Re: [Marxism] Chinese peasant land ownership

[Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:.

> Does the Economist believe its own propaganda? The formula for privatizing
> land as a spur to development is obviously based on the Western European
> experience which they understand in a unidimensionally positive fashion.
> Because you had Enclosure Acts in Great Britain, the argument goes, wage
> labor became available for the new burgeoning manufacturing system. (Of
> course, you get the same analysis, more or less, from Brenner.)
>
> What this fails to take into account is the role of the New World and
> Australia in absorbing excess unemployed population. If Great Britain (and
> Italy, etc.) could not export landless peasants to the colonies, the lid
> would have blown off the capitalist system in its early phase. So where is
> China supposed to export its excess population? To the USA, which is
> poised to close the borders using Draconian new laws backed by the liberal
> Ted Kennedy and John McCain?
>
> The assumption here is that the capitalist system is like some sort of
> well-engineered Swiss Watch, when in fact it has more in common with an
> infernal machine that blows up in the face of its creator.
=============================
Yes, which is why there continues to be a lot of debate around this issue
within the CCP and why it seems somewhat paralyzed about how to proceed. The
emphasis at the recently concluded National People's Congress was not about
conferring ownership rights, which would accelerate rural depopulation, but
instead about extending health and education services and other forms of
support to the countryside which have become badly eroded since the turn to
capitalism. I think a law which would have conferred some form of property
rights on Chinese peasants allowing them to claim market-based compensation
in cases of expropriation - in line with the exercise of the "eminent
domain" principle in capitalist societies - has also since been postponed.
Still, even though the rural development budget has been substantially
increased, it only represents a pittance on a per capita basis, and there is
the continuing imperative of foreign and domestic capital to expand into the
countryside  - so the issue remains, as the Maoists would say, China's
"primary contradiction".




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