MEGO

There are many things jostling for our attention these days: do we have enough boots on the ground in Iraq; recovering from Hurricane Katrina; the impending--or not--flu pandemic; whither Jennifer Aniston; whether God will smite Dover, PA.

But how can one compare any, or all, of that against Chinese market reforms and class struggle?

After all, it must surely be rank as one of the issues of the day that China's market reforms have “generated new tensions and contradictions that were solved only through a further expansion of market power, leading to the growing consolidation of a capitalist political economy.” Further, one can only marvel at the bravery of those who "insisted on a class-based critique, an admirable position in an ideological milieu that deems such emphasis unfashionable."

With that lead-in, who could possibly resist reading further?

It is not at all uncommon on the left to view the market negatively ... as at best a necessary evil, only to be tolerated if accompanied by very vigilant regulation. Market relations are viewed as contradicting and undermining the ideal of socialism. Once embraced, the Fall may be initially gradual, but the slippery slope will eventually lead all the way down. An unbridgeable gulf exists between socialism and the market—the system of commodity relations upon which capitalism has historically and structurally rested. That brings us back to the question: for reinvigorating socialism, why the market road after all?

Lest we forget, and really, how could we?

shortly after Mao’s abortive victory over such regressive tendencies during the Cultural Revolution, a small clique of capitalist roaders holed up inside the party succeeded in reversing the achievements of the revolution and imposing the capitalist road simply by governmental fiat, and the restoration of capitalism is now almost complete.

Horrors.

Of course, and I am sure I need not remind anyone here of this, any further criticism of the capitalist road is incomplete without acknowledging that

Ever since the 1930s, Marxists of various strands have been engaged in intense arguments about the class nature of state socialism of the Soviet-type, and enormous political and theoretical energy has been expended on these debates. Briefly, the controversies have centered on three closely interrelated issues: first, whether there exists a ruling class in state socialism; second, how its class character might be defined, or whether it constitutes a bourgeois or state-capitalist class; third, how the nature of such societies and polities may be characterized in class-analytic terms. There is no good reason why our present inquiry into Chinese socialism and its permutations should not benefit from the accumulated insights from generations of Marxian debate.

Just as obviously, it is impossible to keep all this in perspective without revisiting the enervating Sweezy-Bettelheim debate:

Here it may be instructive to begin with some of the ideas from the Sweezy–Bettelheim exchange from thirty years ago. Suffice it to say that their decade-long discussions revolved around two major issues: first, how to interpret the trend toward bourgeois restoration, and second, the class nature of socialism.

All of which must be considered within the context of the incomplete Maoism project:

There is little doubt that late Maoism and the Cultural Revolution are an aberration in the history of world socialism.

Indeed. Although just how much is open to some debate.

Curiously though, this analysis (a word which, used in the context of this article, cries desperately for scare quotes), never mentioned one niggling little detail.

OK. 20 some odd million details. Dead people details, that is.

Sorry, I can't play the straight man anymore. That anyone could write such a heaping, steaming load of turgid nonsense, argle-bargle and gabblefab in 2005, without the tiniest hint of irony, absolutely beggars the imagination. Never mind the reading of which makes me want to bathe obsessively.

And you thought the the need to believe in UFOs was difficult to explain.

Oh, in case you were wondering. MEGO? That is newsroom speak for a story that Makes My Eyes Glaze Over.

Just remember, I did the tough work so you wouldn't have to.