Internationalist Perspective

What was China?

October 26, 2009 on 1:20 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

The following is a post by a member of Internationalist Perspective on a list about China. It was written in as part of a thread of Maoist China.

First, on your last point. While I don’t have an extensive knowledge of China during its Maoist period, I would not be surprised if, as you say, there was not a great deal of increase in the organic composition of Chinese capital in general during that time (as compared, e.g. with its post-Maoist period). The reason, I suspect, relates to what you describe as a very significant increase in the mobilization of labor power, especially in the countryside. And that would be, I would imagine, because what was really occurring during that time was primarily the primitive accumulation of Chinese capital on a massive scale. That would of course be because China’s economy at that time was very ‘backward’ or undeveloped in comparison to the most ‘advanced’ or developed capitalist countries of the West. That would also account for why what was going on then didn’t appear to mimic ‘normal’, developed capitalist extraction of surplus-value and the operation of the law of value as Marx theorized it.

However, you have also claimed (in your first and second points) that during the Maoist period the ruling class was developing the productive forces in order to strengthen China. But how was it developing the productive forces without increasing the organic composition of its capital? Generally these two processes are coeval. As productive forces develop, typically, living labor in the production process is replaced by dead labor, i.e. constant capital, thus, an increase in organic composition. Perhaps, as you suggest in your final sentence (of point three), an increase in extraction from rural workers — and let’s assume that such extraction was principally of absolute rather than relative surplus labor — that would indeed offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, but it wouldn’t negate it. The tendency would still be operative, though, it’s just that during that period it would be effectively counter-acted, just as it was in the early days of Western capitalism, of what Marx called the formal domination of capital.

You say that a capitalist cares not one iota what product is being produced as long as it makes a profit, whereas China did care during the Maoist period which products were being produced. But you are comparing the individual capitalist (or firm) with the whole Chinese ruling class (state). That is not the proper comparison to make, however. At the national level, the level of the national capital, and hence the ruling class and state, of both Stalinist state capitalist countries (e.g. the USSR) and of Western (liberal or mixed) state capitalist countries, the ruling class very much does care about which products are produced. The same concern (as in Maoist China) for the development of the means of mass destruction and other products that are necessary for national ‘defense’ and imperial expansion and conquest applies to them. Also, apart from the products necessary for building up a strong state machine, are those products necessary for providing basic energy needs for their industries, infrastructure, etc, not to mention the housing, health-care, education and other basic needs of the population generally in order to sustain a modern, developed society and to prevent the dispossessed masses from becoming an unmanageable problem. Certain specific products are necessary to meet these needs and it is the state that is charged with assuring their production.

Even if China was largely autarkic during the Maoist period, it still existed in a capitalist world and it had to compete with other countries in that world. It couldn’t afford to ignore what those other countries, especially the most powerful ones, were doing, geo-politically, militarily and economically. It needed to both try to catch up and ‘keep up’ with them and to utilize its economic resources as efficiently as possible in order to do this catching and keeping up. Certainly the Chinese state, exercising more or less total control over the Chinese economy, could organize this effort in a way that wouldn’t appear, on the surface at least, to mimic the way it occurs in liberal or ‘mixed economy’ capitalist countries. But if efficiency or productivity in this effort was significantly ignored, it would clearly at some point thwart it. Whereas, I would argue, if efficiency/productivity was pursued in order to decrease the time and resources needed to achieve it, then the same fundamental economic processes must have been operational.

A final point. You claim that China did not mimic accumulation for accumulation’s sake. But would you say that, e.g. Stalinist Russia in the 1930s did so mimic it? Surely it could be seriously argued that Stalinist Russia in the ’30s pursued the development of its productive forces in order to create a strong military and country within a tense international environment (i.e. the same as how you characterize Maoist China). Yet it was also a state capitalist society and mode of production, was it not? In fact, was not the economy of Maoist China in large part modeled on that of Stalinist Russia? (Not that it was an exact replica, of course.) In any case, ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’ is how capitalist economic functioning appears on the surface to an outside observer. It is not the reality for either the individual capitalist/firm or the national capital/ruling class/state. The reality is that accumulation in capitalism is invariably pursued for the sake of power, both economic and political.

E.R.