The
Arab Spring and its downturn is sometimes compared with the
“revolution” and its “defeat” on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
If a comparison can be made, then I would insist that the review of a
participant of “Tiananmen 1998” and his “conscientisation”
should be studied, so an similar historical materialist analysis
could be made of the Arab Spring. I am reffering to the book “The
Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy” by
MINQI LI (to read and to download on
http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf)
 |
| to read and to download on http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf |
Some
interesting parts out “Preface My 1989”... (subtitles are mine)
From”neoliberal
democrat” to revolutionary Marxist
I
belong to the “1989 generation.” But unlike the rest of the 1989
generation, I made the unusual intellectual and political trajectory
from the Right to the Left, and from being a neoliberal “democrat”
to a revolutionary Marxist. I was a student at the Economic
Management Department of Beijing University during the period
1987–90. This department has now become the Guanghua Economic
Management School, a leading Chinese neoliberal think tank advocating
full-scale market liberalization and privatization. At Beijing
University, we were taught standard neoclassical microeconomics and
macroeconomics, and what later I learned was termed “Chicago
School” economics—that is, the theory that only a free market
economy with clarified private property rights and “small
government” can solve all economic and social problems rationally
and efficiently.
We
were convinced that the socialist economy was unjust, oppressive, and
inefficient. It rewarded a layer of privileged, lazy workers in the
state sector and “punished” (or at least undercompensated)
capable and smart people such as entrepreneurs and intellectuals, who
we considered to be the cream of society. Thus,
for
China to have any chance to catch up with the West, to be “rich and
powerful,” it had to follow the free market capitalist model.
State-owned
enterprises were by nature inefficient and should all be privatized.
State-sector workers should be forced to participate in market
competition and those who were incapable, too lazy, or too stupid,
should just be abandoned.
The
1980s was a decade of political and intellectual excitement in China.
Despite some half-hearted official restrictions, large sections of
the Chinese intelligentsia were politically active and were able to
push for successive waves of the so-called “emancipation of ideas”
(jiefang sixiang). The intellectual critique of the already existing
Chinese socialism at first took place largely within a Marxist
discourse. Dissident intellectuals called for more democracy without
questioning the legitimacy of the Chinese Revolution or the economic
institutions of socialism.
After
1985, however, economic reform moved increasingly in the direction of
the free market. Corruption increased and many among the bureaucratic
elites became the earliest big capitalists. Meanwhile, among the
intellectuals, there was a sharp turn to the right. The earlier,
Maoist phase of Chinese socialism was increasingly seen as a period
of political oppression and economic failure. Chinese socialism was
supposed to have “failed,” as it lost the economic growth race to
places such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Many
regarded Mao Zedong himself as an ignorant, backward Chinese peasant
who turned into a cruel, power-hungry despot who had been responsible
for the killing of tens of millions. (This perception of Mao is by no
means a new one, we knew it back in the 1980s.)1
The
“neoliberal” intellectuals were in favour of Zhao Ziyang ....and
Deng Xiaoping
The
politically active intellectuals no longer borrowed discourse from
Marxism. Instead, western classical liberalism and neoliberal
economics, as represented by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, had
become the new, fashionable ideology. Liberal intellectuals were all
in favor of privatization and the free market. But they disagreed
among themselves regarding the political strategy of “reform”
(that is, the transition to capitalism).
Some
continued to favor a call for “democracy.” Others had moved
further to the Right by advocating neo-authoritarianism, the kind of
authoritarian capitalism that existed in South Korea, Taiwan, and
Singapore, which denied the working class democratic rights but
provided protection of the property right (or “liberty”). Many
saw provided protection of the property right (or “liberty”).
Many saw Zhao Ziyang, then the general secretary of the Chinese
Communist Party, as the one who could carry out such an “enlightened
despotism.” Such were the ideological conditions in China before
the emergence of the 1989 “democratic movement.”
In
1988, I was already active in the campus student dissident
activities, and in early 1989, restiveness grew on university
campuses.
The
death of Hu Yaobang (the former “reformist” general secretary of
the Party) was taken as an excuse by the students to initiate a
series of political demonstrations. At that time, there was a degree
of genuine desire on the part of ordinary students for some form of
democracy; there were still many students attending Beijing’s top
universities who came from workers’ and peasants’ backgrounds.
Thus,
there was pressure from below to push the movement in a more radical
direction. The liberal intellectuals were in favor of the
capitalist-oriented “reform.” To accomplish this, they were
generally inclined to rely upon an alliance with the “reformist”
wing of the Party which was led by Zhao Ziyang. But the liberals also
hoped to win over the support of Deng Xiaoping, the de facto leader
of the Party. The liberals initially attempted to contain the student
demonstrations, but without
success.
While the student leaders were ideologically influenced by the
liberal intellectuals, they were politically inexperienced and also
very
much driven by their personal political ambitions.2
The
Chinese workers, considered “passive”, “obedient” and
“ingnorant” by the students.....supported the rebelling students
As
the student demonstrations grew, workers in Beijing began to pour
onto the streets in support of the students, who were, of course,
delighted. However, being an economics student, I could not help
experiencing a deep sense of irony. On the one hand, these workers
were the people that we considered to be passive, obedient, ignorant,
lazy, and stupid. Yet now they were coming out to support us. On the
other hand, just weeks before, we were enthusiastically advocating
“reform” programs that would shut down all state factories and
leave the workers unemployed. I asked myself: do these workers really
know who they are supporting?
Unfortunately,
the workers did not really know. In the 1980s, in terms of material
living standards, the Chinese working class remained relatively
well-off. There were nevertheless growing resentments on the part of
the workers as the program of economic reform took a capitalist turn.
Managers were given increasing power to impose capitalist-style labor
disciplines (such as Taylorist “scientific management”) on the
workers. The reintroduction of “material incentives” had paved
the way for growing income inequality and managerial corruption.
However,
after the failure of the Maoist Revolution, the Chinese working class
was politically disarmed. The official television programs,
newspapers, and magazines now positively portrayed a materially
prosperous western capitalism and highly dynamic East Asian
capitalist “dragons.” Only China and other socialist states
appeared to have lagged behind. Given the collaboration of official
media and the liberal intellectuals (and certainly aided by
mainstream western academia and media), it should not be too
surprising that many among the Chinese workers would accept the
mainstream perception of capitalism naively and uncritically. The
dominant image of capitalism had turned from one of sweatshop
super-exploitation into one synonymous of democracy, high wages and
welfare benefits, as well as the union protection of workers’
rights. It was not until the 1990s that the Chinese working class
would again learn from their own experience what capitalism was to
mean in real life.
While
many Chinese workers might be ready to accept capitalism in the
abstract from its depiction on the television, in reality they
certainly understood where their material interests lay. They
cherished their “iron rice bowls” (that is, lifetime job security
and a full set of welfare programs) and their initial support of the
student demonstrations was partly based on the belief that the
students were protesting against corruption and economic inequality.
However, once politically and ideologically disarmed, the Chinese
working class was not able to act as an independent political force
fighting for its own class interest. Instead, they became either
politically irrelevant or coerced into participating in a political
movement the ultimate objective of which was diametrically opposed to
their own interests.
The
Chinese working class was to learn a bitter lesson, and pay the price
in blood.3
The
students left the rebellion-scene.... the workers were suppressed
By
mid-May 1989, the student movement became rapidly radicalized, and
liberal intellectuals and student leaders lost control of events.
During the “hunger strike” at Tiananmen Square, millions of
workers came out to support the students. This developed into a
near-revolutionary situation and a political showdown between the
government and the student movement was all but inevitable.
The
liberal intellectuals and student leaders were confronted with a
strategic decision. They could organize a general retreat, calling
off the demonstrations, though this strategy would certainly be
demoralizing. The student leaders would probably be expelled from the
universities and some liberal intellectuals might lose their jobs.
But more negative, bloody consequences would be avoided.
Alternatively,
the liberal intellectuals and the student leaders could strike for
victory. They could build upon the existing political momentum,
mobilize popular support, and take steps to seize political power. If
they adopted this tactic, it was difficult to say if they would
succeed but there was certainly a good chance. The Communist Party’s
leadership was divided. Many army commanders’ and provincial
governments’ loyalty to the central government was in question. The
student movement had the support of the great majority of urban
residents throughout the country. To pursue this option, however, the
liberal intellectuals and students had to be willing and able to
mobilize the full support of the urban working class. This was a
route that the Chinese liberal intellectuals simply would not
consider. So what they did was … nothing. The government did not
wait long to act. While the students themselves peacefully left
Tiananmen Square, thousands of workers died in Beijing’s streets
defending them.4
Trying
to understand the failure of the 1989 “democratic movement”
discovered Marxism, in prison becoming revolutionary
Two
years later, as I read Marx’s The Class Struggle in France,
1848–1850 in prison, I was struck by the similarity between the
French petty bourgeoisie in the mid-nineteenth century and the
Chinese liberal intellectuals in the late twentieth century in their
political ineptitude, which was ultimately a reflection of the social
conditions of their lives and class interests. (....)
The
ideas of the intelligentsia, not unlike the ideas of everyone else,
are first of all reflections of the material conditions of their
lives and social surroundings.
An
intellectual’s ideas, thus, are inevitably limited by their narrow
personal perspectives and biased by their class interest. A person
who grows up in a materially privileged environment, like myself,
does not naturally tend to understand and appreciate the interests of
the working class. It is only with the intensification of
capitalism’s social contradictions, and as sections of the
intelligentsia (or the middle class) are threatened with
proletarianization or downward social mobility, that many among the
more privileged social classes begin to take a political stand
against their own class and identify themselves with the cause of the
working class.
In
my case, soon after the failure of the 1989 “democratic movement,”
I reflected upon this failure and tried to understand the underlying
causes. I became a leftist, a socialist, a Marxist, and eventually, a
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. A year later, I gave a political speech on
the campus of Beijing University, which cost me two years of
imprisonment. However, there were two advantages concerning
incarceration. For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity
to live with people from various underprivileged social strata. This
experience was of immeasurable value. Secondly, in prison, I had
ample time to read, a privilege I have not been able to enjoy since
then. I read Marx’s three volumes of Capital three times, in
addition to many other classical writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and
Mao, Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, Arghiri Immanuel’s
Unequal Exchange, G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History, and
Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy.
For
Marxists “after the Fall,” an inescapable question is how to
evaluate the historical records of twentieth-century socialisms.
As
I started to reject neoliberal economics and accept Marxism, I
attempted to move beyond my own narrow class perspective and
reconsider many issues from the perspective of the working class. For
example, instead of seeing the “iron rice bowl” as a paternalist
labor regime that repressed individual freedom and encouraged
laziness and inefficiency, I began to understand that it was a great
historical right won by the Chinese working class through
revolutionary struggle and had served as a safeguard of the workers’
basic interests, protecting them against bureaucratic and capitalist
exploitation.
I
started to question both the official Communist Party’s account and
the liberal intellectual’s account (which was essentially the same
as the western mainstream account) of the Maoist era. A critical
question was how to evaluate the period of the Cultural Revolution.
The official account and the liberal account were virtually the
same.5
Discovering
the historical LIES of the official Communist Party, being identical
to those of the “liberal intellectuals” and to those of the “western
mainstream”
Mao
Zedong, either because of his thirst for power or his obsession with
class struggle, singlehandedly initiated massive nation-wide
persecution, killed millions, and destroyed the educational system
and the economy. The decade of the Cultural Revolution was referred
to by both liberal and official accounts as the “Ten Years of
Havoc” (Shi Nian Haojie). Readers will certainly be familiar with
the many books, novels, and movies that denounced the Cultural
Revolution along this line of thinking.
Even
before 1989, I read an article in a provincial intellectual journal
which questioned these mainstream versions of the Cultural Revolution
and argued that Mao’s original intention was to mobilize the masses
to fight against bureaucratic privilege. That was the first time I’d
ever heard that Mao was committed to highly egalitarian and
democratic ideals. In 1992, I was released from prison, and I spent
the following two years traveling around the country, debating with
remaining liberal dissident activists; I also had the opportunity to
make contact with both state-sector workers and migrant workers
employed in the new capitalist sector.
In
the meantime, I conducted my own research into political, economic,
and social development in modern China, using fake identification to
visit the provincial and city libraries (many Chinese libraries at
the time required employee or student ID cards forentrance, while I
had been expelled from Beijing University and was unemployed). I
started to view Maoist China primarily as arevolutionary legacy
rather than a historical burden for future socialist revolutionaries.
(...)
I
celebrated the great social and economic achievements of Maoist
Chinese socialism, and pointed out that the nature of China’s
ongoing economic reform was the transition to capitalism and that the
capitalist relations of production had already become dominant by the
early 1990s. 6
First
conclusion: The 1989 “democratic movement” was NOT a popular
democratic movement
I
made a Marxist analysis of the 1989 “democratic movement,”
arguing that the movement was by no means a popular democratic
movement, but that it could not be understood without an analysis of
the three-way class relationship between the ruling bureaucratic
capitalist class, the urban middle class (the liberal intellectuals),
and the urban working class. The liberal intellectuals and the
bureaucratic capitalists shared many common interests. The liberal
intellectuals were unable to lead the “democratic movement” to
victory exactly because of their fear of the democratic potentials of
the working class. The urban working class was unable to
self-consciously fi ght for its own interest and suffered a tragic
historical defeat. This defeat in turn paved the way for China’s
transition to capitalism. I refuted neoliberal economics and the myth
that private property is indispensable for economic rationality. I
discussed the inherent contradictions between democracy and
capitalism, and the social and material conditions that had
contributed to China’s capitalist economic expansion and I
speculated about the conditions for the future Chinese revolution. I
concluded with a chapter criticiziing market socialism and advocating
democratic socialist planning. In short, I made a complete political
and intellectual break with the Chinese liberal intellectuals as well
as their political representatives, and firmly put myself in the camp
of revolutionary Marxism.7
China,
now part of the capitalist world, accelerating the structural global
capitalist crisis... will lead to its demise?
In
2001, a research group of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
published a study on China’s “social strata.” The study
rejected traditional Marxist social analysis and argued that China
was moving towards a “middle-class society.” The study was
believed to have provided theoretical justification for Party leader
Jiang Zemin’s new theory, which no longer claimed the Party to be
the representative of the class interests of the proletariat and
officially opened the way for admission of private-sector capitalists
into the Party. When the editor of a leading Chinese leftist journal
asked me to write a critique of the study. I wrote “China’s Class
Structure from the World-System’s Perspective.” Towards the end
of this critique, I included a section “The Rise (Modernization) of
China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy.” I argued
that China’s economic rise would in fact greatly destabilize the
capitalist world-economy in various ways and contribute to its fi nal
demise.
Building
upon the two earlier papers, I wrote another—“The Rise of China
and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy: Historical
Possibilities of the 21st Century”—this time in English. The
paper begins by pointing out that the rise of China as a major player
in the capitalist world-economy has been one of the most significant
developments in the early twenty-first century and that this
development raises a set of questions of world-historic significance.
How
will China’s internal social structure evolve as China assumes
different positions in the existing world-system? Will China’s
current regime of accumulation survive the potenttial pressures that
will arise out of such a transformation? As China moves upwards
within the hierarchy of the existing world-system, how will other
peripheral and semi-peripheral countries be affected? Will China
become the next hegemonic power? Will the twenty-first century turn
out to be the “Chinese Century”? Most importantly, how will the
rise of China affect the underlying dynamics of the existing
world-system itself? (...)
(T)he
so-called “rise of China” in fact reflects as well as greatly
accelerates the structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy
that will lead to its eventual demise.8
1“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
2“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
3“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
4“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
5“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
6“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
7“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
8“Preface:
My 1989 - Minqi Li, June 2008, in “The Rise of China and the
Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy”, First published 2008 by
Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Minqi Li 2008. http://digamo.free.fr/minqili08.pdf
