Real western chauvinism hours
Thanks for the in depth answer, this actually nearly perfectly answered my question, I have one more though. You said that the progress was allowed to happen because of the brutal rise in exploitation of the labor of the Chinese working class, so how is china going to deal with that now? I thought I heard somewhere that companies were moving manufacturing away from china because there were cheaper options in nearby countries. Is china doing something to combat the worker exploitation going on?
I don’t know if they are. China is transitioning form labor-intensive industry (ie textiles, mining, steel) to capital-intensive industries (ie tech, green energy) and are starting to invest capital overseas. While I doubt they will gut their industrial base like the West did (that would create a gigantic strategic vulnerability for them, one which the US is experiencing now in their drive to start a new Cold War) I believe they plan to simply stay the course until they reach whatever theoretical level of material abundance to fundamental transform social relations of production and transition to communism.
Of course the leftcom answer is “they never will” and that their model is either unsustainable or impossible to achieve communism because of the very monopoly of political power held by the Leninist party. The leftcom answer would be that communism is only achievable by the conscious self-organization of the Chinese proletariat from below and their seizure of state power (for modern China does contain the conditions of capitalist economy for this that Marx described whereas 1949 China where the Communist Party took hold emphatically did not). Matt, for example, holds this position.
Do you think expanded automation might lead to a decrease in need for low wage factory workers? With china’s great strides in AI development do you think they could have better automation sooner than places like the US where it’s still running on DOS and windows XP? Sorry for bombarding you with questions I just never actually talked to someone about this even though it’s been something I’ve wanted to understand for a while.
I mean I really can’t say for sure. But certainly the presence of modern miniaturization and computerization presents opportunities that were never available to the USSR.
