Joseph Rabie wrote:
"For those (as myself) who consider Capitalism a dead end, trying to understand why Communism could not perdure in a country such as China (or the USSR, or the Eastern Bloc) is of interest."
Joe, I went to China several times and I could observe a few things about Chinese Communism.
By far the worst aspect was walking down a street with Chinese people and they pointed to a door leading inside to a large courtyard and said, "that's where the cops organize a social club for half of the neighborhood that spies on the other half."
This was and remains the major problem of really-existing Communism: the inability to deal with difference politically, leading to an extremely oppressive use of force instead. I am sad to say I observed the same thing in Cuba: the artists I met there go in and out of jail, it's very oppressive. A horrible place as far as I could see, the last place I would ever like to live. Everywhere they brutalize you with the exact same pictures of Che and Fidel that we thrilled to see on posters in France, only there are thousands of them, printed for example on 20-meter long canvases spilling off the balconies of little town halls on the periphery of Havana. Plus there's basically no development, folks are dirt poor. The people are wonderful but they're really crushed by the regime. Cuba has done some great things in Latin America with its communist ideals and its doctors, and the governing classes are incredibly smart and well educated, but in its current form it is definitely not a viable model for the future. China is similar in some respects, but with a billion-plus people and a three-thousand year history of specialized bureaucratic governance it's a little bit different.
While in China I also made the effort to study the spread of capitalism in the Shenzhen area and I went to villages where the land had been privatized in two ways: collectively the village leased the newly privatized land to large factories, and individually people had built large rental dormitories for the workers, plus there were bulk businesses all over. This was the pattern that evolved under Deng Xiaoping, on the basis of land privatization. "It is glorious to get rich" and "Someone has to get rich first," as Deng famously proclaimed. In that way the dynamics of capitalist wealth accumulation were unleashed around the country. Needless to say the place is a lot more developed than Cuba because it's basically a managerial capitalist society, whereas Cuba is just Communism on tropical ice. China, on the other hand, has a really perfectly oppressed and controlled working class whose managers been able to take over a huge percentage of global manufacturing operations - with the help and investment of the rest of the global corporate elites, for sure. Despite lots of strikes and organizing (which is going to be seriously hurt by the crackdown on Hong Kong, however), the working class remains loyal and obedient because it's very nice to get some income, and not so nice to get thrown into a reeducation camp, or just beat up or whatever. Some day when you have time, count the number of coal-burning plants that the proletariat has installed in China for the needs of global capitalism. Basically, it's humanity's death sentence right there. Built to meet the demands of Euro-American consumers of course.
What's in some sense admirable in the Chinese system, however, is the CP itself. The party is huge (over 91 million members!), it functions to gather information about society, develop policy ideas and subject all that to critique. It's democratic centralism. This is a very broad process including lots of experimentation. Party Congresses then hash it out and what they judge to be the best will become official policy. The experimentation ends, the policies are implemented, and as the years go by they are evaluated in the same ways. If you're not a Uigher or a dissident, and if they haven't built a railroad through your village or decided to tear down your neighborhood so the local glorious rich guy can build a shopping mall, this form of government can be very efficient. That efficiency looks awful right now (the large cities all bear a devastating resemblance to San Jose - the epitome of commercial sprawl in the US) but as climate change intensifies China will be able to take steps that the West will not, failing a change in our way of governing. I think that how China develops in this respect is central to the future of the entire planet, so it's worth keeping an eye on it for sure. It's an incredibly dynamic society right now.
Max Herman is totally right to say that all complex industrial societies include specialized bureaucracies, this was identified in the US case as "the managerial state" (James Burnham) and later as "the technostructure" (JK Galbraith). This is what we find across the developed world since WWII: dense interlocks between administrators and corporate hierarchies, supported by universities and specialized professionals. No doubt Mao wanted to resist the onset of such things in China and that was the reason for the Cultural Revolution: but it doesn't matter because Mao failed completely in that respect. Today China has a tremendous technostructure, mirroring that of the US. People don't and won't stage full-on revolutions against these systems because they deliver extremely high standards of living, it's not like Tsarist Russia or Mexico in the 1910s. So this whole idea that we're gonna revolt and change the system for a fundamentally different one, no, it's not going to happen. People will not trade a luxury lifestyle for civil war, chaos and penury. So you would have to actually change this thing from the inside. You would have to do it through political means.
There's an unfortunate corollary to this observation, which nullifies a lot of the utopian ideas we celebrated in the 1990s. It turns out that you cannot replace what the technostructure delivers with small autonomously organized initiatives. We have seen that such utopias are a joke. Jack Dorsey comes along and makes some fabulous hacker creativity into Twitter. Then the whole world uses it. If we want to have anything like a democracy we have to prevail on Jack Dorsey's corporation to use some force over the users of his machine. Which is finally happening I am glad to say.
I have spent my adult life analyzing and, when possible, working against the devastating consequences of the managerial state, particularly but not only in the US. I am a pundit, yes, and I think it's a valuable activity because if you want to change the technostructure you have to participate in an immense process of collective learning about what it is (or you could also say, about what we are) and then try to apply that knowledge. It is not going to be easy. It will also require the use of various kinds of force to control fascists who don't really want to topple the technostructure, they just want to impose their brutal and retrograde values on it, to retain a sad kind of privilege that stretches back to the time when European settlers stole the land and started exploiting it, through genocide, enslavement and all the rest. It is really amazing that the American multiracial Left has identified this privilege and now talks about how to overcome it, not just in seminars or obscure books but on the radio, TV and in the halls of government every day. We call that liberation. It's something to be proud of. We also call that the Left.
So the main thing it will require, if any change is gonna come, is the Left entering government with all its progressive ideas about equity and ecology. The Left stretches from the grassroots to the contested heart of the state. It maintains the difference between civil society and the state, which is essential to democratic experimentation and effective critique (self-organizing is still super important and valuable, just don't expect it to rule the world and become the only game in town). The generous ideals of the Left respond to a million aspirations that hierarchical capitalism can't satisfy. One of them is equity - which is not just equality, but above all the attempt to redress the historical wrongs that make equality impossible for many, many categories of people. The other big one is, obviously, ecological survival in a situation that is increasingly threatened.
All these things are at stake in the US right now. I lived through some pretty amazing political sequences in France, but never anything on this scale. Of course it could come out very badly, but what else is new? Well, what's new is the tremendous level of struggle, on political coordinates that are no longer the us/them, friend/enemy, capitalist/communist coordinates of the twentieth century.
I keep writing in this thread because it would be just too absurd to abandon the theorization of the present for some banal Stalinist ideas of the 1950s - as though the Soviet invasion of Hungary never happened, whew, what nonsense.
all the best with hopes for some social democracy,
Brian