Marxist theory and Chinese reality
Bell, Daniel A.
IN 1956, Mao Zedong completed one of his proudest achievements: the abolition of private property in China. Over forty years later—March 17, 1999, to be exact—the Chinese Communist Party, led by...
...The National People's Congress voted 98 percent in favor of a constitutional amendment that redefined the private sector from a "complementary" to an "important part" of the economy...
...This was not widely publicized at the time...
...In "primitive" society, technology is undeveloped, people must work hard to satisfy basic needs, and there is no surplus to free them to do other things...
...The problem is not just that so-called Marxists such as Mao distort his ideas for their own dubious purposes...
...This was an expression of Mao's belief that human will and strength could vanquish all natural and technical challenges...
...If and when China becomes a rich, technologically advanced country, perhaps the Chinese Communist Party can keep this in mind...
...The amendment also promised government protection "for the legal interests and rights of the private economy...
...But the modern-day Marx—now more willing to admit that history is not pre-determined and that political intervention based on moral ideals can tilt the balance one way or another—could reply that we should still try to harness machinery to free people from drudge labor...
...Over forty years later—March 17, 1999, to be exact—the Chinese Communist Party, led by Jiang Zemin, formally reversed course...
...The basic problem is that it puts the blame for China's woes on Marxism, and more specifically on Marx himself, rather than on Mao's (mis)interpretation of Marx's ideas...
...Grain production plummeted, the furnaces were not able to produce a high-standard product, and the ensuing chaos led to a famine that claimed at least twenty million lives between 1959 and 1962...
...Nonetheless, Marx would have been impressed by the massive expansion of productive power accomplished through these capitalist reforms...
...However, the most efficient way of deploying this new machinery is no longer that of the typical capitalist factory...
...This time, however, he would really mean it...
...Most people are now workers— a large class of "producers"—who sell their la20 DISSENT / Summer 1999 bor for a wage...
...Communism, he might have said (he would hope, anyway) is all that much more likely now that its "absolutely essential material premises" were being fashioned...
...Even if China adopts liberal-democratic rights and allows the protection of workers' interests, the final outcome of its experience with communism—if European history is any guide—is not likely to live up to Marx's expectations...
...Unpleasant work will be limited to the maintenance of machinery and other tasks required to keep the system going...
...The result was a catastrophe...
...The Jiang regime is, of course, merely putting into legal form China's de facto endorsement of the private sector that began with Deng Xiaoping's reform program in the late 1970s...
...Second, the Chinese Communist Party hasn't understood that promoting capitalism does not require repression of independent unions and workers' rights...
...Yet capitalist countries also rely on other civil and political rights, such as freedom of speech and the right to choose one's political leaders in periodic elections...
...Without this "absolutely essential material premise," as Marx once put it, "want is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored...
...If we look at Marx himself, it will become immediately apparent that Mao grossly distorted his original vision...
...But the ultimate goal, according to Jing Shuping (chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce), is still to "implement communism...
...As Marx famously put it, "with the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed...
...But they also come to realize that by a radical restructuring of the organization of work—for example, ensuring that machines are communally owned and that profits are distributed fairly to all workers instead of going to greedy capitalists—their lot will be improved as well as that of society as a whole...
...DISSENT / Summer 1999 21 The Transition to Communism Soon after Deng Xiaoping took over in December 1978, China embarked on a capitalist-style economic reform program...
...According to MacFarquhar, Marxism led the Chinese nation to disaster, and Deng Xiaoping—whatever his faults—at least had the vision to replace Marxism with capitalist-style practices...
...Of course, China is still a relatively undeveloped country, and capitalism—or what the Chinese Communist Party labels the "primary stage of socialism"—looks set to stay for the foreseeable future...
...Human society will eventually reach a stage in which people can be largely freed from the tedium of unwanted labor to satisfy their physical needs...
...Urban entrepreneurs were encouraged to experiment with businesses, and foreign corporations were encouraged to bring technology to China...
...He didn't speculate in detail about what would happen if political leaders tried to implement communism in poor countries, but there is little doubt that he would have predicted that such attempts were doomed...
...More surprisingly, perhaps, Marx would probably have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Deng/Jiang capitalist economic reform program...
...This was meant to bypass capitalism and—in the words of a document issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party—to "complete the building of socialism ahead of time...
...Marx divided history into epochs, each corresponding to different levels of technological development...
...That is the moment of revolution...
...Marx and History Marx's theory of history is undoubtedly familiar to many readers of Dissent, but it is worth restating in brief...
...Capitalist relations of production are stabilized, as Jiang recognizes, by the legal recognition of property rights...
...DANIEL A. BELL is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and author of the forthcoming East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (Princeton University Press, forthcoming...
...First, the Communist Party has not grasped fully Marx's claim that new economic structures give rise to new legal and political institutions...
...This has been accompanied, needless to say, by the ills of capitalism, such as corruption, growing inequality, unemployment, and the blind worship of money...
...The standard view of modern Chinese history—a view widely shared both inside and outside China—is that Deng acknowledged, and remedied, the folly of Mao's disastrous experiment with Marxism...
...It seems that the Chinese Communist Party has finally put China on the road to communism...
...One last qualification...
...Mao versus Marx Far from being inspired by Marx, Mao seems to have gone out of his way to distort his ideas...
...Capitalism, the economic system that does most to speed up technological progress, was for Marx a necessary stage of development...
...People reorganize their relations of production—who has economic power over other people and who owns what in the workplace—so that they can make the best use possible of the technology...
...They hire workers and claim ownership over their products, which they sell in turn on the market...
...When large-scale machinery develops, they find it most efficient to structure economic life in a capitalist way...
...Technology continues to advance until steam mills and other large machines permit the mass production of goods with less and less physical input...
...He went to great lengths to describe the cruel indignities inflicted upon workers by capitalism and he wanted communists to struggle on behalf of those who paid the price for rapid economic development...
...It might take fifty years, or it might take one hundred...
...This is not inevitable, of course, but it is an ideal worth pursuing...
...Technology does most of the dirty work needed to meet physical needs and people are finally free to do the things they want to do—go fishing, read books, design and create works of beauty, and so on...
...a small surplus results, and a small class of people can now live off that surplus without working...
...Basically, people have to work all the time, hunting, gathering, and growing food...
...That is, the only way to avoid competition for scarce goods is to go through a long process in which machines are so developed that they yield a huge surplus that can meet everyone's needs...
...For example, the legislature passes laws securing private property (as in contemporary China), which makes it illegal for workers to claim ownership of the machinery in the workplace...
...The Chinese Communist Party, however, has attempted to carry out a capitalist economic transformation while maintaining obsolete legal and political institutions...
...This is not to imply that Marx himself would have the same expectations if he were around today...
...Capitalists, on the other hand, own the tools, the machinery, and natural resources...
...In short, Chinese leaders cannot forever put off the day when they will have to fashion the same kinds of legal and political institutions that help to stabilize the relations of production in other capitalist countries...
...We know what happened to those who were trying to bring about peaceful legal and political change in June 1989...
...In 1966 Mao plunged his country into yet another disastrous attempt to bring about a major transformation simply by means of instilling "revolutionary consciousness"—the ten-year nightmare known as the Cultural Revolution...
...This is how class-divided societies emerge...
...The deeper problem is that twentieth-century history has cast doubt on many of Marx's basic tenets, including the optimistic expectation that advanced technology would cause people to restructure economic life so that machines would work for the 22 DISSENT / Summer 1999 benefit of humanity instead of a small capitalist class...
...Instead of just doing one simple task on an assembly line, workers must be more creative and knowledgeable...
...Consider the Great Leap Forward...
...In capitalism, technology develops more quickly than ever before, and the material surplus expands exponentially...
...It is useless, Marx argued, to discuss communism if its material foundations are not present...
...Thus, in 1958 he launched a radical program to establish communes and diverted resources into building local backyard steel furnaces...
...Then new technology is invented, which allows people to produce things more efficiently...
...Mao thought that he could accomplish a technological and thus economic revolution and overtake developed countries like Britain simply by instilling the masses with revolutionary fervor...
...Some Qualifications There are two senses, however, in which the Jiang regime continues to deviate from Marx...
...From a Marxist perspective, these freedoms stabilize the system by providing an outlet for dissent and thus defusing revolutionary energy...
...No doubt he would repeat the claim, uttered at the end of his life: "What is certain is that I am not a Marxist...
...As the eminent Sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar put it, "[Deng] deconstructed the China he took over: not the traditional China of Confucian values and Taoist cults, but the China of Communist principles and practices which he had himself helped Mao to superimpose upon their land...
...Private property is abolished, and machines are made to work for the betterment of humanity instead of the interests of one small class...
...The most important of these is advanced technology, as we have seen...
...The result is one of the major transformations of the late twentieth century— double-digit growth rates, the material improvement of literally hundreds of millions of people's lives, and predictions that China will become an economic superpower in the twenty-first century...
...In his own day, Marx was severely critical of "utopian socialists" who tried to build communism "ahead of time...
...Rural families were allowed to increase the amount of land they could till as private plots and they were permitted to sell the produce on the open market at unpegged prices...
...The standard view, however, is wrong...
...Marx himself, while recognizing that developing countries needed to go through a capitalist phase, devoted much energy to the improvement of workers' rights in capitalist countries...
...Eventually, technology is so advanced that the society produces a huge material surplus...
...The people as a whole were told that "to get rich is glorious...
...This occurs because capitalists compete with each other in order to make a profit, and hence they have a special incentive to develop new, ever more efficient means to produce goods...
...It rests on the idea that there is a continual growth in productive forces (meaning technology and the knowledge needed to operate it) and that as technology improves, the productive process becomes more and more efficient...
...Meanwhile, the legal and political "superstructure"—the laws and political institutions of a particular society—ensure that capitalism is stabilized...
...MARX WOULD have been appalled...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
