Jim D. writes:
Marv Gandall wrote:
Below an article from the latest Economist which, even if inadvertently, refutes two misconceptions about China: a) The right-wing myth that a large state sector is economically inefficient. If China recovers from the global downturn faster than the US, as the Economist suggests it will, it will be primarily owing to continuing public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy - to "the government’s ability to 'ask' state-owned firms to spend and state banks to lend (which) means that the government’s measures are being implemented more rapidly than elsewhere...". This is a legacy of the Chinese Revolution,
the Chinese state was pretty large before the revolution, wasn't it? I think that was true under the Manchus and under the Nationalists. The latter were no free-marketeers? ============================= Although the revolution didn't realize it's socialist ideals, it did accomplish the "bourgeois-democratic tasks" of land reform, industrialization, national unity and independence, and the improvement of the living conditions and cultural standards of the population which the Chinese bourgeoisie, represented by the Kuomintang, presumably would not and could not itself have carried out. I say "presumably" because it's at least arguable that the Kuomintang did implement such reform and growth in Taiwan, as did other bourgeois parties in Japan, South Korea, and the other so-called Asian Tigers. Of course, they all developed under the umbrella of US imperialism. But the CCP was also transformed into a bourgeois party in the process of accomodating to private markets at home and fostering China's integration into the world capitalist economy. So Asian growth, notwithstanding it's brutal exploitation and inequality, does not seem to accord with the thinking of Lenin, Trotsky, and other classical Marxists who rejected the idea that the colonial and semi-colonial nations would go through the same stage of bourgeois-led post-feudal development as occured in the West - who believed that Western imperialism condemned these nations to the development only of underdevelopment. This iisn't a new discussion by any means, and I imagine it's been explored on the list in the past. I expect Jim would say China's development is not surprising from the POV of the state capitalist/bureaucratic collectivist school of Marxism, but I need to be reminded of the counter-arguments of those who continue to defend more conventional Marxist positions on this issue. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
