On "Billionaires in the Chinese Communist Party"

(This response was written in the context of the question "Why are there billionaires in the Chinese Communist Party?:)

>I suppose you can call these people "patriotic billionaires"; they put the goal of the nation first, using their wealth to develop the country (through the directives of the Party) such that examples of inequality like themselves become a rarer sight as time passes.

I don't really like this explanation, because it reads too much like "the party is good, therefore the capitalists in the party are good."

If you want to dig into the "theory" behind this arrangement, it can be better understood in terms of an analysis of primary and secondary contradictions.

A good analogy here would be the time of the united front against against Japanese Imperialism during/leading up to World War 2. Before this point, the communist party had been engaged in class struggle, but it soon become clear that the party could not successfully wage class struggle while also being under occupation by a foreign power. This led to the decision to pursue temporary compromise and alliance with the KMT in order to put up a united front against the Japanese invasion.

I'm starting here because this is a much more clear and straightforward example of this kind of decision making and it's a good example for learning the kind of thinking that goes into a Marxist analysis and how analytical tools like dialectical materialism should be used.

The most important thing to understand about Marxism is that it is not a policy prescription, or a decree about how the world should work. You can't be more or less Marxist based on how closely you adhere to some arbitrary checklist of things pulled off of the Wikipedia page for "the definition of communism." Nor can it be if your goal is actual political change and a successful transformation of societal relations. This is simply due to the fact that we are not gods who can rule the world by decree. We can not speak our desires into existence, or suddenly manifest a utopia by pressing "The Big Red Communism Button" that is sitting on President Xi's desk. We must engage with the world as it currently exists, and what Marxism teaches more than anything else is that your strategy and tactics must come from a deep and thorough analysis of the conditions that are unique to your specific time and place, and that your strategy must change and adapt as those conditions change. In order for your theory of change to be effective, it is useful to identify what your primary obstacle is and organize the bulk of your limited resources around addressing that obstacle first.

And so, in the 30s and 40s the primary obstacle to the Chinese peasantry and proletariat was foreign invasion and military occupation by Japanese forces, and the best strategy to overcome this obstacle was to put various aspects of the ongoing class struggle "on hold" and instead organize a united front on the basis of national unity in order to repel the invading army.

Once this was resolved with the conclusion of the war, the Chinese communist party resumed class struggle as its primary objective, culminating in the success of the Chinese Revolution in 1954. At this point, the party was able to win great advancements for the people through things like land reform that liberated the people from oppressive, feudal landlords and granted people ownership over the land that they cultivated. This alone was a tremendous improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of people, but now the party was left with a new set of conditions that they were required to address.

First was the geopolitical situation, where they found themselves in a time of continuously rising Cold War tensions and hostilities in which any socialist/communist revolution was met with subterfuge, sabotage, propaganda campaigns, coups, sanctions, embargos, blockades, military invasion, and so on all aimed at weakening the these socialist projects in order to restore the domination of capital and capitalists over those nations. This meant that China was required to organize strong and effective resistance to this international antagonism that was being imposed upon them.

Second was the economic condition of China, who was at this point one of the poorest nations in the world. Prior to the success of the Chinese revolution, China was experiencing a period of history that is now referred to as "The Century of Humiliation," where China was split up into various colonial holdings and "Spheres of Influence" between the various colonial world powers of the 19th century/20th century. China's economic development during this time was practically non-existent, because nearly all of China's labor and natural resources had been effectively systematically looted at gunpoint and exported to develop the economies of these occupying colonial powers. This was usually done with the existing lords and existing Bourgeois in China cooperating/collaborating with these foreign colonial powers in exchange for keeping their positions of power and authority, as well as being given bribes and kickbacks from these colonial governments.

What this meant is that the classic Marxist slogan of "seize the means of production" had absolutely no relevance to the situation of the Chinese peasantry and proletariat. There was no machinery and resources for them to seize and start employing toward their own ends, because nearly all of the fruits of their labor had been robbed from them, exported, and then locked behind the doors of international trade/international capital for the past century. And the economic condition of China was critical to address because you need to build the productive foundation that is necessary to provide the necessities and comforts of life before you can guarantee a decent standard of living for all. And at this moment in time, China was tasked with undertaking this development in a country where roughly 90% of the country was agricultural peasantry, most of whom were still tending to the land with hand tools. There was a long, difficult, and arduous path laid out in front of the Chinese people, because to improve the standard of living of their desperately impoverished nation requires immense amounts of toil as you organize the construction of modernized industry and infrastructure that forms the productive basis of society, and because the Chinese people were beginning this task with mostly hand tools and manual labor, all while under the constant threat of Cold War aggression looming over them constantly.

Bringing this all back to the OP, when addressing a question like this it is important to analyze these decisions and arrangements in the context of the conditions that they were developed in response to, and then evaluate whether or not those strategy and tactics were a rational response to that situation. And here it is important to remember that there is almost never a singular, all encompassing "correct" answer to these situations. There are often many strategies that that lead to success in a battle, just as there are many paths you can walk to reach the same destination. And it is often only with the benefit of hindsight that a better path may be found, because the only way to test a strategy and confirm whether your assumptions/theory is true is by putting that strategy into practice and then study the results.

If we put the inclusion of capitalists within the Chinese communist party into the context of the history that I just laid out above, then the answer that you provide which explains that "they are members of the national bourgeois, and are allowed to exist and participate in government so long as they are patriotic and use their wealth for the benefit of the country" is incomplete at best.

It is true that they are bound to act in ways that are governed by Chinese law, and that the law is written by a governing structure that is beholden to and upholds the interests of the working class, but that doesn't explain why this arrangement came to pass, and it glosses over the inherent class contradiction between the working and owning class, and how the wealth of the ownership class always comes from the exploitation of labor by virtue of using the authority that private ownership gives the capitalist over production extract value from the labor they employ.

There is no way for a capitalist to accumulate wealth other than through the exploitation of labor, so the existence of capitalists in a communist party is a point that is worth addressing with appropriate thoroughness.

We can do this by looking into the rationale that went into making these decisions and creating these arrangements, and then asking whether a person who is acting as a good faith representative of the Chinese working class could reasonably come to the same conclusions and pursue the same course of action. While there is never a foolproof way to infer the intent behind someone's actions, asking questions such as these and being able to establish a consistent pattern is a of behavior is a good approach to answer questions such as "Is the Chinese Communist Party a legitimate representative of the will of the people who is acting in the best interest of the people to the best of their ability and available knowledge, or has the party instead been corrupted/compromised to act as representatives of the capitalist class against the broader public interest." And that is the question that the OP essentially boils down to.

So to understand where we are now, we have to understand where we came from. So starting with the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1954, China had two broad strategies that the could adopt while moving forward. First, you could just take the straightforward approach and get to work. Just acknowledge that you have a difficult task laying ahead of you, and get to work organizing and building a modern economy with little more than a collection of hand tools and immense toil. And while you are doing so, you are also enduring the burden of Cold War antagonism and Cold War aggression that is forcing you to divert a portion of that effort and resources into defense, while also frequently needing to duplicate your efforts to rebuild from sabotage and so on.

Another potential strategy to employ while going forward is to argue that due to the present conditions of China, it is sensible to make temporary compromises with capital in the same way that temporary compromises were made with the KMT to repel Japanese military occupation. The rationale for this compromise would be that since China has practically no capital of its own as a result of colonial looting, the only way to gain access to the capital they need for economic development is by participating in the international economy and in international trade. The primary issue here is that compromises need to be made in order for investors to bring capital into China with regards to protecting and enshrining corporate private property rights. And those compromises inevitably introduce all of the contradictions inherent to the private ownership and private management of production, namely the unequal distribution of resources and uneven economic development, the exploitation of labor, and so on down the list. But it could be argued that these compromises are overall beneficial, because gaining access to labor saving tools, equipment, machinery, and technology through foreign capital investment would eliminate a tremendous amount of the toil associated with economic development and industrialization, and these compromises can be re-evaluated as conditions change and as Chinese industry becomes more self-sufficient and less dependent on capital investment. The idea here is if you are being exploited by an employer who is keeping half of the fruits of your labor as profits, but you are able to produce ten times as much or develop the land ten times as quickly with their investment in advanced implements of production than you could have done on your own using hand tools, then you're still coming out ahead.

These two paths are paths that China has ended up taking at different points in their development. The first path broadly describes the approach taken by "The Great Leap Forward," where the party decided that the best plan was to just strap in and do the work, with some reliance on Soviet trade helping them along. And the experience gained from this attempt shows that this strategy wasn't particularly viable given the present conditions that they were addressing. The pressure to push forward on economic development, while also devoting resources to defense and counteracting sabotage and Cold War antagonism ended up spreading China's very limited resources too thin, leaving the nation in a very fragile and delicate state. The result of this was immense amounts of toil, and a lack of resilience to alleviate famine conditions.

This is not to say that the party is at fault for causing famines. Famine has been a regular occurrence in the region for centuries beforehand, and it is the regular variance in weather and climate that creates the conditions for a weaker growing season that results in a shortage of food. Additionally, economic sanction and embargo from capitalist countries was used as a tactic to intentionally sabotage and weaken socialist countries, limiting their ability to use international trade to make up for domestic agricultural shortfalls by buying and importing food. To be fair, there are several examples of mistakes and mismanagement due to inexperience that exacerbated these conditions, such as the "anti-pest campaign" killing off sparrows because they were eating/destroying crops, only for that to lead to an even greater loss of crops because insect population exploded without the sparrows around to keep their numbers in check. It could be argued that this strategy could still have been viable so long as errors such as this were corrected, but the truth of the matter is that this approach to socialist development was always going to be immensely difficult given the recent history of China, and would be filled with tremendous hardship and fragility even with omnipotent leadership. Whenever you stretch limited resources that thinly, you're always going to have a number of different fracture points, any of which could lead to disaster and even more hardship. Failures aren't necessarily evidence of doing things wrong, after all to quote Jean Luc Picard "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life." So our analysis should be open to the idea that this approach may still have been the best available approach despite the hardships that were encountered. Still, the experience of The Great Leap Forward that there were many shortcomings and weaknesses to this approach, and that continuing along that path may eventually prove to be disastrous.

This brings us to the second approach that I outlined of temporary compromise, which broadly describes the approach of the reform and opening up period, and this has played out more or less how I have already described above. China has experienced very steady economic development by opening up their economy and allowing private investors to buy into their markets over the past ~40 years, and as China's industry develops and becomes more self-sufficient and less dependent on capital investment the laws that govern those markets are constantly being rewritten and updated to reflect that growing autonomy and independence, which has translated into stricter and stricter regulations put on private industry and labor laws that favor the worker more and more so that the Chinese worker is able to see the benefits from this consistent growth in terms of consistent upwards pressure on wages. This pressure has started causing companies to begin being priced out of the Chinese labor market, resulting in them pulling their business out of China and offshoring their business into a cheaper labor market. This is similar to how when unions started winning higher wages in the US through collective bargaining, many corporations responded by moving their factories overseas into places like China where the labor market was cheaper. The main difference is that when that happens in the US, the result is just that thousands of people lose their job and are cut off from earning a livelihood because in a capitalist country the owner has the final authority over production and capitalist law is written such that private property rights are protected above almost everything else. If the people who privately own your nation's economy decide that they want to take their toys and go play somewhere else with them, the law protects them and leaves you destitute with no recourse for the years of labor that you've invested into into that enterprise. In a capitalist country, everything that you labor has built can be taken away at a moment's notice, and this threat is used by the capital owning class to coerce compliance from the workers and is used as a tactic to break unions. When offshoring happens in China, however, the result is very different. Since Chinese law is not written to protect the rights of capital above all else the way that the law in a capitalist country is written, what will often happen when a business closes up and moves overseas is that the fixed assets that are left behind will often be nationalized and incorporated into a relevant state-owned enterprise. The workers will then often keep their same job assuming there is still a demand/social need for the work they were doing, or they will be given assistance finding work elsewhere if their old job became obsolete.

Another critically important benefit of reform and opening up is that all of China's economic development during this time period was all peaceful economic development. The approach taken by The Great Leap Forward had forced China to endure the same Cold War aggression that had plagued every socialist project, but the Reform and Opening Up period had the important effect of tying China's economic health together with the economic health of all the major global economies. What this did was it created a kind of "mutually assured economic destruction," meaning that China now had a powerful deterrent to the kind of economic/military interventionism that the US had regularly engaged in. Now that disrupting/sabotaging Chinese economic development meant sabotaging the economy of your own country or disrupting the economy of your geopolitical allies, it suddenly became much harder to justify the usual Cold War interventionism. And since this is likely what allowed China to survive into the 21th century while still pursing a socialist/communist agenda, I would argue that this is the most important impact that Reform and Opening Up has had. Especially since many other socialist projects ended up collapsing under sustained and unrelenting Cold War aggression. You can only continue socialist development if you survive, there's no reward for being an uncompromising martyr.

In conclusion, what I think can be taken away from this is that the compromises of the market reforms are based on conclusions that a reasonable person acting in good faith trying to represent the best interests of the Chinese public would also arrive at. And with the benefit of hindsight, being able to see how successful these reforms were at accomplishing their stated goals and how these reforms have been constantly adjusted and updated to give more and more leverage to the workers as conditions allowed, I'm fairly confident in stating that it was a good policy and that the party that implemented that policy genuinely has the best interests of the public in mind.

And this finally lets us get back to the original question that was posed, wondering what capitalists were doing in the communist party. Even if we conclude that reform and opening up was a reasonable policy for the conditions that China was addressing, the rationale that policy is based on mostly has to do with incentivizing foreign investors to bring capital into China. So what justifies the existence of a national bourgeois in this context? We already know that "they are the good capitalists who use their wealth to improve the country because they are patriotic" isn't a good answer because it glosses over the class contradiction that is inherent to having a separate ownership class and working class, and also because we already know that this national bourgeois is not loyal or patriotic because they were often the ones who cooperated with/collaborated with occupying colonial powers during the Century of Humiliation.

Instead, the answer can once again be better understood in terms of strategy and tactics. Once you've decided to pursue market reforms as part of your policy for economic development, there isn't really any reasonable way to implement a policy that permits and protects foreign private property but forbids Chinese people from owning private property or running a business. For one, just think about the implication that this kind of policy would have. You would be creating a two-tiered legal system that explicitly gives preferential treatment to wealthy foreign corporations while denying you those same protections if you're a Chinese citizen? People would literally riot. So at some level, just making sure that the same rules apply to everyone equally is important.

Second, there is some positive utility in keeping a national bourgeois around during the period of socialist transformation. For one thing, if your national economy is still severely underdeveloped and is unable to provide a good standard of living to all, that doesn't mean that the demand for luxuries and things of that nature doesn't exist. If the socialist economy is unable to satisfy those demands, and there is no legal market where people can obtain those luxuries, then experience shows us that the result is they become black market products governed by organized crime and hidden from the light of day. This gets back to a point from much earlier, that we are not able to change the world by decree and that we must engage with the world as it currently exists. In that regard, it is much better to allow this kind of business to be conducted legally where it can be made subject to regulations and oversight rather than pushing it to become a black market business.

Third, if you're pursing a policy of market reforms explicitly as a kind of compromise with capital that is being motivated by necessity, it makes sense to have "both parties" at the negotiating table when you are drafting the content of these policies. And to my knowledge, none of the billionaire capitalists who are part of the people's congress are given any decision making authority. The position they are given is nothing more than a formalized advisory role. Though, if I'm mistaken on this point someone feel free to correct me. Regardless, like you said these billionaires make up a very small portion of government, and none are allowed in the highest levels of party leadership.

And lastly, there is some value in maintaining a separation between the national and international bourgeois. When you are pursuing a policy like the market reforms, there is a legitimate threat that the result will simply be capitalist restoration. There is the risk that the capitalist class that you have just allowed to have authority over production once again will take the concessions that you've given, and use their position and their wealth to organize politically around their shared class interests. A capitalist class that is united around their shared class interests is a dangerous thing, and just like we must be strategic when fighting for the liberation of the working class and when fighting for our shared class interests, the capitalist class can also be expected to act strategically when pursuing their class interests.

One critical difference, however, is that the capitalist inherently exists in competition with other capitalists. The wealth of one capitalist grows by out-competing rival businesses and pushing them out of the market so that their business can capture that market share. We can see in a capitalist country such as the US when the capital owning class has formal/informal influence on the levers of government power such as through lobbying and political donations, they will generally pursue a policy agenda that advances their shared class interests. This can be seen by an agenda that calls for lower corporate taxes, deregulation, rolling back worker rights, "Right to work laws" that are specifically targeted to handicap unions, and an ever increasing police and military budget that's used to enforce their absentee ownership over their vast industrial empires. China would like to prevent the capital owning class from being a united, politically active and politically influential entity the way they are in countries like America, and one way to do that is a kind of divide and conquer strategy.

Capital inevitably takes on an international character in its pursuit of unrestrained and continous growth, because given enough time capital will grow larger than what the domestic market can accommodate, and the capitalist is required to seek out new markets to expand into and dominate if they wish to continue the pursuit of unrestrained capital growth. This is something that Lenin goes into great detail on in "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism," and it explains why capitalism is such a powerful driver of colonialism, imperialism, and the military industrial complex. But this is not the stage of development that China's bourgeois has reached yet. China is still an emerging market, and there is still a tremendous amount of room for growth for a purely domestic business. So even though we know that recent history shows that many national bourgeois will take the opportunity to collaborate with/cooperate with foreign powers when it suited their interests and that they can't necessarily be relied on to cooperate on the basis of national loyalty, what we can rely on is that the entirety of the business exists almost exclusively within the domestic market and that it is therefore in their best interests to remain in good standing with the CCP since they govern and regulate those markets. International capital, on the other hand, is untethered and will move around and abandon one market in favor of entering a new market at its convenience, and has no special attachment to any particular nation.

If China treated its national bourgeois as unwanted outcasts, then its reasonable to assume that that national bourgeois would organize with the international capitalists that are operating in Chinese markets to conduct political influence campaigns so that they have a better chance at grabbing hold of political power and influence that they could use to advance their shared class interests. But by instead allowing the national bourgeois to have official recognition and official participation within the party, you erode the basis for unity between national and international capital. Your national bourgeois are now incentivized to stay in good standing with the party, and being caught collaborating with international capital to undermine the party now carries the risk of losing good standing with the party, with too little reward to justify that risk. International capital, on the other hand, knows that it can use its capital as negotiating leverage, and it has the most power and leverage when it can threaten to bring an entire industry to a stop by pulling their capital out of the country. So as long as international capital is satisfied that their right to freely move their capital around is protected, then they have no interest throwing their hat in the ring with China's national bourgeois to organize political power. The international capitalist doesn't want to become that involved in the national affairs of the places in which they operate, it is much more in their interests to not be so tied down to any one place so that if a government tries to regulate their business or if their workplaces start to unionize and make organized demands the owners can just go, "aw, that's cute, but now I'm closing your factory and moving all my stuff over to Bangladesh or some other place where the people are more desperate and willing to work for scraps. Maybe we can talk again after you've had your livelihood destroyed, lost your income, and had your family thrown out to live in the street."

All that is to say, the inclusion of the national bourgeois in party politics helps to undermine the potential for unity between domestic and international capital, and helps to prevent them from organizing around their shared class interests and trying to form a politically relevant faction within Chinese society. By including the national bourgeois in party politics, you ironically cause them to become isolated from who might otherwise be their political allies.

Anyway, that is the far more thorough, but hopefully more satisfying answer to the question in the OP.

This example also illustrates why it's so hard to be a Marxist. Because if we want to change the world, we must first comprehend the world. And in order to comprehend the world, you basically gotta know everything that's ever happened in all of recorded history i stg.