Engels on China

From Comments at The Virtual Politician:

http://thevirtualpolitician.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/an-introduction-to-american-inequality/

philstanfield

Worth considering: ‘The war in China has given the death-blow to the old China. Isolation has become impossible; the introduction of railways, steam-engines, electricity, and modern large-scale industry has become a necessity, if only for reasons of military defence. But with it the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where the family also made its industrial products itself, falls to pieces too, and with it the whole old social system which made relatively dense population possible. Millions will be turned out and forced to emigrate; and these millions will find their way even to Europe, and en masse. But as soon as Chinese competition sets in on a mass scale, it will rapidly bring things to a head in your country and over here, and thus the conquest of China by capitalism will at the same time furnish the impulse for the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and America…’

Engels to Friedrich Adolf Sorge in Hoboken; London, November 10, 1894, Marx Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1982, 450-451

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zeroBelief

I am unfamiliar with Engels and Friedrich Adolf Sorge, let alone their designs upon destroying American and European capitalism. Might you expound a bit on that for us?

Thanks!!!

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philstanfield

Hello zeroBelief,

Thank you for your interest. Essentially I quoted Engels not to argue for destruction but for how the world works – that the only absolute is change and that matter (objective reality) is primary to consciousness (that consciousness is the product of objective reality – what one thinks, whatever that may be, is secondary to and derivate of the world). Accepting these two points orients and focuses one’s thought on all subjects.

The one-party state in China, as you know, is demonised in capitalist ideology. Western democracy is held up as the highest form of political organisation, the standard. But look not only at the damage the Democrat/Republican divide is doing in the United States (and to the world – echoes of of which division are playing out in Australia where I live, with similar hostility between Labor and Liberal parties, and in other capitalist nations), think of the enormous forces – economic and social, that are being impacted on by these divisions.

In China with its population of 1.3 billion (and as Engels foresaw) is taking place rapid economic development, following on the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. With that development, and dialectically informing it, is the equally rapid rise of millions into the middle class. The middle class has historically been the agent of democracy as we know it and I believe that this rising middle class in China (as it has done everywhere else) will put increasing pressure for economic influence and a political voice on their one-party state and that the inter-relationship of these two (party and middle class) will result in forms of political, economic and social organisation that will be models for the world.

I think that these developments, together with the benefits they bring, underscored by the vast size of the Chinese population will force similar and fundamental economic, political and social change on the Western (capitalist) nations. And this is what Engels foresaw in 1894, in outline. We are witnessing and experiencing the unceasing, contradictory change of dialectics at work.

Regards, Philip