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

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

 

Derangement Unbound

Karl Marx famously said in the Eighteenth Brumaire that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” While there are many examples of this insight from history, Marx could not foresee how farce would become the staple of the US ruling class, how elites would defend what they see as their interests with a web of calculated deception extending beyond the limits of the absurd.

Like the mad General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s great film, Dr. Strangelove, an Air Force four-star General, Mike Minihan, “sent a memo on Friday [January 27] to the officers he commands that predicts the U.S. will be at war with China in two years and tells them to get ready to prep by firing ‘a clip’ at a target, and ‘aim for the head,’” as reported by NBC News. Further, the deranged General “directs all AMC [Air Mobility Command] personnel to ‘consider their personal affairs and whether a visit should be scheduled with their servicing base legal office to ensure they are legally ready and prepared.’”

Further evidence of the 1950s Cold War-like craze possessing the military and infecting a gullible public came on February 1 when the US Air Force designated a proposed Chinese-owned corn mill as a “significant threat to national security.” With 370 acres of farmland, Shandong-based Fufeng group saw an opportunity to mill corn to supplement the company’s food additive business. According to Yahoo!news, the locals saw the corn mill as an “economic development success” until the military warning turned them against the plans. North Dakota’s two Senators loudly led the chorus shutting down the project.

The Great Balloon Fiasco

The world woke up during the first week of February with a new and ominous threat-- a great balloon was floating slowly through the Stratosphere across some Western US states. Unnamed “officials” declared that the balloon was a Chinese spy balloon, sent to discover some profound military secrets. The declaration was followed by incriminations from politicians of both major parties, denouncing the treacherous Chinese Communists for their perfidy.

As hysteria mounted and civilians began to report new sightings of imaginary new balloons, a few dissident voices noted that balloon spying was a dated, obsolete technology superseded by advanced high-altitude, manned airplane overflights, which have been themselves replaced by satellites and high-tech cameras. Why would the Chinese use a balloon for espionage?

But “experts” emerged who claimed that there may well be an ever-so-slight advantage to be gained by proximity and slow speed. None of the overpaid newsreaders who occupy network anchor chairs noted that since the balloon had first been detected over Alaska, the military authorities had plenty of time to rush out to Walmart to buy tarpaulins to cover the sensitive military installations from the prying eyes of the balloon’s master.

Officials in Peoples’ China admitted that it was their balloon-- a meteorological balloon-- but denied that it was a spy balloon. They might well have pointed out that it was odd that the US government would make such a fuss when it publicly claimed nearly a year ago that it was planning to engage in balloon-spying and to direct it at the Russian Federation and the Peoples’ Republic of China!

But it gets better…

As the balloon precedes slowly across the US on a course bound for the mid-Atlantic states, politicians, retired military experts, and pundits denounce the inaction on the part of the Biden Administration and the military. Goaded into a response, the military launched its most sophisticated stealth jets to intercept it-- apparently to ensure that the enormous balloon could not take evasive action. A $400,000 Sidewinder missile brought the balloon down off the coast of South Carolina before the intruder could escape our valiant air-defense command.

Not only was the South Carolina engagement the most expensive combat victory over a balloon in history, but it was the first kill for the US’s most expensive fighter, except in war games, movies, and novels. No doubt the pilot will stencil a balloon on the fuselage of his F-22.

But this last-minute response to the cackling of the chicken hawks would not suffice. The naysayers continued to attack the Administration’s response-- not enough, too late. At the same time, comedians could not resist poking fun at the alleged national-security threat from a mere balloon.

To respond to both and underscore the seriousness of the balloon threat to our security, unnamed officials announced that spy balloons had penetrated our stout defenses earlier, including at least three times during the Trump administration. Rather than quieting the warmongers and snuffing out the levity, the defense officials opened a new can of worms.

Trump’s defense officials, including career bureaucrats and Trump haters like China-phobic John Bolton, claimed no knowledge of earlier incursions.

Even the unimaginative, power-ingratiating media could not reconcile the two claims: documented balloon incursions and an unknowing Administration. Did the military shield the information from civilian authorities? Was this proper? What does this mean?

To resolve this dilemma and close the can of worms, unnamed senior Biden Administration officials came forward with a new narrative: The earlier incursions were unknown at the time and only discovered later, after the change in administration.

This led to the undoubtedly unintended parody embedded in The Wall Street Journal headline: U.S. Says Balloons Weren’t Detected. If they weren’t detected, how do we know they were there?

Of course, the military has an answer: they found out later, but how they found out must remain a secret. “Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of U.S. Northern Command, said Monday that the Defense Department ‘did not detect’ the previous balloons, adding that the intelligence community was made aware of them through other means of information collection,” according to Politico.

CNN reports that General VanHerck, the commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, attributes the failure to a “domain awareness gap”. Thus, the failure to detect three balloons, but to discover their presence later, is explained through a mystifying, arcane piece of military jargon: a “domain awareness gap.” Shades of “Advance to the rear!”

Predictably, the stalwart defenders of our interests in the House of Representatives voted 419-0 denouncing China’s “brazen violation of United States sovereignty,” with a balloon.

Like its precedent in the 1950s, today’s war mongers advance Cold War hysteria, regardless of how we view The Great Balloon Fiasco.

If the balloon were merely an errant private meteorological balloon, then the fact that its predecessors advanced across the US undetected would demonstrate the need for more vigilance, more advanced detection capacity, better interception possibilities, and more personnel-- a gift to the Pentagon’s budget.

But if the balloon is authentically a surveillance device, then we presumably have more reason not to trust the Communist leaders and must prepare for further aggression-- with a bigger military budget.

Both are ridiculous conclusions that follow from ridiculous, outlandish, and malignant premises. Balloons constitute no more security risk than the spy satellites that are commonplace today and ensure a relatively fair playing field in international affairs.

Yet the US State Department used the ill-fated balloon as an excuse to cancel Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s trip to Beijing-- a trip scheduled to reach understanding and lessen the tensions between the two countries, a peace that the US government doesn’t want.

While it is impossible not to see the absurdity-- the farce-- in these developments, they have deadly serious consequences. As their historical precedents did in stirring the Cold War pot, China-bashing prepares the US for war. The reckless provocations, the groundless charges, and the constant baiting of Peoples’ China all raise the risk of war.

We have seen this before, most recently in the US behavior leading up to the war in Ukraine.

It must be resisted.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

postscript: Yesterday, February 10, the US government announced that they had shot down "a high altitude object" over Alaskan air space. According to The Wall Street Journal, an unnamed Defense Department official said that "[t]he object didn't initially appear to belong to a government." Aliens, perhaps? The insanity continues...

Inhumanity Unbound: the Case for Socialism

Nothing exposes the hypocrisy, arrogance, and selfishness of capitalism and its backers like a major threat or catastrophe. 

Three hundred Chinese doctors began arriving in Italy on Wednesday, March 18 to help the local effort against the coronavirus  (Fifty-two health professionals also arrived from socialist Cuba last week). In addition, PRChina (PRC) is sending testing kits and protective clothing. PRC has sent kits and gear to Spain, Greece, and Poland as well.

While The Wall Street Journal (3-19-2020) grudgingly reports this international solidarity, it is also compelled to admit that “many people feel let down by the European Union… No other EU countries responded to an Italian plea for masks earlier in March, and German authorities temporarily impeded deliveries of medical supplies to Italy.” The head of a European think tank remarked: “This is a shocking failure of European solidarity. The impression in Italy, Spain, and Serbia and so on is that the weaker links will be left alone.” 

The Italian and Chinese governments announced that PRC will supply needed ventilators and face masks. Balkan countries unable to acquire supplies from the EU are also getting assistance from the PRC, according to the WSJ. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic bitterly commented: “European solidarity does not exist. It was a fairytale.”

Contrast this commentary on European indifference with the arrogant self-righteousness of the policy of “open-borders” as formerly proclaimed by EU leaders. When workers expressed their reservations about unlimited immigration eroding wages and benefits in the EU, the Euro-leadership indignantly charged “xenophobia.” Waving the banner of human rights, the EU chiefs welcomed immigrants-- mostly the victims of imperialist aggression-- desperately looking for jobs at any cost, while appearing to take the moral high ground.

Once the “reserve army” overflowed to create stress on the EU safety net, the welcome mat was quietly removed. 

European workers understood the simple fact that in a capitalist economy the labor of workers is a commodity like any other element in the productive process and that capitalists seek to purchase that commodity as cheaply as possible. They anticipated that humanitarian sentiments were too often a cover for cheapening the cost of labor.

The formerly putative human rights crusaders of an EU without borders are now panicked in a mad dash of self-preservation, hoarding resources and closing borders. Today’s pandemic crisis exposes their hypocrisy.

But neither neglect nor arrogance is a monopoly of the capitalist European Union. It is now widely acknowledged that the austerity imposed upon the US public sector since the crash of 2007-2009 bears a responsibility for the lack of funding for the agencies, like the Center for Disease Control (CDC), that needed to address the threat from the coronavirus.

In addition, the CDC displayed an unforgivable hubris, ignoring the international efforts to contain the virus and the lessons learned. In accounts from as diverse sources as National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal, we learn that the CDC chose to develop its own testing kits for the virus, ignoring the existing technologies of the World Health Organization and the PRC.

When their own kits went into production, they proved faulty, setting the program back. Rather than turning to existing internationally used designs, the CDC sought to make its own corrections, further delaying production. The CDC vastly underestimated the virus’s deadliness and its contagion. The spread of the virus is rapidly outstripping the availability of testing kits, attesting to the conceit of Make America Great Again.

Despite the lack of testing kits in the US, many have noticed that celebrities, sports figures, politicians and others of our “betters” have cut the line and acquired tests before the most needy-- the ugliest side of the inequality of class society. 

Also, reliable accounts have surfaced that some US elected officials have used their privileged information to enable them to liquidate their equity portfolios before the great March stock market collapse.

Workers employed in low-wage, service-sector jobs are the most vulnerable to intensive and persisting human contact and potential infection and are the least able to sustain the economic consequences of the pandemic.

It is not true that we are all in this together. Some are in it for themselves.

For any thinking observer, the coronavirus pandemic is fast becoming an argument for socialism. Even a bitter enemy of public ownership, planning, and economic equality like The Wall Street Journal caustically acknowledges that the PRC’s remarkable defeat of the coronavirus epidemic was achieved with the quickly mobilized, effective state-owned-enterprises (SOEs). In a tellingly titled article (China Steps Back From Market Economy, 3-19-2020), Lingling Wei cites the 20,000 SOE construction workers and supportive public enterprises that built two hospitals with 2,600 beds within two weeks, an achievement impossible in the capitalist West. Lingling cites an official: “It’s like in a battlefield, and state-owned enterprises are the ones who can act fast and decisively.”

The coordination of SOEs was formidable, with petrochemical enterprises working to produce materials for masks and pharmaceuticals. State-owned housing ordered reduced rents by “tens of millions of dollars.” Despite the reduced production necessitated by social isolation, the central government pressed SOEs to maintain employment, even “hire more, especially college graduates.”

The WSJ concedes that “Many private manufacturers are struggling to restore production, yet more than 95% of some 20,000 industrial companies controlled by the central government are churning out masks, medicines, steel, heavy machinery and other products-- keeping workers on the job.”

Western commentators bemoan the success of the SOEs, interpreting it as a setback for the hope of privatization (so-called “market reforms”) in PRC. One former WSJ writer complained: “If and when the outbreak fades, the conclusion is inevitably going to be that the overwhelming exercise of state power saved China.”

In exemplary acts of solidarity fully consistent with its long history of internationalism, tiny socialist Cuba, suffering a criminal US blockade and brutal sanctions, is offering doctors and drugs to several stricken countries.

When the US refused to allow the British cruise ship, MS Braemer, to dock, Cuba met its humanitarian duty and allowed its passengers to disembark and travel home by air. 

The contrast with Western, capitalist efforts is striking. The PRC (and DRVietnam) have largely arrested the virus. As of March 21, the total cases per million of population is lower in the PRC than in the US and the UK, countries only at the beginning of their infection cycle. Italy had 6,557 new cases compared to only 41 in the PRC (4,759 in the US). 

Chinese health workers celebrate by removing their masks for the first time in months as the last of the temporary Covid-19 treatment centres closes in Wuhan, China.

In the US, there are far too few test kits, masks, and ventilators. New York City hospitals are overwhelmed. State administrations and the Federal government are in dispute over responsibilities while disaster looms. 

And tragically, the political and economic elites are more determined to rescue markets and corporations than humans. Trillions have been earmarked to bail capitalism. 

The idiocies, irrationalities, and unnecessary injuries of twenty-first-century capitalism are coming into full, tragic view. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com