Re: China's "Communist" Status

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Boone wrote:

> In order to be considered a true "Communist" nation, there is a large
> revolutionary process that goes on. Is China in that process? How far have
> they come?

Not very far. China is a Third World periphery, hooked up to the global
economy via, well, VIA (one of Taiwan's innumerable chip firms), plus Hong
Kong's textile and assembly plants. Communism, by definition, would be a
society in which we wouldn't have peripheries or obnoxious exploitation of
workers by capital; it has to be a worldwide thing, because capital is
global to its core. We're probably at least a couple centuries away from
that beatific state of affairs. Basically, China is still in the initial
throes of full-fledged industrialization, so there's a sense in which
industrial class struggle is just beginning to get rolling in China as a
whole (as opposed to islands of modernization such as Shanghai, Beijing or
the Guangdong region, which have a long and colorful history of labor
activism, Left politics, etc.).

-- Dennis