there's such a perfect and bizarre overlap between the sort of discourse warrior who otherwise complains about "whataboutism" and the sort of discourse warrior who does the "why isn't LeBron James talking about China???" bit constantly.
Not to be that typo guy, but its "buries the lede" :)
I think it's an interesting take. If you haven't listened to Bari's interview with Mark Cuban from a few weeks ago, they get a bit more in the weeds about the interplay of capitalism and china through the lens of the NBA, where she comes across as more sympathetic to the way you look at things here.
So I actually went back and forth on lede vs lead. I went with the latter because there are some people in "the biz" (like Hamilton Nolan IIRC) who think lede is pretentious insiderism. You can say I bowed to peer pressure if you wish.
It's really weird to see Western leftists try to deny that China is a communist state. It's a mix of lack of even basic understanding of China or the Chinese system and typical insular American arrogance. It's especially visible for the "expert on everything" type left pundit. China teaches Marx at every level from primary school on up, Xi Jinping gives multi-hour speeches on Marx making clear both his veneration for Marx as a thinker and his deep knowledge of his writings, the Internationale is played at official ceremonies and bureaucratic meetings, etc. etc. etc. I mean, someone like Xi Jinping has forgotten more about Marx than Freddie ever knew and that's probably understating it. The notion that a country can't be Communist because something it's doing offends your sensibilities is just really naive and ahistorical -- I'm not saying that as a doctrinaire anti-communist either but as someone who tries to be aware of the reality of how states (and not just Communist ones) operate.
Because Communist revolutions have succeeded at the periphery of the global economy, Communist states always faced a developmental challenge of catching up to cutting edge capitalist economies. China has used controlled market competition as one means of doing this, very successfully too, and has apparently pulled more people out of poverty than any country ever. The fact that a functioning Marxist-Leninist state is on the brink of becoming the largest economy in the world ought to be of more interest to leftists than it is.
State capitalism is not communism. That's black letter, communism 101. And communism with billionaires and homeless people is not communism. Nor am I impressed with the economic gains of the affluent and educated urbanites in China while 400 million Chinese remain under the international poverty level. That kind of inequality is exactly what communism is meant to prevent - and the CCP is well aware of it and chooses not to aggressively level things. That's not communism.
I don't know what "international poverty level" you are using, but per the World Bank China has wiped out extreme poverty, which capitalist countries like India are very far from doing. Further reductions in economic inequality are a repeatedly stated priority for Xi Jinping and the party.
Communism is not the same as a vague humanitarian egalitarianism and socialism. Marx believed that economic inequality was critical to progress -- this is why he believed capitalism for all its evils was a historically necessary stage in social progress. This belief is at the absolute center of Marxist historical thought, so to say that Communism is incompatible with economic inequality is not coming from a Marxist framework at all.
Defining Chinese-style state capitalism as a transitory stage on the path to Communism under a Marxist framework is one thing; defining Chinese-style state capitalism *as Communism* is another.
The CCP is perfectly aware that they have not achieved "full Communism" and clearly views themselves as in the process of self-conscious transition to something better. On the five year plan level this focuses on increasing economic equality, expanding the middle class, full employment, and improving job quality, and not on abandoning the market system. In the longer run it does appear to aim at some form of full Communism.
Relevant quote from Xi Jinping -- "We must recognize that our labors today and the unceasing work of so many generations in the future are paired together, all moving towards the ultimate goal of achieving communism....At the same time, we must recognize that the realization of communism is a very long historical process. We must ground ourselves in the struggles of the present moment and keep our work down to earth."
I would also add that it seems possible markets could be one of the social technologies used in a fully Communist state.
It's always hard to interpret politicians but I see no reason to take what Xi says any less seriously than any other politician. In any case my point was that the CCP is well aware of the distinction you are making and it is incorporated into their official ideology and theories.
I can't understand seeing how the Soviet and Chinese economies function(ed) and concluding that China is communist in any way, shape, or form. I'm honestly flabbergasted.
Yes, Marx believed that the productive power of capitalism was essential and that this period also inevitably led to extreme inequality - and he called that period capitalism. The whole point of saying China is authentically communist is to say that they have moved beyond this period.
The CCP has been in power 70 years. I think at some point it's fair to point out that they have not really instituted a meaningfully flattened economic distribution, nor can it be said that the workers control the means of production, nor that there is or has been a dictatorship of the proletariat, or the fact that there are literal communes in orthodox communism.... And this is separate from whether we consider the Maoist notion of locating revolutionary power in an agricultural base instead of an industrial one to be legitimate.
Look, I hate arguing definition, which this conversation inevitably is. If you want to call China an authentically communist country, I'm not particularly invested in arguing with you. But I would say that it is certainly a failed communist state if it is one, because it has invested dictatorial power in the hands of an oligarchy rather than in the workers through soviets or similar. But look, if you think that the job of a communist is to defend actually existing communism, then you're perfectly free to do so here. I just find it hard to defend China's increasingly heavy hand in repressing press freedoms.
I have plenty of issues with China as well. But I don't agree with some of your statements, e.g. that the CCP has not "meaningfully flattened economic distribution" in 70 years -- with all due respect that is somewhat bizarre. When the CCP took power large-scale famines and human slavery were regular occurences in China, which had a quality of life that was likely below the very poorest countries in the world today. Nor do I think that it is reasonable to say that just because a country hasn't achieved full communism -- presumably a long historical process -- that it is not in any sense functionally a communist state despite being self-consciously Marxist-Leninist. But as you say that is somewhat definitional.
What I'm really reacting to is what I see as the Western/American condescension toward China and unwillingness to take it seriously as a functional and in some senses successful government, even though it has racked up significant and historic achievements. (For the left that should include an assessment of what China demonstrates about how a self-consciously Marxist-Leninist state can achieve). People just don't seem to bother to learn from unbiased sources about the social system, read statements of the official ideology or the stated goals of the party, or get into the details of the economy before giving quite extreme judgements of the entire country and its system. Then there is the constant flow of decontextualized propaganda on issues like e.g. Hong Kong and Xinjiang, which is utterly dismissive of the idea that there might be a legitimate Chinese side to the issue (even if one ends up critical of it). It's a kind of demonization of the country, which I don't think is healthy.
I've always found it problematic to learn (old left here) on the one hand that communism is the "withering away of the state" and then be told that so-and-so country is a communist state.
The most generous interpretation of this is that the state in question has communist aspirations, not that the socio-economic system in place is communist
Regarding hybrid labels - state capitalism, market socialism, etc. These are sign posts to earlier left discusions that do not appear to have much value today.
as someone who has worked w the Chinese interests of large U.S. companies doing business in China, I think the capitalist elements in the Chinese system are very apparent and even flamboyant. and a lot more real than "Xi gives long speeches."
which isn't to suggest that we should treat China and U.S. as more or less interchangeable re capitalism. just that it's not crazy to look at "communist China" and recognize a lot of conspicuously capitalist elements in its operation and growth.
I hopped on to Twitter to ask the IEA’s brilliant (and very witty) Kristian Niemietz about this. He posted some tweets back:
1 It's an uncharitable reading of his point, but it's not completely wrong.
He was not an "ardent supporter of dictatorship", but he did say, more as a thought experiment, that we can at least imagine a benign liberal autocracy, and a tyrannical democracy.
2 Which is true. Venezuela under Chavez (and well into the Maduro years) was a democracy; Hong Kong under British rule was not. But where did people enjoy greater individual freedom?
3 The point of this was not to praise dictatorships, but to praise the rule of law, and limitations on state power. However, under a democracy, limits on state power are limits on democracy. If there's a constitutional guarantee of private property rights, that rules out socialism.
4 Under different circumstances, Lefties wouldn't be opposed to that. Ask a Leftie whether they'd want a referendum on the reintroduction of the death penalty, or on a very tight immigration cap. The answer, of course, is no. Because they know which way the public would vote.
Hayek had a very.. ah, classist notion of individual freedom. In a sense, since private property is the only thing that matters to him, it is, inevitably, simply more 'freedom of the rich' rather than anyone else. A non-propertyholder's freedom is of no consequence to him. Things the poor cannot do because they do not have the resources for it are not really freedoms prevented in this kind of analysis.
That being said, it's the exact same blind spot that almost every ideologue of liberalism(in the broad sense) had, from Locke onward. Hayek just put it out more bluntly.
it amazes me that you even have to point this out. Of course it's all just capitalism. Every culture warrior on Twitter wants it to be because of the tyranny of people tweeting about social justice, but the only real power in our system is market power. Of course that's the reason so many companies' logos are gaudy with rainbows this month.
However there is nuance to the stories about the publishing industry that writers like Weiss conveniently ignore. Some of the pressure on publishers (particularly Penguin Random House from what I have read) has come from workers within the company, which I would hope any committed leftist would support. If the workers don't want to be a part of publishing books they find objectionable, fine by me. I certainly don't take the bosses side of putting money over principles. If there's a market for it, I'm sure someone else will publish it.
I think you're being generous by saying Weiss is no dummy, but if you are correct that only makes me think the China saber rattling more cynical. I'm not sure I even agree with you Freddie that China feels "more and more emboldened". This is how the modern Chinese state has been for at least fifty years (to be clear: it's repressive, I'm not defending it, don't even call myself a communist). The only thing that's changed is that their consumers have some money now so our corporations are eager to hoover it up. Whatever threat to our freedoms China poses pales in comparison to the threat posed by our own militaristic, plutocratic system. It's no coincidence that the people rattling the saber the loudest (Bari Weiss, lots of libertarian Silicon Valley VCs) are people that have benefitted enormously from our own massively unequal system.
She's no dummy but she's extremely inconsistent, including when it comes to civil rights, period. She may be a classical liberal, but she's no free thinker.
Hey Freddie, if you're going to write about someone else's opinions, I strongly urge you do to so at sufficient length to engage in a meaningful way (as you have done in the piece itself).
This sort of tweetlike putdown does not advance anything that is in any way useful.
Supporting Israel over Hamas (you know, actual Nazis) in no way implies someone "doesn't care about human rights." It's the only sensible position unless you yourself are a far-right nationalist.
Comments are comments. If you want essay-like engagement read the essays. I am a strong critic of Bari Weiss's attitudes towards the Palestinians. Unlike 90% of liberals and leftists, I have taken the time to substantively and respectfully respond to her piece. It's not practical for me to treat every comment with the gravitas demanded of an essay, and frankly, I don't want to do that. I like being a little more free and off the cuff here. It's how I like to engage in this space. Sorry.
IMO there is a big gap between "treat every comment with the gravitas demanded of an essay" and gratuitous insults like "definitely doesn't care very much about human rights".
And being more thoughtful than 90% of people on twitter is pretty low bar.
But of course this is your space to do with as you choose ...
I think she was pointing out the hypocrisy, that at home, these corporations claim to care about things like DEI, BLM, etc., then theymanufacture in, and for, the world's number one abuser of human rights.
No doubt. Part of the point I'm making is that this hypocrisy is inevitable: they will never be authentically motivated by principle, only profit. It's just baked into what corporations are.
I would consider myself rights-focused, but I absolutely disagree with corporations being treated as people and given rights. What alternatives are there? What limits could be placed by law that would fix it? I’m asking earnestly.
Yeah, I think arguing that corporations don’t *literally* cast votes is a bit disingenuous considering what we all know about how elections are affected and how policy is shaped in government by entities with large quantities of money, particularly post-Citizens United.
HRC was not going to substantially limit the rightward shift of the courts. At best she would have forestalled it for a bit by backstopping it with less right-wing doofs like Merrick Garland. Then she would lose in 2020, and the slide would resume.
Very sorry to say but "vote for the libs who can't fix the problems" is not a recipe for success against the right, and never will be. Lord knows I wish it was.
I have a lawyer friend who suggested that since the Supreme Court is giving corporations right similar to what citizens have, then corporations should also be subject to the death penalty for serious malfeasance.
The issue isn't Lebron James or Cena advocating for human rights, it's the disgusting groveling they do when China cracks the whip. Simply refusing to say anything in the first place is always an option and it's probably the only viable one if you intend to at least try to maintain your personal dignity/integrity.
No, because the humiliation stems from the apology. If you know you're going to be forced to grovel for taking a stand why take a stand in the first place? Any message you might have hoped to send is going to be erased by the inevitable kowtow.
I think capitalism and communism both have good intentions and some good ideas but both kinda' suck in practice. Add greed and corruption, which is a human failing, and you get the worst of both worlds. Which is what we're seeing globally.
Why do we think we need pure versions of either ideology? I guess I'm a socialist Democrat. But I'm also down with just feeding the Data to some Siri or Alexa type AI and saying "figure it out! Make it fair!"
(Yes, I know this is a dream since the companies making the AI are the same corporations that Freddie's talking about. I can dream!)
I think the problem is that the universe is constructed on a slider: if you want more of a you get less of b. And where your preference lies on that spectrum is entirely subjective.
“As corporations they follow - must follow, can only follow - the profit motive. And the profit motive doesn’t give a single shit about press freedoms or democracy or human rights. If anything those things are inconvenient to the business of making money.”
This foundational and central principle of “free market” capitalist ideology is taught as necessary, good, and immutable in every Econ 101 course in America. And yet classical liberals like Weiss constantly “forget” (conveniently and self-servingly ignore) this fact because the tyranny of the profit-seeking motive is inherently inconsistent with any regime that prioritizes basic human rights for all. Profit is, after all, the exploitation of labor and the harvesting of excess productive capacity. (Fun fact: the right to hoard limitless property and wealth is an individual right, not a human one. Something, something, philosophy and ethics.)
I would like to point out to everyone that I did not say "and communism is the solution to this problem." I am happy to discuss my orientation towards communism at some point, which is... idiosyncratic. But I'm not saying it's the solution here. And this is my great frustration: if you say "this is bad about capitalism," very often people will say "but communism is bad, therefore your concern is invalid." But there are other potential futures than capitalism or communism, and more to the point, even if there was no such thing as a concept of another system, that would not change capitalism's great downsides in human rights and human welfare. We have to envision solutions to capitalisms problems without constantly being preempted by "but communism is worse!" In many ways, it may be. But so what? Saying that's not a solution to anything.
This is true as far as it goes but I think Freddie, like Bari Weiss, is omitting a point he may find ideologically inconvenient. If true communism were capable of creating as much wealth (power) as state capitalism, China would still be practicing it and would be using it to coerce capitalists in other countries--just as it's doing now. But it isn't, so they aren't.
Agreed. But the takeaway here isn't that state capitalism is bad. The takeaway is that.governments of all stripes behave badly and use their national power to coerce people in other countries. If state capitalism is better than either communism or Thatcherite capitalism at creating wealth (which is not proven beyond doubt but seems highly likely, judging from experience) then state capitalism is the best known economic system, but it's going to have the unfortunate side effect of empowering state capitalist regimes to behave badly in a more effective way than socialist or laissez-faire regimes. You'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if you argued that state capitalism should be avoided for that reason. The goal should be to get governments to follow the best economic policies •and• not to misuse the power those policies produce. A tall order, but who said politics was easy?
>" If state capitalism is better than either communism or Thatcherite capitalism at creating wealth (which is not proven beyond doubt but seems highly likely, judging from experience)"
So far, state capitalism (China) has succeeded largely by stealing IP from laissez-faire capitalism (the West), and then using slave labor to undercut the West's prices on stuff they invented.
While slave labor is a sustainable system, it's not one most of us would sign up for these days. And stealing IP only works as long as there is IP to steal.
That said, I do think Freddie has a huge blind spot on the nature of wealth creation. Freddie, did you ever spend any time in the socialist East pre-1989? Or spend any time talking with refugees from that system?
Forced labor accounted for a negligible share of Chinese GDP before the camps were set up in Xinjiang a few years ago, and it's probably still negligible now:
As for using other people's ideas without paying for the right to do so, the international trade regime which prohibits that was set up at a time when China had almost no global influence and no say in how the rules were made. It's entirely appropriate that the Chinese don't follow those rules except insofar as the threat of trade sanctions has forced them into partial compliance. Intellectual property rights are socially constructed, not matters of natural law. (I think Freddie will agree with me on this point, at least.)
"Slave labor" was an exaggeration. Labor with very few rights, say. And IP law is irrelevant, the point is that there is no evidence that state capitalist systems can innovate at the level of laissez-faire capitalist systems in order to achieve a similar level of wealth creation.
I think generally slavery decreases productivity and innovation (or at least, that was pretty persuasively the case for the American South and the Spartans). It has benefits only in the very short term. Then again, that might no longer be true of modern slavery.
(somewhat hilariously, an American Southerner by the name of George Fitzhugh articulated some of Marx's theories about a decade before Marx did in a book entitled "Cannibals All!"...but in defense of slavery, claiming that the "wage slavery" of the northern US was far more exploitative than actual slavery, and that slavery was in fact the most perfect form of socialism. I bring it up only because it's tangentially related to the topic and I find Fitzhugh utterly fascinating because his logic is just so bizarre)
I always struggle with articles that point out the problem without offering a potential solution. Positives and negatives to any system and of course there are negatives to a profit motive. But what then is the solution that gives us more positives than negatives? You do reference socialism in passing but couldnt figure out if thats your actual end goal
This is part of my point: the endless communism-capitalism binary has given people a permanent out from ever considering problems. "Oh, capitalism results in vast inequality and permanent poverty? Well, socialism IS WORSE." Even if I thought that was true, so what? "Other systems have problems too" is not a response to identifying a legitimate problem. It's just deflection. Someday capitalism will end. It might not end in a way that leads to anything I prefer; it might end with total anarchy, who knows. But it will end. And to move intelligently into the future we have to be frank about the current system's problems, whether we have an immediate solution at hand or not. Yes, eventually you have to talk solutions. But right now the biggest impediment to having that conversation is people reflexively defending capitalism through reference to the failings of communism/socialism.
Capitalism will always spontaneously arise. The only necessary pre-condition is that people are free to try new things. Because then someone will find a better way to do something. And then she will ask for greater reward for sharing it, because she believes she deserves it. And people will happily provide that greater reward, both because they want what she is able to share, and because they agree with her that she deserves to be rewarded for it.
And thus capitalism begins again. It's simply endemic to human psychology.
The only way to prevent this natural process is by utterly ruthless, top-down dictatorship.
Which is why every single socialist society in history has ended that way.
I'm writing about this soon, but every human culture since the dawn of agriculture has thought that they lived in the final economic system of mankind. All of them were wrong.
Well I look forward to reading you on this. For one thing, I don't know what all these other economic systems might be. Whatever they were/are, they all seem to have lost out to capitalism.
If you raison d'etre is profit why would you restrict your potential market to only Republicans or only Democrats? The private sector should be apolitical--the cognitive dissonance arises when we see companies that fly the pride flag, or BLM, or whatever the cause de jour is and then turn a blind eye to prison labor in Xinjiang. That suggests to me that corporate sponsorship for liberal causes is probably less than sincere.
Consequently I am surprised to see people who advocate for the expression of "cancel culture" that involves ratting out somebody to their employer for their political views. Either you a) believe that these large corporations really are on your side fighting the good fight or b) believe that corporations can be forced to kowtow to the pressure of negative publicity. The first option is of course ridiculous. The implications of the second are bidirectional: for every James Damore I can think of many more examples of individuals forced out of companies because of their lefty politics.
Although I do wonder if a certain segment of the population has bought into the PR line. How else to explain the curious phenomenon of activism at work, e.g. the #metoo walkouts at Google and so on?
The red scare at the start of the Cold War is probably a good example. For instance, Hollywood basically had a whole blacklist of suspected communists at the time.
I agree, but would go even further and say (human)rights discourse itself is a product of liberal capitalist and can't and never will be exported from that context while still logically intact. Trying to square that circle has led many on the left to trot out the most naive bromides. I don't even really thinks rights discourse is a useful framework for analyzing geopolitics, full stop. China may have a bad record as every empire does and the profit motive is absolutely a factor, but the mistake is thinking human rights discourse is in any way separable from the liberal capitalist project and more darkly the moral justification ofUS attempting to dominate the globe.
I dislike even participating in the conversation. It's a waste of breath, like arguing about the best rain dances for crop irrigation.
there's such a perfect and bizarre overlap between the sort of discourse warrior who otherwise complains about "whataboutism" and the sort of discourse warrior who does the "why isn't LeBron James talking about China???" bit constantly.
You are a troublemaker Freddie. I like that.
Not to be that typo guy, but its "buries the lede" :)
I think it's an interesting take. If you haven't listened to Bari's interview with Mark Cuban from a few weeks ago, they get a bit more in the weeds about the interplay of capitalism and china through the lens of the NBA, where she comes across as more sympathetic to the way you look at things here.
So I actually went back and forth on lede vs lead. I went with the latter because there are some people in "the biz" (like Hamilton Nolan IIRC) who think lede is pretentious insiderism. You can say I bowed to peer pressure if you wish.
It's really weird to see Western leftists try to deny that China is a communist state. It's a mix of lack of even basic understanding of China or the Chinese system and typical insular American arrogance. It's especially visible for the "expert on everything" type left pundit. China teaches Marx at every level from primary school on up, Xi Jinping gives multi-hour speeches on Marx making clear both his veneration for Marx as a thinker and his deep knowledge of his writings, the Internationale is played at official ceremonies and bureaucratic meetings, etc. etc. etc. I mean, someone like Xi Jinping has forgotten more about Marx than Freddie ever knew and that's probably understating it. The notion that a country can't be Communist because something it's doing offends your sensibilities is just really naive and ahistorical -- I'm not saying that as a doctrinaire anti-communist either but as someone who tries to be aware of the reality of how states (and not just Communist ones) operate.
Because Communist revolutions have succeeded at the periphery of the global economy, Communist states always faced a developmental challenge of catching up to cutting edge capitalist economies. China has used controlled market competition as one means of doing this, very successfully too, and has apparently pulled more people out of poverty than any country ever. The fact that a functioning Marxist-Leninist state is on the brink of becoming the largest economy in the world ought to be of more interest to leftists than it is.
State capitalism is not communism. That's black letter, communism 101. And communism with billionaires and homeless people is not communism. Nor am I impressed with the economic gains of the affluent and educated urbanites in China while 400 million Chinese remain under the international poverty level. That kind of inequality is exactly what communism is meant to prevent - and the CCP is well aware of it and chooses not to aggressively level things. That's not communism.
I don't know what "international poverty level" you are using, but per the World Bank China has wiped out extreme poverty, which capitalist countries like India are very far from doing. Further reductions in economic inequality are a repeatedly stated priority for Xi Jinping and the party.
Communism is not the same as a vague humanitarian egalitarianism and socialism. Marx believed that economic inequality was critical to progress -- this is why he believed capitalism for all its evils was a historically necessary stage in social progress. This belief is at the absolute center of Marxist historical thought, so to say that Communism is incompatible with economic inequality is not coming from a Marxist framework at all.
Defining Chinese-style state capitalism as a transitory stage on the path to Communism under a Marxist framework is one thing; defining Chinese-style state capitalism *as Communism* is another.
The CCP is perfectly aware that they have not achieved "full Communism" and clearly views themselves as in the process of self-conscious transition to something better. On the five year plan level this focuses on increasing economic equality, expanding the middle class, full employment, and improving job quality, and not on abandoning the market system. In the longer run it does appear to aim at some form of full Communism.
Relevant quote from Xi Jinping -- "We must recognize that our labors today and the unceasing work of so many generations in the future are paired together, all moving towards the ultimate goal of achieving communism....At the same time, we must recognize that the realization of communism is a very long historical process. We must ground ourselves in the struggles of the present moment and keep our work down to earth."
I would also add that it seems possible markets could be one of the social technologies used in a fully Communist state.
I would argue that over the past few decades China's private sector has grown more robust rather than the opposite.
Have you considered that Xi — the autocratic head of a repressive empire — doesn't mean what he says?
It's always hard to interpret politicians but I see no reason to take what Xi says any less seriously than any other politician. In any case my point was that the CCP is well aware of the distinction you are making and it is incorporated into their official ideology and theories.
I can't understand seeing how the Soviet and Chinese economies function(ed) and concluding that China is communist in any way, shape, or form. I'm honestly flabbergasted.
Yes, Marx believed that the productive power of capitalism was essential and that this period also inevitably led to extreme inequality - and he called that period capitalism. The whole point of saying China is authentically communist is to say that they have moved beyond this period.
The CCP has been in power 70 years. I think at some point it's fair to point out that they have not really instituted a meaningfully flattened economic distribution, nor can it be said that the workers control the means of production, nor that there is or has been a dictatorship of the proletariat, or the fact that there are literal communes in orthodox communism.... And this is separate from whether we consider the Maoist notion of locating revolutionary power in an agricultural base instead of an industrial one to be legitimate.
Look, I hate arguing definition, which this conversation inevitably is. If you want to call China an authentically communist country, I'm not particularly invested in arguing with you. But I would say that it is certainly a failed communist state if it is one, because it has invested dictatorial power in the hands of an oligarchy rather than in the workers through soviets or similar. But look, if you think that the job of a communist is to defend actually existing communism, then you're perfectly free to do so here. I just find it hard to defend China's increasingly heavy hand in repressing press freedoms.
I have plenty of issues with China as well. But I don't agree with some of your statements, e.g. that the CCP has not "meaningfully flattened economic distribution" in 70 years -- with all due respect that is somewhat bizarre. When the CCP took power large-scale famines and human slavery were regular occurences in China, which had a quality of life that was likely below the very poorest countries in the world today. Nor do I think that it is reasonable to say that just because a country hasn't achieved full communism -- presumably a long historical process -- that it is not in any sense functionally a communist state despite being self-consciously Marxist-Leninist. But as you say that is somewhat definitional.
What I'm really reacting to is what I see as the Western/American condescension toward China and unwillingness to take it seriously as a functional and in some senses successful government, even though it has racked up significant and historic achievements. (For the left that should include an assessment of what China demonstrates about how a self-consciously Marxist-Leninist state can achieve). People just don't seem to bother to learn from unbiased sources about the social system, read statements of the official ideology or the stated goals of the party, or get into the details of the economy before giving quite extreme judgements of the entire country and its system. Then there is the constant flow of decontextualized propaganda on issues like e.g. Hong Kong and Xinjiang, which is utterly dismissive of the idea that there might be a legitimate Chinese side to the issue (even if one ends up critical of it). It's a kind of demonization of the country, which I don't think is healthy.
> For every human rights issue in China, the US does worse or comparable
The fact that you have the freedom to say this in the US but not in China disproves your point.
I've always found it problematic to learn (old left here) on the one hand that communism is the "withering away of the state" and then be told that so-and-so country is a communist state.
The most generous interpretation of this is that the state in question has communist aspirations, not that the socio-economic system in place is communist
Regarding hybrid labels - state capitalism, market socialism, etc. These are sign posts to earlier left discusions that do not appear to have much value today.
as someone who has worked w the Chinese interests of large U.S. companies doing business in China, I think the capitalist elements in the Chinese system are very apparent and even flamboyant. and a lot more real than "Xi gives long speeches."
which isn't to suggest that we should treat China and U.S. as more or less interchangeable re capitalism. just that it's not crazy to look at "communist China" and recognize a lot of conspicuously capitalist elements in its operation and growth.
I hopped on to Twitter to ask the IEA’s brilliant (and very witty) Kristian Niemietz about this. He posted some tweets back:
1 It's an uncharitable reading of his point, but it's not completely wrong.
He was not an "ardent supporter of dictatorship", but he did say, more as a thought experiment, that we can at least imagine a benign liberal autocracy, and a tyrannical democracy.
2 Which is true. Venezuela under Chavez (and well into the Maduro years) was a democracy; Hong Kong under British rule was not. But where did people enjoy greater individual freedom?
3 The point of this was not to praise dictatorships, but to praise the rule of law, and limitations on state power. However, under a democracy, limits on state power are limits on democracy. If there's a constitutional guarantee of private property rights, that rules out socialism.
4 Under different circumstances, Lefties wouldn't be opposed to that. Ask a Leftie whether they'd want a referendum on the reintroduction of the death penalty, or on a very tight immigration cap. The answer, of course, is no. Because they know which way the public would vote.
Hayek had a very.. ah, classist notion of individual freedom. In a sense, since private property is the only thing that matters to him, it is, inevitably, simply more 'freedom of the rich' rather than anyone else. A non-propertyholder's freedom is of no consequence to him. Things the poor cannot do because they do not have the resources for it are not really freedoms prevented in this kind of analysis.
That being said, it's the exact same blind spot that almost every ideologue of liberalism(in the broad sense) had, from Locke onward. Hayek just put it out more bluntly.
it amazes me that you even have to point this out. Of course it's all just capitalism. Every culture warrior on Twitter wants it to be because of the tyranny of people tweeting about social justice, but the only real power in our system is market power. Of course that's the reason so many companies' logos are gaudy with rainbows this month.
However there is nuance to the stories about the publishing industry that writers like Weiss conveniently ignore. Some of the pressure on publishers (particularly Penguin Random House from what I have read) has come from workers within the company, which I would hope any committed leftist would support. If the workers don't want to be a part of publishing books they find objectionable, fine by me. I certainly don't take the bosses side of putting money over principles. If there's a market for it, I'm sure someone else will publish it.
I think you're being generous by saying Weiss is no dummy, but if you are correct that only makes me think the China saber rattling more cynical. I'm not sure I even agree with you Freddie that China feels "more and more emboldened". This is how the modern Chinese state has been for at least fifty years (to be clear: it's repressive, I'm not defending it, don't even call myself a communist). The only thing that's changed is that their consumers have some money now so our corporations are eager to hoover it up. Whatever threat to our freedoms China poses pales in comparison to the threat posed by our own militaristic, plutocratic system. It's no coincidence that the people rattling the saber the loudest (Bari Weiss, lots of libertarian Silicon Valley VCs) are people that have benefitted enormously from our own massively unequal system.
She's no dummy but she's extremely inconsistent, including when it comes to civil rights, period. She may be a classical liberal, but she's no free thinker.
She definitely doesn't care very much about the human rights of people living in Gaza....
Hey Freddie, if you're going to write about someone else's opinions, I strongly urge you do to so at sufficient length to engage in a meaningful way (as you have done in the piece itself).
This sort of tweetlike putdown does not advance anything that is in any way useful.
Supporting Israel over Hamas (you know, actual Nazis) in no way implies someone "doesn't care about human rights." It's the only sensible position unless you yourself are a far-right nationalist.
Comments are comments. If you want essay-like engagement read the essays. I am a strong critic of Bari Weiss's attitudes towards the Palestinians. Unlike 90% of liberals and leftists, I have taken the time to substantively and respectfully respond to her piece. It's not practical for me to treat every comment with the gravitas demanded of an essay, and frankly, I don't want to do that. I like being a little more free and off the cuff here. It's how I like to engage in this space. Sorry.
IMO there is a big gap between "treat every comment with the gravitas demanded of an essay" and gratuitous insults like "definitely doesn't care very much about human rights".
And being more thoughtful than 90% of people on twitter is pretty low bar.
But of course this is your space to do with as you choose ...
I think she was pointing out the hypocrisy, that at home, these corporations claim to care about things like DEI, BLM, etc., then theymanufacture in, and for, the world's number one abuser of human rights.
It's just, slightly, you know, hypocritical :-)
No doubt. Part of the point I'm making is that this hypocrisy is inevitable: they will never be authentically motivated by principle, only profit. It's just baked into what corporations are.
If corporations were truly people, they would be psychopaths because they have no regard for the well-being or rights of human-beings.
I would consider myself rights-focused, but I absolutely disagree with corporations being treated as people and given rights. What alternatives are there? What limits could be placed by law that would fix it? I’m asking earnestly.
Plenty of alternatives, the law clearly distinguishes corporations and people. Corporations don't vote, to give one obvious example.
The big problem now is the huge rightward shift of the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, that occurred over the past four years.
If only there had been something that we leftists could have done in 2016 to prevent this!
They don't technically vote. And now we're into campaign finance.
Yeah, I think arguing that corporations don’t *literally* cast votes is a bit disingenuous considering what we all know about how elections are affected and how policy is shaped in government by entities with large quantities of money, particularly post-Citizens United.
HRC was not going to substantially limit the rightward shift of the courts. At best she would have forestalled it for a bit by backstopping it with less right-wing doofs like Merrick Garland. Then she would lose in 2020, and the slide would resume.
Very sorry to say but "vote for the libs who can't fix the problems" is not a recipe for success against the right, and never will be. Lord knows I wish it was.
"HRC was not going to substantially limit the rightward shift of the courts."
I guess you honestly believe that. I think it's patently absurd.
I have a lawyer friend who suggested that since the Supreme Court is giving corporations right similar to what citizens have, then corporations should also be subject to the death penalty for serious malfeasance.
I'd be down with that.
lol
I would say it's baked into what people are.
The issue isn't Lebron James or Cena advocating for human rights, it's the disgusting groveling they do when China cracks the whip. Simply refusing to say anything in the first place is always an option and it's probably the only viable one if you intend to at least try to maintain your personal dignity/integrity.
It's the same kind of groveling they do when they lamely stand for the 1000th rendition of the US national anthem for a sporting event.
No, because the humiliation stems from the apology. If you know you're going to be forced to grovel for taking a stand why take a stand in the first place? Any message you might have hoped to send is going to be erased by the inevitable kowtow.
I think capitalism and communism both have good intentions and some good ideas but both kinda' suck in practice. Add greed and corruption, which is a human failing, and you get the worst of both worlds. Which is what we're seeing globally.
Why do we think we need pure versions of either ideology? I guess I'm a socialist Democrat. But I'm also down with just feeding the Data to some Siri or Alexa type AI and saying "figure it out! Make it fair!"
(Yes, I know this is a dream since the companies making the AI are the same corporations that Freddie's talking about. I can dream!)
I think the problem is that the universe is constructed on a slider: if you want more of a you get less of b. And where your preference lies on that spectrum is entirely subjective.
You lost me at "universe is constructed". #BigOldAtheist
“As corporations they follow - must follow, can only follow - the profit motive. And the profit motive doesn’t give a single shit about press freedoms or democracy or human rights. If anything those things are inconvenient to the business of making money.”
This foundational and central principle of “free market” capitalist ideology is taught as necessary, good, and immutable in every Econ 101 course in America. And yet classical liberals like Weiss constantly “forget” (conveniently and self-servingly ignore) this fact because the tyranny of the profit-seeking motive is inherently inconsistent with any regime that prioritizes basic human rights for all. Profit is, after all, the exploitation of labor and the harvesting of excess productive capacity. (Fun fact: the right to hoard limitless property and wealth is an individual right, not a human one. Something, something, philosophy and ethics.)
I would like to point out to everyone that I did not say "and communism is the solution to this problem." I am happy to discuss my orientation towards communism at some point, which is... idiosyncratic. But I'm not saying it's the solution here. And this is my great frustration: if you say "this is bad about capitalism," very often people will say "but communism is bad, therefore your concern is invalid." But there are other potential futures than capitalism or communism, and more to the point, even if there was no such thing as a concept of another system, that would not change capitalism's great downsides in human rights and human welfare. We have to envision solutions to capitalisms problems without constantly being preempted by "but communism is worse!" In many ways, it may be. But so what? Saying that's not a solution to anything.
Would you agree they should change the name to Chinese Capitalist Party? Still CCP so you can keep the old letterhead
This is true as far as it goes but I think Freddie, like Bari Weiss, is omitting a point he may find ideologically inconvenient. If true communism were capable of creating as much wealth (power) as state capitalism, China would still be practicing it and would be using it to coerce capitalists in other countries--just as it's doing now. But it isn't, so they aren't.
As I pointed out in another comment, I didn't say in this piece that I think communism is the solution. I do think capitalism has this problem.
Agreed. But the takeaway here isn't that state capitalism is bad. The takeaway is that.governments of all stripes behave badly and use their national power to coerce people in other countries. If state capitalism is better than either communism or Thatcherite capitalism at creating wealth (which is not proven beyond doubt but seems highly likely, judging from experience) then state capitalism is the best known economic system, but it's going to have the unfortunate side effect of empowering state capitalist regimes to behave badly in a more effective way than socialist or laissez-faire regimes. You'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if you argued that state capitalism should be avoided for that reason. The goal should be to get governments to follow the best economic policies •and• not to misuse the power those policies produce. A tall order, but who said politics was easy?
>" If state capitalism is better than either communism or Thatcherite capitalism at creating wealth (which is not proven beyond doubt but seems highly likely, judging from experience)"
So far, state capitalism (China) has succeeded largely by stealing IP from laissez-faire capitalism (the West), and then using slave labor to undercut the West's prices on stuff they invented.
While slave labor is a sustainable system, it's not one most of us would sign up for these days. And stealing IP only works as long as there is IP to steal.
That said, I do think Freddie has a huge blind spot on the nature of wealth creation. Freddie, did you ever spend any time in the socialist East pre-1989? Or spend any time talking with refugees from that system?
Forced labor accounted for a negligible share of Chinese GDP before the camps were set up in Xinjiang a few years ago, and it's probably still negligible now:
https://www.routledge.com/New-Ghosts-Old-Ghosts-Prisons-and-Labor-Reform-Camps-in-China/Seymour-Anderson/p/book/9780765605108
As for using other people's ideas without paying for the right to do so, the international trade regime which prohibits that was set up at a time when China had almost no global influence and no say in how the rules were made. It's entirely appropriate that the Chinese don't follow those rules except insofar as the threat of trade sanctions has forced them into partial compliance. Intellectual property rights are socially constructed, not matters of natural law. (I think Freddie will agree with me on this point, at least.)
"Slave labor" was an exaggeration. Labor with very few rights, say. And IP law is irrelevant, the point is that there is no evidence that state capitalist systems can innovate at the level of laissez-faire capitalist systems in order to achieve a similar level of wealth creation.
I think generally slavery decreases productivity and innovation (or at least, that was pretty persuasively the case for the American South and the Spartans). It has benefits only in the very short term. Then again, that might no longer be true of modern slavery.
(somewhat hilariously, an American Southerner by the name of George Fitzhugh articulated some of Marx's theories about a decade before Marx did in a book entitled "Cannibals All!"...but in defense of slavery, claiming that the "wage slavery" of the northern US was far more exploitative than actual slavery, and that slavery was in fact the most perfect form of socialism. I bring it up only because it's tangentially related to the topic and I find Fitzhugh utterly fascinating because his logic is just so bizarre)
I always struggle with articles that point out the problem without offering a potential solution. Positives and negatives to any system and of course there are negatives to a profit motive. But what then is the solution that gives us more positives than negatives? You do reference socialism in passing but couldnt figure out if thats your actual end goal
This is part of my point: the endless communism-capitalism binary has given people a permanent out from ever considering problems. "Oh, capitalism results in vast inequality and permanent poverty? Well, socialism IS WORSE." Even if I thought that was true, so what? "Other systems have problems too" is not a response to identifying a legitimate problem. It's just deflection. Someday capitalism will end. It might not end in a way that leads to anything I prefer; it might end with total anarchy, who knows. But it will end. And to move intelligently into the future we have to be frank about the current system's problems, whether we have an immediate solution at hand or not. Yes, eventually you have to talk solutions. But right now the biggest impediment to having that conversation is people reflexively defending capitalism through reference to the failings of communism/socialism.
>"Someday capitalism will end."
Oh, my friend, you are so so wrong about this.
Capitalism will always spontaneously arise. The only necessary pre-condition is that people are free to try new things. Because then someone will find a better way to do something. And then she will ask for greater reward for sharing it, because she believes she deserves it. And people will happily provide that greater reward, both because they want what she is able to share, and because they agree with her that she deserves to be rewarded for it.
And thus capitalism begins again. It's simply endemic to human psychology.
The only way to prevent this natural process is by utterly ruthless, top-down dictatorship.
Which is why every single socialist society in history has ended that way.
I'm writing about this soon, but every human culture since the dawn of agriculture has thought that they lived in the final economic system of mankind. All of them were wrong.
Well I look forward to reading you on this. For one thing, I don't know what all these other economic systems might be. Whatever they were/are, they all seem to have lost out to capitalism.
If you raison d'etre is profit why would you restrict your potential market to only Republicans or only Democrats? The private sector should be apolitical--the cognitive dissonance arises when we see companies that fly the pride flag, or BLM, or whatever the cause de jour is and then turn a blind eye to prison labor in Xinjiang. That suggests to me that corporate sponsorship for liberal causes is probably less than sincere.
Consequently I am surprised to see people who advocate for the expression of "cancel culture" that involves ratting out somebody to their employer for their political views. Either you a) believe that these large corporations really are on your side fighting the good fight or b) believe that corporations can be forced to kowtow to the pressure of negative publicity. The first option is of course ridiculous. The implications of the second are bidirectional: for every James Damore I can think of many more examples of individuals forced out of companies because of their lefty politics.
Although I do wonder if a certain segment of the population has bought into the PR line. How else to explain the curious phenomenon of activism at work, e.g. the #metoo walkouts at Google and so on?
>" for every James Damore I can think of many more examples of individuals forced out of companies because of their lefty politics"
Example?
The red scare at the start of the Cold War is probably a good example. For instance, Hollywood basically had a whole blacklist of suspected communists at the time.
Uh, that was quite a while ago. Things have changed. That's kinda the point.
Yes they have.
No one ever accuses their political opponents of being Russian agents these days.
Claira Janover.
Juli Briskman.
Tim Chevalier.
Claire Stapleton.
Meredith Whittaker.
Jonathan Bailey.
Rashad Long.
Emily Cunningham.
Maren Costa.
Timnit Gebru.
Thank you, I will read about these.
I agree, but would go even further and say (human)rights discourse itself is a product of liberal capitalist and can't and never will be exported from that context while still logically intact. Trying to square that circle has led many on the left to trot out the most naive bromides. I don't even really thinks rights discourse is a useful framework for analyzing geopolitics, full stop. China may have a bad record as every empire does and the profit motive is absolutely a factor, but the mistake is thinking human rights discourse is in any way separable from the liberal capitalist project and more darkly the moral justification ofUS attempting to dominate the globe.
I dislike even participating in the conversation. It's a waste of breath, like arguing about the best rain dances for crop irrigation.