Thoughts on China's Economic Agenda for 2018 - Wilberg on Wednesday

As a Marxist, I believe it is the firm duty of the CPC to represent the interests of farmers and the industrial and white-collar proletariat in private capitalist corporations - as they did before 1949. If they don't, who will? China will then just be selling out its own workers to foreign and domestic wage-slavery.

The capitalist class would very much like the CPC to serve its exclusive interests rather than  those of the people - just as 'democratic' governments in the West do. The CPC must do the opposite - use its authority to protect the proletariat and migrant farm labour from abuse by foreign and domestic capitalist corporations - and severely punish those corporations which defy regulations on minimum wages, impose unhealthy working conditions or economically enforced and excessive overtime.

I was very disappointed that the panel in this discussion used nothing but the language of capitalist economics and not one single element of Marxism in analysing the economic challenges and the future of economic development in China - particularly in the light Xi Jinping's recent and renewed emphasis on the enduring scientific truths of Marxism. The CPC has vastly and successfully accelerated the first stage of capitalist development - what Marx called the 'primitive accumulation of capital' through migration of labour from farms to factories - as well as further stages of capitalist development such as the concentration of private capital in ever larger corporations. And in his great work 'Socialism, Utopian and Scientific' Engels stressed that the final stage - state capitalism - provides the foundations upon which the transition to socialism, i.e. full state and social ownership of the means of production based on can proceed - accompanied by the Communist-led promotion of ECONOMIC democracy and working class control of the management of corporate enterprises - thus ensuring that they serve the people and not just profit. The 'visible hand' must gradually replace the 'hidden hand'. Foreign and domestic capitalist interests will necessarily work to subvert this staged Marxist and CPC led process - not least through promoting the dominance of speculative finance capital over industrial capital, the state and the people. Beware of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs!

A debt-based state economy can only be avoided by holding to the central policy of 'The Communist Manifesto': 'the centralisation of credit in the hands of the state' - in this way maintaining China's sovereign national right to issue its own money without debt and submission to the international finance capital. The People's Bank of China has so far managed directly and indirectly to protect this basic right and maintain control of the money supply, since its 'debt' is purely notional (see  See Ellen Brown on 'Funding Infrastructure: why China is running circles around America.' )

If the privately run banking system  can create money from nothing - as the Fed and other privately owned central and commercial banks in the West freely admit to doing - so can the PBoC, but in order to invest it in the real economy and in the labour and welfare of the people (for example through state funded healthcare, unemployment security and affordable state-built housing). Its task is not like that of capitalist central banks like the Fed - which creates money to bailout the very Wall St. banks that own and control it.

The biggest threat to China is the coming collapse of this whole Western-style privately owned central and commercial banking system - from which both the state and people are forced to borrow money created from nothing. In every respect it is the duty of the CPC and its leadership to ensure that 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics' means exactly that: the evolution of 'SOCIALISM with Chinese characteristics'. Only through economic policies founded on Marxism and Scientific Socialism, which alone can recognise and overcome real economic and also CLASS contradictions facing China (let's be true Marxists and not avoid talk of class contradictions) can the great objective of Communism be fully achieved by the CPC. I was happy to hear Xi Jinping reaffirming this truth. So less reliance on capitalist economic 'experts' and more study and application of Marxist economic analyses please!!!