In 2021, when China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism was published, Ali Kadri was teaching at the National University of Singapore, which seems to me an interesting vantage point in East Asia from which to study world events. I had read Kadri’s 2019 book, Imperialism with Reference to Syria, which deserves (and might get) a newsletter on its own. I was very interested to see what a writer focused on US imperialism in the Middle East would have to say about China. With these two books, Kadri has made definitive statements on two of the burning questions of imperialism. In recent years, Syria and China have both preoccupied my mind and forced me to change some of my own views.
Let’s stick to the China book though, which tackles an important and divisive question for leftists: is the apparent US-China rivalry really a rivalry between two different systems? Or is it an essentially fake rivalry where Chinese elites, integrated into the capitalist system, are trying to get a slightly better share for themselves under US hegemony? The more I learned about China’s history with the imperialists, from the Opium Wars, the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, to the 1911 revolution and beyond, the more the question was settled for me.
The question is settled for Kadri too, who is not one for halfway declarations or mealy-mouthed conclusions: China is socialist, and it is because of its socialist policies that it has had the developmental achievements that it has.
Neoliberalism as waste accumulation
For Kadri, the socialist approach is one where a state “holds ultimate control of production and property relations” and can make “autonomous” macroeconomic policies, regulating “macro-prices and its trade and capital accounts in ways that recirculate much of the social surplus for the benefit of society”. The alternative in this world is neoliberalism, which Kadri emphasizes is fundamentally about turning life -- the living earth, human lives, other species, nature – to waste. The most devastating passages in Kadri’s books are about this ruthless, cold, calculating waste. “The destruction of the labourer along with the labour power he houses in his very being becomes itself an industry of destruction or waste.” Kadri’s descriptions of how capitalists operate are not for the faint of heart: “In the new factory of the world, living labour produces dead labourers with dead labour.” The death is ivsited upon the developing world by the imperialists, and it is subject to a simple, brutal equation, in inverse proportion to the “power that the aggressed masses exercise in self-defence.”
Kadri’s critique of eurocentric analysis
Kadri unleashes a harsh critique not only on the imperialist system but also on those intellectuals who justify it. “The western left,” Kadri writes, “was the cultural manifestation of the imperialist right and its weapons.” This western left “fought capital’s battles by inculpating the regimentation that the developing world deploys to fend off imperialism as ‘state capitalist’ practice. While contributing to imperialism’s... ideological edifice, it magnified the partial errors in the practice of Southern socialism to discredit it.” By doing so, “the western left turned Marxism into a white supremacist ideology.” According to Kadri, this means misrepresenting Marx himself, who “has been transformed into a liberal obsessed with the western machine and its voting system.” His conclusion: “the ideas propagated by western universities and other ideological apparatuses do more harm in a single day than all the peoples of the developing world pulling rank to keep imperialism at bay do in a century.” To Kadri, the bias towards critiquing global south states’ attempts at self-defence is at the root of much of the western left’s animus towards China especially.
China after the Nixon rapprochement
The debate on the western left about whether China is socialist or not is based on analysis of what happened after China and the US reconciled in 1971 (including joint foreign policy projects like supporting the mujahadeen in Afghanistan 1978-1991), when Deng Xiaoping opened an era of market reforms after 1978, and when China joined the WTO in 2005. Do these changes not indicate that China has embraced capitalism, and neoliberalism? No, Kadri says, because the Chinese state continues to not only grow the economy but also to redistribute wealth. Kadri sees no discontinuity between the planning-driven economic growth of the Mao era (6% until 1977) and the market-reform era post-1980. The growth in the latter period “had roots in the social and productive infrastructure built under Mao.”
What are the actual policies that China uses, and could these be adopted by other countries? Kadri cites investment policy, including state ownership and management of the “inter-industrial input-output relations at social prices, which respect the value of direct producers while guaranteeing growth in industrial investment”; the use of “state-owned development banks” to “create the credit space into which the economy grows”, “entrapping the moneyed value chain within the national economy” through regulation. On the employment side, China includes “planning schemes correlating employment with existing spare capacity”. In agriculture, China engaged in a land reform which “enabled the working class to own wealth”, and slowed rural-urban migration through “government transfers from an industrial sphere benefiting from agricultural surplus and labour” to “re-capitalise” rural areas. China exerted control over agricultural prices, pumped new technology into the rural sector, and equalized wages.
It is these policies, and China’s ability to enact them, that make China socialist. By merely existing in this form, China causes panic to imperialists. “China hinders two operations of imperialism, the concentration and centralisation of capital.” For this reason, “US-led imperialism intensifies its offensive against China.” That ever-intensifying offensive means China has to always think about self-defence. “If China is to survive, it has to finance the national front as well as working classes far afield. It must fight back, and it is better to fight with a working class free of want as well as supersonic missiles.”
As I said at the top, Kadri’s ideas have applicability well beyond analyzing China. The idea that imperialism’s main product is waste has implications for environmental analysis, for example. Without Kadri, you might conclude that there are certain errors in the way we make things that could be changed with better or different technologies. With Kadri, you see that every techological choice in our system is designed to produce waste, and death. To whatever degree China has been able to win some policy freedom from this system, and help others do so, space is provided for policies that produce something other than death.
On your show, you talk about how Britain stole roughly $45 trillion dollars from India, and Ive often wondered “where did that go?” With such a heist, you might imagine every Briton living in sky mansions. But the the idea that capitalism produces, among other things, waste and death explains the disappearance of that wealth very well.
Food for thought. Not sure how much Justin's and Ali Kadri's ideas mesh with Carlos Martinez, the Friends of Socialist China @socialist_china, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research
@tri_continental and @DongshengNewsBR, @DongshengNewsES. I will try to encourage some cross pollination on social media.