Metal Reviews

His nickname isn't The Obamanator for no reason.

ha we should be remembering the tankman
he was legendary in the way he acted but was sadly executed a week after

So I just read in a book, The Shock Doctrine, how these protests were pro-democracy but anti-deregulation. China had begun regulating wages and expanding market options. The party wanted to open the economy up to privatization and consumerism yet remain in power, all the while reaping the profits. Disappearing price controls, job security and equality is what sent the people into a frenzy.

I guess a whole book has been written about this and what Rio has been saying, China's New Order by Wang Hui, the leader of the Chinese "New Left".

China is a strange beast. On the one hand, you have what is essentially a totalitarian government where the bars of the cage are so wide that the inmates can't tell they're there. The CCP today is light-years away from the days of Mao, yet still jealously controls the flow of information within it's own borders (but it's not like Western democracies do that either, right?).

On the other hand, the modus operandi of the CCP is a) stay in power at all costs, and b) modernise the fuck out of the country as quickly as possible (something Mao tried and failed epically to do).

Yet to modernise the country this quickly, stability and unity are essential. They can't afford to experiment with the hit-and-miss nature of the democratic process. Sure, the last vestiges of Marx's noble but thunderously naive concept of a communist utopia has pretty much slipped away. Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed following the Cold War, China has been frantically working to avoid the same fate. This means that they have created this strange hybrid of capitalism and socialism, but still at the expense of personal freedoms. I guess there is only one pure piece of Marxism that remains, and that is the idea that the needs of the State are ultimately more important than those of the individual.

One more thing. If China were to become democratic, I imagine the country would fragment into smaller squabbling states like Eastern Europe. The region could potentially become yet another hotspot of pointless conflict over pointless reasons like Serbia and Bosnia(Falun Gong nationalists vs Taoist extremists anyone?).

don't count Marx out just yet. Latin America is embracing proponents of his ideas all over the place, and most of them have high as hell approval ratings.

Not to be cynical or anything, but so did Stalin.

Well, look; you could very easily use China as an example of why Marx's prescriptions were totally wrong (although you could also construct an argument to the contrary; i.e. China never had the right conditions for communism anyway).

But if you look at Marx's actual analysis, China at the moment bears it out more than it ever did in the past. The processes of herding hundreds of thousands (millions, even) of migrants into packed industrial areas, generating a massive, militant proletariat is happening more vivdly in China than anywhere else in the world currently. Although obviously with many twists from a traditional Marxist analysis.

One such twist is the dismantling of the state sector, and the concurrent "commodification" of the workers in it; being turned from job-for-life public employees to chucked-on-the-trash-heap capitalist workers. And yeah, this explains what Trapt is saying about many people at Tiananmen protesting, not just pro-democracy, but also against economic liberalisation.

I see a similarity between what is happening to Chinese workers now (being cogs in the industrial machine), to the causes of the Russian Revolution. In a brain-bending Terminator type plot line, the Russian Revolution happened because workers were forced into being cogs in a massive capitalist machine. They then rejected capitalism and (long story short) embraced the ideas of communism.

In China, we have a "communist" state, forcing workers into much the same conditions as in 19th C Russia (ie: expendable in every way), to drive a new industrial perogative for capitalistic gains. So, will a new revolution happen that rejects the current capitalist agenda of the CCP and embrace pure communism, or will they throw off communism in favour of a democracy that rejects capitalism? Ergh! My brain just hurt.

It's a tricky one...

The thing about the CCP, I think, is that they've managed to deal with economic liberalisation in the way that the Soviet Communist Party couldn't. If you just switch to a market economy, there's no way that a Communist Party can survive in charge and there is a gravitational pull towards some kind of bourgeois Western parliamentary democracy.

But in China, they slowed down the rate of change so that only very specific regions were allowed to liberalise their economies at a time. So, the CCP retains its legitimacy as the arbiter of the pace of change, rather than trying to hang on to control following a rapid transformation.

It's too powerful to lose control, and, China has never being a coherent entity without the CCP in charge anyway, so who knows if the country wouldn't simply collapse if the CCP fell? IMO China is on the road to becoming a market economy but with very heavy state guidance which is not going to go away any time soon. The best results for actual Chinese people would be if the government there acquiesces to pressure from below and within the more sympathetic government branches and constructs a stronger welfare state and more protective labour regime. Which is, actually, probably fairly likely. Apparently a good book that is optimistic about the subject is Giovanni Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing. (Haven't read it, just going on reviews, synopses and recommendations).

That's most likely going to be the case.

Even though the Soviet system was doomed to fail in the long-term, it had the arms/space race going with America at the time, which hastened its economic demise. China has no such frivolous expenditures. It manufactures the crap that the rest of the world wants to buy, so it really is in a great economic position.

I read somewhere that China's intentions are to first catch up (or even supercede) the current standards of first-world nations, and then ease off the accelerator and relax its social restrictions. Only time will tell if this is true.

That's interesting. They've got a hell of a way to go though, the amount of hideous poverty there.