or<\/p>\n
Did China really rise without trace?<\/p>\n
At the 2017 Chinese Communist Party congress, Xi Jinping openly broke with Deng Xiaoping\u2019s 1990 maxim for the Chinese Communist Party: \u201cHide your strength and bide your time.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 According to Xi, China was now in a \u201cperiod of strategic opportunity.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This may have been a reference to Trump\u2019s recent election to the US presidency and the UK Brexit decision weakening the European Union.\u00a0\u00a0 The term had been used by previous Chinese leaders at times when the US was particularly distracted by other matters.\u00a0\u00a0 At any rate, Xi said that it was \u201ctime for [China] to take centre stage in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
The nearly five years since have seen overt Chinese and American antagonisms magnify considerably.\u00a0\u00a0 The situation is important for several reasons:\u00a0 materially, because it constitutes a major component of the power framework within which humanity lives, and theoretically, because the development of China over recent decades gives us an opportunity to assess how well our analyses have dealt with the reality of capitalist economic development historically.<\/p>\n
The comrades who left the ICC in 1985 and formed IP at the time defended the ICC\u2019s economic analysis of capitalism, the key element of which was that the current epoch of decadent capitalism was putting a brake on the development of the productive forces.\u00a0\u00a0 As the years passed, we saw that the development of capitalism\u2019s productive forces was accelerating and this recognition contributed to a reassessment of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of decadence in capitalism.\u00a0 By 2016, IP\u2019s new reference text had no mention of decadence.\u00a0\u00a0 Other texts of the time talked of us \u201cliving in a phase of social retrogression\u201d; but the questions of \u2018what had changed?\u2019 and \u2018why did it change?\u2019 remained.\u00a0\u00a0 Additionally, it is worth pointing out that old ideas can linger on in different guises; sometimes they cast shadows and create blind spots.\u00a0\u00a0 IP\u2019s analyses of modern China over the past thirty-five years illustrates such a problematic.<\/p>\n
The first description of China\u2019s trajectory made by IP in 1986 was that it was being integrated into the US bloc, a process that Russia was trying to slow down.\u00a0\u00a0 Also, the agreement to return Hong Kong to China was seen as strengthening its links with the UK.\u00a0\u00a0 (Remember, the Cold War was still going strong.)\u00a0\u00a0 In the 1990s, IP used the fact of China\u2019s rapid industrialisation against the ICC\u2019s concept of decadence.\u00a0\u00a0 But, at the same time, it was argued that the crushing weight of debt made any significant global economic recovery impossible.\u00a0\u00a0 In 1998, while acknowledging the possibility of Chinese development in the context of the Asian crisis IP argued that the inconvertibility of the Chinese currency limited its export market access.\u00a0\u00a0 By the early 2000s, IP noted that China was becoming the biggest manufacturing centre in the world and that its growth had been prodigious.\u00a0\u00a0 However, in 2007 it was argued that China was stuck and that it couldn\u2019t spend capital freely on national development.\u00a0 The cutting edge of capitalist production was not in China but in the US, Western Europe and Japan.\u00a0\u00a0 Furthermore, it was a myth that China was catching up like Germany and the US in the 19th<\/sup> Century.\u00a0\u00a0 Such were IP\u2019s main assessments of Chinese economic development in the printed publication between 1986 and 2007, just before the global financial meltdown.<\/p>\n Subsequently, in 2011, IP did go so far as to say that the Chinese economy had saved capital from drowning over the previous quarter of a century \u2013 while pointing out that it had not prevented capital from descending into its worst crisis since the 1930s; however, its beneficial effect was diminishing both as a source of surplus value and as a market.\u00a0\u00a0 Then, in the following years, China went on to more than double its GDP.\u00a0\u00a0 In 2007, the UK\u2019s economy was bigger than China\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet, as of 2020, China\u2019s economy had become seven times the size of the UK\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0 Have we missed something?\u00a0\u00a0 It appears we have; Deng\u2019s \u2018hide and bide\u2019 has been very effective.<\/p>\n I am reminded of a comment made by an academic (David Banach concerning Who Killed Substantial Form<\/em>) albeit on a different matter: \u201cI am in the unenviable position of a rookie cop watching a skilled detective and an expert medical examiner examining a body, formulating intricate and ingenious theories about the possible timing and cause of death, but being forced to point out the large axe protruding from the patient\u2019s skull.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 China has taken a sharp instrument to western capitalism, to geopolitical balance, and to Marxist theorists\u2019 views on what is or is not possible.\u00a0\u00a0 We can\u2019t do anything about the first two but we can \u2013 and must \u2013 do something about the third.\u00a0\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n We must because we have not simply been fooled by Deng.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not only an issue of being blind to the significance of an aspect of empirical reality; it goes to the heart of a Marxist analysis of the capitalist economy.\u00a0\u00a0 If we claim to have an analysis of the development of the global capitalist economy it must examine the economy at that global level.\u00a0 It is a self-deception to portray the global economy as if it were only the West with other parts of the world merely hanging on.\u00a0\u00a0 That may have appeared to have been the situation sometime in the past but has surely not been a credible description of reality for decades now.<\/p>\n It should be obvious that a methodology is flawed when it leads us over a period of years to say that certain developments can\u2019t take place, that they are mythical, and when they actually happen the previous denial is ignored.<\/p>\n Deng was hiding much more activity than the level of domestic economic development, and Xi has doubled down on the many activities that had been underway.\u00a0\u00a0 Now his Major Country Diplomacy reveals integration of many aspects of politico-economic activity covering the Wolf Warrior diplomacy, the Belt and Road Initiative (the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st<\/sup> Century Maritime Silk Road) covering widespread infrastructural developments, the soft power global reach of the United Front Work Department and, of course, the massive build-up of military forces and distant bases.\u00a0\u00a0 And, as if to further the rapprochement with Russia since 1991 an extension to their friendship and cooperation treaty was signed this year; joint army exercises have been taking place for some years and this year (for the first time) joint naval exercises have been conducted.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The geo-political and geo-economic frameworks have changed fundamentally since the collapse of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n It seems to me that there were several sources of error, including biases inherited from previous analytical beliefs.\u00a0\u00a0 One was the legacy of the ICC\u2019s concept of decadence being a brake on the productive forces.\u00a0\u00a0 Another was the associated legacy belief that what was known as the \u2018third world\u2019 could not develop its production capacity substantially.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet another was the assumption that the capitalist world was essentially North America and Western Europe; this was an inexplicit assumption and may also have been linked to some vestiges of the Frankfurt School influencing early practitioners of the Neue Marx-Lekt\u00fcre.\u00a0\u00a0 Along with these were assumptions about the theoretical tools that could be used:\u00a0 that the functioning of the capitalist economy could be analysed solely using broad movements of exchange value, ignoring the activities of institutions \u2013 organisational and contractual \u2013 that house these activities constructed and dismantled as required by major players: involving states. major companies and complex networks.\u00a0\u00a0 These institutions are the structures within and through which capitalism has found the means to further its real domination over all aspects of human life.\u00a0\u00a0 Not giving such developments their due weight in (our) analysis leads us to serious self-delusions.<\/p>\n There have also been errors of omission.\u00a0\u00a0 One concerns the huge increases in production in the East, from India through the Asian tiger economies and to China which now account for an enormous proportion of the capitalist economy.\u00a0\u00a0 East Asia now accounts for about one-third of world GDP; an interesting outcome for something that couldn\u2019t happen.\u00a0\u00a0 China has not been stuck..\u00a0\u00a0 It has gone through an economic development \u2013 all pushed by the anti-democratic, dictatorial state \u2013 from the breaking-up of autarky, through low tech, production displacement from the West, through mimicry (and theft) to technological inventiveness.<\/p>\n (A related error is to neglect the theoretical analysis of the historical evolution of the role of money in capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0 Only an ever-diminishing proportion of money movements today is used to make or receive payments for material or service commodities.\u00a0\u00a0 Massive movements of capital can now be accomplished in minutes.\u00a0\u00a0 For the economic system, this means that states and large companies can transfer and apply their power<\/em> where and when they wish.\u00a0\u00a0 Likewise, we must deepen our analysis of what money is.\u00a0\u00a0 In Capital v1, Marx takes money to be gold or silver and its use as world money is to make or receive payments, and to transfer wealth.\u00a0\u00a0 But money today is fiat money, no longer based on a gold standard, and its functioning is essentially underpinned by the US dollar.\u00a0\u00a0 This money change signifies deep changes in capitalism since Marx\u2019s time and cries out for thoroughgoing analysis.\u00a0\u00a0 And then there is cryptocurrency \u2026\u2026..)<\/p>\n In case any reader is in doubt, let me stress that there are no \u2018sunlit uplands\u2019 for Chinese capital nor for global capitalism as a whole.\u00a0\u00a0 Capitalism\u2019s whole historical trajectory has been punctuated by crises, financial and material, revolts and wars, local and global.\u00a0\u00a0 The above comments are concerned with how capitalism\u2019s prospects were viewed over past decades; they do not give predictions for the future.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, the economic problems confronted by the Chinese state today are similar to those confronted by the American state:\u00a0 real estate markets over-heating with financial bubbles swelling, antagonisms with the power of Big Tech, supply chain problems, rising labour costs, inflation, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 By arguing that, over the past decades, capitalism has found mechanisms to tackle certain problems does not lead to the conclusion that capitalism can do anything it wants.<\/p>\n All in all we need a reset, theoretically speaking.\u00a0\u00a0 It would do us no ill to review our work to see what we\u2019ve got right and what wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 And if we were to edit our text on \u2018The World As We See It \u2013 Reference Points\u2019 we might include a better description of China than as a \u2018living fossil\u2019.<\/p>\n Marlowe<\/p>\n 9 January 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" or Did China really rise without trace? At the 2017 Chinese Communist Party congress, Xi Jinping openly broke with Deng Xiaoping\u2019s 1990 maxim for the Chinese Communist Party: \u201cHide your strength and bide your time.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 According to Xi, China was now in a \u201cperiod of strategic opportunity.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This may have been a reference to Trump\u2019s … <\/p>\n