On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 03:45 PM, Vladimiro Giacche' wrote: > > I incline to think that the real issue is another one: who is NOT in > charge? And the answer (both in the former URSS and in China) is : the > bourgeoisie. > The fact that this class doesn’t own the political power is not a detail. > This is true for the USSR as well as for China, in my opinion. (Regarding > the latter see for instance “Capitalism, alone” Branko Milanovic).
Milanovic believes that China’s economic system is state capitalist in the sense Lenin understood and applied the concept to the NEP, but that the PRC is not ruled by the bourgeoisie as in the two-party systems shielded by US imperialism. Milanovic is still, however, very much conscious of the country's large private sector and its rising bourgeoisie, and sees Xi as representative of those forces in the party and state which are trying to contain its economic and political rise in accordance with the Leninist formula of state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat. That struggle, as he notes, has been largely conducted within the party. I’m attracted to this view of the current situation in China. I shy away from using the term “state capitalism” to describe the system, however, because it is almost universally interpreted to mean, including on this list, that the state has been captured either by its new billionaires or by a new political and bureaucratic class whose personal wealth rests on their collective control of the state sector. Lenin’s concept instead suggests that the adaptation to capitalist market forces and relations by the PRC has been an organic outgrowth of the party-state’s development since the 1949 Revolution which has compelled it to rapidly increase the growth of the productive forces internally combined with its dependence on a global capitalist economy which has never given way to the socialist commonwealth of nations long anticipated by Marxists. Here is Milanovic on Lenin’s NEP and its applicability to China: https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/state-capitalism-one-hundred-years And Lenin’s justification of the NEP in “The Tax in Kind”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29491): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29491 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104961025/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
