On his book Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution
Cover Interview of March 10, 2021
In a nutshell
My book reconsiders the history of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) since 1949 from a novel perspective: the spread of consumerism in a
self-proclaimed communist country.
The book title, Unending Capitalism, suggests my interpretation:
The Chinese Communist Party’s Revolution aimed to end capitalism but instead
accelerated its development. To use a term of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
the party “negated” its Communist Revolution by expanding rather than ending
capitalism. In my view, the CCP’s self-defined socialist state was not an
antithesis to capitalism but rather a moving point on a spectrum of
state-to-private control of industrial capitalism.
By examining the spread of consumer products and impacts on
everyday life, I argue that the People’s Republic of China was a country closer
to the “state capitalist” end of a spectrum of capitalism. This spectrum ranges
from a capitalism entirely dominated by the state to one entirely dominated by
the private sector. In my interpretation, all countries are on a spectrum of
capitalism because all countries, including the PRC, have continually shifted their
policies regarding the ownership of capital—sometime public, sometime private—and
the allocation of resources—sometimes with greater state planning, other times by
using markets.
I make my case with sources focusing on everyday life, using
everything from blogs and newspaper clippings to internal government reports and
archival documents. These sources reveal what “socialist” policies looked like
from the bottom up rather than from the stated intentions of policy elites down.
I document unending capitalism through the spread of
consumerism and all the inequalities accompanying consumerism with numerous
examples. Take wristwatch production and distribution. In the early 1950s,
after decades of relying on imports, China began to produce its own brands of
wristwatches. Who got those watches first and why? What does the distribution
of those watches say about the priorities of the state? In my analysis,
facilitating the expansion of capital—even at the expense of socialist
egalitarianism—was always more important. The state allocated those watches to those
thought best able to help expand capital, not “build socialism”: managers
rather than workers, people in factories rather than on farms, and those living
in the prosperous coastal areas rather than the poorer interior. The same
distribution priorities of capitalism everywhere with the minor difference of the
managers being state employees rather than private businesspeople.
In short, the actual policies introduced and elaborated by
the Communist Party manifested the forms of social and economic inequalities
associated with capitalism, not socialism.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
My book reconsiders the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949 from a novel perspective: the spread of consumerism in a self-proclaimed communist country.
The book title, Unending Capitalism, suggests my interpretation: The Chinese Communist Party’s Revolution aimed to end capitalism but instead accelerated its development. To use a term of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the party “negated” its Communist Revolution by expanding rather than ending capitalism. In my view, the CCP’s self-defined socialist state was not an antithesis to capitalism but rather a moving point on a spectrum of state-to-private control of industrial capitalism.
By examining the spread of consumer products and impacts on everyday life, I argue that the People’s Republic of China was a country closer to the “state capitalist” end of a spectrum of capitalism. This spectrum ranges from a capitalism entirely dominated by the state to one entirely dominated by the private sector. In my interpretation, all countries are on a spectrum of capitalism because all countries, including the PRC, have continually shifted their policies regarding the ownership of capital—sometime public, sometime private—and the allocation of resources—sometimes with greater state planning, other times by using markets.
I make my case with sources focusing on everyday life, using everything from blogs and newspaper clippings to internal government reports and archival documents. These sources reveal what “socialist” policies looked like from the bottom up rather than from the stated intentions of policy elites down.
I document unending capitalism through the spread of consumerism and all the inequalities accompanying consumerism with numerous examples. Take wristwatch production and distribution. In the early 1950s, after decades of relying on imports, China began to produce its own brands of wristwatches. Who got those watches first and why? What does the distribution of those watches say about the priorities of the state? In my analysis, facilitating the expansion of capital—even at the expense of socialist egalitarianism—was always more important. The state allocated those watches to those thought best able to help expand capital, not “build socialism”: managers rather than workers, people in factories rather than on farms, and those living in the prosperous coastal areas rather than the poorer interior. The same distribution priorities of capitalism everywhere with the minor difference of the managers being state employees rather than private businesspeople.
In short, the actual policies introduced and elaborated by the Communist Party manifested the forms of social and economic inequalities associated with capitalism, not socialism.