Essay: The Chinese Economic Miracle – A Triumph for Capitalism or the Planned Economy? By Jonathan Clyne.
Please request the full document, which exists in both abridged and full-length version, from author Jonathan Clyde via bretorp@telia.com
More generous excerpts are here.
The Key Thesis of Jonathan Clyne is the following:
“A transitional economy is the economy which is established after capitalism and landlordism is abolished, and before there is a real socialist economy. It is common that one’s view of a transitional economy is coloured by how things were in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. It is easy to draw the conclusion that a well functioning transitional economy equals how things were run then, minus the dictatorship, plus workers’ control and management. In fact, things are more complex than that. In Stalinist states the economy is deformed, compared to the socialist model economy, in a much broader sense than that the plan was decided upon and implemented bureaucratically.Apart from the lack of workers democracy it was deformed in at least three more aspects:
1) not participating on the world market,
2) abolishing market prices, and
3) nationalising more than the commanding heights of the economy.
This document will show that the removal of these deformations is the real cause of the Chinese economic miracle, not the introduction of capitalism.P2P Foundation Blog
Why China may not be ‘capitalist’: the Role of the State in Chinese Economic Development
Michel Bauwens
My comment at FB:
Very good. I'd been thinking along these lines for some time. Belief in capitalism as "the end of history" in the establishment of the "market state" as the fully realized expression of liberal democracy globally is naive in my view for several reasons, not the least of which are different mindsets, cultural background and institutional arrangements. The West itself is not homogenous, and to expect non-Western countries with very different histories and traditions to conform to the Western developmental model is an unwarranted assumption based on the erroneous notion of neoclassical economics that economics is a natural science rather than a social science. Humans are not atoms whose behavior is regulated by law, but rather human societies are complex adaptive systems subject to reflexivity and which exhibit emergence.
2 comments:
China may not be "capitalist". Well, duh! No one ever thought of that before!
I think the important point is that in the neoliberal West it is widely believed that China is on the capitalist path and all that necessary is to replace communist control with Western liberal democracy under the aegis of the newly wealthy haute bourgeoisie and China will be a replica of Western economies and governments. I think that is a pipe dream that is at odds with the cultural and institutional history of China.
What is happening now is a historical dialectic with China and the West vying for leadership in the 21st century. A lost will depend on the course that the other large nations take —Russia, India, Brazil and Indonesia. They are unlike to develop in close conformity to the Western model owing to significant historical differences.
Post a Comment