getfiscal posted:

one thing i like about lord hoxha is how often he points out that a lot of times people defend foreign parties that are doing things that the grassroots of those parties hate and fight and consider backwards. like in venezuela a lot of the grassroots of the PSUV just vote for the party to keep the broad coalition in power but then spend a lot of their actual political work fighting the right wing tendencies of the party. like openly fighting, resisting police violence and such. and we should criticize right-wing babies who complain about how violent video games are banned but like it seems like low level trolling to just broadly defend a government where major figures and large movements even internal to the party have a lot of criticisms. especially when it doesn't matter at all. i could give a million dollars to the fuck china party and the world won't change. the people, and the people alone, are the driving force of history, not donald.

dont sell yourself short, kid

solzhesnitchin posted:

well yeah that is what i was going to say... because it's obviously true?

Who meets your definition of a lawmaker or politician in China, if not members of the highest political bodies as established by the Chinese constitution? Think carefully because I might "troll" you based on your answer and it would be very embarrassing for you

Superabound posted:

elemennop posted:

i can't really speak for china, but i can say a bit about corruption in general and in serbia specifically.

leftists in the west i think, like FSAD pointed out, misunderstand the strength of having a functioning civic and legal structure. the difference between corruption in america and serbia, is that in america corruption has to be hidden and obfuscated, whereas in serbia corruption is, at almost all levels, practiced openly without fear. some examples include:

see, this is really funny, because whats ACTUALLY happening is youre confusing corruption in America "having to be hidden" with it actually just being invisible to you because its an inherent and built-in part of the system itself. The Dirty Foreign Corruption you find so distasteful seems garishly overt by comparison, because it is merely adjunctive. Its like how an armed bank robber seems "worse" than a Wall St. pension-robber, or a street prostitute seems "worse" than a Kardashian.

* i've had relatives that had gone years of working without picking up a paycheck simply because they want to preserve their pension

ive had millions of fellow countrymen go lifetimes without preserving their pension simply because they want to pick up a paycheck

* a couple of years ago, my grandfather fell of his bicycle and hurt himself relatively seriously. with the help of a neighbour he was able to get to a hospital and get treated. a day or so later, a policeman came by and gave him a fine for causing a traffic accident--the traffic accident was falling off a bicycle.

in America, your grandfather would have been killed by that policeman for falling off his bike aggressively lunging headfirst at an officer of the law. But hey, im glad he was about to get to a hospital and get treated. Quick question totally unrelated to this whole "corruption" discussion: how far back did that quick trip to the hospital end up setting him? Sure hope he didnt end up having to pay some doctor an OUTRAGEOUS $50 bribe!

* normally to get a state ID, it can take weeks upon weeks to get it. since my visit in serbia was short at the time, and I needed to get my ID in a matter of days before leaving, a friend of my family got in contact with a friend of his who was a police officer. He pushed us to the head of the line in exchange he got a bottle of cognac.

wow. such draconian citizenship policies. Weeks! Weeks i tell ya! ¡Ay dios mio!

lol, calm down dude. i'm not some tourist to serbia, i'm telling you what people who live there experience and think. just because i'm pointing out petty greed, doesn't mean mass scale corruption doesn't exist. it's just as much a part of the system as it in the west. there are some things that are better about serbia, remnants of Yugoslavia along with stronger social and family ties, but even those have been eroding over time. healthcare is provided by the government, but healthcare costs have been going up, while pensions are being cut. so while you may laugh at offering a $50 dollar bribe to a doctor, that's literally a third of what some elderly people receive in a month.

babyhueypnewton posted:

FSAD you're missing the point. It's not that China is more or less corrupt, it's that the word 'corruption' carries within itself an ideology of orientalism and neoliberalism.

i agree that's true for the most part when you have westerners criticizing the third world or liberal technocrats who believe the solution is always just more efficient capitalism. however, these are also the words that common people are using to criticize their government.

in serbia, these are new accusations. people are legitimately disgusted with the out and out criminality in every aspect of their lives in a way that was not true before--even during the war and sanctions.

babyhueypnewton posted:

only when capitalism wipes away the desire for things with the desire for money, the infinite 'Sisyphean task' of hoarding, is a concept like corruption possible. thus the slur 'corrupt' is a postmodern one, as it only applies to countries in which money has not become entirely virtual and its power as morality has not yet taken over our being. In China, people still buy use value with money and morality appears directly on the marketplace. this appears distasteful to us in our postmodern era, where the values of the marketplace (and the infinite accumulation of money) is the supreme value, hidden beneath the spectacle.

sure, but that doesn't mean that this phenomenon is not detrimental to the people that live there. there is a reason why people living in these countries care about this.

elemennop posted:

lol, calm down dude. i'm not some tourist to serbia, i'm telling you what people who live there experience and think. just because i'm pointing out petty greed, doesn't mean mass scale corruption doesn't exist.

its exists. it does not exist at a scale greater than that of the US, or even anywhere near it.

it's just as much a part of the system as it in the west. there are some things that are better about serbia, remnants of Yugoslavia along with stronger social and family ties, but even those have been eroding over time. healthcare is provided by the government, but healthcare costs have been going up, while pensions are being cut. so while you may laugh at offering a $50 dollar bribe to a doctor, that's literally a third of what some elderly people receive in a month.

in America, healthcare is NOT provided by the government. and for the record, im STILL laughing. A third of what some people make in a month? my DEDUCTIBLE is more than what i make in TWO months

Is China a capitalist country? And does it matter?

Whether China is a capitalist country and whether this matters is
related to all the three questions raised above. When Mao launched the
Cultural Revolution in 1966 the overriding ideological rationale was to
prevent ‘capitalist roaders’, that is, CCP officials in high positions who
had capitalist ideas and tendencies, from ‘restoring capitalism’. Deng
Xiaoping was criticized and deposed as the CCP’s ‘number two
capitalist roader’ (the number one being Liu Shaoqi, a former chairman
of the PRC). Deng wrote a couple of self-criticisms, and in one of these
he swore that he would never reverse the verdict of the Cultural
Revolution (Deng 1972). In 1976, when Deng was made to criticize
himself once again, Mao reportedly said: ‘Oh yeah, “ never
reverse the verdict”, we cannot rely on his words.’

While many may not agree with Mao’s ideas, policies and their
associated practices, it is hard not to conclude that Mao was correct in
his perception of Deng Xiaoping. For, if China was socialist to any
degree after the 1949 Revolution, it has now changed beyond all recognition,
and this change is largely due to Deng and his follow capitalist
roaders, who, it should be noted, were criticized and humiliated
during the Cultural Revolution for the kind of ideas and tendencies
found in them (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2005a, Hinton 1990). Put
another way, if it is possible to argue that China of the Maoist era was
a two-way street – that is, it could either move towards real socialism,
which is what the Cultural Revolution was designed to do, or move
towards full-scale capitalism (Sweezy and Bettelheim 1972) – then, it
appears to have been moving irreversibly towards the latter since the
late 1980s, due to post-Mao reforms.

Inequality and the social status of the working class

There are three major lines of argument to suggest either that China is
already a capitalist country or that it is well on its way to being a
significant player in the capitalist world. The first holds that market forces
and profit seeking have driven the continuing decline of the social status
of the working class and resulted in increasing inequality (Chan 2001, Sato
and Li 2005, Wang Shaoguang 2003). As Blecher (2006) explains:
Karl Marx urged the workers of the world to unite. ‘The proletarians
have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to
win.’ China’s workers, however, have lost their world. In the
Maoist period, they were an exalted, pampered, and yet, paradoxically,
extremely radical class. Under China’s structural reforms of
the past two decades, they have fallen fast and hard. Employment
security is nonexistent and unemployment is rampant. For those
fortunate enough to have dodged the axe, wages have not kept
pace with those of other sectors or with inflation, and poverty –
particularly ‘deep poverty’ – is skyrocketing. State-supplied housing,
medical care, and education have declined in quality and
availability, and increased in cost to workers.

No one really knows how many millions are unemployed in China
today. According to one estimate, the current unemployment rate is
14 per cent among urban permanent residents. This figure is based on
survey data collected by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and
does not include the rural population. Though millions of rural
migrant workers are employed in sweatshops, the economic reform
measures have meant reduction of employment in the urban sector.
According to an International Labour Organization study quoted by
Hart-Landsberg and Burkett (2007), between 1990 and 2002, regular
formal wage employment in China’s urban sector declined at an
annual rate of 3 per cent and employment in state and collective
enterprises fell by 59.2 million over the 13 year period.

Liu Jian (2005), the Director of the State Council Poverty Aid Office,
suggests that the number of people who fell below the official poverty
line actually increased by 800,000 in 2004. The official poverty line,
according to Liu, was by 2005 an annual income of 637 RMB (less than
US$80), which means 53 RMB (about US$6) a month, or 1.8 RMB a
day.1 Based on this criterion, the minimum amount of social security
payment to urban residents was set at 56 RMB a month, just above the
poverty line. In terms of purchasing power in China, 1.8 RMB is just
about enough to buy a bowl of the cheapest noodles – but only in a
county town, not in big cities like Shanghai (Liu Jian 2005).

Even for those who are fortunate enough to have a job there is clear
evidence that the working people are subjected to the treatment of an
‘underclass’. Lee (2007), for instance, reports how workers – be they insurance
salespersons or bar hostesses – are manipulated into serving the
profit-seeking capitalist economy in post-Mao China. On the other hand,
there is opulence for the few. According to Lardy (2006), total worldwide
sales of Bentley automobiles in 2003 came to 200, with 70 of them sold in
China at 2 million RMB each: 250 times the average urban income.

Polarization between the rich and poor in present-day China is officially
admitted to have crossed the danger line of social unrest. China’s
Gini co-efficient, a standard international measurement of income
inequality, reached 0.454 in 2002, far above 0.4, which is the threshold
generally considered a cause for concern. A recent study by Wang Xiaolu
(2007) suggests that income disparity is in fact much worse. The officially
available statistics, on which the World Bank-recognized 0.454
Gini co-efficient was based, did not take into account what Wang calls
‘grey income’, which is monopolized by the 10 per cent of China’s highest
income households. According to Wang’s study, in urban areas the
income of the 10 per cent of the highest income households is not the
widely accepted nine times but 31 times higher than that of the poorest
10 per cent. If rural and urban areas are combined in this calculation, the
difference is 51 times.

Even though members of the urban working class have been
confronting a deteriorating situation (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett
2007), few if any at all are willing to take up the kind of jobs and levels
of pay that are associated with migrant rural workers in urban centres
(Bian 1994). For migrant workers from rural China the monthly wages
of factory workers in 2003 ranged between $62 and $100, only marginally
higher than in 1993. To earn this meagre wage, millions of rural
Chinese not only have to work under appalling conditions but also
have to leave their families; an estimated 20 million children have been
left behind in this way (Kwong 2006)

Privatization of the economy

The second perspective from which one can argue that China is a capitalist
country is to note that China is in the process of being further privatized:
the means of production are increasingly being handed over to
private ‘business entrepreneurs’. Although major and strategic industry
and infrastructure such as banks, telecommunication, railways and the
military are still owned by the state, China is preparing for a more radical
process of privatization. Indications are that everything but the military,
telecommunications and energy industries, along with some parts of the
transportation sector, will be opened to private competition (Pomfret
2000). According to a report partly funded by the World Bank, private
business already accounted for more than half of China’s economy in
2000. Similarly, Ross Garnaut of the Australian National University and
Song Ligang of Beijing University estimate that officially registered
private firms, foreign enterprises and family farms made up 50 per cent
of the Chinese economy as early as 1998, with that share rising to 62 per
cent if private firms that were still officially labelled collectives were
counted (Garnault and Song 2000). Multinational corporations now
account for 34 per cent of Chinese industrial output, which is greater than
the 30 per cent share attributed to state-owned enterprises, and the
percentage of the former keeps growing (Wang 2003).

Joining the transnational capitalist world

The third perspective from which one can argue that China is either
already a capitalist country or rapidly moving towards it is that China
increasingly is run by transnational capitalist firms (Hart-Landsberg
and Burkett 2007). Take the automobile industry as a case in point.
Nowadays, all the important car production plants in China are owned
by either foreign companies or joint venture companies. Professor Hu
Xingdou (2005) argues that by making China the sweatshop of the
world, the developed West not only exploits cheap Chinese labour but
also Chinese intellectual and knowledge sources. He asks his audience
to think of the example of Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta, where
on a car journey from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, from Zhuhai to
Foshan, a journey of thousands of miles, one would see nothing but an
endless stream of factories. But according to Hu, even with a manufacturing
industry of this scale, the total GDP of Guangdong is no greater
than the profits of a multinational company like McDonald’s.

One commentator calls this kind of development the Dongguan
model and increasingly Suzhou and even Wenzhou are moving
towards it (Jin Xinyi 2005). Suzhou used to have its own industry and
product brands such the Xiangxuehai refrigerator, Kongque television,
Chunhua vacuum cleaners and Changcheng electric fans. These local
brands have now disappeared. The Xiangxuehai refrigerator disappeared
after its manufacturer entered into a joint venture with a
Southern Korean company, Sansung; the Kongque television disappeared
after its makers entered into a joint venture with the Dutch
corporation, Phillips (Han Yanming 2004).

The strategy employed by foreign companies is first to enter into a
joint venture with an existing Chinese enterprise and demand the best
assets, tax and infrastructure concessions while making use of Chinese
labour and expertise. They then use their technological and financial
advantages to squeeze the Chinese partners out of the enterprise. This
happened to Xibei Bearing Co Ltd with a German company FAG, to
Ningxia Machine Co Ltd with a Japanese company, to a petroleum
equipment company in a joint venture with an American company,
and to the Lanzhou Camera Plant with a Japanese company.2

The following examples show how the profits are shared when
foreign firms operate in China. A Barbie doll may sell in the US market
at a retail price of US$10, but its FOB price from China is only US$2, of
which US$1 is for management and transportation costs. Of the other
US$1 spent in China, 65 cents are spent on materials. Only 35 cents are
left for the Chinese workers to share. Similarly, Han Yanming (2004)
notes that a factory in Suzhou produces 20 million computer mouses a
year for Logitech International SA to sell to the US market for US$40
apiece. Logitech takes US$8, distributors and retailers take US$15, and a
further US$14 is paid for the materials and parts. The Chinese side gets
only US$3, which includes the cost of labour, electricity, transportation
and so on.

Another example of how the transnational capitalist chain exploits
Chinese labour is a case study reported by China Labor Watch. A Puma
shoe factory run by a Taiwan businessman employs about 30,000 workers
in Guangdong; the retail price of a pair of its shoes in the United
States ranges from US$65 to US$110. The average Chinese worker gets
paid US$1.09 per pair, while Puma spends US$6.78 per pair on advertising.
The retail value of the shoes made by a worker in one week equals
all the money paid to him or her for a whole year. The average hourly
wage rate paid to a Chinese worker is 31 US cents, while the profit the
company makes from each Chinese worker is US$12.24 per hour. The
workers regularly have to work from 7.30am to 9.00pm, but sometimes
have to work overtime until 12pm with no increase in the hourly rate.
Sometimes they do not even get paid at all for overtime. They have a
one-hour break for lunch and an hour and a half for dinner. They sleep
in the factory compound, with twelve people in one room and one bathroom
for 100 people to share. They are not allowed to talk at work and
cannot leave the factory compound without permission. The penalty for
arriving five minutes late at work is the deduction of three hours’ pay.
There are no regulations on workplace health and safety conditions in
the factory (China Labor Watch 2004).

Joint ventures not only make profits but also shift production relations
in China. In an in-depth study of two key model joint ventures,
Chin (2003) finds that there has been a significant shift to capitalist
social relations of production in China’s joint venture sector. The study
suggests that China’s foreign-invested sectors operate according to the
logic of capitalist accumulation, or ‘accumulation by dispossession’
coined by David Harvey, and that a hegemonic regime of labour
control has developed in these ventures. The 1995 Chinese Labour Law
has specific stipulations to protect workers’ rights and working conditions
(Du Guang 2005). But privilege and concessions are allowed to
exempt foreign companies from the Labour Law. Such labour concessions
were first made in special economic zones, but were later
extended throughout the country, and now the Chinese Labour Law
does not bind Chinese private enterprises either.

It is frequently argued that China’s embrace of transnational
companies is a necessary step towards upgrading its industrial and
technological sophistication; the growth of China’s production and
export of electronic and information technology goods is cited as an
example (Lange 2005). But as Branstetter and Lardy (2006), cited in
Hart-Landsberg and Burkett (2007), argue, these electronic products –
produced in huge volumes at low unit costs – are not really high-tech
and China does not really produce them. Rather China assembles them
from imported parts and components which make up 85 per cent of the
value of the exported products. Moreover these products are largely
assembled in foreign-invested firms. In 2003, for example, foreigninvested
firms accounted for approximately 75 per cent of China’s
exports of electronic and telecommunication goods and 90 per cent of
its exports of computer-related goods.