MoneyIsTheDeepState [comrade/them, he/him]

MoneyIsTheDeepState [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net · 23 days ago

Thanks for linking to it! Like a much-needed wash, I found relief I didn’t entirely know my brain needed in reading Boer’s straightforward synthesis of the history and theory of Dialectical and Historical Materialism as it applies to the particular experience of China.

MoneyIsTheDeepState [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net · 23 days ago

[…] the goal, which, unless we are not both communists, is to end the rule of markets over the world […]

I shared that perspective until it was brought to my attention that capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy. In case you’re interested, I’ll excerpt the most relevant chapter of the book that brought it to my attention, but otherwise I’ll cut straight to the Marx of it and note that he examines the configuration of precapitalist market economies in both slave and feudal societies in Capital vol. 3.

Excerpt

from Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer:

Chapter 5.2.2 - Market Economies in History

This point is rather straightforward: market economies have existed in many periods of human history, but they have by no means been capitalist market economies. This reality was already foreshadowed in the text I quoted earlier, from 1979, where Deng Xiaoping observed that a ‘market economy was in its embryonic stages as early as feudalist society’. Further, on a number of occasions he offered the comparative point that a planned economy is also part of capitalism, the more so during times of economic difficulties. While most Chinese scholars make similar observations, neither they nor Deng were the first in the Marxist tradition to deploy historical arguments in relation to market economies.

The first was actually Marx, in the third volume of Capital(1894b, 583–599; 1894a, 588–605), where he examines the market economy of ancient Rome. His concern is to trace the effects of “usurer’s capital”. Found in the ‘most diverse economic formations of society’, in Rome a portion of this capital led to commodities, money, trade, borrowing, surplus, and profit. In other words, we have some of the core components of a ‘market economy’. But is it a capitalist market economy? Not at all. It is a slave economy, for its primary purpose was to find, transport, and buy the labour of others as slaves. The whole market economy of ancient Rome (and indeed ancient Greece) was geared for and subordinated to this purpose. Marx subsequently outlines the way some of these components worked: usury, interest, surplus, money, labour, and so on, were arranged quite differently and functioned in ways that are far from a capitalist market economy. Or, if they do at times seem similar, they function in ‘altered conditions’, without a capitalist framework (Marx 1894b, 587, 590; 1894a, 592, 595). Marx moves on to outline how some elements of feudal markets worked, and then how the different constellation of a capitalist mode of production overturned and reconfigured many of these earlier features (especially usury). For Marx at least, market economies are not all the same and do not function in exactly the same way. They may have some components in common, and to a casual observer such market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.

We may add to Marx’s initial thoughts that it was precisely a slave market economy that was a major component of the Ancient mode of production of both Greece and Rome (Boer and Petterson 2017), and that the ancient Persians of the first millennium BCE developed a military market economy by deploying the relatively recent invention of coinage (Boer 2015), and that the European feudal market economy was primarily focused on the estate’s own production and well-being (Kula 1976). I mean not local peasant produce markets, but state-wide and even empire-wide socio-economic systems of which market economies formed an important component. As Chinese scholars routinely point out, market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies (Yang J. 2009, 174). But they also point out that these market economies are by no means capitalist in nature, since they are shaped by the socio-economic system of which they are a component: to assert otherwise is—as Deng Xiaoping made clear—to become dogmatic, or to fall into what we may also call ‘economics imperialism’, in which the assumptions of a capitalist market economy (and its economic theory) are de-historicised, de-socialised, universalised, and superimposed on any historical market economy, thereby skewing analysis (Milonakis and Fine 2009; Fine and Milonakis 2009).

MoneyIsTheDeepState [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net · 23 days ago

I listened to several interviews with Rockhill too - I was eager to learn more while I waited for a non-PDF version of the book. The ones I heard were good but mostly covered the same ground as each other. A couple of weeks ago, though, The Black Myths Podcast released a very different, praxis-focused interview with him.

https://blackmyths.libsyn.com/myth-all-marxisms-are-created-equal-w-gabriel-rockhill

The hosts ask how he sees his findings applying to the concrete practice of organizing in the US, and his answer surprised me. He notes that the compatible left was always meant to be a temporary concession by the bourgeoisie, with the ultimate goal being to remove any and all space for Marxism. In the context of the stated goal for his work being to help reorient the Western left against imperialism, his thesis in short is that in many instances this goal will require tactically working to defend elements of the compatible left from attacks by the right.

He said it might be a tough pill to swallow, and for me it was. At first I thought he had to be wrong, because it sounded like he was suggesting we undialectically try to push history backward. But situating it in the context of rapidly changing material conditions, I’ve started to think he’s right. Anticommunism can no longer rely on perverting people’s evaluation of real material conditions to sustain its legitimacy, increasingly leading to the failure of mechanisms used to harness compatible left sentiments toward imperialist ends.

MoneyIsTheDeepState [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net · 24 days ago

Not that I think telling a group of 9 European socialists “read these 2 books” would help here, but a while back I decided to read Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer because I had so many questions about how China could rely on a market economy for decades and remain a socialist project, or else how they could maintain the trajectories they’ve maintained without being a socialist project, and I was sick of getting longwinded non-answers from sources outside China. It not only answered all of my questions except for their international strategy (which could be read clearly between the lines imo, in light of their sovereignty-focused foreign policy), but it also expanded my understanding of dialectics.

Then Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill came out, providing a materialist analysis of the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption in the context of a global war waged by the US-led West against communism. It gives concrete examples of how psychological war accompanies material war, and how the US in particular has relied on psychological war to an outstanding degree since its founding as a settler-colonial oligarchy which took exceptional measures against democracy while advancing a narrative that it is exceptionally democratic. It traces that line through to the US framing its imperialist campaign against self-determination as protecting the world’s freedom from imperial domination.

That background and more is used to firmly plant the feet of the book’s focus on a material base, oriented directly against the idealism of “anti-anti-imperialist” Western Marxist traditions. It goes on to extensively detail the organizational and funding structures of the clandestine bourgeois/state campaign to ideologically “turn the world upside down”, including monopolizing Marxist discourse in the West and beyond with myriad pseudomarxist positions that all happen to Freely agree that the only thing worse than capitalism is actually-existing socialism.

In the context of that global campaign, I feel much more certain about what I initially thought I could read between the lines of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: that a main pillar of China’s international strategy is to use material means to turn the world right-side up. No matter how certain I am that the values produced by capitalism are misanthropic, and that the floor of economic security matters infinitely more than the ceiling of excessive consumption, that certainty exists in the material vacuum of abstract philosophy. Capitalist values, on the other hand, have been projected onto the world with the full material force of global hegemony, such that they have been made tactically important to the strategic goal of building socialism. It is not enough to act on sound principles; those principles must constantly be dialectically applied to the conditions of an interconnected and everchanging world.

It’s not simply that China is “better than us at capitalism,” as I often hear. Instead, China is demonstrating that socialism is more capable than capitalism of fulfilling even the warped values imposed on the world by capitalists. Of course material security for everyone remains of the utmost importance, but China has never abandoned that. In fact, it’s the core of their model for human rights - a model they’ve been incomparably more honest, consistent, and successful in enacting than the West has with its abstract model. I used to wonder how China could focus on building something instead of fighting fires as the world burned, but now I see they were building a firebreak.