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5 points

I mean I think we should also look at how the term was used in the relatively recent past. People want to shout about how China was a poor country in the 1970s and yet ‘socialist’ but the story is so much more complex. China was still the most successful Third World country by a long shot, it had successfully resisted both superpowers, launched an ambitious program of international aid in Africa (almost totally interest free at that, very much unlike today), literacy rates were incredibly high, healthcare was free, etc etc. Lots of incredible problems, sure, but most of these were the consequences of either misguided agricultural policies (I will maintain that center imposed quotas on agricultural production is dumb) or a lack of international trade.

What happened in the reform era was a very definite switch in terms of total political economy - privatization, mass cuts, depoliticization of local life…Much of this has been reversed somewhat but I think we need to look at fundamentals of political economy to actually gauge the ‘dialectical direction’ a country is taking. It is not enough to have a communist party in government if they do not try and establish some sort of decommodified understanding of economic life imo. Just calling yourself communist hardly fixes things.

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2 points

literacy rates were incredibly high

can you source this? because the sources i have put literacy rates at 65% in 1982, which means it was probably even lower during the maoist period

it was even worse for women as about half of them were illiterate

the maoist period improved things for sure, in many ways - the country absolutely started at a miserable state, having to rebuild everything after decades of war and over a century of colonialist plundering, and their synthesis at this time put the country at a relatively decent condition, though still poor and mostly rural

but the progress coming with the reforms has never been seen before, even in the USSR (though i argue it would have, if stalin had been allowed to let the NEP stay in place for longer)

What happened in the reform era was a very definite switch in terms of total political economy

certainly

depoliticization of local life

i’m interested in this, what leads you to say it? this is actually my biggest worry regarding china, have you got any numbers i could look at?

i mean, i obviously don’t think ideals can ever lead anyone to socialism, so no matter how much politicization we get it won’t do much in the present, but once the necessary material conditions are set you definitely need a supportive, ideologically sound majority to suppress any conservative and/or reactionary forces

It is not enough to have a communist party in government if they do not try and establish some sort of decommodified understanding of economic life imo

i think this depends on the stage of development

you can’t have a decommodified understanding of economic life if your material conditions don’t allow you to have a sustainable decommodified access to and production of material resources in the first place

or rather, you can, but you’re bound to fail at some point

this is why, though i’ve criticized cuba’s reforms before, now i’m very thankful they’ve done it

Just calling yourself communist hardly fixes things.

the important thing about a communist party is that it is able to impose its will on reactionary forces and to negotiate from a position of strength with the conservative ones

everything else is highly dependent on whatever situation we’re in

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4 points
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I dunno how to properly quote you so am gonna respond in a big old lump of text!

So in regards to literacy, I don’t think even a comparison to Russia is all that useful considering how dire conditions of literacy were in China by 1949. Let’s compare them to a country with similar rates of (il)literacy at the time - India. This is what Jay Taylor does in his book The Dragon and the Wild Goose. Despite the shit title, it is a good book in that it uses a comparison that is fairly apt - by 1950 both countries had similar metrics in pretty much everything (actually India, having not gone through a devastating war with Japan, was slightly better off in terms of industrialization etc). He states that China had a literacy rate in 1951 of 26% compared to 77% in 1982. (I believe in the 71 it was something like 70%, but I am having a harder time finding my previous sources for that) I believe Wang Zheng’s recent book also notes that women’s literacy is harder to track, but she estimates that by the mid-1970s it was around 50%.; at 1949 it was less than 5%. For comparison, in India (which also had a relatively interventionist state, and a few fairly well-run literacy programs in certain states) had 18% women’s literacy in 1971. Total literacy that same year was 34%. That is a monumental difference. Only Sri Lanka was able to outperform China in Asia.

In terms of depoliticization of local life, I mean that in the Maoist era power ultimately did stem, at least in part, from ‘the people’, or ‘the mass line’. People went out on campaigns. Bands of women beat up abusive husbands. You’d insult your landlord on the street. In the village you would all work together and learn from your local cadre and then distribute the material to your neighbors. In the urban danwei you would live next to your manager, wear the same clothes, get called off from work to go to protests, signature campaigns etc. There was a sense that life was inherently poltiical, because it is. Today, there is nothing along those lines. Wang Hui makes note of this, but after the protest movements of the 1980s were crushed, people’s relationship to politics (Party endorsed or otherwise) became entirely disembodied. Politics became something only a very small subset of individuals did. ‘Campaigns’ in China now are not so much little laboratories of people’s democracy wherein individuals have a huge role in making sure they are carried out in a certain way. Rather, they are systematized, choreographed little things that have little substance beyond the full power of the state. Now granted, that counts for a lot - but it does mean your local kuaidi deliver man is probably not thinking about campaigns as integral to his life. In my opinion, this isn’t a simple issue of ideals or even ideology - practices are what make politics and can have a profound affect on the way people interpret and understand their material conditions. People are not thinking in such a way in China anymore, and this is a massive issue.

I actually reject stagism entirely. Several historians of Maoist China (Viren Murthy, Rebecca Karl, Arif Dirlik - all Marxists) have mentioned that the profound theoretical contribution of Maoism lies in its desire to break the idea of historical teleology. Revolution is possible, Maoism states, because one is backwards. To be ‘backwards’ means that you can transform things in a way that advanced capitalist powers cannot. I am aware that this goes against orthodox Marxist understandings of revolution. But pretty much every major revolutionary force in Asia disagreed with that understanding (and also with the Soviet notion of WORKERS and not peasants driving revolutionary change) because they saw it as too dogmatic and teleological. I think we ought to respect this somewhat. The idea that Maoism was doomed to fail materially doesn’t really stand up to snuff. The economy had certainly had its ups and downs but a lot of modern economic historians note that post-Deng growth would have been impossible without Maoist industrial policy. Who knows what the future could have looked like?

I agree a communist party is important. I believe, at least somewhat, in something resembling a vanguard party. I do not believe the CCP meets that category necessarily. I do not think they are holding back the tide of reactionary forces. Certainly, if one looks at cultural attitudes in China (for example, towards women, towards Confucianism, towards family hierarchy etc), the reform era has seen a lot of setbacks. My worry is that actually many cultural conservatives with a veneer of supposedly ‘socialist’ economic thinking have been in the Party for a while and are a pretty core element of its leadership. Again, the overtures towards Confucianism, against the discussion of sexual harassment etc all bodes badly. But even just from a purely materialist perspective, I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.

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4 points
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thanks for elaborated answer! i’ll avoid quoting too so we don’t delve into massive posts

my discussions about china aren’t coming from personal ego, or from picking a team and wanting it to win or whatever; like i said earlier, i’m from the 3rd world myself so i’m interested in discussing every aspect of the chinese experiment (and the cuban, the vietnamese, the bolivian, etc) as they’re going to give us clues on how to solve our own problems. so i really like that i can have some useful discussion for once lol

regarding literacy rates: thanks for the sources, and i’m gonna read that book as china really should be compared to india (this is something vijay prashad insists on and i deeply agree with). but i did agree with you that the country improved a lot with mao, what i don’t see is how we could say the country was in a good position back then, even compared to other 3rd world countries, aside from specific areas of low material requirements

regarding depoliticization: i’m aware people were more politically active in that sense, and i understand the new left’s criticism - but do you think that resulted in an overall positive for china? to me it seems like a defense of aspects that would ultimately result in another cultural revolution, and it would again happen at the wrong time and space

regarding stagism: i dislike the term and i very much disagree with my position being teleological - i think there’s a dialectical relationship between ideals and material conditions too, and stating that we need to deal with material limitations before we can move forward is in no way dogmatic, but a way of avoiding what marx used to call the various kinds of conservative socialism. it’s not dogmatic to say decommodification requires a certain level of abundance (and therefore, development), it’s just empirical observation; it’s also just empirical, not dogmatic, to think market forces play a very useful part in the beginning, before the contradiction between productivity incentives and rates of profit becomes unsustainable (as is already the case for so much of the modern economy in developed countries). in fact, i think the dogma lies in believing we can have (and maintain) these large productivity rises under a decommodified economy in spite of all the empirical evidence to the contrary from the previous experiments - especially the USSR before, during and after the NEP, but also just china itself

i guess if we disagree on these premises we’re not gonna find common ground in the inferences either; for instance, i’m getting the impression you believe china could’ve got here (and kept moving forward, in terms of economic, and therefore social, development) without the reforms, and i clearly don’t

i’m not well-versed in confucianism and which aspects of it have been focused on in their more recent cultural developments, i would enjoy sources on this if you’ve got any (though i guess this would be wang hui as well?)

I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.

can you go into more details on that level of collusion, especially since xi? i understand they negotiate with capital, and like i said, i’m ok with that; actual rampant collusion would be an entirely different thing and yes, a huge issue

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