A quick comment re Sun Yat-Sen: it’s been decades since I studied Sun, Wang Ching-Wei, Jiang Jie Shih, Whampoa, the Northern Expediton, the Shanghai Massacre etc. But I recall that Sun had spent several years in Japan prior to his raising the Kuomintang banner in Guangdong, and that much of his early support came from elements in Japan who few would suspect of any real sympathy with the Chinese. Another important early source of support was of course the Soong family, the living descendants of Sung dynasty royalty. Banker T V Soong was the key figure, until Soong Mei-Ling’s marriage to Generalissimo Jiang became a key link to US support. The historians I found most credible gave Sun credit sincerely wanting to improve the lot of the average Chinese, but saw him basically as a tool being manipulated by Japanese elites. Jiang placed his bet on the US & the British Empire, also got key support from J Stalin & his “emissary” Borodin, only to lose most of his stake in 1949.

It’s worth noting that Jiang’s main rival for top dog in the Kuomintang, Wang Ching-Wei, eventually was exposed as a Japanese stooge, and wound up back in Japan.

Marx is generally thought of as profound and prescient. A tip of the hat to Karl Marx & Nostradamus. But we are tasked to comment here on the pointy-headed authors, Bichler & Nitzan, apologists for the investor class, and their contemplation of capitalist end times.

What these authors do not consider is that the nature of capitalism as we know it is determined by two factors, the money supply and interest rates. In the capitalism we know, the owners of capital also control the money supply and the rate of interest. Remove the control of the money supply and the determination of interest rates from the control of the capitalist overlords, invest it under public authority, and capitalism becomes a different animal.

Capitalism needn’t die, it can transform itself.

The decreasing profitability of any given product does not cause the decline of any given industry. Investor dollars seek stable returns as much as they seek increasing returns. Chrysler was not suffering from some mysterious decline in profitability all over the industrial world. It suffered from its inability to adapt to the market, but even more than that, it was the victim of the failure of that market itself. This is usually called “overproduction”, one of the root flaws of the capitalist system itself, so the story goes.

Overproduction is most often due to a lack of money in consumer hands, not to market saturation. The amount of money in consumer hands is determined by interest rates. Lower interest rates, the Fed strategy at present, to lower the cost of money, which should theoretically increase the money supply and revive the market. This is not happening, so the authors wail about the end of capitalism in some Hegelian sense.

But the fact is the current problem with capitalism is purely a money management problem. It is currently managed in the private interest ( and very incompetently), by and for the rich, but if it were managed ( money…not markets ) in the public interest, capitalism would revive and behave rather differently from that point on….

And what Marx had the wisdom to point out was that the decline in the rate of profit has the more fundamental effect than simply raw natural limits of growth.

> The financial sector that produces nothing devours the productive sector, misappropriating useful capital, starving the real economy into collapse.

What actually occurred was that in the 1970s it became clear that profitability in the production sector had begun to decline in the advanced industrial world. there might be room on earth for more Chryslers, but it was no longer as profitable to produce more Chryslers as it once had been. This takes effect long before the available lebensraum has been exhausted. Marx understood this fact better than anyone before him. The logical consequence of this was that more and more people with money shifted their allocations away from trying to develop new products (because the profits gained by doing so had declined) and moved them over to financial speculations. In the short run this enables a recovery of profits, but in the long run it fails. Marx had all of this laid down rather nicely a long time ago.

That may be true in the long haul, PatrickSMcNally, but at present there is still space and plenty of resources to be exploited. The system begun to devour its own entrails before it has encountered insuperable limits to growth. That is happening presently with what is called “new finance”. The financial sector that produces nothing devours the productive sector, misappropriating useful capital, starving the real economy into collapse.

This has nothing to do with the limits to growth or a shortage of lebensraum. It’s a matter of too many wannabe financial smart-asses trying to live on Easy Street.

Why are you people parading your erudition on Marx and China, and blah, blah? Richler & Nitzan went to the trouble to write this article for you. The least you can do is respond to it. You have plenty of opportunities to jack off elsewhere. Thank you very much.

This article is little more than an academic exercise. Many have made a living by regurgitating such wild abstractions.

(My lead was simply in response to teafoe2. Sorry you felt the need to “follow”.)

How this began was right here:

> While your resurrecting Marx, let’s see how he’s done where his name has graced the hemispheres of the 40s 50s and 60s. So how’s his record so far?

Unfortunately, Marx’s name never in the last century really graced the advanced industrial states which had been the thrust of his analysis. The modern-day decline of capitalism which is quite visible all around the world right now is what motivated the original header piece which began this thread. With respect to the header article there should have been no cause to raise any issues about “where his name has graced the hemispheres of the 40s 50s and 60s.” But that was your choice, I simply followed that lead. The crisis which capitalism in the 21st century will increasingly face will certainly be very different from the older types of crisis which generated in semi-developed or simply undeveloped regions of the last century. One can expect to witness a much more direct correlation to what Marx had delineated as real underlying crises of capitalism.

“WHILE SUN YAT-SEN’S PROPOSALS with regard to increments of land value clearly followed Henry George, his most famous land proposal did not. This involved the slogan, “All land to the tillers,” which he apparently advanced in 1924 (Leng and Palmer, 1960, 154). Sun was quite vague about how this was to be achieved. In 1923-24, he refused to endorse a program for land confiscation and redistribution (Wilbur, 1976, 212-4). Sun’s general idea, however, is consistently claimed as an inspiration for latter-day land reforms in Taiwan and mainland China.”

Yes, that vagueness accounted for why no plan of action was left for his successors to follow. The problems were never actually addressed by Sun. He has a natural historic significance as someone who began the early revolution. But he never reached any solutions to go by.

The problem is that China is scaled far too large (particularly from a population perspective). The Chinese have lived primarily under authoritarian regimes of one sort or another. Mao certainly fit the bill regarding authoritarianism. Sun was not an authoritarian (certainly not to the extent of Mao). A population as massive as China under feudal lords could be corraled and in some proportional way, have better outcomes in the broadest of sense than under the chaos of feudalism.

But Marxism (which we seem to agree) was not so much the solution, but rather it was the sheer force of authoritarian rule. To minimize the hardships and misery of those in Mao’s China seems to make some kind of end made possible through brutality (or bruteforce) an “improvement” to the human condition in China. But this seems like an argument with no real purpose than to make a rather weak point which is how this “discussion” began.

China was already a place of turmoil under the old warlords before anyone had ever heard of Mao, and the warlord class never allowed any distribution of land while it was in power. They kept China in a state of perpetual food crisis which led to recurring famines that only ceased when society had been totally reorganized under Mao. Sun never had a solution and when he died Chiang began openly trying to accomodate the warlords. Yes, China was much better off with Mao and those are the realities which liberals don’t wish to recognize. As I’ve already noted, the real problem with the Cultural Revolution (which was not simply under Mao’s control but did involve many real spontaneous complaints by the populace against various party authorities) was that it failed to actually stop the capitalist restoration which Mao had gone on about so much. In that respect it was a waste. But it certainly was nothing new on the scale of turmoil for China.

Sun Yat-sen may not have had the same success, but what he represents is superior than what Mao achieved by supplanting feudalism with a tyranny.

This is not to idolize the man, but to acknowledge what he represents. He also understood the importance of land and a means by which to distribute it. This is missing with Mao.

He was certainly viewed by all later factions as a founder and Mao always maintained that the CCP was carrying on what he had begun. But Sun never figured out how to decisvely break the power of the warlords who had control of China. Chiang Kai-shek tried to accomodate the warlords, and that proved to be his undoing. The Chinese warlord class was far too corrupt to enable Chiang to establish a functioning government which accomplished anything. It took the CCP led by Mao to destroy the power of the old warlord class for good.

Totally noncomparable. The USA had achieved a mortality rate as low as 13.8 per thousand in 1913. It’s gone lower since, of course. But the USA was on a completely different playing field from China or Russia even a century ago. There’s absolutely no way that such comparisons can be justified. China was stagnant in a state of perpetual ongoing famine before the Communist Party of China had even been formed. It was the revolution which changed all of that. If you really imagine that China in the early 20th century was advancing towards a rise in living standards then maybe you should put your head back on the pillow.

As John Finley puts it in the Foreword to a 1926 study published by the American Geographical Society:

“It is a shocking fact that with all of the labor expended and virtues practiced, nearly a fourth of the people of the globe live in a land of famine–not of general famine at any one time nor of continuous famine in any one place, but of famine in one or another province or locality all the time.”
– CHINA: LAND OF FAMINE, p. xiii.

It was that state of things which created the revolution.

On the other hand, Czarist Russia did have the potential to modernize, but the conservative aristocrats resisted that. Western investments in Russia from the 1880s up to 1914 did create the potential for an improvement in living standards. But Russia’s conservatives were suspicious of this and advocated an ideology of Slavophilism which said that Mother Russia was the protector of the Slavic peoples against evil western influence. That led to a series of crises int he Balkans from 1911 on in which Russia failed to back up its allies. The Slavophiles became concerned that Russia was loosing its position as the leader of Slavic peoples and so when 1914 came they urged Nicholas II to mobilize the Russian army. Nicholas was an indecisive person and so he ordered a half-mobilization as a compromise decision. That then drove the German Kaiser to order mobilization and war.

But China never came close to reaching even the stage which Russia was at in 1914. They were locked into stagnation.

> Hardly a plug for Marx.

As I said, Marx never really attempted to think through what would be done by backward states to modernize. His thinking was devoted to understanding the crisis that advanced capitalism generates.

> But thanks for the extraneous material.

Extraneous material was introduced by yourself with the comment:

“While your resurrecting Marx, let’s see how he’s done where his name has graced the hemispheres of the 40s 50s and 60s. So how’s his record so far?”

But thanks for the extraneous material.

That sounds like the old line of how things would be better if only the king knew. Capitalism breaks down because there is no infinite space for unlimited growth. If only we had a flat earth then it would be possible to endlessly follow the pattern of migration to the west the way Europeans did in the 19th century. But on a finite planet the space for growth becomes exhausted and at a certain the system must turn inward on itself and begin devouring its own intestines for the sake of more profit.

The numbers who died in the Cultural Revolution is still not at all clear, but even so it si clear that China was a much healthier place to live in during the Cultural Revolution than it had ever been before 1949. This issue would certainly be helped by opening up more archival documents. Before 1991 there used to be a myth in circulation to the effect that “millions” or even “tens of millions” had been executed within a few years in the purges carried on in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Once the archives had been opened up this was scaled back to hundreds of thousands, still a bloody massacre but well short of what cranks like Solzhenitsyn had pushed for a long time.

Not that the Curtural Revolution should really be compared with the Soviet purges of the 1930s. The latter were really done under the control of top-down administration by the NKVD. The upheavals in China in the late 1960s were of a very different character. Mao had alleged that “capitalist-roaders” within the party were threatening the restoration of capitalism. Later events proved him correct on this point. Because of this Mao maintained that the people should rally from below to fight the capitalist-roaders within the party.

This did bring about a lot of popular participation in places like Tibet. Serious critics had alleged, however, that Mao’s approach was simply too chaotic and did not lead to any practical resolution to the problem of would-be capitalist-roaders within the party but would simply waste whatever chances existed for stopping them. That does appear to have been the real outcome. Deng launched the counter-revolution in 1978, two years after Mao died. On those grounds the Cultural Revolution must be viewed as a wasteful failure.

How many actually died as a specific consequence of it in the sense of being executed with a bullet to the head or something like that is still not very clear. Whether it was hundreds of thousands as in the Soviet purges or managed to reach the million mark is something that will have to wait to be judged. But it remains clear that all demographic studies agree that the general mortality rates among the Chinese population as a whole were approaching that of the USA during the years of the Cultural Revolution. For the majority of Chinese this was a healthy period. The only issue is over what number of individuals suffered unnecessary violence.

> And there was no famine during those years?

There was a famine caused by massive drought in the year 1960. What I had noted was simply that this famine was in no way exceptional by the standards of old China. When people attempt to calculate a number of deaths to be attributed to “famine” as opposed to more “natural” deaths they always must have in mind some standard of mortality which represents the expected number of deaths relative to the given population size. So when the Chinese famine of 1936 is said to have caused 5 million deaths, this means 5 million deaths over and beyond some undefined “normal” rate of death. But the normal rate of death in China at that time was always assumed by westerners to be far above the corresponding normal rate of death in western Europe and North America. That is why the customary estimates given for all of the earlier famines in China are simply non-comparable to the claims normally floated about 1960.

Roderick MacFarquhar, THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD, Volume 2 of THE ORIGINS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION, makes it perfectly clear that drought, typhoons, plant disease and other forms of natural disaster were the principal cause of the famine of 1960. The closest thing to an authoritative published demographic study of China since the revolution is Judith Banister’s CHINA’S CHANGING POPULATION. Banister’s given numbers are as follows:

Year__________Deaths per thousand among the population
1949__________38
1950__________35
1951 __________32
1952__________29
1953__________25.77
1954__________24.20
1955__________22.33
1956__________20.11
1957__________18.12
1958__________20.65
1959__________22.06
1960__________44.60
1961 __________23.01
1962__________14.02
1963__________13.81
1964__________12.45
1965__________11.61
1966__________11.12
1967__________10.47
1968__________10.08
1969__________9.91
1970__________9.54
1971 __________9.24
1972__________8.85
1973__________8.58
1974__________8.32
1975__________8.07
1976__________7.84
1977__________7.65
1978__________7.52
1979__________7.61
1980__________7.65
1981 __________7.73
1982__________7.89
1983__________7.97
1984__________8.00

> Czarist Russia?

That is natural place to look for comparison since there actually do exist demographic records from pre-revolutionary Russia, but none for China. Death rates among the population of those provinces in Czarist Russia that remained within the USSR after 1917 are given by Frank Lorimer, THE POPULATION OF THE SOVIET UNION.

Year__________Deaths per thousand among the population
1899__________33.4
1900__________32.3
1901__________33.6
1902__________33.1
1903__________31.1
1904__________31.1
1905__________33.2
1906__________31.6
1907__________30.2
1908__________30.2
1909__________31.6
1910__________33.3
1911__________29.2
1912__________28.7
1913__________30.9

You can find some books which give the number 30.2 for the year 1913 instead of Lorimer’s 30.9. That has to do with the 11 other provinces of Czarist Russia which broke away from the USSR in 1917. Either way, we can safely assume that mortality rates in China during the early 20th century were significantly higher under even the most normal conditions than any of these numbers which hold for Czarist Russia. So, yes, to have people dying at an approximate rate of 11.12 per thousand in 1966 as the Cultural Revolution flares up is a big improvement over everything which ever came before in Chinese history.

Investors no longer feed the horse, yet they insist upon their right to ride in the cart. The horse weakens and collapses and some pointy-headed individual in a tailored suit with a selection of graphs and charts and specialized jargon, which sounds a bit like philosophy, or some species of systematic scientific thinking, consoles the stranded investors with soothing theories of historical significance. And they lavish him with praise because of what he does not say: “You fools! Your pursuit of the free lunch cause your horse to die of starvation!”

Financial “products” are truly illusory. They are completely irrelevant for the most part, to the all important process of production and consumption. Yet they constitute about 20some percent of our GDP! Could this have something to do with the failure of the economy to thrive. Could the despicable behavior of financiers who draw off the liquidity and credit for our economy have something to do with the killing deflation confronting us and the contraction of the money supply?

What we are talking about is not the systemic failure of capitalism per se, but the betrayal of capitalism by its self-anointed capitalists, that class of fools for whom no entitlement is sufficient and no truth too sacred to spin.

Fuck ‘em all. They are not capitalism. Their behavior can sabotage the system, true enough, but capitalism remains the only viable option for economic activity in a nominally free society. It is no longer understood because it has been co-opted by a class of pontificating bobble-headed bloviators, such as the gentlemen who penned this article, whose missions is to cater to investors and financializers and speed the collapse of this particular corrupted example of capitalism.

And there was no famine during those years?

Czarist Russia?

Perplexing. Not to say what they’ve go going now is particular healthy.