Marxism International

One reason I read the capitalist press (Wall Street Journal,  Financial Times, The Economist, etc) more assiduously than that of ink-shitters like the New York Times is that the truth — though equally unwelcome in both venues — does manage to sneak in occasionally in the former, if only as part of the attempt to insure the survival of their class.

Take China.   It is finally beginning to dawn on western capitalists that “values” are not only not universal,  those broadly defined as “western” are roundly rejected by the overwhelming majority of humanity, and are unlikely to be adopted as some sort of admission ticket into the fabled milieu of the “world community”.    The “world community” itself has shifted definitively south by southeast in the last few years, and the nimblest and most perspicacious among the owners of international capital are scrambling to catch up.    The old 90’s canard — propagated by Madeliene Albright and other liberal Democrats — that China had to over-exert itself to be accepted by “normal” members of the “community of nations” lies pretty much in tatters.    Instead, it is becoming more apparent everyday that it is US liberals — and the whole panolopy of western values — that are in far greater need of ideological remodeling.

Of course, ideology itself rests on no securer basis than the dispensation under which it is given life and then nurtured until, finally, it naturally expires.   Just as the old nineteenth century shibboleths of Protestant liberalism were nothing more than the product of industrialism and imperialism, collapsing in unison when that ideology became untenable, so will and are the shibboleths of western capitalism and its entire grab-bag of “human rights” and “free markets”.

I think the trend has picked up considerably with Randall Peerenbom’s China’s Long March Toward the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which skilfully lays to rest the notion that the Chinese either want or need western-style legal systems in order to continue to develop market socialism.    Peeronbom’s work was followed a couple of years later by China’s New Order: Society, politics and Economy in Transition (Harvard University Press) by Wang Hui, a participant in the Tiananmen Square movement,  but who has chosen to remain in China while maintaining his links to American academic and intellectual life.   His is a bracing survey of how modern China, with its emphasis on growth and development to the exclusion of almost everything else, mirrors the new global order at large, though with important exceptions.  

Now, finally, along comes two American business writers who try to get a handle on perhaps the biggest story of the 21st Century; the rise of China.  

Ted Fishman’s China, Inc (Scribner’s) puts paid to the notion that China’s meteoric rise replicates that of either Korea or Japan, and that somehow “Asian values” will trip up Beijing in much the same way as it did Seoul or Tokyo.   The Chinese Century (Wharton School/Pearson) goes a bit further; Oded Shenkar compares the rise of the Chinese economy with that of the US a century earlier.  

The key?  China’s wide-open domestic market which, unlike the models of protectionism which marked the rise of Korea and Japan, facilitates the flood of consumer goods into global markets and the opposite flow of capital to China.    Mr Shenkar puts the case without equanimity.   “China,” he writes, “is the only country in the world where domestic automotive makers maintain equity ventures with competing foreign partners which make it possible to learn best practices from both and end up with potentially more knowledge than either.”

Other values may count at different times in the development of social entities, national or international, but it is the open cooperation between producers striving always to opitimize output that brings real freedom to a people.   Marx recognized this.   Lenin tried to achieve it during NEP in the early years of the USSR.    Values are not immutable, but the Chinese seem to have for the moment trumped the “universal values” of the liberal with those of their own making.  

Today is being observed just about everywhere as the international workers’ holiday.   Well, everywhere that is except here in the US which ironically gave May Day its birth in 1886 (Chicago, following a successful general strike for the 8 hour day).   Instead,  Americans were subsequently given Labor Day, in early September, much as the Left in the West were given Earth Day in 1970 in order to dilute enthusiasm for the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth.   Labor Day of course is no longer really observed except as an extra lingering day at the beach.    In our frightfully anaesthetized society,  the working class no longer exists, only the Rich and the increasingly affluent Middle Class, who will be Rich tomorrow.   Or the Day After.    Of course, there are the poor, but no one notices them since they are famously shiftless and insouciant.   Of course, they are useful in their profligancy, but because there are so many of them.   They help keep wages down and police departments well-funded.    Which makes things better for the Rich.    And all those who will be Rich tomorrow.

So, where are we this Sunday?   I mean, those of us who are working class and, especially, those among us who count themselves as Communist or at least anti-capitalist?   Number-wise, we’re not doing that badly.   There are this May Day 2005 more members of Communist and Working Class parties worldwide than ever before.   Many more, in fact, than in 1989, the year commonly given as that of the apotheosis of Communism’s “collapse”.   More than 60 million in China alone.    The anti-capitalist movement is proceeding apace throughout the developing world and has even achieved the status of a state religion in Latin America.    And Marx-friendly liberation movements are alive and well throughout the developing world, especially in Peru, India, the Philippines, and Colombia, and some — notably in Nepal — hover near the seizure of state power, always a pre-requisite for fundamental change.    There even appears to be a stiffening of spine in those Left parties in eastern Europe and Russia, whose peoples have by now experienced the first pangs of the nightmare capitalism that is inexorably descending upon them.

Closer to home, things ain’t so great.    There is still that nagging tendency among many in the Left to tail the Democrats, or the Greens, or the Mullahs, or whomever speaks ill of Bush and who draws a crowd.     No liberal yet has effectively stood up to the far Right.   Collectively, the liberals can hardly staunch the veritable stampede among America’s political and social elite toward fascsim.    At best, they will insist on ”due process” as Communists are marched off to the gallows; they are more likely to pay the hangman.     An orderly, disciplined Communist movement, dedicated to the secular, anti-liberal program of socialism and brooking no ”supporting” role for the rights of the workers is needed.   

That would make for a really great May Day next year.