Research

Quotes from this article:

First, I agree that anarchism has failed in the sense that there has been no worldwide anti-authoritarian revolution, or even a successful anti-authoritarian revolution in one country. Second, I agree that the anarchist movement has not been very impressive in developing its theory, and that its efforts to explain its defeats have not been fully convincing. Third, I agree that it is not possible to carry out an anti-authoritarian revolution in one country alone.

I'm not sure why people find these failures to be a problem within anarchism? We should expect to fail, especially when faced with such a great enemy. What we should do is actually address these failures.

For example, if an anti-authoritarian revolution is not possible to carry out in one country alone? Then perhaps we need to be better at global organising, which is atrocious and still harmed by people's misconceptions of others and the hierarchical superiority that some western anarchists see themselves as having.

These failures highlight problems to solve rather than highlighting how anarchism is entirely a failure.

... but let’s be clear about something: Marxism has also been a failure, and an abysmal one at that. There is today no international classless, stateless society that Marxism advocates and predicts, nor is there socialism (or even a dictatorship of the proletariat), even in one country. In my opinion, Marxists did lead a proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, only to strangle it ruthlessly in the year or so afterward and to build in its place one of the most monstrous and violent state-dominated societies the world has ever seen. Is this any less of a failure than that of anarchism? If anything, it is more so: anarchism doesn’t have the blood of many tens of millions of people on its hands.

Marxism has been “successful” only if one fails to see, or willfully obscures, the fact that Marxism did not carry out anything like the socialist transformations they predicted, but bourgeois, that is, pro-capitalist ones which, whatever their achievements, resulted in the torture and murder of millions of people.

Of course, we can support bourgeois revolutions, just as we may support various bourgeois reforms under capitalism, but we should not dress up bourgeois revolutions in anti-authoritarian clothes. Nor should we transform ourselves into bourgeois revolutionaries just because bourgeois revolutions have been successful and anti-authoritarian ones have not.

Marxism’s attempts to understand itself, both as an ideology and in terms of its practical results, has been sadly deficient. Marxism has shown itself to be totally incapable of grasping what it has actually accomplished and what it really is. Marxist analysis of Communist revolutions and the societies they have created range from bald-faced apologetics to self-serving excuses, rarely getting close to a serious explanation. The best Marxism has been able to do are the state-capitalist analyses of the Communist system, such as those of Tony Cliff in Great Britain and Raya Dunayeskaya and C.L.R. James in the US. And neither of these, nor any of the other less insightful analysis, has even tried to address the responsibility of Marxism itself for this very system. Indeed, one of their chief aims is to SAVE Marxism from being judged by and rejected because of the gruesome regimes it has created. For a worldview that claims to be self-conscious, in contrast to the “false consciousness” that afflicts everyone else, this is not very impressive.

Beginning in 1918, no methods were too vile, too dishonest or ruthless, in the Communists’ campaign to slander, isolate and destroy every left-wing organization, tendency, and individual that dared even to criticize them, let alone actually oppose them. They had millions of dollars at their disposal which they used to finance newspapers, magazines and books, in fact, an enormous worldwide propaganda apparatus. They had an army of agents, not just diplomats and spies but world-famous intellectuals, who repeated every lie, no matter how absurd, and every slander, no matter how outrageous, about those labeled “anti-Soviet.” All left-wing critics and opponents of the Soviet Union and the particular policies it advocated at any given moment were denounced and, where this was feasible, killed, as counter-revolutionaries, fascists and agents of Hitler.

Most important for our purposes, virtually all of the political trends to the left of the Communists — anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, left-wing socialist, Trotskyists — were either destroyed or politically marginalized.

Note the intent. There is a reason many people who fit into any of these categories are quick to point out red-brown alliances (which are a real thing); it's because we will end up, at best, marginalised and left to struggle and, at worst, dead. That's not hyperbole. This is literally part of "left unity," and the only people demanding it are those who have a modicum of power or could see themselves as having a modicum of power.

In February, 1936, a coalition of liberal and left-wing parties and organizations known as the Popular Front won the elections held under the newly-formed Spanish Republic. Claiming the need to resist the imminent “Sovietization” of Spain, a group of fascist generals under the leadership of Francisco Franco revolted in July and, from various parts of the country, began to march on Madrid to crush the republic. In response, workers and peasants throughout Spain rose up to resist them. They not only organized militias that put up a determined and largely effective resistance. They also seized factories, workshops, the means of transportation and communication in the cities, the land in the countryside, and ran out the capitalists and landlords, their allies and agents. Not least, they set up collectives and councils to manage what they had confiscated.

While the fascist forces were being financed and armed by Hitler and Mussolini, the Republican government was internationally isolated. The US was officially neutral, while England and France pursued a policy of appeasement, that is, giving Hitler whatever he wanted in the hopes that he would leave their countries (and their colonial empires) alone. The only country that offered to aid the Spanish Republic was the Soviet Union, but at a price. In exchange for military and other assistance Stalin insisted that the social revolution in Spain be rolled back and that the revolutionary struggle there be transformed into a traditional-style war between two bourgeois armies.

There were two interrelated reasons behind Stalin’s policy. First, consistent with his theory of “Socialism in One Country,” (that is, the defense of state capitalism in Russia), he wanted to convince Britain, France and the US to form an anti-Fascist alliance with the Soviet Union and was worried that the Revolutionary events in Spain would scare them off. Second, following from his theory of the two-stage revolution, he had decided that the objective conditions in Spain were not ripe for a socialist revolution, but only a bourgeois one.

But in Spain, most of the bourgeoisie had fled and/or had sided with Franco and most of the state apparatus had collapsed. As a result, Stalin’s policy meant bringing back the institutions, including the police and standing army, of the old regime, seizing the land and factories from the peasants and workers, smashing the revolutionary organizations they had built and imprisoning and murdering thousands of leaders and militants of those left-wing organizations that opposed his policies.

Robbed of the revolutionary conquests, forced to submit to the oppressive conditions of the old system, and shorn of many of their leaders, the workers and peasants became demoralized. In part as a result, the Republican forces, deprived of the mass participation in revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers and peasants and forced to wage a traditional military campaign, were defeated.

Undoubtedly, the militias left a lot to be desired militarily (and probably could have profited from an increase in discipline and the coordination of their forces). But the liquidation of these outfits and the replacement by a traditional army, based on a traditional military hierarchy and discipline, was inseparable from the liquidation of the revolutionary conquests and the resulting political demoralization of the workers and peasants.

And all this, including the execution of their political enemies, was inseparable from the Stalinists’ view that the Spanish Revolution was, and had to be, a bourgeois one. Believing in the inevitability of the bourgeois revolution in Spain, the Stalinists did everything in their power to make sure that this, and only this, kind of revolution occurred.

One of the main reasons the Stalinist were able to do what they did in Spain and elsewhere was the fact that millions of people, both in Spain and around the world, believed that the Soviet Union was socialist, a workers’ state, some other kind of progressive alternative to capitalism, or, at the very least, the only force capable of waging a consistent fight against fascism. In other words, millions believed that if the Russians did or said something, it must be right.

To raise people’s political consciousness, including their understanding of the nature of Marxism and all authoritarian ideologies and social structures, is one of the chief tasks of anarchists and anti-authoritarians in general. But we won’t be able to do this if we become attracted to and begin to promote authoritarian ideologies because they’ve been more successful or have more impressive theory. It seems to me that it is of the very nature of anti-authoritarianism to be on the losing side of popular struggles for liberation until humanity achieves the transformation we envision. This is something we should be proud of, not something we should sell for the chance to emulate authoritarian revolutionaries.

I think it's the principles that we should be proud of, for the record; that's how this reads to me. It's that we haven't given up our principles of anti-authoritarianism in lieu of a "successful" revolution that liberates a few but continues to oppress many.

Anarchists often argue, or seem to argue, that humanity has always been ready for anarchism but has been thwarted by the actions of Marxists and other authoritarians. This downplays human beings’ responsibility for our own conditions. If the state is bad, where does it come from? If capitalism and other class societies are brutal and oppressive, why do they arise and why do we put up with them? Why do so many people believe Marxism’s claim to be liberatory, despite all the evidence to the contrary? This is one area in which anarchist theory, it seems to me, needs to be developed.

I actually agree with this. There is a lot of space for theory to develop within the realm of anarchism, and we're seeing much of this flesh out in the recent decades, especially from anarchists who traditionally come from more marginalised backgrounds. It's important that we don't lose sight of the lessons we're learning or being taught.

The problem with this concept of the “objective conditions” is that it is very abstract and obscures the actual realities of the countries to which it refers. Economic and social conditions in all countries are very uneven. No country is uniformly advanced: nor is any country totally backward. This is this especially the case since the development of imperialism, which has brought about a tremendous intermingling of economic, social, political and ideological forms. As a result, most imperialized countries have been characterized, and are still characterized by complex combinations of conditions, ranging from extremely archaic to extraordinarily modern. It is therefore very difficult to determine which country is or isn’t ripe for a particular kind of revolution.

For example, at the turn of the century Russia was considered by most revolutionaries, and certainly by Marxists, to be a “backward” country (indeed, most Marxists looked to Marxism as a means to modernize the country, which is what happened). Yet, as Leon Trotsky and others observed, this characterization was simplistic and obscured the concrete nature of Russian reality. While it was true that the vast majority of the people in what was then the Russian Empire were peasants who lived under barbaric conditions and that the country was ruled by an absolute monarch, etc., the country also contains some of the world’s largest and most technologically advanced factories, in part as a result of imperialism. Because of such industry, the country also contained a small but highly concentrated working class which had a tremendous amount of power at its disposal if only it chose to use it.

Many of these views about Russia "being backwards" still persist when discussing the revolution that took place and Marxist views in history books; it actually seems like it could've been one of those things that was co-opted as a way to explain why "things went wrong." It's curious.

As a result of all this, it is incorrect simply to say that Russia lacked the objective conditions for a socialist revolution. This is especially so when one considers not merely the objective conditions but also the subjective conditions, that is, the consciousness of the popular classes. Throughout the centuries, the Russian peasants, “normally” quiescent, profoundly conservative and under the domination of religious and ancient superstitions, periodically rose up in vast, powerful upheavals. Although generally led by someone who claims to be the true Tsar, as opposed to the “pretender” who occupied the throne, these uprisings threatened, for a time, the social structure, indeed the very existence, of the entire country. Moreover, the working class, only recently come into existence, was extremely receptive to revolutionary ideas, not only Marxism, but anarchism and anarchist-like programs as well.

This latter bit is actually pretty obvious when you think of the number of people who lived in exile, regardless of it being voluntary or forced. There are a lot of Russian names in socialist and anarchist movements, and it should be pretty obvious why that was.

It’s always easy, after the fact, to say that something happened of necessity, that is, that it was inevitable that things happened as they did. This is especially true of social and historical developments. Once some particular social event has occurred, it’s relatively easy to come up with a theory that appears to explain it. But to develop a theory that can predict social developments is something else again. This is a major weakness of bourgeois sociology and its radical manifestation, Marxism.

The same consideration applies to revolutions, especially so when we are considering revolutionary defeats. Once a revolution has been smashed, it sounds convincing to say that this was inevitable. The person who says this, particularly if he blames the defeat on “objective conditions,” comes across as scientific. The revolution was defeated and science, which at this level is deterministic, comes up with explanations to explain why this happened. By the same token, those who argue that the defeat was not inevitable appear to have their heads in the clouds. In short, reality is hard to argue against.

It's the same views that seem to side line "What if we tried [thing that isn't status quo]?" attempts, including alternative schools and educational/learning spaces.

In Spain, as we saw, Stalin assumed that the country was not ready for a socialist revolution but only a bourgeois one. He therefore ordered his agents and followers to dismantle the socialist aspects of the revolution, that is, to limit the revolution to the so-called bourgeois stage. But since revolutions can’t be so neatly divided in two stages or any other way, the Stalinist efforts to limit the revolution led to the destruction of the entire revolution, including the bourgeois one.

Something very similar happened in China. In the 1920s, as part of his struggle against his opponents in the Russian Communist Party, Stalin adopted the slogan “Socialism in One Country.” As we discussed, this meant foregoing attempts to encourage socialist revolutions in other countries in order to appease the imperialist powers into leaving Russia (and its state capitalist system) alone. This slogan was integrally connected to Stalin’s theory of the two stage revolution.

Sometimes I wonder why it is that the people who tend to mention "Socialism in One Country" are the same few people mentioned earlier as getting destroyed and marginalised. I feel like I rarely see it from anyone else, even people critical of Stalinism (and especially people engaged in Stalinism under another name).

Having decided that the objective conditions in China did not exist for a socialist revolution, Stalin urged the Chinese Communist Party to maintain an alliance with the leader of the bourgeois nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek, at all costs, in order to carry out the revolution in China. This meant subordinating the struggle of the Chinese workers to the interests of the Chinese capitalists, whom Chiang represented. Despite these orders, the workers mounted a wave of increasingly militant, widespread and coordinated strikes. In 1926, Chiang carried out a coup in the southern city of Canton and began his “Northern Expedition” to root out the reactionary warlords who controlled much of southern China. As Chiang approached the port city of Shanghai in early 1927, the workers there rose up to liberate the city. They mounted two general strikes, took over the city and set up a provisional government in March, 1927.

Chiang halted outside the city and began negotiations with local landlords and capitalists and representatives of the imperialists to seize control of the city. Consistent with his strategy of not scaring off Chiang and the Chinese bourgeoisie, Stalin directed the Chinese Communists to order the Communist-controlled unions to offer no resistance to Chiang and to have the workers bury their arms. Trusting their leaders, the workers did so. When Chiang entered the city, his troops slaughtered over 20,000 workers. Among other things, this led to the elimination of the most revolutionary workers, destroyed the Communist Party in Shanghai and ultimately led to the peasant-based strategy championed by Mao.

All of this is really well detailed in Chuăng #1 (2019). It really makes someone wonder what would've happened had Stalin actually supported radical people. Where would we be now?

The crucial point to understand here is that if revolutionaries decide before the fact that the objective conditions in a given country mean that the revolution is there “of necessity” will be a bourgeois one, they will act to oppose those struggles that go beyond the bourgeois revolution. In more graphic terms, they will become the executioner’s of the most revolutionary workers and peasants and will in all likelihood destroy the revolution altogether.

After the defeat and slaughter of the Chinese workers in Shanghai, a section of the Chinese Communist Party and eventually the party as a whole gave up entirely on organizing the working class and instead focused on the peasantry. But the result was not a spontaneous peasant uprising of the sort that powered of the French, Russian and Spanish Revolutions. The peasants in China did not spontaneously rise up, slaughter the landlords, seize the land and work it under their own direction. The Chinese Communist certainly organized peasant armies, but it would be more accurate to describe these as armies of peasants. The peasants were organized into formations that were firmly controlled by the Communists from the top down through officers and party functionaries.

Moreover, throughout most of the struggle, these armies did not attack the landlords and let the peasants seize and manage the land as they saw fit. Quite the contrary, consistent with the theory of the two-stage revolution, the Chinese Communist strategy centered on maintaining united front of all patriotic Chinese, including Chiang Kai-shek, the capitalists and landlords, in a purely nationalist struggle against the Japanese, who invaded Manchuria in 1931 and attempted to conquer the rest of China several years later. In the areas they controlled, the Communists merely limited the extent to which the landlords exploited the peasants by lowering rents and interest rates. All spontaneous peasant movements were either absorbed into the Communist armies or ruthlessly suppressed as “bandits.”

Even after the Japanese were defeated and the Communists turned their full attention against Chiang, the Communist pursued a purely bourgeois program and maintained firm, bureaucratic control over the peasants. Consistent with this, when their armies surround the city, the Communists did not urge the workers to rise up, throw out the capitalists and take over the factories. Instead, the workers were urged to remain at work under the firm control of the capitalists, who continued to exploit them as before and were assured by the Communists that their ownership and control of the factories would not be infringed. In fact, Mao advocated lowering wage rates and lengthening working hours in order to increase production.

It was not until the 1950s, that is, after the Communists had defeated Chiang and consolidated their power, that they moved to introduce land reform and expropriate the capitalists. Even then, these processes were well controlled by the Communist Party; at no point were the workers encouraged to form autonomous factory committees or given control over the factories; nor were the peasants given full and autonomous control over the land. Meanwhile, the capitalists were compensated for their property and often hired as managers at generous salaries to run their former plants, while their children were guaranteed entry into Chinese colleges and universities.

How is any of this consistent with communism? (It's... not.)

Rather than being a model for anti-authoritarians, the Chinese Revolution reveals the logic of Marxists’ attitudes toward methods. Unlike anarchists, Marxists are generally not restrained by particular scruples about the methods they employ. This is especially the case when they have the power of the state at their disposal. Whatever they may claim, they have always acted as if all means, no matter how brutal, dishonest and disgusting, are justified in their struggle against capitalism. These methods become ipso facto progressive because, they believe, they represent the proletariat, socialism and the liberation of all humanity.

But in politics, particularly revolutionary politics, you are what you do. If you claim to be an anti-authoritarian but decide, for whatever reason (perhaps because the objective conditions are not right), to try to carry out a bourgeois revolution, you are no longer an anti-authoritarian: you are bourgeois, that is, an authoritarian, revolutionist.

It is of the very nature of an anti-authoritarian revolution to be a worldwide phenomenon. We are, in fact, speaking of a transformation of the human species. It either happens relatively rapidly or it won’t happen at all. If the people in any one country, even an economically “advanced” one, carry out an anti-authoritarian revolution and it remains isolated, it will be defeated. There remains nothing that anti-authoritarians can do about this but to pick up and start over. > Adopting authoritarian measures, such as a standing army based on traditional centralization, hierarchy and discipline, will not save the revolution but will destroy it from within.

This perspective is not as far-fetched as it may seem. It should be clear that human society as it is currently organized is rapidly undermining the conditions for its own existence; among other things, it is destroying the planet on which we live. Human beings will increasingly be confronted with the need to make a radical transformation in the way we treat each other and the Earth as a whole. These two questions are thoroughly interconnected: we must stop viewing other human beings and the Earth as a whole as tools to increase our own individual and/or group power. Do we carry out this transformation or do we all get destroyed?

Quotes from the introduction:

With the largest navy, the most advanced technology, and unprecedented agricultural productivity, the Ming Dynasty remained the most extensive and powerful political structure in the world. In every way it matched and surpassed Europe, and the question of China’s “failed” transition to capitalism (known as “Needham’s Paradox”) would become a sort of initiatory riddle for future scholars of the region. [Galeote] Pereira had arrived in the midst of the Ming’s deterioration, caused in part by the Portuguese and Spanish silver industries and the new trade networks of which he was himself a product.

“China” was very much a product of the Occidental imagination. The people Pereira asked had trouble even understanding the question of what “country” they were from, as there were no clear indigenous correlates to the concept. Ultimately they explained that there was one ruler, but many countries, which still used their ancient names. The combination of these countries composed the “Great Ming,” but each retained much of its local specificity.

Today, in a crisis-stricken global economy, China is again defined by its exceptions. Its staggering ascent seems to promise an almost messianic escape from decades of declining growth: the mirage of a new America, complete with a “Chinese Dream” and the moral zeal of its Puritanical CCP-Confucianism. For the Western economist, this takes the form of a steady-handed Sino-Keynesianism, as new infrastructure projects are initiated by more charitable global financial institutions such as the China Development Bank, promising the salvation of the world’s final far-flung hinterlands. In the official discourse of the Chinese state, this represents nothing more than the slow transition to communism, with a long layover in the stage of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” wherein capitalist mechanisms are used to develop the productive forces until general wealth is possible.

Instead, the socialist developmental regime designates the breakdown of any mode of production and the disappearance of the abstract mechanisms (whether tributary, filial, or marketized) that govern modes of production as such. Under these conditions, only strong state-led strategies of development were capable of driving development of the productive forces. The bureaucracy grew because the bourgeoisie couldn’t. Given China’s poverty and position relative to the long arc of capitalist expansion, only the “big push” industrialization programs of a strong state, paired with resilient local configurations of power, were capable of successfully constructing an industrial system. But the construction of an industrial system is not the same as the successful transition to a new mode of production.

Even at the height of its diversity, however, this project was ultimately defined by a particular communist horizon that had emerged from the combination of the European workers’ movement and the region’s own history of millenarian peasant revolts. Today, this communist horizon no longer exists. There is no point in “taking sides” on these historical matters, simply because there is no symmetry between then and now—the material conditions (rapid industrial expansion, large non-capitalist periphery, etc.) that structured this earlier communist horizon are absent, even if the fundamental crises of capitalism remain. There is no question of whether communists today will face the same problems—they won’t. Instead, there remains only the question of how communism and communist strategy can be conceived without this horizon.

Beyond this, the geography of Russian influence was uneven. Outside the northeastern industrial heartland, Chinese production was more strongly shaped by other systems of enterprise management, economic planning and state administration. If the Chinese took Russia as one model, they also inherited numerous others—from the imperial era, the Nationalist regime of the Republican period, the Japanese, and the Western enterprises in coastal cities. All of these influences were combined in conscious attempts to create a distinctly “Chinese” nation, complete with a unified national economy. The result was a far more decentralized, uneven system than is visible in the era’s propaganda.

The result, we hope, is a picture of socialist China as it actually was, neither a totalitarian wasteland nor the kingdom of heaven. The nation we illustrate below was not “Mao’s China” in any meaning of the phrase. It was a project constructed by millions of people, and its ultimate (though not historically determined) result is the China we see today—a China that holds the global economy together at its disintegrating roots. A China that, we hope, will also finally be undone by more millions of Chinese people, alongside billions of others destroying their thousand nations and, with them, this monstrous economy that yokes each to all and all to none.

Quotes from Part I: Precedents:

Development in the imperial era does not begin with the stasis of a so-called “traditional China.” The imperial state, often in competition with members of the landowning elite, periodically intervened in rural society, each time reshaping its social character. In one of the last significant interventions (inaugurating the late imperial period), the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) attempted to create an independent peasantry in order to eliminate rivals vying for control over the rural surplus product and to stabilize society. In order to do this, peasants were given land, although not as equitably as originally intended. At this time, as in much of the region’s history, peasants were not just farmers: they farmed but also produced handicraft items, in particular silk or cotton cloth. And the Ming state, as with earlier ruling dynasties, encouraged this dual production by requiring tax payments in grain, cloth and labor.

Earlier in the Ming, most rural households had not produced commodities for sale on markets, but had instead produced a variety of goods for subsistence and then sold a small surplus to the rural gentry, who would then re-sell those products as commodities. But with increased commercialization and specialization, more households began to focus on commodity production without abandoning subsistence production for their family units: a situation of commercialization without development. Over time many began to satisfy their reproductive needs through market purchases as well, with areas that produced higher-end goods buying food through regional markets from more peripheral areas. And it was the rural gentry that controlled those markets.

Not that it's identical (in circumstance), but this seems to be coming back in some (possibly more negative) ways for people in rural places to make money. As described in Blockchain Chicken Farm, rural people are engaging in practices to help keep up with their needs while also producing things deemed commodities (including food) that are then sent to the cities (as sales through Alibaba or other companies).

In some ways, it seems like they're re-using historical structures but adding some technology to them as "progress." (But it reminds me of the shoe-maker in a small village described in the book talking about how the current model is ruining their lives and that it's not possible to keep doing what they're doing.)

Tea producers, for example, suffered from the 1880s onward once the British tea plantations in South Asia were producing in full swing. In the cotton textile industry, spinners of yarn had a hard time competing with foreign, machine-spun yarns. In contrast, the cheap imports of such yarn initially allowed cloth weavers to do well, and only over time did they, too, have increasing trouble on the new market. Foreign-owned industrial weaving facilities along the coast—mostly built since the turn of the century—began to cut into the handicraft market. Sourcing much of its yarn from abroad, the industry led in part to the initial disintegration of the rural-urban continuum.

This bit is interesting when you consider how a lot of European and North American economics texts talk about China today and how their "cheap products" have "cut into" the markets for what's being done. So it's interesting to see that industrial yarn development (often foreign-owned) was cutting into the traditional market here. Perhaps it would do us well to recognise the many ways Europe (and North America) interrupted lives through colonialism and imperialism.

During this new phase, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, hereafter GMD) that had taken over much of China by the end of the 1920s attempted to complete the capitalist transition and build a national economy by creating a stronger link between industrial facilities in the coastal cities and the raw materials produced in rural China. By the early 1930s, factions of the GMD consciously looked to an Italian Fascist model of economic independence and productivism to reintegrate the rural and urban spheres. This implied strong government control over internal markets and state-private cooperation in industrialization. Yet these policies were sidelined by administrative weakness, GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek’s focus on military development, and the subsequent Japanese invasion of the Chinese coast in 1937 that inaugurated World War Two in Asia.

Note: The GMD mentioned here is the same thing as the KMT (Kuomintang).

Considering their later actions in Taiwan, a lot of this is unsurprising.

By the time of the Japanese invasion, the GMD found its main opposition in the form of a peasant army mobilized by a reinvented Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But the CCP itself had begun decades earlier, born out of the same tumultuous intellectual milieu as the GMD itself, both of which began as largely urban affairs. The CCP’s 1921 founding congress was originally intended to take place in Shanghai. Disrupted by police, the meeting was moved north to Jiaxing, where twelve delegates founded the CCP as a branch of the Communist International. As this early CCP grew, it remained a mostly urban project, staffed by intellectuals and skilled industrial workers. Six years after its founding, it was again in Shanghai that this first incarnation of the CCP came to its violent end. In a Russian-backed alliance with the GMD, revolutionaries seized control over most of China’s key cities in a series of worker-staffed insurrections. After victory was secured with the success of the 1927 Shanghai Insurrection, the GMD turned against the communists, arresting a thousand CCP members and leaders of local trade unions, officially executing some three hundred and disappearing thousands more.

The only surviving fragments of the CCP were its rural bases among the peasantry.

Alongside the gang boss and labor contractor there were also guild masters and secret societies. Though often initially founded under the Qing as rebel organizations of one kind or another, under the Nationalists the guild and secret society took on the character of criminal rackets. Each also helped to shape the forms of labor deployment that would develop in this early period of capitalist integration. Guilds deemphasized the art of the craft in favor of seeking lucrative contracts. They “became fledgling capitalist construction companies whose managers, the guild masters, hired people for wages that were quickly returned to the guild in the form of membership fees […] Brutality in enforcing the guild’s monopoly over hiring and construction was common.”

Secret societies, outlawed under the Qing, had helped staff the 1911 Republican revolution and, in return, were permitted to operate openly for the first time. This fundamentally transformed the function of the secret society and ended the period in which they could be understood as “primitive revolutionaries.” Some “remained faithful to their ‘social bandit’ origins” and joined the Communist Party. But the rest became run-of-the-mill reactionaries...

The influence of such groups grew in the vacuum created by the destruction of the communist labor unions and Party cells after 1927. The result was a city in which labor contractors, the gang boss system, the guilds and the secret societies all formed a complex mesh of labor deployment defined by both the dependence on the wage and the threat of direct violence common in colonial regimes of accumulation.

In this sense, the conditions of CCP politics mirrored that of the GMD, with its focus on national unity, although the CCP was better able to bridge the contradiction between these two politics with the concept of “the people.” A focus on national unity was incomplete and one sided. “The people,” by contrast, was defined neither solely by national citizenship nor by one’s class. Instead, one’s subjective stance towards the revolution placed one within or outside of “the people.” Thus even the national bourgeoisie (Chinese capitalists who did not collaborate directly with foreign powers) and patriotic rich peasants and landlords could become members of “the people,” so long as they threw their weight (and resources) behind the revolution. This focus on subjectivity would remain a strong component of CCP politics from that time on.

Faced with a labor shortage toward the beginning of the 1940s, the Japanese soon turned to more coercive means of recruitment. This included forcing students, prisoners, vagrants and the floating population of unemployed or casual workers into largely unpaid and compulsory labor service, all formalized by the April 1940 National Army Law which sought universal conscription into the military and industrial development projects. Those not pulled into the army itself were sent to the national labor corps “between the ages of twenty and twenty-three [to] work in military construction, essential industries or local production.” The brutality of this labor regime is not to be underestimated, and has been quite fairly compared to the European holocaust in the scale and scope of its devastation.

Throughout this period, then, attempts to rationalize and modernize labor deployment through the implementation of Taylorist methods and the use of hourly wages co-existed with and were ultimately superseded by regimes that relied, in the last instance, on the threat of violence, whether this be at the hand of the gang-boss or through the revival of systems of corveé labor and “tributary” methods of production and trade. This bore degrees of similarity to various forms of pre-capitalist accumulation seen throughout Eurasia, and authors writing on the Manchurian labor system have sloppily referred to it as “feudal.” More importantly, these “feudal” aspects of the labor regime are often portrayed as being in tension with the properly “rational,” Taylorist system of labor deployment through the wage relation.

But this opposition is not so clear. Despite its allegedly “feudal” elements, the Japanese industrialization of the Chinese mainland can well be seen as the initiation of a transition to an explicitly capitalist mode of production dominated by value production. Rather than seeing the build-up of the Japanese wartime complex (or its German, Italian or American counterparts) as driven by simple military madness, we must understand these military expansions as necessities of accumulation posed by states facing limits to their growth and mired in a crisis of value production. The Japanese colonization of the mainland was a response to a crisis of global capitalism. In one sense, this can be understood as a process of “primitive accumulation,” but only if we sever the term from its connotations of an expanding commercial capitalism, circa the European gestation of the capitalist mode of production in its Genoese, Dutch or British sequences.

The Japanese scaling-up of the gang-boss system and the implementation of forced labor were not, then, in any way a form of backsliding into pre-capitalist modes of production. They were instead a capitalist logic of production taken to its extreme—literally a last-ditch effort to preserve the capitalist social relations that ensured the continued accumulation of value on the East Asian mainland. Compounding growth rates, the increasing circulation of commodities across the domestic market and the beginning of the urban demographic transition all followed, alongside the mass proletarianization of ex-peasant migrants. These forms of labor deployment were in fact the ultimate complement to the Taylorist “rationalization” campaigns, because, in the face of labor shortage and military defeats, it was only these forms of labor deployment that worked, or, more accurately: got people working.

The GMD was utterly unable to manage this vast new bureaucracy. Incapable of reining in inflation, the dire economic trends initiated under the Japanese continued under the Nationalists, who were ill-suited to restart the project of imperial expansion begun by their predecessors. The middle class that had started to form prior to the invasion was now all but liquidated. A new bureaucratic warlordism arose alongside and within the collapsing GMD, creating nearly perfect conditions for the growth of the communist armies in the countryside.

As the GMD began to cede territory to the CCP in the Civil War, this Japanese-built state-industrial structure was the most intact component of non-agricultural production that the communists inherited. Manchuria was conquered early on with substantial military assistance from Russia, which gave significant amounts of ammunition, artillery, tanks and aircraft to the communist army while also assisting in the reconstruction of the Manchurian railroad system. But this assistance also came at significant cost, as Stalin ordered Russian troops to partner with the GMD and loot Manchurian factories in order to recuperate the USSR’s own war-strained industry.

The decisions confronted there, more than anywhere else, cut to the root of the communist project. If the Party were to simply seize the industrial infrastructure built by the Japanese, they risked reigniting the brutal expansionary process for which these industries were built and reconstructing the bureaucracy necessary to keep them running. Even if the Party devolved direct control of these industries to the remaining workers trained to run them, this would have done nothing to solve the structural problems inherent in how these large-scale factories functioned, nor the challenge posed by their geographical concentration. The gang-boss hierarchy could be filled with elected representatives, but this would have simply replaced a more Darwinian bureaucracy with a democratic one.

The problem was how, precisely, to utilize the productive capacity of this inherited infrastructure while simultaneously transforming society’s relations of production—a transformation that can only occur at a scale much larger than the individual enterprise, and which is in no way produced by a linear agglomeration of small changes made in individual workers’ relationships to individual workplaces, though these are obviously important and occur at every stage in the process. It was only in confronting this larger problem, then, that the Party’s own theories of industrial organization would become relevant. These top-down theories, meanwhile, were often paired with the bottom-up activity of workers in these industries, whose own opinions on these questions contributed to the overall heterogeneity of the communist project, which was by no means reducible to the CCP. The next three decades would be marked by struggles over the transformation and expansion of this industrial inheritance, with the Party absorbing many of these heterogeneous positions in the securing of its strategic hegemony—a hegemony premised on the potentials of production.

The socialist era was indeed a time of transition, in which a “national economy” was gradually sewn together out of disparate economic sub-regions and various methods of labor deployment. But the most fundamental characteristic of this “national economy”—the one feature that could be said to span city and countryside, determining the relationship between the two—was the implementation of the grain standard and the net funneling of resources from countryside to city. > In other words, the lynchpin of the entire development project was the widening of the urban rural divide, despite the increase of the country’s total social wealth.

In reality, capitalism has not been the only mode of production that saw major processes of urbanization. Nevertheless, it is often simply assumed that the abolition of capitalism entails the abolition of the city and the explosion of industry into a “garden city” of fields, factories and workshops,” in which population itself must be roughly equalized across inhabited territory. Marx and Engels’ own work exacerbates this confusion. The “more equitable distribution of population over town and country” is one of the ten measures advanced in the Communist Manifesto. Though this can be understood as a response to the particular rural-urban inequalities that had arisen in Europe at the time, it is then made ahistorical in The Origin of the Family, where Engels claims the city as a basic “characteristic of civilization,” and thereby an origin-point for all early class structures.

It's actually interesting how frequently this is misunderstood and overlooked; there have been numerous cities that were built without capitalism as their mode of production/economics (such as Cahokia) because the cities were not sufficiently "urbanised" by Eurocentric values. I'm glad this was included.

The situation changed, however, upon the completion of the Civil War. In the later-liberated southern port cities, many owners and managers remained present, leveraging precious technical skills and access to foreign credit in exchange for favorable treatment by the Party. More importantly, victory in the war meant that the communists had seized several of the country’s largest urban areas precisely when the wartime stimulus to these cities’ industries was faltering and the US-backed economic blockade had just begun. The number of workers and wartime refugees skyrocketed, but many of the industries in the coastal cities had been bombed by the Japanese or sabotaged by the retreating GMD. In Guangzhou alone, “it was reported in December 1949 that less than a quarter of the city’s enterprises were operating at full capacity, while nearly a third of the entire workforce was unemployed.”

Nonetheless, attempts at agrarian forms of socialism were not without precedent, as anarchists, republicans and communists alike had advocated and even attempted to build such egalitarian rural projects in the past, particularly in the New Village, Rural Reconstruction and Village Cooperation movements of the early 20th century. Some, such as the Tolstoyan anarchist Liu Shipei, envisioned the end goal of any egalitarian project in China to be anti-modern in character, returning the country to its agrarian heritage. Many of the CCP’s earliest members had emerged from the anarchist movement and retained more than a little fidelity to decentralized models of development that mixed industrial and agricultural activity and thereby encouraged out-migration from urban cores.

Would this be linked to what happened with the labour education movement in Shanghai (which had an anarchist tone)?

Name: Liu Shipei

The restructuring of the economy was coordinated by three main actors. First, there was the military, “which sent representatives (who were also Party members) to individual factories where they claimed the authority of the new government.” But these military representatives were not particularly familiar with industrial production and, therefore, had to rely on the hierarchy of technicians and administrators already in place. Secondly, there was the urban wing of the CCP itself, many members of which were skilled workers. Nonetheless, the Party’s urban wing was small and accustomed to operating within a rigid command hierarchy necessitated by secrecy. Whereas the rural Party’s experience mediating between simultaneous social conflicts and administering large swaths of production had made it a flexible and adaptable organization, the urban Party’s experience had been far more limited.

Finally, there were “the skilled, literate workers who, with the blessings of the Communist Party, were quickly promoted to positions of leadership in the factories by the trade unions.” But these workers were sparse, due to widespread illiteracy among both urban residents and the majority of CCP cadre: “In Shanghai alone […] the illiteracy rate for all employees, including clerks and white-collar workers, was estimated at 46 percent.” Meanwhile, “among blue-collar factory workers, this figure was much higher, probably near the 80 percent figure for industrial personnel in the whole country.” By contrast, “in 1949 almost all of the students in Chinese universities and higher level technical schools were from the urban middle and upper middle classes.” And these students were no longer simply elites educated in the Confucian classics. Instead, “well over half (63 percent) of the members of this group who were university and technical school graduates in 1949 had majored in subjects that were essential for industrialization.”

The Party’s response was to launch a recruitment drive, hoping to bolster its ranks with loyal intellectuals and skilled technicians. The risk of careerism and corruption was clearly noted, but these were considered necessary evils that could later be uprooted. Meanwhile, new unions were formed alongside the new Party organs, intended to simultaneously rationalize production and provide workers with some oversight over the new, less trustworthy Party recruits. At first, the Party had attempted to weed out former gang-bosses, GMD-union thugs and secret society members from its restructured industrial system, but this proved to be nearly impossible and the attempt only further stalled the recuperation of industry. Local cadre were instructed to open recruitment in the new unions, hoping that workers’ own political perceptiveness combined with state-sponsored reform campaigns would be sufficient to prevent these lower-tier elites from regaining power.

Many urban workers had felt disappointed or betrayed by the continuation of capitalism in the port cities, and the early 1950s saw a slow increase in industrial agitation. The new state responded to this dissatisfaction in several ways. First, concessions were given to many workers. Wages increased and most urbanites’ livelihoods were significantly improved—not necessarily a difficult task, since peace alone was an improvement on two decades of war and occupation. Second, new mass organizations were created, including new unions and a national Labor Board, in an attempt to provide less economically disruptive means to solve workplace grievances.[78] Though these new organizations often proved clunky and unresponsive, they were still initially seen as an important tool for the reorganization of industry and for the devolution of more power to workers.

Many anarchists had hoped to strengthen these local forms of resistance into an egalitarian revolutionary movement aimed at expanding the potentials of statelessness already present in Chinese village culture. These attempts, however, were systematic failures. Several of the most prominent anarchists in China, including Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Ji and Zhang Jingjiang, ultimately joined and had leading roles within the Nationalist Party, sitting on its central committee and forming close relationships with Chiang Kai-Shek and other members of the GMD’s right-wing. Those that retained their belief in an egalitarian and essentially communist revolution, faced with the failures of anarchism, flocked to the newly-founded CCP.

On top of this, the CCP had itself been reformatted by its years in the Chinese countryside. Previously, the leading minds of the Party, such as Chen Duxiu and Wang Ming, had been unambiguously internationalist, and had leveled critiques against rising nationalist trends within the Party itself. Many of the Party’s rank-and-file were, in this period, laborers and trade unionists in the port cities, their everyday lives marked by cosmopolitan contact with workers, technicians and revolutionaries of various leanings from all over the world—but especially Europe and the colonies of Southeast Asia.

Quotes from Part II: Development:

But what scholars often classify as the “Soviet Model” actually covers two alternating tendencies in industrial organization and enterprise management, the first influenced by High Stalinist methods of mass mobilization campaigns alongside “crash production drives and close supervision by Party committees,” and the second more in line with the USSR’s five-year plans of the 1930s, a method of organization “encapsulated in one-man management” which “in effect imposed a strict hierarchical and bureaucratic order over enterprises that was antithetical to the mobilizational impulses of High Stalinism.”

At the same time, the elimination of the handicrafts industry and the market networks that had undergirded relations between city and countryside ensured that most of China’s industrial activity was now urban, and that the population would be more strictly concentrated in urban industries or dispersed across the agricultural collectives being created at this time. Most importantly: the divide between urban and rural was now becoming a clear geographic divide between grain-producing and grain-consuming regions, with the grain-consumers as the primary targets of industrialization.

The easiest solution to this problem, adopted as a local fix by enterprises across the country, was the practice of “replacement (dingti),” in which the enterprise would hire relatives and children of current employees into the same work unit. Because of the constraints on hiring, “the Chinese government inadvertently promoted an intensely localistic practice of work-unit occupational inheritance.” In so doing, the CCP revived the family unit as an integral source of social privilege, fusing it to the danwei and thereby to the state itself. Families that had poor placement or little clout in their enterprises held little bargaining power and therefore saw their family members deported to far-off cities (often in the interior) by the demands of national labor allocation. This created a financial and emotional stress that further prevented such families from ascending the distributional hierarchy.

Again, this reminds me of things that were written about in Blockchain Chicken Farm, where the author discusses how there were still elements and places that utilised the same system of children working in (and taking over) their parents' positions but that this was becoming less common among those who saw new industries.

The collective dining halls and the huge size of communes made it almost impossible for peasants to see how their labor affected their own subsistence. The accounting and workpoints systems had basically broken down. As crop yields dropped in 1959, food began to run out in the dining halls and peasants stayed home to conserve energy. Collective control over labor disintegrated. Most free dining halls only lasted three months, and in the fall of 1958 even commune cadres’ salaries were stopped. Meals in the dining halls that continued to exist in 1959 had to be purchased with meal tickets given out according to work. By the spring of 1959, the Central Committee tried to push the communes back into a system of remuneration according to labor: “The principle of distribution according to labor means calculating payment according to the amount of labor one does. The more work done, the more one will earn.” And summer harvests were to be distributed with 60 to 70% according to labor.

Cadre lost control of the rural population, which took matters into its own hands by stealing from communal stores, scavenging for food, eating the green shoots of plants before grain could ripen and fleeing the countryside. Resistance was punished, in turn, with violence and the withholding of food rations, potentially a death sentence at the time. In the wake of famine, rebuilding state institutions and Party power in the countryside would prove a very difficult task.

The uncontrollable flood of migrants into the cities over the course of the 1950s—first pursuing jobs in the new industries and then fleeing the famine in the countryside—provided the impetus to use hukou records to fix people in their home villages. This was achieved through the apportioning of state benefits according to one’s registration status—effectively preventing rural out-migrants from obtaining jobs in the city. Through the urban danwei system, urban hukou holders would be provided a quota of grain at a state-subsidized price, while rural hukou holders were required to produce grain and would not receive state rations, instead receiving rights to a plot of land, or a direct portion of co-operative, then collective, agricultural output.

Workers in such joint-owned enterprises, then, not only found themselves lacking the privileges of their counterparts in state-owned heavy industry, but also saw the benefits they had wrested from factory owners over the past decade gradually stripped away. Under “joint ownership,” they increasingly lost their opportunities to participate in management, witnessing the evisceration of the democratic institutions that had been built within the enterprise as a counter-power to that of private owners. Many of these private owners, alongside the management personnel they had employed, were simply transferred to positions of authority within the new industrial structure, making the obliteration of workers’ own institutions all the more insulting. Maybe more importantly, the sheer numbers of managers, supervisors and other administrative personnel skyrocketed, composing “more than a third of total employees in Shanghai’s joint enterprises.” This increase in administrative personnel was made necessary by the scale of consolidation and the chaotic character of the port cities’ pre-existing industrial infrastructure. Nonetheless, the practice appeared purely unproductive from the standpoint of most rank-and-file workers, instigating further resentment.

In late 1956 and early 1957, sensing the unrest and frightened by recent revolts against Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe, the CCP sponsored a wide-ranging “policy of (limited) liberalization and democratization and increased scope for criticism of the Party,” in what was known as the “Hundred Flowers” campaign. In standard portrayals of the period, Mao calls for criticism of the Party, and students and intellectuals follow suit. Once the movement gets out of hand, with heavy critiques leveled at the Party and comparisons being made to the rebellion in Hungary, the Party initiates the Anti-Rightist campaign later in 1957 to reign in the movement and punish those who had spoken too harshly of the leadership. There is often an ambiguity in these accounts about whether or not the Hundred Flowers’ movement had been a sort of trick to draw the Party leadership’s potential enemies out into the light. But, whether a trick or an earnest attempt at reform, most of these accounts are consistent in their portrayal of the movement as a largely top-down affair, primarily involving students and intellectuals.

This connects well to what's happening today (in terms of the lessons learned about "liberal democracy." Give people something that masquerades as a "responsive" and "participatory" system, and it helps cool down the issues of repression.

That is, for people who aren't repressed.

In reality, the Hundred Flowers campaign was a response to the extreme social conflicts that had arisen over the course of the First Five-Year Plan. It merely recognized dynamics already reaching a boiling point across Chinese society and concealed them beneath the complaints of students and intellectuals—figures who could easily be dismissed as vestiges of the old society. Directly acknowledging the antagonism that existed among urban workers would have, in effect, raised the question of whether the Party had lost the mandate of the working class. This also entailed that, after the fact, workers had to be “written out of the Hundred Flowers story as protestors, being present only as defenders of the Party during the anti-rightist campaign.” But the reality was quite different.

It's interesting how intellectuals are often used in this manner by authoritarians.

In some cases, this intra-enterprise division took on extreme forms and strikes were crushed by more privileged workers themselves, with no need for directives from the central government. During a dispute at the Shanghai Fertilizer Company in May 1957, 41 temporary workers who had been promised regular status but had then been abruptly laid off attacked union officials, demanding to be re-instated as regular workers. After nearly beating the union director and vice-director to death, the union, youth league and permanent workers vowed to solve the conflict themselves, and the permanent workers “even stockpiled weapons in preparation for killing the temporary workers.” Before this could happen, however, the municipal authorities stepped in and arrested the temporary worker leaders.

Given the dangers posed by open worker revolt, the Party not only sided with the more privileged members of the industrial workforce—i.e., older permanent workers with urban-based families employed in heavy industries—but also sought, initially, to reform systems of industrial and political management. As early as the fall of 1956, the upper echelons of the Party had realized that the strike wave, still in its infancy, was rooted in deeper conflicts that were themselves engendered by national industrial policy. Events in Eastern Europe further verified these fears. At the Eight Party Congress the Soviet Model influenced by the five-year plans of the 1930s, with “one-man management” at its core, was rejected in favor of the alternate Soviet Model, based on High Stalinist principles, which favored mass mobilization, workers’ participation, and direct supervision and management by Party committees instead of technocratic leadership by factory directors and engineers.

Though endorsed at high levels and rendered into socialist mythology via historical comparisons with the USSR, the mobilizational policies that resulted were often more the product of local, practical solutions to factory and city-scale conflicts and, in many instances, would ultimately exceed what central authorities considered acceptable concessions to the workers. In many factories, workers’ congresses were founded, “consisting of directly elected representatives who could be recalled by workers at any time,” a form of organization that was pushed for by then-chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), Lai Ruoyu, who “identified democratization of management as the feature which distinguished socialist enterprises from capitalist ones.”

In terms of repression, workers suffered far more than students or intellectuals. Though the crackdown on strikes was concurrent with the Anti-Rightist campaign, workers were denied the political status of “rightists.” Instead, they were given the classification of “bad elements,” implying a simple criminality rather than any sort of principled political opposition. This was no difference of semantics: “workers, and some union officials, were in fact imprisoned and sent to labour camps in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers movement, and some were executed.” When high-ranking ACFTU officials such as Lai Ruoyu, Li Xiuren and Gao Yuan stood behind the workers, even going so far as to advocate for independent unions, the result was vilification, dismissal, and a general purge of the ACFTU.

It is untenable, then, to simply attribute the failure of the strike wave to the state’s repressive measures. For the most part, the state simply did not have to intervene. Divisions within the workforce—particularly along lines of seniority and regular versus temporary status—were often sufficient to prevent the strikers’ demands from galvanizing wider support. The striking workers were often the minority in their own enterprises, and their demands were just as often violently opposed by other workers, as in the example of the Shanghai Fertilizer company.

The Party would soon leverage this fact, portraying strikers as “bad elements” with non-proletarian family backgrounds attempting to trick other workers into participation in an anti-communist conspiracy. Despite the exaggeration of this propaganda, the kernel of truth here was simply that a significant bulk of the national industrial workforce was sufficiently satisfied with their positions to be wary of losing them. This was especially true among the older workers, who not only held higher wages and received more benefits, but also remembered the abysmal conditions of work prior to the revolution.

The result was that no mode of production fully cohered during the socialist developmental regime—and it is precisely because of this that the state itself, increasingly fused with the Party (and, ultimately, the military) played the mechanical role of ordering production, distribution and growth. In some cases this entailed mimicking patterns seen in the transition to capitalism, in other cases importing practices, technicians and entire factories from the USSR, and in still others replicating or reinventing forms of labor deployment, infrastructural development and cultural mobilization that bore significant resemblance to practices found in the region’s history.

At the same time, because these methods of accumulation were mechanical, the state tended to ossify into a stiff bureaucracy if any one policy or method was in place for too long. At each point, new practices were adopted not out of ideological attachment or as neutral tools in factional battles, but most often as a bricolage of makeshift responses to an accumulation of myriad local crises. Throughout the socialist era, each policy shift was also a method of re-oiling ossified state mechanisms through modification and reinvention. In extreme cases, these shifts were accompanied by large-scale purges and re-staffing.

But this decentralization also caused new forms of competitive chaos, as different segments of local hierarchies competed for control over the new powers devolved to cities and provinces. In some cities, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, the municipal Party committees effectively took direct control over much of the cities’ heavy industry, despite Party directives dictating that these industries be administered by the central planning authorities. Meanwhile, the decentralized enterprises (accounting for more than 85% of all employment in Shanghai) were effectively given over to “direct control by municipal Party committees,” which meant that “enjoying as they did ties with local Party officials, enterprise Party committees gained control over production tasks.” Down to the most basic units of urban life, the policy was to “guarantee the absolute leadership of the Party in industrial production.” Decentralization, then, actually represented a stronger fusion of Party and state, as the tasks of everyday production as well as setting output targets and reporting final production numbers were all roundly handed over to Party committees rather than technicians and managers.

An extreme example of this can be seen in the practice of several factories in Guangzhou, which adopted “an anarchical policy of ‘non-management’ (wuren guanli).” This policy entailed that enterprises “practiced the ‘Eight Selfs’ (ba zi), in which workers arranged their own plans, output quotas, technology, blueprints, operations, inputs of semiprocessed goods, quality inspection, and accounting.” The practice became so extreme that banks “distributed cash to any worker who came in with purchase orders. Employees who knew the enterprise’s bank account number could withdraw funds to procure whatever items they needed for their factories.” Yet, even with the near-complete abolition of enterprise-level management and with workers collectively agreeing upon their own production quotas, all evidence suggests that these quasi-syndicalist factories suffered the same output speculation as factories that retained more traditional management structures. The ultimate effect of the production crisis was not blunted in Guangzhou.

Quotes from Part III: Ossification:

Quotes from this article:

Travelling only at night, the corpse drivers would ring bells to warn off the living, since the sight of the dead migrants was thought to bring bad luck. Though itself somewhat apocryphal, new myths grew out of the practice, as the hopping corpses were transformed into jiangshi, vampire-like creatures driven to feed on the life force of others. Their own blood siphoned out of them by the docks and factories, these migrant workers were transformed into monsters befitting a new reality—one of crumbling empires, civil wars and the insatiable expansion of commodities.

Transporting corpses over a thousand li was not remembrance, then, but a strange sort of survival. The stiff-limbed dead walked from their factories, traversed countries torn by war, famine and other unnamable sufferings to finally settle amongst their kin in the dust of their homeland, a rural world that had only just caught sight of its approaching oblivion.

Today, China itself has become such a wandering specter. The rural world is dying, yet hundreds of millions of workers still seem stuck between their peasant past and a future that fails to arrive. Two decades of staggering economic growth built on a series of credit bubbles have left a legacy of “development” defined by wastelands of apartment complexes sitting next to half-empty factory cities, each year filled with fewer workers and more unmanned machines. While the elite children of the country’s financial and administrative centers collect sports cars and foreign degrees, the children of today’s migrants are guaranteed little more than the fleeting chance to become yet another corpse crushed to pulp in the factory.

A lot of this is reminding me of Blockchain Chicken Farm and the depictions of rural life among the techno-optimist framework.

As growth rates dwindle, the country seems nonetheless driven ahead by an undead, mechanical momentum. Workers are laid off with nowhere to return. Ruralites give up their land in exchange for a fraction of the condos built on them, soon losing their value to an inflating currency. Entire landscapes are poisoned by decades of rapid industrial expansion, while urban centers succumb to man-made landslides, earthquakes and chemical explosions. Riots and strikes proliferate, but fail to cohere into anything larger. The working class has been dismantled. Nothing is left today but dead generations united in their separation, shambling through the fire and the dust.