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China is cutting its tech giants down to size. Should the west learn from this?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2021
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I will never understand why people think the government of China is functionally any different from other governments and such mafia-like structures around the world.
That's precisely because you don't understand how the government in China functions.
China is a state governed by the Communist party where Marxism-Leninism is the official state ideology. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. The party is a grassroots driven organization, and members of the party directly engage in their communities.
Claiming that China is not functionally different from other governments shows further ignorance on your part. One simple test to consider is that China doesn't suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. One of the inherent contradictions within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.
And a related point is that quality of life in China continues to steadily improve and the government is actively working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
Chinese government is consistently directing labor towards public good. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it's the most populous country on the planet and social mobility is also quite high.
And then there's the handling of the pandemic where it's all but eliminated in China with life getting back to normal and the economy growing, while we anxiously look at our fourth wave where our government left people out to dry to protect business interests.
Finally, the government has recently passed massive regulation on big business and released a a five-year blueprint calling for greater regulation of vast parts of the economy. The government has also openly stated that the era of capital expansion is over and the interests of the majority outweigh the interests of shareholders.
this is the most far-left thing I have ever seen
This is exactly like the mafia has worked in southern Italy and many of the mafia leaders have rightly pointed out that the Italian government is just a competing mafia organization.
Your text really shows how you fundamentally don't understand how human societies work.
Today's China is 100% state-capitalist, just slightly different in form the version found in the west. Improving the wealth of its citizen has always been an effective strategy of early capitalist expansion and China is no different in that regard (but you need to look back a hundred years or so to see the same in the west). Plus many of the advantages you point out are solely due to being an export oriented economy and thus externalizing the costs to other countries and the environment.
China is not capitalist. Its a mixed economy with a predominating state-planned sector with 5 year plans.
Cut & paste propaganda, nice /s
It's pretty clear that I understand how human societies work a lot better than you do since I at least recognize the basic fact that human societies have organized themselves hierarchically throughout history. This simple fact appears to elude anarchists. Hierarchical organization continues to prevail over federalist approaches time and again. Yet, anarchists keep selling their dogma after over a century of failure to achieve any meaningful results while rejecting sane approaches that have been shown to work.
I also love how you just keep repeating your dogma like a broken record here in face of evidence to the contrary. You claim that China is in early stages of capitalist expansion when China is an advanced economy that rivals any capitalist one already. It's also not clear how this capitalist expansion is working given that China has grand total of four military bases abroad. Last I checked capitalism expands through colonialism and military subjugation for colonized states.
The advantages I point out are a direct result of the government applying productive forces towards common benefit. There are plenty of export oriented economies where quality of life isn't improving in the slightest and no infrastructure is being built.
Leftists rejecting practical ways to improve lives for people in favor of utopian ideas is precisely why the west is the hellscape that it is today.
During most of humanity's 250000 years of existence there was no large scale hierarchy at all, and even during the 5000 or so years of written history most of humanity has lived outside of state hierarchical constructs. I really wish you Marxists-Leninists would finally move on from a long shown to be historically inaccurate description of human society based on some book written more than a hundred years ago. Frankly it reminds me of people referring to the Bible for historical "facts".
And you yourself have cited a link of the CCP recognizing they they are slowly moving away from the early capitalist expansion phase (in the last 10 years or so) and as a result wealth inequality and lack of social mobility have strongly increased in China. Oh and with expansion I mean economic expansion, not imperialists one through military bases... but beside that... travel to some places in Africa and you will very much see colonialist like expansion of Chinese companies, usually not very well liked by the local people there (other than the corrupt leaders that benefit from it).
That's just an artifact of there not being that many humans around. Yet, hierarchies certainly existed and they even predate humans. Apes and monkeys also organize hierarchically, and seeing how we evolved from same origins this behavior is hardwired in humans through natural selection. And the reason is that it was successful behavior that outcompeted other behaviors. Anarchist dogma is both reductive and ahistorical.
China is indeed moving away from its capitalist phase, which contradicts your whole thesis here.
I see you redefine imperialism as having economic relationships between countries. Why don't we look at some actual data on how that's working out:
Chinese investment in Africa has had ‘significant and persistently positive’ long-term effects, this study shows positive effects of Chinese debt relief in Africa, and no dept trap resulted from China's investment in Sri Lankan port.
You continue to parrot counterfactual nonsense while accusing others of "referring to the bible for historical facts". Sounds like somebody needs to take a long hard look in the mirror here.
lol, the old long dis-proven monkey hierarchy story written by colonial explorers in the 19th century based on very superficial observations of chimpanzee only. Most apes do not live in hierarchical structures and even for chimpanzees it is less clear cut. The entire story is about as accurate as 19th century colonial explorers describing other societies as backwards and primitive.
If you believe that false monkey story, maybe it is time to question some of the other evidently false historical believes you seem to have?
This is the height of comedy. You at least acknowledge that apes and chimps organize hierarchically, and these are our closest ancestors last I checked. Humans throughout history have also organized hierarchically. This is even the case for small tribes.
If you can't even acknowledge this simple fact what else is there to tell you really. The fact that you glibly jumped on the whole false monkey story instead of addressing this fact shows just how intellectually dishonest you are.
Humans (and apes) throughout history have usually not organized hierarchically. It can happen for short amounts of times during specific events and there it also makes sense to do so.
The constant hierarchical structure of nation-states is historically speaking an extremely new invention and largely an illusion at that.
That's just a false statement. Pretty much all human societies have organized themselves in tribes with leaders and hierarchies. The only thing that changed over time is that humans started living in increasingly larger groups necessitating increasingly complex organization. Claiming that hierarchical structure starts with nation-states is utterly ahistorical.
You failed to get my point. All current and historical anthropologic research suggests that what you describe as "tribes" are very fluent structures with hierarchies often only of symbolic nature, i.e. having one or several well respected figure-head leaders to take over command in times of emergency only.
The idea of a constant hierarchical structure that is constantly in effect and which has an effect on the majority of the population (a opposed to only effecting a tiny cast of nobles or other such groups) is a rather new development coinciding with the emergence of modern nation states after the French revolution.
I got your point, and I fundamentally disagree with it. The difference is one of scale. We have nearly 8 billion humans on the planet right now, and hierarchies that every large society developed are a result of managing this complexity.
Furthermore, as the French revolution clearly shows, organization is needed in order to effectively resist capitalist hierarchies. Anarchists continue to fail learning the lessons of why the commune failed.
Again, you're preaching utopia without providing any tangible path towards achieving it. Meanwhile, MLs have liberated countless people from the hell that is capitalism. Much like religious preachers, anarchists preach utopian ideals to keep the masses from rising up and taking effective action.
The more scale you have the less do centrally organized hierarchical systems work... as in the case of those tribes, what you perceive as leadership is mostly figure-heads only.
China is actually a good case in point, as when the nation-state tried to expand its reach to more and more formerly peasant farmers, it had to do so by adopting non-hierarchical market based principles that ultimately turned China into the state-capitalist system we see today.
Anarchists do have plenty of practical approaches, but they did in fact learn their lessons from MLs that have claimed to have liberated countless people from feudal oppression, just to in turn to make them suffer from authoritarian state hell, or as the most recent development turned their inefficient authoritarian state systems into state-capitalist "wonderlands" as China did (history still to be written how that will turn out...).
If anything MLs act like religious preachers claiming that if people just suffer through this current bad situation they will surely reach communist heaven soon. Anarchists follow no such false prophets :p
Once again, you're letting your dogmatism get ahead of you. Central organization has consistently outcompeted federalized systems. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that pretty much all large companies are centrally organized. There is even a great example of Sears trying to compete with Walmart using a federalist approach which eventually drove it out of business.
Meanwhile, China shows how central planning allows dealing with pandemics effectively, how it results in great infrastructure such as cross country high speed rail, and how central planning allows actually tacking emissions instead of just talking about it. Market based principles you talk about in China are very much subordinate to the central plan.
Anarchists do not have practical approaches, if they did we would've seen them in action by now. It's been over a 100 years and all anarchists have done was to continue propping up the existing capitalist hellscape that whole time.
Anarchists share a lot with libertarians ideologically. It's largely a privileged class of people who largely don't care about actual suffering that's happening to people in their countries, and are more focused on high level concepts like freedom of speech because their own needs are already met. The "authoritarian state hell" you talk about lifted over a billion people out of abject poverty, but you can't be bothered with such things because you don't care about alleviating real suffering. Anarchism is fundamentally rooted in western individualism and selfishness. Anarchists can't imagine themselves as part of a collective whole and working towards common benefit. That's what anarchists refer to as authoritarian state hell.
It did not! Only after turning to market-based approaches did that happen (and thus mostly abolishing the authoritarian state hell), before that it made the suffering much worse by starting a civil war and afterwards doing their "great leap" causing millions to starve to death. You can not glance over facts like that, and doing so is highly dishonest.
That's just more nonsense since none of the core industry was ever privatized or left up to the markets. You are as ignorant as you're bullheaded.
Also, imagine being so historically illiterate to claim that communists in China made "suffering much worse. This is presumably what you're referring to.
And what else is there to tell you if you can't even understand how Walmart example is relevant to the discussion of whether centralization is effective or not.
Where is the difference?
It is something mostly unrelated.
Capitalist/economic expansion is about economic growth and turning social relations into economic transactions, as typical for emerging capitalist societies. It can also include geographic expansion, but that it not the primary meaning.