[Marxism] Fwd: Re: [PEN-L] Leftforum 2006

[Andrew Pollack <acpollack2@xxxxxxxxx>]

First, thanks, Louis, for the summary of the workshops you attended.

  Second, the forward from Walt Byars was very useful. I don't know enough 
about state intervention in the post-Mao period to know how much of what he 
claims it's true, but it merits very serious empirical investigation, because 
it's potentially very valuable in cutting across capitalist propaganda about 
the sources of China's expansion.

  For instance, even when he thinks he's gone off-topic he's raising important 
issues:
  "...all this stuff about China's interventions is basically written from the 
same perspective as an Alice Amsden or Robert Wade."

  But that's OK! Even if the measures taken by the post-Mao state resemble 
those taken by the "Asian Tigers," they were still state measures. This is 
important in countering propaganda that attributes 100% of China's skyrocketing 
economic growth to the market. And in a formal sense many state measures taken 
in any postcapitalist society, including Lenin's NEP, resemble those of 
interventionist capitalist states. So who cares if it was Amsden or Amsden-like 
people providing the evidence; we can put our own spin on it.

  Now by this point it seems the Chinese state has intervened not just to spur 
on growth, but to make a reborn capitalist class the primary beneficiaries of 
that growth. But if the state was the primary social force spurring on growth 
in the first place that's still an important argument for the potential of 
nonmarket growth.

  (I would add parenthetically that there is another, equally important, 
argument in challenging the propaganda about the role of the market in China's 
growth: China, after being consciously, indeed viciously, underdeveloped for a 
century and a half by imperialism, was bound to grow as soon as it achieved 
genuine independence in 1949. And it took a massively f***-d up bureaucracy 
(i.e. Mao's) to restrain that growth for so many decades. It would be pretty 
damned hard NOT to grow once the shackles are off, but Mao found a way in his 
most idiotic ventures.)




                
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