Chinese Capitalist Party

 

Vijay Prashad is a historian, journalist, and political commentator. He is the author of 40 books, including one reviewed last year in the Socialist Standard.   During an interview for the Harvard Political Review published yesterday, he was asked '... I’m interested in what you make of the state of the left or, more precisely, the state of Marxism today and in the era post the fall of the Soviet Union'  to which VP replied  'I mean, it’s interesting — the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the largest political party in the world today is a Marxist party, and that’s the Communist Party of China. It’s got 96 million members. There are more Chinese Communists — that is to say, party members — than the population of Canada. So when people say Marxism died in the rubble of the Soviet Union, I say, well, maybe you’re just talking about Europe and maybe North America.'

In our review of his Struggle Makes Us Human. Learning from Movements for Socialism, we said 'The Bolshevik state... authoritarian and oppressive from its very beginnings, bore no relation to socialism (a democratically organised stateless and leaderless society of free access to all goods and services). In the same way, Cuba, Vietnam, China and Venezuela, all of which the author is a strong supporter of, are essentially ‘top-down’ regimes integrated into the world capitalism system of markets, trade, money and wages, buying and selling. And they are more oppressive than more ‘liberal’ capitalist states in that they keep a closer check on their populations and in some cases don’t even offer them meaningful elections to vote in..'.

​Unmentioned in either the interview or review is the fact that Vijay Prashad is a fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China.   Oh, the irony!   Has  this self-described Marxist forgotten that the socialism Marx envisaged involved the ‘abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production’ (Communist Manifesto)?

Mao stated in 1949 ‘China must utilize all the factors of urban and rural capitalism that are beneficial and not harmful to the national economy and the people’s livelihood, and we must unite with the national bourgeoisie in common struggle. Our present policy is to regulate capitalism, not to destroy it.’

 That wages have increased since Mao's day is not in doubt. The 1% in China and the US, unlike the vast majority of us, are doing very nicely - even during the latest pandemic...

'China's super-wealthy got $1.5trillion richer during pandemic that began in Wuhan, with one analyst saying: 'The world's never seen this much wealth created in one year' (Daily Mail, 20 October 2020).

'Since the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, the combined wealth of the 650 American billionaires has increased by nearly $1 trillion' (Alternet, 1 December 2020).

'Xi’s government has cracked down on young people who apply Marxist analysis too critically to abuses of labour allowed under China’s system of state capitalism' (Financial Times, 28 June, 2022).   But this should not worry VP as he, unlike Marx ('The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery'  - Vorwärts, August 1844) and Engels  ('The more it [the state]   proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head'  - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880) or us ( 'We are not concerned with State capitalism. We are concerned with Socialism. Socialism is the negation of capitalism. Consequently State capitalism cannot be the ideal of any Socialist. Ergo those who preach State capitalism or collective exploitation are not Socialists’ - Socialist Standard, December, 1906).

is a supporter of the status quo.