Research

Quotes from this book:

Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity's Childhood

This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:

1. simply aren’t true;
2. have dire political implications;
3. make the past needlessly dull.

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.

To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century.

There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves.

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing

capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.

When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way – which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong – made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. It felt like almost everyone else seemed to be caught in the same trap. Specialists were refusing to generalize.

Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?

All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.

Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time; and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

Chapter 2: Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress

Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down. It’s a bit like pretending William Shakespeare had somehow invented the English language. In fact, many of Shakespeare’s most brilliant turns of phrase turn out to have been common expressions of the day, which any Elizabethan Englishman or woman would be likely to have thrown into casual conversation, and whose authors remain as obscure as those of knock-knock jokes – even if, were it not for Shakespeare, they’d probably have passed out of use and been forgotten long ago.

Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in popular revolts.

True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mortals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points of creating a ‘carnival king’ or ‘May queen’ is that they exist in order to be dethroned.

After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.

This is something that we've seen a resurgence in as of late, particularly in societies that are trying to separate themselves from the State (or in community-oriented discussions for those that try to operate within the confines of the State but to remove elements of State control from their spaces).

Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.

Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.

Do you seriously imagine, he says, that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service?

Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’.

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Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’

Something to go back to because this seems like an interesting line of exploration.

The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying. Graffigny’s Inca heroine, Zilia, is as critical of the vanities and absurdities of European society as she is of patriarchy. By the nineteenth century, the novel was remembered in some quarters as the first work to introduce the notion of state socialism to the general public, Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.

In 1751, preparing a second edition of her book, Madame de Graffigny sent letters to a variety of friends asking for suggested changes. One of these correspondents was a twenty-three-year-old seminary student and budding economist, A. R. J. Turgot, and we happen to have a copy of his reply – which was long and highly (if constructively) critical. Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.

Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.

There is no avoiding such inequality, concluded Turgot in his reply to Madame de Graffigny. The only alternative, according to him, would be massive, Inca-style state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions: an enforced equality which could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and, therefore, result in economic and social catastrophe. In light of all this, Turgot suggested Madame de Graffigny rewrite her novel in such a way as to have Zilia realize these terrible implications at the end of the book.

Unsurprisingly, Graffigny ignored his advice.

A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization. Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development.

Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food. ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.

The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality has been taught, debated and picked apart in a thousand classrooms – which is odd, because in many ways it is very much an eccentric outlier, even by the standards of its time.

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Almost all the examples in this Discourse on the Arts and Sciences are taken from classical Greek and Roman sources – but in his footnotes, Rousseau hints at other sources of inspiration...

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As for Rousseau, he spent much of the next several years writing well-publicized responses to criticisms of the piece (as well as using his new fame to produce a comic opera, The Village Soothsayer, which became popular at the French court).

Also an interesting line of inquiry to explore.

What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others? The answer isn’t pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.

Chapter 3: Unfreezing the Ice Age

The problem is that prehistory turns out to be an extremely long period of time: more than 3 million years, during which we know our ancestors were, at least sometimes, using stone tools. For most of this period, evidence is extremely limited. There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.

I hate this phrase. I know it's harkening back to Richard Dawkins and his bullshit, but it usually just rubs me the wrong way.

In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profound happened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 years ago, variously referred to in the literature as the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ or even the ‘Human Revolution’. But in the last two decades it has become increasingly clear to researchers that this is most likely an illusion, created by biases in our evidence.

Here’s why. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC. It includes more advanced toolkits for hunting and handicrafts, the first clear evidence for the making of images in bone, ivory and clay – including the famous sculpted ‘female figurines’, dense clusters of carved and painted animal figures in caves, often observed with breathtaking accuracy; more elaborate ways of clothing and decorating the human body; the first attested use of musical instruments like bone flutes; regular exchange of raw materials over great distances, and also what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.

All this is impressive, and gives the impression of a lack of synchrony between the ticking of our genetic and cultural clocks. It seems to ask the question: why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’. A few go so far as to postulate some late mutation in the human brain to explain the apparently superior cultural capacities of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans, but such views can no longer be taken seriously.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole problem is a mirage. The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world. With each year that passes, new evidence accumulates for early behavioural complexity elsewhere: not just Africa, but also the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Even as we write, a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years; and research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia. No doubt still earlier examples of complex pictorial art will one day be found somewhere on the continent of Africa.

This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.

So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.

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: