More on China: A Reply to Carlos Martinez’s Reply

Carlos Martinez has posted a thoughtful, measured response to my recent article raising questions on the soundness of the “Chinese road to socialism.” I’m appreciative that he accepted my arguments as constructive and comradely. I’m happy that Martinez-- one of the most ardent defenders of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics-- is open to a respectful and frank exchange. I hope others will engage in a similar fashion.

We have several points of disagreement, both factual and theoretical. 

I challenge China’s foreign policy. I believe that the PRC’s departure from the proletarian internationalism that served as the foundation for the Communist International and for a united and fighting world Communist movement has frequently placed it on the wrong side of history. 

From the break with the Soviet Union, China has fallen short on international solidarity and opposition to the imperialist system. Driven by anti-Soviet animus, China sowed disunity among Communists and anti-imperialists and placed unnecessary obstacles in front of support for the heroic Vietnamese struggle against US imperialism (for example, instigating a break with the Japanese Communist Party). China forged an unholy rapprochement with the US leadership at a critical juncture of that struggle. The leaders valued discrediting Soviet and Cuban assistance to countries seeking liberation or advancing an independent course over advancing the struggles of those countries. China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The PRC justified these retreats from a class-based policy by adopting a non-Leninist Three World Theory that equated US imperialism with Soviet “social-imperialism.” 

With the demise of the Soviet Union, the post-Mao PRC embarked on a foreign policy devoid of class alignments and class interests. In place of constructing policy around the interests of the working class, China defines the central contradiction to be between the US and its closest allies and a vague “Global South,” a slippery concept that includes the greatest, most powerful rival to the US, other emerging economic powerhouses, and the poorest, most economically deprived countries; countries ruled by tyrants, by popular regimes, or by bourgeois democracies; and countries defiant of the US, countries allied with the US, and countries supplicant to the US. In short, there is no discernable basis-- certainly no class-based relationship-- linking these varied countries together today. Moreover-- paradoxically-- China has unqualified and economically productive relations with both sides of the “contradiction.” 

Accordingly, China is absent from international campaigns against egregious violators of even the most basic moral values, like the economic boycotting of the genocidal regime in Israel. It is not so much that PRC foreign relations are consistently malignant as it is that they are incoherent and disappointingly neutral from a class perspective.

This incoherence is witnessed in China’s lack of militant engagement with the burning international issues of the left at this moment: the Israeli genocide, the current US war with Iran, the exercise of the Monroe Doctrine in Venezuela, or the strangling of Cuba. Is this what the left accepts as fighting the imperialist system? 

Far too many on the left pretend that defanging or diminishing the influence of the US-- like dismantling the British empire-- will put an end to imperialism. For them, China’s intense competition with the US is the same as anti-imperialism. Of course, Marxists should not believe this simplification. Since Lenin’s polemics against Kautsky, Marxist-Leninists have understood that it is capitalism that gives birth to imperialism and that the surpassing or defeat of one imperialist country-- whether it be the British Empire, the Japanese Empire, the Nazis, or the US-- does not signal the end of the imperialist system. Other capitalist countries will seek dominance and risk war to achieve it. Only the ending of capitalism will bring that victory. Even long before Lenin, Marx and Engels affirmed this conclusion broadly in the Communist Manifesto:

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put to an end, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. CM (International Publishers), p. 28.

It is this unbreakable link between the existence of capitalism and the exploitation of other nations that liberal and social democratic commentators fail to see or acknowledge. Instead, they urge support for one “better” nation over another in the rivalries intrinsic to the imperialist system. Nor do the Chinese Communists, in word or deed, acknowledge this relationship. How could they, without denouncing their continued participation in the global capitalist system of commodity production and exchange?

Fifty years from now, will people remember the Chinese Communists for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers who died defending their neighbor, People’s Korea, and resisting the designs of the bloodthirsty, mad imperialist, General Douglas MacArthur? Or will they remember them for the 26 loans to Kenya totaling $6.2 billion at a more favorable rate than that offered by the World Bank or the IMF?

*****

I wholeheartedly agree with Carlos Martinez that, in the end, our difference turns on whether the ruling Communist Party of China can successfully tame capitalism in order to construct the material conditions for a socialist state without being devoured by rapacious capitalism. In my words, the question becomes: Can and should a Communist Party “manage” capitalism? In Martinez’s words, the relevant answer lies in “which class holds state power…”

The most common response to this question-- one which Martinez gives-- is to cite the period after 1921 in the Soviet Union: the period of the New Economic Program, or NEP. In that period, the Soviet leadership adopted policies that re-introduced private businesses, relatively open markets, and foreign investment into the Soviet economy. From this fact, defenders of “socialism with Chinese characters” argue for the historical legitimacy of China’s opening to the global capitalist market and its rapid expansion of capitalist production relations.

Indeed, the NEP policy enjoyed the authority of the Party’s leader, V.I. Lenin. But unstated is Lenin’s resolve to abandon it once the war-torn Soviet economy was back on its feet, understanding that NEP was transitional. NEP was accompanied by severe imbalances (the so-called scissors crisis), massive inequalities, corruption, and political instability. With the withdrawal of NEP, the Soviet Union returned to the path of a balanced growth of the productive forces under socialist relations of production. As E. H. Carr wrote in his careful study of the period:

But the idyllic picture of a predominantly peasant country painlessly evolving towards socialism under the gentle pressures of NEP was disturbed by the strained relations between the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy, whose persistence still constituted the root of the trouble. It had been comfortably believed or hoped after the twelfth party congress that the price scissors would widen no further and the situation gradually right itself. The opposite happened… By this time [October, 1923] other unmistakable signs of a grave economic crisis had begun to appear… The industrial trusts, relying on the strengths of their financial positions and of their monopoly sales organization, and on the market provided by the new ‘middle class’ which NEP had created in the towns, continued to force up prices and were content to hold back goods… The economic crisis of 1923 clearly differed from the preceding crises through which the Soviet regime had passed since 1917…

…what happened in 1923 was in this sense a crisis of NEP-- ‘the first crisis’, in Rykov’s words, ‘which has driven a wedge between workers and peasants’... A History of Soviet Russia: The Interregnum 1923-1924, pp 95-97.

The Soviet leadership moved on without NEP, adopting a five-year plan guided by central planning in 1928.

Peoples’ China has hewed to an NEP-like project for nearly half a century and now has the world’s largest or second largest economy; yet we know of no clearly defined path to the final expropriation of the expropriators or even a promise forthcoming of the definition of such a path.   

China’s NEP-like approach and Martinez’s defense of it stands on a promissory note: The Communist Party holds state power and, representing the working class, guarantees both that capitalism will not be restored and socialism is in China’s future. However, it is a promissory note, but-- by no means-- a guarantee.

Two points need to made:

1. Holding state power is not a sufficient condition for a party to stay on the socialist course, as the experience of the USSR and the Eastern European socialist countries demonstrates. While capturing state power may well be-- as many of us believe-- a necessary condition for achieving socialism, what a ruling party does while in power determines whether a country goes toward or away from a socialist future. If the Gorbachev era teaches us anything, it is that building socialism is a fragile project and a party-- even a Communist Party in power-- can go off the rails. 

2. The class partisanship of a Communist Party is not a given. Parties reflect the class structures of their respective countries at various times; parties reflect their membership composition; and parties reflect the ideological orientation of their leaders. These factors can be decisive.

In the case of China, the percentage of workers in the Communist Party has steadily declined between 2008 and 2023 (see below) as has the percentage of peasants. 

Source: Intra-party statistical communiqué of the Communist Party of China 图解：中国共产党党

Those losses have come with the gain in influence of managers and professionals among party members. Clearly, this trend would suggest that the Party, as the safeguard of the interests of the working masses, may be growing weaker. Workers represented well below 10 percent of members in 2023, and peasant membership has slipped below that of professionals and managers, a category that represents the largest employment category among those reported.

This dramatic growth of party membership by the upper strata began with the “opening” and continues in the Xi era. To be fair, under Xi’s leadership, efforts have been made to educate and integrate this stratum into party life; but, nonetheless, the shift from a party of workers and peasants to a party of managers and professionals (and “public servants”) is a disconcerting trend. Further, these trends challenge Martinez’s presumption that the Chinese Communists’ firm rule over China guarantees a socialist path. A similar trend was exhibited by the CPSU up to the dissolution of the USSR. To the question “which class holds state power?” my answer is “I’m not so sure…”

If Western accounts are to be believed, corruption has become rife within the Communist Party. To the credit of General Secretary Xi, the Party has mounted powerful campaigns against this abuse of power, employing harsh measures to even those high up in state power. This is laudatory. But the existence of widespread personal enrichment is a worrying sign of ideological rot.

*****

I share with Martinez an admiration for the late, outstanding British-Indian Marxist R. Palme Dutt. Martinez recently (June 27) spoke about Dutt’s legacy, delivering the R. Palme Dutt Memorial Lecture 2026 in London.

Dutt famously wrote a pamphlet in 1967 entitled Whither China? in which he questioned where the People’s Republic was headed, given the break with the international Communist movement and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. I have tried to follow Dutt’s approach in my own writing about People’s China, neither condemning nor endorsing the Chinese Communist Party's chosen road, but skeptically raising queries about dangerous turns and risky detours in the journey. I first expressed my fidelity to Dutt’s approach in 2011 in The Chinese Puzzle and most recently in People’s China: What Lies Ahead. 

For his lecture, Martinez does not shy away from Dutt’s critical views expressed in 1967, seven years before his death. He cleverly entitled the lecture: What would Rajani Palme Dutt Have Made of Contemporary China? 

We can’t know, but it would be helpful if we carefully attended to Dutt’s thinking.

Martinez dismisses Dutt’s critique of the Three Worlds Theory, maintaining that it continues to find resonance today, though he restates it in a form radically out of focus with current realities:

But the notion of the principal contradiction in global politics as being between oppressed and oppressor nations; and identifying the main arena of struggle as being in the Global South rather than in the industrialised North; and furthermore highlighting the possibility of establishing a modus vivendi with the ‘Second World’, or the ‘intermediate zone’, and helping to draw it away from a dying hegemonism – all that remains valid and useful for understanding the world today.

In Whither China? Dutt discredits the Three Worlds Theory or even any contemporary revisit to it:

This geographical theory of the battle between “cities” and “rural areas”, drawn from the experience of the Chinese revolution, and transferred to the world scale, plays straight into the hands of the current reactionary imperialist theories which seek to deny the Marxist class analysis of the contradiction between imperialism and socialism as the main world contradiction, and to substitute a picture of the conflict between the “haves” countries (in which they [the Chinese] include the Soviet Union in the same basket with western imperialism) and the “have not” countries. Thus this theory, while professing to give a clamorous voice to the anti-imperialist struggles of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in reality disrupts them from unity of the world socialist front which is the indispensable basis for their victory, and thereby renders them vulnerable to imperialism. Whither China?, p. 27.

Would Dutt withdraw this argument today? I think not. We live in a world where Pakistani workers or Bolivian workers have more in common with the forgotten workers of the deindustrialized North than with their native bourgeoisies or the corrupted tyrants that rule their countries. Their fate depends more on distinguishing between the various classes arrayed with and against them than in a battle of their respective bourgeoisies for a more favored place in the imperialist hierarchy, as the Three Worlds Theory would suggest.

Dutt was an uncompromising partisan for socialism, as a look at his many writings demonstrate. And he makes his views on what constitutes socialism crystal clear. In a series of lectures collected under the title, Problems of Contemporary History, he writes:

For the innocent victims of this terminology game, who may be confused by the supposed identity of large-scale monopoly capitalism and socialism, the simplest rule of thumb test to judge the economy of a country is to enquire whether there is a Stock Exchange. There are Stock Exchanges in Stockholm, in London, in Paris and in New York. But there is no Stock Exchange in Moscow or Pekin or Warsaw or Prague or Budapest. In other words, the economy of the Western countries, however elaborate the social democratic dressing and facade, is based on stocks and shares; that is, on the private ownership of the means of production; on incomes derived from ownership; on rent, interests, and profits drawn on the basis of ownership by a minority class from the labors of the entire population. In socialist countries there is no need of a Stock Exchange…

To a socialist audience such an explanation may seem elementary to the point of childishness. But to the general Western reading public, especially the bourgeois intelligentsia, mystified by reactionary apologists (often professing to hold “left” opinions and regarding themselves as far to the left of reactionary out-of-date Communists) this game of terminology has been carried to such an extent that an elementary explanation of this type is necessary. Problems of Contemporary History, p. 76.

Sadly, today, stock exchanges are a reality in Moscow, Beijing, Warsaw, and Prague-- a testament to the retreat of real-existing-socialism. However, the game is far from over. The setbacks to socialism are more than matched by the decline of a decadent, dysfunctional capitalism. But our setbacks should not lower our expectations for the emancipatory, liberatory power of socialism. We should never simply declare victory and accept what we have and call it socialism. 

On the other hand, we must concede that others may see a different road to our goal and pursue it in different ways.

Like the great Marxist, R. Palme Dutt, we should not be afraid to challenge those approaches. All ideological perspectives, political programs, and policies should be rigorously put to the test of reason and history. 

Though Dutt subjected the Chinese revolutionary project to sharp and-- I believe, justifiable-- criticism, he made an important qualification to be kept in mind:

...our international duty, irrespective of any difference on policy or tactical questions with the Chinese leadership within the international communist movement, is to maintain solidarity with China and the Chinese people and the Chinese revolution against the aggression of U.S. imperialism. Whither China?, p.47-48. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Review: Requiem for French Theory--Transatlantic Funeral Dirge in a Marxist Key

During the 1960s and 1970s, it was an oft-repeated quip that the European left was long on theory and short on practice, while the North American left was strong on action, but allergic to theory.

In West Germany, Italy, and France, young leftists would often passionately debate theoretical questions deep into the night, while seldom coming to a common commitment to action the next day.

Their youthful US counterparts--revived after the retreat from High McCarthyism-- counted on spontaneous action and a firm commitment to common, inherited political values rather than the ideas buried in deep theoretical tracts.

But those observations were far from completely true. The often student-driven US New Left developed a thirst for a broader, deeper explanation of the injustices that they were rejecting. Many of those committed to action turned to left classics-- quite often a reconsidered Marx-- and others favored a wave of West European radical-oriented thinkers.

It is the rise and importation to the US of one particularly influential “brand” of European theory to which Aymeric Monville and Gabriel Rockhill’s new book is devoted. In Requiem for French Theory: Transatlantic Funeral Dirge in a Marxist Key (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2026, $22.00, 168 pp.), Monville and Rockhill show that what became known as “French Theory” in the US was both a calculated interruption of the rediscovery and study of Marxism and an intellectual trend hostile to anti-capitalist and socialist currents.

John Bellamy Foster’s excellent introduction (to be found in the March, 2026 issue of Monthly Review as well) locates D-Day for the invasion of French Theory as October 18, 1966 at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. On that day, a sizable number of French philosophers and social critics arrived to attend a three-day conference. This seemingly innocuous event introduced a veritable menu of acclaimed, celebrated (in France), radical-poseurs to an emerging left-intellectual crowd hungry for something new and anti-establishment. This moment arguably gave birth to the wave of postmodernist thought that subsequently swept through elite universities. Bellamy Foster gives due discredit to French Theory’s unfortunate affinity toward the fascistic influences of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

Despite the sales-pitch of being radical, this traveling snake-oil show bore a strong antipathy to Marxism. They portrayed Marxism as staid, passé, or simply evil, and of having little relevance today. This was a sure-fire way to be welcomed into a US academic, intellectual community weaned on anti-Communism.

Foster calls on a semi-insider, Frederic Jameson, to affirm that French Theory-- despite its once celebrity-status in the French media-- was then on the wane in France just as US graduate students were enthusiastically drinking the Kool-Aid.

*****

Requiem for French Theory is organized in two parts and a brief conclusion: 1. An exposure of the origins, evolution, sponsorship, and the service of French Theory toward the goal of undermining Marxism and 2. an appeal to revitalize Marxism by shedding the moth-eaten garment of French Theory and embracing the traditions of authentic Marxist theory and practice. 

The book employs a question-and-answer structure, with Jennifer Ponce de León asking intelligent, challenging questions that invite equally intelligent and insightful answers. The three engage in a kind of Socratic trialogue. 

Both Monville and Rockhill speak to the legitimacy of French Theory as insiders. Both have higher degrees from the cathedrals of French Theory and have known its leading bishops intellectually as well as personally.

Monville and Rockhill employ a semi-division of labor in their assault on the academic fortress of French Theory. Monville offers argument after argument against the intellectual roots of French Theory, its axioms, and its content. He meets French Theory directly as a Marxist philosopher. 

Rockhill, on the other hand, also explains French Theory as a particularly malicious player in the multinational idea industry (Rockhill calls it the “knowledge industry,” but I recoil from this characterization because I was schooled in the philosophical tradition that argues that “knowledge” is a success-term!). Rockhill meets French Theory as a Marxist political economist. From this perspective, Rockhill chronicles French Theory’s promotion in elite US universities, the numerous publishing houses that sell it, and most importantly, the numerous foundations that put sums of money behind the intellectual infrastructure that supported French Theory in France and its importation to the Anglophone world. 

Rockhill’s industrial model of intellectual production, a model that seeks to show who and what are rewarded with academic success and a public soapbox, challenges the legitimacy of those who made the Faustian choice to harness their careers and reputation to French Theory. His model stands on the shoulders of Marx’s famous observation that:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. (The German Ideology)

Understandably, this approach has rankled many. Just as Rockhill’s earlier assault on the Frankfort school-- a Euro-American collection of philosophers and social critics who emphasize cultural critique-- angered many academics heavily invested in Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, this new book will likely generate a strong backlash to his charge that French Theory owes its popularity, at least in part, to its sponsorship by and compatibility with wealth and power. fn.1

Monville, Rockhill, and Ponce de León fervently argue for a return to Marx. They defend the Communist tradition that shaped the course of almost the entire twentieth century. They defend real-existing-socialism, fully aware of its failings and missteps, but embracing the great achievements won in the years since the Bolshevik Revolution. 

The authors cite the inestimable Michael Parenti:

To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. (Quoted from Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)

Monville and Rockhill cleverly turn Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach on its head by charging that advocates of French Theory and their ilk believe that “Communists have only changed the world, in various ways (with negative, even disastrous, consequences); the point, however, is to interpret it!”

Rockhill states plainly what is at stake: “This is no longer--if it ever was-- a time to indulge in the theoretical games of the petty-bourgeois intellectual.” Monville adds: “It’s up to readers to have the last word, as referees. Put simply, that’s the rule [in poker]: at some point you have to lay your cards on the same table, because there is only one game, one table, one world.”

*****

Requiem for French Theory is an important book. It is an element of a larger project-- a long-overdue project-- of recognizing how ruling classes throw ideological sand in the eyes of the most militant, advanced workers and their class allies. The project exposes how institutions protective of the interests of capitalism (including the security services) devote vast sums of money to promote ideas counter to those ideas that empower workers. The project calls out the enablers-- institutions and influencers-- that hustle theories, perspectives, and critiques meant to misdirect, mislead, or simply muddy the ideological waters. It also exposes the witting and unwitting consumers-- activists and academics-- of these tainted products, who should know better.

Those consumers-- the career-oriented academics looking for an iconoclastic book theme, the young students seeking the next “hip” deep thinker, or the many earnestly searching desperately outside the mainstream for new answers-- are seduced by these snake-oil merchants by, in Rockhill’s Leninesque words:

...a heavy dose of pseudo-poetic obscurantism, empty phrase-mongering, signature neologisms, interrogative skepticism devoid of denotative statements, and a proliferation of bourgeois cultural references in order to kick enough discursive dirt into readers‘ eyes that they might have trouble immediately recognizing your radical discourse for what it is: an idealist theoretical practice grounded in the petty-bourgeois politics of a magical third way, which is devoid of rigorous materialist analysis and a grounding in real collective struggles.

Unfortunately, this imported nonsense masking as deep thinking intimidates many innocent victims afraid to call it out for what it is. Similarly, the credibility of so-called Analytical Marxism-- another misdirection-- rests on a profound fear of and inexperience with symbolic representation, giving its “findings” an undeserved legitimacy. Where obscurantism and mystification are French Theory’s secret sauce, symbols and equations serve the same function in Analytical Marxism.

To the objection that exposing the forces behind French Theory and its ilk is conspiratorial: why would it be surprising that those with power and wealth would use their resources to misdirect and delegitimize movements and programs that challenge power and wealth? Even the most dedicated mainstream rational-choice practitioner would insist that slandering Marxism-Leninism and offering toothless “radical” alternatives to Marxism are obviously the rational and self-interested actions for capitalist elites to take. Not only is it logical, but the rise of fascism between the World Wars factually demonstrates the lengths to which a ruling class-- desperately afraid of Marxism-- will go.

Exposing these machinations is exactly what is needed at a time when the revitalization of the Marxist left is most urgent.

Rockhill, Monville, and Ponce de León are leaders in this project, pioneered by non-Marxists like Frances Stonor Saunders and Hugh Wilford. As insiders in one of the more influential intellectual schools and as Marxists, Monville and Rockhill are uniquely positioned to see how “enemy” philosophies in the idea industry function to undermine social advances. 

Their work might be strengthened by linking the effort to undermine Marxism today to its historical antecedent in the post-war anti-Communist hysteria, as John McCumber does with his explanation of the practice of US professional philosophy (Time in the Ditch).

Also, it is not clear why the authors feel compelled to locate the sins of French Theory within a conceptual framework that they call “Western Marxism.” Clearly, it emerges from their justified respect for the late Italian philosopher, Domenico Losurdo, who continued to defend Marxism when most of his colleagues scurried like rats to dissociate from Marx in the post-Soviet era. However, Losurdo’s gathering of the various threads of recent history’s revisionism and opportunism under the geographically limiting and misleading rubric of “Western” Marxism seems unnecessary. Opportunism is opportunism; it doesn’t need a new, and somewhat ill-fitting, name.

Ponce de León, Monville, and Rockhill (and Bellamy Foster) have embarked on a righteous crusade to remove the ideological detours blocking the march to socialism. Their research and writing move us closer to getting a fair hearing for the powerful ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

1. A review of Rockhill's earlier book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, by Richard Gilman-Opalsky in the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, received numerous irate commentaries in this normally placid and civil online journal.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Should We Discuss the Potholes on China’s Road to Socialism?

One can admire the Chinese revolution as one of the great setbacks to the imperialist and colonial undertakings of Europe, Japan, and the US. One can hail the extraordinary sacrifices and deep dedication of members of the Chinese Communist Party to both liberate the peoples of China from foreign domination and advance the people toward a better life.  

At the same time, one can recognize the errors, the missteps, and the failed campaigns that unsurprisingly went with establishing and developing the New China.

As with other previous revolutionary projects like the Americas and France -- in their times-- and the Soviet Republic, the European Peoples’ Democracies, Peoples’ Democratic Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam in our time, Peoples’ China’s fate will and must be decided by its own people and their leading forces. And we are obligated to defend their right to make that choice, whether we agree with it or not.

Those of us who are on the outside looking in need to demonstrate humility and reserve in assessing the progress of the Chinese revolution. We should make neither hasty critiques nor unqualified defenses. We should not rush to judgement on a job that is, by all accounts, unfinished. Even as late as February of 1952, Stalin was reminding us that commodity production still existed in the Soviet Union. At the same time, the goal of Communists remained, in Engels’ words from Anti-Duhring as cited by Stalin, “the seizure of the means of production by society” and putting “an end to commodity production, and therewith to the domination of the product over the producer.”

While conceding that the Soviet Union had yet to secure this aim, Stalin was unequivocal about how the Soviet Union and Soviet Communists pursued this goal: 

The specific role of Soviet government was due to two circumstances: first, that what Soviet government had to do was not to replace one form of exploitation by another, as was the case in earlier revolutions, but to abolish exploitation altogether; second, that in view of the absence in the country of any ready-made rudiments of a socialist economy, it had to create new, socialist forms of economy, "starting from scratch," so to speak. Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR [my emphasis]

For Stalin, the socialist project in the USSR was to hinge on eliminating exploitation and developing socialist economic forms.

Undoubtedly, there are many ways to target these objectives. Every country embarking on the revolutionary path faces a different set of circumstances determined by unique historical, geographical, national, and social features. These circumstances foreclose a “one-size-fits-all” program to secure socialism. Yet, ending capitalist exploitation-- the buying and selling of labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value-- and developing new non-capitalist forms of economic life stand as the common goals of the Communists. 

As Marx and Engels attest in Part III of The Communist Manifesto, there are many kinds of “socialisms.” Those “socialisms” compete with the socialism of the Communists, where the “distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.” (The Communist Manifesto [my emphasis])

It is significant that the grand debates raging over whether The People's Republic of China is socialist or capitalist so rarely invoke the “exploitation of the many by the few.” Reaching for relevance, the Western left-- Marxist and non-Marxist-- rarely couch the struggle for socialism in the language of exploitation, despite its centrality in the classics.

Consequently, the debate over China frequently has one side celebrating the impressive alleviation of extreme poverty in China’s recent history, while the other side decries the vast wealth and income inequality produced over the last decades. Both claims are true, seemingly leading to contradictory conclusions. 

A recent Jacobin article takes a different tact, provocatively arguing that “the greatest stretch of growth and poverty alleviation in human history [achieved by China]” was “made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions of workers.” Daniel Cheng’s article is a review of a book by Xiao Hai allegedly recounting his experience working in five different Chinese enterprises. The book's unabashedly anecdotal character-- vividly brutal, yet only one man’s experience-- may carry little weight in the larger picture. 

But even the most fervent friend of “Socialist China” will not deny that millions of rural Chinese migrated to the cities and special economic zones to work under similar harsh, capitalist conditions of exploitation. 

Certainly, the accumulation of the vast sums of capital by an emergent Chinese capitalist class (as well as by welcomed foreign capitalists) contributed greatly to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy. 

Undoubtedly, a “rich” China might better afford to provide a humane economic floor to a more and more stratified Chinese society. And surely, under the leadership of a seasoned Communist Party, the provision of such a guaranteed standard of living would be more likely than under a regime dominated by hidebound monopoly capitalists.

But in today’s China, the exploitation of the many by the few remains-- after nearly fifty years-- a central driving force in the country’s economic advance. Cheng’s article reminds us of that fact.

Into this conversation steps Carlos Martinez, a leading leftist supporter of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the direction Chinese Communists embraced after 1978. His response to Cheng argues that “[e]xploitation must be contextualized.” Rather than addressing the fact that Chinese socialism encourages the exploitation of workers under capitalist conditions of labor, Martinez suggests that the ends justify the means; suffering capitalist exploitation will result ultimately in gains for the Chinese people. This may seem to some to be an uncomfortable counterpart to the Western capitalist promise that growth will “trickle down” to the least advantaged or that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” After all, life expectancy under capitalism in the UK has more than doubled since 1800 and average male height has increased by four inches. Caloric intake, access to ever-advancing medical care, improved sanitation, public goods, etc. all benefitted the people, while the UK working class continued to be profoundly exploited, generating a greater concentration of capital into the hands of monopoly corporations and the obscenely rich. The capitalist development of productive forces generally enables an increase in the relative costs of successfully reproducing labor power extracted from a restive, organized, and resistant working class.

Enduring exploitation has never been simply a matter of the classic Reagan-era rubric of “are you better off now than you were before?”. The recognition of a new meaning to exploitation-- labor exploitation-- traces its origins to early European industrialization and its adoption of capitalist social relations. Even before Marx and Engels, observers were cognizant of the injustices of capitalist exploitation, of using humans as instruments of capital accumulation, of compensating workers according to their sustainable cost of reproduction, of forcing them into the universe of commodities.

Conditions of labor were brutal and difficult in early Soviet industrialization as well. Life was hard. But the conditions were not exploitative because all of the wealth produced by working people promised a better future for everyone. Some of the accumulated wealth may have been squandered, misdirected, even stolen, but it was not systematically and methodically directed to the few and denied to the many. Sacrifice was voluntary because workers believed that it was destined to help the many. Martinez cynically seems to dismiss this experience as “an imagined socialist utopia.”

One easily forgets some of China’s early successes while following a model more congruent with the experiences in the Soviet Union and the Peoples’ Democracies. For example: 

The success of early land reform meant that at the founding of the PRC in 1949, China could credibly claim that for the first time since the late Qing period that it had succeeded in feeding one fifth of the world's population with only 7% of the world's cultivable land… By 1953, China had rapidly recovered its economy…  Its industrial outputs grew by 31% in 1955 and a further 10% in 1956… The collectivization process began slowly but accelerated in 1955 and 1956. In 1957 about 93.5 percent of all farm households had joined advanced producers' cooperatives. Although the agriculture sector only received 6.2% of the budget during the first five-year plan, agricultural gross outputs increased by 24.7%. The industrial working class grew from 6 million to 10 million.  Industrial work places organized as danwei (work units) provided subsidized housing, permanent jobs, education, and medical care.  In the early 1950s, China established a social security system covering workers at SOEs [state-owned enterprises], collectively owned enterprises, government administrative units (such as Ministries) and operative units (such as public universities and state-owned hospitals) ... Throughout the 1950s, a major challenge for the large-scale economic modernization was the relative lack of managerial talent.  Promotion of ordinary workers to management roles was intended to address this challenge while also serving the larger political goal of placing the proletariat in control. 

Thus, by including some ideas inspired from earlier Communist experiences and with help from the socialist community, People’s China achieved remarkable success in its first decade.

Unfortunately, this path was interrupted by The Great Leap Forward, an excessively idealist departure in the direction of what Martinez might more appropriately view as “an imagined socialist utopia.” Despite the disaster of the GLF (combined with a brutal famine), growth was restored in its wake, only to be disrupted again by the equally chaotic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and beyond. 

The Communist Party’s ultra-leftist, voluntarist excesses of the time derailed the economic successes fostered by rational, reality-based projects. The notion that a collective will could overcome all material limitations-- a notion alien to Marxism-- led the Party to many policy dead ends, while exhausting the enthusiasm for socialism among many. 

Accompanying these twists and turns was a break with the Soviet Union, a break resulting in closer cooperation with US imperialism, friction and actual aggression against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and a shameful alliance with South African apartheid in the anti-colonial wars against Portugal’s African colonies. 

The Chinese Cold War anti-Soviet posture and the metaphysical romance of creating socialism by sheer collective will appealed to far too many in the New Left and with other anti-Communist “leftists.”

With the death of Mao, the Party leadership made an extremely sharp turn away from ultra-leftist adventurism, embracing the Deng capitalist-friendly reforms in 1978. Pragmatism replaced wild idealism.

When Martinez insists on “contextualizing” exploitation in the People’s Republic, he should be as enthusiastic in contextualizing the turn toward allowing capitalism in through the front door. It has its historical roots in the rejection of the mechanical, shock-troop socialism of the Mao era that delayed a planned, efficient march to a society without exploitation. Despite the chaos of the era, the PRC enjoyed an average growth rate of 6.2% from 1952 until 1978, according to Lin Chun in The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, an accomplishment achieved without relying on capitalist relations of production.

Martinez seizes upon Cheng’s comparison of emergent capitalism in nineteenth-century Manchester and the more recent emergent Chinese capitalism in Shenzhen. Indeed, it is an imperfect comparison in many ways. Cheng would have been better served by comparing the number of billionaires in Shenzhen (132) to the number of billionaires in New York City (146). There were no billionaires in Shenzhen in 1978. Billionaires in both places are the direct or indirect product of capitalist exploitation. From a Marxist perspective, what is the social utility of a billionaire? How does the existence of billionaires advance the cause of socialism in China or anywhere else?

Rather than contextualizing exploitation, Martinez succeeds in relativizing and-- consequently-- rationalizing the exploitation of the many by the few. He urges a comparison between today’s China and low-wage countries in the Global South. Indeed, the same changes in the mobility of capital, lowering of export and transportation costs, and trade liberalization that allowed China to offer up millions of low-wage workers to manufacturing is now shifting manufacturing to even lower-wage countries. Ironically, many Chinese companies are now taking advantage of these lower costs and shifting production to these new “Chinas.” In a race to the bottom, workers will always lose, as they have even outside of the global economy. Few on the left would celebrate the "prosperity" of the US South, when jobs migrated from the unionized North to non-union cheaper labor areas.

What Martinez fails to understand or chooses to ignore is that capitalism has a unique, focused logic that accumulates vast sums of capital into the hands of the few. Marx’s proclamation in Capital that accumulation is “Moses and the Prophets” is made to vividly, emphatically acknowledge that accumulation is a never-ending process. The existence of masses of capital in private hands commands that the owners of capital invest, reinvest, and reinvest again to grow their capital. China’s billionaires cannot escape that logic.

From 1978 on, the imperative of capital accumulation was expressed through investments in manufacturing and the turning of China into an enormous commodity-exporting engine. As capital has accumulated, China has become-- following the logic of capital-- more and more an exporter of capital to capital-poor countries, accumulating assets, financing projects, and expanding demand for its products. 

Whether or not China’s Belt and Road Initiative was intentionally meant for this purpose, it well serves as a vehicle for the exportation of the accumulated capital of China’s billionaires. 

As capitalist apologists have faithfully maintained since the dawn of the era of imperialism, global trade, the “reasonable” export of capital, and “a rules-based international order” are supposedly the road to mutual prosperity. Today, the Chinese government is the leading exponent of this “Moses and the Prophets” doctrine, while the rest of the capitalist world is increasingly engaging in protectionism, tariffs, and sanctions to cling to a tenuous hold on its place in a global economy more and more dominated by China and other Global South success stories.

Is this class struggle in today’s world or something else entirely? Is the clash for market share, stock market success, and capital accumulation a twenty-first-century class battle or a revisit of twentieth-century great-power rivalry for markets and spheres of interest? It is not enough to answer these questions by pointing to the glitzy cities, the incredible fast trains, and stunning technology of China, without discussing the status of the 400,000,000 workers and their relationship to Chinese private capital. 

Keen observers have noted China’s unexpected behavior in recent international conflicts, behavior more in step with a capitalist country, a country putting economic interests ahead of political principle. China has maintained strong economic ties with Israel during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, speaking with a loud oppositional voice at international forums, but actively doing next to nothing to stop Israel or break the blockade of Gaza. Similarly, China’s reaction to an unprovoked attack on Iran-- a BRICS partner-- by the US and Israel is best described as fence-sitting (apart from finding ways to continue economic activity with all parties). For arguably the most powerful potential counterforce to US imperialism to step aside from serious resistance to a rabid US administration is not what many of us would expect from a socialist country. 

With Cuba facing an extortionate, existential crisis imposed by the empowered North American gusanos, China’s response has been less than inspired.

Establishing a useful balance sheet on China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” may prove to be a daunting, even misguided challenge for Western leftists, but blindness to legitimate questions like those raised by Daniel Cheng and others serves neither the cause of the Chinese working class nor exploited workers in other countries.

After nearly fifty years of riding the capitalist tiger, China’s chosen road to socialism remains foggy and fraught with danger. Nonetheless, it is China’s road. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

 

A Peek Behind the Curtain?

David J. Rush, 49, a senior CIA executive was arrested on May 19, a day after FBI agents searched his home in suburban Washington, DC. Charges were filed against Rush in Federal Court on May 20.

On May 27, a week after the court filings, the FBI and the CIA released a joint statement “explaining” the raid and arrest. The local DC media and the national media circulated the story on May 27 and 28. The interim week gave the CIA plenty of opportunity to carefully construct a credible account. 

Nonetheless, what emerged was wildly bizarre. 

First, this 17-year veteran of the CIA possessed 303 one-kilogram solid gold bars, totaling nearly 700 pounds and worth $40,000,000, depending on the exchange rate. In addition, he had $2,000,000 in cash, and 30-plus luxury watches, including many coveted Rolexes, discovered in his storage area.

Second, the announced charges included lying to the CIA about his educational and military records and time-card fraud, namely fraudulently claiming 744 hours of benefits totaling around $77,000. While acknowledging his possessing vast sums of booty, the federal filing claimed that the legitimacy of his possession of the assets was still undetermined.

Subsequently, a Federal prosecutor added that Rush’s deception extended to posing as a doctor, a lie that escaped CIA security checkers? 

The august New York Times noted that the booty collected by Rush originated with the CIA, but expressed no alarm that he was not cited for his possession of a massive horde of government assets. The writers did not seem terribly curious about how a government employee could acquire such a bounty.

Indeed, the lack of media curiosity was… curious. Normally, a juicy story like the checking out of well over $40,000,000 of taxpayer wealth would dominate the news cycle; but, strangely, Rush’s mystery largely disappeared. A casual search of “David Rush” produced little mainstream interest until June 3, nearly a week after the initial flurry. NBC News-- which seems to retain the most interest in the case-- noted that the allegedly lyin’-thievin’ CIA official had been appointed as CIA liaison to a super-secret Pentagon submarine program by the number-two official at the War Department, establishing his importance in the CIA hierarchy.

As interest resurfaces this week, we are told by the courts that Rush must remain in jail, pretrial, because he is a “master manipulator” and a flight risk. Allegedly, he is being kept in solitary confinement. We are also told-- again by the inquisitive NBC team-- that “several senior officials” have been “put on administrative leave” over the Rush case.

Meanwhile, the CIA was busy throwing sand in the public’s eyes. In the aftermath of the federal court filings, the New York Post cites former CIA officer R.M. Gerecht, who scoffs at the possible use of the gold as bribery, payoff, or influence-peddling by the CIA: “People don’t realize how heavy money is. It was regularly a problem for large payments – particularly if you’re trying to do it clandestinely. You could just weigh yourself down with cash. Gold – you’d need mules…” Diamonds, he suggests, are far better because they are lighter.

Sure. That’s why convicted former Senator Menendez received his ill-begotten bribes in gold bars?

Anticipating that citizens might be wondering how anyone could so easily check out nearly a third of a ton of gold bars from the CIA’s supervision, Gerecht reminds us: “It’s not British banking. You don’t have multiple lines of people checking things. The agency is a system that operates largely on trust.” Is he referring to an agency that frequently administers polygraphs to its employees? Is he referring to the agency that has an entire branch of counterintelligence devoted to spying on its spies?

Before curiosity could take hold on where Rush’s booty might have been destined, the CIA-friendly Washington Post jumped into the breach. Throwing Rush under the bus, WaPo contended that he had concocted a fake program, duping colleagues and amassing the hoard for a secret “continuity of government” program to keep the government functioning if disaster strikes. How gold bars, cash, and Rolex watches create continuity is not explained in any satisfactory manner. 

Like Captain Louis Renault in the movie Casablanca, members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are “shocked, shocked that chicanery is going on in the CIA.” The shocking thing is that their “oversight” is so lacking.

To anyone familiar with the actual history of the CIA-- and not the fictional, obsequious CBS TV fantasy-- this is a rare opportunity to dig into its current operation. With a week passing between the arrest and the news release, and with another week afforded the CIA by a compliant, interest-deficient media, the CIA has had plenty of time to create a less provocative narrative, a credible back story. Instead, we have a CIA humiliation.

What do we know? And what can we surmise?

We know that David J. Rush was a bagman for the CIA. That is, he was trusted enough in a highly compartmentalized agency to deliver “incentives” to agents, collaborators, clients, and government officials. A CIA analyst, a field agent, or a low-level manager cannot casually walk into the CIA’s vaults, sign a card, and leave with tens of millions of dollars of gold bullion. That is not possible. The talking heads of the media know this, but they are remarkably silent.

We know that the CIA has an elaborate, thorough security system that researches potential recruits to employ, checks on its employees’ spending habits and lifestyles, and subjects its employees at all levels to frequent polygraphs. The agency prides itself in this diligence. The likelihood that Rush’s multiple, many-faceted lies escaped their scrutiny is virtually nil. That suggests that his background was purposefully overlooked, was an operational ruse, a setup, or some other spook deception. Again, we have a tongue-tied commentariat.

We know that the CIA distractions willingly repeated by the friendly media are absurd and simply meant to thwart speculation on what Rush-- the bagman-- intended to do with the gold, cash, and watches. 

The idea that the CIA-- known to acquire banks and its own commercial airlines-- would be reluctant or unable to deliver hefty, bulky bars of gold to “persuade” or “influence” others is ludicrous. Who needs mules when you own speedboats, airplanes, and helicopters? Gold bars are easily convertible everywhere. The idea that diamonds-- tradeable in limited, specialized markets-- would be preferable for CIA use is silly. The CIA is the world’s greatest influencer-- they find a way.

The story that the New York Times and WaPo are peddling is hilarious. A “continuity of government” program-- a contingency plan meant to secure governance in the face of nuclear war, a natural catastrophe, etc.-- would never be a “black box” project outside of the approval of the top CIA leadership or funded by gold bullion. There are ample contractors, trusted by the CIA and happily funded by secret contracts, who are paid conventionally, and not with gold bars or watches. Could Rush sell his bogus program to his bosses?

While we may never know, it is not unreasonable to assume that $40,000,000 in gold bullion found with Roth is coup money. That is to say, the CIA accountants would not allocate that much money to a lesser project like securing a UN vote, locating a Marxist rebel, or setting up oppositional media. Those goals could be achieved with much less money. But $40,000,000 would get much more: a shot at regime change, betraying leaders, buying military chiefs, establishing alternate unions and political parties, etc. Rush was up to something big with bullion. The Rolexes are for something small like clearing customs or small-scale smuggling. 

In this case, something went awry with an active CIA program.

Fascinating questions linger. Why did the CIA involve the FBI-- an often-rival agency-- in the Roth affair? Other potentially embarrassing foul-ups have been ably handled and disposed of quietly without interagency engagement. Could the clumsy handling of this matter reflect underlying policy differences or rivalries that exploded in exposing and sacrificing Rush?

Given our subservient capitalist media, we may never know…

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com