Windy ___________________________
REPLY TO DENNIS ROBERT RICHMOND A) Dennis writes: “The real statistics point to strong growth during China’s reformist periods (e.g., 1949-56, 1962-65, and 1978-present), and stagnation or near-implosion during the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution.”
First, on the “real statistics.”
One can go back to the Joint Economic Committee compendium of analyses of 1975, “China: A Reassessment of the Economy,” to CIA estimates of the time, and countless other studies of the period that present data and analysis acknowledging substantial economic growth and transformation. As for the dependability of Chinese data during the Mao years, Western scholars like Alexander Eckstein, examining agricultural statistics, have argued for their trustworthiness, and even the anti-Mao “reform” leadership that pillories the Mao polices acknowledges the basic reliability of the data.
On Performance during the Cultural Revolution years.
I have constructed various tables in my essay “The Theory and Practice of Maoist Planning” (in Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism, Banner Press, 1994), that draw on Chinese and Western sources and that detail aggregate and sectoral growth, regional distribution of production capacity, distribution of budget revenues to overcome provincial inequalities, etc.
In an overview table, I utilize S. Ishikawa “China’s Economic Growth Since 1949” (China Quarterly, June 1983) for annual rates of growth in the 1966-76 period: national income--7 percent; industrial output--11.3 percent (heavy industry at 13.6 percent, and light industry at 8.5 percent); agricultural production--3.8 percent. Except for heavy industry, the 1966-76 performance exceeds the average annual growth rates for these categories during the 1952-66 period. Clearly, industry grew far more rapidly than agriculture (about which I’ll say more in a second), but there is no evidence for “economic stagnation or near-implosion” during the Cultural Revolution.
But, still, the key questions are:
Growth for what? For the welfare and transformation of society, or the for enrichment of the few?
What kind of growth? Lopsided and dependent, or integrated, balanced, egalitarian and self-generating?
Maoist economic growth was marked by a conscious attempt to achieve regional balance, to overcome urban-rural inequalities, and to develop base-level institutions of popular control.
The fact that Taiwan or Indonesia might have spurts, or even extended periods, of high GNP growth is hardly a measure of the quality and direction of growth, of social welfare, or of economic rationality. Having said that, a number of studies, such as Christopher Howe, China’s Economy (Basic: 1978) indicate that China’s aggregate rate of growth during the 1952-75 period was exceeded for comparable periods only by Japan and the Soviet Union in modern times.
Yes, during some of the most acute phases of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, growth rates declined in industry and agriculture.
But this was very much related to the fact that workers and peasants were engaged in mass political struggles and movements part of whose purpose was lay the basis for new waves of growth based on changed economic relations that restricted the law of value and gave fuller play to worker and peasant initiative. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- B. Dennis writes: “The food problem was not solved. Per capita grain production barely kept pace with the population increase until 1978. Ordinary Chinese workers and peasants made do with extremely austere life-styles, until relatively recently.”
I think that the most outstanding fact to grasp is that through the course of the revolution, China’s historic “hunger problem” was solved! The revolution shattered a system of landlordism that had produced a countryside of vast inequalities and impoverishment, a countryside stalked by hunger and famine, and a countryside of incredible social subjugation and misery. Through policies of land reform and collectivization, all of which pivoted on peasant mobilization, the countryside was radically transformed.
Yes, statistically and overall, agricultural output slightly exceeded (or “barely kept up with” if you want to put it in that negative way) population growth in the 1949-76 period.
In my view, this does not represent a prima facie indictment of policy and performance, i.e., a picture of stagnation. It tells us very little about the enormity of the challenge before the revolution, nor the scale of its accomplishment. On the other hand, neither does it represent a trend-line with which the revolutionaries were satisfied.
China was and is an overwhelmingly agrarian society, with at least 80 percent of the population living in the countryside. Keep in mind that it has one of the lowest ratios of arable land to population in the world.
So a “grain problem” confronted the revolution, and continued to confront it, during the span of the revolutionary years: how to feed the people. As did a larger policy problem: how to generate accumulation funds in agriculture without draining and exploiting the countryside.
The planning system took agriculture as the foundation of the economy. Economic planning sought to establish mutually supportive links between agriculture and industry. Grain production was emphasized (the “key link”), at the same time that crop diversification was encouraged. The state investment plan allocated resources to industries supplying inputs to agriculture, and substantial direct state investment was made in agricultural infrastructure, like water conservancy projects. Policies of rural industrialization led to a vast network of small and medium-sized factories producing light equipment and parts, fertilizer, etc. —- raising the technical base of the countryside and the technical knowledge of the peasantry. Price and investment policies narrowed the “price scissors” between agricultural and industrial goods.
Under the system of collective ownership, peasants terraced millions of acres of hills and mountains; created a huge irrigation network; and protected land with windbreaks. The combination of collectivization leading to increased scale of production, rural farmland capital construction, and the growing use of fixed machinery led to increases of labor productivity. These kinds of policies and accomplishments were laying the basis for higher and more stable yields in the countryside.
So as I said, China’s historic “hunger problem” was indeed solved! Grain production did keep up with population growth and the supply of vegetables and other foods increased more rapidly.
As for living standards in the countryside, here an aggregate number, like per capita income, only tells part of the story. Various production expenses were shared through the collective ownership and cooperation (and thus the peasant was not left to sink or swim). The commune system provided social services, like education and health care, free or at low cost. And this was part of a new system of political power. The struggles and upheavals in the countryside had let to the development of the commune system: an institutional form that integrated administration and economy, industry and agriculture, social services, and military responsibilities.
Yes, there was an agricultural productivity problem. The question before the revolution was how to solve it on a correct foundation: in a way that promoted balanced and egalitarian growth, in a way that did not widen social and regional differences, in a way that did not open the door to capitalism.
Time ran out, so to speak: The capitalist roaders (the forces around Hua and Deng) seized power in 1976. And in the name of efficiency and productivity, the socialist countryside has been turned into a capitalist nightmare or paradise -- depending on which class you belong to. A privileged rural elite -— made up of rich commercial farmers and private entrepreneurs -— exists alongside a dependent and fragmented peasantry and hired agricultural laborers. Rural educational and health care systems have decayed or collapsed. An AIDS epidemic, female infanticide, rural clan violence, and vast inequality are integral elements of China’s new (old) countryside.
The dislocations in the countryside wrought by the grabbing of public assets by the new elite and by capitalist land reform have led to the emergence of a huge migrant-peasant population—estimates range from 100 to 150 million. Many of them are recruited into China’s burgeoning (sweatshop) export industry—working 12-15 hour work days for low wages, in unhygienic, brutal, and hazardous working conditions, resulting in thousands of deaths annually in industrial accidents and fires. It is the intensity of labor exploitation that is the hallmark of so-called “socialist market reform” in post-1976 China. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Dennis writes: ``Peasant-industrial autarchy isn’t socialism. It’s catch-up accumulation.”
China during the Mao years developed an integrated agricultural-industrial base. It had no foreign debt and no inflation. And it had broken the grip of imperialist domination. This was not autarchy: it was genuine socialism in a world dominated by imperialism. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In closing... I would just like to repeat my overall point and thesis in the essay "Socialist Planning or Market Socialism?" which we are discussing:
"I... think history has shown that a revolutionary system of planning can work in a way that both meets social need and that empowers people. Put differently, socialist planning is not fundamentally a question of what planners and planning agencies do, important as that is. Rather it is a question first and foremost of developing the means and mechanisms by which society can consciously regulate social production-in the service of overall political, social, and economic objectives and on the basis of the conscious activity of the masses. The proletarian state is indispensable to this process. But things are not so simple.
"First of all, it's not possible to abolish commodity-market relations overnight. The new socialist economy will have to utilize certain aspects of these relations. For instance, distribution of some consumer goods will involve forms of commerce and exchange through money. But, at the same time, the new society has to restrict the role and influence of commodity-market relations.
"Second, there is real potential for socialist state structures to become divorced from the masses, for the socialist state to be turned into a capitalist state, and for state planning to become a tool of a new state capitalist class. But that's not an argument to abandon socialist planning in favor of the market. It's a warning to take the problem of bureaucratism and the danger of capitalist restoration seriously."
Yours in struggle for a better world, Ray
I am posting this both to the Left Business Observer discussion and to http://2changetheworld.info
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