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

We Must Not Lose Revolutionary Cuba

Tiny Cuba-- the Jewel of the Caribbean, the Isle of Freedom, the Beacon for the Oppressed-- is clinging by a thread to its independence and its vision. Revolutionary Cuba-- defiant of the world’s most powerful imperialist center-- suffers from a brutal, ever-tightening blockade imposed by the US ruling class. Fidel’s Cuba-- a bastion of socialism and proletarian internationalism-- refuses to surrender its integrity and its devotion to its people.

The US government first imposed an economic and financial blockade on Cuba sixty-six years ago, the longest forced, complete economic sanctions ever imposed by one state on another. Despite widespread, and frequent condemnation, the blockade has intensified, resulting in today’s genocidal denial of energy resources, leaving the island frequently without light, domestic safety, transportation, health care, education, or food security. While Cubans endure, they are facing more and more difficult circumstances.

It is said that the Great Powers never forgave Haiti for its successful slave rebellion. Since the uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, powerful nations have guaranteed that the people of Haiti would suffer for their audacity and rebelliousness. The same could be said for Cuba. The US and its allies will never forgive a small, racially and culturally diverse country for its embrace of socialism and its unparalleled commitment to international solidarity. Cuba has offered an alternative vision to the peoples of the former colonies, a vision that continues to challenge the decadence and mindless consumerism of capitalism.

From the 1959 revolution forward, Cuba offered unlimited selfless aid to the oppressed and exploited of the world. For Cuba’s revolutionaries, it was not enough to be generous with material and moral aid to liberation movements like Algeria or the Congo, it was not enough to simply stand with Vietnam or with the former Portuguese colonies. Mere generosity was not enough for Cuba- a resource-poor, long-exploited country. Sacrifice was demanded by Cuba’s version of socialism-- the sacrifice made by brothers and sisters, by comrades. Since the revolution, Cuban internationalists have died in almost every area of resistance, like the construction workers resisting the unprovoked invasion of Grenada. And as recently as this past January, 32 Cuban security personnel were murdered defending Venezuelan sovereignty from US invaders.

Back when most of the peoples of the world were decrying the brutality of South African Apartheid, few of their governments did more than issue proclamations denouncing racial discrimination and limit some economic activity. Among those who offered concrete aid to those resisting South African racialism, one government rallied its people to join those fighting the brutal regime and its surrogates. With South Africa (and the US, Zaire, China, Israel, among others) actively supporting counter-revolutionaries in Angola, Cuba sent volunteers to fight alongside the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). With the material support of the USSR, Cuba met every escalation of the war-- including the active intervention of the Apartheid forces-- with more troops and weapons.

Under Operation Carlota, Cuban volunteers helped secure the creation of an independent Angolan government in 1975, free of their colonial masters, and their Angolan surrogates. Most importantly, Cuban support was critical in defeating the Apartheid and mercenary intervention.

In response to reactionary indignation over Cuban engagement, Fidel Castro responded directly:

Why were they vexed? Why had they planned everything to take possession of Angola before 11 November? Angola is a country rich in resources. In Cabinda there is lots of oil. Some imperialists wonder why we help the Angolans, which interests we have. They are used to thinking that one country helps another one only when it wants its oil, copper, diamonds or other resources. No, we are not after material interests and it is logical that this is not understood by the imperialists. They only know chauvinistic, nationalistic and selfish criteria. By helping the people of Angola, we are fulfilling a fundamental duty of Internationalism.

In desperation and with the urging and support of the US government, South Africa returned again to remove Angola from the struggle for Namibian and South African freedom. With Operation Maniobra XXXI Aniversario, the Cubans delivered a decisive defeat to the racists at Cuito Cuanavale. Upon his first visit to any country after his release from prison, South African leader Nelson Mandela spoke the following remarks in Havana, Cuba:

The Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice unparalleled for its principled and selfless character - We in Africa are used to being victims of countries wanting to carve up our territory or subvert our sovereignty. It is unparalleled in African history to have another people rise to the defence of one of us - The defeat of the apartheid army was an inspiration to the struggling people in South Africa! Without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organizations would not have been unbanned! The defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale has made it possible for me to be here today! Cuito Cuanavale was a milestone in the history of the struggle for southern African liberation!

Yes, imperialism never forgave Cuba for its sacrifices for the liberation of Africa. Like the Haitian revolutionaries, Cuban freedom fighters earned the ire of every scoundrel, racist, grifter, and killer in the empires. Cubans wrote one of the greatest chapters in the history of working-class internationalism.

Quietly, but effectively, Cuba has sent doctors and health care workers to every corner of the world, wherever there was a need. No country has stepped up more than Cuba in giving life where life was most in danger. Cuban volunteers even offered their services to countries whose governments did not want them! 

Tens of thousands of students, lacking educational opportunities in their own poor countries, have received a free, advanced education in Cuba, a country that has built an impressive truly public educational system in the relatively short history of the revolution.

Cuba has accomplished unmatched feats of solidarity with a population smaller than some of the world’s largest cities!

While millions of the oppressed, exploited, and needy understand and appreciate the Cuban revolution, their oppressors and exploiters despise the existence of an alternative vision-- a counter-vision-- to a world where markets, commodities, and self-interest determine every motive, every action.

In a capitalist-dominated world where one’s place in society is decided by a competitive zero-sum game, where social life divides between winners and losers, where personal identity trumps common humanity, revolutionary Cuba is one of the few places remaining where one can find an alternative. Cuba lives and breathes the call of The Communist Manifesto: Workers of the World Unite! 

Every US administration has supported the blockade of Cuba and sought the overthrow of the Cuban revolution’s leadership. It should be no surprise that the most powerful force in the imperialist system-- the state that assumes the global defense of the capitalist mode of production-- would do all it can to destroy this living proof that there is an alternative.

Today, the Trump administration has severely tightened the grip on the Cuban economy, not only thwarting commerce with Cuba, but also denying Cuban access to the very essentials of life. A resource-poor country, Cuba has been denied the energy resources essential to maintain daily life. Existing energy lifelines have been severed by the US blockade.

Further, the Trump regime has charged the retired head of the FAR (the Cuban military), Raúl Castro, with permitting the interception of a plane from Cuban-exile provocateur Jose Basulto’s private air force in 1996. As the National Security Archives has shown, this charge is ludicrous. 

Basulto’s group had violated Cuban air space on numerous occasions, despite Cuban objections and warnings. Both the State Department and the FAA had also warned Basulto about the provocations. On the night of the fatal shootdown, the State Department asked the FAA to deny the plane’s departure, but the FAA ignored the request. Before the defensive action, the Cuban flight controller told the pilot calmly that “the zone north of Havana is active. You run danger by penetrating that side of North 24.” The charge against Raul Castro is absurd and a ridiculous attempt to justify US intervention in Cuban affairs.

It must be said that countries once benefited by Cuban sacrifices have failed to show the same selfless solidarity in response to the imperialist-imposed crisis. Sadly, far wealthier, more powerful countries have succumbed to US pressure as well as commercial concerns, and denied sufficient assistance to Cuba in its desperate time of need-- a moral failing that could never be said of the Cuban people and their government. The failings of others only underscore the unique greatness of Cuban internationalism.

We must make every effort to see that the flame of international solidarity maintained by Fidel and his comrades is never extinguished by the brutal regime from the North.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Thinking About Capitalism

Sven Beckert is a Harvard economic historian noted for his masterful study of the rise and dominance (and fall) of cotton manufactory in the global economy: The Empire of Cotton, A Global History (2014). Beckert situates cotton’s emergence as a leading commodity in the world economy within the framework of capitalism’s evolution over several centuries.

Building on the subtext of capitalism’s “shape-shifting” that accompanied cotton’s rise and fall, Beckert has recently published an ambitious history of capitalism: Capitalism, A Global History (2025). In 1087 pages and 255 pages of extensive, supplemental notes, Beckert offers a well-researched, detailed account of capitalism’s trajectory-- from the early efforts of traders-for-profit to today’s global reach of giant, multinational corporations, from modest merchant purses of accumulated capital to unimaginable troves of capital concentrated in only a few privileged hands.

Beckert’s work is impressive, placing capitalism’s rise in a global context, finding seeds of its emergence throughout the world, and denying the chauvinist view that capitalism could only emerge in a European setting. At the same time, he does not deny that capitalism did reach its critical mass when certain vital conditions were met in Europe.

He goes to great lengths to show how “[t]hroughout history, it has been difficult to persuade people to work willingly for the benefit of others.” To drive home this seriously understated point-- a point central to understanding how capitalism differs from other modes of production-- Beckert chronicles in great detail the role of coercion in establishing capitalism. That “persuasion” began with chattel slavery and indentured labor. Even with the decline and abolition of slavery, indentures - coerced through contracts-- were transported to work under slave-like conditions. Beckert claims that in South Asia “[t]he number of people transported this way was greater than the number bought and sold by the Atlantic slave trade…”

This fact only underscores the often-overlooked long march from physically coerced labor to the circumstantially coerced “free labor” of today.

There is much that is insightful and suggestive in Beckert’s history, but nothing that deeply challenges Marx and Engels’ theory of capitalism’s birth and rise. Despite Beckert’s avowed distance from Marxism, Capitalism, A Global History does not contradict historical materialism. Beckert does accuse Marx of dismissing merchant capitalism, but that criticism dissolves when we understand that Marx and Beckert are engaged in two different projects. The object of Marx’s study is a mode of production (and circulation) centered on the commodity and on labor exploitation. Beckert, on the other hand, is constructing a chronological narrative beginning with the earliest sprouts of features that were later to be commonplace with mature capitalism, features that were found in proto-capitalism without capitalists, in primitive profit taking, in the earliest connection between buyer and seller, etc.

Perhaps Michael Roberts said it best: “But the book’s de-merit is its lack of any systematic understanding of capitalism. Indeed, it is like the work of Adam Tooze – namely, it is ‘more the how, than the why’.” [emphasis added]. Marx is concerned with the ‘why’ of capitalism; Beckert is searching for the ‘how’ of its journey.

Others besides Roberts have offered useful reviews of Beckert’s book. I would recommend Nelson Lichtenstein’s straight-forward, appreciative, and fairly comprehensive presentation of the book’s content in Jacobin.

But that is not my purpose here. Instead, I would like to examine whether Beckert’s findings have any bearing on current left perspectives and controversies.

Beckert finds an essential and ever-growing role for the state in capitalism’s trajectory: "...capital needed state support to control its masses of workers and access materials and markets. Capital thus became newly attached to the nation-state and the nation-state to capital. And because states competed with one another, this process was contagious.”

But the state is not an obsolete or a parasitic attachment to capital as some on the left argued in the wake of the rise of so-called globalization and still others have argued from the right with the intent of dramatically reducing its role. Beckert states early in his Introduction:

Capitalism, this book argues, is an extraordinarily statist form of economic life. Though the state changed over time; developed different institutional forms; grew in scale, scope, and territorial extent; and occupied more or less powerful positions within an international system of states, it always remained an essential ingredient in the capitalist revolution.

It is this bond between the state and capitalism that birthed an even more intimate relationship between the monopoly stage of capitalism and the modern state-- a stage where cartels and monopolies dominate the state and the state works primarily for the benefit of the monopolies and the cartels. This stage-- often usefully called state-monopoly capitalism-- reigned throughout the twentieth century and continues today; the grip on the state by capital and capital's dependence on the state is even tighter now. The state is, thus, an enabler and not a hindrance to the continuing maintenance of capitalism.

Capital may be transnational, but it still needs and controls the state.

*****

Unlike most of his academic counterparts, Beckert fully understands the powerful historical role of the Soviet Union in bending and shaping the trajectory of twentieth century capitalism:

...it could be argued that the greatest beneficiaries of global communism were not Russian but Western European and American workers. Labor politics might have seemed local, but they played out on a global stage, just like capitalism more broadly. Capital was politically weakened by communism’s removal of people and territories from the capitalist world, and by the bargain it made with an increasingly powerful state and mobilized workers…[E]ven some conservative Western policymakers supported social democratic policies and unions-- if only to weaken their communist competitors… It was Eisenhower who supported Reuther’s Treaty of Detroit, and who oversaw the massive public works program that built the nation’s Interstate Highway System. This coalition was the mold that formed the unprecedented political economy of the golden age [1945-1973, an era when workers’ wages tended to march in lockstep with productivity gains].

Too often, Cold War bias tends to blind commentators from understanding that the Communist alternative drove ruling classes to accept a tempered capitalism-with-a-more-human-face in the post-war period. Communism “...domesticated capitalism at the exact moment that the system faced its greatest challenges.”

The demise of the Soviet Union consequently undomesticated capitalism, unleashing its raw, brutal character under the banner of “shock therapy.” The so-called end of history-- the disappearance of the USSR and the PRC’s embrace of capitalist reforms-- opened the door wide to attacks on the gains made by working people. Austerity became the watchword for official policy. Beckert acknowledges:

The political space for the new policies emerged in part because two of the core pillars of the golden age wobbled: Labor weakened, and the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence disintegrated. These changes which came in the 1990s, undermined the need for capital owners and the state to accommodate labor, as they had been forced to do during the golden age….

The single most important postcapitalist project-- the North Star of global politics, either as friend or foe, for many decades-- suddenly unraveled with astounding celerity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Overnight, the political calculus in the capitalist world changed. Even more consequentially, capitalism gained new breathing room by expanding into vast new areas of the globe-- into the homes, workplaces, and public spaces of billions of Russians, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans.

It is impossible to understand the raw, brutal edge of today’s global politics without grasping the impact of the demise of the Soviet Union.

*****

For those investing in a future shaped by the BRICS alternative, Beckert reminds us of the earlier promise advanced by OPEC, the coalition of oil producers: “The ‘oil revolution’ in the Global South for its promise to redistribute some of the world’s wealth, was a turning point, the first time that a group of countries from the Global South used their control over an essential raw material to shift the global economy’s basic structure… By building new solidarities, the resource rich countries of the Global South attained a more powerful voice not just in their own affairs but also in the affairs of the world economy at large.”

Spurred by the US and European support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Middle Eastern states acted to reduce oil shipments to Israel’s allies. This united act of solidarity with those fighting for the cause of Palestine demonstrated the potential of joint action for empowerment. But the fate of Palestine was advanced no further. And, as Beckert shows, the “solidarity” succeeded in producing the further integration of the oil-producing states into the global capitalist system, into securing for themselves a greater share of the oil booty for those states, but achieving little advancement-- even regression-- for the Global South as a whole. Today, the Middle Eastern oil producing countries, with the exception of Iran, stand on the sidelines or support Israel in the genocidal destruction of Gaza. The fractures in an expanded OPEC existing today-- the political impotence, the failure to act in concert, or to honor quotas-- demonstrate the limits of concerted action by countries deeply embedded in a competitive global market economy and guided by overriding self-interest.

It’s no surprise that an alignment made up of countries with a strong commitment to capitalism and with even more diverse interests, like today’s BRICS, is proving to have even less collective impact on global inequalities and political conflicts.

*****

Sven Beckert’s Global South of the twenty-first century is unrecognizable from the Global South depicted by far too many leftists in the Global North.

Among the most extraordinary changes was the formation of new modes of capital: Local capital owners and international investors forged new agglomerations of capital in what came to be called the Global South. Building upon the novel nodes of state power that had emerged in the wake of decolonialization, these superclusters of capital powered the world’s most significant industrialization ever. In the process, the world’s working class expanded at lightning speed… [my emphasis]

At first, the so-called Four Tigers-- Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore-- were in the vanguard, but other countries swiftly industrialized as well, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil. No part of the world, however, industrialized as quickly and as radically as China. The value of the world’s manufacturing output increased almost five times in the years between 1973 and 2008, most of it coming from the Global South, with China contributing a stunning 31.5 percent by 2008. That year, China manufacturing added more value than the whole world had produced in 1973, a time when scholars in the North Atlantic area were convinced that Europe’s marked manufacturing prowess gave it an enduring global advantage. In retrospect, the theories they developed then to explain such a divergence seem like dated artifacts, better relegated to the status of a window on Western self-fashioning than to social science analysis.

Unfortunately, much of the North Atlantic left is under a similar spell, viewing the Global South as though they were still backward colonies. Having given up on workers in the Global North (they constitute an “aristocracy of labor”!), left intellectuals cling to an outdated, stereotypical picture of a river of wealth only flowing North to wealthy countries (and their workers!), while draining the South of its wealth (and that of its workers). As Beckert shows, that is not an accurate picture of the Global South or the North. Largely neglected in left conversations are the many multinationals based in the Global South like The Gerdau Group (Brazil), Ambev (Brazil), ARAMCO (Saudi Arabia), Tata (India), Dr. Reddy’s laboratories (India), to name a few.

To be sure, the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation of the Global South are still often legacies, organizations controlled by capital based in wealthier countries. Indeed, many monopolies, or near monopolies are the product of more than a century of concentration, beginning in the Global North. But to miss the story that Beckert tells is to underestimate the adaptability of capitalism and to misunderstand its logic.

Beckert offers the following telling note on capitalism’s mutation: “The richest 1 percent in India now control more of India’s income than the richest 1 percent (Indian and British) had under British colonial rule, 22.6.”

Thus, while corporations located in the Global North continue to exploit resources and workers of the Global South, many rapidly growing, industrialized countries of the Global South have become class societies mimicking those of the Global North. With often-unprecedented growth, their economies have distributed that wealth according to the logic of capitalism, leaving their working people far behind.

Despite the remarkable economic growth in Asia, especially the PRC and India, “almost half of the world’s people-- 46.4 percent, or a total of 3.6 billion-- live on $6.85 or less a day.”

Certainly, the legacy of colonialism plays a significant role in explaining this tragic fact. However, capitalist social relations-- class inequalities-- explain why that fact remains stubbornly with us today in the face of the enormous economic growth enjoyed by the Global South. The rapacious US and European corporations continue to exploit the Global South at every opportunity. But understand that the class societies constructed on the decades of explosive growth in the Global South owe as much or more to exploitation of workers by their own domestic capitalists. In the end, it is not some amorphous, class-neutral identity called the “Global North” that drains all the wealth and impoverishes working people in the Global South, but the capitalist system in general. Wherever it takes root-- North or South, East or West-- it reproduces class societies, inequalities, and injustices.

A final word from Sven Beckert:

The reemergence of Asia was a rebuke not just to generations of racist analysis that had posited a transhistorical superiority of Western civilization but also to some neo-Marxist theorizing of the 1960s and 1970s, which had seen the world economy as structured in ways that would not allow for the emergence of prosperity outside the Western industrial heartlands. As it turned out, the opposite was true….

Of course, it is vital that the EuroAmerican left defy their own ruling classes to stand against the aggressive action directed at the former colonies, the so-called Global South. It is the highest form of internationalism to defend the right of nations and states to self-determination in the face of domination and aggression by other countries, even if they are ruled by tyrants, theocracies, or a cabal of capitalists, as is true in the Global South.

It is another thing entirely to overlook or underplay the role of capitalism in creating the misery and injustice visited upon the working people of the Global South. To ascribe that misery and injustice to a vague geographical identity like the Global North is to deflect attention from the mechanism that systematically and historically extracted the product of labor in both the Global North and South. Labor exploitation knows no geographical limits, nor does it grant favoritism to its subjects. It extracts all it can from everyone within its scope.

Capitalism is the enemy of the Global South. Socialism is the answer to global capitalism.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Debate Behind the Debate: Is the Exploitation of the Global South by the Global North the Main Contradiction of our Time?

When it comes to debates among Marxist intellectuals, it is often difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some of the more arcane disputes have absolutely no bearing on Marxist practice-- the actual class struggle. 

The so-called “Transformation problem” debated among political economists, for example, is not a problem, unless you accept the assumptions that graduate students in economics departments are told must be attended if Marxism is to be taken seriously. Marxism, however, advances a powerful, effective critique of capitalism without accepting those assumptions or deferring to the manufactured problem. Failure to deduct fluctuating prices from exchange values no more derails the Marxist project than failure to deduct actual thought from brain events or neural processes derails the scientific project of neurophysiology.  

But the outcomes of some “theoretical” debates have real practical consequences. Still others are stalking horses for controversies within our political movements.

A recent dust-up between Vivek Chibber and Vijay Prashad is an example of both, along with a heavy dose of pettifoggery.  

Chibber spurred the debate with an interview posted in Jacobin magazine in mid-December. His thesis-- set out explicitly in the interview’s title-- is: “Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism.” To the query of whether “colonial plunder was essentially responsible for bringing about capitalism,” Chibber responds with characteristic bluntness: “The idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder can’t even get off the ground.” 

In March, Vijay Prashad responded sharply to Chibber in a long piece in Monthly Review. After chastising Chibber for not being serious: “It would have been better if Chibber wanted to initiate a discussion on the issues of the origin of capitalism and the role of colonialism for this origin to have produced something other than a podcast as an incitement to debate…” He regrets that Chibber’s thoughts were not presented “as a major written text with citations.” 

This would appear to be a specious charge, coming from an intellectual whose stature and broad appeal come largely from podcasts, interviews, and popular writing, and not from his academic work.

Further, Prashad unabashedly concedes in his article that “No serious scholar says that colonialism created capitalism.”

With that concession, the contest would appear to be closed-- there really is no disagreement. Anyone innocent of the often-acrimonious debates on the left would wonder why there was a dispute at all.

Why does Chibber feel it necessary to deny that colonial plunder created capitalism? Is “colonialism-created-capitalism” a straw man? If Prashad is right and no serious scholar believes it, who is Chibber’s argument directed towards? Why is Prashad so agitated by Chibber’s intervention?

Is this another instance of seminar-room Marxism? Of résumé padding? Of dispute-for-dispute’s-sake?

In fact, there is a seething backstory to both positions--- a long, contentious ideological battle that erupts frequently on the academic stage.

Chibber takes issue with a left trend prevalent among many Marxists to locate the nexus of exploitation in national inequalities, specifically between the most advanced capitalist countries and the less developed countries. He says:

In the 1960s and ’70s, it had come back in the form of what’s called “Third Worldism,” which was this idea that the Global North collectively exploits the Global South. And you can see how that’s an extension of the view that capitalism in the West came out of the plunder of the Global South. You can just extend it to say that the Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the South…

It’s transforming a class argument into a racial and national argument. And in today’s left, nationalism and racialism are the dominant ideologies. It’s quite striking to me how this trope, this “global white supremacy” has become so current on the Left. And it’s utterly nonsensical. It has literally no connection to reality.

But it’s become fashionable on the Left because it allows you to align radicalism with the current wave of racial identity politics. And the core of this is whatever divisions there might be within the races, pale — no pun intended — in relation to the divisions between the races.

In essence, Chibber believes that he is defending class analysis against a left that has abandoned class, a left viewing global oppression only through the lens of nationalism and racialism. 

Writers like Prashad frame the principal contradiction in today’s world as between the “Global North” and the “Global South,” abstractions constructed from a rough division of the world between the former colonizing states and the post-colonial states.

The appeal of the Global North versus Global South analysis should be readily apparent. Since well before the birth of capitalism, powerful empires have subjected, exploited, oppressed, and enslaved peoples to the benefit of the empires. In the pre-industrial mercantile era, principalities, city-states, kingdoms, and other centers of power continued to extract wealth from those unable to resist. And soon after the maturation of capitalism and the full development of the modern nation-state, the monopoly capitalist corporations of the great powers continued the subjugation, pillage, plunder, and rape of weaker peoples through the colonial system.

There is nothing new or original, however, in affirming that powerful nations, organizations, institutions, groups, individuals, etc. periodically or even systemically exploit their weaker counterparts. There is nothing new or especially insightful about recognizing asymmetries of power in global relations. Certainly, there is nothing specifically Marxist about such a claim.

But Prashad wants to go further. He wants to specifically link nation-states to capitalist exploitation. Where the Marxism of Marx and Engels fundamentally located exploitation in the relationship between those who own the means of production and workers-- two distinct classes-- Prashad sees exploitation as a relationship between nation-states: the original colonizing states and the colonial subjects. And today, he and others argue that exploitation remains fundamentally grounded in the relations of nation-states: the privileged former colonizers and the former colonies. Granting that inequalities are certainly, at least in part, the legacy of colonialism, the fact that national inequalities exist today further demonstrates that this exploitative relationship exists, according to Prashad and others of like mind.

Prashad cites counterfactual studies-- identifying where wealth might have gone if events had taken a different course-- as further showing that exploitive relations account for the continuing inequalities between South and North, without mentioning the relations of production-- capitalism-- that actually enable these inequalities. Class relations-- relations privileging exploitative advantages of the foreign and domestic bourgeoisies-- go unmentioned. Do we conclude, by comparison, that the US North exploits the US South based on the existence of persisting inequalities? Or do we say that-- due to uneven, disparate development-- corporate capitalism exploits them both, but differently? I think we agree it’s the latter.

Paradoxically, Prashad says:

This ceaseless drain provides a continuous stream of plunder into the Western-controlled financial systems whose power remains intact despite the great changes taking place with the center of gravity of the world economy shifting to Asia.

This curious statement suggests that the global North is systematically plundering the global South, while the weight of the global economy-- its future and fortunes-- lie in Asia, the economic powerhouse of the Global South. How can he have it both ways? How can Prashad and others celebrate the fact that the core of the South-- the BRICS+ countries-- have together surpassed the economic product of the G7 and also maintain that the North continues to systematically plunder its wealth?

The fact is that capitalist social relations-- struggle between classes over the fruits of labor-- have entirely penetrated both the Global North and Global South. It is monopoly corporations-- social entities that respect no state boundaries-- that “plunder” anywhere and everywhere.

 Rather than uncritically submitting its fate to the direction of international capitalist institutions, their loans, or foreign investment, rather than seek some compensatory justice to the crimes of colonialism, the post-colonial states should consider the insights argued by Paul Baran in his opus at the height of the colonial independence movement:

The principal insights, which must not be obscured by matters of secondary or tertiary importance, are two. The first is that, if what is sought is rapid economic development, comprehensive economic planning is indispensable… The second insight of crucial importance is that no planning worth the name is possible in a society in which the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits (or security or other private advantage) ... (xxviii-xxix, Foreword to 1962 printing) The Political Economy of Growth, Paul A. Baran [emphasis added]

Baran is unabashedly advocating for a socialist escape from the legacy of colonialism and the fate of neocolonialism-- a position that has fallen out of fashion, but remains the only authentically Marxist answer for workers in the so-called global South. As an ideological godfather of many who stress the North/South exploitation divide, it is odd that this conclusion is rarely cited by those who owe their lineage to Baran.

Neither Prashad nor Chibber acknowledge this solution. Prashad, citing Samir Amin, mischaracterizes contemporary imperialism:

In the Marxist tradition, there are a variety of interpretations of the idea of originary accumulation, but what the facts show—and has been established in, for example, the oeuvre of Samir Amin, among others—is that imperialism is not an outgrowth of capitalism, but is foundational to capitalism itself. [emphasis added]

Today’s imperialism is driven by protecting and expanding spheres of influence, energy and rare metal acquisition, market access and expansion, and dominating labor markets. Behind the endless Great Power conflicts, civil wars, and regime changes is inescapably capitalist competition. 

Capitalism is foundational to imperialism itself. And if we lose sight of that fact-- the class perspective-- we will lose sight of who are the perpetrators and who are the victims.

But class alone does not explain exploitation and imperialism, as one might think from reading Chibber. Nationalism and racialism have always been capable tools in misguiding, thwarting, or taming class struggle. Capitalism’s long life and resilience owes much to the insidious, but masterful manipulation of race and nationhood by the capitalist class to deflect attention from the war between the class exploiters and the exploited. Deafness and insensitivity to race and national identity only exacerbates and multiplies the harsh lash of class exploitation.

Debate is most useful when it shines a light on the way forward.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com