[Marxism] Imperialism in 1848

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, but you didn't compare China to Stalin's Russia. You compared it
to 
Victorian Great Britain.


Marvin Gandall wrote:


I agree with you that there was imperialism in 1848, but it was not the

same imperialism that Hilferding, Hobson, Lenin and Bukharin wrote 
about. Capitalism was arguably the system that the CM described as 
revolutionizing the means of production, but as Rosa Luxemburg would 
point out in "Accumulation of Capital", it never had that effect in the

colonized country despite what Marx wrote in 1853.

^^^
CB: And of course, in China today capitalism is not being brought to
China by colonizing, imperializing, racist Europeans, which takes it
qualitatively out of the empirical category of Luxembourg's critique.
The capitalism in China and Vietnam has self-determining control by 
nationally liberated ,indigenous peoples. In China ,it's capitalism with
Chinese national characteristics, controlled by the Chinese state power,
qualitatively different than capitalism brought to India by a British
state power, and much more like capitalism brought to Britain by a
British state power. In China today, it is also monopoly capitalism,
finance capitalism,  not pre-monopoly capitalism. Lenin, in
_Imperialism_ , noted that monopoly capital prepares the ground for
socialism better than capitalism of so-called free competition. Finally,
it is capitalism "supervised" by a Communist Party, which declares that
it is still trying to build socialism.  This is a Communist Party that
tried mightily to travel a road to socialism bypassing capitalism. It
then  frankly, honestly, with extraordinarily courageous self-criticism,
assessed that it was not succeeding; basically declared that its
"socialism" was not good enough; and perhaps that the material
production was not sufficient to protect China from real imperialism,
which had already conducted two genocidal wars on China's bordering
countries, had nuked Japan, demonstrating full willingness to annihilate
genocidally "yellow perils", explicitly threatened to do so, had a world
ending scale of nukes pointed at that country !

  I don't care that some American Marxists don't trust the Chinese
Communist Party on these issues,  frankly. That's a sort of leftist
White Man's Burden, as far as I'm concerned. Like China has to risk
annihilation and continue in massssssssss poverty to uphold American
Marxists' ideals. 



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