In October a Chinese labor activist in Beijing and I wrote up a response ( http://tinyurl.com/ydjk6p ) to Robert Weil's Monthly Review article on the Conditions of the Working Class in China [ http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606weil.htm ]. As you can see from the tone, we thought the essay was highly valuable to leftists in and outside China today. We also had some criticisms of the article that we thought would add to the discussion on China's working class today and we hoped that the response and Weil's response to our response would be published in Monthly Review.
Unfortunately MR was not interested in the idea of publishing the letter and a response to it, so I'm just forwarding on our letter in response to Weil's article to the China Study Group and a number of left discussion lists, including Marxmail, PEN-L, and LBO-Talk, for starters, and will also ask a labor activist in Beijing to find some people in Beiiing to translate the piece into Chinese and distribute to Chinese discussion lists.
I've forwarded the letter to Robert Weil and perhaps at some point he will want to respond our letter. We'd welcome his or others' responses to the letter we wrote.
A short excerpt from the start of our letter in response to Weil's article:
A Response to Robert Weil's "Conditions of the Working Classes in China"
---Stephen Philion and Chi Hua*
Robert Weil's recent (June 206) MR article on the condition of the Chinese working class has provided us with a rarely visited and lucid view of the impact of China's turn to markets on both the economic and political decline of China's working class. Such work, based on in-depth field interviews, can only serve as a basis for a deeper understanding of both the contradictions of China's economic growth and potential for present and future organization in defense of China (and the world's) working class. However, despite these laudable strengths, Weil's article falls short at the level of analysis, which reflects that of political and/or social based movement activists on whom he relied for his information. The result is an insufficient conceptualization of what we believe is in urgent need of analysis, namely the level of actual working class organization in China.....
Stephen Philion Assistant Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology St. Cloud State University St. Cloud, MN
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