Is China the Final Phase of Capitalism? - Global Capitalism with Richard Wolff

well there was a very interesting development in the Socialist movement of the 19th and 20th Century to the surprise of everyone socialists over the century the 19th century and into the 20th became steadily more powerful but they became powerful as a subordinate social Force yeah they won the trade unions and they developed the cores of intellectuals and they developed some social movements of various kinds but the governments were in the hands of the capitalists that's the story of the 19th century and that's the story most of the 20th then something odd happened in 1917 as a byproduct of a terrible the worst war in human history World War one fought among capitalist countries struggling against each other a byproduct of that was the Russian Revolution and the Russian Revolution brought to power a socialist government for the first time that was a real Step Up For What socialism could claim it could do it went beyond being a movement of some people in a capitalist Society to being the government of a society and they had a remarkably smart leader Lenin and one of the many things he taught and said about his Revolution two or three years into it he made a famous speech in which he said you know what we have here is we we've made a revolution against capitalism but it's kind of only gotten halfway to where we need to go and he had a name for what halfway meant and you'll see how this connects to China in a moment he called where Russia had gotten to say by 1920 21 state capitalism Lenin's phrase what did he mean he said well we the working class the Communist Party of Russia we have captured the state we made a revolution and we control the state but what goes on in all of the factories of Russia at that time in all of the offices in all of the Farms um is what was here before we either have a self-employed person trying to make their little business work or we have an Enterprise in which there's a small group of people at the top you know like the owner used to be or like the private capitalist board of directors used to be and a mass of people who are the employees employers employees that's capitalism we don't want we want to go beyond that we don't want to keep going this division of the workplace into a few who run it and a mass of people who take orders that's how slavery Works Master Slave that's how feudalism Works Lord Surf and that's how capitalism Works employer employee we don't want that a revolution Beyond capitalism has to go beyond that and we haven't done that Lenin was honest what we've done is replaced here we go now private capitalism individuals Boards of directors shareholders all those people who have nothing to do with the government they have all the Enterprises we've changed that from many of them we took it away and we now make them State Enterprises the government runs them owns them runs them but you know what we run them like capitalist and a small group of officials who run it and an army of workers who come for wages their employees they notice that the people telling them what to do have changed but they're still in that position employee versus employer we haven't finished our Revolution wow Lenin died very early 1922-23 brain aneurysm and he died wasn't leader of the Soviet Union very law the next leader more famous probably than violin was Stalin and he had hope maybe to go beyond like London did but other countries didn't go through revolutions like Russia there was no one to work with on the part of the Russians so Stalin gave up and Stalin said I'm gonna create socialism in one country before that people had thought the world would have to change you couldn't just do it here or there yeah he gave up now China looked at what the Soviet Union did its socialism impressed that they were able to take it to the next level impressed that the government was doing what it was doing but it also had to face the fact that something in Russia didn't go well because in 1989 the Soviet Union collapsed imploded and went back to a mainly private capitalist system Chi and so the Chinese raised up in the Socialist tradition aware of all of this made a crucial decision that they were going to produce a different kind of socialism they call it socialism with Chinese characteristics what exactly does it mean it means they're not going to do what capitalism did in its first two or three hundred years be a private capitalism you know the kind of capitalism we have here in the United States or in Great Britain or in Germany where most of the industrial activity most of the production of goods and services is handled in Enterprises organized with an employer and an employee the great division We're not gonna do it with all private and we're not going to do it with Russia's alternative the state taken over that didn't work out here's our solution we're going to do a hybrid we're going to give some position for private capitalists both Chinese and foreign but we're also going to hold on to a big sector of the state owning and operating we're going to have a mixture of these two and we're going to make them all controlled and coordinated by a powerful political force which is called the Communist Party of China notice I didn't say a word about private and state capitalism because the Chinese haven't gotten further than London did Lenin substituted state for private China substitutes estate private hybrid for the private that's the difference between the United States and China the United States is overwhelmingly private with a small state sector China is more 50 50. much bigger state but a huge private sector as well but China hasn't gotten beyond the employer employee relationship but what China has done is raised a fundamental challenge why because this hybrid this combination of a private capitalism and a state capitalism controlled by a Communist Party has taken China in half a century from one of the poorest countries on the face of the Earth to the most serious competitor to the United States in the history of the United States or of the world an unbelievable accomplishment China has grown its economy two to three times faster than the United States for the last 30 to 40 years the years during which the American capitalist system suffered a greater and greater inequality tension filled as I spoke about a few moments ago this was a time when the Chinese soared in terms of their economic achievement but the issue remains is the Chinese a solution or is the Chinese the last phase of a capitalism that can't work if it's all state capitalism that was Russia or if it's overwhelmingly private capitalism that was the United States and still is is that hybrid the last way you can hold on to a capitalism are the difficulties and tensions and contradictions inside China and there are plenty of them are are they the first signs of the final recognition we've tried everything including this private State hybrid it doesn't work it's not enough and we need to change the system by which we mean finally no more minority of employers facing a majority of employees that's not a sustainable system just like in the end slavery went when people basically understood it's not this or that detail of slavery it's not whether the slaves are whipped or not or whether you separate the family or not or whether you feed the slave adequately or not the problem is one group of people a small minority cannot literally own other human beings that's got to go and it did and one group of people doesn't swear to to love honor and obey another where one is the Lord with all the power and the other is the serf with none that didn't that didn't work either what may well be happening in the world today is the most profound challenge to capitalism slowly emerging out of these four different kinds of challenge of capitalism and that challenge is employer employee organization of the workplace is the problem it's the problem that lies behind the efforts of the few to deny two years of retirement to the many in France it's behind the creation of impossible burdens especially on the women workers of the United States the creation of impossible burdens on the working class of the United States for the last 40 years and it's the question emerging out of both the success China has had in outgrowing private capitalism in the United States and everywhere else versus the fact that it has not gone beyond what Lenin recognized as the continuing capitalism and that socialists now have to in a way bite the bullet they have to understand that it's at best one kind of socialism to play around with what is still a capitalist workplace and it's another kind of socialism that says that workplace itself has to be revolutionarily transformed if we're going to get beyond the burdens the flaws the failures of a capitalism that works forever fewer people

Channel: Democracy At Work

Views: 106,695

Keywords: Richard Wolff, democracy, work, labor, economy, economics, inequality, justice, capitalism, capital, socialism, wealth, income, wages, poverty, yt:cc=on

Id: nmD_q37oOWI

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023