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

[Marvin Gandall]

Artesian writes:

Quite clearly, the NEP was a retreat, a step back, brought upon by the civil
war.  The Bolsheviks in their debates were clear about that.  The Bolsheviks
knew the risks.  The Bolsheviks regarded it as no more than a temporary
measure.  Compare all that to the 28 years of Chinese development, the
enshrinement of private property, the dismantling of guaranteed employment;
guaranteed health care; the propaganda that egalitarianism is unhelpful to
labor productivity, the propaganda that makes Bukharin's "Enrich
Yourselves!" look like a slogan of the Left Social Revolutionaries.

MG: I agree. See my response to Louis who made a similar point. The issue
is the context within which FDI and other concessions are made to global and
local capitalist markets. The difference, as I see it, is that Fred, Walter
and perhaps some others do not see China as capitalist or moving in that
direction. If I understand them correctly, they still see China as a
deformed workers' state and it's market-based reforms as laying the basis
for further advance within that framework, and therefore justifiable with
reference to the NEP. I think your comparison to "the 28 years of Chinese
development" is a valid one.

A: Regarding bi-lateral agreements that absolve China of responsibility-
that's not what was posed or proposed. First, all those things you think
China must do, and must do in the WTO to ensure its position, it did before
it ever joined the WTO in 2001.

MG: No question. But you did propose that China could free itself from
opening its markets to foreign investment if was willing to leave the WTO
and strike bilateral deals instead. My reply was that whether bilaterally or
as part of the WTO, before or after 2001,  the Chinese could not close their
markets to foreign investors if they wanted to engage in any kind of trade,
bilateral or maultilateral, with the rest of the capitalist world. I
suggested it was "dreaming" to imagine they could do so.

A: The question is does China need the WTO?  The answer depends on how,
where, when, and why you see China's development of its social relations of
production.  Capitalist?  Then absolutely, WTO.

MG: Certainly, if it is capitalist. I don't know why the WTO was even raised
as a controversial subject in relation to China if it is regarded as
capitalist - anymore than you would see US membership in the WTO as somehow
controversial.  I think the criticism about FDI was directed at Walter and
others who don't accept that China, Cuba, and Vietnam are capitalist, which
raised the more general question of the propriety of socialist states
relying on FDI. I think the two questions can be treated separately. China
may be capitalist and Cuba anticapitalist, but whatever the political
character of each, neither can wall itself off from the capitalist world
economy, nor does either want to. The USSR and Maoist China each failed the
attempt to do so in more favourable historical circumstances.  The price for
such participation, however, is acceptance of foreign direct and portfolio
investment in exchange for access to the markets of the advanced capitalist
countries, which brings inequality and the reproduction of other features of
capitalist economy in its wake. This is harder to swallow. The Cubans want
the full two-way trade which has been denied to them by the blockade, but I
doubt they can obtain it and remain immune to these other negative
developments. It is a difficult crossroads for the Cubans, and I think the
same must have been true for the veteran Chinese and Vietnamese
revolutionaries who preceded them.

A: I'd like to take issue with your linking China's "socialism with Chinese
characteristics" with "welfare-state social democratic capitalism," since it
precisely the welfare-state characteristics that China is dismantling.

MG: There's evidence the Chinese are moving under popular pressure to
replace the old iron rice bowl, long gone, with the kind of social supports
found in the OECD countries earlier promoted by social democrats. The
Chinese leadership now preach class harmony rather than class struggle in
the manner of social democrats. They are for a mixed economy, with continued
state control of strategic sectors and infrastructure. And since when have
Western social democrats  been immune to dismantling parts of the welfare
state they idealize?

A: I'm afraid you don't get to turn the question back on me, and not simply
because I/we on this side of the debate don't berate China, don't berate
Cuba, don't smear others by saying that they would rather see China rich
rather than socialist.  You can't turn the question back on me, because it
is not an ideological question, with a pro or con side.  It is a question of
analysis.  Is there an alternative to capitalist development?

Certainly there is.  And it depends on revolution in the advanced countries.
It doesn't exist yet?  Absolutely, thus the restoration of capitalism in
Russia, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the conversion of China.  But
as Russia, China, Vietnam prove, there is no alternative.

MG: I fully agree.