Top of the morning to ya, Charles!
You wrote:
Unlike petit bourgeois utopians like you, Marx didn't hold a moralizing attitude toward the objective necessity of going through the capitalist stage to prepare masses for socialism...
I write:
To live a life without being called a utopian moralizer by Charles Brown, is to live a life unfulfilled! I may be just that, but surely this is not an example. I was merely calling facts, facts. China's hugely "successful" export drive, and Wall Street's bubbly behavior not only share the same epoch in capitalist history, they are dialectically interrelated. US TNC's expanding their production and sourcing operations in China helped to enrich Wall Street. The People's Bank of China investing currency reserves in dollarized assets helped enrich Wall Street. Chinese officials today do not want to see stock values on Wall Street plunge further or China's currency reserves (built on the sweat and blood of its proletariat) might amount to squat. Etc. Etc. Etc.
In the longer run, these actions and policies may INADVERTENTLY contribute to the weakening of US empire -- the jury's still out on that -- but they certainly did not represent the "battering down of Wall Street" (or however you put it).
We've already had it out (a year ago or so, on pen-l) about the intent of the CCP's post-Mao development policy and the rationalizations attached to it. I don't necessarily challenge the assertion that the CCP had no better options at the time, but I do robustly challenge the notion that Deng and company based this switch on a principled reading of Marxist theories of historical development (or to be more accurate, rigid interpretations of Marxist theories of historical development). It was all post hoc... choose the path, then resort to some variant of Marxist doctrine to warrant the choice, no matter how matter how badly mangled the theory becomes in the process. Again, I'm not making normative judgments about this, just stating facts (or what I believe the evidence shows to be facts).
You wrote:
How else would they learn real capitalism except by working on Wall Street? Again your moralizing about "doing" capitalism reveals a utopian, not scientific and Marxist, conception of the road to socialism. Engels was a capitalist, and Marx lived on some of the surplus got from cotton manufacturing workers in England. Gulick would have been wagging his finger at them for that.
I write:
Dear sir, you have misinterpreted my point here... which, admittedly, was not meticulously made. My point is not that working on Wall Street tarnishes all credibility! In fact in the near future I may be entering an Engels-Marx collaboration of my own (with whom and how I cannot and will not disclose on this list). My point is simply that in part from doing long stints on Wall Street, Chinese financial officals tend to think in terms of maximizing the value of China's currency reserves (or preserving existing value in times of worldwide slump), rather than some of the short-term losses that have to be borne in order to revamp China's development model into something more equitable and inspiring. In other words, they have the worldview of accountants and bankers, not of political strategists (a vocation you seem to assign to them).
I have a hard time avoiding invective when I dialogue with you, Charles, because your convictions (from Obama to the CCP) ultimately seem to derive from the CPUSA playbook. Your method typically involves gloriously leapfrogging facts and mercilessly torturing logic to defend these convictions, while casting aspersions on your "purist" antagonists along the way. Too often I find you employ this method disingenuously (i.e., you're too smart not to know that you're eliding facts and twisting logic, but you do this anyway b/c of your a priori commitment to certain positions).
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