Instead of Capitalism vs. Socialism: A Proportion-Seeking Review of Two Contemporary Approaches in China and Russia (original) (raw)
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China - Russia: A Threat to Western Type Democracies or an Alternative Way of Governance
International Journal of Political Science, 2020
The tectonic shifts in global economy, the emergence of the Internet, the refugee crisis have all contributed to the fuelling of populist labyrinths that reinforce authoritarian leaders. This raises the question of whether authoritarianism is viable in a post-modern world, with the emergence of authoritarianism in China and Russia. China is emerging as a new economic model: authoritarian modernization, state capitalism or socialism with Chinese features as an alternative to western liberal democracy. The Russian-like state monopolist capitalism , sovereign democracy and Eurasianism dominate the imperial power with the Soviet past. If rivalries eventually culminate in a war of the Great Powers is perhaps the key issue of 21st century geopolitics, highlighting a battle of beliefs and values.
Public Choice, 2020
More than 40 years ago, János Kornai introduced his famous supermarket metaphor. Socioeconomic systems cannot be constructed from purposely selected features, similar to customers in a supermarket, who can freely put into their shopping trolley whatever they like. Systems constitute an organic whole. They contain good and bad features in fixed proportions. After 1990, Kornai and most Western commentators expected that as market integration and private property expand, China would eventually turn into a liberal democracy. Prior to the worldwide fall of communism, Kornai had three primary criteria to determine whether a country was socialist or capitalist; later he amended this with six secondary ones. The present paper introduces into this list an additional 11 criteria—i.e. 20 quantifiable metrics altogether. Kornai was among the very first to recognize that with President Xi Jinping taking charge, China made a U-turn. While capitalist elements remain strong, in the final analysis, ...
The Journal of Asian Studies, 1988
Chinese draw their lessons largely from the experience of their own country. Their deepest impressions are of a weak and divided country suffering humiliations one after another in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. While roundly condemning rapacious foreign states, including Russia, for their imperialist behavior, the Chinese also find fault with their own country's internal shortcomings. Internal divi sions and backwardness "invited" aggression. There are limits on the form this debate over what went wrong in Chinese history can take. By 1984 a brief discussion on the Asiatic Mode of Production had been quieted. As one review commentary phrased it, on this subject "there were previously two points of view." 3 The first 2 The primary guide to the Chinese worldview is Deng Xiaoping's writings. See Selected
Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
Socialism and Democracy, 2018
Amin argues that "capitalism cannot continue indefinitely as permanent accumulation and the exponential growth it entails will end up in certain death for humanity." Globalized capitalism "is ripe to be overtaken by another form of civilization, one more advanced and necessary". There is no inevitability to the apocalyptic end, but neither is there any necessity for a progressive transition to socialism. Socialism is a potential, so the question is, how might this transition occur, where, and when? In his view, ripeness requires capital accumulation to have reached a point at which people's "capacities for action" have been "enabled" and they have become culturally and ethically mature. 1 Unfortunately, where capital accumulation has proceeded the furthest, in the globalized centres, there is very little evidence of enabling or of cultural and ethical maturity. Radical potential would still appear deeper in the peripheralized South (which Amin acknowledges: Latin America and the "Arab Spring"). The principal problem is that Amin does not pay sufficient attention to the conditions necessary for the development of the subjective factors necessary for socialist transition. Like the transition to capitalism, which Amin said required a conscious ideology, the transition to socialism requires a different consciousness. The above phrase, however, is as close as Amin gets to discussing the conditions for creating such a radical consciousness. Implicitly at this stage of his argument, then, Amin has adopted what Lenin referred to as "spontaneity" and rejected the need for centralized organization. The essays Amin has collected for this volume, which were written between 1990 and 2015, range widely over time and space, and have been rewritten in part in an exercise of clarification. He argues that any Marxist analysis must take both of these dimensions into account. Whereas historical Marxism and the Leninist theory subordinate geography to history, and "know only class struggle", in world systems theory class struggle is virtually eliminated "because it is incapable of changing the course imposed on it by the evolution of the system as a whole." 2 Amin proposes to combine both approaches by analyzing "the dynamics of the local transformations" in the context of social struggles, and the articulation of these regional dynamics relative to the world system. 3 He focuses on the emergence and future of the centerperiphery contradiction in globalized capitalism, the history of the Soviet and (more briefly) Chinese experiences in building a socialist alternative, and then advances some policy requirements of a contemporary socialist movement that is required but is, at best, embryonic. The World System: Center/Periphery At all its stages, globalized capitalism "can only produce, reproduce, and deepen the center/periphery contrast. The capitalist path is an impasse for 80% of humanity." 4 The old center/periphery system was based on a set of national production economies linked in a hierarchal world system. Sine about 1980, the new globalized production system has dismantled this national production system. Oligopolistic companies in the US, Europe, and Japan (the triad
Communism and the emergance of democracy
The long crisis of communism was a powerful impetus for the development of critical social theory, but critical social theory has not had much to say about the end of communism and what has followed in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. There are some monographs and edited collections on post-communism that use ideas and concepts from critical social theory, but they are few in number in comparison to work that starts from mainstream social science perspectives. This is especially the case for the study of post-communist politics where perspectives from 'mainstream' comparative politics have shaped debate about the nature of post-communist political development. Harald Wydra's Communism and the emergence of democracy should therefore be welcomed for attempting to apply ideas from critical social theory to the study of post-communist politics and filling in a significant intellectual lacuna. There is a need for a volume written from this perspective, ideas about transition should and can be criticised, and there is nothing wrong with interpretation of events through secondary sources. Unfortunately, Wydra's book fails at almost every level: it fails as a critique of conventional wisdoms, which are parodied rather than rebutted; it fails as a theoretical alternative because of the confusion of ideas and terms used and the avoidance of any effort to establish the relationship between the concepts deployed in the book; and it fails as interpretative analysis because analysis takes second place to the avalanche of concepts that Wydra deploys and what is left of it after the theoretical deluge is often conventional, frequently simplistic and sometimes erroneous.
Global Capitalist Hegemony And The Struggle For Socialism: The Case Of China
From the First Industrial Revolution through the twentieth century, the global hierarchy of nation states evolved. The contemporary pecking order includes social formations previously viewed as backward and underdeveloped. The twentieth century revolutions, particularly those in Russia and China, were national attempts at overcoming obstacles to development within a global system dominated by powerful neocolonial states. The organized struggle took a revolutionary socialist turn, confronting the old order with a promise of creating a condition not previously known to the masses. To that end various strategies as informed by Scientific Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism, among others, were adopted by the two Revolutions-the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party of China under the banner of socialism. In both Russia and China the peasantry acted as the proletariat and the leaders as the vanguard revolutionaries. While Russia and its satellite countries and Soviets of post-October Revolution continued to maintain the anti-capitalist state ideology until the implosion, the People's Republic of China began reorienting its approach to the world from remaining behind the Great Wall to engaging with global capitalism-the bearer of technology and multifaceted power while maintaining its state ideology. The rise of China as the second superpower in a remarkably short period of time is owed much to the awareness of the leadership and structure that engaging with the world, particularly in the age of advanced robotics and internet, is the ultimate survival strategy. This strategy has produced positive results for China, and in the age of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has propelled it to a hegemonic position in the hierarchy of global capitalism. China provides an excellent context for assessing the
Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism: China and Eastern Europe
International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), 1990
State Socialism 3 international developments into the next century, an understanding of reform takes on added urgency. It is at this moment, then, that the length of reform in a country like Hungary and its breadth across settings as culturally and historically diverse as China and Eastern Europe provide a critical mass of evidence for analyzing the problems endemic to centrally planned economies and the dilemmas faced in efforts to reform them. This book takes the first steps toward such a comparative analysis by presenting the results of new research on reforms in China and Eastern Europe. Its contributors include Wlodzimierz Brus and Janos Kornai, economists who have contributed to each stage of the reform debates in Eastern Europe and whose works are now stimulating much discussion in China, as well as representatives of a younger generation of economists, sociologists, and political scientists, many of whom report on field research recently conducted in factories, cities, and villages in China and Eastern Europe. This set of essays is brought together, however, not simply to reach across the boundaries of disciplines and area studies or to publish a compendium of related findings, but because the research and analysis in these papers exemplify an emerging new perspective in the study of state socialism. This new perspective, whose broad contours will be outlined in this introduction, is developing as an alternative to the two major traditions-the theory of totalitarianism and modernization theory-that have dominated the specialized study of socialist societies in the postwar period.
Towards a Chinese Brand of Democracy? Models, Dynamics and Limitations
Being the second largest economic power of the world, China's Leninist centralized market system seems to have set up a development model of authoritarianism without fundamental political reform. Still, some reform efforts at the elite and local levels (for example, village committee elections) have begun to challenge the balance of power between the conservatives and proponents of political reform. In particular, in view of many paradoxes, conflicts, inequalities and anxieties resulting from economic growth-promoting policies, moderate Chinese elites have articulated different models of political reform ranging from a system of consultation backed by the rule of law, a power-sharing system, democratic institutional building, to incremental democracy. Is there a Chinese democratic model in the making? This paper uses new institutional and constructivist approaches to analyze the effects of some reform efforts and examines the applicability of different governance models in the Chinese context. It argues that a strategy of incremental institutional tactics may prove to be helpful to address urgent social inequality issues. A strong elite leadership is still highly expected that continues to obstruct the birth and development of a pluralist and power-sharing system.
1 Communism and democracy – a problematisation
2007
As startling as the sudden and total disintegration of the Soviet Union may have been, the complete oblivion to which communism has quickly been consigned has been no less surprising. Political analyses of democratisation in eastern Europe have all but forgotten the rise of communism in Russia after 1917 and its enormous influence on the politics of the twentieth century. This book brings communism back into the study of democracy. The reason for such a return is not nostalgia for a failed political experiment, but the conviction that the rash classification of communism as an object of study for historians overlooks its active role in shaping the post-communist order. The unexpected collapse of communism indicated that much social science research was prejudiced with ideas about the immutable and eternal nature of communist power. Its sudden disappearance not only prevented corrections of this cognitive failure but also privileged views on communism as a ‘legacy’ rather than a soci...