Re Mike L's [7l27]: Welcome back from your trip. > What more is there to say? The following appeared in the Shanghai Daily on May Day (or was it 30 April?): <snip, JL> Oh yeah, I could add that Chinese Marxists are busily debating about how capitalists are productive workers, how capital in socialism is not exploitative, and how capital is produced by the capitalist's own labour and comes from savings. Value theory is being upgraded so it can once again be a weapon for change. There doesn't seem to be any debate about how capitalists represent advanced productive forces; since, according to Ziang Jemin's 'Three Represents", the Party represents advanced productive forces, it follows of course that capitalists belong in the party (indeed, in the leadership). < Well, I guess it was but a matter of time before the official state ideology had to be modified to reflect the new reality. There are precedents in the history of the USSR: e.g. Stalin's doctrine of "socialism in a single country" and changing interpretations of value theory in the l940's (noted by Raya Dunayevskaya in her l944 article and l945 rejoinder in the _American Economic Review_; also see "The War and the Assault on Marx's CAPITAL" in _Marxism and Freedom_, l97l, Pluto, 237-239). In this sense the "instrumentalisation of Marxist theory by a totalitarian state", which Alfredo notes in [7l28], is -- unfortunately -- not new. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the ironies of recent history. A small irony is that the article that you referred to was published on (or on the eve of) May Day. The use of value theory by "Marxists" to justify capitalist production relations is more than a little ironic. And, of course, the mainstream use of the expression "transitional economies" to describe the economies of the former "socialist" nations transition _to_ "free market capitalism" is a bitter irony from the standpoint of the Bolsheviks, like Lenin and Preobrazhensky, who used that expression to mean something quite different. What is quite interesting in the case of the PRC is that the CCP leadership can't say, or choose not to say, that they want capitalism. Indeed, they continue to claim that they are building socialism. Yet, obviously, there had to be modifications in their official doctrine to reflect the changing social relations of production which have been fostered by the CCP leadership itself. * A question for those who believe that China was (at some point) either socialist or a (deformed) workers' state: how does one determine when it has become a social formation in which capitalism has become the dominant mode of production? In other words, how can we distinguish quantitative changes towards capitalism from a qualitative change to capitalism? Of course, the above question(s) -- with modifications -- could be asked about the former republics of the USSR, the former "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe, etc. One could also ask the same questions about Cuba. Indeed, one could with a lot of justification claim that these are some of the biggest questions of the recent and current epoch -- and are even recognized as such by mainstream economists. Any takers? In solidarity, Jerry
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