Night Thought About Economic Democracy and China

It is possible to consider China since the revolution as being a series of experiments in a large country officially governed by materialists.   First there was the brutality of the imposition of the Communist government, from an admittedly brutal and chaotic series of awful non-communist regimes.  Then there were the horrible famines brought on by the imposition of high theory and science on agriculture.  Tens of millions of people are estimated to have died in those.  Part of that was the importation of Lysenkoism in China but much of it was the inability of lower level communist hacks and lackies to tell higher ups that the great applications of science in service to materialist ideology didn't, somehow, seem to work in reality.   Lysenkoism was abandoned within fifteen years, as it was in the Soviet Union after Stalin died.  The bureaucratic establishment under communism has been perpetuated into today.

Then, I'd guess largely in response to the disasters of the early years of the "Peoples' Republic",  the different horrors of the Cultural Revolution were imposed as a means of maintaining control.  With its large scale bloodshed, enslavement and other horrors.   I don't think that the frequently encountered stories of families forcibly divided into agit-prop dramas for public consumption were merely coincidental.  Any level of competition for loyalty to the governing establishment was seen as a danger to it.  It is an indictment, especially of people allegedly on the left in the West, that the lives of people destroyed in this modern reign of terror, weren't seen as more important than theory, more important than concentrating on the bizarre spectacles of that period and finding them amusing.

Gradually, as the old and true believers died off or became the focus of show trials by those who grabbed the reigns, China abandoned pretensions of "socialism"* for a capitalism that has been brutal and destructive, humanly and environmentally,  on a scale that would be hard to match.  Adding scientific efficiency to the enslavement of humanity and the despoliation of the environment, quite intuitively, turns out to bring even more horrific results.  It's so weird that students of Marx, whose critique of industrial capitalism will stand as his greatest work even as so much else of it lies discredited, didn't get that.   Or maybe they did and, in the belief that moral obligations are scientifically discredited, they went with it.   And here we can indict  the "right" in the West which has had no problem with moving in to make deals turning the "Peoples" Republic" into a vast slave market and industrial brown field, working hand in hand with their "communist" partners, so many of whom became instant billionaires with a vulgarity unmatched by that of the most vulgar "capitalists" our gaudy economics has produced.

For this week, as I turn from encouraging people to read Eddington to promoting Joseph Weizenbaum's great and important and criminally neglected book,  "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation",  I will ask if the current system in Capitalist-Communist China, isn't a continuing experiment in capitalism with the, admittedly imperfect, moral restraints of religion removed and what that means for people and the biosphere.  If the new atheists' prophesy of an atheist West comes true, it might be a window into our future.

*  I put socialism in quotes because that word has come to mean something quite different from what socialism should have always meant.   When I said "I'm a socialist" I meant nothing except that the means of production rightfully belong to those who use them to produce wealth and not to investors who, through legalized theft, are illegitimately given legal ownership of them.  That turns workers into equipment as it steals the tangible product that they produce, allowing the "owners" to turn them out and ship their jobs to slave labor markets in places such as China.

"Socialism", in that meaning of the word must be democratic, socialism is an aspect of democracy. No political system which is not, actually, democratic could possibly sustain workers' ownership of the means of production.  Some form of theft on behalf of investors will always succeed where democracy is absent.  I would almost guarantee that, as in the United States, the extent to which investors are allowed to steal the products of other peoples' work that democracy can be dependably regarded as being absent.

The appropriation of the word by fascists, both of the "right wing" and "left wing" variety, has made it unusable.  I'm in favor of finding a term that will separate real socialism from what most people mean when they use the word.   "Economic democracy" seems to me to be the best expression of what I meant when I have said I was a socialist.   If I'd said I was an "economic democrat"  from the beginning I might have avoided being willfully blind to the horrors of so much of the brutal history of communist rule and the moral depravity of so much of the pseudo-left here and in Europe.   So, in my very late middle age, I go from being a "socialist" to being an economic democrat,  changing nothing except common misunderstanding and a label.