Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (rough drraft)

So the problem with the idea of “seize the means of production” when you are a formerly colonized nation is that you have no means of production to seize. Colonization means that for over a century your nation’s labor and natural resources were robbed at gunpoint, and used to develop the colonial power that was occupying you instead of your home.

So in order to get means of production, you either have to start building up productive forces from scratch using sticks and stones, all while facing the unrelenting imperialist aggression faced by any country who doesn’t comply with the interest of private enterprise, or you need a mechanism of exchange to get access to the capital that was stolen from you and is now locked behind the doors of global trade.

You could probably justify taking that stolen wealth back by force as reparations, but the chances of that actually succeeding against a superior military power are slim. Meanwhile, participating in global trade and allowing for a private sector reintroduces the contradictions and exploitation of private enterprise, but it also gives access to investments in labor saving tools and machinery so that economic development can be achieved with far less toil. The mistake most analysis of China makes is to say "I have identified a contradiction, and therefore my analysis is complete." This is not a complete analysis, because a complete analysis would also need to include what contradictions are solved as a result of the contradiction you've identified, what other options are available, and what contradictions would arise from choosing one of these other options.

It’s one of those “best choice from bad options” circumstances. And while you are reliant on that investment to develop your country, your bargaining power is tied to the bargaining power of every other global south nation that they can choose to do business in instead. You are still part of that "Global reserve army of labor" when you are starting out.

But these conditions are not stagnant. As you develop more and more self sufficiency, you gain the bargaining power to hold out for better investment deals, or to abandon private investment and transition towards public development.

These states see steady improvements in quality of life as a result of this increasing bargaining power. Every decade has been the most prosperous decade for the average Chinese citizen for the past 50 years.

Having the leverage of the entire government as bargaining power when negotiating the conditions of employment is powerful. There’s only so much leverage you can apply when you need investment. Investors can set up shop anywhere. If you want to use markets as a mechanism for exchange, you have to make compromises.

But as that development matures, as more industry is developed and more fixed capital gets built there’s a sunk cost. Private enterprises can’t pull out of the country without having to start from scratch building new factories. The leverage gained from this process has been continually applied to force wages to go up at a steady rate. With an average increase of 17% every year for a 400% increase in the past 3 decades. And after a while, this did result in some businesses shutting down and outsourcing to cheaper markets, same as had happened in the US. The difference being that in China when that business pulls out, instead of leaving everyone out of a job the state simply steps in and begins managing it as a public enterprise.

China has developed incredibly rapidly, but it’s still only in the last few years that you could honestly say that China had a fully matured and self sufficient economy. And with that self sufficiency, you see China moving much more aggressively toward socializing production and bringing the private sector under public control. A process which up till now has been happening gradually and relied on simply stepping in and nationalizing businesses when the natural contradictions of capitalism inevitably resulted in bankruptcies and falling rates of profit.

I have a hard time seeing what China has accomplished under these difficult circumstances as anything other than an incredible success. Sure, it’s not what I’d want here, but it’s important to keep in mind that as recently as the 1950s as the communist party was coming to power, China was still a nation that was over 90% agrarian peasant farmers, the vast majority of which were still tending to the land with hand tools. The progress they’ve made and the lives they’ve improved in such a short time is incredible. And with over 90% of citizens expressing approval for the government in opinion polls, most of China would seem to agree with that assessment.

Like I said, it’s the best of some bad options. And you’re right, there are other ways to develop your productive forces, but I think you’re glossing over just how important the deterrent to imperialist aggression is. Stubbornly keeping your markets closed and pursuing socialist development will result in facing the same imperialist aggression that every socialist project faced during the Cold War period, and that most collapsed under the weight of. But opening your markets also creates a kind of “mutually assured economic destruction” if the imperialist powers attempt to invade or otherwise destabilize your country.