Very glad that I've seen this community. I am a Chinese student who's currently doing research on Marxism. Sorry, my Japanese is so bad that I cannot even write any of them.
Anyway, you guys are basically Marxist researchers, right? OK, how do you guys think about the ongoing Socialistic trend on so called "Chinese Communism"? Pretty much everyone right now thinks that actually, China is taking a Capitalism approach. Correct me if I am wrong. My question is, if the Communism is really that perfect, then why China has in fact dropped the original route, and has already embarked upon pursuing a totally opposite route, which is Capitalism?
Despite the fact that China is still adopting the socialistic political system, the lethal part, which is the economic policy, has already been replaced by those Capitalism based policies. Please use the Marxism theory to answer my questions.
Many thanks, everybody has a nice dream tonight. Oh year!
Thanks for your comment.
This community is not to study Marxism but original Marx in the context of 19th century. But I'd like to say my opinion.
>“Despite the fact that China is still adopting the socialistic political system, the lethal part, which is the economic policy, has already been replaced by those Capitalism based policies. Please use the Marxism theory to answer my questions.”
I guess Marx(or Engels?) was thinking the Capitalism has its limit to live. And he is sure that capitalism must change into another system.
But ,in fact, we can see the capitalism is living now and it is increasing more and more than Marx thought once.
So recently, I doubt Marx's thory can explain present Capitalism. He wasn't able to complete his theory and “Das Kapital”is unfinished.
Of Course, China adopting the socialistic political system.
I guess Marxism was right in the 19th century and the comtext. But did the capitalism change so differently apart from Marx?
I don't think I have enough intelligence to answer your question.
This comment is just my thinking.
Neverthless, I don't think my questions have been well answered. I would like to hear about what you guys think about the current moving of China's social policies, from both political and economic respective.
And, further, someone was worried about the current status of China's dictatorship, but in fact, it went quite well. People seem to be quite satisfied with their current living. Recently, the overall salary level in China has increased by around 20% in spite of slight inflationary impact on the currency. This, has in turn, stimulated the boom of the comsumption level in the Chinese market to some degree as well.
Hence, it seems that dictatorship makes some sense here, doesn't it?
Again, any thoughts from you guys will be highly appreciated.
The question could be better rephrased as a general theoretical problem in the following form: Why has the last major (I use major to exclude North Korea, Cuba, Chavez' oil-based socialism in Venezuela, etc.) self-branded "communist" power adopted an essentially capitalist market?
This, of course, echoes a more basic crisis in Marxism since the fall of the Wall, namely: whither communism? Since then, there have been several answers. From the perspective of American academic work, most of these center around factors external to economic production missed by Marx himself: Benedict Anderson's theory of the "nation,"; the move to "culture" by the New Left; theories of "post-industrial society" where the mode of production is based on a new type of knowledge capital different from Marx's theorization of abstract, alienable labor.
Let me answer instead, however, by following Yasui-san's injunction that we stick close to the works of Marx himself.
Noburin-san mentioned in his comment that Das Kapital itself remains unfinished; my suspicion is that a more feasible answer lies nowhere in Das Kapital itself, but within the pluralist history that Marx lays out in his Grundrisse (literally, notebooks, or a set of incomplete notes that served as a prior "draft" to Kapital).
Unlike Kapital, which proposes a linear model of historical evolution, the Grundrisse describes (in the section on "Pre-Capitalist Formations" -- this has been translated into English by the British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm) at least four distinct economic formations from which capitalism could potentially emerge -- the Classical (Western antiquity, i.e. Greece and Rome); the Slavic (Eastern Europe and Russia); the Germanic; and the Asiatic. The Germanic, which is decentralized at first, is most conducive to the development of private property, and thus an early forerunner of modern capitalism. On the other hand, the Asiatic, according to Marx, should be the last to develop capitalism, if it does at all.
Yet what occurred in mid-twentieth-century China was basically a historical "leap" into state socialism that more or less bypassed any developed form of capitalism. Thus it seems possible to me that China is only now actually "realizing" its historical trajectory, and moving into a capitalist phase (which then may or may not, ultimately, produce communism).
On a side note, this issue of a historical "leap" is also a significant issue in trying to analyze the capitulation of the former U.S.S.R. One of the great ironies of the 20th century (something that perhaps made Marx roll over in his grave) was the fact that of the two major communist nations, NEITHER entered the kind of advanced capitalist state of dialectical self-negation that Marx describes in Kapital -- in fact, both remained predominantly agrarian, quasi-feudal societies up until the eve of their conversion to communism.
そうですね。
「あのような強力で中央集権的な権力がないと、まとまりようがない」とおっしゃいましたが、バクーニンのマルクスに対する批判も似たような分析ではないかと思っています。それが故にいわゆる国家社会主義というのが生じるということですね。バクーニンの「Marx, the Bismarck of Socialism」という論文に出てくるのですが、今のところは英訳のタイトルしか分かりませんから、また日本語の参考を探してDolphy Lindseyさんにお伝えします。