As someone who was in the streets during the Nov. 30, 1999 Battle In Seattle, I find it ironic that it is now the US that is sabotaging WTO by not appointing judges while the Chinese Communist government is the great advocate of free trade. As has been the case when the nation had competitive advantage, the UK and US formerly before they lost it and began to close their doors. The continuity of trade barrier policies from Trump to Biden underscores this. I don’t expect the belated return to industrial policy in the U.S. is going to reverse this.
Thanks for the comment Patrick. The history of capitalism is of nations, starting with the Dutch and the Brits, advocating for free trade until they have market power, and then letting the free-trade lecture fall to the wayside.
Of course, the idiocy of the free trade argument is that lopsided power relations, e.g. US military power after WWII, means that national leaders simply declare other reasons, like liberating a nation in the case of Ukraine, for using the state to boost the economic fortunes of its donor class.
I wish the best for the people of China. And Xi Jinping appears to be a thoughtful and very smart leader. But the people of the world need a better way forward than capitalist trade theory is likely to generate.
keeping to the topic of capitalist economic policies and consequences - in the real world - not as they are conceived in the metaphysical realm - there's an article by Patrick Bond in Counterpunch - Oct. 3 - "The Blessing" for Genocide: Nearly all BRICS+ Regimes Nurture Israel, Economically - do you have any present or past work in relation to this topic? It would help- people make sense of what country does what and why as genocide unfolds before us.
Thanks for the comment Patricia. According to I believe Ray McGovern, Russia and Iran are in the process of finalizing a mutual defense pact. With the existing pact between Russia and China, I believe that this will place most of BRICS, population wise, against Israel in the current conflict.
While my theory is that Israel has backed off temporarily because of the holiday, should Israel (the US) continue to bomb Iran, it will be bombing Russia. As I understand it, Putin also publicly endorsed the Palestinian cause in the last few days.
Last, rumor has it, again from Ray McGovern, that Netanyahu has been frantically calling Putin, with Putin refusing to speak with him, likely to head off Tel Aviv being leveled when Israel continues its assault on Iran.
Well written and interesting! But, unfortunately for the Chinese, China may be radically changing its model before our very eyes. Between roughly the early 1980s up until recent years, with its politically and economically decentralized system and democratic governance structures built around its broadly representative local parties who wielded control of local governments that had *real* power, China, despite not having the vote and some other key things, in some of the most key ways darkly ironically resembled the USA's Old Republic more than contemporary America does. However Xi and the special interest groups around him at the national center are trying to hyper centralize and dedemocratize, the recent 3rd Plenum declares the intent to eliminate any policy variabilities that have the effect of generating partial local trade protectionism and partial local capital inhibitors. But that variability and the democracy it enables has been the great enabler of China's success! I hope they fail.
Which gets us to democracy, they can talk about "redistributing" gains all they want, but the fact of the matter is if everyone lives in a world where the entirety of hundreds of thousands of places with over eight billion people collectively contained within them are completely and totally, with no leeway or any, even just moderate, ability for policy variability, subject to the designs of a planetary center comprising some far below one percent miniscule percentage of the human species, then very close to hundred percent of the human species would be living within a centralized dictatorship, the best they could hope for is some redistribution. But that'll eventually be gone too. And either way, by snuffing out very close to every single one the human species ideas before they can ever be tried, along with the fact that there will be no redundancy, we will have far worse economic, social, and scientific outcomes. Capital "G" Globalism is at best deeply in error, no matter who's doing it. But thats empire. But we could still try cooperation...
A few years back I met some ideological communists from Cuba and Venezuela who explained the Venezuelan plan for power redistribution. The plan was America before power was consolidated at the top. This is something that Americans raised on anti-communism don't get. The natural allies of the American people were the Bolsheviks and Cuban revolutionaries, not the American ruling class. Thanks for the comment.
Xi hasn't made any indication that he intends to change the norm of issuing a general goal and letting that be interpreted by provincial and municipal governments.
All he's done is ensure that closet Capitalists can't push their agenda.
Local trade protectionism is actually quite a problem that likely contributes to the consumption issue.
They've had local trade protectionism this whole time and done great. America had local trade protectionism for ~200 years and did great, and then when we abandoned it, the economic arguments made for us to do so were pretty much exactly the same as the ones being made for China to do so now, but those arguments failed even according to their own oversimplified metrics, such as real gdp growth rates and real gdp per capita growth rates, both, along with their other metrics, began to decline. Why would local trade protectionism, which in increases employment and investment, and which they have already been degrading significantly over the last seven years thus reducing employment and consumptions as they've been doing it, lessen consumption?
Additionally, the English translation of the third plenum communique mentions adapting policies to local conditions. And when I found Xi's speech on the main Chinese language official website of the central website, it does seem to emphasize that each locale has different needs that must be addressed instead of copy pasting the same agendas everywhere. In fact, I think it does so right in the same sentence where the "Unified national market" idea is mentioned.
They literally said it the same exact way to Americans in the 1970s/1980s. What the central government statements say, what the prestige universities are saying, what mega companies like Huawei are saying, ect. are so close to what we were told that if they had a super good version pf google translate they could save themselves the work and just feed it stuff from the USA in the 1970s to produce the relevant parts of the communications. They took away all actual power and decision making ability and said they were going to have some guys in the center who were both incorruptible AND super geniuses (Both ended up being far off) who would take care of it. We centralized and democratized and have performed much worse for it
I'm out of my depth then, where can I go to read more about this?
Every time I search "America 70s local trade protectionism" it just keeps telling me about how America tried protectionism against foreign economies. When I specify "protectionism between states" Google continues to be confused. Maybe this is just enshittification, but regardless, I'm going to need you to show me where the parallels are, unfortunately I haven't been able to find them myself.
The issue is China has always been supply-side dominant in our policymaking, so while your concerns our fair, I'd say that the biggest reason for our decline in employment is just our demographics, but also, our governors literally haven't put much thought into finding markets for products that their industry makes within other provinces. It's not like they haven't been trying to get locals to buy local so that each province can support itself on its own industry, but locals just don't buy enough anyways.
Command F for "supply-consumption imbalance" the other parts of David Daokui Li's analysis I may not necessarily agree with.
In the past, local protectionism in China has actually relied on the argument that it drives growth, while Chinese scholars now have noticed that it is not sustainable.
Yes the link above is from a Western think tank, however, that story about Yunnan province is a brilliant example of what David was talking about in the substack link.
"Yunnan, a landlocked southwestern province famous for its flowers, used to struggle to sell its products to major cities in Eastern China due to its location. However, with China having developed advanced cold chain technology, logistical infrastructure, and e-commerce platforms over the past decade, next-day delivery is now accessible to most urban consumers, facilitating substantial growth in the sector."
So the truth is, everyone keeps producing what they are most fit to produce, but we just make sure we can actually buy the stuff that the other provinces are producing.
They told us the same stuff, and even according to their own oversimplified and kinda dumb metric they failed, like real gdp growth rates and real gdp per capita growth rates started to trend down, amongst others. China has had democratic governance structures, democratic governance structures, in the instances of vast territories, require decentralization and policy variability
Hi Rob, would you say that Capitalism seems to be right then seeing as so many Capitalist economists got many things right, but China is just able to do it better for structural reasons?
Thanks for your comment Peter. There are multiple issues here.
I believe that your point is that China has developed using capitalist economic policies, and that therefore demonstrates that capitalist economics works.
But the point of the piece is that capitalist economists haven’t gotten it right. (I’m educated in capitalist, mostly neoclassical, economics). Or rather, they’ve gotten it only halfway right. And the half that they haven’t gotten right can’t be dissociated from what was gotten right.
I’m not sure what information you are getting, but the US side of the trade relationship hasn’t gone so well. That might be fine and well from the Chinese perspective if the current geopolitical tensions between the US and China weren’t directly related to it.
It is understood here that geopolitical tensions stand outside of what it is that capitalist economists care about. But wilful blindness to the broader consequences of economic policies isn’t the virtue that they imagine it to be. The present appears to be quite like the lead-ups to WWI and WWII in terms of economic tensions being expressed on the battlefield.
One other thought is that if you wish to call China’s policies capitalist, and the US is capitalist, why isn’t the declining international fortunes of the US representative of what capitalism produces? The US has been capitalist for centuries longer than China has. To be clear, I’m not calling China capitalist. If I understand correctly, you are.
China’s policies should be up to the Chinese people. What I write and think represents a political tussle over US policy. The very best is wished for the people of China from here. China represents a great civilization. It would benefit the US to partner with China on a path forward for all of us, not just one nation or the other.
Oh no I'm actually a socialist, but I think what you wrote demonstrated the degree of nuance that is necessary when analyzing mainstream economics as a leftist, instead of just saying "if it's not a Marxist it's all wrong". Unfortunately it seems we have to do a lot of "Yes, however-"
I just wanted to ask you what your thoughts were, because there are plenty of people in China, and outside of China, who greatly appreciate China's rise and they all have their theories of it, but because of global anticommunism, too many of them refuse to give Marxism ANY credit in China's success. It's either Confucianism, or traditional values, or collectivist spirit, or not being woke, I've even heard people say that the rising number of Christians in China is cause for China's rise instead of correlation. And of course, the classic one is, "they've long given up on Communism and they're just doing Capitalism, but they're doing it better than the West."
It just wasn't clear if you were analyzing it from that angle.
Thanks for the response Peter. Please feel free to share links on issues to do with China. I went to the translation of the Third Plenary and will read it. Putin’s annual speeches at Valdai should be required reading by government officials in the US.
Russia has a distributed power model as well. American officials who call Putin a dictator have no understanding of the form of Russian governance.
Capitalist economics is the language spoken by government officials around the world because so many leaders were educated in Western schools. I’ve had long discussions with fellow Marxists who don’t know the language, and therefore can’t respond in kind in policy disputes.
Rob - I have thoroughly enjoyed and benefitted from reading your work as it appears on nakedcapitalism.com, where I was introduced to it. This was another fine essay. Questions linger about what to do with the information and perspective you provide. That something more closely approximate to truth than is to be found in the mainstream exists is wonderful in and of itself; that it takes more work to de-bunk than to 'bunk' seems to foretell an information environment in which the easy answer prevails, especially for those looking for it, as an excuse. I write off the already-powerful as too susceptible to personal and intellectual dishonesty. I am around organizers, but they don't read anything; they can't, because they are exhausted from working for their bosses, and, as a result, the organizing suffers. I suppose my question is: why do you do this hard work?
Thanks for the comment Vicky. I'm an analyst by both training and disposition. The minor contribution that I can make to the human project comes through analyzing problems to try to solve them. So to me, doing so is akin to putting out the fire when my neighbors' house is aflame. The work isn't hard if it's done from love. So the trick is to make sure that everything that I do comes from love. Sorry if this sounds hokey. Cheers, Rob
As someone who was in the streets during the Nov. 30, 1999 Battle In Seattle, I find it ironic that it is now the US that is sabotaging WTO by not appointing judges while the Chinese Communist government is the great advocate of free trade. As has been the case when the nation had competitive advantage, the UK and US formerly before they lost it and began to close their doors. The continuity of trade barrier policies from Trump to Biden underscores this. I don’t expect the belated return to industrial policy in the U.S. is going to reverse this.
Thanks for the comment Patrick. The history of capitalism is of nations, starting with the Dutch and the Brits, advocating for free trade until they have market power, and then letting the free-trade lecture fall to the wayside.
Of course, the idiocy of the free trade argument is that lopsided power relations, e.g. US military power after WWII, means that national leaders simply declare other reasons, like liberating a nation in the case of Ukraine, for using the state to boost the economic fortunes of its donor class.
I wish the best for the people of China. And Xi Jinping appears to be a thoughtful and very smart leader. But the people of the world need a better way forward than capitalist trade theory is likely to generate.
a great piece - economics heavy or not.
a digression, but
keeping to the topic of capitalist economic policies and consequences - in the real world - not as they are conceived in the metaphysical realm - there's an article by Patrick Bond in Counterpunch - Oct. 3 - "The Blessing" for Genocide: Nearly all BRICS+ Regimes Nurture Israel, Economically - do you have any present or past work in relation to this topic? It would help- people make sense of what country does what and why as genocide unfolds before us.
Thanks for the comment Patricia. According to I believe Ray McGovern, Russia and Iran are in the process of finalizing a mutual defense pact. With the existing pact between Russia and China, I believe that this will place most of BRICS, population wise, against Israel in the current conflict.
While my theory is that Israel has backed off temporarily because of the holiday, should Israel (the US) continue to bomb Iran, it will be bombing Russia. As I understand it, Putin also publicly endorsed the Palestinian cause in the last few days.
Last, rumor has it, again from Ray McGovern, that Netanyahu has been frantically calling Putin, with Putin refusing to speak with him, likely to head off Tel Aviv being leveled when Israel continues its assault on Iran.
Well written and interesting! But, unfortunately for the Chinese, China may be radically changing its model before our very eyes. Between roughly the early 1980s up until recent years, with its politically and economically decentralized system and democratic governance structures built around its broadly representative local parties who wielded control of local governments that had *real* power, China, despite not having the vote and some other key things, in some of the most key ways darkly ironically resembled the USA's Old Republic more than contemporary America does. However Xi and the special interest groups around him at the national center are trying to hyper centralize and dedemocratize, the recent 3rd Plenum declares the intent to eliminate any policy variabilities that have the effect of generating partial local trade protectionism and partial local capital inhibitors. But that variability and the democracy it enables has been the great enabler of China's success! I hope they fail.
Which gets us to democracy, they can talk about "redistributing" gains all they want, but the fact of the matter is if everyone lives in a world where the entirety of hundreds of thousands of places with over eight billion people collectively contained within them are completely and totally, with no leeway or any, even just moderate, ability for policy variability, subject to the designs of a planetary center comprising some far below one percent miniscule percentage of the human species, then very close to hundred percent of the human species would be living within a centralized dictatorship, the best they could hope for is some redistribution. But that'll eventually be gone too. And either way, by snuffing out very close to every single one the human species ideas before they can ever be tried, along with the fact that there will be no redundancy, we will have far worse economic, social, and scientific outcomes. Capital "G" Globalism is at best deeply in error, no matter who's doing it. But thats empire. But we could still try cooperation...
A few years back I met some ideological communists from Cuba and Venezuela who explained the Venezuelan plan for power redistribution. The plan was America before power was consolidated at the top. This is something that Americans raised on anti-communism don't get. The natural allies of the American people were the Bolsheviks and Cuban revolutionaries, not the American ruling class. Thanks for the comment.
Xi hasn't made any indication that he intends to change the norm of issuing a general goal and letting that be interpreted by provincial and municipal governments.
All he's done is ensure that closet Capitalists can't push their agenda.
Local trade protectionism is actually quite a problem that likely contributes to the consumption issue.
They've had local trade protectionism this whole time and done great. America had local trade protectionism for ~200 years and did great, and then when we abandoned it, the economic arguments made for us to do so were pretty much exactly the same as the ones being made for China to do so now, but those arguments failed even according to their own oversimplified metrics, such as real gdp growth rates and real gdp per capita growth rates, both, along with their other metrics, began to decline. Why would local trade protectionism, which in increases employment and investment, and which they have already been degrading significantly over the last seven years thus reducing employment and consumptions as they've been doing it, lessen consumption?
Additionally, the English translation of the third plenum communique mentions adapting policies to local conditions. And when I found Xi's speech on the main Chinese language official website of the central website, it does seem to emphasize that each locale has different needs that must be addressed instead of copy pasting the same agendas everywhere. In fact, I think it does so right in the same sentence where the "Unified national market" idea is mentioned.
They literally said it the same exact way to Americans in the 1970s/1980s. What the central government statements say, what the prestige universities are saying, what mega companies like Huawei are saying, ect. are so close to what we were told that if they had a super good version pf google translate they could save themselves the work and just feed it stuff from the USA in the 1970s to produce the relevant parts of the communications. They took away all actual power and decision making ability and said they were going to have some guys in the center who were both incorruptible AND super geniuses (Both ended up being far off) who would take care of it. We centralized and democratized and have performed much worse for it
I'm out of my depth then, where can I go to read more about this?
Every time I search "America 70s local trade protectionism" it just keeps telling me about how America tried protectionism against foreign economies. When I specify "protectionism between states" Google continues to be confused. Maybe this is just enshittification, but regardless, I'm going to need you to show me where the parallels are, unfortunately I haven't been able to find them myself.
The issue is China has always been supply-side dominant in our policymaking, so while your concerns our fair, I'd say that the biggest reason for our decline in employment is just our demographics, but also, our governors literally haven't put much thought into finding markets for products that their industry makes within other provinces. It's not like they haven't been trying to get locals to buy local so that each province can support itself on its own industry, but locals just don't buy enough anyways.
Command F for "supply-consumption imbalance" the other parts of David Daokui Li's analysis I may not necessarily agree with.
https://open.substack.com/pub/ccgupdate/p/transcript-ronnie-chan-and-david?r=3crx6z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
In the past, local protectionism in China has actually relied on the argument that it drives growth, while Chinese scholars now have noticed that it is not sustainable.
https://www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/chinas-unification-within-dismantling-local-protectionism
Yes the link above is from a Western think tank, however, that story about Yunnan province is a brilliant example of what David was talking about in the substack link.
"Yunnan, a landlocked southwestern province famous for its flowers, used to struggle to sell its products to major cities in Eastern China due to its location. However, with China having developed advanced cold chain technology, logistical infrastructure, and e-commerce platforms over the past decade, next-day delivery is now accessible to most urban consumers, facilitating substantial growth in the sector."
So the truth is, everyone keeps producing what they are most fit to produce, but we just make sure we can actually buy the stuff that the other provinces are producing.
They told us the same stuff, and even according to their own oversimplified and kinda dumb metric they failed, like real gdp growth rates and real gdp per capita growth rates started to trend down, amongst others. China has had democratic governance structures, democratic governance structures, in the instances of vast territories, require decentralization and policy variability
Hi Rob, would you say that Capitalism seems to be right then seeing as so many Capitalist economists got many things right, but China is just able to do it better for structural reasons?
Thanks for your comment Peter. There are multiple issues here.
I believe that your point is that China has developed using capitalist economic policies, and that therefore demonstrates that capitalist economics works.
But the point of the piece is that capitalist economists haven’t gotten it right. (I’m educated in capitalist, mostly neoclassical, economics). Or rather, they’ve gotten it only halfway right. And the half that they haven’t gotten right can’t be dissociated from what was gotten right.
I’m not sure what information you are getting, but the US side of the trade relationship hasn’t gone so well. That might be fine and well from the Chinese perspective if the current geopolitical tensions between the US and China weren’t directly related to it.
It is understood here that geopolitical tensions stand outside of what it is that capitalist economists care about. But wilful blindness to the broader consequences of economic policies isn’t the virtue that they imagine it to be. The present appears to be quite like the lead-ups to WWI and WWII in terms of economic tensions being expressed on the battlefield.
One other thought is that if you wish to call China’s policies capitalist, and the US is capitalist, why isn’t the declining international fortunes of the US representative of what capitalism produces? The US has been capitalist for centuries longer than China has. To be clear, I’m not calling China capitalist. If I understand correctly, you are.
China’s policies should be up to the Chinese people. What I write and think represents a political tussle over US policy. The very best is wished for the people of China from here. China represents a great civilization. It would benefit the US to partner with China on a path forward for all of us, not just one nation or the other.
Oh no I'm actually a socialist, but I think what you wrote demonstrated the degree of nuance that is necessary when analyzing mainstream economics as a leftist, instead of just saying "if it's not a Marxist it's all wrong". Unfortunately it seems we have to do a lot of "Yes, however-"
I just wanted to ask you what your thoughts were, because there are plenty of people in China, and outside of China, who greatly appreciate China's rise and they all have their theories of it, but because of global anticommunism, too many of them refuse to give Marxism ANY credit in China's success. It's either Confucianism, or traditional values, or collectivist spirit, or not being woke, I've even heard people say that the rising number of Christians in China is cause for China's rise instead of correlation. And of course, the classic one is, "they've long given up on Communism and they're just doing Capitalism, but they're doing it better than the West."
It just wasn't clear if you were analyzing it from that angle.
Thanks for the response Peter. Please feel free to share links on issues to do with China. I went to the translation of the Third Plenary and will read it. Putin’s annual speeches at Valdai should be required reading by government officials in the US.
Russia has a distributed power model as well. American officials who call Putin a dictator have no understanding of the form of Russian governance.
Capitalist economics is the language spoken by government officials around the world because so many leaders were educated in Western schools. I’ve had long discussions with fellow Marxists who don’t know the language, and therefore can’t respond in kind in policy disputes.
Rob - I have thoroughly enjoyed and benefitted from reading your work as it appears on nakedcapitalism.com, where I was introduced to it. This was another fine essay. Questions linger about what to do with the information and perspective you provide. That something more closely approximate to truth than is to be found in the mainstream exists is wonderful in and of itself; that it takes more work to de-bunk than to 'bunk' seems to foretell an information environment in which the easy answer prevails, especially for those looking for it, as an excuse. I write off the already-powerful as too susceptible to personal and intellectual dishonesty. I am around organizers, but they don't read anything; they can't, because they are exhausted from working for their bosses, and, as a result, the organizing suffers. I suppose my question is: why do you do this hard work?
Thanks for the comment Vicky. I'm an analyst by both training and disposition. The minor contribution that I can make to the human project comes through analyzing problems to try to solve them. So to me, doing so is akin to putting out the fire when my neighbors' house is aflame. The work isn't hard if it's done from love. So the trick is to make sure that everything that I do comes from love. Sorry if this sounds hokey. Cheers, Rob