struggles for progress to a new democratic socialist future, in China or anywhere else for that matter. That sustains our faith in socialism. But in my posting I was looking at here and now, plus the near future, at the level of practical politics: absence of a coherent national movement presenting a viable alternative to what the current power elite in China offer.
Did the rural populace in the 1940's flock to the leadership of the Red Army because they believed in the principles of Maoism, or because in the liberated zones they sought effective refuge from usury, rack-rent, crooked administration, collaboration with the Japanese killing machine, and so on?
Is there anything comparable to the Red Army to which the discontented populace can flock today? Is one likely to emerge soon?
3) Some of the demands which you yourself classify as "economistic" are anything but:
By economistic I mean the absence of the tribune of the oppressed at the national level, giving coherence to myriad struggles based on myriad problems and striving to present a structural alternative to capitalist development.
Why not just contend that China's ascent to the status of economic colossus is a net gain because fostering international alliances against US empire is more politically important than moving toward democratic socialism at home? Why all the tendentious assertions about the complacent social consciousness of the PRC's popular classes?
I'm not saying the PRC's popular classes are particularly complacent in comparison to popular classes in other nations where myriad struggles also exist. I'm saying that the former are in many respects like the latter in grievances and aspirations, and higher growth rates in China than most other nations, which create a large number of winners as well as losers in China, make it unlikely that individual struggles will become a structural alternative to capitalism in China while economic growth lasts. In short, my argument is for realism. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
