[lbo-talk] A response to Robert Weil on the Condition of China's Working Class

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 1/5/07, Philion, Stephen E. <sephilion at stcloudstate.edu> wrote:
> http://tinyurl.com/ydjk6p
>
> 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*

Last year, Michael Givel posted a NYT Magazine article about China's
"New Left" -- probably not the most appropriate term to describe them
-- here: Pankaj Mishra, "China's New Left Calls for a Social
Alternative," October 13, 2006:
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20061023/021246.html>;
the full text is also available at
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/13/news/left-web.php>.  In it,
Mishra writes:

<blockquote>Co-editor of China's leading intellectual journal, Dushu
(Reading), and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought,
Wang Hui, still in his mid-40's, has emerged as a central figure among
a group of writers and academics known collectively as the New Left.
New Left intellectuals advocate a "Chinese alternative" to the
neoliberal market economy, one that will guarantee the welfare of the
country's 800 million peasants left behind by recent reforms. And
unlike much of China's dissident class, which grew out of the protests
in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and consists largely of human rights and
pro-democracy activists, Wang and the New Left view the Communist
leadership as a likely force for change. Recent events - the purge of
party leaders on anticorruption charges late last month and continuing
efforts to curb market excesses - suggest that this view is neither
utopian nor paradoxical. Though New Leftists have never directed
government policy, their concerns are increasingly amplified by the
central leadership.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cui [Zhiyuan] does not regard the Communist regime as a "totality."
There were, he said, many different aspects of it, at both the local
and central levels. "Almost every day," Cui said, "The New York Times
carries reports of peasants agitating against the Communist
government, but if you listen to what the peasants are saying, they
are telling the central government that the local government has
violated their rights. So even the peasants can see the different
aspects of the state, who supports them and who doesn't."</blockquote>

In short, the main impact that China's leftists have had seems to be
to reform the Communist Party a little and move it to the Left a
little, because China's peasant and workers by and large do not think
that the central government is their enemy (they may in the future if
China's economic growth stalls).

-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>