"There is no fundamental contradiction between socialism and a market
economy. The problem is how to develop the productive forces more
effectively. We used to have a planned economy, but our experience over
the years has proved that having a totally planned economy hampers the
development of the productive forces to a certain extent. If we combine a
planned economy with a market economy, we shall be in a better position to
liberate the productive forces and speed up economic growth." Deng
Xiaoping
For the past 22 years I've studied the Chinese economy, made several
trips to the mainland, including a two year stay in 1996-1998, and have
visited numerous cities, towns, and villages (including visits to the
communes before they were dismantled), interviewed rural farmers
(including many Dai farmers in Yunnan) and managers at state-run
enterprises. However, my interest in China dates back further than my
interest in Chinese economics. As a teenager and during my early
undergraduate years I explored Chinese history and philosophy, as well as
the Mandarin (guó yu) language. I look back on my first course in Asian
Philosophy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis (Normandy), which I
audited during my junior year of high school, as one of the primary
influences on my becoming a professor.
This essay series was the foundation (seedgrain) for Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision.
Please note that while these essays formed the intellectual basis for the
text, they are significantly different in a number of ways. By way of
analogy, in some ways you might think of the relationship of the essays to
the text as similar to that between MS-DOS and Windows. The latter is an
evolution from the former, but they are significantly and functionally
distinct. The latter contains ideas that had yet to develop when the
essays were being written, although the ideas in the essays made the new
insights of the text possible. However, looked at in another way, these
essays are a completely different operating system (Linux, perhaps) to the
more tightly integrated operating system of the book (Mac OS, I hope, and
not Windows, because of the heterodox nature of the theoretical framework
deployed in the text). The essays were written as individual attempts to
make sense of certain aspects of the Chinese transition process. I made
no effort to organize them in any coherent whole. The text, on the other
hand, was written with a singular theoretical framework as the guide,
utilizing a version of overdeterminist Marxian theory (the former term
refers to the specific ontology deployed -- one that is more consistent
with current understandings of physics and the nature of change and the
latter refers to a specific type of social accounting) to critique the
Marxian theory that shapes the political and economic strategies of the
Communist Party of China (CPC). Indeed, one of the most serious
shortcomings of the "China literature," at least that which attempts to
explicate post-1949 China, is the illiteracy of most "sinologists" on the
language of Marxian theory, and, more particularly, the differences
between variant forms of Marxian theory that have been deployed and
contested in China. The text attempts to make up for these past
shortcomings and to provide a critique of "modernist Marxism" CPC-style,
and its rationale for maintaining monopoly control over the state,
utilizing the same logical categories as the CPC. Hopefully, the argument
that is produced would, therefore, be more difficult to dismiss on purely
ideological grounds (although I've seen enough intellectual gymnastics to
know some will find a way to do precisely that).
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Chinese Capitalism and the
Modernist Vision is that it is the first and only text to examine
the theoretical and related political roots of the post-Mao economic
reorganization in China and to use this grounding to make sense of the
current transition of Chinese society, as well as the initial conditions
for this transition. The text also answers the question (provocatively)
of what kind of transition this is and why it is so significant to
political economy. The essays below were a beginning at exploring the
interconnections between politics, Marxian theory, and economics in the
context of Chinese transformation.
Doug Henwood Interview with Satya Gabriel on WBAI New
York Part 1 of 2 (MP3 format)
Doug Henwood
Interview Part 2 of 2
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