Anti-Imperialism, War
and Peace, Part 10b
Mao
Declaring the People’s Republic of China in 1949
The Present and Future of China
Attached
and linked below is an article by Samir Amin on China, which can serve to
finish off our course on Anti-Imperialism.
This
article creates a picture of where the National Democratic Revolution takes a
country, if care is taken with the alliance that the NDR depends upon. The
Chinese communists have taken good care.
More than
this, the article is in effect a comparative critique of all of the post-20th-century
states, and more especially of the other BRICS countries: Russia, India, Brazil
and South Africa.
The article
deserves to be read, and read again at intervals. It is a comment by an African
revolutionary intellectual on the world as it has been, is and will be for a
long time to come.
One piece
of unfinished business left by this article may be the definition of socialism.
The
difference between the proletariat and the peasantry is not, as Samir Amin
correctly notes, that one has no use for property, while the other craves
property above all. These are caricatures.
The more
functional difference is the one pointed to by Marx in his “18th
Brumaire”, with his unforgettable phrase “sack of potatoes”, used to describe
the relation of peasant families to each other.
Whereas the
proletariat has learned two things in its harsh relationship with capital:
discipline and social organization.
The social
division of labour that is characteristic of the proletariat is what is
otherwise called the socialization of production under capitalism. It is the
material root of the idea of socialism.
Socialism
means the integration of people over larger and larger fields (village, town,
city, nation, world). If it is only de
facto, it may in practice be imperialism or it may be “globalization”.
The word
“socialism” is not precise. This is clear from the Communist Manifesto of 1848,
where Marx and Engels talk of feudal socialism and bourgeois socialism, among
others. Socialism is only society organised as a unity, and not as a “sack of
potatoes”. The proletariat is the most socialist class because of its highly
developed and explicit divisions of labour.
Communism
is a more precise word. It just means a classless society. Inherent in the idea
of communism is escape from capitalist relations of production. For all that
Samir Amin has to say about state capitalism, and correctly, he does not say
this much. But the initial reason why post-revolutionary production must be
“state capitalist” is only that there is no other relation of production
available.
So the move
of hundreds of millions of Chinese people from the rural areas to the new
cities is bound to be a move from peasant, more-or-less self-sufficient family
production, towards wage labour.
Seeing it
as a move from the smallholding to the factory is maybe an over-simplification.
But the absence of an alternative way of organizing production other than the
notional factory, is a reality.
The present
absence of an alternative set of relations of production appears to be the
reason why the Chinese will say that they don’t expect “socialism” (probably in
this instance meaning communism, the classless society) for another 200 years.
The
relationship between the proletariat (the hammer) and the peasantry (the
sickle) is not a relationship of like with like, but it is a relationship of
different classes.
In South
Africa, the urban survivalists, and the small businesses, have to some extent
replaced the peasantry, but they are also not strictly proletarian. Slogans
that include the words “workers and the poor” can obscure this distinction, or
illuminate it, depending how they are used, and understood.
Intelligent
communist-party leadership is the essential ingredient in the National
Democratic Revolution. Samir Amin gives ample evidence and argument for this
assertion.