Yossarian-22 posted:

For the record, I had a Marxist economics professor who has written a ton about this very subject. He has also been to China and both of the Koreas, has contacts in the labor movement, and even given talks in Cuba about how the Chinese economic system isn't worth emulating

His newest article on China is here. https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/whats-driving-trade-tensions-between-the-us-and-china/amp/

"For its part, the Chinese government is trying to use its large state-owned enterprises, control over finance, investment restrictions on foreign investment, licensing powers, government procurement policies, and trade restrictions to build its own strong companies. These are reasonable development policies, ones very similar to those used by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It is short-sided for progressives in the US to criticize the use of such policies. In fact, we should be advocating the development of similar state capacities in the US in order to rebuild and revitalize the US economy.

That doesn’t mean we should uncritically embrace the Chinese position. The reason is that the Chinese government is using these policies to promote highly exploitative Chinese companies that are themselves increasingly export oriented and globalizing. In other words, the Chinese state seeks only a rebalancing of power and wealth for the benefit of its own elites, not a progressive restructuring of its own or the global economy."

quote:

China rejects Singapore model for state-owned enterprise reform
in Shanghai

Chinese policymakers have largely rejected plans to depoliticise state-owned enterprises by governing them through financial holding companies that aim solely to maximise returns.

A forthcoming plan to reform China’s SOEs is the latest sign that efforts to boost efficiency and profitability are taking a back seat to ensuring that state groups support government macroeconomic and industrial policies.

Use of holding companies, a model based on that of Singaporean wealth fund Temasek, had been seen as a middle way between the privatisation of SOEs and the current system, in which top managers are approved by the Communist party and often put politics ahead of commercial considerations.

But the new plan from the finance ministry and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission will cap the number of Temasek-style holding companies at two or three, compared with more than 80 central government-owned SOEs, the official Shanghai Securities News reported on Thursday.

[capitalist propaganda omitted]

The gap reflects the government’s use of SOEs to advance policy goals. [capitalist propaganda omitted]


In addition, big acquisitions such as ChemChina’s $44bn purchase of Syngenta were used to acquire advanced technology, even though the deals might not be profitable for the acquirer.

Singapore’s Temasek holds stakes in domestic and foreign companies and is known for making decisions based purely on financial considerations.

In February 2016 Sasac launched a pilot programme in which two SOEs were chosen to operate as Temasek-style “capital operation companies”. The two were China Chengtong Holdings, a paper-products conglomerate, and China Reform Holdings, a platform established in 2010 to invest in a range of industries.

Local governments in Shanghai and Chongqing have also established capital operation companies. In 2015 Shandong province took a similar step by transferring shares in provincial SOEs to the social security fund, which focuses purely on maximising investment return.

Related efforts to change management incentives include a pilot programme to let boards of directors, rather than the Communist party and Sasac, appoint senior management.

The soon-to-be-released plan from the finance ministry and the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (Sasac) builds on the broad outline for SOE reform approved in 2015.

But Sasac has now cooled on the Temasek model. According to Caixin, a respected financial news website, Sasac has decided not to expand the existing pilot programme for capital operation companies.

The agency feels that promoting the Temasek model would reinforce an undesirable trend in China’s economy towards “fake” investment that generates profits by shifting money between existing assets without generating new economic activity, Caixin reported.

Sheer size also remains a top priority for SOE reform. The plan calls for reducing the number of central SOEs to less than 90 from the current 101. Sasac controlled 189 central SOEs when the agency was created in 2003, but successive rounds of mergers have steadily reduced that number.

KaptainKrunk posted:

the ccp is way more sensitive to mass opinion and increasingly more effective at policymaking than its american counterparts; this is hard to stomach for people raised on absolute us exceptionalism

R. Guyovich posted:

seos aren't my measure, and the existence of markets doesn't make an economy capitalist. does the marketization of certain industries in cuba suddenly make their economy capitalist?

you can take "agrarian" out of the earlier quote if you want. the rural population still amounts to nearly half the total and rural employment is also about half. it's not nothing. you're insistent that markets of any kind=capitalism, the same kind of error as state ownership=socialism. the fact you say "these other things don't matter" when they do matter very much tells me how serious you actually are

Yandat posted:

it would have been cool as heck if Germany had had a successful revolution

Thug Lessons posted:

I never said they don't matter. You're just clearly backfilling. You work backward, listing cherry-picked aspects of Chinese society and can make a coherent if specious case that whatever economic intervention the Chinese state happens to be engaging are evidence of socialism. You act as though you have a nuanced understanding of the concept that we're too ignorant to get, while in fact opportunistically crafting it as you go along to reach the conclusion that you want.

Yandat posted:

I don't think anyone's arguing that China doesn't have a sort of Market Socialism in a sense, the argument is that it's soon to be the largest economy in the world and might be developing towards a goal of socialism, depending on how you feel about the CCP.

I think everything rests on the intentions of a few dozen people and doing a high wire act towards communism is dangerous as hell. Xi can have the best of intentions, but if his plane crashes who is around to push a socialist vision.

Top City Homo posted:

Having an NEP like policy doesn't make the state capitalist.

If the CCP has an autocoup at some point than yes but until there is an actual counter-revolution within the party or outside its a socialist state

Thug Lessons posted:

This isn't the loving NEP. They're the largest advanced economy on the planet. Again, a better comparison would be Norway, but way bigger and still mired in the so-called development process.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I don't see what the size of the Chinese economy has to do with comparisons to NEP.

Yossarian-22 posted:

On that note, it kind of bugs me to hear advocates of various state socialisms use pithy arguments about standard of living increases under Stalin and Mao, as though we should take similar arguments about capitalism's standard of living increases by Stephen Pinker et al as similar gospel.

Every single post-WWII economy that boomed did so with some combination of capitalist and state enterprise. The different gradations, geopolitical impacts, and ideological variations thereof do not a "socialist state" make. The one opportunity for global socialist revolution came and went with the failure of the USSR's revolution to spread to Western Europe, and that's made clear by the eagerness of Western states and businessmen (Kochs included) to do business with Stalin

Trotsky may have been a bit of a demagogic nutjob, but he was right about the necessity for international revolution. It's too bad that he would prove to be better than the newspaper sellers who would try to follow his example

R. Guyovich posted:

china isn't an advanced economy yet. this is basic stuff.

Thug Lessons posted:

I never said they don't matter. You're just clearly backfilling. You work backward, listing cherry-picked aspects of Chinese society and can make a coherent if specious case that whatever economic intervention the Chinese state happens to be engaging are evidence of socialism. You act as though you have a nuanced understanding of the concept that we're too ignorant to get, while in fact opportunistically crafting it as you go along to reach the conclusion that you want.

Thug Lessons posted:

They are an advanced country. They're a massive industrial power, in fact the greatest industrial power ever to exist. What you mean is that they're a "middle-income country", i.e. not as rich as the US and Europe, which is unsurprisingly a definition that owes far more to contemporary bourgeois economics than materialism.

R. Guyovich posted:

"aspects" of chinese society that are universal and govern the most important sectors of it? just because you want to downplay their importance doesn't make them window dressing. i could accuse you of the same thing; ignoring those elements of the chinese economy that are inconvenient to your capitalist restoration hypothesis. this kind of finger-pointing gets us nowhere.


no, i meant precisely what i said. their industries are not as advanced as their american and european counterparts.

Thug Lessons posted:

This isn't the loving NEP. They're the largest advanced economy on the planet. Again, a better comparison would be Norway, but way bigger and still mired in the so-called development process.

Top City Homo posted:

What is your benchmark for socialist economic policies? So far you've compared China to the dirigisme policies of fascist South Korea and the militarist Japanese Empire and then to a social democratic country like Norway.

Lay out the framework for us to figure out your argument.

KaptainKrunk posted:

the ccp is way more sensitive to mass opinion and increasingly more effective at policymaking than its american counterparts; this is hard to stomach for people raised on absolute us exceptionalism

Thug Lessons posted:

My argument is that your defenses of Chinese socialism are obviously opportunistic and self-serving. Whatever China's doing must be socialist. I'm not going to have a conversation about socialism with you where I'm forced to lay out some theory of socialism so you can poke holes into it.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

Lol

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

Lol

Thug Lessons posted:

Karl Barks posted:

Home ex is like fishmech with Chinese characteristics so I don't know why you waste your time jousting with him

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Posing with the lesbian Nazi is peak liberalism tbf.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://twitter.com/ajitbirsingh/status/990347167029190662

Thug Lessons posted:

This isn't the loving NEP. They're the largest advanced economy on the planet. Again, a better comparison would be Norway, but way bigger and still mired in the so-called development process.

Typo posted:

NEP was actually a pretty good analogue for China in the early reform period when agriculture -was- actually the first part of the economy to be "liberalized"

Typo posted:

alice is the weirdest far right politician ever, her party virulently opposes immigrants and gay marriage and globalism but she's living in switzerland with her sri lankan girlfriend