Re: [A-List] CHINA: Property Law Denies Farmers the Good Earth

[Omahkohkiaayo_ipoyi <omahkohkiaayo@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Old-style leftists have attacked the legislation for straying too far
from the Marxist foundations of communist China and embracing
capitalism. They worry the law could lead to a fire sale of state
assets and have blocked its passage for years.
 
Gong Xiantian, a leading Marxist economist and critic of the draft
law, argues that the law undermines the legal foundation of China's
socialist economy which is based on public ownership.

"Equal protection of private and public ownership is the feature of
the market economy, not a socialist economy," he says.

Chinese leaders have responded to the leftist concerns by allowing a
rare long public discussion. The revised draft of the law includes
lengthy paragraphs as to the primacy of the "socialist system" and the
"state ownership."

Response Jim C:

This topic and debate is raging on the Chinese language sites like
Sina.com. Prof. Gong Xiantian is a 70-year-old professor of Law at Beijing
University who argues that the new property law, which guarantees "equal
status/protection" of Private, Group (Collectives and Corporations) and
State Property violates the Chinese Constitution which guarantees the
supremacy of State forms of property over Group and Private forms. He has
been denounced as an "unreconstructed Maoist", an "opportunist seeking
fame" and someone who favors Marxist students and gives bad grades to
non-Marxist students.

Interestingly, the US Supreme Court passed property rights findings even
more "Statist" than anything in the Chinese Constitution in that they have
found that under Eminent Domain, the bourgeois State can even expropriate
private property not only for social purposes, but even to favor another
private entity like a corporation.

Ultimately, however, all "private property" only remains held and
recognized and "titled" as long as bourgeois property
rights/relations/institutions hold and only as long as those holding or
selling property have the "power" to do so.

The days will come, in China and all over the world, where either ALL
private "ownership" of land and critical resources will vanish, or it will
be the earth itself and its life forms that will vanish. When inequalities
of wealth and incomes, combined with commodification of everything
including land is allowed, and especially in the case of land, one person
"owning" large tracts of land not only influences the uses of that scarce
land, but it also influences/constrains the uses of other forms land
adjacent as well as distant. With commodification of everything
(information, access to political power, land, labor-power etc)
inequalities and asymmetries (including in land ownership/control) can only
become self-fulfilling and self-reproducing on expanded scales. In that
case only social expropriation/elimination of the private "owners" and
expropriators of land and other critical resources is consistent with the
survival of any group of Peoples or indeed of the whole planet.

Again, "In the contradiction lies the hoope" [as well as the potential for
a lot of misery and destruction).

Jim C./Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi



 
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