http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2008-May/028790.html
Marxism] Imperialism in 1848 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yes, but you didn't compare China to Stalin's Russia. You compared it to Victorian Great Britain. wrote: I agree with you that there was imperialism in 1848, but it was not the same imperialism that Hilferding, Hobson, Lenin and Bukharin wrote about. Capitalism was arguably the system that the CM described as revolutionizing the means of production, but as Rosa Luxemburg would point out in "Accumulation of Capital", it never had that effect in the colonized country despite what Marx wrote in 1853. ^^^ CB: And of course, in China today capitalism is not being brought to China by colonizing, imperializing, racist Europeans, which takes it qualitatively out of the empirical category of Luxembourg's critique. The capitalism in China and Vietnam has self-determining control by nationally liberated ,indigenous peoples. In China ,it's capitalism with Chinese national characteristics, controlled by the Chinese state power, qualitatively different than capitalism brought to India by a British state power, and much more like capitalism brought to Britain by a British state power. In China today, it is also monopoly capitalism, finance capitalism, not pre-monopoly capitalism. Lenin, in _Imperialism_ , noted that monopoly capital prepares the ground for socialism better than capitalism of so-called free competition. Finally, it is capitalism "supervised" by a Communist Party, which declares that it is still trying to build socialism. This is a Communist Party that tried mightily to travel a road to socialism bypassing capitalism. It then frankly, honestly, with extraordinarily courageous self-criticism, assessed that it was not succeeding; basically declared that its "socialism" was not good enough; and perhaps that the material production was not sufficient to protect China from real imperialism, which had already conducted two genocidal wars on China's bordering countries, had nuked Japan, demonstrating full willingness to annihilate genocidally "yellow perils", explicitly threatened to do so, had a world ending scale of nukes pointed at that country ! I don't care that some American Marxists don't trust the Chinese Communist Party on these issues, frankly. That's a sort of leftist White Man's Burden, as far as I'm concerned; or left humanitarian/progressive intervention - Like China has to risk annihilation and continue in massssssssss poverty to uphold American Marxists' ideals. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
