Re: [Marxism] PRC: The Left of the CPC critiques capitalist restorationists

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Walter wrote:
>Well, one can cite anything from old polemics by Marx, Engels, 
>Lenin, Stalin, Avakian or whoever to prove whatever. I pay little 
>attention to those things and prefer to see how these things play 
>out in real life.

This is the last thing I will say on this but the article that 
Chandan posted a link to has nothing to do with "real life". You can 
scour it for data related to the Chinese economy today and you will 
come up empty. It is an exercise in the sort of sterile, dogmatic, 
scholastic polemics that the Stalinist movement perfected. The reason 
I referred to Stalin's 1951 article is because the author of the 
article was trained in Stalin's methodology that a side-by-side 
comparison of the two items would reveal.

It is particularly glaring when it comes to the heading of section 4: 
"The main difference between socialism and capitalism is public 
ownership and private ownership." But when you read the section, you 
will find *nothing* that concretely addresses a Chinese state sector 
that has no connection to the state sectors in Soviet Russia or Mao's 
China for that matter. The state sector in China operates purely on 
the basis of profit. In many ways, it is the equivalent of Kemal's 
Turkey where the bourgeoisie emerged out of the public sector. In 
fact, the political clash in Turkey today can be explained by 
rivalries between the traditional Kemalist bourgeoisie that operated 
out of Turkish Airlines, etc. and the new Islamist bourgeoisie that 
rests on the privately-owned textile sector, etc.

State-owned enterprises in China are no longer guarantors of an "iron 
rice bowl". Instead, they are strictly profit-oriented entities, so 
much so that Goldman-Sachs has begun buying shares.

NY Times, July 11, 2005
Another China Bank Is Courted by the West
By DAVID BARBOZA and KEITH BRADSHER

SHANGHAI, July 10 - Goldman Sachs and Allianz of Germany are in talks 
to acquire a $1 billion stake in China's largest state-owned bank, 
the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, according to a person 
briefed on the discussions.

The talks come at a time when some of the world's biggest financial 
institutions are rushing into China to acquire stakes in some of the 
country's large but troubled state-owned banks ahead of planned 
initial public offerings in the next few years. The Bank of America 
said last month that it would pay $3 billion for a 9 percent stake in 
the nation's third-largest lender, the China Construction Bank, which 
is expected to offer shares to the public late this year.

And UBS said last month that it was considering investing as much as 
$500 million in the Bank of China, another huge state-owned bank.

"All the big financial institutions want a piece of the action," said 
Jack J. T. Huang, who oversees China coverage for the law firm Jones 
Day in Taipei, Taiwan. "This is not necessarily a rational decision 
when you look at the numbers. But these institutions believe the 
government won't allow these banks to fail. They will step in to help 
them succeed."

---

Just ask yourself if SOE's in Cuba, Mao's China or the USSR operated 
this way... 


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