Chinese Socialism and Global Capitalism

Abstract

Marx did not foresee the socialist revolutions in economically backward national settings—the Leninist initiative broke the imperialist chains to create the first Soviet regime in Russia in 1917 and, through an entirely different path, the Maoist strategy of mobilizing rural forces brought the communists to power in China in 1949. The economic deterministic tenor is palpable in Marx’s major works, as his critics agree. For him, in the last analysis people would not be free from the “realm of necessity” without a material foundation of abundance. And even a successful socialist revolution would not be able to hold up against the remnants or return of the old social structures and relations. For a comparatively less developed country such as Germany in his time, “the successive phases of its normal development” by “the economic law of motion of modern society” could not be skipped by either “bold leaps” or “legal enactments.” This, in the strongest terms he once employed, is intrinsically “not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.”