This is Richard Wolff from Democracy At Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question
from our Patreon community. This one comes from John Lewis, and John asks me to talk about China.
The People's Republic of China: is it socialist? Is it state capitalist? What exactly is it? How do
we understand it and how do we look particularly at some of the qualities of that system over there
that we perhaps don't like or don't agree with? Perfectly good question—comes to us quite often.
So let me respond by picking up on something I think the Chinese have been wise to do.
They refer to their society as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics'' which immediately means
that they recognize—as I think we should—that socialism can come with a whole variety of
characteristics. We can distinguish socialism a la China from socialism with Swedish characteristics
or socialism with Portuguese characteristics, because indeed there are differences.
Moreover, the Chinese are on to something because we might have been able to do that—had we thought
about it—with capitalism as well. Capitalism with United States characteristics is not the
same as capitalism with French characteristics or capitalism with Saudi Arabian characteristics
or capitalism with Paraguayan characteristics and so on. I'm not saying that every nation does
it differently, although it probably does, but I am saying that there are variations.
You could signal them by nationality but you could also signal them in several other ways.
So what does the People's Republic of China offer us? What does it say to us? Well it
is a kind of socialism because it's similar to other societies that call themselves socialist.
That is, they have some of the characteristics that some of the parts of the world that call
themselves socialist identify with—doesn't mean more than that. We could establish our own
standards. Some of us have done that but that's really a different matter from recognizing that
there are a multiplicity of standards. In Scandinavia, for example, the standard is
you leave enterprises in private hands by and large. Privately owned capitalists
run most of the business in their society but the government takes a very major role
regulating those businesses, requiring them to observe rules, limits, maximum, minima, and so on.
The basic idea there is that socialism takes the hard edges off of capitalism—softens
it [and] makes sure the mass of people are well treated not necessarily according to the rules of
the capitalist market, but rather by a standard set politically by what they mean by socialism:
national health care, free or low-cost education, subsidies for people of all kinds,
and so on. Then there's another kind of socialism isn't there? The Soviet kind that came for many
people to be the only kind that [they] kind of understood if they “understood” anything about
socialism. And there we see quite [a] different sort of socialism. There, the government doesn't
merely regulate or influence the production of goods and services [by] the enterprises
that remain private. No no no. There, at least in industry, the government took
over owning and running the enterprises. Didn't do it to the same extent in agriculture where
private plots and self-run little mini enterprises were the norm. But they did do it in industry,
and so it's a different kind of socialism because the government owns and operates enterprises
as well as being a regulator and so on. In this display of difference the Chinese fall
in the middle. In some ways they're like Scandinavia because there's a large
part of the People's Republic of China that is privately owned capitalist enterprises—both
Chinese and non-Chinese—that is, European, Japanese, and so on.
The other part of China is a little bit more like the Soviet Union in the sense that a significant
part of the goods and services production is in enterprises owned and operated by this state.
So China falls somewhere in the middle. What about those characteristics that John
Lewis and others have raised that they're not happy with? Too much political power
in the hands of a state that plays as important a role as it does in the People's Republic of China,
disagreement with policies having to do with LGBTQ people, for
example, and there's a whole range of other policies. And I would remind everyone
socialism should not be thought of (as all of its greatest thinkers have always said)
as something that solves all problems [or] as something that you go after on the grounds that
if once you get a socialist economy well all the other issues you're concerned about—particularly
as left people [and] left political movements—will be automatically taken care of. That has never
been true. It isn't true in China either. There is room for disagreement about all kinds of issues
within socialism of all types. Nobody should imagine that social criticism
or disagreement or struggles over very important issues will not continue in a socialist society.
They will, but its economic situation will be radically different and that's the reason
people push for socialism. It's a little bit like recognizing that when you overcome slavery, you're
not solving all the problems that people have. You're solving one big one, namely, that there
are such a thing as masters and such a thing as slaves. Now if you believe that socialism should
be of the sort in which the employer-employee relationship is gone [and] is superseded
(what many believe Marx meant by communism or “the ultimate goal”) then yes. Then you would say
that the Chinese, the People's Republic of China, hasn't got there yet and that's clearly the case.
I'm not even sure the “yet” is appropriate because it's not clear where they're going
to go and nobody knows what the future is. But clearly what the People's Republic of China has
is not superseding the employer-employee relationship that is at the core of capitalism,
because that continues to exist both in the private capitalist enterprises inside the People's
Republic of China and in the government-run enterprises inside the People's Republic of China.
Last point. Probably the most remarkable event of the People's Republic [of China] right now is the
apparent effort of the government today to undo much of the inequality that their openness to
private capitalism brought into China. And that's a remarkable thing since in most of the rest
of the capitalist world inside the capitalist countries—U.S., western Europe, Japan—inequality
is getting worse, whereas the Chinese are moving to reduce it. That is probably a more important
difference right now than all the others that I've spoken of. In hopes that this helps clarify the
question, thanks for your attention. This is Richard Wolff from Democracy At Work.