[lbo-talk] Sole cause of all this woe?

John Gulick john_gulick at hotmail.com
Fri Feb 20 10:02:53 PST 2009


To the extent that I may have slandered Charles' sincerity in a public forum, I apologized to him off-list.

There is one substantive issue that I think needs further addressing here, however.

Charles claims that when I do not take at face value the CCP's claim that it adopted Dengist policies in order to build socialism (via a market detour to build the productive forces), but instead suggest that other motives may have been behind its "opening and reform" initiatives, it is I who has left the realm of fact, not he.

Certainly I do not know what the post-Maoist leadership's actual motives were. More knowledgeable people than myself who have researched the issue considerably have suggested a few things: 1) China was falling farther and farther behind its E Asian competitor-neighbors in the science and technology race, so made some ad hoc adjustments 2) after the cultural revolution and the excesses and chaos it unleashed, the CCP was deadly afraid of accelerating development through the harnessing of mass energies, and 3) certain CCP insiders, especially those from the coastal south, came to understand that they could personally benefit from playing a broker-middleman role with foreign investors (although this clique was disapppointed by the slow growth of the SEZ's at first).

To the extent that I have any coherent position at all, I guess it is that reasons 1) and 2) were predominant at first, with 3) gaining steam and becoming more important as the years unfolded. Yes, throughout it all, CCP propagandists defended "opening and reform" through the argument that the market detour (whether dubbed "socialist" or "capitalist") was necessary for the building of the productive forces (the putative precondition of socialism)... and maybe this to some degree reflected genuine beliefs. But that begs the question of whether we are comfortable defining the building of productive forces as tantamount to "socialism," rather than something more colloquial, such as a "modern, economically and geopolitically competitive, industrial state." And more to the point, should we ever take the public pronouncements of the politically powerful (regardless of the mode of production) at face value?

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