[Marxism] =?Windows-1252?Q?Re:_=5BMarxism=5D Inflation_Delivers_a_Blow_to_Vietn?= amâ?Ts Spirits

[Marvin Gandall]

Artesian writes:

> Now to answer Marvin's question-- let me point out that I asked a question
> first, to which I have received no answer.  And that question is where in
> the history of FDI have such programs advanced socialist relations of
> production?  Feel free to take as much time as you need, anyone, to
> answer.

I don't know. Would you describe the NEP and similar openings to private and
foreign capital by states where the bourgeoisie was expropriated as
contributing to the advance of socialism - and, by extension, to "socialist
relations". Some on the list would. How would you distinguish between the
two?

> So as to Marvin's question as to whether China should withdraw from the
> WTO
> and revert to its isolation of the 70s?  Yes and no.  Yes, China should
> withdraw from the WTO.  I think the latest Doha round failure makes it
> quite
> clear that the advanced countries only have use for the WTO to the extent
> that they can force their agenda on all others.  No China should not
> return
> to isolation.  Nor does it need to.
>
> China did not become a member until 2001, and certainly it's isolation had
> ended before then.  In addition, China would have very little problem
> constructing a number of bi-lateral trade agreements with individual
> countries; and regional agreements with other Asian countries, and not
> just
> other developing countries, but with Japan, Singapore, Taiwan.  Many
> bi-lateral agreements are already in place.

Point us to a single bilateral trade agreement which absolves China of the
obligation to open its markets to direct and portfolio investment by the
other country's capitalists? As for China's large American, European, and
Japanese markets, you're truly dreaming if you expect that they would
continue to admit Chinese exports on the same terms as at present if the
Chinese did not reciprocally allow US manufacturers and financiers direct
access the Chinese labour and consumer markets. Incidentally, I'm no fan of
the WTO, but it has been favoured by the poorer countries, for all its
defects, as affording more protection than the tyranny of bilateral
agreements imposed on them singly by stronger rich countries.

> But wait, there's more:  The question of China's participation in the WTO
> cannot be abstracted from the general course of China's development for
> the
> past 25 years.  And that course has been openly, explicitly, capitalist.
> China attempted capitalist development of agriculture by dispossessing
> communes and collectives and distributing individual titles to land to the
> peasants, hoping that they would follow the old Marxist mythology that
> somehow peasants morph into rich capitalists.  Didn't happen (actually
> can't
> happen).  China inititated this at the same time as it was opening itself
> up
> to FDI.
>
> Over this time period, China has cultivated, nurtured, sanctioned the
> development of a bourgeois class.  There's no secret to this.  This is not
> a
> sudden revelation, or a distortion of the results of leadership's
> policies.
> The CCP has created and empowered a bourgeoisie.

This is largely true. Unlike Walter and Fred, I don't believe China is a
workers' state, deformed or otherwise. If China does not yet have all the
fully formed features of the advanced capitalist economies, that is the
declared goal of its leadership which has been actively taking steps in this
direction for the past quarter-century and especially since joining the WTO
at the beginning of this decade. In the Chinese political idiom, "Socialism
with Chinese characteristics" means the same thing as the welfare capitalist
state means to Western social democrats.

> The question really is, for all those who think China or Cuba or Vietnam,
> must go down this road:   what alternatives are there to capitalist
> development?

I think it's appropriate to turn the the question back to you. The only
present alternatives to capitalist development I've heard mentioned with any
regularity on this and other left lists are the Venezuelan road and, in the
US, third party electoral candidacies by the tiny Green and socialist
parties or individual campaigns like Nader's. You seem to have rejected all
of these. What alternatives do YOU see to capitalist development? Are you
able to identify any anticapitalist political formations with a mass base in
China, Cuba, and Vietnam to which you're attracted? It seems unfair to
berate others when you evidently don't see any worldly alternatives either
and seek to substitute an abstraction called "program" as compensation for
this lack.