CAPITALISM AND ENVIRONMENT

Capitalism and the Environment

Written by Mick Brooks

Monday, 21 August 2006 

Global warming and other environmental issues are always in the news. The Green Party in the UK claims to be neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend the traditional issues of class and the division between rich and poor that define conventional political discussions and divisions. This is poppycock. The environmental problems, and the potential environmental catastrophe, we face are creations of the capitalist system.

Global warming – the ‘population time bomb’ – nuclear energy – pollution – environmental issues are always in the news. There is even a party – the Green Party – that claims to put the environment at the centre of its concerns. The Green Party claims to be neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend the traditional issues of class and the division between rich and poor that define conventional political discussions and divisions.

This is poppycock. Environmental issues are vitally important to us inhabitants of the planet earth. But the environmental problems, and the potential environmental catastrophe, we face are creations of the capitalist system.

Anyone who has read a standard account of the problem of global warming, for instance, will realise that it is possible, apparently through carelessness, to wipe out human life on earth. Hold on, and take a deep breath! Don’t capitalists also live on the planet? Is it in their interests that human life, including not just their profits but even their very existence, should be extinguished?

Of course it’s not in their interests. But things that happen under capitalism don’t just reflect the interests of the individual capitalist. Events follow the logic of the system.

This is how Marxism explains environmental degradation, “As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account…What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, most tangible result, and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite opposite in character.” (Engels – Part played by labour in the transition from ape to man).

We know the Greek islands supported a much bigger population in antiquity than they do know. We know they were once covered in trees that prevented soil erosion. “We have seen how the goats prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece” (Engels op. cit.) The people who cut down the trees and introduced grazing animals were not stupid. They cut the trees down to make ships or just burned them to clear the land. They introduced goats because that was an easier way to make a living on their thin soils than ploughing the land. Short-term ‘rational’ decisions produced environmental disaster in the longer term.

We have seen that environmental degradation is not confined to capitalism. Marx explained why. In a letter to Engels discussing a book by Fraas, he observes, “The whole conclusion is that cultivation … when it progresses in a primitive way and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois of course he does not arrive at this) leaves deserts behind it – Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece. Here again another socialist tendency!” (Marx letter to Engels 25th March 1868) The problem is that there is no planning on and no concern for environmental issues in an unplanned economy. The difference is that now capitalist anarchy produces environmental disaster on a much bigger scale than that of antiquity.

Environmental problems are usually presented as a clash between humans and nature. The greens argue that growth is bad because it always harms the environment, and the basic problem is to stop people from plundering the environment that they ultimately depend upon. Actually growth isn’t always ‘dirty’, it doesn’t always use up more resources. For instance over ten years Japan increased its output by 46%, but used 6% less energy to do so. (Boyd and Ardill – The greenhouse effect, New English Library, 1989)

The greens have actually missed a vital link in the chain of causation. The problem is not people versus the environment as if we are all isolated Robinson Crusoes. People interact with the environment by way of a specific mode of production, the way they organise themselves to get their daily bread. The capitalist mode of production is unplanned. Environmental degradation is quite simply off the balance sheet for the individual capitalist. Yet the sum total of individual ‘rational’ calculations can threaten human life on earth with environmental disaster.

“Man can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step is conditioned by their physical organisation.” (i.e. the mode of production – MB) “By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life.” (Marx and Engels, German Ideology, Collected Works Vol. 5 pp. 31-32) By progressively mastering nature in the labour process rather than passively adapting to it humans can alter nature and therefore harm the earth in doing so. But this is the only home we shall ever have! Economists talk about externalities. Externalities are things that don’t affect the balance sheet and therefore firms don’t worry about. The firm produces iron and steel. It gets paid for these outputs. It also produces smoke. It’s a nuisance, but the firm is not charged, so it doesn’t bother how much smoke it belches out. Who pays? We pay. We pay through lung and chest diseases. The National Health Service pays in treating us, so we pay twice. But the firm doesn’t pay.That is why the idea that the market treats the environment ‘efficiently’ is ridiculous. Firms minimise costs because that is the best way to make money. But they don’t minimise costs that others have to pay – externalities. Why bother? But these are real costs, just like pig iron and coking coal. They are just costs that have to be born by the rest of us.

So what if human life on earth expires in a welter of its own waste products? That would be quite an ‘externality’!

Global warming

Let’s get specific. Probably the biggest danger facing the world today is global warming This is better called climate change since, according to the predictions, not all parts of the globe will become universally warmer. There is a consensus among scientists that climate change is happening. This consensus is overwhelming.

It is true that if you google in “global warming” you may get a contrary impression. Prominent among the hits is www.globalwarming.org, which rubbishes the notion of climate change. It is promoted by the Cooler Heads Coalition and updated by the Competitive Enterprises Institute. We know where they’re coming from! The carbon fuel industries are spending vast sums of money to muddy the water on this issue. They just buy scientists like you might buy a KitKat. And their influence extends to the White House, inhabited by a man who made his fortune from oil and who instructs his understrappers to ignore or falsify the scientific evidence.

Back to the facts. First the earth as a whole is getting warmer. Secondly, this is partly because of human action – we don’t know how much. OK, the earth has always gone through hotter and colder periods (ice ages), but more and more greenhouse gases (the most important of which is CO2 (carbon dioxide) are being pumped out into the upper atmosphere. These operate like a greenhouse or blanket in that they let warmth from the sun in, but then trap it in the atmosphere. So the earth gets hotter. The science is complex. As the critics say, if all the warmth escaped from the earth no life would be possible. But, particularly since the 1980s, the earth has been warming up at a faster rate than ever before. And emissions from us, in the form of burning fossil fuels that give off greenhouse gases, are to blame.

The US National Academy of Sciences has issued a report, ‘Climate change science: an analysis of some key questions’ which concludes, “the changes observed over the last several decades are most likely due to human activities.” The earth as a whole is now warmer than it has been for the past 400,000 years. It is an observable fact that glaciers and polar ice are melting. This has a knock-on effect in that the ‘dark water’ of the ice caps is melted and no longer traps heat. The permafrost on the tundra melts and no longer locks in CO2.

Other human activity makes the situation worse. At present capitalists are gnawing away at the Amazon rain forest, burning it away just like the Spanish planters in Cuba but on a much larger scale. The aim once again is short-term gain in the form of soya crops, logging or cattle ranching. Already some of the denuded land has become exhausted. The Amazon rain forest is home to an estimated half of the world’s species. And biodiversity is a good thing in itself. How many unknown medicinal plants have we already exterminated? On top of that the forest is a ‘sink’, as the trees hold CO2. As they are cut down or burned off that CO2 adds to climate change.

The statistics don’t seem so extreme – an overall increase in temperature of 0.6-7% in the twentieth century. But over half of this increase has happened in the past thirty years and is in part attributable to human activity. Already it has led to droughts, extinctions of species and rising sea levels leading to localised flooding. It’s going to get worse.

Overfishing

“Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net between immense all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across the plains of Africa. This fantastical assemblage, like something from a Mad Max movie, would scoop up everything in its way: predators, such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangered herbivores, such as rhinos and elephants, herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthog and wild dog. Pregnant females would be swept up and carried along, with only the smallest juveniles able to wriggle through the mesh….There are no markets for about a third of the animals they have caught because they don’t taste too good, or because they are simply too small or too squashed. The pile of corpses is dumped on the plain to be consumed by carrion. This efficient but highly unselective way of killing animals is known as trawling.” (Charles Clover – The end of the line: how overfishing is changing the world and what we eat, Ebury Press, 2005).

It shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s happening. When the Grand Banks fishery off Newfoundland was discovered it was said (with just a little exaggeration) that you could walk across the water on the backs of the fish without getting your feet wet. Now the Grand Banks are closed and Atlantic cod is an endangered species. It’s happened to the blue marlin. It’s happening to the bluefish tuna. And dragnets destroy the whole food chain at the bottom of the sea. So the Grand Banks, closed in 1992, have never recovered as a fishery. Overfishing is a prime example of how capitalist greed confronts us with environmental disaster.

Clover is a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, so don’t expect a socialist analysis. But he’s spot on when he tells how European countries subsidise the building of trawlers to make the overfishing worse; how the fishing industry begs for handouts because of the crisis in fish stocks which is of its own making; and how, having raped our own fisheries these trawlers sail to the coast of Africa to repeat the whole sorry business of overfishing. In the process they destroy the livelihood of local fishermen who have fished sustainably off their coasts for generations.

Where do we go from here?

Does the green analysis and programme help us to deal with environmental issues? Though the greens don’t have a unified body of ideas, (some would regard themselves as socialists) two common threads in their propaganda come up over and over:

"There are too many people on the planet."

"There are not enough resources."

These ideas come from a reactionary economist called Thomas Malthus who wrote at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He wrote of nature providing us a feast, which was spoiled when too many people turned up to ruin the party. Malthus thought that Britain was overpopulated. At the time he was writing there were probably less than ten million people living in this country. Half of those were engaged in agriculture and related activities. Now the island supports sixty million and less than 5% are needed to grow our food. OK, we don’t actually grow all our own food. But we export manufactured goods and, increasingly, financial and other services to pay for food, and other countries do the reverse as part of an international division of labour. The basic variable Malthus was missing out was productivity. That means the earth can support a growing population of humans over time. Malthus’ ideas were widely discredited with the steady improvement in working class living standards in the second half of the nineteenth century (which his theory suggested was impossible). Productivity rose and, through class struggle, the working class gained some benefit form the increased wealth they were producing.

Malthus’ basic theory on population still gets wheeled out again by doomsayers every so often.

Note what else Malthus was doing. As a representative of the landlord class, he was deliberately ignoring the fact that society is divided into classes and some people get a much bigger share of resources than others. He was blaming the poor for their poverty.

But isn’t it true that resources are finite? Of course it is. But we don’t know what they are. Take the case of oil. It’s not even clear what the reserves owned by the big oil companies are. BP ‘wrote down’ a large chunk of its reserves a while back. In other words it declared that oil, which people thought had been in the ground for the last 300 million years, did not really exist! Did this mean the world’s potential supply of crude had really shrunk? BP shareholders regarded the write down as just financial shenanigans. Certainly share prices were hit. But assessing global resources, whether owned or just lying in the ground waiting to be tapped, is much harder than adding up oil companies’ guesses at reserves. Nobody can agree a figure as to what the world’s resources are.

Here’s the reason. If the price of oil doubles to $77 a barrel (which it is at the time of writing), a whole lot of oil reserves suddenly become economically viable – profitable – to exploit. At half the price (oil was $35 a barrel not so long ago) they are not reserves at all. That’s capitalism for you! For decades scientists have known how to extract oil from bituminous shale. But under capitalism it’s not economic to extract it.

Even if we accept the argument that we are up against limited resources now, what should be our response? Malthus, as an apologist for the rich, cleverly eliminated the inequalities in our society from his analysis. Surely the first thing we should do is to eliminate the luxury spending of the rich, which gobbles up a disproportionate amount of earth’s resources? The second thing we should do is run a worldwide inventory to establish exactly how much we have of all these resources.

Then we should look into producing and adopting alternatives. We need to sit down and think very hard about the alternatives to burning fossil fuels as an energy source. We can’t do this under capitalism, partly because of the vested interests, such as the hydrocarbon capitalist in the White House, that dominate decision-making in most capitalist states. Dominant sections of the capitalist class are actually CO2-burning junkies. The other problem is that wind and wave power and other sustainable energy sources are not taken seriously by capitalists who can’t find a way of making money out of them. Therefore not enough research has been done on their viability. Finally, if absolutely necessary, we should implement a fair system of rationing until the alternatives come on stream.

How can we do this under capitalism? We can’t. The price mechanism praised by economists is essentially reactive. When the price of petrol goes up, people will buy more fuel-efficient cars. But the fact that oil prices have gone up is actually a signal that capitalism has been squandering the earth’s resources. Our action plan on the environment is really a plan for world socialism.

Won’t world capitalism do something about the mess it has created in the meantime? Even the imperialists under siege in Mafeking introduced rationing (communism in consumption) for the duration in order to survive.

They might. But the example of overfishing shows the problems. The capitalist state is captive to capitalist vested interests: the shipbuilding industry and the fishing industry cry out for subsidies. Competition, which involves the weakest going to the wall, is fine in the textbooks, but it’s not for the likes of them. Capitalist countries fight each other more viciously as resources become more difficult to grab. African countries have little muscle against the European Union’s trawling fleet.

Outside the flat-earthers in the White House, there is a consensus that global warming is a big problem – actually the biggest environmental problem the world faces by far. The capitalist powers met at Kyoto and came to an agreement. The USA opted out. But America, with less than 5% of the world’s population, is responsible for a quarter of all carbon emissions. So that makes the Accord pretty much meaningless. But a lot of those countries that agreed to the Kyoto targets to cut the increase in emissions (not cut emissions) have failed to meet them. It is actually quite difficult for a capitalist state to control the activities of tens of thousands of capitalist firms who are responsible for giving off CO2. And everybody agrees that Kyoto will not solve the problem. It is usually described as a ‘first step’, and that first step has never really been taken.

So world socialism really is the only way we can protect the environment, in other words our home, the planet earth

Reforms and Revolution

Hi this article from sanhati.com, I redirect for all of you, I think this may useful for u.

Details on this painting have been provided by a reader: “This artwork was done around 2005 by an artist who prefers to stay unidentified….Notice the portraits hanging on the wall; the center piece is Jiang Zemin who opened the floodgate to allowing super-rich big bourgeois elements to join the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the early 1990s. On the left is Deng Xiaoping who is hailed by CPC capitalist roaders as the grand architect of their great reform and opening up of China for world capitalist super exploitation. On the right is Zhao Ziyang who was the first to openly embrace Western bourgeois lifestyle by popularizing suits and ties among CPC party members and playing golf. After the Tiananmen uprising in June 1989, his flashy bourgeois walk and talk earned him the boot from Deng and older CPC capitalist roaders who prefered hiding behind “socialism with Chinese characteristics”…. The priest is GW Bush who seems to have just closed a secret deal with three persons who are popularly known in China as the corrupt “Iron Trio” — Chen Liangyu (seated far right) represents the incumbent comprador bureacrats and was also the former Shanghai party secretary who was convicted of massive fraud several years ago; Zhang Weiying (seated next to Chen) representing the intellectual elite; Ren Zhiqiang (seated nearest the door) representing the big-time capitalist enterprenuer…. Mao is portrayed in the prime of his Yenan-era revolutionary demeanor accompanied by the two leading protagonists — Li Yuhe and his daughter Li Tiemei — from one of the famous revolutionary opera, “Hongdeng Ji/The Red Lantern Saga”. The father and daughter represent the vast majority of workers and peasants in China who have suddenly decided to invite their late Chairman Mao back to the present-day era to help them settle historical accounts with US imperialism and its comprador-bureaucrat puppets who have been oppressing and super expoiting the working masses not long after he died in 1976. Regarding the URL for the source of the painting, it is http://www.wyzxsx.com; it is “wu you zi xiang” in Chinese. It’s one of the two foremost pro-Mao websites in China and is very popular among newly awakened leftist intellectuals and students.”

The Post-Mao Chinese Left: Navigating the Recent Debates

July 16, 2011

By Zhun Xu. Guest contributor, Sanhati. The author is a member of the Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This year saw an unprecedented rise in political fights among the Chinese leftists. An outside observer might surprisingly discover such big differences on the “left” when all of the major leftist online forums began publishing harsh political polemics from opposing camps. Various issues are discussed, but the practical political stake is whether the left should be a political ally of the current CCP leadership or not, i.e. political program of a united leftist camp. One group, which mostly posts on one of the largest online leftist forum in China (Utopia, or wu you zhi xiang), has been a long supporter of the government and tries to consolidate the leftists under its pro-CCP flag and advocate reforms under current regime to “restore socialism”; while other groups, mostly publishing on relatively smaller online forums, take a different stance and argue that socialism cannot be built under the current capitalist state. The pro-CCP people accused other groups as “extremists”, and their opponents also called them “reactionary and opportunist”.

Who are our friends and who are our enemies? This is the most fundamental question for any political program. There has always been huge difference in the answers to this question among the Chinese left.

Some people argue that although China became largely a capitalist society and the class conflict between the workers and the new rich people including the CCP cadres and compradors, the major contradiction is between the Chinese as a people and “imperialist power” like the US.

Zhang Hongliang, a famous political writer on the internet and professor at Minzu University of China, is often times regarded as the spiritual leader of this camp. In Zhang’s articles, class conflict is always important, but racial conflict is more vital for him. It is unpleasant to find many reactionary ideas in Zhang’s writings, for example, Zhang repeatedly claimed that the Anglo-Saxon people (that is their preferred word to describe imperialists) have the huge genocide plan of killing Chinese people. In his own words: “racial conflict has changed class conflict fundamentally, nowadays class struggle is not about who controls the state anymore, rather it is on whether China is going to be destroyed (by Anglo-Saxon people and its allies). The solution to the danger of “genocide”, according to Zhang Hongliang, is to wholeheartedly embrace the government and defeat both the “imperialists and its allies” and the “left extremists”.

Other people presented the same perspective as Zhang’s. Kong Qingdong, professor at Beijing University, made the claim that those who want to overthrow the current regime by revolution are crazy “fundamentalist Marxists”, and there is no difference between them and imperialists together with their Chinese allies.

Zhang and others’ writings are popular among younger readers, including left-leaning students and nationalists. Although most of them repeatedly claim that they are Maoist communists, they do not really use Marxist analysis. They would like to throw out concepts like “class struggle”, “imperialist” etc, but as we have seen, their real message is a nationalist one, even with some Nazi flavors.

Others in this camp do not necessarily have the same ideas as Zhang or Kong, but they all seem to agree that given the existence of imperialists and their compradors, “save the Party” is more or less identical to “defend our country”. Therefore, they tend to believe that the ruling class in China is ultimately their friend while anyone opposing to the ruling class must be their enemy. In order to reconcile this view with the clear neo-liberal turn in the last three decades, they argue that while it is true that China has been going down a capitalist path, this is only because the anti-Mao faction held power and chose the way of capitalism, as long as the true “socialists” in the Party got power, China could be taking a totally different route!

The other camp had quite different perspectives on the nature of the Chinese society and the major enemy of the left. Although it is still difficult to generalize their politics, they view class conflict between workers and capitalists as the most important issue. Instead of dividing the Party leaders into the pro-socialism faction and pro-capitalism faction, they tend to treat them both as political representatives of the bourgeoisie and they just have different attitudes on how to build capitalism (and their family wealth) safely. Therefore, it does not make sense for Marxists to become allies of the government to fight against “imperialism”. In fact, both the domestic bourgeoisie and the imperialists should be our enemies.

Clearly, the two camps have opposite views on China from the very beginning, but why did they stay at relative peace previously and suddenly began to fight each other? Some historical background and current context should be discussed to help us answer this question.

It would be unimaginable for such a debate to take place in China for most of the recent 30 years. After Mao died in 1976, the communist party leadership quickly cleaned out all the leftists from the central committee and began taking a long but steady transition to capitalism as we can see now. Why the CCP changed its mission is another question which has been discussed elsewhere.

To accompany this transition, the previous revolutionary period was demonized as much as possible and “to be rich is glorious” became the official ideology. The “old” revolution doctrines were considered to become outdated or extremist or even “reactionary” for China’s enlightenment/development.

Plus, in a short period, the unleashed market brought some positive changes to the life of Chinese people while some key elements of socialism were maintained, like nearly full employment. Therefore, the intellectuals as well as many working class people believed the “reform” was the way to go. The major contradiction of China, at that time, was believed to be the pure conflict of the old regime and reform.

Of course, everything changed when the economic reform reached much difficulty in the late 1980s. Huge inflation unprecedented to Socialist China greatly affected people’s life, no need to mention that the increasing income polarization and huge corruption always came hand in hand with marketization. People became more and more suspicious about the ongoing reform and the CCP itself, which, combined with other political factors, led to the nationwide political demonstrations in 1989 which also happened in other Soviet countries. The difference was that in China the movement was soon defeated by the military force. This brought an end to the chaotic 1980s.

Although the 1989 movement itself was due to many negative outcomes of the neo-liberal turn of the CCP, there were no real self-conscious leftists by that time and no Marxist solution was provided. Instead, the vision from the petty bourgeois leaders of the movement was neo-liberal capitalism, not much different from the CCP itself in essence. Indeed, after a short 3-year break, in 1992 CCP began to officially embrace “market economy”, and the shift to capitalism was accelerated greatly. It was from here that political oppositions to the current neo-liberal model began to emerge.

Many Chinese intellectuals referred to the 1980s as their good old time since that was the only decade when most Chinese intellectuals seemed to have a consensus, clearly a right wing one. It was not the case anymore since the 1990s, when some people began to re-evaluate the transition to capitalism and re-appreciate the importance of the socialist period from 1949 to 1979. These people were not alone. The whole society was going through a thorough structural adjustment and workers and peasants bore all the costs. In the urban sector, millions lost their lifetime jobs because of the privatization and the working class began their nationwide struggles since then. These depressed, extremely exploited people still remembered clearly their good days under a socialist society, so they had nothing but socialism as their goal. In the countryside, the tension between peasants and state was palpable because of the stagnant revenue in face of increasing expenses and corrupted, sometimes violent local bureaucracy. The long process of fighting the neo-liberal turn to capitalism gave birth to the post-Mao Chinese left inside workers, peasants and petty bourgeoisie (including intelligentsia). The late goodbye to the “golden” 1980s actually announced a new era of modern China’s political history.

There are, broadly speaking, three most important sources of leftists in today’s China. They share some of their politics, but still differ on a number of ones.

The first group was the veteran of the Chinese Revolution in the last century. Many of them experienced civil war, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and maybe once supported the neo-liberal transition, but gradually began to stand against it. Although they are not part of the ruling class because of their politics, they still have relatively closer relationship with the CCP than others.

The veterans share socialism as their goal although their interpretations might be very different (from Soviet model to more radical versions). They also have complicated attitudes towards the CCP, on the one hand, they dislike the political program of the current regime, on the other hand, it was once a revolutionary party that they joined for the good of the people. So within the group there are divergent opinions, some try to believe that CCP can be steered towards socialism again (if the top leaders change minds, for example), and the rest gradually lean towards the idea that a thorough reform or revolution is needed to build socialism.

The second group came from the intellectual/petty bourgeoisie. They were part of the privileged people in the 1980s when the CCP tried to build a political coalition with them in order to isolate workers and peasants. However, with the good 1980s gone, petty bourgeoisie’s political weight decreased gradually because the CCP has already defeated the workers and peasants. The deepening of marketization and privatization has made them the new victims.

The intellectual/petty bourgeoisie group does not have a general political goal; often times their politics is a combination of several distinct elements, including the “new left” tradition from the west, nationalist sentiment and some parts of the Chinese revolutionary tradition from the Mao era. Radicalized ones tend to work with workers and other leftists to build future revolutionary path to socialism, while more liberal people prefer some sort of social democracy/regulated capitalism and put their hope in the peaceful changes from above.

The last group has its roots in workers, including the ones who had experiences under socialist period and the ones who became workers in more recent time. Workers have a natural tendency to be hostile to capitalism, in particular, the Chinese workers suffered greatly during the transition to capitalism; but they as a class did not become conscious until the nationwide layoff in the 1990s. The older generation saw the huge contrast between the Mao era and the current era, so they had very strong will to rebuild socialism in China; the younger generation only has experiences under capitalism, and generally they were not as politically sophisticated and organized as the older ones, but the severe exploitation by the new capitalist class make them resent the current regime.

In general, the workers, especially the old generation, are the most revolutionary ones in that they have nothing to lose in abolishing the current regime. Unlike the other two groups, they do not have any more hope in the ruling class as they have been hopelessly waiting for a “left turn” in recent two decades.

Therefore, the post-Mao left gradually formed two major camps as we have introduced at the beginning, differing on the nature of the CCP and means to achieve a better society. The radicalized parts of veterans and petty bourgeoisie joined the workers on overthrowing the current regime and constructing socialism (but not rejecting possible progressive reforms), while the more conservative parts of them gather around the goal of progressive reform (and exclusively reforms) under the current regime. The conflict has been there for a long while, but since the post-Mao left is relatively young and weak in various aspects and the dominant right-wing has been always very hostile towards any dissent, the two camps mostly worked together on the issues they share the same opinions, for example, they both oppose neo-liberalism and imperialism. Moreover, Mao is the flag held by all camps. As a side-note, although Mao has been demonized for so many years, his reputation remains extremely high among people, and increasingly so. In my experience, it is very rare nowadays to find an active Chinese leftist who is not a self-claimed Maoist, although the term “Maoist” might refer to different meanings.

This harmony between the “reform” camp and “revolution” camp could be maintained solely on the basis that the power of the left wing remains weak and the ruling class kept playing hardball with working class people. However, in recent years, the situation dramatically changed. First, a new wave of labor movement together with the world economic crisis greatly terrified the capitalists and the cadres, who are forced to begin changing their strategies to maintain order. The growing mass actions against the local government also manifest Chinese people’s huge resentment towards the current capitalist regime.

Second, as the contradiction of neo-liberalism unravels, lots of former middle or right-wing white collar/petty bourgeoisie people began joining the left wing. This significantly increases the impact of the left.

Not surprisingly, there arise politicians who deliberately behave more “left” than others. The most notable example is Bo Xilai, son of one of the former leaders of the CCP and currently the party leader of Chongqing Municipality, who started the huge campaign called “Praise Red & Destroy Black (chang hong da hei)” in recent years. The essence of the campaign is to destroy the gangs and maintain a good social order (destroy black) and educate people with so-called “red songs/books” which includes both revolutionary legacies and other purely old songs (praise red).

Bo, a charismatic cadre, likes to quote from Mao in his speeches and talk with passion and candidness like a revolutionary leader in those good old days. His programs and talks are well received among people and it is not very unrealistic to assume that he could easily win a national election if there is one. As a matter of fact, Bo’s program is a clearly capitalist one; there is nothing changed in the economic model, they embrace sweatshops and big capital just like other places do. The improvements like providing low-rent public housing and a safer society are pretty limited. Bo is definitely not building socialism (besides his lip service), although a good number of leftists try to convince themselves that he is the one (or one of the ones).

All these new factors contribute to the end of the harmony. Lots of signs suggest that left wing now has more say in the politics and even some of the high level cadres began to send a “leftist” message to people. This inevitably reinforces the confidence of “reform” camp in restoring socialism via the CCP as if the party is a neutral vehicle which can be turning left or right depending on the leaders. They began praising Bo Xilai and others as true socialist leaders who inherit the legacy of Mao and follow the revolutionary tradition. However, the other camp points out that the “left turn” is both very limited in its scope and opportunistic in its practice, and they find it unacceptable to be a political instrument of the ruling class. Thus it is only a matter of time for the fights between the two camps to start.

Based on this context, the internal struggles among the Chinese left are nothing but the natural results of the development of the left and the decline of the neo-liberalism. Its implications are twofold. First, it implies the leftist impact in China has reached a new high level due to the people’s continuing struggles against capitalism, and even part of the ruling class begin to “turn left” on purpose. Second, the left wing is now facing a historical moment; if the “reform” camp wins, the Chinese left wing will become a political partner of the CCP and cease to be a revolutionary force; but if the “revolution” camp successfully radicalizes the left wing, then the Chinese left should be able to play an important role in binging an end to neo-liberalism and capitalism in general in China and the world.

Some factors are likely to have significant impacts on the “choice”. First, is a Chinese version of welfare state possible in the near future? In other words, is the Chinese bourgeoisie willing and able to give up some of their privileges and redistribute part of their profits and rents to the working class? Second, is the Chinese left able to figure out new ways to mobilize and organize the mass as the early CCP cadres successfully did 80 years ago? My answers to these two questions are no and yes, but of course only time and practice can tell the results.

http://sanhati.com/excerpted/3894/

SOCIAL CONFLICT THEORY

In social-conflict theory, it is argued that individuals and groups within society have differing amounts of material and non-material resources and that the more powerful groups use their power in order to exploit groups with less power. The two methods by which this exploitation is done are through brute force and economics. Old-school social conflict theorists argue that money is the mechanism which creates social disorder.

Sociologist Steve Padgitt explains, "Consider paying rent towards housing. The conflict theorist argues that this relationship is unequal and favors the owners. Renters may pay rent for 50 years and still gain absolutely no right or economic interest with the property. It is this type of relationship which the conflict theorist will use to show that social relationships are about power and exploitation."

Padgitt continues, "Marx argued that through a dialectic process, social evolution was directed by the result of class conflict. Marxism argues that human history is all about this conflict, a result of the strong-rich exploiting the poor-weak. From such a perspective, money is made through the exploitation of the worker. It is argued thus, that in order for a factory owner to make money, he must pay his workers less than they deserve."

TEN THESIS OF MARX.

1. It no longer makes sense to ask to what extent the teaching of Marx and Engels is, today, theoretically acceptable and practically applicable.

2. Today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias.

3. Though basically ambiguous, there are, however, important aspects of Marxian teaching which in their changing function and applying to different locations have until today retained their effectiveness. Also, the impetus generated by the praxis of the old Marxist labor movement has been presently incorporated into the practical struggles of peoples -and classes.

4. The first step in re-establishing a revolutionary theory and practice consists in breaking with that Marxism which claims to monopolize revolutionary initiative as well as theoretical and practical direction.

5. Marx is today only one among the numerous precursors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the working class. No less important are the so-called Utopian Socialists from Thomas More to the present. No less important are the great rivals of Marx, such as Blanqui, and his sworn enemies, such as Proudhon and Bakunin. No less important, in the final result, are the more recent developments such as German revisionism, French syndicalism, and Russian Bolshevism.

6. The following points are particularly critical for Marxism: (a) its dependence on the underdeveloped economic and political conditions in Germany and all the other countries of central and eastern Europe where it was to have political relevance; (b) its unconditional adherence to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution; (c) the unconditional acceptance of the advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries and as objective preconditions for the transition to socialism; to which one should add; (d) the consequences of its repeated desperate and contradictory attempts to break out of these conditions.

7. The results of these conditions are: (a) the overestimation of the state as the decisive instrument of social revolution; (b) the mystical identification of the development of the capitalist economy with the social revolution of the working class; (c) the subsequent ambiguous development of this first form of the Marxian theory of revolution by the artificial grafting onto it of a theory of the communist revolution in two phases; this theory, directed on the one hand against Blanqui, and on the other against Bakunin, whisks away from the present movement the real emancipation of the working class and puts it back into the indefinite future.

8. This is the point for insertion of the Leninist or Bolshevik development; and it is in this new form that Marxism has been transferred to Russia and Asia. Thereby Marxism has been changed; from a revolutionary theory it has become an ideology. This ideology could be and has been used for a variety of different goals.

9. It is from this viewpoint that one comes to judge in a critical spirit the two Russian revolutions of 1917 and 1928, and it is from this viewpoint that one must determine the functions fulfilled by Marxism today in Asia and on a world scale.

10. The control of the workers over the production of their own lives will not come from their occupying the positions, on the international and world markets, abandoned by the self-destroying and so-called free competition of the monopolistic owners of the means of production. This control can only result from a planned intervention by all the classes today excluded from it into a production which today is already tending in every way to be regulated in a monopolistic and planned fashion.