Scientific Socialism in Contemporary China

Contribution to the International Symposium held in Wuhan,
People’s Republic of China, 13 - 15 October

Friedrich Engels and Scientific Socialism in Contemporary China

It is 110 years since Friedrich Engels, the man who along with his companion Karl Marx laid the foundations of scientific socialism, passed away. To commemorate his death, an international symposium was held in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The organisers were the University of Wuhan, the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the CC of the Communist Party of China and the Academy of Social Sciences of China. 32 Chinese speakers made contributions, as well as 13 foreigners.

At the request of the organisers, Peter Franssen, journalist with the Belgian weekly Solidaire and researcher at the Institute for Marxist Studies, wrote a contribution, which you can read in full below.

Peter Franssen
17-11-2005
Mister chairman,
Friends and comrades,
Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure and honour for me to have the opportunity of saying a few words here about Friedrich Engels and his merits in the construction of socialism in China.

What the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people have achieved since the revolution of 1949 is unprecedented in the history of mankind. There has never before been such a huge advance in the economic, social, cultural and political fields. Only the construction of the USSR, after the October Revolution of 1917, bears comparison with it. Practice has brilliantly and unequivocally proved that the general line of the Chinese Communist Party is correct. The achievements of the Chinese Communist Party have only been possible because the Party took as its guide scientific socialism, the dictatorship of people’s democracy, the leadership pf the Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism. Friedrich Engels is, along with Karl Marx, the man who laid the fundamental basis of Chinese Communist Party thought. 110 years after Engels’ death, his ideas are nowhere more alive than in China.

Historical and Dialectical Materialism

Engels was only 23 when he wrote Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie. He was thus the first to apply the method of dialectical and historical materialism to the analysis of economic relations in bourgeois society. He researched economic phenomena in their entirety, their interaction and their development. Bourgeois political economy proclaimed then - as now, 161 years later – that capitalist private economy was the highest possible economic form and that capitalism was only capable of improvement in its distribution mechanisms. However, Engels showed that private ownership of the means of production under capitalist relations is characterised by a number of laws which bear within them the death of private property. The most important are the law of constant competition and the law of the constant relative or even absolute impoverishment of the masses.

Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie draws a sharp dividing line between the petty bourgeois, who reject capitalism on moral grounds, and scientific socialism, which shows the necessity and the historical limitations of private property and concludes that a socialist revolution is necessary to destroy the private ownership of the means of production and to allow society to move up to a higher stage, where the liberation of the productive forces is the main object.

The dividing line traced by Engels in 1844 today still forms the boundary between Marxism and « left-wing » petty bourgeois currents in China and elsewhere in the world. On the one hand there is scientific socialism. On the other there is a hotchpotch of moral, ethic and religious considerations, in other words idealism, which, as Engels caustically remarked, “seems to have a previously prepared recipe for achieving heaven on earth”. With the Utopians, scientific analysis must make give way to morals. Engels tales aim at Karl Heinzen, a representative of the Utopians, and writes: “Mr Heinzen imagines that property relations and heritage rights can change at will. He cannot understand that the property relations of each epoch are the necessary result of the modes of production and the way trade is carried on in that period. ” ¹

That same year 1844 Engels wrote with Marx The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. It was their first work in common. It is a devastating criticism of Utopianism and contains the fundamental ideas of the materialist conception of history, which proclaims that material production plays a decisive role in the development of society.

In 1844-1845 Engels and Marx wrote The German Ideology in which they show the dialectical relation between productive forces and relations of production. The historical role of capitalism and of its bearer, the bourgeoisie, was to concentrate the means of production and thereby to revolutionise society at every level. However, to the extent that the bourgeoisie accomplishes this feat, it approaches its limit, determined by the economic and social contradictions it itself has created. The ever-recurring crises of overproduction since then and the ever-recurring wars between capitalist countries and against developing countries for the capture or redistribution of raw materials and markets, show how correct the analysis of Engels and Marx was.

In the space of barely two years, Engels and Marx had worked out the foundations of dialectical and historical materialism. Lenin later wrote : « Historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking..»²

Utopianism today

All that teaches us that socialism is a transition system containing characteristics of the feudal and capitalist past and of the communist future. Socialism is no static situation but a movement from low to high, from primary to developed. Socialism will itself come to an end and pass into communism, as soon as all the economic, political, social, religious, moral and cultural vestiges of feudal and capitalist production relations in social structures are a thing of the past, and as soon as the members of society have left these vestiges in their behaviour and thought behind. Socialist transition society will necessarily last for a very long historical period and will, like all previous societies, constantly change its structure.

Some observers, Marxists or not, have not understood this basic idea of Engels and Marx and get very upset when they hear the words « socialist construction in China ».

One of the texts circulating in Western Europe and the United States is the book "China and Socialism" by two American professors, Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett. There one can read the following: « Beginning in 1978, the Chinese Communist Party embarked on a market-based reform process that, while allegedly designed to reinvigorate the effort to build socialism, has actually led in the opposite direction and at great cost to the Chinese people. »³ A few pages further is this: « Despite the hopes of many on the left, it is our argument that China's market reform process has led the country not toward a new form of socialism, but rather an increasingly hierarchical and brutal form of capitalism. »⁴ The objective reader will be flummoxed by this bold conclusion: what we’re talking about is “a brutal form of capitalism” with a ”great cost to the Chinese people”. Professor Minqi Li from York University comments as follows: “Hart-Landsberg and Burkett present an insightful analysis of the internal and external contradictions of Chinese capitalism. They convincingly argue that the Chinese experiment of market socialism has led to nothing less than full-fledged capitalism. China and Socialism will prove to be one of the most important contributions to the Marxist literature on contemporary China”.

We can point to another piece of writing that is being diligently studied: From Situational Dialectics to Pseudo-Dialectics: Mao, Jiang and Capitalist Transition by the American professor Barbara Foley. Ms Foley writes: “There are a number of indications that the People's Republic of China has become for all practical purposes a capitalist country, and that even the residual features of the socialist iron bowl are rapidly being eroded. ”⁵

Martin Hart-Landsberg, Paul Burkett and Barbara Foley give identical reasons to prove that the Chinese Communist Party has exchanged socialism for capitalism. These reasons are: income disparities have widened at one of the most rapid paces in the world; the official unemployment rate is nearly 5 percent but many investigators in the West think that unemployment is at a much higher rate; corruption is the rule of the day; the economic transformation with its option of everything through the market, of privatisation and increasing foreign domination has created an economy that has little to do with socialism; forced overtime, illegal working hours, unpaid wages, and dreadful health and safety conditions are commonplace.

What is their conclusion? Barbara Foley formulates it as follows: “Supporters of Chinese socialism who believe that the die has not yet been cast - that leftist forces within the CCP can eventually win out, and that workers and peasants can once again travel the road to communist egalitarianism - are, I believe, fooling themselves if they think that these things will happen without another revolution.”⁶

A revolution is necessary to overthrow this monstrous regime, according to these “left-wing” critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

China’s Achievements

So it is time to take a look at the horrors the Chinese Communist Party has brought about throughout the country.

In the first phase of the construction of socialism, from 1950 to 1978, the growth rate of the Chinese economy was 6,2% a year. This first phase was characterised by the organisation of the state and the building of industry, both as good as non-existent. China was a backward agricultural country. In such circumstances, there is no better method than centralised planning. Primitive accumulation of capital has still to begin and industry must go from its embryonic stage to a fully-fledged apparatus. The capital gained must be reinvested straightaway in order to realise this objective. In spite of which the consumption of the average Chinese rose by 2,2 % a year. 7 Between 1950 and 1978 the Chinese population doubled, but the number of poor people nonetheless dropped from 300 to 250 millions.⁸

In the sixties, the industrial infrastructure had outgrown its infant clothes. However, the state subsidies received by firms went on rising, year after year. The bank credits of many firms reached record heights. In the middle of the sixties 60% of firms were running at a loss. State subsidies to industry accounted for a third of total government spending.⁹ Industrial reform was the key to the following phase in the construction of socialism in China.

In this phase, which began in 1978, the economy grew on average by 9.5 % a year. That is eight times the figure for Germany and three times more than in the United States. Consumption and thus the standard of living of the average Chinese rose by 7.5% a year.

Chinese society as a whole at present enjoys moderate welfare. Between 1978 and 2004, the number of people living in dire poverty dropped from 250 million to 26 million. In 1949 a Chinese could hope to live on average until he was 40. Today, life expectancy is 71 years and in Beijing even 80. In 1949 90% of the population could neither read nor write. The figure is now less that 10%.

The mode of production and the structure of the economy have in the last 25 years taken big steps towards the level where social ownership of all important means of production will once again become necessary. When the revolution took place in 1949 agriculture and individual craft industry made up 90% of the economy. There were scarcely 3 million industrial workers, 0.6% of the population. Agriculture has since dropped to less than 20 % and will according to plan make up only 10% in 2010. The proportion for industry will then be 50 % and for the tertiary sector 40%.¹⁰

What do the masters say?

We have seen how Engels and Marx sketch the dialectical relationship between mode of production and production relations and how the Utopians set themselves outside this reality and daydream about a perfect society. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao Zedong, all these masters of the working class, have pointed out how mistaken the Utopians were.

Friedrich Engels treated the Utopians of the beginning of the 19th century such as Claude-Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen mildly. Engels wrote: “The utopians, we saw, were utopians because they could be nothing else at a time when capitalist production was as yet so little developed. They necessarily had to construct the elements of a new society out of their own heads, because within the old society the elements of the new were not as yet generally apparent; for the basic plan of the new edifice they could only appeal to reason, just because they could not as yet appeal to contemporary history. ”¹¹

However, the Utopians who lived in Engels’ day and those of today, Martin Hart-Landsberg, Paul Burkett and Barbara Foley no longer have that excuse. They can read what Engels says: “Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realisation were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions.”¹²

After the revolution of 1949, Mao Zedong invoked these same economic conditions to plead for good relations and a united front with the national bourgeoisie. He declared: “The view held by certain people that it is possible to eliminate capitalism and realise socialism at an early date is wrong, it does not tally with our national conditions.”¹³

In 1921 Lenin made a self-criticism concerning the period of the three previous years. He wrote: “We expected… to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small-peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong.”¹⁴ This mistake had led, said Lenin, to a serious defeat: “In attempting to go over straight to communism we, in the spring of 1921, sustained a more serious defeat on the economic front than any defeat inflicted upon us by Kolchak, Denikin or Pilsudski. This defeat was much more serious, significant and dangerous. It was expressed in the isolation of the higher administrators of our economic policy from the lower and their failure to produce that development of the productive forces which the Programme of our Party regards as vital and urgent.”¹⁵ Hence the New Economic Policy with among others this directive of Lenin: “ We shall lease the enterprises that are not absolutely essential for us to lessees, including private capitalists and foreign concessionaires.” ¹⁶ Lenin added that this period could last a long time: “But it will take a whole historical epoch to get the entire population into the work of the co-operatives through NEP. At best we can achieve this in one or two decades.”¹⁷

And naturally, just as nowadays, the critics howled: “ The Bolsheviks have reverted to capitalism!”¹⁸ Lenin scolded them: “They are not assisting but hindering economic development; … they are not assisting but hindering the proletarian revolution; … they are pursuing not proletarian, but petty-bourgeois aims.”¹⁹

The Rise of Social Democratic ideas

Friedrich Engels has taught us that the birth of a new class is inevitable when new production relations arise. Private ownership of some means of production created a new capitalist class in China opposite the class the latter created itself, the working class. The working class has the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist state as its two most important weapons. The capitalist class seeks ways and means to realise its own programme. In China that occurs today in the first place through the expression of social democratic ideas, which, as Marx wrote “want to take the teeth out of socialism.”²⁰

With some, that happens by pointing out the “convergence between capitalism and Chinese-style socialism, comparing Marx’s Communist Manifesto to the practice of western societies and finding much of Marx’s social program realised in the West. ” 21 Others add that: “Since the end of World War II, all major capitalist countries have taken varied and energetic measures for social welfare so as to alleviate the labour-capital contradictions.”²² In Western Europe since the second half of the 19th century, social democracy preaches a third way between capitalism and communism, both of which it calls “inhuman systems”. Some people in China copy this humbug literally and write: “Today China is caught between the two extremes of misguided socialism and crony capitalism, and suffering from the worst of both systems. We have to find an alternate way. This is the great mission of our generation. I am generally in favour of orienting the country toward market reforms, but China's development must be more equal, more balanced. The European idea of social-democracy like in Germany can be a model for China's new left.”²³

The criticism Friedrich Engels made of professor Dühring can be applied here, where he says: “Dühringian economics comes down to the following proposition: the capitalist mode of production is quite good, and can remain in existence, but the capitalist mode of distribution is of evil, and must disappear.”²⁴ The economic laws and contradictions of capitalism are to be found in its production relations, so Engels teaches us. Private ownership of some means of production inevitably brings into being capitalist production relations whose fundamental contradictions cannot be prevented by any socialist state or any social democrat looking for the third way. The original need for private ownership of some means of production also turns into its opposite in modern China, to the extent that private ownership completes its mission and becomes a brake on further development of the productive forces.

No one can foretell when this process will be so far advanced that the abolition of private ownership will become a necessity. What we can now say, however, with positive certainty, is that at that moment the political and ideological steadfastness of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese working class will be of paramount importance.

Thank you very much indeed.

Footnotes

¹. Friedrich Engels, Die Kommunisten und Karl Heinzen, Marx-Engels, Werke, Dietz-Verlag, Berlin, 1980, Band 4, p. 314.
². Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Collected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1963, vol.19, p. 25
³. Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China & Socialism, Market Reforms and Class Struggle, Monthly Review, New York, July-August 2004, p. 8.
⁴. Ibidem, blz. 26.
⁵. Barbara Foley, From Situational Dialectics to Pseudo-Dialectics: Mao, Jiang and Capitalist Transition, Cultural Logic, Volume 5, 2002. Foley’s text can be found on: http://eserver.org/clogic/2002/foley.html.
⁶. Ibidem, point 5.
⁷. Justin Yifu Lin, Fang Cai and Zhou Li, The Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform, University Press, Hong Kong, 1995.
⁸. Liu Wenpu, Poverty and the Poverty Policy in China, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Beijing, 1999.
⁹. Zhu Huayou and Liu Changhui, The Development of China's Nongovernmentally and Privately Operated Economy, in: Gao Shangquan and Chi Fulin, Studies on the Chinese Market Economy, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1996, pp. 1-38.
¹⁰. Li Jingwen and Zhang Xiao, China's Environmental Policies in the 21st Century, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Beijing, 1999.
¹¹. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Marx & Engels, Collected Works, Volume 25 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch23.htm
¹². Ibidem, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm.
¹³. Mao Zedong, Fight for a Fundamental Turn for the Better in the Nation’s Financial and Economic Situation, Selected Works, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1977, Volume V, p.30.
¹⁴. Lenin, Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, p.58
¹⁵. Lenin, The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments, , Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, p.63.
¹⁶. Lenin, New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, p.28
¹⁷. Lenin, On Co-operation, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, p.470.
¹⁸. Lenin, New Times and Old Mistakes, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, pp.21 and 24.
¹⁹. Ibidem, p.27
²⁰. Karl Marx, To F.-A. Sorge, 19 September 1879, in: Marx & Engels, Selected Correspondence, Lawrence and Wishart, London, p.396
²¹. Sen Jiru, Zhongguo Du Dang 'Bu Xiansheng', Jinri Zhongguo Chubanshe, Beijing, 1998, pp. 36-42.
²². Su Shaozhi, Developing Marxism under Contemporary Conditions, in: Su Shaozi and others, Marxism in China, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1983, p. 29.
²³. Wang Hui, China's New Order: Society, Politics and Economy in Transition, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2003; Wang Hui, China: Unequal Shares – how Tiananmen Protests led to the New Market Economy, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2002. This last text can also be found on http://www.christusrex.org/www1/news/hui-4-02.html.
²⁴. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Marx & Engels, Collected Works, volume 25 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch26.htm

Thursday, 17 November 2005, 12h40,

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