A sub for discussing Marxist economics and how the bourgeois economists did us dirty.
This article rubs me the wrong way, especially coming from an "peace and social justice advocating" website.
The US has been able to print money without much consequence due to the imposition of the USD as the IRC, advocating for the US to print money is to advocate for the development of the imperial core at the expense of the rest of the world. Fuck em.
This is true, but on the bright side, there is virtually zero chance of the US being able to implement the kind of China-inspired strategy that the author of this article advocates. For one thing it would take going against the power of the financial oligarchy. It would take going against the neo-liberal way of thinking that has become ingrained in the American government from top to bottom, not to mention the donor class would not allow it, as a strategy focused on long term growth over short term predatory practices threatens their immediate profits.
The US does not, at least to me, appear capable of changing course even as many see the disaster they are barrelling towards if things continue the way they are. And Trump's reckless policies will only accelerate things.
I thought it was a good illustration of the fact that issuance of currency itself isn't what drives inflation. The question is of how that money is allocated. China issues currency for socially useful ventures such as building infrastructure, expanding industry, etc. Meanwhile, the US issues currency for stuff like bailing out financial capitalists. I'd argue what this highlights is that money should really be seen as an allocation mechanism. When a government issues currency, it directs labor and resources in a particular direction.
Good article (if quite naive in how it assumes that the US could just emulate China's monetary policies, as if the US government wasn't under the control of a financial-corporate oligarchy), but it kind of reminds me of a thought i've been having on and off for a while, which is one of the few things that i think the Chinese government may be making a potentially big mistake with. Namely, i fear it is being too opaque toward its own people about the policies that have created the success that we see today.
Not in the liberal sense of "the CCP hiding the truth from the people", because these policies are not actually hidden as we can see. Even a person from outside of China can uncover and understand them with some research. But rather that the government is not doing enough to explain and advertise the kinds of policies it has implemented that have led to the massive and ongoing improvement in the standard of living of the Chinese people, and the polices that enable China to maintain such comforts as healthy and extremely affordable food (especially compared to countries like the US where food prices seem totally out of control).
For instance, if you were to ask the average Chinese person whether they have price controls on food items, would they be able to answer correctly? Would they know that it is because of communist policies like price controls that they are doing so well or do they think that it is thanks to "opening up" and the market mechanisms as the liberal camp (which i'm sure exists in China as well) would like people to believe. Or if you were to ask them if money printing is a good policy or not, what would they say? I genuinely don't know, i would be curious to know how well informed the average person is about these things in China.
The danger of people not knowing that it is precisely these communist policies have led to the good lives they enjoy is that they may fall prey to malicious actors telling them that it's actually the more liberal policies that did this and tricking them into believing that by abolishing things like price controls they could have it even better. For the time being i don't see this happening because the government in China enjoys a high level of trust, and it has a fairly good handle on keeping troublemakers and foreign propagandists out of the public media sphere, but in the long term, especially with the connections that Chinese academia has with western universities that are positively infested with liberal thought, this may create problems one day.
Should the Chinese government not start to "advertise" how well their policies are working, to explain and educate the people about the kinds of economic tools that they are using and why? Is China's government being too passive when it comes to propaganda work and socialist ideological education thereby creating an opening for the enemies of socialism? Shouldn't there be more Mao-style political public awareness campaigns? Or would this be counter-productive as it would be viewed as too heavy-handed government propaganda?
Or maybe my entire line of thinking on this is too western and i'm just projecting what i think westerners would do in the same situation, maybe i'm just missing the point about how Chinese society works...
This was precisely the problem that the 20th century European socialist states encountered, which is that people typically don't appreciate something until it's taken away and have a tendency to believe the grass is always greener on the other side.
In some ways, China has become better equipped than the USSR at combating some particular elements. There won't be any Chinese liberal dreaming of throwing away the socialist state just so they can get their hands on Levis blue jeans, because the CPC has strategically situated post-Deng China as the producer of all material goods in the modern world (I'd say with combatting this mentality that the USSR faced consciously in mind). The Gorbachev/Yeltsin/Yakolev types lurking in China aren't at least going to be morons that converted to anti-communism because they visited the West and saw a Walmart. The recent RedNote incident shows that this paradigm has flipped the other way around, with normal Americans losing their minds over the endless variety on Chinese supermarket shelves.
In other ways, China faces the exact same challenges that 20th century socialist states encountered, which is that where the West has Orientalism; the socialist world had "Occidentalism." Orientalism for the West is a chauvinistic boogeyman projection of everything the West is not, where the existence of the "Orient" itself defines what it means to be the "West." At the end of the day, it recapitulates and engenders a form of collective gratitude where a "Westerner" is meant to go "well now, aren't you glad you're in the West and not in the East?"
Occidentalism is the exact opposite where the "Occident" is everything the "Orient" ought to be. Orientalism is a chavinistic negative foil while Occidentalism is a toxic positive one. America, for example, is therefore held to be a land of milk and honey. Just as it was in the USSR, everything China has done wrong or has disappointed them on, for those people, is something the America-in-their-heads has surely done right. The same RedNote incident shows how prevalent this mentality was among the normal Chinese population. It was thought that a dishwasher living in America could afford a middle class Homer Simpson lifestyle, providing for an entire nuclear family to boot. It was a case of "never meet your heroes" that you could witness being disrupted in real-time on that app. I've seen them post retrospectives of how many Chinese intellectuals have poured endless ink shouting the same thing to them in China, but they only began to believe it when some American made a RedNote account posting about having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. It's like that post-Soviet Russian joke about how "Everything they taught us about Soviet socialism was a lie, everything they taught us about the West was the truth."
It is without argument that there is much more that China can do, though some parts of this come from a fundamental historical asymmetry. I've recently read Jiang Shigong's 2021 article "A History of Empire Without Empire" posted on Redsails and he frames the Chinese confrontation against America as "better characterized as China, a rising sovereign state, facing the U.S.-dominated world empire or world system. It’s not a question of managing a relationship between two sovereign states, but a question of how China faces the U.S.-dominated world empire." I'd personally expand this characterization to the 20th century Cold War as well. The USSR and the socialist world was never fighting a "peer" in the West but a world empire formed by 500 years of imperialism. The modern history of the world has only ever known an unchallenged paradigm of Western supremacy. Any challengers like China itself in the Opium Wars and Boxer Uprising were beaten down until they accepted this paradigm. The failure of the USSR and all 20th century socialist states in combatting Occidentalism should also account for the wider historical context that they were fighting an uphill battle not just against the contemporary material conditions of the socialist world vis-a-vis the West but also the engrained intergenerational societal and cultural propaganda of Occidentalism.
To be honest, I think this is a sort of psychological confrontation that socialist education is ill-equipped to confront without generations of consistent reinforcement. Even then, there have been many socialist states that attempted to do so (with varying degrees of imperfection) and failed. The short and medium term means of securing ideological security against the West might be better addressed by a careful toleration of nationalism. It's indeed what worked for much of history and is what all capitalist states rely on today as a means of ideological cohesion. The Indian Marxist argument has been that Third World/Global South nationalism shouldn't be prejudiced inherently just because Europe mucked it up in the 20th century. I'm not entirely convinced that the risks of European nationalism are entirely inapplicable in cases of Global South bourgeois nationalism like BJP-run India today and I'm cautious about its compatibility with actual socialist states. However, this is something observable in all AES today, particularly China and Vietnam (I'm not sure about the DPRK/Cuba/Laos), where there is a greater emphasis on (largely socialism agnostic) patriotism as a rallying banner than was the case with 20th century socialism (non-existent in some cases like the DDR, where any national sentiment was squarely defined by socialist pride). The challenge is, of course, in subordinating it so that it never cannibalizes the socialist state in a fit of nationalist stupidity like how Yeltsin's Russian nationalism-pandering destroyed the USSR.
I actually agree with this, and this was my experience growing up in USSR as well. People in the west love to talk about how much propaganda there was in USSR, but the reality was that the government was absolutely terrible at actually selling the system to the people. Nobody cared about politics, nobody really understood what it meant to be communist, why we did things the way we did them, and what the alternative was like. The country was just driving on auto pilot where people simply accepted the system as just being there without really thinking about it.
I've often wondered what things might've been like if political education was part of the curriculum in school from early on. It wouldn't even have to be done in form of reading books. For example, you could create a whole bunch of games, like monopoly, that kids could play and learn from. Then you could have class discussion, and talk about why monopoly always ends up the same way. Have games illustrating how communist approach works, etc. That could've created an intuition for why our system was desirable. In the same vein, the government could have been far more transparent about governance, encouraging worker organization, and bottom up governance. We really should've gone back to the way things worked in 1930s, but there was utter lack of imagination in the political class.
I do get the impression that China has a similar problem where majority of the population isn't really invested in politics and doesn't really care to be engaged. The system gets support because the economy is doing well, but what you really need is for people to be able to support the system in times of crisis. And to do that, you really need people to feel engaged, to have a measure of understanding of how things work, and that they're directly participating in the system.
The system gets support because the economy is doing well, but what you really need is for people to be able to support the system in times of crisis. And to do that, you really need people to feel engaged, to have a measure of understanding of how things work, and that they're directly participating in the system.
Precisely. This is exactly my worry. History makes it very clear that nothing stays the same forever. Sooner or later any system runs into issues, whether internally or externally caused, and in order to survive a system needs to be robust and enjoy not just opportunistic but principled support. Capitalist societies unfortunately have gotten very good at ideologically priming their populations for accepting that the system cannot be changed no matter how bad their crises (which they inevitably and regularly run into) get. "There is no alternative" and all that. They invest heavily in ideological indoctrination and in justifying the system to the people, even if they have to constantly lie to achieve this. We are surrounded by it, we are drowned in pro-capitalist propaganda almost 24/7 from the moment we begin as children to learn how the world works until we die, through advertising, the media, the educational system, our social and work environment, etc.
Socialists could have such a great advantage in this regard because we don't need to lie, all we need to do is properly present the truth to the people. Reality is on our side. Yet we see so many socialist states that have failed or are failing to do that. The only one that seems to have done a better job on this than most is the DPRK (though i strongly emphasize the "seems" here because frankly i just don't have a very clear understanding of how things in the DPRK work or exactly how the people there are taught to think about their system... forming an opinion based solely on what defectors say, even ones who have since seen the ugly reality of capitalism and regret their decision, is not reliable), and perhaps to some extent Cuba, though i think it can be hard to distinguish between what is support for the social and economic system, and what is patriotism or the desire to protect national independence against imperialism. Not that the latter isn't also useful but it's not a reliable safeguard against counter-revolution.
I very much agree, a certain level of ideological indoctrination is necessary and it should not be seen as a negative. People need to have a basic understanding of how and why their society is structured the way it is. I also think it's crucial for people to see themselves are active participants in the workings of the system, as opposed to being passive recipients of rules handed down from high up.
Good news is that China does have a lot of grassroots organization. This was a surprisingly decent western article discussing it https://www.noemamag.com/what-the-west-misunderstands-about-power-in-china/
And this infographic shows how embedded CPC is in the communities https://news.cgtn.com/event/2021/who-runs-the-cpc/index.html
I definitely do think they're doing a much better job than USSR did in that regard.
China does advertise the success of their policies, but I don't think they do it nearly as often as they should.
I think some of the reasons might be because in Chinese culture, and the style of governance of the CPC, is "actions speak louder than words" and the government doesn't want people to become complacent with success or think that the CPC is always right or has the answer, or appear arrogant or all-knowing.
I think that even though Mao did alot of good, China is very reluctant to take influence from him and the Cultural Revolution, for obvious reasons. Not to say that China doesn't take any influence or lessons whatsoever from the classical Maoist era, though.
I also think that even though China does an excellent job at filtering out anti-communist and sinophobic propaganda, the government feels that no matter how well it presents counter-arguments against malicious lies and slander, the mere fact that the Chinese government is addressing things will make an unfortunately surprising number of people outright reject, deny or be skeptical of their claims.
Given how tech-certified and super-rational the CPC is, sometimes I think that they think that most Chinese people are just like them, and underestimate just how powerful irrational and emotional arguments can be to people who don't know any better, aren't politically involved, or don't research every single question about every topic they have. And there are only so many hours in a day.
I agree that China's government is being too passive about the "why" behind its wins. A lot of the people I've talked to on Xiaohongshu don't have a firm grasp on these how's and why's, nor do they generally have much of a connection to communism in general. The government is obviously doing a good job governing, but they're not doing a good job educating.
Yeah. I have the impression sometimes that maybe being a bit more heavy handed in propaganda may not be such a bad thing. For instance, one thing i see in many of the older Chinese people is that perhaps they may not have necessarily a very deep understanding of the theory, but what did stick are political slogans that they still know by heart, or political songs, operas, etc. from the Cultural Revolution that they still enjoy singing to this day.
I think art in particular is an excellent vehicle for this sort of thing because it sticks with people and i wish China would have more explicitly political art, not just from independent artists but actual government sponsored initiatives. And it doesn't always need to be subtle, it's ok to be a bit direct so that everyone gets the message. Sure the West would make fun of it and say shit like "look how the Chinese government is brainwashing the people", but so what? Fuck the West, who cares what they say?
And in some cases art can actually lead people to take an interest in communism. I don't know if i would be a communist today if i had not taken an interest when i was young in Soviet and Irish revolutionary music which led me to want to read and learn about their history.
Iirc, at least according to this, China is attempting to be a cultural power by 2035. I reckon that in undertaking this goal, some if the things you've mentioned might be getting addressed in the near future.
Of course these are just plans and statements for now, but I have trust in the PRC to fulfill its goals as they have steadily in the past decade.
I'm glad that China is already on track to becoming a cultural powerhouse, and as always, they can do more. I think/hope they can cement their status by 2035. Possibly even by 2030, at how China does things.
I keep a personal and mental list of hundreds of tv shows, books, movies and bands I want to watch, read or experience one day, and alot of Chinese donghua and tv series and movies are on my list.