Socialism |OT| The Dawn of a Red Era

lmcfigs said:

I also say check out spectrerouge.com

The articles are user submitted from /leftypol/ though if that bothers you. I think it's interesting enough.

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Lafiel said:

So for the record apparently it looks like some "trolls" or the alt-right on the internet have definitely being looking at this thread with a keen eye just had this written about me somewhere


Probably means you should watch out for whatever personal info you post on this page, it doesn't bother me in the slightest that some of my posts here are spreading around it just means extra profile for my group which is always nice, i'm more at risk of more serious threats from the far-right in a physical realm because of my activism anyway. :P


Anyway here are some good resources and links that might be useful to attach the OP at some point


News publications


https://www.counterpunch.org/

https://socialistworker.org/

http://links.org.au/

http://climateandcapitalism.com/ - i think this blog is very very good, i think the ecological arguments against capitalism is very convincing and one of the most radicalizing force out there, I've personally met the author of the site (Ian Angus) who has spoken at a number of my parties conferences and he's a brilliant speaker and has written some fantastic books on ecology and capitalism.

https://monthlyreview.org/

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/

www.greenleft.org.au (for australian radical news and i'm a frequent writer for it :P)

https://overland.org.au/ australian publication that prints a lot of radical stuff.



Educational


https://www.youtube.com/user/readingcapital david harvey capital educational series.


Book shops


https://www.versobooks.com/- has very good sales with free shipping for international orders every christmas.

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/


Probably have some more but this is what is off the top of my head at this point.

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Eylos said:

Perfect. LoL
Great job sphagnum.
Sugestion, bold the divisions. And add an img of a red flag at the top or anything you think its cool, to give a Nice visual aspect. g

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wisdom0wl said:

Yo. Can I get book recommends? Or general stuff to read? Views are more in line with Bernie's, but I wanted to see what the fuss is about when going full socialist.

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Cindi Mayweather said:

Libertarian socialist here.

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What this tells me is that, under Xi, China will never move towards the dismantling of the party and the state machine in order to develop a 'bourgeois democracy' based on a fully market economy and capitalist business. China will remain an economy that is fundamentally state-controlled and directed, with the 'commanding heights' of the economy under public ownership and controlled by the party elite.

Foreign businesses don't find this an appealing prospect, unsurprisingly. In a January survey of 462 US companies by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 81 percent said they felt less welcome in China, while more than 60 percent have little or no confidence the country will further open its markets in the next three years.

Indeed, China still ranks 59th out of the 62 countries evaluated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of openness to foreign direct investment. At the same time, FDI is becoming less important to the economy: in 2016 it accounted for a little more than 1 percent of China's gross domestic product, down from around 2.3 percent in 2006 and 4.8 percent in 1996.

An even bigger cause for concern for multinationals are Beijing's plans to replicate foreign technologies and foster national champions that can take them global. A program launched in 2015, called Made in China 2025, aims to make the country competitive within a decade in 10 industries, including aircraft, new energy vehicles, and biotechnology. China, under Xi, aims not just to be the manufacturing centre of the global economy but also to take a lead in innovation and technology that will rival that of the US and other advanced capitalist economies within a generation.

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And American imperialism is scared. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has described the plan as an "attack" on "American genius." In an excellent new book, The US vs China: Asia's new cold war?, Jude Woodward, a regular visitor and lecturer in China, shows the desperate measures that the US is taking to try to isolate China, block its economic progress and surround it militarily. But she also shows this policy is failing. China is not accepting control by foreign multi-nationals; it is continually developing trade and investment links with the rest of Asia; and, with the exception of Abe's Japan, it is succeeding in keeping the Asian capitalist states ambivalent between China's 'butter' and America's 'arms'.' As a result, China has been able to maintain its independence from US imperialism and global capitalism like no other state.

This brings us to the question of whether China is a capitalist state or not? I think the majority of Marxist political economists agree with mainstream economics in assuming or accepting that China is. However, I am not one of them. China is not capitalist. Commodity production for profit, based on spontaneous market relations, governs capitalism. The rate of profit determines its investment cycles and generates periodic economic crises. This does not apply in China. In China, public ownership of the means of production and state planning remain dominant and the Communist party's power base is rooted in public ownership. So China's economic rise has been achieved without the capitalist mode of production being dominant.

China's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is a weird beast. Of course, it is not 'socialism' by any Marxist definition or by any benchmark of democratic workers control. And there has been a significant expansion of privately-owned companies, both foreign and domestic over the last 30 years, with the establishment of a stock market and other financial institutions. But the vast majority of employment and investment is undertaken by publicly-owned companies or by institutions that are under the direction and control of the Communist party. The biggest part of China's world-beating industry is not foreign-owned multinationals, but Chinese state-owned enterprises.

And here I can provide some new evidence that, as far as I know, has not been noticed by any other commentators. Recently the IMF published a full data series on the size of public sector investment and its growth going back 50 years for every country in the world. This data delivers some startling results.

It shows that China has a stock of public sector assets worth 150% of annual GDP; only Japan has anything like that amount at 130%. Every other major capitalist economy has less than 50% of GDP in public assets. Every year, China's public investment to GDP is around 16% compared to 3-4% in the US and the UK. And here is the killer figure. There are nearly three times as much stock of public productive assets to private capitalist sector assets in China. In the US and the UK, public assets are less than 50% of private assets. Even in 'mixed economy' India or Japan, the ratio of public to private assets is no more than 75%. This shows that in China public ownership in the means of production is dominant – unlike any other major economy.

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A report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (http://www.uscc.gov/pressreleases/2011/11_10_26pr.pdf) found that "The state-owned and controlled portion of the Chinese economy is large. Based on reasonable assumptions, it appears that the visible state sector – SOEs and entities directly controlled by SOEs, accounted for more than 40% of China's non-agricultural GDP. If the contributions of indirectly controlled entities, urban collectives and public TVEs are considered, the share of GDP owned and controlled by the state is approximately 50%." The major banks are state-owned and their lending and deposit policies are directed by the government (much to the chagrin of China's central bank and other pro-capitalist elements). There is no free flow of foreign capital into and out of China. Capital controls are imposed and enforced and the currency's value is manipulated to set economic targets (much to the annoyance of the US Congress and Western hedge funds).

At the same time, the Communist party/state machine infiltrates all levels of industry and activity in China. According to a report by Joseph Fang and others (http://www.nber.org/papers/w17687), there are party organisations within every corporation that employs more than three communist party members. Each party organisation elects a party secretary. It is the party secretary who is the lynchpin of the alternative management system of each enterprise. This extends party control beyond the SOEs, partly privatised corporations and village or local government-owned enterprises into the private sector or "new economic organisations" as these are called. In 1999, only 3% of these had party cells. Now the figure is nearly 13%. As the paper puts it: "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by controlling the career advancement of all senior personnel in all regulatory agencies, all state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and virtually all major financial institutions state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and senior Party positions in all but the smallest non-SOE enterprises, retains sole possession of Lenin's Commanding Heights."

The reality is that almost all Chinese companies employing more than 100 people have an internal party cell-based control system. This is no relic of the Maoist era. It is the current structure set up specifically to maintain party control of the economy. As the Fang report says: "The CCP Organization Department manag(es) all senior promotions throughout all major banks, regulators, government ministries and agencies, SOEs, and even many officially designated non-SOE enterprises. The Party promotes people through banks,regulatory agencies, enterprises, governments, and Party organs, handling much of the national economy in one huge human resources management chart. An ambitious young cadre might begin in a government ministry, join middle management in an SOE bank, accept a senior Party position in a listed enterprise, accept promotion into a top regulatory position, accept appointment as a mayor or provincial governor, become CEO of a different SOE bank, and perhaps ultimately rise into upper echelons of the central government or CCP — all by the grace of the CCP OD."

China's Communist party is now writing itself into the articles of association of many of the country's biggest companies. describing the party as playing a core role in "an organised, institutionalised and concrete way" and "providing direction [and] managing the overall situation".

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This also lends the lie to the common idea among some Marxist economists that China's export of capital to invest in projects abroad is the product of the need to absorb 'surplus capital' at home, similar to the export of capital by the capitalist economies before 1914 that Lenin presented as key feature of imperialism. China is not investing abroad through its state companies because of 'excess capital' or even because the rate of profit in state and capitalist enterprises has been falling.

Similarly, the great expansion of infrastructure investment after 2008 to counteract the impact of collapsing world trade from the global financial crisis and Great Recession hitting the major capitalist economies was no Keynesian-style government spending/borrowing, as mainstream and (some) Marxist economists argue. It was a state-directed and planned programme of investments by state corporation and funded by state-owned banks. This was proper 'socialised investment' as mooted by Keynes, but never implemented in capitalist economies during the Great Depression, because to do so would be to replace capitalism.

The law of value of the capitalist mode of production does operate in China, mainly through foreign trade and capital inflows, as well as through domestic markets for goods, services and funds. So the Chinese economy is affected by the law of value. That's not really surprising. You can't 'build socialism in one country' (and if a country is under an autocracy and not under workers democracy, that is true by definition). Globalisation and the law of value in world markets feed through to the Chinese economy. But the impact is 'distorted', 'curbed' and blocked by bureaucratic 'interference' from the state and the party structure to the point that it cannot yet dominate and direct the trajectory of the Chinese economy.

It is true that the inequality of wealth and income under China's 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' is very high. There are growing numbers of billionaires (many of whom are related to the Communist leaders). China's Gini coefficient, an index of income inequality, has risen from 0.30 in 1978 when the Communist Party began to open the economy to market forces to a peak of 0.49 just before the global recession. Indeed, China's Gini coefficient has risen more than any other Asian economy in the last two decades. This rise was partly the result of the urbanisation of the economy as rural peasants move to the cities. Urban wages in the sweatshops and factories are increasingly leaving peasant incomes behind (not that those urban wages are anything to write home about when workers assembling Apple i-pads are paid under $2 an hour).

But it is also partly the result of the elite controlling the levers of power and making themselves fat, while allowing some Chinese billionaires to flourish. Urbanisation has slowed since the Great Recession and so has economic growth – along with that the gini inequality index has fallen back a little.

The Chinese economy is partially protected from the law of value and the world capitalist economy. But the threat of the 'capitalist road' remains. Indeed, the IMF data show that, while public sector assets in China are still nearly twice the size of capitalist sector assets, the gap is closing.

Under Xi, it seems that the majority of the party elite will continue with an economic model that is dominated by state corporations directed at all levels by the Communist cadres. That is because even the elite realise that if the capitalist road is adopted and the law of value becomes dominant, it will expose the Chinese people to chronic economic instability (booms and slumps), insecurity of employment and income and greater inequalities.

On the other hand, Xi and the party elite are united in opposing socialist democracy as any Marxist would understand it. They wish to preserve their autocratic rule and the privileges that flow from it. The people have yet to play a role. They have fought local battles over the environment, their villages and their jobs and wages. But they have not fought for more democracy or economic power.

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A new study of income and wealth data by Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman reveals just how much has changed in Russia from the time of the tsarist oligarchy through the Soviet Union to rise of the new oligarchy during and after the "shock therapy" that served to create a new form of private capitalism under Putin.

As is clear from the chart, income inequality was extremely high in Tsarist Russia, then dropped to very low levels during the Soviet period, and finally rose back to very high levels after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thus, for example, the top 1-percent income share was somewhat close to 20 percent in 1905, dropped to as little as 4-5 percent during the Soviet period, and rose spectacularly to 20-25 percent in recent decades.

The data sets used by Novokmet et al. reveal a level of inequality under the new oligarchs that is much higher than was apparent using survey data—a top 1-percent income share that is more than double for 2007-08.

Novokmet et al. also show that the income shares of the top 10 percent and the bottom 50 percent moved in exactly opposite directions after the privatization of Russian state capitalism in the early 1990s. While the top 10-percent income share rose from less than 25 percent in 1990-1991 to more than 45 percent in 1996, the share of the bottom 50 percent collapsed, dropping from about 30 percent of total income in 1990-1991 to less than 10 percent in 1996, before gradually returning to 15 percent by 1998 and about 18 percent by 2015.

In comparison to other countries, Russia was much more equal during the Soviet period and, by 2015, had approached a level of inequality higher than that of France and comparable only to that of the United States.

Finally, Novokmet et al. have been able to estimate the enormous growth of private wealth under the new oligarchy, especially the wealth that was captured by a tiny group at the very top and is now owned by Russia's billionaires. As the authors explain,

"The number of Russian billionaires—as registered in international rankings such as the Forbes list—is extremely high by international standards. According to Forbes, total billionaire wealth was very small in Russia in the 1990s, increased enormously in the early 2000s, and stabilized around 25-40% of national income between 2005 and 2015 (with large variations due to the international crisis and the sharp fall of the Russian stock market after 2008). This is much larger than the corresponding numbers in Western countries: Total billionaire wealth represents between 5% and 15% of national income in the United States, Germany and France in 2005-2015 according to Forbes, despite the fact that average income and average wealth are much higher than in Russia. This clearly suggests that wealth concentration at the very top is significantly higher in Russia than in other countries."

Clearly, there is nothing "natural" about the distribution of income and the ownership of wealth. This new study demonstrates that different economic structures and political events create fundamentally different levels of inequality in both income and wealth, both within and between countries.

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