Much of the current discourse on China’s rise significantly overstates its economic might. China’s model of state capitalism and the dynamics of globalization have contributed to its rapid development over the past four decades. Yet these same factors circumscribe its hegemonic potential.
Changes in the Egyptian textile industry gave women workers structural power, which they drew on to develop cross-gender solidarities and working-class consciousness to fight back. Their strikes laid the groundwork for the Arab Spring.
Absolute freedom of critique and discussion lies at the heart of the interests of the workers’ movement, and it must be pursued at all costs.
Under Deng Xiaoping’s famous slogan, “liberating the productive forces” (jie fang sheng chan li), the official policy of liberal reform – strong state intervention in the labor market – has worked in support of commodification of labor, rather than constructing a system of social welfare that restricts the impact of market forces in China. When it comes to the price for labor power, there are two kinds of remuneration: the direct and the indirect salary (or fringe benefits). The first resembles what we know as hourly wage, whereas the second “is redistributed through a social agency.” For most welfare states, this social agency refers to the State, or a statutory agency that manages the social security fund, for example. As regards the Chinese context, it is the household solidarity characterized by auto-exploitation and auto-deprivation of rural households that has played this role.
While all of the various crises that comprise the larger organic crisis are inextricable, I’ve tried to map out in schematic form a number of the crises I see cascading across our conjuncture. As you will see, it’s nearly impossible to talk about one without talking about all, but that’s what I’ve tried to do here: provide a roadmap to the organic crisis that’s only just begun.
In China, contrary to the usual sequence, the socialist revolution preceded, rather than followed, the democratic breakthrough. For China to progress beyond its current early socialist stage, massive political change will be needed, and this poses serious challenges for the Chinese Communist Party. This way of looking at China does not coincide with CCP official doctrines, of a “harmonious society,” “market socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and the “Chinese dream.” But it also rejects the very common facile Western notion that China’s society is “capitalist,” or has been since the death of Mao and the reform and opening-up policies were promulgated. Socialist ideology has sunk deep roots in the country’s political consciousness, and this is a real force – just as the classical philosophies of earlier Chinese social formations were a force exceeding their material foundations.
Bhaskar’s bringing ontology back in to science makes it possible to rethink Marx’s claims for his economic theory in Capital as the founding work of a new science.
The emergence of dictatorial rule in capitalist societies once organized by parliamentary institutions can best be interpreted as a response to an intensifying crisis of representation within parliamentary democracy.
In Brazil, fiscal and monetary policies have favored the financial fraction of capital and established a state and institutional apparatus through which finance extorted income from labor. Together, public debt and taxation form a fiscal complex that, in addition to redistributing surpluses, deepens labor exploitation.
Several scholars have suggested that Marx never finished his planned volumes on Capital due to his recognition of unsolvable problems with his theory, in particular the so-called transformation problem of labor values and the law of the falling rate of profit. However, the ultimate culprit for Capital remaining unfinished seems to be the combination of such theoretical riddles – theories he continued to work on but never abandoned – with Marx's perfectionism and his insatiable appetite for knowledge. Marx’s perfectionism and severe self-criticism repeatedly led him to the latest scientific findings in many fields, but it also prevented the finishing of the manuscripts. This is most clearly evidenced by Marx reading frantically about the newest economic and social developments in the major capitalist countries in fields ranging from agriculture to financial panics.
Theoretical research summaries