To wield the blunderbuss and call the current CCP regime “fascist” (as Nathan Newman does) is not only bad social science (i.e. intellectually off-base) but also, if multiplied a million-fold, this provocative charge kills the very slim chances that anything resembling ecological socialism in the PRC will come to pass. The CCP is not a totalitarian monolith. It is poisoned (perhaps lethally) by a de facto alliance with foreign and domestic capital and shot through and through with heinous venality of all sorts, from Jiang Zemin's "crown prince" kin all the way down to township apparatchniks; more charitably, even many less cynical cadres are ideologically confused by the bankrupt equation, development of the productive forces at all environmental and social costs=the long-run emancipation of the Chinese people. (Although if one is to be brutally honest one should not completely sneeze at this equation; a China without long-range missile capacity would be a China unable to open up some room for the anti-Wash Con plaints of Brazil, India, South Africa in the WTO; a China without cutting-edge scientists would be at the total rather than the partial mercy of the Fortune 500 and the keiretsu as it embraced and further embraces bureaucratic capitalism, etc.). But there is also a faction of technocrats within the CCP that is receptive to the ideas and programs of the much broader Chinese “New Left.” This “New Left” may be too enamored with woolly social-democratic nostrums for my privileged ultra-leftist tastes, but when combined with the imperative of the new CCP leadership to a) slow the rate of natural resource consumption and reverse the despoliation of ecosystems as a “sustainable accumulation” (not a “red-green socialism”) measure, b) raise peasant incomes as a “political stability” (not a “social justice”) measure, and c) reorient the productive apparatus to internal growth also as a “political stability” (not a “social justice”) measure, at the very least it opens up space (however meager) for an indigenously driven transition toward ecological socialism in the PRC – and none too soon.
Subjecting the PRC’s “labor rights regime” to the oversight of the core capital-dominated WTO, much less to the predatory whims of the US imperial state, in the ostensible name of protecting the livelihoods of the US working class, would asphyxiate PRC ecological socialism before it even reaches infancy. In the wake of the shenanigans that took place at Cancun, where all the contradictions of free trade shibboleths were on full display, it is preposterous to imagine that the WTO could ever be fashioned into a device that safeguards the basic interests of the popular masses in China or anywhere else in the Global South. We know how the quid pro quo works: genuinely well-intentioned NGO types from the Global North propagate a discourse about incorporating “labor rights” into transnational trade and investment deals, and then G7 trade and finance ministers selectively appropriate the discourse and deploy it as a blunt instrument to press neo-liberal integration on their terms – e.g. “undo your exchange controls, feed your domestic stock markets to the mutual fund sharks of lower Manhattan, or we’ll play the ‘labor rights’ card.” Out-and-out comprador elements in the ruling party (in this case the CCP) will predictably prefer capitulating to the demands of First World finance capital if it means their own personal enrichment and avoiding the independent empowerment of the popular masses; meanwhile, that faction of the ruling party that is still for (if not by) the smallholding peasants, the SOE workers, the sweatshop proletariat in the SEZ’s, etc. -- as well as an indispensable organizational kernel of PRC ecological socialism -- is further marginalized into oblivion.
John Gulick Knoxville, TN
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