An article about this here. The West is absolutely responsible for propping up Modi and what’s happening in India right now.
The regime is definitely repressive and extremely so but that US think tank BS seems like pretext to regime change.
I think the concern for the West is that there’s a communist uprising unfolding in India, and that would be the worst case scenario for them because then India could end up being aligned with China. So, if they think BJP might get overthrown they’d jump in to put in a “democratic” government before the left can take power.
I wonder. I don’t think a communist uprising is plausible at the moment because no communist party has a nationwide appeal, which is important to win national elections. But maybe it’s just a response to unrest in general because people are sick of neoliberal fuckery.
These things take time to manifests, and it’s never a smooth line of progress towards a revolution. As you point out the general dissatisfaction with neoliberalism is key, and now it’s going to be a question of the effectiveness of working class mobilization in India. I don’t really see things going back to normal at this point.
Would this actually even make sense though? Would a communist uprising in India actually create a government that embraced China? I mean… is China really communist at this point?
If India had a communist uprising it wouldn’t necessarily embrace China. Communist countries don’t always see eye to eye, but they’d certainly be more ideologically aligned than they are now.
Regarding whether China is communist or not, I don’t think the question is binary. China has a communist party in charge and they’re working towards communism. I don’t think anybody has ever claimed that China has achieved it yet.
China currently has capitalism, but saying that makes it capitalist would be like saying that a capitalist country with some socialist policies is socialist. The key difference between China and capitalist states is that all the essential industry is state owned, and capitalists do not appear to be in charge of the government.
One simple test to consider is that China doesn’t suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. One of the inherent contradictions within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.
And a related point is that quality of life in China continues to steadily improve and the government is actively working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. This is something that simply does not happen under capitalism. We can compare communist China and capitalist India today to see the stark contrast in their development.
Great answer thank you!
It just seems like what defines China at this point is far better described as authoritarianism than a label like communism or capitalism. Same goes with the US. I mean… at what point does it matter how power is legitimized in a system of governance if in practice the results are the elite owning and deciding everything?
If I am way off the mark, please feel free to educate me with some links to stuff I can read, I am not trying to force a point I am trying to work through these ideas myself!
I’d argue that authoritarianism is an orthogonal concept to communism. Authoritarianism relates to the amount of individual freedom that citizens enjoy, while communism deals largely with the way the economy is run. China’s economy is clearly serving public interest a lot better than US economy, and the public has far more influence over the direction of the country.
The claim that the elite owns and decides everything clearly doesn’t bear out when we look at China. If that was the case we’d expect to see a situation that’s closer to US or India where poverty runs rampant, there is no investment in public infrastructure, and no social services. None of these things benefit the elites in the slightest.
There are also some good resources on how the government works in China:
- Is China a democracy?
- Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
- How does China’s political system work?
- How are Chinese leaders elected / chosen? How meristocratic is the system? How do elections differ from those in western bourgeois democracies?
- Who runs China? Makeup of the national people’s congress.
Polls in China also indicate strong popular support for the government and policy it enacts:
- US policy-makers are misjudging popular support China’s Government.
- China more democratic than US
- In contrast to low US political approval ratings, 96% of Chinese are satisfied with the national government (Edelmans 2016). World Values Surveys says that 83% think the country is run for their benefit rather than for the benefit of special groups. A Harvard research center study of long-term public opinion survey finds that > 95% of Chinese citizens approved their government. How is this possible in a one-party state? (TED talk by Eric X Li)
There is also an argument to be made that authoritarian style government is the only type that can stand up to western capitalist aggression. We’ve seen time and again more liberal socialist governments being destroyed in places like Chile and Brazil. Michael Parenti refers to this phenomenon as siege socialism here.
Maybe this has something to do with the Indian government trying to put restrictions on Amazon, Twitter? Or failing to pass the farm bills? I can’t say for sure.
Yeah I wonder what’s going on behind the scenes.
