"best thing I've ever read"

[–]digrizo

 63 points 2 years ago
Honest question: why does the party allow pigs like Jack Ma and the like to squeeze the workers with things like the 996 working system and amass so much wealth without at least forcing a sort of collective bargain contract or some kind of profit sharing?

I feel like they should get a tighter grip on private companies when they get big and juicy with money off the backs of their workers

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[–][deleted] 81 points 2 years ago
why does the party allow pigs like Jack Ma and the like to

They don't, Xi literally sneaks up behind them and murders them with his bare hands. Didn't you see the thumbnail

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[–]digrizo

 46 points 2 years ago
This made me choke on my drink lmao
It's still a serious question though; I'd love if someone well versed in chinese politics could answer

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[–]FerrisTriangle 90 points 2 years ago*2
I'll try to give a serious answer.

Lets step back in time a bit to the founding of the PRC, and the conditions of China after the revolution. For a rough timeline, China had been heavily exploited under a century of colonial rule and partition which was ended through the victory of the revolution in 1949. However, the country that this new government was inheriting was one that was still suffering the effects of colonialism and feudalism. All capital and natural resources had been systematically stripped from the land and used to develop the colonial powers instead of their homeland, and the work and living conditions were so brutal that the average Chinese lifespan was roughly 30 years.

The agriculture and land reforms of the Mao era immediately following the revolution achieved a tremendous amount of progress in improving quality of life across the board, and securing at least basic subsistence for as many people as possible. These efforts alone doubled the average lifespan up to 65 years in just 2 decades.

However, securing basic subsistence for the masses is by no means the end goal of socialist development. We are still left with the task with developing a modern economy that is capable of providing a decent standard of life for all. However, being a recently colonized country means a lot of Marxist theory on how to achieve this isn't applicable in the Chinese context. Slogans like "Seize the means of production" are completely non-sensical when you try to apply them in the Chinese context. There were no means of production to seize, because for a century their labor and resources had been systematically stolen from them and used to develop the colonial powers who had occupied and partitioned the country before the revolution.

At this point, China was still over 90% agrarian peasant farmers, most of whom were doing the brutal and difficult work of tending to the land with hand tools. All of the advanced means of production which could be used to help alleviate that toil were locked away behind the doors of global capital.

So China is still left with the task of developing a modern economy that is capable of providing a good and comfortable standard of living for everyone, but does not have a lot of great options available to them. The first option is to just get to work, organize the workers to start building an advanced space age/information age economy from scratch using nothing but the hand tools they already owned. Essentially trying to build an advanced economy out of sticks and stones. This kind of socialist construction allows you to stay more true to high minded socialist ideals like labor is entitled to all it creates. However, this path is plagued by many pitfalls. A primary pitfall being that industrializing a country using primarily hand tools is an astronomically intense amount of toil. Another important pitfall is that you would need to carry out this socialist construction during the height of Cold War hostilities, during a time where the imperialist world powers were doing everything in their power to sabotage socialist construction around the world. Every setback you face as a result of that sabotage would serve to duplicate the already astronomical toil you're already enduring while you are working toward industrialization.

This path of sticking your nose to the grindstone and building an advanced economy from sticks and stones is largely what the Great Leap Forward was attempting to do, and the flaws that I outlined are a big part of the reason why the Great Leap Forward was filled with so much hardship and misery. The pressures to industrialize rapidly while effectively under siege from imperialist powers stretched China's meager productive forces far too thin, and agricultural production suffered as a result, which led to natural but potentially preventable famines being much more deadly as a result. The Great Leap Forward shows us that this path for socialist development was unsustainable.

Another potential path, and the one that China ended up taking in the Deng era, is the path of Reform and Opening Up. The rational here is recognizing that if you want to alleviate the intense toil associated with industrializing then you need to get access to those labor saving tools, equipment, and technologies that had been locked away behind the doors of global capital. In order to gain access to this capital, you need to implement some kind of mechanism of exchange. One potential mechanism of exchange is military conquest, where you invade the colonial powers and rightfully claim those resources as justified reparations for a century a colonial looting. I hope I don't need to explain why this path might not be advisable. The other mechanism is making concessions which will allow you to participate in global trade.

Of course, making concessions with capital in order to participate in global trade isn't ideal either. By reintroducing private enterprise and private control of economic production, you are also reintroducing the contradictions of private enterprise such as exploitation, as you have noted in your comment. You also get contradictions like uneven development and inequality. However, you gain incredibly important benefits in exchange. Namely, what you are losing from exploitation you are more than making up for through a reduction in toil due to gaining access to incredibly important investments in labor saving tools, equipment, and technologies. The other vital benefit you gain from the path of reform and opening up is that by intertwining your economy with the imperial powers, you also are creating an incredibly powerful deterrent to imperialist aggression. You effectively create a kind of "Mutually assured economic destruction" which allows you to develop your economy in peace.

This understanding that reform and opening up is a compromise with capital is critical to understanding the political and economic situation in China. I think there is a very convincing case to be made that reform and opening up was the best option out of a set of bad options. But what is important to understand is that when you are pursuing development through global trade, you lose a lot of agency over the conditions of economic development. You're subject to the forces of market competition. And China, still being a recently colonized country at this point in time, only has as much economic leverage as other colonized countries in the global south have when negotiating with global capital, and therefore China was subject to many of the same conditions found throughout the rest of the global south. Because from the point of view of the capitalist, they're asking why they should bring their factories to China and pay Chinese labor a fair wage when they could bring their factory to another country where they can pay poverty wages. So you see a lot Chinese labor working in poor conditions and for low wages because they are now in competition with the global industrial reserve army of surplus labor.

The way we can tell that this is a compromise with capital rather than a complete surrender to capital is by looking at what happens in the decades following reform and opening up. As more fixed capital gets invested into China, and therefore as China becomes less reliant on foreign capital, this gives China and Chinese labor more leverage to negotiate for better wages and better labor conditions. The increased leverage that is gained by the accumulation of fixed capital has been consistently used as bargaining power by the government to consistently force wages to rise, with an average increase of 16% every year for a total increase of ~400% over the past 3 decades.

Of course this upward pressure on wages pushed by the communist party has caused capital flight out of China in recent years where corporations will outsource jobs to cheaper labor markets because Chinese labor is becoming more expensive. But again, here you can see the difference in the Chinese approach by comparing what happens in China as a result of capital flight compared to America. In America, when companies close up shop to outsource to cheaper labor markets, the result is just thousands of people losing their jobs and being cut off from the income that they need to survive. In China, when a business closes up shop their assets are seized and transferred to a state owned public enterprise, and employees will often keep their same job so long as there is still a social need for that production. The trend over this time period has been to move more and more towards most major production being handled through state owned enterprises, and reducing the reliance on private enterprise as time goes on.

So while things like 996 exist, it is far from the norm and is something that the Chinese economy is consistently trending away from as material conditions allow. Additionally, 996 working schedules don't exist in most industries. 996 is really only a thing in high end and high paying tech industry jobs to my understanding. Again, obviously not ideal, but also not endemic.

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[–]digrizo

 17 points 2 years ago
This is honestly of the best explanations of the situation in China I have ever read. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this.

One last question though: do you feel like the same tradeoff applies to their own companies with the majority of shares in China itself? (Like Alibaba) I was mostly referring to those when I asked that question. I am aware that Jack Ma is a member of the CPC and that they allow capitalists - though not in the higher ranks, as they should - and keep them in a tight leash.

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[–]FerrisTriangle 16 points 2 years ago*
Well a national bourgeois is a natural by-product of reform and opening up. I was focusing on the aspect of global trade where foreign investors bring resources into the country and open up factories, but trade goes both ways. And if you have Chinese industry doing trade with foreign industry, then you're also going to have a national bourgeois form under these conditions.

From a strategy perspective, it is beneficial to allow your national bourgeois to thrive if you are going to open up your markets to private enterprise, because it gives you a fault line along which to divide the bourgeois as a class since there are contradictions between the national bourgeois and the international bourgeois. The same trick that capitalists societies use against the working class by dividing us up along as many fault lines as they can find can be used against the capitalist class by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

I mean, I suppose you could regulate the market such that you can only own a private enterprise if you're investing foreign capital into the economy, and all national industry is owned directly by the PRC, but I feel like there would be a ton of issues with that approach. An aspect of this that I didn't really touch on is the experimental nature of these undertakings. The socialist governments that we see today are usually walking in uncharted territory and attempting to build brand new ways of organizing economy and society with almost no existing blueprint to work off of.

China exhibits this very well, since their governing philosophy leans very heavily on this experimental nature. China has a number of different administrative regions and special economic zones who all experiment with different local reforms and regulations, and the results of these projects can be presented to regional or national councils for wider adoption if they are very successful. There is a very experimental and scientific approach when it comes to implementing economic policy in China.

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[–]digrizo

 12 points 2 years ago
Man, these CPC types really know what they’re doing. It’s genius really.

They basically took Lenin’s NEP, adapted to their own material reality and then galvanized it to make sure that it can’t be sabotaged by foreign powers - mostly because if they do, they’re sabotaging themselves.

I remain of the opinion that they could take the edge off of capitalist exploitation a bit more at this stage, but this was certainly eye opening. I just hope I live to see some “actual socialist” reality spring up there. Maybe in the new eco cities they are building?

Again, thank you for taking the time to write all of this comrade! I am becoming more and more pro-China each day. If they win, we all win.

May they succeed and lead the international proletariat to liberation

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[–]FerrisTriangle 16 points 2 years ago
I mean yeah, we're always going to want to see a better world than the one we're currently living in. That's what makes us communists.

But I think it's important to keep in context just how recent all of this history actually is, and how under-developed China still is as a consequence of this history. China as a potential economic super power is an incredibly recent development. But it's hard to keep the big picture in focus, and we end up ascribing a lot more agency than is probably reasonable.