In short, based on my study of the Chinese experience,
while there were
some in the state that just supported growing
marketization for their
own gain, there were many in the party that saw the
need to overcome
problems of imbalance and inefficiency from the Mao
era and sought to
do so by encouraging competition between firms and
this lead step by
step to promotion of profits, and the creation of a
labor market and
...
ta-da-doom........the coninuation of wage-slavery,
classes, the State and all the undemocratic baggage
that goes with that sort of political-economy. Not
that the more Mao inspired system of State controlled
commodity production didn't result in much the same
system with, of course, variations on all the
abovementioned themes.
One cannot create a labor market by a political act because it is a historical formation that exist outside the will of the individual or political institutions. The labor market evolves on the basis of technology, the individual producer, the degree of separation of the individuals from land and self sufficient means of production and this process is accelerated or retarded by political institutions or just mean spirited individuals.
The state cannot control commodity production as such because it is driven by some human dynamics riveted to sustenance and the degree of separations of a mass of people from instruments of self sufficiency. Force - the state, can retard or accerlate but never control the mode of production.
Marketization is not a category of politics but rather a category of economics or rather the degree of evolution of exchange and the commodity form. Chairman Mao great leap forward became a real leap forward in understanding why industrial prodcution and organization is a historically evolved stage in the development of the productive forces. Tryining to build a steel industrial on the basis of scattered small scale producers was a bitter lesson, that he admitted was extremely bitter.
The Chairman ran into some laws governing industrial development - like the law of cooperation, the law of intensive and extensive development of technology and machinery, the law of exchange dealing with agricultural producers who cannot farm and make steel at the same time.
Revolutionary firmness can suppress privilege seeking but then you need science, technological transfer, industrial development and so on. Sending the revolutionary workers to the countryside will boast production in one sector and lower it in another. You have to have people trained in management and administration which is not a bad word in America. An industrial form of organization is not the property relations but at its base line a stage in the development of the productive forces. Now that we are clearly leaving the industrial era this is slowly becoming pretty obvious.
