[Marxism] China was capitalims

[Walter Lippmann]

Capitalism was the predominant social system in China under the
Republic and under Chiang Kai-Shek. Since I haven't abandoned
all of my Trotskyist training, capitalism remain the predominant
FORM of social organization until all of the major means of 
production were nationalized, in the early fifties, I think during
the Korean War, some time after the October 1, 1949 triumph
of the Chinese Revolution. 

I guess prior to the Republic, around the turn of the twentieth
century, there was a mixture of feudalism with some capitalism
grafted on. It wasn't a model or ideal form of capitalism, but how
many places had a textbook variety? 

As readers here know, I have never called China "socialist" but
call it a "bureaucratically-deformed workers state", the term 
I learned in the Trotskyist world, and haven't seen fit to replace
with something else. Lots of private capitalist investment and a
peculiar political structure with what most posters here call
capitalism led by the explicitly Communist organization called
the Chinese Communist Party. Trotsky did tell us in his book
THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED that a wing of the Soviet regime
would lead the country back to capitalism if it alternatetely 
wasn't overthrown in a political revolution by the workers.

A process like that may well be happening in China a many on
this list are pursuaded. My approach is different. Capitalist or
Communist isn't the issue to me. I think that the Chinese 
leaders are primarily NATIONALIST, more than anything else,
but even there, I'm venturing into territory where I really do
not feel well informed. I just scan the journalistic coverage
and some materials posted on Marxmail.

Cuba I know somewhat, and often remark that the more time
I spend in Cuba, the more I know how little I really know about
that country. I know far, far less about China. That's why I'm
less sweeping in my judgements, and don't fight hard over th
precise designation with which to characterize China today.


Walter

=========================================
CHARLES BROWN asked:
extending your observation on Cuba to China by analogy, was
capitalism ever "established" in China in the past ? If not, it would
not be _re_-establishment of capitalism in China, today, no ?

Charles