The Chinese adopted a policy 15 to 20 years ago of transferring purchasing power to the majority of the rural population and developing petty bourgeois peasant initiative to increase agricultural efficiency and develop local village industries. The purchasing power provided a market for the economic revolution. It was a mass-based bottom up and gradual strategy.
Not without costs and risk but accepting that the change would take time. The big state owned companies are the ones going bankrupt. In some ways the picture looks the reverse in Russia.
There the current crisis emphasises the extent to which it has been a top-down approach based on large monopoly units. Whether those units are state owned as they were when Chernomyrdin was one of the Red Directors of the gas monopoly or whether they are privately owned as by the oligarchs, there is still a social basis for cooperation in the short term.
Yesterday Boris Berezkovsky was claiming that a mere 20 companies are responsible for 50% of the economic turnover in Russia (check). He argued that these companies should be given a special position to be able to continue trading to ensure that economic life would not collapse. No doubt he would not be averse to a little rhetoric about how these major companies alongside those still to be privatised have a socially responsible role to play in the new Russia. Not all the associations of the old Soviet model would have to be invoked but enough to create a patriotic consensus for a government of national unity.
The monopoly companies could be protected from the hazards of foreign exchange markets, and from too close an investigation of what they themselves did with central bank credits earlier this month, when roubles were being off-loaded on the money markets in large quantities. (Indeed the death of an investigative journalist in the last few days will no doubt concentrate minds on the importance of national unity.)
So these monopolies could manage to continue some form of payments through barter or whatever, and some populist concessions could be made to the mass of the population. But what this approach leaves out is any conception of market socialism that is bottom up, and any evidence that the economy will become more flexible to be able to trade with the rest of the world competitively without currency crises.
This is a deliberated rough sketch of a contrast between Russia and China at least part of which will be inaccurate. I would appreciate comments and corrections as well as alternative models.
But given that some sort of class compromise is going to occur if Russia is not to disintegrate, is there any sort of serious market socialism programme that could be a more progressive alternative to a potentially fascist government of national unity around a small number of unaccountable monopolies?
Is anyone in Russian drawing any comparisons with China?
Chris Burford