Im really interested in knowing how far off they were
In the meantime, China has been admitted to the World Trade Organization. Thanks to this, and the Asian country’s prodigious economic development, the commercial ‘nuclear weapon’ has been neutralized. But this does not mean that the arsenal of commercial weapons at Washington’s disposal is empty. If China wishes to be recognized as a country with a market economy (and thereby in one way guaranteed against the threat of protectionism), especially if it wishes to have the technological embargo it remains subject to, relaxed, it is exhorted to make further concessions of the kind we have already noted.
We know that, like other countries with an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial revolution behind them, China finds itself having to confront two different inequalities: global inequality and domestic inequality. Hence, it is as if Washington addressed Beijing as follows: if you wish to clear the obstacles that impede overcoming the first type of inequality (with the abolition of the rules that prevent or impede access to the most advanced technology), you must make concessions that actually aggravate the second type of inequality (dismantling the state sector would entail reduced capacity to intervene on behalf of less developed regions and thereby make the struggle against regional inequalities more difficult).
In theory, China could avoid such pressures and conditions by embarking on a more or less autarkic road of development. In reality, as the Communist Manifesto had already explained, the economic and technological lag cannot be overcome in isolation from an ongoing process at a global level, which sees ‘old-established national industries’ replaced by ‘new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe’. In other words, the development of a country that has made an anti-capitalist or anti-colonial revolution is inconceivable if it does not hook up with a world market still largely controlled by the bourgeoisie. There is no real alternative to the option of dancing with wolves.
We may draw a conclusion. If we wish to understand the terms of the class struggle in China correctly, we must bear in mind the role of the Western, and especially the US bourgeoisie. Its offensive is not restricted to the state sector of the economy and, more generally, the leadership role of political power in the economy. It is a politico-ideological offensive that seeks to demonize Mao on the basis of an absolutization and decontexualization of his unhappiest years in power. In the case of a leader who died in 1976, and who governed the whole of China from 1948 and more or less extensive areas of it from 1928 onwards, only the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are taken into account. What gets repressed is the essential thing. Taken as a whole, the ‘social achievements of the Mao era’ were ‘extraordinary’; they involved a marked improvement in economic, social, and cultural conditions and a significant increase in the Chinese people’s ‘life expectancy’. Without these premises, we cannot understand the prodigious economic development that subsequently freed hundreds of millions of people from hunger and even from death by starvation.
(Losurdo, Class Struggle, 2013)
in my class on chinese history we had to read a CFR article on this very topic, and how the usa anticipated the PRC joining the WTO would mean they would be hobbled enough to remain inferior for years… and then immediately started whinging and screaming in confusion when the PRC kept perverting the rules so they would still succeed. cracked me the fuck up because the article was like “WILL SOMEONE PLEEEEASE THINK OF THE POOR IP LAWS”
…when the PRC kept perverting the rules so they would still succeed.
Sure, the PRC bent the rules that were created to give Western imperialist countries economic power over the rest of the world. So, the PRC started beating the West at its own game, and imperialists didn’t like it.
In theory, China could avoid such pressures and conditions by embarking on a more or less autarkic road of development. In reality, as the Communist Manifesto had already explained, the economic and technological lag cannot be overcome in isolation from an ongoing process at a global level, which sees ‘old-established national industries’ replaced by ‘new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe’. In other words, the development of a country that has made an anti-capitalist or anti-colonial revolution is inconceivable if it does not hook up with a world market still largely controlled by the bourgeoisie. There is no real alternative to the option of dancing with wolves.
a pretty good passage… where is the epub for this book?
I would try Anna’s archive, working URLs are kept up to date on its Wikipedia page.
This is excellent. I need to read more Losurdo.
lol the funny part is this is all something a friend sent me unprompted over discord yesterday. It just happened to coincide perfectly.
On the brink of collapse on a weekly basis
xi doesn’t know what 20-something western grifters know, which is that one glaring figure he surely has NEVER NOTICED ACKSHUALLY indicates the imminent total overnight collapse of the CEE CEE PEE
“US intelligence” has become an oxymoron.
