John Gulick
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!
^^^ CB: Liar
^^^^^ 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.
^^^^ CB: All that is consistent with what I said. The idea is that,of course, China would have "share the same capitalist epoch" with the main capitalist nation if it was going to rapidly build capitalism in China. And to do that, it would not be possible to avoid enriching Wall Street.
And your references to "enriching Wall Street" and "sweat and blood" is exactly
the moralizing I'm talking about. One way or another, Wall Street was going to be enriched in that "epoch". So, from the standpoint of the Chinese CP with a nation of 100's of millions of poor peasants, it took a lot of guts to say if Wall Street is going to get enriched, let us figure out how to make the enrichment process this time turn our peasants into proletarians. Afterall, Marxism teaches that it takes proletarians ,not peasants, to prepare a nation for socialism
What would have been the fate of those millions of
people if China had continued trying to "Leap" forward ? The country's leaders were right there to know the _facts_ on the ground, what was happening with the effort to bypass capitalism , project where things were going.
You and so many others conclude that the Party leaders were just trying to enrich themselves, that their claim to aim still for socialism is a fraud. It doesn't seem that way to me. ^^^
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).
^^^^ CB: I'd say the main goal was to build China's productive forces. But as "rigid" Marxists, they probably had more certainty than you evidently did that however the US boom ocurred it would inevitably end in a bust.
They could not be certain that the bust would be as big as it seems it might be now. And the "Empire" is far from over even if this bust is really big.
The interesting question is have they really figured out how to avoid a big bust of their capitalism. That's the 64 trillion dollar question.
^^^^
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).
^^^^^ CB: You are not just stating the facts. You are interpreting the facts and speculating about the motives. And one big fact you disgard in your interpretation is that the leadership says that they are still building socialism.
You _are_ making a speculative and normative judgment of them, which is the moralizing.
The other _facts_ of history in the long run since the Russian Revolution, including the fate of the Soviet Union,
are making the principle of stages of development look
profoundly true; and adherence to the principle not "rigid" but logical intellectual discipline. And the characterization of "rigid" is looking very liberal, in the bad sense.
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).
^^^^^^ CB: Oh, I see, you're a more clever political strategist than they are. How egregiously wrong I was. Afterall, it was you who got them this far, not 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).
^^^ CB: How egregiously wrong you are in your characterization of my logic and treatment of facts. I'm very logical in the extreme
and stick to the facts better than most. And I can prove it because these lists have archives.
Exhibit A is the exchange we just had. It is clearly you, not I, who is logically and factually challenged on this thread. For example, you assert as a "fact" your guess as to
the motives of the CCP. You can't tell that's an guess, an interpretation,
and not a fact ? What a ____ !
As to the Obama, the CCP and CPUSA, you're a real fool not to realize the importance of their contributions. Your hatred of them distorts your thinking.
It's a dirty shame that you slander me in the extreme in what you say above. It is you who deserves to be spoken to with invective. Liar !
I'll try to remember how messed up you are.