The Contradictions of China’s Capitalism

 The spectacle of a so called 'communist' regime trying to jack up a casino-like capitalist market is just one of the many contradictions that have been accumulating in almost every corner of China’s economy and politics.

 And now, their weight is perhaps becoming too heavy for the Party hierarchy to bear.   Indeed, the composition of the CCP is itself a contradiction. The 'revolutionary' party of peasants and workers is now dominated by businessmen, college students, and professionals. One-third of the people listed in the Hurun Report, the Shanghai-based monitor of China’s wealthiest people, are Party members.

 The average wealth of the richest 70 members of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, far exceeds $1 billion. (The richest 70 members of India’s parliament or even the US Congress, both now controlled by right-wing political parties, are substantially less wealthy.)

But, unlike in other capitalist economies, money is not the only tool at the authorities’ disposal. If your brokers in China advise you to sell shares, they must be careful not to appear to be rumormongers, subject to official punishment. And there are reports that sales of large holdings may trigger investigations by the authorities. Causing public disorder or financial instability can be a serious offense in China, where conspiracy theories about foreigners’ efforts to undermine the economy abound.

 What Chinese officials desire is a capitalist stock market without the possibility of large losses that can shake confidence in the CCP’s credibility and control. But that is a market that no one has yet invented.

As Socialists who have always held, like Marx, that socialism and democracy are inseparable and who denounced Lenin's distortion of Marxism right from 1917, we vehemently denied that it is socialism that failed in Eastern Europe. What has failed there is totalitarian state capitalism falsely masquerading as socialism.

Similarly but with more success apparently, the Chinese state capitalist dictatorship has developed capitalism on top of a backwards, feudal economy.

Socialism, as a worldwide society based on common ownership and democratic control of productive resources and the abolition of the wages system and the market with goods and services being produced and distributed to meet needs, has yet to be tried and more than ever remains the only way forward for humanity.