AES- Actually-Existing Socialism

Edit: Dictatorship of the Proletariat + Predominant, collective ownership and control of the economy = AES?

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    I do not believe China, Vietnam, and such can be considered AES as such, and indeed I think their leadership is actively moving in a capitalist direction (read Lin Chun’s Revolution and Counterrevolution in China). I don’t know enough about the political economy of Cuba to speak on that.

    I think if you phrase the question as “why has China experienced so much economic growth relative to other Asian countries like India or Indonesia?” you wouldn’t come to the conclusion that China is capitalist because the obvious subsequent question would be why did capitalism with Chinese characteristics take over while capitalism with Indian characteristics and capitalism with Indonesian characteristics haven’t taken off. And I haven’t heard any answer that didn’t just boiled down to “Chinese capitalists are just big-brained while the other capitalists are dum-dums.”

    They may not be socialist, but they are not capitalist either. For example, I would argue the PRC is not capitalist because the country hasn’t experienced a real boom/bust cycle in its 70+ years of existence. Notice that a bust cycle is different from any economic downturn like the GLF or Vietnam hitting an economic downturn because the Soviet Union collapsed and they still were heavily sanctioned. People don’t emphasize this, but all other things equal, a socialist society should be able to more effectively and efficiently use the collective labor-hours of their society than a capitalist society.

    Take something like the reserve army of labor, something that is inherent in all capitalist societies due to the inherent logic of capitalism but not inherent in socialist societies. A capitalist society can never reach full employment but a socialist society can. Because the capitalist society can’t reach full employment, the workers there would have to work longer hours to make up for the reserve army of labor that could be employed but aren’t. Longer hours means burnout, wear-and-tear of the body, greater chance of disease due to suppressed immune system and stress, and so on, which has a cumulative effect on how productive that society is. And by productive, I don’t mean line go up GDP or just mindlessly producing commodities without caring about whether those commodities are socially necessary. I mean things like literacy rates, average child height (low height means children are suffering from malnutrition), miles of rail, whether a society is food sufficient, and so on.

    On a micro level, no, I don’t think a Chinese worker is fundamentally experiencing a society that is a whole lot different from a US worker. But just because this is true on a micro level doesn’t means that it’s true on a macro level. The question is how do you make sense of a society where on a micro level it’s not a whole lot different from a capitalist society but on a macro level it’s completely different?

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I don’t really disagree with your points (although the 4 Asian tigers have definitely peaked and are experiencing some degree of stagnation and recession at least for the case of HK and Taiwan) but it goes back to my main point that the PRC isn’t capitalist. Whether the PRC is socialist or not is whether you think “the PRC is neither capitalist nor socialist” is a copout answer or whether you think you can have a non-capitalist, non-socialist, and non-feudal mode of production.

        It’s hard for me to not see AES as a nascent stage of socialism in the same way I see Italian city-states of the Renaissance as a nascent stage of capitalism. Like AES of today with regards with socialism, Italian city-states aren’t archetypal capitalist societies. They lack a proletarian and bourgeois class for one, and they have the trappings of feudal societies. But if you analyze them on a macro level, those Italian city-states don’t really behave like feudal states. For one, actually existing feudalism like the Tang dynasty or the Carolingian empire derive their power from the land they control and the peasantry who work on that land. The peasantry can be utilized through corvee labor to work on public infrastructure projects or to form the bulk of a feudal army. The Italian city-states, on the other hand, are tiny in comparison, but despite their size, they punch well above their weight if they were just feudal societies. They derive their power more from being at an advantageous location of important trade routes, ruled by powerful merchant families rather than feudal lords. Unlike feudal societies but very similar to capitalist societies, the Italian city-states tried to solve many societal problems by simply throwing money at it. This is how they became (over)reliant on mercenary armies that would constantly betray them for the ever higher bidder. On an ideological level, the Italian city-states embraced Renaissance humanism, which is fundamentally anti-feudal and has various components that survives in liberalism. It doesn’t make sense for an anti-feudal ideology to spring forth from a feudal base but perfectly reasonable if it’s a nascent capitalist base which gave rise to an anti-feudal ideology.

        If you traveled back in time to 1523, nobody would believe that Renaissance Italy would be the birth of a completely different mode of production. After all, Renaissance Italy weren’t the first polities to leverage their advantageous location to get rich through trade. It’s only through 500 more years of hindsight that people could see what would blossom in the Dutch Republic and Industrial Revolution England had its origins in those Italian city-states.