[A-List] Restructuring the Chinese Economy

[Waistline2 at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/9/2004 11:15:29 PM Central Standard Time, 
hliu at mindspring.com writes:

>Cars should be owned publicly with consumer enjoying use rights similar to 
the system of car rentals in the West.  People should be able to command the 
use of car as they need them. And holidays and commuting hours should be stacked 
to avoid congestion and reduce peak demand. Why should every stop work on 
week ends and the economy stops operating two days out of seven?  It is merely a 
religious relic of Juda-Christian culture. It's better the two-sevenths of the 
population go on holiday on a rotating basis and the economy operates 
everyday of the year.

Per capita income should and can be doubled every year for thirty years with 
increase expenditure on non-materialistic consumption.  To build a new 
socialist economy, we need to restructure more than financial arrangements

Henry C.K. Liu

Comment

My love affair with the people of China dates back to fifteen years old. The 
first major report ever written in school was on Confucianism and a 
considerable amount of time was spent in the local library collecting information. 
Earlier in life I was exposed to several "children books" about the "Seven Chinese 
Brothers" - one who could swallow the ocean, and the concept of strength 
through unity. Every major African American leader during my maturing years has 
spoken of China with reverence, no matter what their political perspective. 

At age twenty I was part of a group in Detroit that opened a book store 
called "China-Albania Books and Periodicals." I reluctantly gave my daughter the 
Peking (sp ;-)) edition of "Anti-Durhing two years ago and cling to my China 
edition of the "Communist Manifesto." 

China inspires the majority of the earth population who are simply not white. 
Her one hundred and fifty years of humiliation is our pain. It is a mistake 
to underestimate the intensely proud and patriotic people of China and not 
factor this into every political and ideological equation. Not simply from the 
standpoint of China's role in the world system of production and the world body 
politic, but as she faces white chauvinists zealots. 

Judeo-Christian culture has enlarged the chapter of human history on 
barbarism, murder, torture and thuggery. This culture is inherently white chauvinists 
and on one level a clash of civilizations becomes the inevitable consequence 
of this cultures preconditions and results. 

American society is erected and configured on the basis of the enslavement 
and murder of the world people. Our societal configuration is a manifest vision 
of insanity. Our societal conception of itself and its manifest conception of 
beauty is the logic of men drunk with power and degenerate. That is why a "car 
culture" arose as opposed to a system of transportation. The car culture - 
American style, is not simply the result of mass production technique. 

China not only has the oldest continuous culture on earth but contains more 
than a billion minds at work, with each one to a degree contradicting all the 
rest. Under such circumstances no one and no political party is going to get 
what it wants the why it wants. Ideological leaders cannot lead from the 
standpoint of ideology, but by compromising ideology with the economic striving of 
real people. 

Leaders can only lead people in the direction they are already traveling and 
win them over on the basis of how they think things out. The conflict with 
bourgeois property as the circuit in which capital/reproduction takes place, as 
it effects the progressive accumulation of productive forces, is a historical 
consequence and unavoidable. 

My vision of the far future society is devoid of a concept of "wealth" - not 
simply "forms of wealth," and I am not persuaded by appeals to populism. A 
decade ago I fought against the formulation - "the destruction of wealth." My 
vision was still encumbered with industrial logic and property. Vision should 
always be balanced with an understanding of "what is possible." "What is 
possible" can be  very subjective and determined by social forces at ones disposal. 

Under the current world environment it is important that revolutionaries, 
socialists and communists sharpen their understanding of fundamentality and the 
key links in the chain of events that can pull the world forward in our quest 
to leave the last stage of barbarism. 

In the past revolutionaries in America and the imperial centers have secured 
for themselves the unbridled organizational rights - license, to dictate and 
criticize the worlds people and their leaders. In America it is best to error 
on the side of silence in respects to China, rather than unwittingly enter into 
political alignment with our own bourgeoisie.  

Melvin P.