Unfrequently Asked Questions: Is China Really Communist?

Courtesy of the ABC.

On a recent Q&A session on China and the 100th anniversary of the CCP, Bill Birtles (formerly ABC’s China correspondent), Bang Xiao (ABC’s bilingual journalist specialising in China), Stan Grant (ABC’s foreign affairs analyst) and Yun Jiang (Australian National University) answered questions from the public.

Clinton asked: “China’s system of governance seems totally at odds with any definition of communism. Or am I alone thinking this?”

The panel chose Jiang’s answer:

“China’s official ideology is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and it’s the last two words doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

“Officially, the ultimate goal of the CCP is still to realise communism, but in order to reach this goal, it needs to tweak the Marxist-Leninist ideology, hence ‘with Chinese characteristics’.

“Interestingly, one of the threats to the CCP are Marxists who agitate for workers' rights and labour organisers.” (my bold)

But here are additional answers by Birtles, Xiao and Grant (see also).

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Just last week I was talking about the “unusual” or ”surprising” beliefs some Marxists held.

Some of those beliefs are potentially useful. Peter Cooper has some interesting reflections on China and whether it is a socialist or a capitalist economy. However, he introduces a twist that complicates our considerations.

If I understood him well, for him a capitalist economy is one where Marx’s law of value (roughly, what other Marxists call labour theory of value) and especially his law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit holds.

This may seem equivalent to the definition most other Marxists accept (namely, that a capitalist society is one in which the means of production are in private hands); but that apparent equivalence may be unwarranted.

Cutting to the chase: in societies with Governments that issue their own currency, Governments appropriate surplus physical output (as opposed to surplus value). Therefore, those Governments do not act as a collective capitalist and can keep society from collapsing after economic crises.

That doesn’t mean they are socialist, however. In other words, Cooper does away with the capitalist versus socialist binary (which was already weakened after the “state capitalism” category was introduced anyway).

Readers interested in climate change may find Cooper’s brief mention of “ecological limits” suggestive as well.

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Other “unusual” understandings of Marxism and socialism seem less than useful …

(source)

You may not believe me – admittedly it does not sound good for me to say this – but the truth is that I never had much faith in the so-called “Bolivarian Revolution”, you know, the idea of socialism with Venezuelan characteristics. And if the world eventually – at a glacial pace – drifts away from fossil fuels, however insufficiently to save us from climate change, how is that “revolution” going to survive?

Well, let us wait and see.