Re: [Pen-l] China's downturn

[Marv Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim D. writes:

Marv Gandall wrote:
> Below an article from the latest Economist which, even if inadvertently,
> refutes two misconceptions about China:
>
> a) The right-wing myth that a large state sector is economically
> inefficient. If China recovers from the global downturn faster than the
> US,
> as the Economist suggests it will, it will be primarily owing to
> continuing
> public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy - to "the
> government’s ability to 'ask' state-owned firms to spend and state banks
> to
> lend (which) means that the government’s measures are being implemented
> more
> rapidly than elsewhere...".
>
> This is a legacy of the Chinese Revolution,

the Chinese state was pretty large before the revolution, wasn't it? I
think that was true under the Manchus and under the Nationalists. The
latter were no free-marketeers?
=============================
Although the revolution didn't realize it's socialist ideals, it did
accomplish the "bourgeois-democratic tasks" of land reform,
industrialization, national unity and independence, and the improvement of
the living conditions and cultural standards of the population which the
Chinese bourgeoisie, represented by the Kuomintang, presumably would not and
could not itself have carried out.

I say "presumably" because it's at least arguable that the Kuomintang did
implement such reform and growth in Taiwan, as did other bourgeois parties
in Japan, South Korea, and the other so-called Asian Tigers.  Of course,
they all developed under the umbrella of US imperialism. But the CCP was
also transformed into a bourgeois party in the process of accomodating to
private markets at home and fostering China's integration into the world
capitalist economy.

So Asian growth, notwithstanding it's brutal exploitation and inequality,
does not seem to accord with the thinking of Lenin, Trotsky, and other
classical Marxists who rejected the idea that the colonial and semi-colonial
nations would go through the same stage of bourgeois-led post-feudal
development as occured in the West - who believed that Western imperialism
condemned these nations to the development only of underdevelopment.

This iisn't a new discussion by any means, and I imagine it's been explored
on the list in the past. I expect Jim would say China's development is not
surprising from the POV of the state capitalist/bureaucratic collectivist
school of Marxism, but I need to be reminded of the counter-arguments of
those who continue to defend more conventional Marxist positions on this
issue.


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