5. The official Chinese Marxism of the CCP constitutes a cynical political argument in favor of "harmonious" economic development on capitalist lines. If it speaks for itself, then it further demonstrates the need for China to undergo an actual communist revolution.
This conclusion follows largely from Žižek's comments on the failure of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its role in facilitating the victory of a capitalist developmental model in China, organized as a hybrid system of reorganized, market-responsive state capitalist enterprises and foreign and domestically-owned private capitalist enterprises (see "Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao," positions, vol. 19, no. 3, 671-706). The point is that the CCP has, since the end of the Cultural Revolution, facilitated impressive rates of economic growth (see "GDP Growth in China 1952-2011," on the webpage Chinability, at: http://www.chinability.com/GDP.htm) by ensuring underlying political stability as a prerequisite of private domestic investment and foreign inflow of capital through partnerships with domestic enterprises and outright foreign-ownership of enterprise. Against this backdrop of private capital investment, the CCP has orchestrated a reorganization of state-owned enterprises, pruning relatively less productive operations, engaging in partial privatizations (largely in a devolved logic through which smaller enterprises were, in the early 1990s, devolved to municipal and rural county governments with a mandate for privatization), reorganizing ownership (partial securitization through publicly traded equities) and governance (professionalization of executives and diversification of boards of directors for state holding companies) of large state enterprises, and partial opening of privileged markets to non-state (usually foreign) competition (On changes in the organization and performance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), see KPMG, "State-owned entities: From centrally-planned origins to hybrid market competitors," China 360, at: https://www.kpmg.com/ZA/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/China-Business-Desk/Documents/China-360-Issue9-201306-State-owned-entities.pdf).
Reading these economic reforms through the spectrum of Marxian theory, it seems clear that changes made by the government and CCP have generated positive results in enhancing the productivity of SOEs and in, more generally, expanding broader GDP growth, controlling rising cost structures, and promoting a graduated increase in standards of living. The Peoples' Republic may, thus, constitute an exemplar in the "trickle-down" theory on expansion of employment, compensation, and living standards. On the other hand, these changes have taken place in economic contexts dominated by exploitative capitalist practices of suplus value appropriation and distribution (by state-bureaucratic and/or private domestic or foreign capitalist appropriators). Differences in organization of surplus labor/value are not, however, recognized by the CCP as criteria in the definition of class, and, furthermore, the CCP appears to deny the continued existence of class as an analytical category pertinent in describing social structures in China (On a 2001 evaluation of social structure by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) concluding that, with regard to "class (jie ji)," "some scholars and people are hostile to such a word and tend to reject it," see Li Minqi, (2008) The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, 103-105, London: Pluto Press).
Notwithstanding clear differences with my perspective evident in the definition of class and, thus, the definitions of class structures like capitalism and communism, the CCP's contemporary appropriations of Marxian theory seem hypocritical in their own terms. As I have suggested or otherwise implied in the preceding posts, the task of appropriating Marxism with an anti-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic, anti-imperialist Maoist lineage may be impossible for the CCP to manage without recognizing an increasing range of theoretic points and analyses in which Mao was simply wrong (by virtue of his incongruity with current CCP and governmental policies!). How, in these circumstances, can the CCP "harmonize" warnings from Mao against allowing rural producers to accumulate individual property through recourse to petty market production with contemporary efforts to stimulate small, private capitalist enterpreneurial activity on the residuum of the township and village enterprises? As Žižek rightly suggests, something radical and revolutionary is being stripped out of the official Chinese Marxism in the name of a pacifying promise that the road through capitalist development somehow leads to a socialist paradise.
I want to make two separate points in evaluation of these circumstances. First, acknowledging the continued existence of fissures within the CCP, brought to light again in the prosecution and sentencing of Bo Xilai, who apparently advocated reforms of the CCP along somewhat more thoroughly Maoist lines (however opportunistic such a strategy might have been), the notion of reviving Maoism appears extremely problematic both to China and to the rest of the world that has come to depend on the prospects of continued Chinese economic growth and of active engagement of China in global commodity and capital flows. If nothing else, the U.S. government has certainly come to depend on Chinese capital to finance public expenditures through the marketing of debt. Moreover, any effort to transform Maoist rhetoric on socialist transformations, at least with regard to ownership structures and the organization of commodity and capital markets, from mere rhetoric into state policy would endanger foreign investment in Chinese regional economies. Clearly, there is something meaningful contained in Maoist theorizations and, beyond cynical opportunists on the CCP Central Committee, the ranks of true believers in Mao's version of Marxist-Leninism remaining within the CCP deserve some respect for their honesty and commitment to his vision, however much I would conclude that it was profoundly flawed. These faithful might be bastions of good governance in a political/governmental system that, if the Western media comes close to approaching the truth, appears famously corrupt! (Especially on the importance of network connections (guanxi), see Zhang, "Author: In China, Everyone is guilty of corruption," on CNN, at: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/23/opinion/china-corrution-lijia-zhang/index.html?iid=article_sidebar). That being said, there is nothing remotely honest or committed in official CCP pronouncements alluding to Maoist theoretic ideas or linking the supposed incongruity of Western political or cultural institutions with China's socialist system and its particular understandings of Marxism.
Second, the larger purpose embodied in Marxian theory is to support the development of communism. Acknowledging that the definition of the latter is sharply contested within the Marxian tradition, I contend that the sorts of market oriented reforms introduced by the CCP since the Cultural Revolution should have manifest a positive effect on the development of new, entrepreneurial versions of communism, especially in the development and more recent privatizations of rural township and village enterprises (TVEs). What we have here is the introduction of a class-ambiguous space, open to transformations of class structures in multiple different directions, some exploitative some not. In this manner, I am not qualified to make any judgments about transformations in the rural industrial economies characterized by the development of TVEs, but these moves seem promising to the nurturing of class structures that I would characterize as communism in China. As the broader development of Chinese urban economies advances, moreover, similar spaces for communism (e.g. state recognized and/or clandestine workers' cooperative or other productive extended partnership arrangements characterized by the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus value) might be expected to open up.
Finally, the tenuous and turbulent opening up of the Peoples' Republic to global economic commodity and capital flows might support the expansion of such communist class structured entities by enabling them to articulate supply chain linkages with communist class structured entities outside of China, maybe first within the East Asian Chinese diaspora and increasingly with ethnically non-Chinese communist producers. Such possibilities demand an ever increasing progress of market liberalization and, more significantly, liberalization of transnational information flow, a process tightly controlled by the CCP at the present time. On the other hand, the necessities of global economic integration and maintenance of the competitiveness of Chinese SOEs (state-capitalist enterprises) and domestic private capitalist enterprises may force the CCP and the government to commit to a gradual lifting of restrictions on transnational communications, making the articulation of transnational communist supply chains, emanating from China or otherwise integrating Chinese communist producers in the flow of commodities/use values and, possibly, finance, more likely.
I would label such developments as consistent with my understanding of communist revolution (i.e. a vast expansion of the prevalence of communist class structured organizations, accompanied by the development of non-class institutions facilitating the reproduction of their non-class (economic, political, cultural, ecological) conditions of existence). In turn, as democratic/democratizing organizations, such communist enterprises might exert an influence on state political processes, undermining CCP repression or, at least, unveiling its fundamental inconsistency with the very things that Marxism stands for. In any case, the very existence of such organizations would constitute a cultural argument for the democratization of surplus labor and for non-class manifestations of democracy. With these thoughts in mind, as a Western Marxist, I think that there is much to be hoped for in the market-oriented liberalization of China, even if these hopes are not shared or even conceived within the upper ranks of CCP policy makers and intellectuals.
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