Raskolnikov38 posted:

what government exists in a state of grace other than Vatican City

R. Mute posted:

I haven't read the second article, but the first one is laughably bad. it's just so utterly unwilling to delve beyond the surface, digging just deep enough to make the argument that china is clearly socialist but no further.

Centrist Committee posted:

epstine wasn’t a billionaire dummy

The Voice of Labor posted:

yup just your average joe prol who owns a sex island

mila kunis posted:

you're a moron

R. Mute posted:

you know what i mean. everybody going on about the post-revolutionary mix of capitalism and socialism in the economy is suddenly real shy about looking at the chinese state/ccp as anything but a stalwart of socialism, pure and unblemished

dead gay comedy forums posted:

aren't you thinking of them as abstract instead of modes of production, though?

like, mercantilism certainly doesn't have a dialectical relationship with feudalism in the abstract, but as modes of production, they worked and interacted concurrently and transformed themselves for centuries before mercantilism properly became capitalism

Ferrinus posted:

eh, i wouldn't say so. in practical terms china is basically a social democracy right now, with the unusual distinction of having drawn in most of the capital that sustains its burgeoning social programs from more advanced nations that have historically exploited it rather than weaker nations that it was able to plunder. however i think it's pretty unquestionably under the control of the cpc rather than the bourgeoisie as a class, because if it actually were the bourgeoisie calling the shots there'd be a lot of things the government simply could not do that it's doing now

Centrist Committee posted:

Ferrinus posted:

eh, i wouldn't say so. in practical terms china is basically a social democracy right now, with the unusual distinction of having drawn in most of the capital that sustains its burgeoning social programs from more advanced nations that have historically exploited it rather than weaker nations that it was able to plunder. however i think it's pretty unquestionably under the control of the cpc rather than the bourgeoisie as a class, because if it actually were the bourgeoisie calling the shots there'd be a lot of things the government simply could not do that it's doing now

mila kunis posted:

https://www.ft.com/content/1fe0559f-de6d-490e-b312-abba0181da1f


The vanishing billionaire: how Jack Ma fell foul of Xi Jinping
Alibaba founder’s dramatic rise and fall illustrates China’s wary embrace of tycoons who power economic growth

But it was what Ma said next, setting private enterprise’s interests above those of the Chinese state and challenging financial regulators, that dramatically changed the course of events. In the days that followed, the authorities summoned him to Beijing for a terse dressing-down and unveiled regulations designed to damage a pillar of Ant’s business. His speech had reverberated to the very top of the ruling Chinese Communist party, angering the autocratic Xi.

[...]

As Xi has tightened control over Chinese society, he has reinvigorated state-run companies and brought the country’s oligarchs to heel. Billionaire run-ins with the state over regulatory concerns, corruption or other perceived slights have become so frequent in recent years that a new rule has emerged: lie low. Some, such as Wang Jianlin, founder of real-estate conglomerate Wanda, have fallen silent while shrinking their businesses; others, like Wu Xiaohui of insurance conglomerate Anbang, have ended up in jail, with their empires taken over by the state.

[...]

But the relationship was fragile and China continued to favour state-owned companies with access to loans and licences. Ma saw this first-hand when a local champion in Hangzhou replicated China Pages’ business, leaving him with little choice but to sell to this big, state-backed incomer. Ultimately, he found himself powerless and left.



[...]



However, on the very same day, a hapless mid-level official at China’s business regulator decided to take aim at Ma’s domestic influence once again. When the regulator’s report suggested roughly two-thirds of the goods sold on Alibaba’s Taobao platform were counterfeit, Alibaba fired back directly at the person behind the report. “Director Liu Hongliang! You’re breaking the rules, stop being a crooked referee!” tweeted Taobao’s account on Weibo, attributing the statement to one of its merchants.

The business regulator responded with a white paper bashing Alibaba. But then Ma flew to Beijing and met with Liu’s boss, Zhang Mao. The two men agreed that Alibaba would work on stamping out counterfeits and Zhang commended the company’s efforts to safeguard consumer interests. The white paper was withdrawn and the issue melted away. Though public opinion had been largely in the tech tycoon’s corner, the sight of Ma daring to take on the country’s regulators was not to everyone’s taste. “This public challenge was not a step forward for the rule of law,” says Song, the economist. “Actually, it was a demonstration of arrogant capital secure in its backing.”



[...]



China was changing, but Ma appeared not to have realised how much. Empowered by amendments to the constitution that removed term limits on the presidency, Xi had become its most powerful leader in decades. Any form of public dissent was risky and Xi had made a crackdown on high debt levels and financial-sector risk a top priority, as officials worried that a US-style systemic financial crisis could shake the economy and even their hold on power.



[...]



Ant’s size and scale had grown by leaps and bounds since Ma had taken it from Alibaba, and regulators were just beginning to understand its vast scope when the company made public its financial details for the first time in August last year. The very details that made investors so excited — its consumer loan issuance that eclipsed every state-owned bank, its annual payment volume that surpassed China’s GDP — made regulators in Beijing wary. “Ant’s business is inherently risky, we can’t count how many meetings executives have had with officials to get us through to today,” says one employee. Ma’s next step was to prove too risky even for him.



[...]



But he took the fatal step of making the battle public. On stage, Ma challenged the financial norms of the old world, pushing for China to take its own path. “Today’s financial system must be reformed,” he lectured from the podium. “Right now our capacity for ‘control’ grows stronger and stronger, while our capacity to ‘monitor’ is obviously lacking. Innovation doesn’t fear regulation, but it does fear regulation by yesterday’s methods.” Unlike most of his speeches, Ma repeatedly looked down at his notes, suggesting his words were finely calculated. Ma’s personal office is full of former journalists from China’s official news agency Xinhua.



According to people close to the situation, some top officials in Beijing saw the episode as Ma attempting to win the public over to his side and influence policy. The Alibaba-backed news outlet Huxiu reposted an article defending Ma’s speech.



But a few weeks later a vice-chair of the party’s propaganda department gave a speech urging Chinese media to resolutely “guard against . . . the risk of capital manipulating public opinion”. Huxiu, which had also published an editorial warning against excessive punishment of China’s tech groups, was ordered to halt its operations for a month.



[...]



A large portion of the Chinese public has turned against him, eager to see the downfall of the country’s greatest celebrity capitalist. Whereas in the past he was affectionately praised as Daddy Ma or Teacher Ma, comments on Ma’s videos are now along the lines of “Proletariat of the world, come together!” Teacher Ma’s greatest lesson for the legions of Chinese entrepreneurs he’s inspired may be reminding them that the Communist party reigns supreme and that any private business, no matter how strategically important to the country’s future, will be brought to heel if it is perceived to jeopardise the party.



[...]



The country’s tech groups in particular are in for change. Alibaba and Tencent expanded mostly unchecked over the past two decades, growing to control vast swaths of the digital and even physical economy. Last weekend, authorities fined Alibaba a record $2.8bn for abusing its market dominance and ordered the company to “rectify” its behaviour, and regulators quickly followed on Monday by announcing a plan to shrink Ant’s business.



Ma’s rivals have been quick to understand which way the wind is blowing. At China’s annual legislative session last month, Tencent’s Pony Ma proposed tighter regulation of internet businesses such as his own and has had a “voluntary” meeting with antitrust authorities. JD.com called off the IPO of its finance unit and put a compliance officer in charge. Colin Huang of ecommerce juggernaut Pinduoduo exited the company he founded altogether — after giving away a large chunk of shares over the summer in what one friend said was a move designed to keep his name from topping the rich list.



As the Chinese Communist party approaches its 100th birthday this summer, a landmark event, it is cementing its control over private enterprise. The party committees that all private companies must have are being reinvigorated, with their oversight roles growing. State-owned businesses are expanding. “For the past four decades the relationship between the private sector and the Chinese Communist party has been contingent and tenuous, with undulations between control and autonomy,” says Jude Blanchette, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“We’re in another cycle of control and I expect this one to be enduring.”

quote:

The trend reflects China’s new reality. The Communist Party has greater control over all aspects of life, and Mr Xi has greater control over the party. This does not just mean it is a good idea for companies to butter him up. It means that he is in a position to reshape the economy within which they prosper or fail. What is he doing with it?

Nothing good, say critics at home and abroad. He has brought reforms that liberalised the economy to a halt and has smothered market forces, returning to a top-heavy state-dominated growth model which looks distinctly creaky. Private companies have rushed to set up party committees with an increasing say over strategy.

quote:

Yet the basic tension in the SOE sector remains unresolved. Yes, the government has put more emphasis on profitability, but that does not mean decisions get made according to commercial logic. Indeed, under Mr Xi national duty—supporting China’s rise—is more important than ever. And stricter party control is confusing lines of responsibility. An executive with a major state-owned insurance firm says that its party committee now controls all senior personnel appointments and expresses “opinions” on all investments worth more than 20% of net-asset value. Opinion is a euphemism. “It is normally the final decision. No one would go against the party secretary,” he said. “But if something goes bad, the board will be responsible.”

mila kunis posted:

not sure i agree with all of this espescially when he goes off on some weird trotskyite tangents but its an interesting/informative read

https://spectrejournal.com/why-china-isnt-capitalist-despite-the-pink-ferraris/


there’s plenty of capitalism in China today: there’s state capitalism, crony capitalism, gangster capitalism, normal capitalism—China’s got them all. China has more billionaires than the US3; many state-owned industries produce extensively for market, and the majority of the workforce are self-employed or work for private companies. Even so, it’s not a capitalist economy, at least not mainly a capitalist economy. It’s best described as a hybrid bureaucratic collectivist-capitalist economy in which the bureaucratic collectivist state sector is overwhelmingly dominant


China’s Communist Party rulers do not own their economy privately like capitalists. The state owns the bulk of the economy and CCP owns the state—collectively. The market does not organize most production in China. Market reform long ago ground to a halt in China in what Minxin Pei termed a “trapped transition.”4 In forty years of “market reform and opening” China has never missed a Five-Year Plan or failed to set an annual growth target. China remains a mostly state-owned, mostly planned economy. As MIT’s Yasheng Huang put it, “the size of the Chinese private economy, especially its indigenous component, is quite small” and mostly comprised of small businesses and self-employed workers and farmers


[...]


Of the sixty-nine companies from mainland China in the Fortune Global 500 in 2012, only seven were not SOEs [and all of these seven] companies have received significant government assistance and most count government entities among their shareholders.” In key industries, SOEs owned and controlled between 74 and 100 percent of assets. China’s major banks are 100 percent state-owned (there are hundreds of foreign-invested private investment banks but they’re restricted in where they can invest).7 The government also owns 51 percent or more of the thousands of joint-venture export-oriented industries with multinational companies from Audi to Xerox that have powered China’s rise over the last decades. The government has also bought up at a raft of foreign companies including Volvo, Syngenta, Smithfield Farms, Pirelli Tires, and Kuka Robotics, which it runs more or less as state capitalist firms, plus it owns shares in many Western companies including ten percent of Germany’s Daimler (Mercedes Benz).


[...]


Forty-two years after market reforms were introduced, the government still owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy: banking, large-scale mining and manufacturing, heavy industry, metallurgy, shipping, energy generation, petroleum and petrochemicals, heavy construction and equipment, atomic energy, aerospace, telecommunications and internet, vehicles (some in partnership with foreign companies), aircraft manufacture (in partnership with Boeing and Airbus), airlines, railways, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, military production and more


[...]


The Communist Party keeps its domestic capitalists on a short leash. Successful entrepreneurs soon find they need a state “partner,” or the government sets up its own competitors to drive them out of business, or they suffer forced buyouts.15 Worse, those whose names appear on Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest citizens or Rupert Hoogewerf’s Hunrun Rich List risk attracting unwanted government attention; they get arrested or disappear without a trace at “alarming rates.”16 In just one year, 2015, at least thirty-four senior executives of Chinese companies were arrested by the state, including the CEO of Fosun which had acquired Club Med in the same year.17 Chinese call these the sha zhu bang, “pig-killing lists.” As Xi’s anti-corruption campaign gathered force since 2013, tycoons have been taken down left and right.18 In 2015-16, China’s rich funneled more than a trillion U.S. dollars out of the country, mostly via investments in private companies including HNA, Fosun, Dalian Wanda, Anbang and others who bought up hotels (Hilton, Starwood, and others), AMC Entertainment, Legendary Entertainment, Cirque du Soleil, soccer teams and properties around the world – largely to launder their loot and park it in a country where the rule of law would protect their assets.19

Xi, anxious to stanch “hot money” outflows, fearful of government losses on state loans to private companies and determined to prevent the rise of an overmighty class of wealthy capitalists, took the fight to them


[...]


He went after the so-called “grey rhinos” whose highly leveraged companies and “irrational” foreign investments threatened financial stability. CEOs were charged with economic crimes, locked up, their assets and companies seized.21 In June 2017 he took down Anbang’s CEO Wu Xiaohui, the car insurer who married a granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping. Wu got 18 years in prison. His company was nationalized and the state is unloading his properties. In July, Wang Jianlin (Dalian Wanda), the bloviating property developer, entertainment mogul, and Hunrun-list richest man in China who once vowed to “defeat Disney,” was ordered to sell off his theme parks and hotels to pay back state banks. Wang Shi, founder of China Vanke, the nation’s biggest builder/developer, though not charged with any crimes, was forced out and his company taken over by state-owned companies in 2017. In March 2018, Chen Feng, CEO of HNA (an aviation-to-financial services conglomerate based in Hainan), biggest of the big spenders who had amassed trophy assets across six continents taking a 10% share in Deutsche Bank, 25% of Hilton Hotels, tens of billions in Manhattan mansions and buildings, Swiss companies, etc., was ordered him to sell off real estate and other assets “that fall outside Beijing’s policy agenda.” Just this week it was reported that Xiao Jianhua’s multibillion dollar empire had been seized and was being dismantled by the state. Xiao, once a trusted financier to the ruling elite including Xi Jinping’s own family, was kidnapped from a Hong Kong luxury hotel in 2017 never to be heard from since.22 And so it goes. As they say in China “the state advances, the privates retreat” (guo jin min tui).


[...]


, Xi has decapitated China’s aspirant national bourgeoisie, nationalized their companies, demoralized the private sector, his intended aim.23 Xi is a nationalist and neo-Maoist. He’s hostile to capitalists and he doesn’t want government capital, or even private capital, wasted on trifles or funneled out of the country. He wants it concentrated on state industrial policy priorities. Besides, in his push to end poverty in China, bling-encrusted billionaires are embarrassments to his neo-Maoist social leveling.


[...]


Deng abandoned Mao’s autarky, introduced market reforms and threw open the economy to Western investment. But from the start he was crystal clear that reform did not mean counter-revolution. There would be no privatization, no restoration of capitalism. In the 1980s-90s, Deng and his comrades were shocked and horrified by Gorbachev’s privatizations that precipitated the collapse of the CPSU and they determined to avoid that error.


[...]


There is no end of “capitalist things” in China today. But there has been no wholesale privatization of state assets to oligarchs as in Russia.


[...]


Yet China’s state-owned “corporations” are not profit maximizers per se like, say, Singapore’s state-capitalist Temasek and similar sovereign wealth funds. They’re happy to make money when they can. But they’re not obliged to. Many have been effectively bankrupt for decades but the government won’t let its “zombies” fail so rolls over their loans in perpetuity. In forty years of market reform, not a single significant SOE has been permitted to go bankrupt. Their existence and purpose is dictated by the Plan not the market. Thus when the head of a major state-owned conglomerate was removed for embracing market economics a bit too enthusiastically, a Beijing University expert on China’s state enterprises remarked:

There’s a system in place, not just one person. The party’s appointee draws his position from patronage… and the task is to engage with state leaders and safeguard government assets, not to maximize profits


[...]


Lastly, the market has not replaced planning in the state controlled economy either. Back in the 1990s Western market-enthusiast China experts predicted that China was “growing out of the plan.”32 But this never happened. While leaders hinted that someday they would “let the market allocate resources” they never got around to this, beyond the margins. And they could not do so because to overtake the US, they need to build those state-owned “champions”; so they need to steer resources into developing key industries and plan the overall economy. Thus, as the annual U.S. Congressional Economic and Security Review reported in November 2015:

Soviet-style, top-down planning remains a hallmark of China’s economic and political system. Five-Year Plans (FYP) continue to guide China’s economic policy by outlining the Chinese government’s priorities and signaling to central and local officials and industries the areas for future government support. The FYPs are followed by a cascade of sub-plans at the national, ministerial, provincial, and county level that attempt to translate these priorities into region- or industry-specific targets, policy strategies, and evaluation mechanisms

The Voice of Labor posted:

man, if only jeff had contacted out the work of recruiting and exploiting teen girls he could've transcended beyond his petite bourgeois status and he would still be with us today

namesake posted:

You're right and that's why your article concludes there's a bureaucratic collectivist thing going on. As a system it has a real degree of autonomy from serving capital but is not dogmatically hostile to it. Bourgeois states have also shown the ability to discipline capital on occasion (not recently but it happens) but never for so long, similarly the workers under China has seen extreme material gains on one hand but extreme neglect on the other. It's not an easy fit into the usual dichotomy as it is without historical parallel.

mila kunis posted:

i wouldn't call it a social democracy because they don't have most of the welfare state elements in place that the post ww2 keynesian states did, its somewhere on a line between that and the USSR but its own unique thing. china isn't a socialist state - it had to make concessions to recover from the wreckage of the GPCR and hijacking the global capitalist apparatus desire to shed themselves of the burden of paying their own labour worked. but it's not a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie either, oligarchs do not call the shots and that's a huge deal, because it represents the last credible threat left.

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/08/15/xi-jinping-is-trying-to-remake-the-chinese-economy

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Epstein was killed because he couldn't run an elite pedophile blackmail ring without telling on himself and all of his associates. Meanwhile Jack Ma gets knocked down a few pegs and forced to go through re-education because he was agitating for deregulation of Chinese financial markets with cheap credit for speculators. Chinese disciplining of its capitalist class has a clear intent of maintaining party control of Chinese political economy, whereas Epstein was killed for purely cynical reasons of espionage.

The American equivalents of Jack Ma or Guo Wengui aren't just able to do whatever they want, they run the government.

mila kunis posted:

i sense a great disturbance in the force...the sound of a few dozen online ultraleftists sarcastically crying out "socialism is when the government own things...state capitalism much??" while the CCP continues to take china forward

The Voice of Labor posted:

I would contend that in both cases it was a matter of maintaining a facade. the facade of legitimacy of the rich and powerful not being a bunch of kid fuckers on one hand and the facade of legitimacy granted by having an actual real productive economy that makes stuff and doesn't rise and fall based on speculative manipulation and money printers on the other. the later leans towards communism, sure, but I'm not convinced that the motivation behind it has anything to do with the interests of the people. I think it mostly comes down maintaining party legitimacy, regardless of what party position actually is. outcome and intention are usually looked at separately because outcome can be accidental, there's a point where moral luck is bound to run out

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

If China were dogmatically hostile to capital, then it would be isolated as a pariah state and cut off from world markets. For China to pursue development in the absence of a 2nd World means navigating the existing hegemony of capital.

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

Really feel like yall would be happier if the revolution stayed 'pure' and then failed tbh. There's a reason everyone likes Allende and it's because he didn't live to actually rule.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

https://twitter.com/AmbZhengZeguang/status/1408786709324648448?s=20

https://twitter.com/YXiusheng/status/1408236401536258048?s=20

namesake posted:

The ruling party aren't ashamed to call themselves communists because they get to decide what communism means. You're free to take them at their word but there's nothing stopping you applying a bit of analysis to the situation either.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

https://twitter.com/YXiusheng/status/1408236401536258048?s=20

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

You are the one who's trying to gatekeep communism with all this undialectical nonsense where we argue over a strict definition of what socialism is.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I wish we could have anti-revisionist conversations about communist countries other than China. How about Cuba or Nepal? It's like eating breakfast cereal every day for every meal.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

If China were dogmatically hostile to capital, then it would be isolated as a pariah state and cut off from world markets. For China to pursue development in the absence of a 2nd World means navigating the existing hegemony of capital.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Ok, man. My eyebrows are raised. I'm giving Xi Jinping the Dreamworks face. Still not sure how this proves China isn't socialist, except by going off a dogmatic and inflexible definition of it. Something that would directly contradict the social dynamic of socialism. It's their prerogative to determine how to build socialism within conditions as they actually exist. All of this hemming and hawing over whether China is truly socialist for real means nothing.

namesake posted:

It's hardly strict when we see all kinds of collective production being replaced by wage labour causing massive inequalities in society as the new business owners literally profit from their employees work. Seems like the sort of thing socialists should raise eyebrows at.

I don't know anything about Nepal but Cuba seems to be adaptive to its circumstances like isolation from world markets in a way that's much easier to say is closer to socialist.

gradenko_2000 posted:

China status: really cool, actually

https://twitter.com/laowhy86/status/1408478187382788100?s=19

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

So is the assumption here that the party secretly wants to deregulate financial markets and is only pretending to care about Jack Ma for appearances? This is a bunch of nonsense.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I wish we could have anti-revisionist conversations about communist countries other than China. How about Cuba or Nepal? It's like eating breakfast cereal every day for every meal.