Daniel wrote:
> However, how can you say that governments always want high wages? Am I
> misunderstanding you? Our government, for example, does not want high wages.
> It's fiscal policy is designed to keep wages low (when circumstances
> permit - clearly at this moment, it is ever so slightly, and only slightly,
> moderated by countervailing demands of capital for liquidity).
>
I was speaking within the narrow context of foreign trade. All governments want to export and retain as much of the export revenue as possible on its own shores through higher wages. In the US, export sector wages tend to be the highest. In the service sector, the US actually exports a whole army of experts of all kinds overseas, lawyers, banker, scientist, professors, accountants, designers, etc. They fill up the front of air liners and the 5 star hotels. And don't forget, China has a Communist government that in ideology at least, if not always in practice, is committed to promote equal and maximum labor wages. Conceptually, the conflict between capital and labor does not exist in China, except in the export sector where foreign capital is predominant.
>
> I can believe that Chinese leaders do have a greater interest in inflating
> the working wage than do the Americans and Europeans (and even Japanese),
> but I don't believe that is their dominating interest. The primary goal of
> every ruling elite is to perpetuate its rule, and to enjoy the pleasures and
> comforts that come with it. A living wage for the working masses must be
> somewhere on a list of "other" concerns. (Naturally, every government wants
> a high wage, if some other government will pay for it. The Americans are
> always telling the Japanese to stimulate demand: what a joke!)
>
That was very much my point, that there is no incentive for the Chinese government to keep wages down in the export sector. Yet the Chinese government is being criticized for a condition that has been mostly created by others.
>
> I thought this was merely ironic. I had long wondered, for example, about
> Leibniz's receipt of the I Ching from his Jesuits contacts in China. I don't
> know of any reference to the I Ching in Hegel, but ask: could Hegel have
> written his Dialectic without the benefit of the I Ching? My father would
> consider this a preposterous question. But the indisputable historical fact
> stands out, it seems to me, as an odd philosophical coincidence. Why does
> the dialectic become so important just one generation after the appearance
> of the I Ching in the West? (Later, from Needham, I learned in much more
> explicit ways and in a fuller context just how ironic such notions about
> science as a Western invention really are.)
>
It is conceivable that Hegel was influenced by Daoism in his concept of dialectics. Several people on this list made that observation as Hegel/Marx when I was submitting posts on Daoism. I Ching is the bible of Daoism. Although in Hegel's A Philosphy of History, his understanding of Asian culture seems somewhat shallow to me.
>
> It is an idle question, I know, but have you ever considered how Marxism
> might have been different if Marx had been Chinese? To what extent does the
> emphasis on class "warfare", the emphatic obsession with evolutionary (and
> revolutionary) "progress", the intensely felt distinction between
> proletarian "good" and bourgeois "evil" - to what extend do these originate
> in the biblical culture of the West. (Is it impolite to touch on the matter
> of sacred texts?) We have ALWAYS been fighting some kind of bloody proxy
> battle between God and the Devil, and always citing some book or other as
> our scriptural totem and shield. In general, it seems to me that a basically
> biblical conception of life underlies all of Western culture, even when
> divorced from religion and God.
>
I cannot imagine Marx being Chinese. His thought process is too deducitve, too scientific, too analytical and too materialistic to have emerged from Chinese philosophical culture. This a fundamental problem Marxism has in Asia. It is very useful at a particular time in history, in Asian's search for a philosophy and a world view to effective deal with a powerful and technologically better developed West. To Asian, the West is imperialism and in that perspective Marxism amkes everything fall in place. But as Western imperialism wanes, Asia embrace of Marxism will wane with it. It is clear to me that the period of that usefulness will not last more than 2 or 3 more decade before Marxism itself face fundamental problems with indigenous Asian culture. In that sense, very few Asian thinkers believe Marxism to be an eternal universal truth. That is not to say the Marxist ideas will disappear all together, only tha t Marxism 's dominance will subside. As Western influence and dominance of Asian wanes, the concept of class and class struggle will move off center stage. The Asian concept of family will overpower all other social concepts and will get stronger over time. Even in Japan, the Japanese government is still run like a paternalistic organ, despite MacArthur's gift of a constitution. In Confucius paternalistic culture, social hierarchy is more powerful than class.
>
> Naturally, there is class "warfare" all over the globe, and all through
> history. Good struggles with Evil in China as it does here. It is only a
> question only of what role the struggle plays in one's life and
> consciousness. And, the role it plays is conditioned by the culture. In this
> way, we attach expectations to the struggle that may be erroneous, or not:
> it must be examined.
>
> >From a Judeo/Christian, "biblical", point of view, one can easily imagine a
> world without class "warfare": indeed, the classless society of a fully
> realized communism. This is surely a very good thing, but it seems always,
> for us, such a small step from imagining Utopia to enlisting in some war to
> obtain it. (Yet we know too well, to mix the metaphor, "'tis many a slip
> 'twixt cup and lip".) According to the Western view, to do otherwise would
> be morally deficient. One is either on the side of the Devil or of the
> Christ. There is no in-between.
>
> The point I want to make is that we have taken this idea of battle to such a
> pitch that it is drowning out everything else. The fate of the world as we
> conceive it seems actually to be cast in the image of a biblical myth. Is it
> any surprise that millennial fears of the end of the world are so entrancing
> to us? After all, doesn't it really seem at this moment in time that evil is
> primed to WIN the battle? Don't we all love that clock of the Concerned
> Atomic Scientists, rising toward midnight? Good stands now near to being
> vanquished in a cathartic decimation of the web of life. Capitalism pollutes
> the air and water until the human race commits mass suicide in a military
> paroxysm of nukes (taking with us the birds and the bees). It could happen.
>
> I'm not putting the battle down. Why shouldn't people get sucked into this
> vast drama of good and evil? Should we call an end to it now of all times?
> The best part of the novel or movie is the moment when it looks most
> hopeless for the heroine/hero. But, do you think Lao-tzu and his cultural
> children could possibly take the drama as seriously as we do here in the
> West? (Is the real influence of Marxism in China evidence that they do?) Do
> you think we might have done things differently, in the West, if we had
> paired Heaven, as the I Ching does, with something other than Hell?
>
> As my father always said, "If we don't have socialism, we will have
> barbarism." I would always reply, "We already do." That was years ago.
>
> Quincy
Chinese civilization has a long history of assimilating all kind of new imported ideas. But it always puts on these ideas a Chinese characteristic. The case of Buddhism is very illustrative. So when the Chinese say they are trying to develop socialism with Chinese characteristic, they are doing to socialism what they did to Buddhism. the dialectic synthesis of Hybrid Marxism in china is a highly likely prospect.
Henry