EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES (continued)
4. Many questions naturally arise concerning the "socialist market economy," since
this conception proposes a minimal role for planning, in either the publically owned
sector or the informal sectors (private, cooperative, etc.). Experience with
spontaneous market economies around the world suggests a range of issues that
need to be addressed.
First, in a context of widespread private ownership, what role exists for trade
unions? How would worker participation in enterprise management, long
considered to be an important objective of socialist development, be implemented?
If trade unions negotiate wage increases, how will management handle problems of
decreased profitability, adverse effects on international competitiveness and
prospects for attracting foreign investors? In given historical conditions, a tradeoff
may exist between social goals, including higher living standards for workers and
environmental protection, on the one hand; and productivity and efficiency, on the
other. The question is whether market forms of ownership and activity, in which
enterprises and individuals are positioned to compete without benefit of a political
framework that can shape and encourage principled behavior, can be reconciled
with socially advantageous approaches to this tradeoff.
Market economies have always been associated with polarization and
inequality, both among individuals and among industries, firms, and regions.
Unregulated market systems also tend toward instability: cyclical swings in
economic activity, combined with periodic phases of acute crisis, bankruptcy, etc.
Won't a rapidly developing market economy in China eventually come into sharp
conflict with the constraining goals of socialism — especially a desire to lead the
country toward greater equality, security and opportunity for the large majorities of
working people?
5. China is increasingly a major world economic power, and its relation to the
dominant world capitalist economy must necessarily have a large impact on Chinese
economic development. Foreign investment plays an increasingly large role in
China, and industrial zones have been created in which foreign-owned companies
have considerable freedom to carry out production for the world market in ways
determined by themselves. A large Western literature exists which is highly critical
of this practice, citing what it sees as extremely adverse working conditions, severe
problems of health and basic reproduction for workers and their families, and
significant environmental destruction.
What is the role of capitalist social relations in China's economy at present?
How necessary is major foreign investment, and what steps are being taken, or
should be taken, to shape and constrain the effects of that investment?
To what extent has a class of domestic Chinese capitalists formed, given the
new freedoms for capitalist enterprise in China? What is the significance of opening
CCP membership to private capitalists? Should capitalism, both foreign and
domestic, be seen as a necessary component of the current stage of development, to
be steadily overcome in the future as conditions permit? Or is capitalism, as a
necessary expression of "the market," a permanent presence in social life? In
general, how is the blend of present-day economic forms — state, private, mixed,
cooperative, foreign-owned — evolving over time? Is there a significant socialist
component in the present configuration, and in the policy that the CCP and
government are applying to shape the future relations among these forms?
6. What has been the nature and role of class struggle in China since 1949? Can and
should conflicts internal to the nation be described as class struggles? The current
leadership claims to be taking the country along a harmonious path to socialism,
and ultimately communism, but also says that it will take a long time, perhaps a
century, to reach the end of that road. What is the meaning of the increasing
number of "mass incidents" in China (74,000 in 2005, 87,000 in 2006)? Is there
the possibility that various forces that see themselves as a Chinese left, as well as
insurgent workers and peasants, will coalesce into a new revolutionary political
formation, or will act within the Chinese Communist Party? What kinds of
ideological struggles are taking place within the CPC at present? Certainly China's
rapid growth and opening up to the rest of the world will create new consciousness
and new expectations, especially among young people. How can the accompanying
pressures for change be reconciled with the current system of political control?
7. The elephant in the room in many discussions of the direction China has taken,
and is taking, is the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), about which
there appears to be little explicit discussion in China currently. The GPCR has been
variously described as cataclysmic, tragic, and heroic. Do all sectors of the
population view it in similar ways, or do different classes typically have different
historical memories of it? What kinds of reassessments of the GPCR, formal or
informal, are taking place in China at this time? The GPCR also had a tremendous international impact in the late 1960s. How
do Maoists and ex- or post-Maoists elsewhere in the world now view the legacy of
the Cultural Revolution?
8. What kinds of assessments of the leadership of Mao Zedong are in order? The
Western press continues to demonize him, indeed treat him as a mass murderer.
Yet he remains enormously popular in China. What can we say about the cult of
personality? About his handling of opponents on both the right and the left? About
his role in socialist construction? How is his image being treated by the current
Chinese leadership?
------------------<>------------------
IN THIS ISSUE
Gregory Meyerson and Jim Neilson kick off an unusually varied article section
with their study, "Pulp Fiction: The Aesthetics of Anti-Radicalism in William
Faulkner's Light in August." (The lumber industry is the 1930s U. S. South is the
setting, giving "pulp fiction" a whole new twist.) This critique of the Faulknerian
world view, while not the first of its kind, offers a unique perspective by introducing
a political-economy dimension. When flawed character structure replaces, rather
than complementing and enhancing, systemic crisis as the source of the violence
and tragedy blighting the lives of the novel's protagonists, those lives are to that
extent less fully revealed, and implicitly held captive to an ideology of immutable
characterological ranking and spiritual determinism.
The Marxist tradition posits unlimited growth of human capacities, and an
ever-ascending curve of power to use and transform the global environment. The
question whether there are ultimate constraints upon our economic activity, and
what these constraints imply for the overall project of transcending class
antagonism and initiating a new stage of cooperative abundance, must always be
addressed. Now biologist David Schwartzman ("The Limits to Entropy: Continuing
Misuse of Thermodynamics in Environmental and Marxist Theory") examines
arguments, put forward within both Marxist and non-Marxist ecological circles, that
claim rigorous grounding in physics (the laws of thermodynamics) for the view that
human economic activity as such is fundamentally non-sustainable. Schwartzman
argues that the true physics of isolated (but not closed) systems allows for solar
energy to serve as a sufficiently renewable foundation for continuing human
development (Schwartzman's "solar communism").
From biologists studying physics we move to economists studying biology!
(This is an instance of S&S' ever-present interdisciplinary spirit.) Economists tired
of static equilibrium models have turned to evolutionary theory for inspiration; thus
the recent "plankton bloom" of papers and models in the new discipline of
evolutionary game theory (EvGT). In essence, EvGT posits structures of strategic
interaction, which themselves evolve over time. Long-time contributor Yanis
Varoufakis, who has done both theoretical and experimental work in game theory,
here provides a major survey of these developments, along with a respectful (i.e.,
dialectical; recuperative) critique, from a Marxist standpoint. Varoufakis argues
that evolutionary game theory, while offering useful insights, cannot ultimately
serve as an adequate basis for understanding historical transformation and capital
accumulation. Along the way to this argument, we find, in the "hawk-dove game,"
a wonderful exposition of the actual content of EvGT models; with just a little
willingness to work through some simple arithmetic and algebra, the non-initiated
reader can actually see how results are obtained.
Finally, we present a "Communication" by Rakesh Bhandari, "Grossman and
Luxury Spending," which continues a discussion in our pages begun by Andrew B.
Trigg (Summer 2004), and continued by Cheol-soo Park, and Stavros Mavroudeas
& Alexis Ioannides (July 2006). Henryk Grossmann (the name is spelled both
ways) produced a model of capitalist breakdown, based on Otto Bauer, in his The
Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (1929), which has
been widely interpreted, and rejected, as an exemplar of a particularly determinist
and rigid reading of Marx. Grossmann, however, is a much more complex and
subtle thinker than he is given credit for being (refer to Rick Kuhn, "Capitalism's
Collapse: Henryk Grossmann's Marxism," S&S, Summer 1995). Now Trigg has
considered inserting some ideas from Michal Kalecki into Grossmann's model, with
quite transformative results; Mavroudeas & Ioannides have taken a dimmer view of
this enterprise; and the latest entry in the debate, from Bhandari, quite usefully asks
what constitutes a theory of crisis, suggesting that Trigg's Kaleckian innovations
may be more in the spirit of Grossman's attempt to use Marx's models of extended
reproduction as a theory of general capitalist crisis than Trigg himself may have
realized, or intended. All of the positions in this discussion rely on Grossmann's
original postulate of an increasing composition of capital, in a way that this editor
finds to be at least requiring of further elucidation — but that is another story
altogether.
D. L.
