[Marxism] David Matters: Personal observations of China

[Anon Anon]

I just returned from Beijing and Shanghai--where a
capitalist class engorges itself on a  shackled
working class denied the most basic of rights such as
the right to strike or form democratic trade unions. 
I wonder where the socialism is at the Ferrari
showroom, just a subway stop from the forbidden
palace? Or the Cartier showrooms? ad nauseum....

What about the gleaming towers of Shanghai?  Are these
being built by organised cooperatives of workers, who
will democratically control the fruits of their
labour?  Or is it, at every turn, capitalist social
relations which are expanding?  

To quote a Chinese factory owner I met, living in
luxury with servants: "we can hire who we want, we can
fire when we want."

I find it sadly ironic, that someone calling
themselves a communist could have the same delusions
of contemporary China as those working in the IMF or
the World Bank.

Walter Lippmann wrote:
"Many of the posters to Marxmail are hostile to China,

but few of them, it seems, actually go there and
report 
on what they see. This report is from the the website
of the Communist Party of Australia, a group
supportive of China, but by no means unaware of its
complexities and challenges and contradictions.

The author has been to China, unlike many of the
critics. Just physically going and seeing a place
doesn't guarantee the validity (or not) of what
someone chooses to write of when settings ones
impressions down in written form, but an eye-witness
account is an eye-witness account, valid to the extent
that the author draws a picture which is of compelling
veracity.

The article itself is much longer than these excerpts."


       
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