China and the purity fetish of Western Marxism
China and the purity fetish of Western Marxism
In this essay, extracted from the book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, Carlos Garrido takes a detailed look at China’s socialist market economy and seeks to understand why so much of the Western left insistently misunderstands it. Carlos discusses the assorted tropes about China...
My wake-up call was the COVID pandemic.
When the rest of the world sent "essential workers" like me off to die while China stayed locked down, I had to reevaluate everything I thought I knew. If China had completely abandoned the revolution, I thought, why would they put the lives of workers ahead of profits and growth? Surely if they were just some kind of authoritarian capitalist state they'd have marched their workers off to die the same as my country did!
And they didn't. And they kept not doing it, long after the rest of the world was screaming for them to open up the economy.
Any Westerner that still believes China has completely betrayed the revolution needs to explain why and how this happened.
It's honestly pure fucking racism. China is clearly just acting in an underhanded way and manipulating people by LOOKING like they are doing the right thing by bringing people out of poverty but really they are just waiting for their moment to assume imperial power. Those sneaky orientals-- I mean revisionists!
China is obviously a complicated entity. There are a lot of important questions to be asked about how they operate and how that fits into ideas of socialism and communism. But 1. this is their socialist project and not ours and 2. you definitely don't have the right to project centuries old racist tropes on them.
That's because they are Authoritarian©, which means that, huh, they order people to do things.
No, you should not try to understand why. You should just stop thinking and conclude they must crave power, or something like that
I think I agree with you. I cannot be certain of anything in this world anymore. Is the a chance that they knew the workers would infect the upper classes? Like, they knew they would be able to weather the lockdown?
Here's how I understand it:
In capitalist countries the markets are in command. Even though locking down was the obviously rational and scientific choice, the rest of the world simply couldn't do it because markets demand growth at all costs. The market commanded us all to die for the money line.
There was a chance workers would infect the upper classes in the West but they took that risk because they must obey the market too. If the worst happened and the virus mutated into something apocalyptic, they could flee to New Zealand as the designated bunker nation.
In China, the Party could actually make the rational choice to lock down because politics are still in command. Even if the worst had happened and a new mutant strain started wiping out countries, I believe China would have weathered it because they were actually prepared. They were the only mainland country to take the pandemic seriously because they were the only one that even could.
Even the SocialismForAll guy writes China off as being a capitalist state now. I’m no expert on China, but that seems like some black & white, purity fetish thinking on his part.