Understanding China, Socialism, and Communism: An Early Morning Comment

How can any social scientists hope to understand China and the Communist Party of China (CPC) without without understanding Marxian theoretical traditions? I review a large number of texts every year and remain perplexed that so many of the the authors are ignorant of Marxism/Marxian theory. This ignorance leads to all sorts of misunderstandings, faulty premises, and flawed conclusions. And the problem is not only that these theorists do not understand Marxian theory(ies), but that some subset of them have such simplistic and incorrect understanding that their arguments start badly and get worse from there. Nevertheless, I try to be as forgiving as possible in my reviews, although it sometimes stretches the kindness muscles to their limits. (By the way, this problem does not permeate what used to be called the Directorate of Intelligence at the C.I.A., where knowledge of Marxian theory is an important asset for any top flight analyst working on China.) These misunderstandings are also reproduced within popular discourse (and all the talking heads on the boob tube who feed popular discourse), where many analysts seem completely clueless about the relationship between capitalism as a social relationship (in fact, they don't even know what Marxian theorists mean by capitalism, despite the fact that it was in that theoretical tradition that the phrase "capitalist system" was invented and elaborated) and Marxian theory as a social science (as opposed to Marxist political practices -- the meaning of which I'm actually not completely clear about). Marxian theory is primarily a social science of capitalism, grounded in an understanding of social dynamics that depends upon the existence of capitalism as driving force, and within which an understanding of transition has always been vital. And there are a lot of different Marxian theories out there, even within the CPC (a critical point in my text, Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision). In order to understand the debates within the CPC and the direction of public policy in China, one needs an understanding of these Marxian theories, and particularly of the modernist version of Marxian theory that has come to prevail in the CPC and which is most closely associated with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, as well as the group of leaders ("the engineers") who have followed Deng Xiaoping. Have these leaders abandoned communism? Again, it is important to know what communism means within Marxian theory(ies). No political leader or social scientist trained in Marxian theory (in China or any of the other countries that we called "communist") ever claimed that their societies had achieved communism. Communism was the social formation to come, the goal, the end of the rainbow of the revolutions (and non-revolutions). It was a society grounded in the democratic control by workers of the profits/surplus values generated by their labor. No such society had actually been created in China or the USSR or Bulgaria or North Korea or Cuba. Workers in these societies continue to toil under the control of other people. Their liberation is a dream deferred, so to speak, something to be aspired to, at least in political rhetoric, if not in political practices. Instead, these societies are called "socialist," meaning social formations that continue to be based on capitalism and other non-communist class processes but directed by a political leadership (a vanguard party) that has communism as the ultimate goal (with no real check on whether or not these political leaders are really trying to achieve such a society or have provided any time table for its establishment and the people being led are not usually in a position to fire them for mal- or misfeasance). Thus, the rise of capitalism in China today in no way contradicts the underlying theoretical understanding of socialism by the spinners of CPC ideology or other like-minded thinkers. China remains socialist (socialism with Chinese characteristics, as it were), in some ways precisely because capitalism is ascendent, given that modernist Marxists believe that the establishment of capitalism is a precondition for the ultimate achievement of communism. The strange irony of this teleological way of thinking is that it actually makes the United States appear closer to communism (a more advanced form of capitalism is necessarily closer to communism in this modernist teleology) than countries governed by communist parties, including China. Okay, that's a bit too strange for this early in the morning, so I'll stop there and go have a cup of tea and wait for the sunrise.