There’s an infuriatingly common type of liberal who purports to oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza while also saying they support “Israel’s right to exist”, as though Israel’s existence is somehow separable from its genocidal murderousness. This is a state that literally cannot exist without nonstop violence and tyranny, as demonstrated by its entire unbroken history since its inception. It was set up as a settler-colonialist outpost for western imperialism from the very beginning, and that’s exactly what it’s been ever since.
History has conclusively established that it is not possible to drop an artificial ethnostate on top of an already-existing population in which the pre-existing population is legally subordinate to the new one without tremendous amounts of warfare, police violence, mass displacement, apartheid, disenfranchisement and oppression. This is not actually debatable. It is a settled matter (no pun intended). Is it possible to have a nation in which Jews are welcomed and kept safe? Of course. Many such nations exist outside of Israel, and the majority of the world’s Jews live in them. What isn’t possible is a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine in which the pre-existing population is treated as less than the Jewish population that does not necessarily entail nonstop violence, tyranny and abuse. This is self-evidently a direct contradiction in goals, but it’s what the liberals we’re discussing here pretend to believe is a reasonable possibility.
There absolutely could be a state in that region wherein Palestinians and Jews coexist peacefully, but it would be so wildly different from present-day Israel that you can’t pretend it would be the same state as the one we see now. It would entail such a radically dramatic overhaul of Israeli civilization, such a comprehensive dismantling of deeply ingrained racism, such a drastic restructuring of governmental and living systems, so much labor, sacrifice, humility, inner work and reparations, that to call it by the same name as the state that presently exists would be nonsensical.
And that isn’t what the liberals in question are talking about instituting when they say they oppose Israel’s atrocities in Gaza but “support Israel’s right to exist”. What they are saying is they want Israel to remain the unjust and tyrannical apartheid state that is has always been, but for the killing to stop. They want the injustice to continue, but they want its most overt manifestations to stop causing them cognitive dissonance. They want the status quo, without the murderous savagery that is necessary for the status quo’s existence. They want to pretend they live in an imaginary fantasyland where such a thing is possible. In order to make this fantasy seem more believable, liberals will pretend that the violence we are seeing can be blamed entirely on the Netanyahu government, as though things would be fine without Bibi in office despite the fact that Israel’s abusiveness began long before he showed up, and despite the fact that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza have the approval of the vast majority of Israelis. Israeli violence isn’t the product of Netanyahu, Netanyahu is the product of Israeli violence. He built his political career upon sentiments that were already in place.
They’ll also tell themselves fairy tales about a two-state solution to make their position seem more valid, ignoring inconvenient facts like that Israeli officials have been openly saying a Palestinian state will never happen, that Israeli Jews overwhelmingly oppose such a measure, and that Israeli settlements are being built in Palestinian territories with the explicit goal of making a future two-state solution impossible. Liberals subscribe to these fantasies as a kind of cognitive pacifier, which allows them to relax and feel okay with themselves despite the fact that they’re not actually endorsing any viable path toward justice.
And to be clear this isn’t just what liberals do with regard to Israel-Palestine; it’s their whole entire position on everything. On every issue their position is little more than “Maintain the status quo, but make it pretty and psychologically comfortable for me.” They never want to do what’s right, they just want to feel like they are right. Theirs is an imperialist, militarist, tyrannical oligarchic ideology with a bunch of feel-good social justice bumper stickers slapped on top of it. A boot on your neck and a flower in its hair. That’s who liberals are. It’s who they’ve always been. Phil Ochs released the song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” in 1966, and they haven’t changed one iota ever since. The issues change, their arguments change, but their “maintain the status quo but let me feel nice about it” values system has remained exactly the same for generations. ArchivesMarch 2024
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3/19/2024 Starvation Is a War Crime: Note From the Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians. By: Vijay Prashad.Read NowSpeaking in Rome, Italy, the head of the United Nations World Food Program Cindy McCain said, “If we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas” of Gaza, “famine is imminent. It’s imminent.” Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the genocidal Israeli war, and the Palestinians in Gaza are on the verge of famine. Palestine’s Permanent Observer at the United Nations Riyad Mansour said that over half a million people are “one step away from famine.” “What it means for mothers and fathers to hear their babies and children cry of hunger day and night, no milk, no bread, nothing,” he added. Indeed, babies and children already have begun to die due to the famine-like conditions in Gaza. With Ramadan already begun, the situation is not only physically acute, but also mentally torturous. There are currently 2,000 medical workers who are trying their best to operate basic medical care in northern Gaza. They are working without access to any hospital facilities and often with no power or water, including very limited supplies of medicines. Now, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has said that these workers are themselves in a dire situation. The staff, said the Ministry, “will start Ramadan without Suhoor or Iftar meals.” “Doctors will die. The nurses there will die. And the world will witness the largest number of victims of hunger in the coming days,” said Ashraf al-Qudra, the ministry’s spokesperson. War Crime In June 1977, at a conference on humanitarian law in armed conflict, the member states of the United Nations extended the Geneva Conventions (1949) to add Protocol II. Article 14 of that protocol says that “[s]tarvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited.” The belligerent power is “prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless” any “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works.” Two decades later, when the UN member states wrote up the Rome Statute (1998), they added in a section on starvation under the heading of war crimes (Article 8); “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies” is a war crime. The Rome Statute is the treaty that formed the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has thus far remained silent on its obligations to act on its own founding document. On February 29th, trucks with humanitarian aid came into the northern part of Gaza. When desperate people rushed to these trucks, Israeli soldiers fired on them and killed at least 118 unarmed civilians. This is now known as the Flour Massacre. In its aftermath, 10 UN experts released a strong statement, which noted, “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.” The UN special rapporteur for food, Michael Fakhri, who signed that statement, later expanded this accusation against Israel. “Israel,” he told the UN Human Rights Council, “has mounted a starvation campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” These statements are very pointed. Words such as “intentionally” and phrases such as “starvation campaign” directly accuse Israel of war crimes based on Protocol II and the Rome Statute. Fakhri focused on Gaza’s fishing industry, which had provided important food security for the 2.3 million Palestinians who live there. “Israeli forces,” he said, have “decimated the Port of Gaza, destroying every single fishing boat and shack. In Rafah, only two out of 40 boats are left. In Khan Younis, Israel destroyed approximately 75 small-scale fishing vessels.” This destruction, Fakhri said, has pushed Gaza “into hunger and starvation.” “In fact,” he added, “Israel has been strangling Gaza for 17 years through a blockade, which included denying and restricting small-scale fishers access to their territorial waters.” At the UN General Assembly, Palestine’s Riyad Mansour said that Israel has bombed “every bakery and farm, destroying livestock and all means of food production.” In the first month of the bombardment, Israel bombed the major bakeries of Gaza City. In November 2023, Abdelnasser al-Jarmi of the Bakery Owners Association in the Gaza Strip said that bakeries have not been able to function for lack of fuel and flour. As a consequence of the absence of bread, families have begun to gather a weed called khubaiza (or Malva parviflora) and to boil this as the main meal. “We are dying for a piece of bread,” said Fatima Shaheen as she built a meal for her two sons and their children in northern Gaza. Crossings Israel has refused to fully open the crossings into Gaza at Beit Hanoun and Karem Abu Salem as well as refused to allow complete opening of the Rafah crossing the links Gaza to Egypt. Since these land crossings are closed, and since Israel destroyed the Yasser Arafat International Airport in 2001, there are no easy solutions to bring food aid into Gaza. Delivery of food and supplies through the air is not sufficient—indeed it is a drop in the ocean (which is where some of the aid packages landed). There is now talk of building maritime corridors, but since Israel has bombed the Port of Gaza this is not an easy option. That the U.S. has said that it would build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza’s southern half is ridiculous. It would be so much easier to open the Rafah crossing to allow at least 500 trucks a day into Gaza. But Israel will not permit this option. International law is clear as daylight on the point of starvation as a war crime. There are no loopholes in Protocol II (1977) or in the Rome Statute (1998). Friends in Gaza are finding this Ramadan month to be more difficult than any previously. Starvation is their general condition. But, unlike with other Ramadans, there is no early morning meal (Suhoor) and no late-night meal (Iftar). There is only the perennial noise of Israeli fighter jets mirrored by the groans of hunger in their bellies. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives March 2024 When interest-bearing commercial and agrarian debt came to be incorporated into civilization’s economic structure in the third millennium BC, it was accompanied by clean slates that liberated bondservants and restored to debtors the rights to the crops and land that creditors had taken. By the second millennium BC in Babylonia these royal “restorations of order” became customary proclamations rescuing debtors whose family members had been reduced to bondage or who had lost their land to foreclosing creditors. Anthropologists have looked at surviving tribal enclaves for ideas of how the Bronze Age takeoff may have been managed. But no tribal communities in today’s world possess the outward-reaching dynamics of Mesopotamia during its commercial takeoff, which occurred in many ways that are alien to modern ways of thinking. The documentation describes an approach operating on different principles from those that most modern observers assume to have been primordial and universal. The Character of Bronze Age Debt That Made Royal Clean Slates Necessary The dynamics of interest-bearing debt are different from those of tribal gift exchange and related reciprocity obligations. Monetary credit arrangements bear a specific interest rate, and the date of payment is specified in advance rather than left open-ended. That requires debts to be recorded in writing and formally witnessed. Creditors may take foreclosure measures for non-payment, leading to the debtor’s bondage or the loss of land rights. Civilization’s earliest written records, from Sumer in the third millennium BC, provide the best evidence for civilization’s monetized debt relations “in the beginning.” Two categories of debt existed, each associated with its own designated monetary commodity. Business obligations owed by traders and entrepreneurial managers were denominated in silver, above all those associated with foreign trade. The agrarian economy operated on credit denominated in barley units, assigned a value equal to the silver shekel in order to strike a common measure. Money Loans and Long-Distance Trade Rules for money loans described in scribal training exercises are found almost exclusively in the commercial sphere, especially in connection with long-distance trade. These loans were denominated in silver at the equivalent of a 20 percent annual rate of interest, doubling the principal in five years. Under normal conditions merchants were able to pay this rate to their creditors and keep a profit for themselves. Lenders shared in the mercantile risk, taking what in effect was an equity position. If caravans were robbed or ships and their cargoes lost at sea through no fault of the merchant, the debt was voided. There is no indication that payment of such mercantile debts led to problems requiring royal intervention. Interest-bearing debt had initially arisen in the commercial sphere, taking the form of advances of assets by the large public institutions to entrepreneurial recipients, enabling them to make an economic gain in commerce and land management. But throughout all antiquity the most problematic debts disrupting the economy’s fiscal and social balance were in the agrarian sphere. The original objective of charging interest to sharecroppers and other cultivators, however, can hardly have been to reduce them to bondage or to expropriate them from their self-support land. Their labor was needed for the agrarian economy to function. Agrarian Debt and Land-Rental Agreements Rural usury and the consequent widespread forfeiture of lands seem to have derived from advances of land, animals, and tools to sharecroppers (or their manager intermediaries) by temples and palaces. Sharecropping land and agricultural inputs were advanced for a rent of one-third of the (optimistically) estimated normal crop yield 1. Interest was charged on arrears of this rent and other agrarian obligations not settled at harvest-time. The interest rate charged on these carry-over debts was the same as the sharecropping rental rate: one-third. Even arrears for unpaid debts for food or credit for other needs, such as priestly social services, were charged interest at the rate of one-third of the sum owed, simply mirroring the sharecropping rental return for creditors. Arrears on agrarian obligations must have been infrequent, given the ever-present risk of crop failure preventing anticipated crops payments from being paid. Researchers Alfonso Archi and Piotr Steinkeller show that agrarian interest rates denominated in barley are attested by the middle of the third millennium BC. Officials, collectors for the palaces and temples, and merchants often acted in their own private capacity to make interest-bearing loans to cultivators in arrears for arrears of fees owed to the large institutions. Rural usury thus emerged as well-to-do “big men” charged for arrears owed to the palace and temples, also lending food and other necessities to distressed cultivators. But agrarian interest-bearing debt, especially usury charged to borrowers in need, was always denounced as socially unfair. The question therefore arises as to just how such charges originated in the first place. Few types of barley debt involved actual loans of money. What often are called “loan documents” should more literally be termed “debt records” or simply “notes of obligation.” Even in the commercial sphere with its debts denominated in silver, textiles, and other handicrafts that temple and palace workshops consigned to merchants for trade were recorded as debts. And when contractual work was to be performed, craftsmen gave customers tablets of obligation when they were given materials to make into a finished product. The basic contractual formulae were well established by the end of the third millennium BC. Debt tablets state the sum owed, the due date, and the names of witnesses, with the appropriate seals. Additional stipulations might include the pledges involved, guarantees by individuals who stood surety, and the interest rate to be charged (often to accrue only if the debt were not paid on time). Some documents were given a title citing the reason why the debt was established. Agrarian debts mostly arose on rental agreements on land advanced by public institutions to intermediaries, who then subleased it to sharecroppers. Near East researcher Johannes Renger describes how land and workshops were administered directly by palace officials in Ur III (2111-2004 BC), but by the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600 BC) the palace franchised the management of its fields and date orchards, herds of sheep, brick-making workshops, and other handicrafts to “entrepreneurs” as Palastgeschäfte, “royal enterprises.” These managers were entitled to keep whatever they could produce or collect above and beyond the amount stipulated by their contract with the palace, but if the sums they collected fell short, their arrears were recorded as a debt and they were obliged to pay the difference out of their own resources. The rate of interest payable by cultivators on such debt arrears was, as described above, one-third, being the same as the rate charged for advances of sharecropping land. Cultivators were also charged this one-third rate of interest for unpaid arrears of charges for advances to buy food or beer or meet emergency needs on credit. If they lacked the means to pay out of whatever assets they had, they had to work off the debt charges in the form of their labor service or that of their family members (daughters, sons, wives, or house-slaves), and ultimately they had to pledge their land rights. How Agrarian Debt Transformed Land Tenure Barley debts had an annual character reflecting the crop cycle, falling due upon harvest. The accrual of such debts did not reflect a parallel growth in the cultivator’s ability to pay out of their harvest. Creditors obtained work at harvest-time by extending loans whose interest was paid in the form of labor service, as labor-for-hire was not generally available in this epoch. In addition to their labor, debtors were obliged to pledge their family members as bondservants, followed by their land rights. Self-support land had traditionally been conveyed from one generation to the next within families, not being freely disposable outside of the family or neighborhood. Land transfers did occur when families shrank in size and transferred their cultivation rights to distant relatives or neighbors. But starting with rights to its crop usufruct, subsistence land was pledged and relinquished to outsiders after 2000 BC. Debtor families initially were left on the land after they lost their crop rights, but were forced off the land as the new appropriators turned to less labor-intensive cash crops such as dates. Debtors often ended up as members of rootless bands or mercenaries after the middle of the second millennium BC. Instead of crop and land rights being lost only temporarily—being returned to their original owners by royal edicts that restored the status quo ante2—such forfeitures became irreversible by the first millennium BC, especially in Greece and Italy to the west. The Logic of Canceling Rural Debts and Reversing Land Forfeitures An inability to meet obligations was inherent in the risks to which agrarian life was subject throughout antiquity: drought, flooding, infestation, or an outbreak of disease, capped by military disruptions. The problem confronting rulers was how to prevent debts from mounting up to the point where they threatened to expropriate the community’s corvée labor and fighting force, dooming debt-ridden realms to defeat by outsiders. If the indebted rural citizenry were to survive along customary lines, priority could not be given to creditors. Mesopotamian rulers countered the rural debt problem not by banning interest outright, but by annulling barley debts. To restore the means of self-support, rulers issued edicts “proclaiming justice,” decreeing economic order and “righteousness.” These proclamations date from almost as early as interest-bearing debt is attested, starting in Sumer with Lagash’s rulers Enmetena circa 2400 BC and Urukagina and 2350 BC. Much as commercial debts were forgiven when the merchandise was lost through no fault of the merchant, Hammurabi’s laws (§48) provided that cultivators would not be obliged to pay their crop debts if the storm-god Adad flooded their field and the crop was lost. The operative principle was that debtors should not lose their economic liberty by being held liable for “acts of God.” And inasmuch as most barley debts were owed to the palace or royal officials, it was easy for rulers to cancel them. Letting officials and merchants keep the crops and labor of debtors would have deprived rulers of their ability to collect the customary royal fees and land rents for themselves and to obtain corvée labor and military service. There was no modernist thought that the dynamics of interest-bearing debt might be self-stabilizing by letting “market forces” proceed unimpeded. There was no thought of Adam Smith’s Deist god designing the world to run like clockwork, with checks and balances automatically maintaining equilibrium without any need for intervention by kings or priestly sanctions. Not even the wealthy voiced the ideology of modern free-market fundamentalism arguing that society’s wealth and revenue would be maximized by letting it pass into the hands of the richest and most aggressively self-serving individuals reducing hitherto free families to bondage. Notes 1. Although not clear from the records, it seems likely that agricultural inputs were advanced as part of a “package” with the land for a total rental of one-third of the crop.↩ 2. The classic studies of these edicts are F.R. Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (Leiden, 1984); Jean Bottéro, “Désordre économique et annulation des dettes en Mesopotamie à l’époque paléo-babylonienne,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 4 (1961): pp. 113-164; J.J. Finkelstein, “Ammisaduqa’s Edict and the Babylonian ‘Law Codes,’” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 15 (1961): pp. 91-104; “Some New misharum Material and Its Implications,” in Assyriological Studies, no. 16 (1965); Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday: pp. 233-246; “The Edict of Ammisaduqa: A New Text,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale, vol. 63 (1969): pp. 45-64; and the works of Igor Diakonoff and Dominique Charpin.↩ AUTHOR Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history here. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives March 2024 A group of young people in Paris are enjoying a drink in a café on an unseasonably warm evening. The conversation drifts into politics, but—as one young woman says—“Let’s not talk about France.” The others nod their assent. They focus on the U.S. presidential election, a slight bit of Gallic arrogance at play as they mock the near certainty that the main candidates will be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77. A Special Counsel in the United States has called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” hardly the words required to inspire confidence in the president. Trying to defend himself, Biden made the kind of gaffe that is fodder for online memes and affirmed the report that he tried to undermine: he called President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico.” No new evidence is required, meanwhile, to mock the candidacy of Trump. “Is this the best that the United States can offer?” asks Claudine, a young student at a prestigious Parisian college. These young people are aware enough that what appears to be comical on the other side of the Atlantic—the U.S. presidential election—is no less ridiculous, and of course less dangerous, in Europe. When I ask them what they think about the main European leaders—Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France—they shrug, and the words “imbecilic” and “non-entity” enter the discussion. Near Les Halles, these young people have just been at a demonstration to end the Israeli bombing of the Rafah region of Gaza. “Rafah is the size of Heathrow Airport,” says a young student from England who is spending 2024 in France. That none of the European leaders have spoken plainly about the death and destruction in Gaza troubles them, and they say that they are not alone in these feelings. Many of their fellow students feel the same way. The approval ratings for Scholz and Macron decline with each week. Neither the German nor the French public believes that these men can reverse the economic decline or stop the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine. Claudine is upset that the governments of the Global North have decided to cut their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN Palestine agency, although another young person, Oumar, interjects that Brazil’s President Lula has said that his country will donate money to UNRWA. Everyone nods. A week later, news comes that a young soldier in the United States Airforce—Aaron Bushnell—has decided to take his own life, saying that he will no longer be complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians. When asked about the death of Bushnell, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President is “aware” and that it is a “horrible tragedy.” But there was no statement about why the young man took his life, and nothing to assuage a tense public about the implications of this act. Eating an ice cream in New York, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he hoped that there would be a ceasefire “by the beginning of the weekend” but then moved it to “by next Monday.” The meandering statements, the pledge for a ceasefire alongside the prevarication, and the arms deliveries do not raise the confidence of anyone in Biden or his peers in Europe. With the Emir of Qatar beside him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “lasting ceasefire.” These phrases—“lasting ceasefire” and “sustainable ceasefire”—have been bandied about with these adjectives (lasting, sustainable) designed to dilute the commitment to a ceasefire and to pretend that they are actually in favor of an end to the war when they continue to say that they are behind Israel’s bombing runs. In London, the UK Parliament had a comical collapse in the face of a Scottish National Party (SNP) resolution for a ceasefire. Rather than allow a vote to show the actual opinions of their members, both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party went into a tailspin and the Parliament’s speaker broke rules to ensure that the elected officials did not have to go on the record against a ceasefire. Brendan O’Hara of the SNP put the issue plainly before the Parliament before his words and the SNP resolution was set aside: “Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over ‘sustainable’ or ‘humanitarian’ pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war.” Global desire for an immediate stop to the Israeli bombing is now at an all-time high. For the third time, the United States vetoed a UN resolution in the Security Council to compel the Israelis to stop the bombing. That the United States and its European allies continue to back Israel despite the widespread disgust at this war—exemplified by the death of Aaron Bushnell—raises the frustration with the leadership of the Global North. What is so particularly bewildering is that large sections of the population in the countries of the North want an immediate ceasefire, and yet their leaders disregard their opinions. One survey shows that two-thirds of voters in the United States—including majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Independents (69 percent), and Republicans (56 percent)—are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Interestingly, 59 percent of U.S. voters say that Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in Gaza, while 52 percent said that peace talks must be held for a two-state solution. These are all positions that are ignored by the main political class on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The qualifications of “lasting” and “sustainable” only increase cynicism among populations that watch their political leadership ignore their insistence on an immediate ceasefire. Clarity is not to be sought in the White House, in No. 10 Downing Street, or in the Élysée Palace. It is found in the words of ordinary people in these countries who are heartsick regarding the violence. Protests seem to increase in intensity as the death toll rises. What is the reaction to these protests? In the United Kingdom, members of parliament complained that these protests are putting the police under “sustained pressure.” That is perhaps the point of the protests. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Source: Globetrotter Archives March 2024 In 2009, former Texas governor Rick Perry discussed secession from the federal United States government at an anti-tax rally. Today, the same threats are made by Texas governor Greg Abbot over the standoff between the state of Texas and the US federal government. Headlines swept the country that made this clash appear to be rooted in a division of political opinion on immigration between Republican and Democrat governed states. However, the two sides of this standoff are rooted in a deeper phenomenon that has left a split in interest between the federal government and the red state governments, namely southern state governments. To understand the standoff at Eagle Pass, we have to look at Governor Abbot’s Operation Lonestar from its beginning in March 2021, and the demoralization crisis among the Texas national guard members that’s plagued the operation throughout its three year existence. We have to examine its antagonistic first year with the broad Texas national guard membership. We have to look at its second year, where this membership does the historically unprecedented by organizing their own union, forcing the state of Texas into compromises. We have to examine its third year, where guard members defy their command, and refuse orders to commit human rights abuses against migrants. While examining these occurrences, we must also look at how this demoralization crisis creates a political split in the economic interest between the federal and southern state governments, and the private corporate donors that dominate them. The southern states consist of the largest private military industrial complexes, compared to the other states, that together, make up the most incarcerated country in the world. Migrants apprehended at the southern border make up a considerable portion of this prison labor force, whether it be at facilities designated for immigration or general population. The interest of the southern states, governed by the “America first” republican party, particularly relies on US prison labor for their mode of profit. These private corporate donors are compelled to use their governmental power to pull national guard members from their civilian lives, in order to maximize detainment of a prison workforce. In contrast, what the US federal government does is determined by a much larger, international private corporate interest. While the less free, southern states are inclined to maximize a prison work force as rapidly as possible, the US federal government has to consider its overall military strength in the long run. The US federal government doesn’t have an interest in declining its prison population. The Biden administration apprehended over four million migrants in the first two years of its presidency according to United, We Dream. ICE and CBP are federal programs specifically installed to maximize the apprehension of undocumented people in the United States. However, across all military branches, there has been a record low recruitment in the past several years. This record low in recruitment comes at a time after a record number of police officers in the United States resigned during the Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. The US federal government is in a tense point of its history, in conflicts for sanction power with major forces like China and Russia.. US congress members have even begun to draw up bills to invade Mexico. In order to maintain its massive military presence across the entire world, while maintaining a coercive grip on the working class at home, the US federal government can not allow for a demoralization crisis to plague the national guard in a state as critical as Texas, especially as the result of something as non-combative as Governor Abbot’s Operation Lonestar. It can not allow for Texas National Guard service members to gain practice in defying orders, like we have seen all throughout the duration of Operation Lonestar. “Political Pawns” Greg Abbot launched Operation Lonestar on March 6 2021, exactly two months into the Biden presidency. Now it’s become the largest deployment in the history of the Texas National Guard in size and duration. It began with the deployment of 500 guard members. By November, Greg Abbot boasted a total of ten thousand guard members deployed. However, records show that number never reached beyond 6,500. On January 5-10, 2022, ten months into Operation Lonestar, a survey was taken at a base near Brownsville, Texas. The survey was taken among 250 guard members, asking questions and taking direct quotes. The survey was published and distributed by the Military times and the Texas Tribune. The conductor of the survey has not been revealed, as they were not authorized to leak the survey. The survey found that more than half of the guard members “expressed skepticism and frustration with Operation Lonestar.” Nearly thirty percent “vented about the length, haste, and involuntary nature” of the mobilization. One in five members gave no response to “what they liked most about Operation Lonestar,” or stated that they disliked everything about it. Each of the following direct quotes come from separate guardsmen that took the survey. “Members feel like political [pawns] and do not feel like their [issues] are being heard.” “Most of us signed up to help Texas in times of need like hurricanes. This doesn’t feel like we are helping any Texans besides the governor and his ability to say he has activated the [Guard] to the border.” “Whether or not you agree with the politics and morals of [Operation Lone Star], the best thing you could do to improve morale would be to shorten [deployments]. I’ve spoken to very few people who plan on continuing their service in the Texas [National Guard], much less staying on [the border] any longer than they have to. Send people home.” “[Operation Lone Star] cares more about numbers than the impact on individuals and their families. It does greater harm to our members than good by putting their families and own lives at risk for an unclear mission.” “We are disposable in the eyes of top leaders, from the governor on down. The leadership failures of this mission will be a case study for military leaders for years to come.” In the year leading up to the survey, there are several instances that indicate demoralization among the guardsmen. In May 2021, a cavalry troop from Louisiana was temporarily disbanded for misconduct and command issues. This is noted to be a “rare occurrence.” Due to an arrest made for narcotic trafficking in McAllen, Texas, local law enforcement brought drug sniffing dogs to a hotel where many guardsmen were living in the deployment in September. A staff officer at McAllen was quoted by the press saying, “We are literally the biggest threat to ourselves down here,” One instance during the year, a guard member slipped away from her unit, and returned to her home territory of Puerto Rico to seek psychological treatment. On September 10th, 2021, an unknown guard member had slipped a manifesto under every door of his brigade quarter that said the following: “Someone please wave the white flag and send us all home. I would like to jump off a bridge headfirst into a pile of rocks after seeing the good ol’ boy system and fucked up leadership I have witnessed here.” On January 4th, 2022, it is reported four Texas guard members deployed to Operation Lonestar had committed suicide in the span of two months. In response, a retired Texas National Guard general made a public statement admitting that morale is low in the Texas National Guard. By December 31st, 2021, The National Guard had only 327 reenlistments, or roughly 65% of the target set by the National Guard Bureau. This can be compared to the reenlistment rate that occurred in the first three months of 2021, before Operation Lonestar, which reached expectations by 105%. Guard Members Unionize and Defy Orders On February 21st, 2022, the Texas National Guard held its first union meeting in the history of its existence. Talks to begin unionizing began in December, 2021. This came after January 25th, 2022, when the Department of Justice ruled that National Guard members can unionize as public employees when on state active duty, as the laws against military unionization exclusively apply to federal military members. Immediately following the union meeting, the Texas Military Department issued an urgent statement discouraging members from joining the historically unprecedented Texas National Guard Union. However, this came along with an obligation to reform the leadership of Operation Lonestar in the following month. In the face of this historically unprecedented act of defiance, Governor Abbot replaced the general and two other top officials overseeing Operation Lonestar. The Texas National Guard union leader made this public statement at the time of the first meeting: “It'd be one thing if they were like, ‘Hey, yeah, we mobilized too fast and we shortchanged on equipment,’ or ‘We're gonna rectify that.’ Instead, you've got leadership that's acting like a petty ex-girlfriend. Just not taking us seriously. You're not going to fool the guys who are actually here, you may fool your voting base back home, But we know better. And it's kind of insulting. This isn't some politically motivated endeavor, we're not out just to get Beto O'Rourke elected. That's not why we're doing this. We want better conditions, and we, you know, most of us want to go home.” The month after Pro-Publica released an investigation that revealed the number of fentanyl arrests that Greg Abbot credited to Operation Lonestar, actually included the entire number of fentanyl arrest made in the state of Texas away from Operation Lonestar, we see evidence that Texas National Guard members had began defying their command, and breaking orders to keep migrants from drowning in the Rio Grande. Unfortunately, this was revealed to us when tragedy struck at the same Eagle Pass location we see the standoff at today. Spc. Bishop Evans had jumped into the Rio Grande to save a migrant from drowning while not being supplied with a floatation device to do so. He and the migrant he was trying to save both drowned as a result. The Texas Military Department had issued orders for guard members to not enter the water under any circumstances, yet the death of Spc. Bishop Evans revealed that many guard members had been doing the same thing. This gives us a first indication of when guard members at Eagle Pass began to defy their orders from the Texas government, out of honest sympathy with migrants who would die as a result of the orders being carried out. The Texas National Guard union leader, Hunter Schuler, made this public statement in response, once again demanding the end of Operation Lonestar: “Our hope is that the new TMD command staff learns from this tragedy, listens to soldiers, and works cooperatively with leaders on the ground towards safer working and living environments. With the growing number of service member fatalities on Operation Lone Star, what more will it take for the Governor to end this political charade? It is long past time to let the thousands of involuntarily activated guardsmen and women return home to their families - before it’s too late for yet another soldier.” Fast forward a few months to July, the US federal government officially begins a probe into Operation Lonestar for human rights violations. This is followed by civilian protests against Operation Lonestar in the border cities of El Paso and Brownsville in August. On September 14th, Greg Abbot rolled back the number of Texas Guard members deployed from 6,500 to 5,000. On October 1st, the US federal government deployed 2,500 troops to the US border, replacing the 1,500 that Governor Abbot was inclined to roll back, at the demand of the Texas Guard union. On October 6th, 2022, it’s revealed that the Texas Department of Military issued a filing error that resulted in 96% of Guard Members to unexpectedly owe back hundreds to thousands of dollars in taxes to the federal government. This was due to the Texas department of Military not issuing pay stubs correctly. Guard members had been quoted saying that they were curious why their payment checks had been so high. Guard members began writing state representatives asking them to address the Texas Department of Military about the issue. “Made In The Image of God” After the Biden administration sent another 1,500 troops to the US border on May 2, 2023, Greg Abbot began deploying flotation devices into Rio Grande on June, 8th. However, these flotation devices are not the flotation devices that Spc. Bishop Evans needed it in order to survive his heroic attempt to save a drowning migrant. These deployed buoys hid razor wire underneath them, intentionally designed to maim drowning migrants reaching for somewhere to rest. This targeted migrants that guard members, like Bishop Evans, had been heroically diving in to save from drowning in the past year. At Eagle Pass, the same location that Bishop Evans made his heroic attempt, and at the same location we see our standoff between the Texas and federal government today, an email leaked that once again showed Texas national guard members defying their command for the sake of migrant survival. Nicholas Wingate, a trooper and paramedic for the Texas Department of Public Safety, wrote an email to his sergeant explaining why his fellow troopers defied their shift command: “While doing so (going on patrol- author’s insert) we came across 120 people camped out along the fence line. In this group there was several small children and babies who were nursing. The entire group was exhausted hungry and tired. We called the shift officer in command, and we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning. We made contact with command again and expressed our concerns and we were given the order to tell them to go to Mexico and get into our vehicle and leave.” He went on in the email to explain the type of damage that the razor wire had done to the people they came in contact with. He detailed a man who was severely bleeding from tearing his leg while freeing his small child from the razor wire, a 15 year old child who had broken his leg, and a 19 year old woman who was having a miscarriage from being stuck in the razor wire. He detailed a mother and her two children drowning as a result of the razor wire. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane (sic). We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God. We need to recognize that these are people who are made in the image of God and need to be treated as such,” He says in the last paragraph of his email, “The wire and barrels in the river needs to be taken out as this is nothing but a in humane trap in high water and low visibility. Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well.” On December 7th, 2023, the Texas Department of Public Safety concluded an investigation into itself in response to Nicholas Wingate’s leaked email, and cleared itself of any wrongdoing. The official report conceded that others besides Wingate had come forward with legitimate concerns. However, on January 2nd, 2024, the Biden administration, obligated to maintain the morale of the entire US military, petitions the US supreme court, to allow the federal government to concede to the demands of the Texas national guard membership, and remove the razor wire buoys that were deployed as a part of Operation Lonestar in June. The federal supreme court ruled that the Biden administration will be able to concede to the demands of the Texas national guard membership, and remove the razor wire from the river on January 22nd. Greg Abbot refuses to comply with the supreme court, which leads to the standoff at Eagle Pass, and the powerless threats of secession that we see today. Demoralization, Defiance, and the Standoff at Eagle Pass In order to understand the standoff at Eagle Pass, we have to understand Operation Lone Star in its three year existence. The standoff at Eagle Pass is not the result of a clash between the Democrat and Republican Party. It’s not the result of a clash between the state of Texas and the US federal government. It is the result of a clash between the broad membership of the Texas National Guard and the entire standing order behind their command. Before the federal government ever ruled for the razor wire to be removed in 2024, we find the Texas National Guard demanding the end of the entire Operation Lonestar as early as February 2022, through their new organized union. We saw heroic Texas guard members defy their orders from Austin for the sake of human dignity, and use their leverage against Operation Lonestar, until one side united economic interest between the federal and state governments was forced to cave into their demands. This is a critical issue to US politics, yet our major corporate media continues to duck from any further investigation into the source of this occurrence. This is why we have to explain everywhere we can to the working people in the rest of the United States, what really led up to the political standoff between the US and Texas governments at Eagle Pass. Author Ned Brown is a community organizer and writer. In the past, he has organized to overturn ICE policies in Arkansas. He is a contributor at CommunityParty.net and the Alienated Press. Archives February 2024 The way China engages in corporate governance and enterprise discipline has been subject to much scrutiny, particularly by the Left. Many in the Western Left claim that China’s corporate governance is far too lacking. This article is designed to go over the way China is able to exert its party influence over both state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises. It is the third part in our series of articles that conduct an in-depth investigation of China’s economy. Our first article of the series investigated the degree of state-control over China’s economy. The second article of the series investigated how finance, banks, and investments work in China, in addition to how China was able to survive the many financial crises mostly unharmed that many other countries - including the West - could not. Corporate Social Credit According to the Communist Party of China (CPC) document “The Planning Outline for the Establishment of a Social Credit System (2014 - 2020)”, the following is stated the establishment of a social credit system: “... must have advancing the establishment of creditworthiness in government affairs, commerce, and society and establishment of judicial credibility as its primary content; must have advancing the establishment of a culture of creditworthiness and establishing mechanisms to encourage trustworthiness and punish untrustworthiness as key points; must be supported by advancing the establishment of industry and region specific credit, and developing credit services markets; must have raising the entire society’s awareness and levels of creditworthiness, and improving the economic and social operating environment as its goals; and must put people first, to form an environment across all society in which trustworthiness is honored and untrustworthiness is shameful, and make honesty and trustworthiness the entire populations’ conscientious behavioral norm.” [1] What is credit worthiness? It is being able to comply with financial agreements and willingness to pay debts. And in the context of the social credit score, to ensure companies enact on their promises. The score is used to regulate the private sector and continue to clamp down on potential exploitative behavior that may be undergone. In other words, social “credit” can also be translated from Chinese as social trustworthiness. The score is given to private firms and there are real punishments and drawbacks for those who do not comply or fail to achieve a high score. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is pushing ahead with social credit-based supervision of all commercial entities from large firms to small, independently owned and operated businesses, which prompted complaints over corporate privacy and heavy-handed government intervention [2]. The social credit rating will include court rulings, tax records, environmental protection issues, government licensing, product quality, work safety and administrative punishments by market regulators [2]. In 2019, Lian Weiliang, deputy chairman of the NDRC, stated the following: “All the existing credit incentive and punishment measures listed in the memorandums are based on laws and regulations... For severe violations, especially those endangering life and property, harsh punishment will be adopted, such as a temporary or even permanent ban on market entry.” [2] While the China Blacklisting system is still in its early stages, it is already the most prominent system of its kind worldwide. China has already put this system into action, and has barred thousands of Chinese residents’ rights to buy plane tickets and travel either domestically or abroad. However, most of the blacklisting that has occurred to date has been as a result of violations or misbehavior of companies and the individuals working for them. [3] Individuals who end up on a blacklist due to mistreatment of workers or violating the laws around workers’ rights are given penalties. These penalties can be as severe as having their business license revoked or barring them from using social amenities and public services until they fix their social credit score. How the social credit score is measured according to CreditChina, the website responsible for openly publishing corporate social credit data lists the following reasons for a low social credit score:
A study found that the Corporate Social Credit System could be used in a way that signals “corporate fealty” to the Party. This incentivizes more corporate social responsibility programmes such as participating in poverty alleviation, strictly implementing deadlines for national industrial and environmental policies. The credit system itself does not award scores based on profitability, profitability is not a metric that is factored. [5] There is however a wide misconception that the social credit score is something that only impacts people. However, state owned enterprises and other government bureaucrats who work at state owned enterprises can be subject to the corporate social credit. The social credit system is ‘self-reflective’: Bureaucrats and politicians themselves will be subject to the regime, with the goal of reducing corruption. This core concept is known as “Government integrity” which is a part of Xi Jinping’s Anti Corruption crackdown. [3] Blacklists and Redlists As mentioned earlier, with the Social Credit System (SCS), there comes consequences to gaining low scores or high scores. This comes in the form of Blacklists and Redlists. The blacklist is negative while the redlist is positive. A blacklist is a type of public record which identifies companies and individuals found in violation of a predetermined set of regulations — for example, one blacklist may identify companies which have violated work safety regulations, while another identifies parties found in violation of patent laws. A redlist is the opposite: a roster of companies and individuals demonstrating consistent compliance with a specific set of regulations, such as consistent tax payment or low rates of import-export violations. [6] The majority of existing blacklists and redlists were created between 2016 and 2018. Since then, the announcement of new national-level lists has slowed dramatically. As of November 2019, forty established blacklists and eight redlists were in effect at the national level. Of these, about half have a broad scope, such as those targeting violations in the areas of environmental protection, import-export, social security, tax arrears, and e-commerce fraud. The remaining blacklists are only applicable to enterprises and professionals operating in specific sectors, such as financial services, transportation, insurance, salt production, domestic services, travel, real estate, food, agriculture, and medicine. [7] Companies found to have engaged in “seriously untrustworthy behavior” may have their business license revoked and credit irreparable. And of course, being subject to imprisonment. [8] These acts include:
A court case found the firm guilty in 2016, after which the directly responsible employees within the company were sentenced to prison and fined for the crime of producing and selling fake and inferior products, as were members of Shanghai Husi’s holding company OSI. [10] This had credit-related consequences: the local government revoked Shanghai Husi’s food production licenses, while the company was designated as a “seriously untrustworthy producer” and added to the food safety blacklist by Shanghai local government officials for a period of two years (2016-2018). Additionally, three key responsible parties (the quality supervisor, factory manager, and planning director) within the organization were personally blacklisted for a period of five years (2016-2021) [11]. The company reportedly lost RMB 6 billion in the year after the scandal, though how much of those losses resulted from Corporate Social Credit System (CSCS) penalties rather from the scandal more generally, is unknown [12]. The company did not repair their credit, and though OSI still operates in China, Shanghai Husi appears to have effectively halted operations. [13] In Regard to Foreign Enterprises Foreign enterprises are not free from the social credit score. Companies that do not comply or actively reject party building and the formation of party organizations within the enterprise (more on that later) will be penalized by the Social Credit System (SCS). A report published by the EU Chamber of Commerce estimates that multinational firms in China will be subject to approximately 30 different ratings under the Corporate SCS, the requirements of which will be dispersed across numerous government documents. Firms are also required to disclose to the Chinese government detailed data and other information about their operations and capabilities, which may include proprietary information or sensitive intellectual property. [14] An example of which is that 44 airline companies attempting to operate in China were required to follow the Chinese mainland designation of Taiwan; failure to comply would result in their corporate social credit score being deducted. Japanese retailer Muji was fined over $30,000 for describing Taiwan as the “country of origin” on 119 clothing hangars last year. [15] This further solidifies the state control over foreign enterprises inside China, where the terms are dictated by the state, and these corporations have to follow the line. When the Communist Party tells foreign entrepreneurs to jump, the response from these entrepreneurs is to ask how high and how far. According to the EU Chamber of Commerce, the corporate social credit score system will mean life or death for foreign enterprises wanting to operate in China. China’s Corporate Social Credit System is here to stay. Businesses in China need to prepare for the consequences, to ensure that they live by the score, not die by the score. [16] This further solidifies the fact that foreign enterprises cannot escape the grasp of the Communist Party of China. Corporate Party Organizations A study in 2008 looking into listed organizations found that for every listed enterprises’ board of directors, there is a parallel power structure known as the firm’s Party Committee, headed by a party secretary. In the large SOEs (state-owned enterprises), the Party Secretary appoints the top executives and directors, often simply relaying orders from the Communist Party of China’s Central Organizational Department, and effectively exercising a leading role in the company. Thus, significant overlap between the Party committee or group with traditional corporate structures. Where the two structures do not overlap, real power flows through the party channels, leaving the board and formal corporate top executives with scant real authority. The figure below visualizes this arrangement. [17] Corporate governance organization chart in China. Notice parallel structures and overlaps between the Party committee and corporate board. Note: CA = cross appointments; CA1 = chairman of the supervisory board; CA2 = chairman of the board -party secretary; CA3 = general manager-Party vice-secretary, head of the discipline inspection team + one to two other managerial deputies. CD = collective decision-making. “Sanzhong yida” (三重一大) = “Three Importants and One Big”, discussed later. [38] In the book, Capitalizing China, it was found that: Parallel to this corporate governance system, each (Listed) enterprise also has a Communist Party Committee, headed by a Communist Party Secretary. These advise the CEO on critical decisions, and are kept informed by party cells throughout the enterprise that also monitor the implementation of party policies. Indeed, the party secretary plays a leading role in major decisions, and can overrule or bypass the CEO and board if necessary. For example, foreign independent directors on the board of CNOOC reportedly first learned of that enterprise's takeover bid for Unocal, an American oil company, from news broadcasts. Directors often also learn of such major strategic moves, and of equally major personnel moves such as the rotation of oil company top managers described earlier after the fact. Despite their formal powers, CEOs and boards are thought to welcome party advice, and any directors likely to have reservations are kept out of the loop to preserve harmony-especially if issues the CCP views as strategically important are involved. [18] Furthermore, according to Article 33 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: Primary-level Party organizations in non-public sector entities shall implement the Party's principles and policies, guide and oversee their enterprises' observance of state laws and regulations, exercise leadership over trade unions, Communist Youth League organizations, and other people's group organizations, promote unity and cohesion among workers and office staff, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all parties, and promote the healthy development of their enterprises. [19] Most of the listed shareholder firms have a party secretary. A study on 4,104 listed firms was conducted between 2000 and 2004, which represents 68% of the total firms with A-shares in China during that period. Note, referring back to our previous article, A-Shares are shares of companies based in mainland China that are listed on either the Shanghai or Shenzhen stock exchanges that are off limits to foreigners. It was found in this study that only 11% of the firms said that they did not have a party secretary. In those firms with party secretaries, many of the secretaries hold other management positions as well: 5% also serve as both the chairman and the CEO; 18% also serve as the chairman; 6% also serve as the CEO; and 26% also serve as a supervisor, director, or executive. Thus, many party secretaries have a significant effect on firm management. [20] One example can be observed with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), a central SOE holding group. As of October 2019, the Party group in CNPC had eight members (see Table below), six of whom simultaneously held top management positions: the chairman of the board, the general manager, the chairman of the supervisory board, the head of the discipline inspection office, the chief accountant (i.e. chief financial officer) and the chief safety monitor. With this level of insider control, the Party group dominates corporate decision making. In addition, many of these Party group members simultaneously held positions in the publicly listed subsidiary company – as board members and/or members of the subsidiary Party organization. For example, Liu Yuezhen was simultaneously a Party group member, chief accountant of the parent company and non-executive director of the subsidiary. Thus, to recap, the Party committee exercises strong horizontal control within the parent company’s top management through overlapping positions, but also exercises strong vertical control through SOE control of subsidiary enterprises and more overlapping positions. The result is more streamlined management as a result of how embedded the Party is in these enterprises. [38] In Taizhou, 39 listed firms in 2018 modified their charter to include party construction in their constitution. And the party organization’s role entails the party branch to have more say in the company's selection and employment of personnel, to play a core role in political leadership, as well as decision-making in other major corporate decisions. For instance, feedback/voice on the acquisition of other enterprises, which falls under having a role in corporate business decisions. [21] Interestingly, as a side effect of having Party Committees, a study found that Communist Party Committees actually improved enterprise value and reduced corruption within SOEs, indicating that they are not just a tool to enforce party leadership, but also assist positively in business decisions. [22] Another study found that while ostensibly cooperative enterprises (Township Village Enterprises) had private revenue rights, their control rights were not. In reality, collective enterprises are under close control of the government. Major investment and employment decisions could not be made without government direction or approval. [23] Enterprises which have party committees are much more likely to engage in “Green Innovation”, which refers specifically to inventing technologies or having processes which reduce environmental pollution. [24] The Three Importants and One Big But what does this entail specifically? How do party committees actually engage in their day-to-day management of enterprises? One of the largest key aspects of this is the ability to set performance indicators. The party’s pre-decision powers include the “three importants and one big” (sanzhong yida, 三重一大), which refers to:
First and foremost, party committees (party groups) at all levels are expected to actively reform and improve leadership methods, adhere to and improve democratic centralism, combine collective leadership with individual division of labor and responsibility, fully develop intra-party democracy, and strive to improve scientific decision-making, democratic decision-making, and decision-making in accordance with the law, ability and level. Moreover, party group members, especially the principals in charge, should correctly handle the relationship between democracy and centralism, work together with decision-making bodies, take the lead in implementing democratic centralism, ensure the correct exercise of power, and prevent the abuse of power. [27] Intra-Party regulations shall be decided by the shareholders' meeting, the board of directors, the management team without a board of directors, the workers' congress/union and the party committee (party group) matters. It mainly includes the major measures taken by enterprises to implement the party and the country's lines, principles, policies, laws and regulations, and important decisions of superiors, enterprise development strategies, bankruptcy, restructuring, mergers and reorganizations, asset adjustments, property rights transfers, foreign investments, interest allocation, organizational adjustments, etc. major decisions on corporate party building, security and stability, and other major decision-making matters. [28] Party Organizations in Foreign Enterprises Foreign enterprises and their joint-ventures are not free from party organizations. As the majority of foreign enterprises are actually joint-ventures ran with SOEs (State-owned enterprises), naturally there would be a spillover in terms of party committees. Party committees were first implemented in SOEs afterall and naturally their subsidiaries (which include joint-ventures with foreign companies) would be affected as a result. In 2018 an analysis prepared by the European Commission investigating the Chinese Party-State’s role in the domestic Chinese economy. It noted that Party organizations in both SOEs and private companies “can potentially wield significant influence, and allow for the CCP to directly influence the business decisions of individual companies.” [29] In May 2018, the US-China Business Council noted that certain SOE joint venture companies had asked some of their foreign partners to alter their articles of association to support Party groups within the joint venture, even going so far as to request that they be amended to allow critical matters to be approved by the party organization before they are presented to the board. [29] In one example, Mercedes-Benz established a Party organization in its local Chinese joint venture in 2013. The secretary of the Party organization participates in the company’s economic management meetings through the entire process and has full authority to participate in the company’s major decision making. This means that even in joint-ventures, party organizations still have sway in major decision making and economic management. [30] In 2018, a Samsung subsidiary had seven Chinese executives of the company who are all Party members and 74 percent of middle managers and above are Party members. The same article notes that 70.8% of all foreign enterprises have party organizations. In Pinpu Company given in the article, it was found that Party organizations play decisive roles in R&D decisions as well as decisions over production optimization. They also play a role of promoting party policies, such as for instance with Ford’s China subsidiary being convinced to start investing in New Energy Vehicles. In Nokia Shanghai, it was found that party organizations assisted heavily in human resources, especially in regard to employee management and development plans. [31] Another 2018 article on Nissan’s automotive joint venture Dongfeng Motor Co. notes that their Party organization has been written into the enterprise charter, with members of the Party organization playing a role in enterprise decisions. This includes ensuring the direction of business development, complying with national laws and regulations, ensuring legal operations, safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of employees, and promoting corporate stability, especially in the selection and use of talents. [32] Control Via Shares Previous essays in the series have gone over how limited liability corporations (Multiple shareholders in one company) could be controlled/steered towards state directives via internal corporate governance through the use of a majority or controlling state shareholder that coordinates the enterprise alongside party directives. As mentioned earlier, it is not just SOEs that have implemented the Party Committees, but also limited liability corporations, some of which are listed on the stock market while others have a significant minority state share. Corporate groups in the People’s Republic of China, and by extension their subsidiaries and divisions, are therefore actually controlled by Party-State nomenklatura insider appointees working at the core holding company level, and as directors and officers of the subsidiary entities controlled by the core holding company. As Party-State bureaucratic political actors seeking advancement in the Party system, these individuals are perfectly responsive to Party-State policy (which necessarily includes national industrial policy), while at the same time they are content to ignore the interests of external minority shareholders in the listed subsidiaries they formally manage. [33] Consequently, there are also ways for the CPC to institute corporate governance within these mixed ownership enterprises without establishing a controlling/majority share in these companies, via something that is known as a golden share. A golden share is a type of share that gives its shareholder veto power over changes to the company's charter. One golden share controls at least 51% of voting rights and may be issued by private companies or government enterprises. [34] This concept was first introduced in 2013, to allow the CPC to exert more influence over private enterprises, particularly media conglomerates [35]. Between 2018 and 2022, several government entities took 1% stakes in popular news and content platforms, including US-listed Sina Weibo, 36kr, Qutoutiao and Kuaishou, according to company filings or public registration records. [36] The stakes in subsidiaries of Alibaba and TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. have allowed the government to get in on—and police—the growth of the tech behemoths. Golden shares have become a useful tool to keep companies like these in line with party objectives without the need for the state being a major stakeholder. Companies that sell the government the much smaller stakes called golden shares are finding that even this way, the government is getting a lot of power over their businesses. The director whom China’s cybersecurity watchdog named to the board of ByteDance’s main subsidiary has veto rights over content on apps including Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, according to people close to the subsidiary. The director also can vote on corporate issues such as the subsidiary’s personnel decisions, compensation packages and investment or divestiture plans. [37] Conclusion In short, the idea that corporate entities, whether foreign, private or collective are somehow free from state influence, but more specifically party influence is untrue. Even companies with minority shares from the State have party committees onboard, let alone joint ventures with foreign enterprises. The Social Credit System is a means to hold corporations and their bosses accountable to certain standards to the benefit of the mass public. Corporate Governance in China is one that does not allow any corporate entities, SOE or non-SOE, to escape its grasp. Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 Applied geopolitics and the battle for peace and the right to development: Palestine as the focal point of the global balance of power. By: Bruno DrweskiRead NowIn his recent book, La défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West), Emmanuel Todd observes that the United States and its associates react to every international crisis only in violent ways, which enabled them to give Israel an unlimited license to kill on October 8, 2023. This "reaction" noted by Todd in fact goes much further than an expression of the nihilism of a civilization in perdition, even if it testifies to the moral decadence of Western elites who keep on imposing their rules on the entire planet. But the bellicose moods of our leaders are also the result of the ever-growing weight of the private military-industrial complex that has developed in Western countries at the expense of civilian production committed to the economic and social progress of their populations. The result has been the relocation of civilian industries to low-wage countries, and the transition in the Western bloc towards the domination of its financial sector over its industrial sector. The fight for peace and against the militarization of our societies is therefore not just a moral imperative, it complements the necessary struggle to defend existing civilian enterprises and promote a policy of re-industrialization of our countries. This can only be done within the framework of an economic policy planned by a state power under popular control, favoring socially profitable, productive, and creative investments at the expense of merchants of death. The fight against sending weapons to Ukraine or Israel, against military interventions and the dispatch of soldiers or mercenaries to Ukraine and Israel, against the bombing of Yemen or other countries targeted by NATO, against the presence of foreign troops in Europe and elsewhere, against sanctions and blockade policies, is also the fight for the reconstruction of our productive forces, for the development of scientific research and for social progress. Only then will we be able to defeat the forces that serve the murderous interests of the merchants of death running around the world to increase their profits. Profits from which wage-earners, workers, the precarious and the unemployed, receive fewer and fewer crumbs, as the rate of profit continues to fall. Late globalized capitalism has reached the end of its road, since the whole world has been subjected to its rules and tariffs, and there are no longer any new markets to conquer. In reaction, local peoples and bourgeoisies have begun to promote development in the territories where they live, work, produce and create. This explains the emergence of counter-hegemonic powers such as China and Russia, and of ideologically very different states such as Cuba, Venezuela, (North) Korea, Nicaragua, Belarus, Iran, and Eritrea, all of which have chosen to oppose "capitalism without borders". The fight for peace therefore aims to disarm powers that have failed to fulfill their commitments, such as those expressed in the preamble to the French constitution, which is supposed to institute a "social republic", and those contained in the United Nations Charter prohibiting the use of force outside the right of self-defense, a right that should be interpreted solely within the framework of the United Nations system. Geopolitics as a method for analyzing international conflicts and social relations Initially, geopolitics was a method of analysis developed mainly by researchers working for certain colonial powers. Its aim was to analyze, on the basis of geographical and territorial data, the fundamental interests of each state, which was supposed to be either opposed to or, on the contrary, a partner of other states. This method tended to determine, in an initially rather mechanical way, conflicts seen as almost "natural" and inevitable, with the aim of controlling a "vital space". In its most extreme form, this led to the justification of Nazism, which sought to conquer "the vital space necessary for the German people". After 1945, geopolitics was delegitimized as a bourgeois, imperialist science, before that is, relevant elements of this method were gradually rediscovered in the USSR of the 1970s, as well as in the USA, especially if made dynamic through a class analysis of each state's politics. To use geopolitics dynamically, we must first determine the class basis of each state, in the knowledge that in our time, there is no such thing as a "chemically pure" system, since every state is confronted with trends either pushing it towards more capitalism and deregulated markets or, on the contrary, pushing it away from them to build alternative paths. It is in this context that the place occupied by each country in the era of globalization in the "international division of labor" combines with the territory it occupies and the economic potential this gives it. This explains why our era is one of a de facto Third World War between forces of unipolarity centralized around the USA, NATO and their allies, and counterforces of multipolarity. Today, however, this war is taking place in a "hybrid" form, with multiple "local" hot wars being waged by protagonists unable or unwilling to confront each other directly. This "pacifying" factor is all the more evident as the domination of the consumer society model and the triumphant individualism of neoliberalism have led a mass of people to reject the idea of risking their lives in the service of a higher cause. The dominant Western powers are controlled by bourgeoisies who can set commodity prices ("terms of trade") and derive wealth from them. Depending on the balance of power between countries and social classes, this wealth can be used to distribute crumbs in order to corrupt at least some of the working classes who would have an objective interest in breaking away from the capitalism organized around Wall Street and the City of London. In economically dominated countries, on the other hand, we have to deal with a comprador bourgeoisie that takes advantage of its role as local intermediary for foreign imperialist bourgeoisies. But there are also national bourgeoisies seeking to defend their national market, their territory, and to launch self-centered development policies to face up to the competitive pressures of those powers dominating the world market. In this context, wage-earners in dominated and overexploited countries, as well as those in "central" countries, act as a spur to greater independence for their national bourgeoisies and petty bourgeoisies. In this struggle, the popular forces and national bourgeoisies rely on the advantages of their national territory, in terms of resources and geostrategic position. Their aim is to conquer autonomous spaces that will enable them to launch policies of development, industrialization, and even socially progressive reforms. Geopolitics can therefore be a useful scientific method if it combines analysis of the territorial situation of each political entity, in terms of strategy, resources, historical links with its neighbors ("geo-economics" and "geo-culture"), etc., with analysis of the class base of each state formation. It is against this backdrop that, among the forty or so armed conflicts in the world, known or unknown, more or less active or "frozen", since October 2023, the conflict in Palestine has become the "central conflict" between the unipolar bloc and the "nebula" of countries and peoples manifesting counter-hegemonic tendencies. This conflict is a continuation of the wars and tensions we are witnessing in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, the African countries of the Sahel, Taiwan, and the Korean peninsula - in other words, all around the Eurasian core. Geopolitics of Palestine If we look at the map of Palestine and the Israeli entity that took total control of it between 1948 and 1967, the first thing that stands out is the fact that its borders were drawn during the Anglo-French Sykes/Picot agreements following the First World War in such a way as to encompass the entire southern desert (Negev or Naqab), This enabled the territory to extend all the way to the Red Sea, giving whoever controlled Palestine a "dagger" cutting through the Arab nation, the Islamic world and the Afro-Asian space ("Third World" or "Global South") in two. These two parts, located on either side of the Palestinian territory redesigned by the English colonist, can no longer communicate directly without passing through Palestinian ("Israeli") territory. As a result, every Arab, every Muslim and every anti-colonial activist in Africa or Asia sees his or her territorial, national, cultural, religious or anti-colonial solidarity space - and therefore both his or her imaginary and political space - blocked or at least hindered in their movements. This was the historical reality of the Crusader state in the Middle Ages and, geopolitically speaking, it is exactly the same position occupied by the Israeli entity (see the geostrategic context of Zionism from the development of English colonialism). As a result, the Palestinian question has become the emblematic cause of all anti-colonial movements worldwide. Depending on their political and cultural sensitivities and class cleavages, each has been able to accentuate the anti-imperialist, nationalist, cultural or religious component of this state of affairs. So, in the geopolitics of Palestine, there is simultaneously an anti-Western geopolitical aspect, a social aspect aimed at promoting the struggle of the working classes against the bourgeoisie of the "collective West", and a symbolic and identity-related aspect that can take the form of Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, a more specific Palestinian nationalism or an Islam experienced as an element of affirmation in the face of the colonizer. For, as Thomas Sankara once said, "You don't read the Bible or the Koran in the same way if you're rich or poor, otherwise there would be two editions of the Bible and two editions of the Koran". This was amply demonstrated by the period that followed the dismantling of the socialist camp and the Soviet Union. Palestine at the heart of the contemporary world's geopolitical contradictions This central aspect of the Palestinian question, at once geopolitical, political and identity-related, explains why there is a particularly violent opposition between the Arab comprador bourgeoisies at the head of regimes that have little legitimacy and are therefore particularly authoritarian, and the "Arab street", the term used to designate the Arab masses, especially the Palestinians, including the Palestinian masses who have taken refuge in neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Gulf states. This situation also explains why all the conflicts in Western Asia, Northern Africa and generally elsewhere in the world have a more or less direct link with the Palestinian question. This is very clearly seen in the Arab-Islamic cultural area, but it is also evident in sub-Saharan Africa, in socialist countries, in Latin America and among the various layers of marginalized populations in the West. The exceptional mobilization visible today and in the past among the Irish in support of Palestine therefore appears extremely symptomatic of the objective and subjective reasons mentioned above, in connection with the national liberation struggle of the Irish people, for Ireland was geopolitically confronted with British imperialism as it still is today within the framework of the unipolar world centered on the Anglo-Saxon powers. Palestine and national liberation struggles Palestinian geopolitics is marked by the attempt made by Zionists since the beginning of the colonization of Palestine to "de-territorialize" the indigenous people, replacing them with imported colonial settlers who are supposed to "territorialize" in their place. And today, all the world's conflicts around the issue of globalization actually raise the question of territory and its role in the politics of right to development in the face of policies pushing for relocation of production and promoting "supranational" strategic and economic choices. This explains why "Israel" has been and remains perceived by all Arab peoples as a "foreign body" prevenitng any possibility of regional integration and development. This situation also explains why, until the demise of the USSR, the Palestinians were generally able to rely on socialist, non-aligned, and decolonized countries. After the crisis and the end of this "bipolar" world, the Palestinians found themselves on their own in an environment where, quite naturally, the comprador bourgeoisies of the Gulf, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan tended to dominate the region. But more broadly, all the peoples of the world see the Palestinian cause as emblematic of their own relationship to the right to development, recognized in the 1970s by the UN, globalized capitalism, neo-colonialism and imperialism. The Iranian revolution, the rise to power of the People's Republic of China and the return to world politics of a Russia where a national bourgeoisie has partly asserted itself in opposition to the "oligarchs" (making up in fact the local comprador bourgeoisie) have been the cause of the development of the Eurasian integration process, which has led to the formation of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These organizations represent a counterweight that is helping to loosen the imperialist stranglehold on West Asia and Africa in particular. And as Euro-Atlantic imperialism has entered a deep crisis, particularly since 2008, fractions of the bourgeoisie in key countries such as the Gulf states, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Venezuela, etc. have been increasingly tempted to distance themselves from the unipolar center in favor of the "multipolar adventure". The latest episode is the accession of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt to the BRICS. Against this backdrop of multiple global and social contradictions, we can see that, both objectively and indirectly, the process of asserting counter-powers around the world has given new impetus to the resistance of the Palestinian people as a consequence of the weakening of the Western pole. Today, the Palestinians, thanks to the military aspect of the action of October 7, 2023, and after the American-European defeats in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and at least in part in Ukraine, have been able to regain their central place on the dividing line between the "collective West" and the "global South", a new counter-hegemonic factor towards which the more independent "Eastern European countries" are also tending. For the first time since the 1970s, China has justified armed struggle as a legitimate and internationally recognized means of struggle for a colonized people. The new stage in the struggle of peoples, countries and states towards sovereignty The relocation and de-industrialization of countries in the NATO bloc centered on the USA, the Anglo-Saxon Five Eyes, the EU, and Japan, with Israel as their colonial outpost at the Afro-Asian crossroads, have reinforced the weight of the only non-relocated productive sector in these countries, the military-industrial complex. The emerging counter-hegemonic powers, for their part, are tempted to promote a more productive and therefore more peaceful economic development policy. This explains why Russia waited from 2014 to 2022 before reacting to NATO's eastward thrust threatening Ukraine, and why China and Iran favor diplomacy and economic ties over the use of force to alter the international balance of power. This is in line with the interests of the local national bourgeoisies, who are also organically reticent about any international tension that might push the popular masses to take direct control of the struggle for national sovereignty, and therefore for popular sovereignty and the democratization of social and economic relations, and political systems. The difference between the national bourgeoisie and the comprador bourgeoisie in the countries of the Global South is clearly perceptible when we observe the fear of the people that plagues the comprador bourgeoisies, while national bourgeoisies seek to retain the support of its people and wishing to retain a monopoly on power; in other words, betrayal on the one hand, opportunism on the other. In a context where social tensions tend to explode all over the world due to the relative and often absolute impoverishment of the masses, Palestine, and Gaza in particular, is the world's "pressure cooker", bound to explode following attempts by Western powers and conservative Arab and African regimes to bury the Palestinian question by putting forward less burning issues. This is one of the reasons why the military leadership of Palestinian Hamas has decided to take a proactive response to the despair of the people of Gaza and Palestine, as well as of neighboring countries and those further afield who feel humiliated. Indeed, it had long been preparing for the coup de force of October 7, which, whatever one may think in the specifics, fundamentally altered the international balance of power. This explains the extraordinary response to Gaza from people all over the world, including in Western countries. In the USA, for example, the mobilizations in support of the Palestinians represent the most massive demonstrations to have taken place in that country in the last two decades, to the point where 40% of Jews in the USA disassociate themselves from Israel and 30% of neo-evangelicals are now in favor of the Palestinians. This shows that prejudice aimed at essentializing one religious group, or another is counter-productive. In France, the Macron government's ban on demonstrations denouncing the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the repeated aggressions targeting Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, are not evidence of power strength, but, on the contrary, of its weakness. France's conservative authorities have been forced to adopt a particularly authoritarian stance, in keeping with what happened during the Algerian war, and gradually with the mass movement of the Gilets jaunes, in order to avoid a possible "convergence of struggles" between "pro-Palestinians", working-class neighborhoods largely populated by people of immigrant origin, the movement for decent pensions, farmers, outlying towns, Gilets jaunes, trade unionists, community activists, radical political activists, Muslims, Marxists, working-class priests and so on. For all progressives in France and elsewhere in the world, and regardless of what some may think of the Palestinian tool that is Hamas (supported by its secular or Marxist allies in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq), this tool has been able to take into account the local and global contradictions of the moment. This qualitative leap explains why no Palestinian organization, including even the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, felt able to criticize this action. While we must always avoid the fetishism that leads to the adulation of certain organizations or, on the contrary, the demonization of others, we must also be in a position to observe how they are capable or incapable of modifying the balance of power in the long term. Organizations are merely tools which, sometimes consciously, sometimes less consciously so, can from time to time trigger a new process of struggle, turning things on their head and leading to the delegitimization of a whole bloc of powers. This explains the immense joy of the "Arab street", and more broadly of working-class neighborhoods and strata the world over, at the sight of young Palestinians storming the latest Israeli tanks. At a time when, in Ukraine, tanks sent by Western powers are being destroyed. To make us forget these extraordinary Palestinian feats of arms, we have been told about the horrors committed by these new fedayeen, even since certain Israeli witnesses and certain investigations by rare Israeli media remaining free have begun to cast at least some doubt on those horror tales. (see: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231030-report-7-october-testimonies-strikes-major-blow-to-israeli-narrative/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkHs7ZG7rFY/ https://www.chroniquepalestine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Hamas_our_narrative.pdf). All this reminds us of the article written by Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune describing the violence committed by the Indian Cipayan insurgents against British settlers responsible for prior, far more painful, violence and humiliations. So, even if the extreme pain we feel in the face of Gaza's martyrdom reminds us of other martyrdoms in history - the Paris Commune, the Warsaw Ghetto, the thousands Soviet, Yugoslav, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Algerian, Vietnamese, and Korean villages, etc. whose populations were exterminated to punish them for having given birth to rebels who might themselves have committed questionable or even reprehensible acts of violence, the essential historical fact is that the Palestinian question goes far beyond the question of Hamas alone, which is no more than a tool of the Palestinian people at a given moment in history. On the other hand, Hamas's action has put the Palestinian question back at the heart of the global contradiction, namely the pivotal issue in the balance of power between the imperialist pole and the various counter-hegemonic currents emerging around the world. This is what the peoples of the world have already remembered, and this is what world history will remember. (Note: For thoughts on the possible future of a reunited, multi-ethnic Palestine after the collapse of the "two-state solution", see my article in the 2020 Géostratégiques magazine.) The current "hybrid world war" situation therefore demonstrates that geopolitics is a useful method of analysis, to be combined with the analysis of social and economic relations. At this stage in human history, it is becoming essential to make an intellectual effort to understand the world as a whole, and to link the tragedy being experienced by the Palestinians with that being experienced by Ukraine, Syria, and all other countries at war or under economic blockade, in the face of a dominant capitalist world whose rotten nature is becoming ever more apparent. Author Bruno Drweski is an activist and a professor at the National Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilizations in Paris. He sits on the editorial board of 4 peer-reviewed journals and has published extensively (articles, chapters, and books) in history, political sociology, and geopolitics. Archives March 2024 In Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels writes the following on definitions: "From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten."[1] This quote arises in the context of the chapter’s attack on Dühring’s philosophy of nature. Specifically, Engels wants to point out the inadequacy, or, in other words, the abstract character, of the ‘definition’ of life. To understand this perspective on definitions we must comprehend the Marxist distinction between the abstract and the concrete, since it is, properly speaking, the abstract character of definitions which are problematic. Today we hear the word abstract, and we conjure up images of mental abstractions, of generalizations which occur in our mind and are a disconnected reflection of the sensible things in the world. This is not, generally, the way our tradition understands the ‘abstract’. We, of course, see a necessary role for mental abstractions in the process of acquiring theoretical knowledge. Theory is, always, a form of abstraction. However, this ‘abstraction’ can itself be more or less abstract or concrete – in the sense in which we specifically use the words. Etymologically, the Latin concretus referred to that which is mixed, composite, fused. As Marx and Hegel have put it, the concrete is that which contains many determinations.[2] The concrete is the unity which contains the many, a unity of opposites. It is that which is most complex, the whole or totality. When we say, for instance, that Marx provides a concrete study of the capitalist mode of production, we mean that he has logically reconstructed the mode of production as a whole, comprehensively, on the basis of ascending from its germ (the commodity, the most abstract integral component of the whole) to the whole itself. In Hegel’s logic the absolute idea stands as the most concrete form of the concept, that last form the concept takes, precisely because it self-consciously contains within it the many determinations it has gone through to achieve this utmost moment of logical concreteness. Abstractus, in Latin, refers to that which has been withdrawn, removed, extracted, estranged or isolated. It is quite evident to see how this operates in abstract thinking… in abstract mental abstractions. As Ilyenkov writes, “thinking abstractly merely means thinking unconnectedly, thinking of an individual property of a thing without understanding its links with other properties, without realizing the place and role of this property in reality.”[3] But the abstract is not simply this flaw in disconnected thinking, there are also real abstractions operative objectively in the world, abstractions which themselves can be understood concretely. For Marx, for instance, this is operative in commodity exchange, where the “general value-form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour-power.”[4] As you find in the first four chapters of Capital Vol. I, the exchange value of commodities (which comes to dominate over its use-value) is a reflection of the abstract labor time that went into it. It is a quantitative metric of the socially necessary labor time needed to produce a specific commodity. For such quantifiability to take place qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable. The labor that goes into making a shoe and the labor that goes into making a coat must lose their uniqueness and obtain an abstract form in which each is comparable, as qualitative equals, in terms of quantity. This is a real abstraction.[5] That which is the most concrete, i.e., the ‘wholes’ or ‘totalities’ to be examined, cannot be studied directly qua whole. The concrete, in other words, cannot be a point of departure. Treating it as such limits you to engaging with what Marx called an “imagined concrete,” a concrete object of study approached through abstract thinking.[6] Instead, to understand the concrete concretely, an ascension from the abstract to the concrete is required. Marx, for instance, does not deal with the capitalist mode of production as a whole until the third volume of Capital, i.e., until he has arrived at the whole through a “process of concentration,” through an ascension to the concrete.[7] This ascension, therefore, requires initially the descending from the concrete (the whole) to the abstract (its determinate components). We exist, for instance, within the capitalist mode of life as a concrete reality. But to study such a reality Marx had to descend from the immediate experience of the concrete to its abstract components in order to reconstruct them logically through this process of ascension to the real concrete. Descending from the concrete to the abstract is a means, an intermediary disappearing moment for the ascension to the concrete. Both of these movements, the descending from the immediate concrete to the abstract to reascend from the abstract to the concrete, thereby reconstructing the concrete whole in the mind, are integral to the process of mental concrete abstraction… the antidote to the one-sidedness and disconnection central to abstract thinking. Primacy, however, is given to the ascension to the concrete. It is, as Ilyenkov notes, “the principal and dominant [movement], determining the weight and significance of the other, the opposite one [descending from the concrete to the abstract],” which “emerges as a subordinate disappearing moment of the overall movement.”[8] So, what does this have to do with the Marxist tradition’s view of definitions? Well, definitions, though helpful for practical purposes, too easily lend themselves to abstract thinking – i.e., to completely misunderstanding the world. One cannot provide one-sentence textbook definitions for complex (concrete) things in the world. Even for the most elemental things in the world, a basic abstract definition tells me very little about such a thing. This approach to definitions attempts to freeze frame whatever is being defined – to remove it from its spatial-temporal context, from the web of relations it exists in, and to ignore how such context is the horizon for the form the defined thing takes. Definitions, in other words, force our thinking into seeing things statically, disconnectedly, and free from the contradictions which pervade a thing’s existence as a complex, heterogenous entity. This does not mean we condemn definitions. They are, after all, an integral component of communication. Human social life without definitions would be impossible. But it does mean that, when participating in scientific inquiry (as Engels mentioned), or, frankly, in any other activity, we should not treat definitions as these pure sacrosanct things reality must mold itself into (for instance, how the purity fetish outlook treats the pure ‘idea’, or ‘definition,’ of socialism as something which could be used to look at socialist countries and say, ‘that’s not real socialism because it is not an accurate representation of the pure idea, or definition, that exists in my mind’). We should be cognizant of the fact that the things ‘definitions’ define are themselves in constant motion, riddled by contradictions, and necessarily interconnected to a host of other things within a given totality… all of which must be grasped so that phenomenon, currently captured abstractly through a definition, could be understood concretely. I can, for instance, tell you about how capitalism is a system where the owners of capital are in power over the productive forces and the state apparatuses (ideological and repressive) of society, and where such dominance is used to perpetuate the process of capital accumulation rooted in the exploitation of the working class’s labor. This, for instance, is a somewhat helpful ‘definition.’ But could one say they understand this concrete reality (this ‘whole’ form of life) concretely on the basis of such a definition? Of course not! It is not without reason that Marx’s Capital remained an open, unfinished project… it’s object of study was itself unfinished, continuously developing, obtaining greater concreteness. Therefore, those (like Marx and Engels) attempting to concretely reconstruct the mode of life as a whole in writing, require an openness in their intellectual project that reflects the open dynamism of its object of study. This is why Marxism (dialectical materialism) is creative through and through. It holds as an ontological reality this incessant development of the world, and thus understands that to continue to know it concretely (and, of course, to change it in a revolutionary manner), its thinking must creatively develop with it. References [1] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 2016), 81. [2] G. W. F. Hegel. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974., pp. 13. Karl Marx. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books, 1973., pp. 101. [3] Evald Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2022), 27. [4] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I (Moscow: International Publishers, 1974), 57. [5] This is explored in Alfred Sohn-Rothel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor, which anticipates the argument from Richard Seaford in Money and the Early Greek Mind that the real abstraction found in the introduction of coinage (money commodity, universal equivalent) in Miletus was what sparked the development of philosophy, i.e., ideal concrete abstractions into the question of being. [6] Marx, Grundrisse, 100, [7] Marx, Grundrisse, 100. [8] Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete, 139. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 Another Lost Cold War Document: Zhou Enlai's March 8, 1952 Denunciation of U.S. Germ Warfare. By: Jeffrey S. KayeRead NowPicture of the “Northeast China Group of the Commission for Investigating the Crime of Bacteriological Warfare Committed by the American Imperialists,” taken at Shenyang, April 1, 1952. From 1952 pamphlet, “Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes Committed by the Government of the United States,” pg. 13, published by The Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace (author’s private collection) Introduction This is an updated version of the original post. The update is necessary, in my opinion, because claims as to the availability of the materials described in the bulk of the post must be amended. While the “lost” statement of Zhou Enlai has in fact been nearly unobtainable in the U.S. for decades, in January 2024, a pamphlet containing Zhou’s statement, and other important material, was posted for viewing and download at The Internet Archive. A description of this, and links to the material are included in the updated post below. — Jeff Kaye In February 2018 I published online the full 669-page Report of International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (ISC Report), which corroborated the Chinese and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an experimental fashion on civilian populations. I described it as a “lost document” from the Cold War. As I discovered later, the difficulty in tracking down a copy of the ISC Report was due to the fact that the U.S. government, utilizing a bogus interpretation of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) had likely destroyed almost every copy entering the U.S. via shipment from abroad. The FARA law initially was passed on the eve of World War II, and was initially meant to stop the importation of Nazi propaganda. But with the onset of the Cold War, and with the beginning of the Korean War, the U.S. Attorney General interpreted FARA to claim that any foreign entity sending materials from “Iron Curtain” countries — books, pamphlets, magazines, recordings, etc. — were in effect acting as “foreign agents.” Accordingly, the U.S. Postal Service and Customs agency, as well as the FBI, were authorized to seize all third class mail from Communist countries and destroy it. Literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of mails were duly confiscated and destroyed monthly for years! In my article on the subject, I noted that this is why we did not have many materials from that period in our libraries or archives, including the ISC report, or printed materials that included, for instance, statements from North Korean and Chinese leaders about the biological warfare (BW) attacks then taking place. Later historians often cited these BW statements, but they were rarely quoted verbatim, possibly because the historians in question were working off secondary accounts and not the actual statements. Hence, along with the article on FARA censorship (which was ended by Supreme Court decision in 1965), I posted online for the first time ever, in English, a copy of then-Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Bak Hon Yong’s, statement accusing the United States of using germ warfare attacks, while “openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals” of Unit 731. Bak’s statement, originally issued on February 22, 1952, was published in a 1952 pamphlet published by The Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, which I privately obtained. Luckily, this copy of the document, “Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes Committed by the Government of the United States of America,” was somehow spared the wholesale destruction of such documents that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. If I had not found this document, then Bak’s statement would still be unobtainable, so far as I can tell. Perhaps it exists in UN archives somewhere. (Sadly, the format of the Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes document is too large for easy reproduction, but researcher Alice Atlas has written to tell me she succeeded in doing so.) A week after Bak’s statement, Zhou En-Lai (publishing as Chou En-Lai in the translation style then used for Chinese) issued his own statement on the U.S. warfare attacks. He was quite precise about the number of attacks and the kinds of pathogens dropped by the United States. Interestingly, his statement never mentions Unit 731 collaboration, although later Chinese statements and propaganda would. [Update: researcher Alice Atlas has informed me that a pamphlet of speeches, including Zhou’s March 8 statement, has been posted at Internet Archive. In an earlier February 24 statement of support for North Korean protests around U.S. germ warfare attacks, Zhou did specifically single out Unit 731’s “Shiro Ishii, Jiro Wakamatsu, Masajo Kitano and other Japanese bacteriological war criminals,” who have “carr[ied] out on the Korean battlefield experiments and manufacture of various types of lethal bacteria” (pg. 6).] Zhou’s document, like Bak’s, is not obtainable, so far as I can tell, in any online resource that I know of. [Except see paragraph above! - JK] Nor am I sure where one would find it in a library. As a service to the public, to historians more specifically, and for the readers of Hidden Histories, I’ve transcribed Zhou’s statement and am posting it here for what I believe is the first time online. So, hopefully, here is yet another “lost” document rescued from the U.S. censorship and book-burning campaign that lasted fifteen years of the early Cold War, as well as from the ongoing censorship that continues to suppress recognition of the U.S. war crimes described therein. Statement by Chou En-Lai [Zhou Enlai], Minister for Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, March 8, 1952 After launching large-scale, bacteriological warfare in Korea on January 28, 1952, the American aggressive forces, between February 29 and March 5, sent 68 formations of military aircraft, making a total of 448 sorties to invade China’s territorial air in the Northeast, and scatter large quantities of germ-carrying insects at Fushun, Hsinmin, Antung, Kuantien, Linkiang and other areas, and to bomb and strafe the Linkiang and Changtienhokow areas. The details of these incidents are as follows: (1) On February 29, American aircraft, in 14 formations, flew a total of 148 sorties over Antung, Fushun, Fengcheng and other areas and scattered insects over Fushun. An investigation on the spot showed that insects of a black colour were found within an area of 15-20 kilometers in Fushun County covering Takow, Lijen, and Fangsiao Villages and Lientaowan. (2) On March 1, American aircraft, in 14 formations, flew a total of 86 sorties to intrude over Fushun, Changtienhokow, Kuantien and Chian and scatter insects of a black colour resembling fleas over Makinchwang and other places in Fushun County. (3) On March 2, American aircraft, in 12 formations, flew a total of 72 sorties over Funshun, Antung, Tatungkow, Changtienhokow, Kiuliencheng, Chian, Kuantien and Changpai. They dropped large quantities of flies, mosquitoes, fleas and other types of insects over Takow and other parts of Fushun County and areas between Fushun and Shenyang. (4) On March 3, five formations of American aircraft, flying a total of 23 sorties, intruded and scattered insects over Antung, Langtou and Chian. (5) On March 4, thirteen formations of American aircraft flew a total of 72 sorties, to intrude and scatter insects over Antung, Langtou, Tatunkow, Kiuliencheng, Changtienhokow, Hsinmin, Chian, Hunkiangkow and Kuantien. At 11 a.m. of the same morning, six American aircraft were observed above Langtou. They dropped from a height of 5,000 meters two cloth receptacles which burst open some 2,000 meters from the ground; and then a swarm of flies was found near the highway. At 2 p.m., an American aircraft was observed over Paikipao and Jaoyangho in Hsinmin County. It dropped a load of flies. On the same day, American aircraft were active over Kuantien, and afterwards flies, mosquitoes, crickets and fleas dropped by American aircraft were immediately found east of Kuantien City and at Hunshihlatze and other places. (6) On March 5, ten formations of American aircraft flew a total of 38 sorties to intrude over Antung, Anpingho, Changtienhokow, Hunkiangkow, Tunghua and Linkiang. Of these, one group of 8 planes at about 8 a.m. indiscriminately bombed and strafed Linkiang, wounding 2 people and destroying 5 houses. In view of the fact that the United States government has dared repeatedly and openly to make air intrusions over China’s territory, spread germ-bearing insects and indiscriminately bomb, strafe and kill Chinese people at the same time as it is delaying the Korean armistice negotiations and obstructing a peaceful settlement of the Korean question in an attempt to prolong and extend the Korean war, I am authorised by the Central People’s Government of the People’s Government of China to protest solemnly against these most savage and brutal acts of aggression and provocation by the United States government. The open and direct acts of aggression of the United States government against the People’s Republic of China date from June 27, 1950 when U.S. President Truman announced the despatch of its navy to invade and occupy China’s territory of Taiwan. On August 27, 1950 the American aggressor troops in Korea began to send their military aircraft to intrude into the territorial air of Northeast China. From then on, the military aircraft of the United States government have many times intruded over Northeast China and carried out reconnaissance, strafing and bombing. Now, on the heels of its large-scale bacteriological warfare in Korea, the United States government is adding to its open violation of international law and all laws of humanity by scattering large quantities of bacteria-laden insects over Northeast China. This is an attempt by the criminal and vicious device of mass slaughter of peaceful people to further its aims of invading China and threatening the security of the Chinese people. These brutal crimes of the United States government will never be tolerated by the Chinese people. The opposition of the Chinese people in their wrath will assure the ignominious failure of these crimes. It is the view of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China that the United States government, pursuing its objectives of extending the Korean war and undermining peace in the Far East and other parts of the world, has employed bacteriological weapons, strictly prohibited by humanity and international conventions, against the peaceful population and armed forces of the Korean and Chinese peoples in Korea, and is even extending such crimes against the peaceful population in Northeast China by employing these unlawful bacteriological weapons in a brutal provocation. In its statement on February 24 [see pg. 5 at link], the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China pointed out: “If the people of the world do not resolutely curb this crime, then the calamities befalling the peaceful people of Korea today will befall the peaceful people of the world tomorrow.” Now is the time for the peace-loving people of the world to rise and put an end to the maniacal crimes of the United States government. We are confident that human justice and peace will triumph. The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China hereby makes it known that members of the American air force who invade China’s territorial air and use bacteriological weapons will be dealt with as war criminals upon capture. The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China at the same time declares that the United States government must bear the full responsibility for all the consequences arising from air intrusions over China’s territory, the use of bacteriological weapons and the murder of the Chinese people by indiscriminate bombing and strafing. Author Jeff Kaye is a retired clinical psychologist. He's been researching and writing on US war crimes for over 15 years, and is the author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation Into the Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri." Currently he writes the blog "Hidden Histories" at Substack.com. Republished from 'Hidden Histories' Substack Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 China’s economy is still far out growing the U.S. – contrary to Western media “fake news. By: John RossRead NowGDP data for China, the U.S., and the other G7 countries for the year 2023 has now been published. This makes possible an accurate assessment of China’s, the U.S., and major economies performance—both in terms of China’s domestic goals and international comparisons. There are two key reasons this is important.
The factual situation is that China’s economy, as it heads into 2024, has far outgrown all other major comparable economies. This reality is in total contradiction to claims in the U.S. media. This in turn, therefore, demonstrates the extraordinary distortions and falsifications in the U.S. media about this situation. It confirms that, with a few honourable exceptions, Western economic journalism is primarily dominated by, in some cases quite extraordinary, “fake news” rather than any objective analysis. Both for understanding the economic situation, and the degree of distortion in the U.S. media, it is therefore necessary to establish the facts of current international developments. China’s growth targets Starting with China’s strategic domestic criteria, it has set clear goals for its economic development over the next period which will complete its transition from a “developing” to a “high-income” economy by World Bank international standards. In precise numbers, in 2020’s discussion around the 14th Five Year plan, it was concluded that for China by 2035: “It is entirely possible to double the total or per capita income”. Such a result would mean China decisively overcoming the alleged “middle income trap” and, as the 20th Party Congress stated, China reaching the level of a “medium-developed country by 2035”. In contrast, a recent series of Western reports, widely used in anti-China propaganda, claim that China’s economy will experience sharp slowdown and will fail to reach its targets. Self-evidently which of these outcomes is achieved is of fundamental importance for China’s entire national rejuvenation and construction of socialism—as Xi Jinping stated, China’s: “path takes economic development as the central task, and brings along economic, political, cultural, social, ecological and other forms of progress.” But the outcome also affects the entire global economy—for example, a recent article by the chair of Rockefeller International, published in the Financial Times, made the claim that what was occurring was China’s “economy… losing share to its peers”. The Wall Street journal asserted: “China’s economy limps into 2024” whereas in contrast the U.S. was marked by a “resilient domestic economy.” The British Daily Telegraph proclaimed China has a “stagnant economy”. The Washington Post headlined that: “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery” with the article claiming: “in the United States… the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.” This is allegedly because: “Through the end of September, it was more than 7 percent larger than before the pandemic. That was more than twice Japan’s gain and far better than Germany’s anaemic 0.3 percent increase.” Numerous similar claims could be quoted from the U.S. media. U.S. use of “fake news”Reading U.S. media claims on these issues, and comparing them to the facts. it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what is involved is deliberate “fake news” for propaganda purposes—as will be seen, the only alternative explanation is that it is disgracefully sloppy journalism that should not appear in supposedly “quality” media. For example, it is simply absurdly untrue, genuinely “fake news”, that the U.S. is “outperforming all of its major trading partners”, or that China has a “stagnant economy”. Anyone who bothers to consult the facts, an elementary requirement for a journalist, can easily find out that such claims are entirely false—as will be shown in detail below. To first give an example regarding U.S. domestic reports, before dealing with international aspects, a distortion of U.S. economic growth in 2023 was so widely reported in the U.S. media that it is again hard to avoid the conclusion that this was a deliberate misrepresentation to present an exaggerated view of U.S. economic performance. Factually, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. official statistics agency for economic growth, reported that U.S. GDP in 2023 rose by 2.5%—for comparison China’s GDP increased by 5.2%. But a series of U.S. media outlets, starting with the Wall Street Journal, instead proclaimed that the “U.S. economy grew 3.1% over the last year”. This “fake news” on U.S. growth was created by statistical “cherry picking”. In this case comparing only the last quarter of 2023 with the last quarter of 2022, which was an increase of 3.1%, but not by taking GDP growth in the year as a whole “last year”. But U.S. growth in the earlier part of 2023 was far weaker than in the 4th quarter—year on year growth in the 1st quarter was only 1.7% and in the 2nd quarter only 2.4%. Taking into account this weak growth in the first part of the year, and stronger growth in the second, U.S. growth for the year as a whole was only 2.5%—not 3.1%. As it is perfectly easy to look up the actual annual figure, which was precisely published by the U.S. statistical authorities, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this was a deliberate distortion in the U.S. media to falsely present a higher U.S. growth rate in 2023 than the reality. It may be noted that even if U.S. GDP growth had been 3.1% then China’s was much higher at 5.2%. But the real data makes it transparently clear that China’s economy grew more than twice as fast as the U.S. in 2023—showing at a glance that claims that the U.S. is “outperforming all of its major trading partners”, or that China has a “stagnant economy” were entirely “fake news”. Many more examples of U.S. media false claims could be given, but the best way to see the overall situation is to systematically present the overall facts of growth in the major economies. What China has to do to achieve its 2035 goalsTurning first to assessing China’s economic performance, compared to its own strategic goals of doubling GDP and per capita GDP between 2020 and 2035, it should be noted that in 2022 China’s population declined by 0.1% and this fall is expected to continue—the UN projects China’s population will decline by an average 0.1% a year between 2020 and 2035. Therefore, in economic growth terms, the goal of doubling GDP growth to 2035 is slightly more challenging than the per capita target and will be concentrated on here—if China’stotal GDP goal is achieved then the per capita GDP one will necessarily be exceeded. To make an international comparison of China’s growth projections compared with the U.S., the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), responsible for the official growth projections for the U.S. economy on which its government’s policies rely, estimates there will be 1.8% annual average U.S. GDP growth between 2023 and 2023—with this falling to 1.6% from 2034 onwards. This figure is slightly below the current U.S. 12-year long term annual average GDP growth of 2.3%—12 being the number of years from 2023 to 2035. To avoid any suggestion of bias against the U.S., and in favour of China, in international comparisons here the higher U.S. number of 2.3% will be used. The results of such figures are that if China hits its growth target for 2035, and the U.S. continues to grow at 2.3%, then between 2020 and 2035 China’s economy will grow by 100% and the U.S. by 41%—see Figure 1. Therefore, from 2020 to 2035, China’s economy would grow slightly more than two and a half times as fast as the U.S. The strategic consequences of China’s economic growth rate The international implications of any such growth outcomes were succinctly summarised by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times. If China’s economy continues to grow substantially faster than Western ones, and it achieves the status of a “medium-developed country by 2035”, then, in addition to achieving high domestic living standards, China’s will become by far the world’s largest economy. As Wolf put it: “The implications can be seen in quite a simple way. According to the IMF, China’s gross domestic product per head (measured at purchasing power) was 28 per cent of U.S. levels in 2022. This is almost exactly half of Poland’s relative GDP per head… Now, suppose its [China’s] relative GDP per head doubled, to match Poland’s. Then its GDP would be more than double that of the U.S. and bigger than that of the U.S. and EU together.” By 2035 such a process would not be completed on the growth rates already given, and measuring by Wolf’s chosen measure of purchasing power parities (PPPs) China’s economy by 2035 would be 60% bigger than that of the U.S. But even that would make China by far the world’s largest economy. Wolf equally accurately notes that the only way that such an outcome would be prevented from occurring is if China’s economy slows down to the growth rate of a Western economy such as the U.S. Clearly, if China’s economic growth slows to that of a Western economy, then, naturally, China will never catch up with the West—it will necessarily simply stay the same distance behind. Therefore. as Wolf accurately puts it the outcomes are: What is the economic future of China? Will it become a high-income economy and so, inevitably, the largest in the world for an extended period, or will it be stuck in the ‘middle income’ trap, with growth comparable to that of the U.S.? The progress in achieving China’s strategic economic goalsTurning to the precise figure required to achieve China’s 2035 target, China’s goal of doubling GDP required average annual growth of at least 4.7% a year between 2020 and 2035. So far China, as Figure 1 shows, is ahead of this goal—annual average growth in 2020-2022 was 5.7%, meaning that from 2023-2035 annual average 4.6% growth is now required. China’ 5.2% GDP increase in 2023 therefore once again exceeded the required 4.6% growth rate to achieve its 2035 goal—as shown in Figure 1. From 2020 to 2023 the required total increase in China’s GDP to hit its 2035 target was 14.9%, whereas in fact its growth was 17.5%. This is in line with the 45-year record since 1978’s Reform and Opening Up, during which entire period the medium/long term targets set by China have always been exceeded. Therefore. to summarise, there is no sign whatever in 2023, or indeed in the period since 2020, that China will fail to meet its target of doubling GDP between 2020 and 2035—China is ahead of this target. Such a 4.6% growth rate would easily ensure China becomes a high-income economy by World Bank criteria well before 2035—the present criteria for this being per capita income of $13,846. It should be noted, as discussed in in detail below, that a clear international conclusion flows from this necessary 4.6% annual average growth rate for China to achieve its strategic goals. It means that China must continue to grow much faster than the Western economies throughout this period to 2035—that is in line with China’s current trend. However, if China were to slow down to the growth rate of a Western economy, then it will fail to achieve its strategic goals to 2035, may not succeed in becoming a high income economy, and will necessarily remain the same distance behind the West as now. The implications of this will be considered below. Systematic comparisons not “cherry picking”Having considered China’s performance in 2023 terms of achieving its own domestic strategic goals we will now turn to actual results and a comparison of China with other international economies. This immediately shows the factual absurdity, the pure “fake news” of claims such as that the U.S. has “the world’s best recovery“ and “the United States… is outperforming all of its major trading partners.” On the contrary China has continued to far outgrow the U.S. economy not only in 2023 but in the entire last period. China’s outperformance of the other major Western economies, the G7, is even greater that of the U.S. Entirely misleading claims regarding such international comparisons, used for propaganda as opposed to serious analysis, are sometimes made because data is taken from extremely short periods of time which are taken out of context—unrepresentative statistical “cherry picking” or, as Lenin put it, a statistical “dirty business”. Such a method is always erroneous, but it is particularly so during periods which were affected by the impact of the Covid pandemic as these caused extremely violent short-term economic fluctuations related to lock downs and similar measures. China’s assertion of superior growth is based on its overall performance, not an absurd claim that it outperforms every other economy, on every single measure, in every single period! Therefore, in making international comparisons, the most suitable period to take is that for since the beginning of the pandemic up to the latest available GDP data. As comparison of China with the U.S. is the most commonly made one, and particularly concentrated on by the U.S. media campaign, this will be considered first. China’s and the U.S.’s growth in 2023 It was already noted that in 2023 China’s GDP grew by 5.2% and the U.S. by 2.5%—China’s economy growing more than twice as fast as the U.S. But it should also be observed that 2023 was an above trend growth year for the U.S.—U.S. annual average growth over a 12-year period is only 2.3% and over a 20-year period it is only 2.1%. Therefore, although in 2023 China’s economy grew more than twice as fast as the U.S., that figure is actually somewhat flattering for the U.S. Figure 2shows that in the overall period since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy has grown by 20.1% and the U.S. by 8.1%—that is China’s total GDP growth since the beginning of the pandemic was two and half times greater than the U.S. China’s annual average growth rate was 4.7% compared to the US’s 2.0%. Economic performance of China and the three major global economic centres Turning to wider international comparisons than the U.S. such data immediately shows the extremely negative situation in most “Global North” economies and China’s great outperformance of them. To start by analysing this in the broadest terms, Figure 3 shows the developments in the world’s three largest economic centres—China, the U.S., and the Eurozone. These three together account for 57% of world GDP at current exchange rates and 46% in purchasing power parities (PPPs). No other economic centre comes close to matching their weight in the world economy. Regarding the relative performance of these three major economic centres, at the time of writing data has not been published for the Euro Area for the whole year of 2023 —which would be the ideal comparison. However, it has been published for the the Euro area for the four quarters of 2023 individually and trends can be calculated on that basis. These show that In the four years to the 4th quarter of 2023, covering the period since the beginning of the pandemic, China’s economy has grown by 20.1%, the U.S. by 8.2%, and the Eurozone by 3.0%. China’s economy therefore grew by two and a half times as fast as the U.S. while the situation of the Eurozone could accurately be described as extremely negative with annual average GDP growth in the last four years of only 0.7%. Such data again makes it immediately obvious that claims in the Western media that China faces economic crisis, and the Western economies are doing well is entirely absurd—pure fantasy propaganda disconnected from reality. Relative performance of China and the G7 Turning to analysing individual countries, then comparing China to all G7 states, i.e. the major advanced economies, shows the situation equally clearly—see Figure 4. Data for China and all G7 economies has now been published for the whole of 2023. The huge outperformance by China of all the major advanced economies is again evident. Over the four years since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy grew by 20.1%, the U.S. by 8.1%, Canada by 5.4%, Italy by 3.1%, the UK by 1.8%, France by 1.7%, Japan by 1.1% and Germany by 0.7%. In the same period China’s economy therefore grew two and a half times as fast as the U.S., almost four times as fast as Canada, almost seven times as fast as Italy, 11 times as fast as the UK, 12 times as fast as France, 18 times as fast as Japan and almost 29 times as fast as Germany. In terms of annual average GDP growth during this period China’s was 4.7%, the U.S. 2.0%, Canada 1.3%, Italy 0.8%, the UK 0.4%, France 0.4%, Japan 0.3% and Germany 0.2%. It may therefore be seen that China’s economy far outperformed the U.S., while the performance of all other major G7 economies may be quite reasonably described as extremely negative—all having annual average economic growth rates of around or even under 1%. Comparison of China to developing economies A comparison using the IMF’s January 2024 projections can also be made to the major developing economies—the BRICS. Figure 5 shows this, using the factual result for China and the IMF projections for the other countries. Over the period since the start of the pandemic, from 2019-2023, China’s GDP grew by 20.1%, India by 17.5%, Brazil by 7.7%, Russia by 3.7% and South Africa by 0.9%. This data confirms that the major Global South economies are growing faster than most of the major Global North economies, which is part of the rise of the Global South and draws attention to the good performance of India. But China grew more than two and half times more than all the BRICS economies except India—China’s growth was 15% greater than India’s. It should be noted that India is at a far lower stage of development than the other BRICS economies—all the others fall in the World Bank classification of upper middle-income economies whereas India falls into the lower middle income group. Comparison of China’s growth to Western economies Finally, this outperformance by China casts light on what is necessary to achieve its own 2035 strategic targets. China’s 4.6% growth rate necessary to meet these goals means that it must continue to maintain a growth rate far higher than Western economies—Figure 6 shows this in overall terms in addition to individual comparisons given to major economies above. Whereas China must achieve an annual average 4.6% growth rate the median growth rate of high income “Western” economies is only 1.9%, the U.S. is 2.3%, and the median for developing economies is 3.0%.That is, to achieve its 2035 goals China must grow twice as fast as the long term trend of the U.S., almost two and a half times as fast as the median for high income economies, and more than 50% faster than the median for developing economies. As already seen, China is more than achieving this. But such facts immediately show why it is an extremely misleading when proposals are made that China should move towards the macro-economic structure of a Western economy. If China adopts the structure of a Western economy then, of course, China will slow down to the same growth rate as Western economies—and therefore fail to achieve its 2035 economic goals. China will be precisely stuck in the negative outcome of the situation accurately diagnosed by Martin Wolf. What is the economic future of China? Will it become a high-income economy and so, inevitably, the largest in the world for an extended period, or will it be stuck in the ‘middle income’ trap, with growth comparable to that of the U.S.? Conclusion In conclusion, it addition to objectively analysing 2023’s economic results, it is also necessary in the light of this factual situation to make a remark regarding Western, in particular U.S. “journalism”. None of the data given above is secret, all is available from public readily accessible sources. In many cases it does not even require any calculations and simply published data can be used. But the U.S. media and journalists report information that is systematically misleading and in many cases simply untrue. While it lagged China in creating economic growth the U.S. was certainly the world leader in creating “fake economic news”! What was the reason, what attitude should be taken to it? First, to avoid accusations of distortion, it should be stated that there were a small handful of Western journalists who refused to go along with this type of distortion and fake news. For example Chris Giles, the Financial Times economics commentator, in December, sharply attacked “an absurd way to compare economies… among people who should know better.” Giles did not do this because of support for China but because, quite rightly, he warned that spreading false or distorted information led to serious errors by countries doing so: “Coming from the UK, which lost its top economic dog status in the late 19th century but still has some delusions of grandeur, I can understand American denialism… But ultimately, bad comparisons foster bad decisions.” But the overwhelming majority of U.S. and Western journalists continued to spread fake news. Why? First, the fact that identical distortions and false information appeared absolutely simultaneously across a very wide range of media makes it clear that undoubtedly U.S. intelligence services were involved in creating it—i.e. part of the misrepresentation and distortions were entirely deliberate and conscious, aimed at disguising the real situation. Second, another part was merely sloppy journalism—that is journalists who could not be bothered to check facts. Third, supporting both of these factors was “white Western arrogance”—an arrogant assumption, rooted in centuries of European and European descended countries dominating the world, that the West must be right. Therefore, such arrogance made it impossible to acknowledge or report the clear facts that China’s economy is far outperforming the West. But whether it was conscious distortion, sloppy journalism, or conscious or unconscious arrogance, in all these cases no respect should be given to the Western “quality” media. It is not trying to find out the truth, which is the job of journalism, it is simply spreading false propaganda. It remains a truth that if a theory and the real world don’t coincide there are only two courses that can be taken. The first, that of a sane person, is to abandon the theory. The second, that of a dangerous one, is to abandon the real world—precisely the danger that Chris Giles pointed to. What has been appearing in the Western media about international economic comparisons regarding China is precisely abandonment of the real world in favour of systematic fake news. This is a shortened version of an article that originally appeared in Chinese at Guancha.cn. About John Ross is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He was formerly director of economic policy for the mayor of London. Republished from Monthly Review Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end. By: Ilan PappeRead NowProfessor Ilan Pappe spoke at IHRC’s annual Genocide Memorial Day in London, UK on 21st January 2024, on the need to understand that the genocide of Palestinians we are currently witnessing, as brutal as it is, is also the demise of the so-called Jewish state. We need to be ready to imagine a new world beyond it. ------ The idea that Zionism is settler colonialism is not new. Palestinian scholars in the 1960s working in Beirut in the PLO Research Centre had already understood that what they were facing in Palestine was not a classical colonial project. They did not frame Israel as just a British colony or an American one, but regarded it as a phenomenon that existed in other parts of the world; defined as settler colonialism. It is interesting that for 20 to 30 years the notion of Zionism as settler colonialism disappeared from the political and academic discourse. It came back when scholars in other parts of the world, notably South Africa, Australia and North America agreed that Zionism is a similar phenomenon to the movement of Europeans who created the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. This idea helps us to understand much better the nature of the Zionist project in Palestine since the late 19th century until today, and it gives us an idea of what to expect in the future. I think this particular idea in the 1990s, that connected so clearly the actions of European settlers especially in places such as North America and Australia, with the actions of the settlers who came to Palestine in the late 19th century elucidated clearly the intentions of the Jewish settlers who colonised Palestine and the nature of the local Palestinian resistance to that colonisation. The settlers followed the most important logic adopted by settler colonial movements and that is that in order to create a successful settler colonial community outside of Europe you have to eliminate the natives in the country you have settled. This means that the indigenous resistance to this logic was a struggle against elimination, and not just liberation. This is important when one thinks about the operation of the Hamas and other Palestinian resistance operations ever since 1948. The settlers themselves as the case of many of the Europeans who came to North America, Central America or Australia, were refugees and victims of persecution. Some of them were less unfortunate and were just seeking better life and opportunities. But most of them were outcasts in Europe and were looking to create a Europe in another place, a new Europe, instead of the Europe that didn’t want them. In most cases, they chose a place where someone else already lived, the indigenous people. And thus the most important core group among them was that of their leaders and ideologues who provided religious and cultural justifications for the colonisation of someone else’s land. One can add to this, the need to rely on an Empire to begin the colonisation and maintain it, even if at the time the settlers rebelled against the empire that helped them and demanded and achieved independence, which in many cases they obtained and then renewed their alliance with empire. The Anglo-Zionist relationship that turned into an Anglo-Israeli alliance is a case in point. The idea that you can remove by force the people of the land that you want, is probably more understandable—not justified—against the backdrop of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries—because it went together with full endorsement for imperialism and colonialism. It was fed by the common dehumanisation of the other non-Western, non-European people. If you dehumanise people you can more easily remove them. What was so unique about Zionism as a settler colonial movement is that it appeared on the international arena at a time where people all around the world had begun to have second thoughts about the rights of removing indigenous people, of eliminating the natives and therefore we can understand the effort and the energy invested by the Zionists and later the state of Israel in trying to cover up the real aim of a settler colonial movement such as Zionism, which was the elimination of the native. But today in Gaza they are eliminating the native population in front of our eyes, so how come they have almost given up 75 years of attempting to hide their eliminatory policies? In order to understand that we have to appreciate the transformation in the nature of Zionism in Palestine over the years. At the early stages of the Zionist settler colonialist project, its leaders carried out their eliminatory policies with a genuine attempt to square the circle by claiming that it was possible to build a democracy and at the same time to eliminate the native population. There was a strong desire to belong to the community of civilised nations and it was assumed by the leaders, in particular after the Holocaust, that the eliminatory policies will not exclude Israel from that association. In order to square this circle, the leadership insisted that their eliminatory actions against the Palestinians were a ‘retaliation’ or ‘response’ against Palestinian actions. But very soon, when this leadership wanted to move into more substantial actions of elimination, they deserted the false pretext of ‘retaliation’ and just stopped justifying what they did. In this respect, there is a correlation between the way the ethnic cleansing in 1948 developed and in the operations of the Israelis in Gaza today. In 1948, the leadership justified to itself every massacre committed, including the infamous massacre of Deir Yassine on 9th April, as the reaction to a Palestinian action: it could have been throwing stones at the bus or attacking a Jewish settlement, but it had to be presented domestically and externally as something that doesn’t come out of the blue, as self-defence. Indeed, that is why the Israeli army is called “Israeli Defence Forces”. But because it is a settler colonial project it cannot rely all the time on ‘retaliation’. The Zionist forces began the ethnic cleansing during the Nakba in February 1948, for a month all these operations were presented as retaliation to the Palestinian opposition to the UN partition plan of November 1947. On 10th March 1948, the Zionist leadership ceased talking about retaliation and adopted a master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. From March 1948 to the end of 1948 the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the expulsion of half of Palestine’s population, the destruction of half of its villages and the de-Arabisation of most of its towns, was done as part of a systematic and intentional master plan of ethnic cleansing. Similarly, after the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967, whenever Israel wanted to change fundamentally the reality or engage in a full scale ethnic cleansing operation, it dispensed with the need of justification. We are witnessing a similar pattern today. At first the actions were presented as retaliation to operation Tufun al-Aqsa, but now it is the war named “sword of war” aiming to return Gaza under direct Israeli control, but ethnically cleansing its people through a campaign of genocide. The big question is why politicians, journalists, and academics in the west fell into the same trap they had fallen into in 1948? How can they still today buy into this idea that Israel is defending itself in the Gaza Strip? That it is reacting to the actions of 7th October? Or maybe they are not falling into the trap. They might know that what Israel is doing in Gaza is using 7th October as a pretext. Either way, so far, the Israelis claim to a pretext every time they assault the Palestinians, has helped the state to sustain the immunity shield that allowed it to pursue its criminal policies without fear of any meaningful reaction from the international community. The pretext helped to accentuate the image of Israel as part of the democratic and western world, and hence beyond any condemnation and sanctions. This whole discourse of defence and retaliation is important for the immunity shield that Israel enjoys from governments in the Global North. But as in 1948, today too, Israel as its operation lingers on, they dispense with the pretext, and this is when even their greatest supports find it difficult to endorse its policies. The magnitude of the destruction, the massive killings in Gaza, the genocide, are on such a level that Israelis find it more and more difficult to persuade even themselves that what they are doing is actually self-defence or reaction. Thus, it is possible that in the future more and more people would find it difficult to accept this Israeli explanation for the genocide in Gaza. For most people it is clear that what is required is a context and not a pretext. Historically and ideologically, it is very clear that 7th October is used as a pretext to complete what the Zionist movement was unable to complete in 1948. In 1948 the settler colonial movement of Zionism used a particular set of historical circumstances that I have written about in detail in my book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in order to expel half of Palestine’s population. As mentioned, in the process they destroyed half of the Palestinian villages, demolished most of the Palestinian towns, and yet half of the Palestinians remained inside Palestine. The Palestinians who became refugees outside the boundaries of Palestine continued the resistance of the Palestinians and therefore the settler colonial ideal of eliminating the native was not fulfilled and incrementally Israel used all its power from 1948 to today to continue with the elimination of the native. The elimination of the native from the beginning to the end includes not just a military operation, by which you would occupy a place, massacre people or expel them. Elimination needs to be justified or become an inertia and the way to do it is constant dehumanization of those you intend to eliminate. You cannot massively kill people or genocide another human being unless you dehumanise them. Thus, dehumanisation of the Palestinians is an explicit and an implicit message conveyed to the Israeli Jews through their educational system, their socialisation system in the army, the media and the political discourse. This message has to be conveyed and maintained if the elimination is to be completed. So we are witnessing a particular cruel new attempt to complete the elimination. And yet, it is not all hopeless. In fact, ironically, this particular inhuman destruction of Gaza exposes the failure of the settler colonial project of Zionism. This may sound absurd, because I’m describing a conflict between a small resistance movement, the Palestinian liberation movement and a powerful state with a military machine and an ideological infrastructure that is focused solely on the destruction of the indigenous people of Palestine people. This liberation movement does not have a strong alliance behind it, while the state it faces, enjoys a powerful alliance behind it—from the United States to multinational corporations, military industry security firms, mainstream media and mainstream academia—we’re talking about something that almost sounds hopeless and depressing because you have this international immunity for the policies of elimination that begin from the early stages of Zionism until today. It will seem probably the worst chapter of the Israeli attempt to push forward eliminatory policies to a new kind of level into a much more concentrated effort of killing thousands of people in a short period of time as they have never dared to do before. So how can it be also a moment of hope? First of all, this kind of a political entity, a state, that has to maintain the dehumanisation of the Palestinians in order to justify their elimination is a very shaky basis if we look into the more distant future. This structural weakness was already apparent before 7th October and part of this weakness is the fact that if you take out the elimination project, there is a very little that unites the group of people who define themselves as the Jewish nation in Israel. If you exclude the need to fight and eliminate the Palestinians, you are left with two warring Jewish camps, which we saw actually fighting on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem up to 6th October 2023. Huge demonstrations between secular Jews, those who describe themselves as secular Jews—mostly of European origin—believing that it’s possible to create a democratic pluralistic state while maintaining the occupation and the apartheid towards the Palestinians inside Israel, were confronting a messianic new kind of Zionism that developed in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, what I called elsewhere the state of Judea, which suddenly appeared in our midst, believing they now have a way of creating a kind of a Zionist theocracy with no consideration for democracy, and believing that this is the only vision for a future Jewish state. There is nothing in common between these two visions apart from one thing: both camps don’t care about the Palestinians, both camps believe that the survival of Israel depends on the continuation of the elimination policies towards the Palestinians. This is not going to hold water. This is going to disintegrate and implode from within because you cannot in the 21st century keep together a state and a society on the basis that their shared sense of belonging is being part of an eliminatory genocidal project. It can work for some definitely, but it cannot work for everyone. We have seen already the indication for that before 7th October, how Israelis who have opportunities in other parts of the world due to their dual nationality, professions and their financial abilities, are thinking seriously of relocating both their money and themselves outside of the state of Israel. What you will be left with is a society that is economically weak, that is led by this kind of fusion of messianic Zionism with racism and eliminatory policies towards the Palestinians. Yes, the balance of power at first would be on the side of the elimination, not with the victims of the elimination, but the balance of power is not just local, the balance of power is regional and international, and the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future. So, I really think that at this very dark moment what we are experiencing—and it is a dark moment because the elimination of the Palestinians has moved to a new level, is unprecedented. In terms of the discourse employed by Israel, and the intensity and the purpose of the eliminatory policies—there wasn’t such a period in history, this is a new phase of the brutality against the Palestinians. Even the Nakba, which was an unimaginable catastrophe does not compare to what we are seeing now and what we are going to see in the next few months. We are in my mind in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians. But even in this dark moment we should understand that settler colonial projects that disintegrate are always using the worst kind of means to try and save their project. This happened in South Africa and South Vietnam. I am not saying this as a wishful thinking, and I am not saying this as a political activist: I am saying this as a scholar of Israel and Palestine with all the confidence of my scholarly qualifications. On the basis of sober professional examination, I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it. This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end—such projects usually collapse violently and thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project, and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel. Collapse like this however produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void, was not filled by any constructive and alternative project; in such a case the chaos continues. One thing is clear, whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look for Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future. These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole. Author Ilan Pappé is Professor of History and Director for the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He is author of numerous books, the most recent being The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine (Oneworld, 2015), The Idea of Israel (Verso, 2014) and The Modern Middle East; A Social and Cultural History (Routledge, 2014) Originally published: Islamic Human Rights Commission Archives February 2024 The dawn of the twentieth century saw the rise of modern, planned national economies around the world. In many of these cases, planned economies often were coupled with state ownership of production. China, especially due to becoming a Marxist-Leninist state in 1949, is no exception to this trend. It is commonly misconceived by both leftists and rightists that the People’s Republic of China has ceased to plan its economy; that the government has relinquished its obligations of maintaining state control, the private sector and “adopted capitalism”. When it comes to analyzing how state ownership operates within the People’s Republic of China, the information that is available on the Western internet tends to be sparse and vague. Many sources do not give specific evidence of how State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) function, nor do they elaborate just how widely proliferated SOEs are, formally or otherwise. This article is designed to clarify the way SOEs and their subsidiaries function and interact with China’s domestic economy today. Formal State Ownership “State-owned enterprises are an important material and political foundation for socialism with Chinese characteristics, and an important pillar and reliance for the party to govern and rejuvenate the country.” — Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China It is a well-established fact within Chinese political discourse that state-owned enterprises are an ever-present fact of the Chinese economy that won’t simply just “vanish” overnight or “erode” over time. In fact, since Reform and Opening Up, while the overall quantity of state-owned enterprises has gone down, the overall quality has increased. Rather than going on the path of root-and-branch privatization, the government has instead sought to make the numerous state-owned enterprises that still remain as efficient and competitive as possible. As a result, the top 150 SOEs, far from being inefficient, have instead become enormously profitable, the aggregate total of their profits reaching $150 billion in 2007. Unlike in the West or Western-aligned states, where privately owned firms overwhelmingly predominate, most of China’s best-performing companies are to be found in the state sector. [1] Contrary to popular belief regarding “Communism”, profit and to make a return on one’s investment is not contradictory to the way state-controlled firms should be run. In fact, it would be damaging if these firms were run in a way where they were actively making a loss or were wasting resources. Contribution to GDP and Scale of Assets In 2011, it was found that roughly 50% of non-agricultural GDP was generated by SOEs. Similarly, in regard to economic industries/sectors in which SOEs play a dominant or majority role, those include defense, electric power, petroleum and petrochemicals, telecommunications, coal, civil aviation, and shipping; as well as equipment manufacturing, automobiles, information technology, construction, iron and steel, nonferrous metals and chemicals. [2] In 2017, that number stood at 63.6%, where China’s GDP was RMB ¥82 trillion, of which non-financial SOEs count for RMB ¥52.2 trillion [3]. In 2021, SOEs accounted for around 66% of China’s GDP [4]. So, even formally speaking, in terms of overall contribution to GDP, SOEs have played a significant amount, rising over the past 10 years from 50% to 66%, rising approximately 1.6% to their contribution to GDP per year. In 2023, that number climbed to 68% of China’s GDP: China’s GDP was RMB ¥126 trillion, of which non-financial SOEs accounted for RMB ¥85.7 trillion. [ From 2002-2011, the value of SOE assets as a percentage of GDP started at roughly 550% before declining to a rate of roughly to 430% by 2008, its lowest point, before reaching a plateau of around 450% since 2009. Note, when Western analysts measure state-owned enterprises, they tend to only factor in what is directly translated as 国有企业, which is formally classified as a non-financial state-owned enterprise. Typically, when comparisons are made from Western studies or articles, they only focus on “SOEs” but neglect the two other formal “SOE categories” which are financial SOEs (国有金融/中央金融企业) and administrative SOE assets (行政事业性国有资产). This is why estimations for “SOE value” may be lost in translations and only partially accurate results can be extrapolated. For the following two sources, one produced by the IMF and the other produced by WSJ, the operative Chinese “SOEs” will be referred to as non-financial SOEs for clarification. Non-Chinese SOEs elsewhere in the world don’t follow these three distinctions. In 2018, a study from the IMF found that Non-financial SOEs assets for China as a % of GDP amounted to 180% of GDP. While in 2015, Italy, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Norway’s SOEs did not rise above 50% [6]. According to WSJ, the value of French SOE assets in 2008 as a % of GDP amounted to 686 billion USD, which is 28% of GDP. In the same year, Chinese Non-financial SOEs were 6 trillion USD, or 133% of GDP [7]. In 2010, 94% of all assets held by the top 150 companies were controlled by the state, which represented 41.2% of all corporate assets in China, out of the total of roughly 5 million registered companies [8]. In 2012, the total assets held by the State sector in China amounted to 55.78% or 53% depending on the estimate used [9]. However, in comparison with European nations during the same year (elaborated by the figure below), the total assets of Eastern European nations (largely former Eastern Bloc) held by the state sector were around 13%. For the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and Portugal, it was around 4.60%. For Ireland and the UK, even less than that number. For Austria and Germany, around 10.79%. For Scandinavia, it was 6.02%. [10] In 2022, the total value of SOE assets as a percentage of GDP amounted to 608%, of which ¥109.4 trillion or 90.4% of GDP was held by all 97 Central State Owned Enterprises (CSOEs), controlled directly by the SASAC (more on that later). And non-financial SOEs held 339.5 trillion, which accounts for 280.5% of GDP [11]. In comparison to the largest 500 private enterprises in the same year, their amassed assets held ¥41.64 trillion RMB, of which represents only 34.4% of GDP, which is dwarfed by the amount held by the 97 CSOEs [12]. In regard to share of total assets, SOEs own 60% of China's total assets as of 2021 [13]. Note, RMB (Renminbi) is more commonly known as Chinese Yuan (¥). Second note, a CSOE is an SOE directly controlled by the Central Government. In 2019 there were 3,777 listed companies on the public stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen, of which you need an operating income of ¥100 million RMB per year to even be available for listing, cumulative over the course of 3 years. Out of total assets, SOEs held 98% in the Telecommunications sector, 95% in the airline sector, 94% in the infrastructure sector and more than 93% in the utilities and energy sector. In the industry sector 74%, in the materials sector, more than 63% and in automobiles, more than 62%. [14] In 2023, out of a total of 4,763 listed companies, of which 1,300 are formally classified as SOEs. They make up 27% of the total enterprises, but capture 69% of the market revenue and 77% of the total profits. Most leading listed companies across key industries, including but not limited to banks, insurance, brokerage, oil & gas, chemicals, coal, power, telecom, construction, Chinese medicine and liquor, are all SOEs. [15] Furthermore, the amount of private involvement is exaggerated. As of the end of 2017, there are only 17 private-owned banks among 4,532 financial institutions classified as the banking industry. The number of people employed by these 17 private-owned banks only accounts for 0.1% of all banking staff. For example, in 1997, POEs (Privately Owned Enterprises) in the industrial sector accounted for only 6.5% by number, and this figure has increased to 57.7% in 2017. However in 2000, POEs in the industrial sector accounted for only 3.1% by the size of assets, and this figure peaked at around 22% in 2013, stagnating to a slight decline by 2017 of 21.6%. [16] Examples of Dominant SOEs Now that the persistence of SOEs in the modern Chinese economy has been established via statistical evidence, I want to provide some empirical evidence, some examples that could be used or shared in future for reference. Circling back to the point about “key sectors” of which SOEs must dominate, below are a few examples of the following SOEs that dominate their respective key sectors. The power-generating industry in China is dominated by five SOE power-generating company groups: China Huaneng Power Group, China Datang Corporation, China Huadian Corporation, China Guodian Corporation, and China Power Investment Corporation. And the public utilities sector is dominated by the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) and China Southern Power Grid Corporation [17]. The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three SOE telecommunications carriers: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile [18]. China’s Three Gorges Dam - one of the largest dams in the world - is run by the “Three Gorges Dam Corporation”, a state-owned enterprise (SOE). Its subsidiaries include utilities companies such as China Yangtze Power, further illustrating state management of the economy. [Image Courtesy: China Daily] The petrochemicals industry is dominated by five SOE company groups: China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec, Sinochem, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Shandong Energy [19]. And the natural gas industry is dominated by five SOEs as well, Sinopec, CNPC, CNOOC, Beijing Enterprises Group and Shenenergy Group [20]. China Baowu Steel Group Corporation, produces 80% of the auto-sheet metal for use in automobiles, major appliances, airplane fuselages and wings, architecture, and others and 60% of the silicon steel which are used in generators, motors, and transformers. Baowu steel remains to be a global leader in both categories as of 2022 [21]. The world’s largest producer of rolling stock and locomotives is under one company, the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation — which is a CSOE — has 90% of the market share for train production [22]. The largest ship producer domestically and worldwide and sole ship producer in China, the Chinese State Shipbuilding Corporation produces 48% of all ships in the world [23].a You have China Minmetals, which has 90% of the domestic metallurgical market share [24]. They also hold 90% of the contract value for domestic metallurgical engineering and construction, which is the construction of industrial metal production engineering machines and items [25]. These are just a few of the prominent examples of the large and dominant SOEs that permeate through China’s domestic market. The more upstream an economic sector is, the more state ownership it will have. This is the general rule of thumb for the state involvement within the domestic economy. The Shareholder System The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) is an institution directly under the management of the State Council. It is an ad-hoc ministerial-level organization directly subordinated to the State Council. The Party Committee of SASAC performs the responsibilities mandated by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. [26] The way ownership is substantiated or demonstrated is through stock ownership. The SASAC owns 100% of the stock of a total of 98 CSOEs. There is a common misconception that companies must be 50% or more, or somehow totally state owned to be in function “state owned” or operate according to party directives. On paper, SOE employment rates and output rates are formally lower than the non-state sector, yet they continue to persist and play a dominant role in the economy. How is this possible? Through the shareholder system. One way the CPC maintains functional control over multiple enterprises is through a diverse shareholder system, where one CSOE directly or indirectly controls 100s or 200 enterprises via their own subsidiary system. Lenin notes in his book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism of precisely this phenomenon, although inverted as it is now the state who is the “shareholder”, while he was analyzing the bourgeoisie who were shareholders. The head of the concern controls the principal company (literally: the “mother company”); the latter reigns over the subsidiary companies (“daughter companies”) which in their turn control still other subsidiaries (“grandchild companies”), etc. In this way, it is possible with a comparatively small capital to dominate immense spheres of production. Indeed, if holding 50 per cent of the capital is always sufficient to control a company, the head of the concern needs only one million to control eight million in the second subsidiaries. And if this ‘interlocking’ is extended, it is possible with one million to control sixteen million, thirty-two million, etc… As a matter of fact, experience shows that it is sufficient to own 40 percent of the shares of a company in order to direct its affairs, since in practice a certain number of small, scattered shareholders find it impossible to attend general meetings, etc. The “democratization” of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called “Social-Democrats” expect (or say that they expect) the “democratization of capital,” the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.” [27] Lenin understood that it was entirely possible for the shareholding system to “increase the power” of the financial oligarchy. But what if, instead of a financial oligarchy sitting at the top of the pillar, it is the Communist Party? Or more specifically, the SASAC. Lenin notes in the above quote that owning merely 40% of the shares of a single company is sufficient to direct its affairs. And how “Mother companies” reign supreme over “Daughter companies” and indirectly control “grandchildren” companies. Therefore, it is entirely possible for “1 million to rule over 32 million”. And this is precisely how the SOEs obfuscate their formal state ownership within the Chinese economy while still maintaining de facto control and influence. This phenomenon is noted by Derrick Scissors, who is a former Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. In 2007, he found that while 100% of state ownership may be “diluted” by division of ownership into different shareholders, of which are non-state, the majority of ownership/controlling shareholder largely trended towards state ownership. This is despite the fact that they might formally be considered non-state owned or sometimes foreign media may even label them private. He says that however, this phenomenon does nothing to change state control. Despite them being listed on foreign stock exchanges, the ultimate control rights remain in the hands of the state. [28] No matter their shareholding structure, all national corporations in the sectors that make up the core of the Chinese economy are required by law to be owned or controlled by the state. These sectors include power generation and distribution; oil, coal, petrochemicals, and natural gas; telecommunications; armaments; Aviation and shipping; machinery and automobile production; information technologies; construction; and the production of iron, steel, and nonferrous metals. The railroads, grain distribution, and insurance are also dominated by the state, even if no official edict says so. [28] The same is noted by Margaret Pearson who argues that despite the issuing of stocks, these stock issuances are not used for the purpose of wholesale “denationalization” or “privatization” of enterprises, but the intended goal is to rather upgrade and enhance the value of corporate state-owned assets. Even though some firms may have been listed on the stock market, their parent firms or “Mother firms” control rights firmly remain in the hands of the state. [29] Stephen Green, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs continues to corroborate the claim, making the statement that the way stocks are issued is not for the sake of denationalization of industries, but to support and subsidize SOE restructuring and to prevent private companies from raising capital. [30] A research study in 2009 concluded that the “privatization” campaign of China drastically differs from the ones conducted in Eastern Europe, that the sale of shares do not fundamentally alter state control. And that in fact, there has been no meaningful transfer of state control over to private hands. The majority of companies in China have around 66% of their shares being held in state hands. Even if shares can be traded/floated on the market, for the most part, shares will still indefinitely be maintained by state actors. [31] In 2014, another study found that China’s domestic market is entirely state dominated. The central government plays every role from issuer, to underwriter, to regulator, to controlling investor and manager of the exchanges. Efforts to simplify domestic arrangements have served only to conceal the fact that the state in its many guises still owns nearly two-thirds of domestically listed company shares. The combination of state monopolies with “Wall Street expertise” and international capital has led to the creation of national companies that represent little more than the incorporation of China's old Soviet-style industrial ministries. [32] A 2017 research paper finds that the state appointed nomenklatura working within these large “mother” companies are responsive primarily to the directives of the state instead of minority shareholders within their “daughter” or “granddaughter” firms. The core holding company is the one that coordinates business activity of the “daughter” and “granddaughters”, and these core holding companies are always dominated by state ownership. These business activities are committed in the interest, above all, of state industrial policy, and certainly with a preference for such national policy over what might be in the interest of shareholder wealth maximization for the nongroup, minority shareholders invested in the individual legal person subsidiaries often through the public capital markets. [33] From 1990 to 2003, it was found that only around 7% of all listed firms could truly be considered “private”. These companies are allowed to have access to private revenue, but their control rights are strongly within the hands of the state and should therefore be considered state firms. Even though many of these firms are not formally listed as SOEs, they are rather considered to be either joint-venture or shareholding firms instead. [34] LLCs/Shareholding Firms Widespread “privatizations” of small SOEs reduced the total number of SOEs from 250,000 in 1995, to 127,000 in 2005. It is naïve to view the state as simply having divested itself from ownership of the state sector. Virtually all of the figures that scholars and the popular press have picked as evidence of the declining role of the state, relates to the decline in state shares but ignores the rise of institutional shares. [35] The transformation of SOEs into share-holding firms took several forms: shareholding cooperatives, jointly owned enterprises, limited liability corporations and limited shareholding corporations. These firms held over 50% of capital assets and generated 35% of national sales. They replaced SOEs as the dominant public sector employers in the interior of the country. These hybrid forms were supposed to operate under hard budget constraints. [35] The introduction of stock markets in China appeared to be a capitulation towards “capitalism”. However, in July 2015, a crisis in the stock market revealed the inner contradictions between market pressures and state control as it exposed peculiar features of China's markets. Formally, all the institutions, organizations, administrative and legislative forms that are required to replicate Western stock markets exist. However, all aspects of the capital markets remain owned by some agency of the state. As a consequence, when share prices began to collapse in July 2015, state banks were told to lend US $209bn to the wholly state-owned China's 89 Securities Finance Corp in order to buy stocks. Market volatility was thereby contained by massive state intervention. This means that the fate of listed companies are ultimately determined by budget constraints which are set by the Central Government. [35] The widespread underestimation of the influence of state ownership in the economy is not simply a question of misidentifying concealed public ownership relations, but also of understanding the ‘dynamics of control’ exercised by organs of the party and state. [36] There is a consistent problem when attempting to identify firms as “state owned”. Many times, functionally state owned firms are listed as “foreign-held” simply because 30% of its shares are owned by a foreign entity, despite the control rights being operated by the state. [37] For example, the joint ventures of the Shanghai local government with GM and Volkswagen (Shanghai-GM and Shanghai-VW) are registered as foreign companies, despite the fact that the Shanghai local government holds 50% of each company (Of which is the largest share in the case of Shanghai-VW). [37] This can also happen when the company is owned by a holding company registered outside of mainland China. For example, Lenovo and CNOOC (a state-owned oil company) are owned by holding companies registered in Hong Kong and, thus, legally registered as foreign owned in China. Despite the control rights firmly being managed by state hands. [37] Second, many state-owned companies, particularly after 1998, are registered as limited-liability or publicly traded companies, despite the controlling stake held by a state-controlled holding company. The Baoshan steel company and Shanghais SAIC Group’s stand-alone car company (SAIC) discussed earlier are examples of publicly listed companies and, thus, registered as share-holding companies but with a controlling stake held by a holding company owned by the Chinese state. [37] 66% of all firms are directly or indirectly owned by the SASAC. In 2012, the number of “underreported” state firms ran at 50%, of which were being registered as private firms. Meaning that the formal state share of the economy is actually 50% larger. Note, state ownership being defined here as 50% or more of a firm being owned by the state. [37] We can extrapolate that number and apply it to asset ownership in 2012, of which 53% of all assets in China were held by the State Sector. Let’s again assume that the state having at least 50% ownership makes a company state-owned. 50% of 53 is 26.5, meaning that in 2012, if we include the "underreported" sector of the state, this means that the total state ownership of assets in 2012 actually amounts to 79.5%. Examples of the Shareholder/LLC system at work An example of how this works in function will be demonstrated using the example of the company known as Sinopec: a petrochemicals company owned directly by the SASAC and is one of the largest if not the largest petrochemicals company in the world. Sinopec has a monopoly on all downstream hydrocarbons businesses in China. [33] A sinopec core company which is 100% wholly owned by the SASAC is the center of the Sinopec group. A majority-controlled subsidiary, department, or affiliated entity would function as a dedicated "finance holding company" necessary for the allocation of funds and finance to and among operations and entities included in the Sinopec Group. Sinopec Group Holding Company - explicitly permitted in its business license to invest in other entities - in turn owns a vast number of only Sinopec business-related subsidiaries, each with a business scope allowing it to operate in a defined sector within the group's larger monopoly or defined geographical areas. A majority-controlled subsidiary, department, or affiliated entity would function as a dedicated "finance holding company" necessary for the allocation of funds and finance to and among operations and entities included in the Sinopec Group. Sinopec Group Holding Company, explicitly permitted in its business license to invest in other entities, in turn owns a vast number of only Sinopec business-related subsidiaries, each with a business scope allowing it to operate in a defined sector within the group's larger monopoly or defined geographical areas. Those subsidiaries will always show majority equity ownership in the hands of the Sinopec Group Holding Company or one of its controlled subsidiaries, but they can be financed directly by bank loans, minority non-public investment, or the public shareholder markets, domestic or foreign. This Sinopec Group can seek to reorganize a traditional SOE grouping of productive and social assets conducting a petrochemicals business, like in the Shanghai suburbs of Jinshan District into a Sinopec Group Holding Company-controlled company called "Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited," which could complete an initial public offering on the PRC domestic or foreign shareholder markets. After the IPO, issuer Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited would still be dominated absolutely by the core holding company (which is the Party-State Ran State-Owned Enterprise of Sinopec) via an 80 percent equity stake and its power to appoint all directors and officers of the listed subsidiary. This is how Sinopec controls over hundreds of its own subsidiaries even though a lot of them aren’t formally “owned” or listed as SOEs according to official Chinese statistics. An example of how a “foreign listed” company is actually state owned would be the SMIC, otherwise known as the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. The only reason it is considered “foreign listed/foreign owned” is because 58% of its shares are listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. 14.11% of its shares are held by Datang HK which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Datang Holdings, which in turn is wholly-owned by CICT which is a central state owned enterprises. [38] CICT itself directly holds an additional 0.92% of the total shares, bringing the total amount to 15.03%. 7.80% of shares are held by Xinxin HK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xunxin (Shanghai) Investment Co., Ltd., which in turn is wholly-owned by China IC Fund which is a state owned investment fund. An additional 1.61% is held directly by the IC fund. 0.46% is held by Guoxin investment which is a state owned fund. 0.50% is held by a subsidiary of the China construction bank which is a state owned bank. Finally, another 0.43% is held by a subsidiary of the Chinese merchant bank which is a state owned bank as well. The total amount of state ownership amounts to 25.83% [39]. The HKSCC share refers to just shares/stock listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, which does not accurately reflect controlling shares. These shares can be bought by anyone who has access to the Hong Kong stock market. The majority shareholder and the largest shareholders are all state owned enterprises, which are either directly or indirectly connected to the central government with varying layers of connection. Even though the SMIC is not “formally state owned” it is functionally state owned. Another even simpler example would be the Mcdonald's China franchise, even though on paper it is a foreign enterprise, bearing the company name/franchise name of “Mcdonald”. The controlling shareholder is a SOE known as CITIC, which holds 52% of the total shares. Making Mcdonalds in China functionally state owned despite being formally a foreign owned company. [40] Finally, the last example demonstrates how an LLC can still functionally be a state-owned company even though the formal designation is of a “limited liability company”. Sichuan Changhong Electric is China’s largest television producer and the sole producer of batteries for the Chengdu J-10 “Vigorous Dragon”, a multirole combat aircraft. Even their official shareholders report states the following: Sichuan Changhong Electronic Co., Limited (“Sichuan Changhong”), a company incorporated in the PRC with its shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, has obtained the control over the board of directors of the Company since 2012. Sichuan Changhong Electronics Holding Group Co., Ltd., (“Sichuan Changhong Holding”, a company established in the PRC and wholly-owned by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the Mianyang city government and one of the Controlling Shareholders) is the single largest shareholder of Sichuan Changhong, which held approximately 23.22% of the entire issued share capital of Sichuan Changhong and has de facto control over the composition of the majority of the board of Sichuan Changhong. [41] Below is a chart that goes over the overall ownership structure that makes it easier to visualize. Conclusion In conclusion, “formal” SOE ownership is deliberately obfuscated and downplayed by Western media despite the large impactful role it continues to play within the Chinese domestic economy. Similarly, “informal” SOE ownership via LLCs, shareholding companies and joint-ventures with foreign enterprises have caused them to be counted as “non-SOEs” despite functionally acting upon state directives. SOEs continue to persist within China’s economy and continue to actively grow in size, scale and scope of economic activities. References Formal State Ownership[1] Jacques, Martin. 2012. When China Rules the World. p. 184. Contribution to GDP and Scale of Assets[2] Szamosszegi, Andrew, and Cole Kyle. 2011. An Analysis of State-Owned Enterprises and State Capitalism in China. p. 1. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/10_26_11_CapitalTradeSOEStudy.pdf. [3] Latest Lessons in Bankruptcy of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in China: An interactive structural approach model (ISM) approach. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/2022/1109442/. [4] State-Owned Enterprises’ Responses to China’s Carbon Neutrality Goals and Implications for Foreign Investors. https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2023/02/15/state-owned-enterprises-responses-to-chinas-carbon-neutrality-goals-and-implications-for-foreign-investors/. [42] Economic performance of state-owned and state-holding enterprises nationwide from January to December 2023, Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China. https://zcgls.mof.gov.cn/qiyeyunxingdongtai/202401/t20240129_3927581.htm. [5] Rise of the ‘shareholding state’: financialization of economic management in China | Socio-Economic Review | Oxford Academic. https://academic.oup.com/ser/article-abstract/13/3/603/1670234. [6] People’s Republic of China: Selected Issues, Volume 2021, Issue 012, IMF. https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2021/012/article-A002-en.xml. [7] China's 'State Capitalism' Sparks a Global Backlash, WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703514904575602731006315198. [8] Khoo, Heiko. 2018. Is China still socialist? A Marxist critique of János Kornai’s analysis of China. p. 85-89. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [9] Pei, Changhong, Chunxue Yang, and Xinming Yang. 2019. The Basic Economic System of China. p. 24-25. [10] State-Owned Enterprises Across Europe: Stylized Facts from a Large Firm-Level Dataset. p. 17. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [11] Comprehensive report of the State Council on the management of state-owned assets in 2022. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nvBGqtx7MuPB8RTC9XT6jA. [12] The top 500 Chinese private enterprises in 2022 released a total operating income of 38.32 trillion yuan. https://www.xinhuanet.com/energy/20220907/79f0e58b387f4e7c903a51be2a8fc3b6/c.html. [13] SOE reforms key to smooth recovery, ChinaDaily. https://archive.ph/44ZmP#selection-403.68-403.79. [14] García-Herrero, Alicia, and Gary Ng. 2021. China’s State-Owned Enterprises and Competitive Neutrality. p. 10. https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PC-05-2021.pdf. [15] China SOEs – the journey to extract values from their re-rating and revaluation trajectory from Premia Partners. https://archive.ph/mMjIq#selection-233.0-236.0. [16] Liu, Kerry. 2021. The Rise and Fall of China’s Private Sector: Determinants and Policy Implications. p. 8. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3921568. Examples of Dominant SOEs[17] Lewis, Joanna I. 2023. Cooperating for the Climate: Learning from International Partnerships in China's Clean Energy Sector. MIT Press. p. 44. [18] Telecommunications industry in China, Statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/6577/telecommunications-industry-in-china/#topicOverview. [19] The 5 Biggest Chinese Oil Companies, Investopedia. https://archive.ph/3POHm#selection-2275.1-2275.36. [20] Top 5 Chinese Natural Gas Companies, Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/090315/5-biggest-chinese-natural-gas-companies.asp. [21] China Baowu Steel Group Corporation Limited, FitchRatings. https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/china-baowu-steel-group-corporation-limited-09-03-2022. [22] Chinese rolling stock manufacturers merge to form CRRC Corp, Railway Gazette International. https://www.railwaygazette.com/business/chinese-rolling-stock-manufacturers-merge-to-form-crrc-corp/40956.article. [23] China becoming world’s go-to for shipbuilding after ‘boom of overseas orders’, but global de-risking threatens to rock the boat, South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3225973/china-becoming-worlds-go-shipbuilding-after-boom-overseas-orders-global-de-risking-threatens-rock. [24] Minmetals Holding Corporation, Publication of Offering Circular. p. 14. https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2021/0421/2021042100263.pdf. [25] China Minmetals Corporation, FitchRatings. https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/china-minmetals-corporation-16-08-2021. The Shareholder System[26] About Us, SASAC. http://en.sasac.gov.cn/aboutus.html [27] Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “III. Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy.” In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm. [28] Liberalization in Reverse, Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/commentary/liberalization-reverse. [29] Pearson, Margaret. 2005. “The Business of Governing Business in China: Institutions and Norms of the Emerging Regulatory State.” p. 304. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25054295. [30] Non-performing, The Economist. https://archive.ph/B5kSb#selection-863.68-863.133. [31] Yeung, Horace. 2009. “Non-Tradable Share Reform in China: Marching towards the Berle and Means Corporation?” https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1156&context=clpe. [32] Walter, Carl. 2014. “Was Deng Xiaoping Right? An Overview of China's Equity Markets.” p. 18. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jacf.12075. [33] Hawson, Nicholas. 2017. “China’s ‘Corporatization without Privatization’ and the Late 19th Century Roots of a Stubborn Path Dependency”. p. 11. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3021&context=articles. [34] Brandt, Loren, and Thomas G Rawski. 2011. China’s Great Economic Transformation. Cambridge University Press. p. 355. LLCs/Shareholding Firms[35] Khoo, Heiko. 2018. Is China still socialist? A Marxist critique of János Kornai’s analysis of China. p. 89-90. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [36] Szamosszegi, Andrew, and Cole Kyle. 2011. An Analysis of State-Owned Enterprises and State Capitalism in China. p. 25. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/10_26_11_CapitalTradeSOEStudy.pdf. [37] Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Zheng Song. 2015. “Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small: The Transformation of the State Sector in China.” p. 7-8. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_hsieh.pdf. Examples of the Shareholder/LLC system at work[38] “CICT”, China Govt Services. https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/201812/05/WS5c07928c498eefb3fe46e304/china-information-and-communication-technologies-group-corporation-cict.html. [39] SMIC, “Announcement of 2022 annual results”. p. 96. https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2023/0328/2023032801249.pdf. [40] CNN, McDonald’s is investing more in China to tap ‘tremendous opportunity’. https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/business/mcdonalds-china-stake-prospects/index.html#:~:text=The%20deal%20to%20acquire%20investment,ownership%20with%20a%2052%25%20stake. [41] Changhong Jiahua Holdings Limited, Annual Report 2020. p. 69 https://ir.changhongit.com/pub/resource/application/2021042001499.pdf. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 Herbert Matthews’ great interview, sixty-six years later. By: Guillermo Suárez BorgesRead NowI never did another story that gave me more professional satisfaction… I only take credit for having correctly interpreted what I saw and heard, for having realized that the extraordinary young man who opened his heart to me in whispers, for three hours, would be the one around whom the hopes and passions of Cuba would be concentrated, for a tide of victory. Herbert Matthews interviewing Fidel in the Sierras. This is how Herbert Matthews, the distinguished American journalist and editorialist who arrived in February 1957 at Epifanio Díaz’s farm, in the vicinity of the Sierra Maestra, to meet with Fidel, responded to his critics. Days before, the guerrilla leader had instructed the guerrilla to obtain an impact interview with a respected correspondent outside Cuba, but the unexpected betrayal of Eutimio Guerra left Fidel in such a compromised security situation that the visting journalist also was in real danger. “Without the press, Fidel Castro would be no more than an outlaw… isolated and ineffective,” said Matthews, who, as a profound connoisseur of Cuban and Latin American affairs, suspected that behind the iron censorship ordered by Batista in Cuba, there was a well-kept secret that was waiting to be told. In Refugio 106, the former offices of The New York Times in Havana, the possibility of the famous U.S. newspaper obtaining the exclusive of the moment was discussed for the first time: “Fidel is alive”. Ruby Hart Phillips, the paper’s snooty correspondent in Cuba, would professionally keep the secret. The arrival of Herbert and his wife Nancie hours later in the Cuban capital ratified the willingness of the newspaper’s editors to run the tremendous risk of going into the eastern mountains in search of that news. Everyone expected Matthews to reveal the name of the young journalist who would undertake the risky assignment, but they were surprised when he smilingly said: I will go up there myself. A well-oiled network of collaborators of the July 26th movement throughout the Island would be in charge of taking him to Fidel. The days would be hard for him and Nancie, undercover as American tourists interested in investing in the eastern zone. Many years later a specialist in Psychological Operations of the U.S. Army Southern Command would write: The propaganda and political warfare of the Cuban Revolution, when examined in its original context, illustrate a well-planned and executed psychological operation that influenced numerous audiences and led to behavioral changes that ended up helping Fidel Castro take power, while commanding a numerically and technologically inferior force. All kinds of reactions were generated by that front page of The New York Times’ Sunday paper on February 24, 1957. In the Presidential Palace they wondered how Matthews, now close to 60 years of age and under the prescription of his cardiologist, had managed to withstand the rigors of that journey and overcome the postures of the Batista troops in the Sierra, trained and armed by the United States. Edmund Chester, an American, former journalist of the Associated Press and CBS television, then hired as Batista’s press secretary and advisor for his speeches, superficially concluded that it was a trick of his experienced “colleague” and recommended the regrettable denial in the pen of the then Secretary of Defense, Santiago Verdeja, published by Bohemia Magazine. At Calzada 55, the advisors of Arthur Gardner, U.S. ambassador in Havana and a fraternal friend of Batista, refused to admit that they had not heard anything. Gardner’s fury would be such that, already replaced and disqualified, he would devote much energy to ruin Matthews’ professional career. Despite censorship and threats here and there, the three articles resulting from Matthews’ interview with Fidel spread like wildfire. The major U.S. newspapers ran versions of the interview, the nascent television reported it exclusively and an army of journalists began to plan their next trip to the Sierra Maestra. From that moment until November 25, 2016, the media in the U.S. did not stop monitoring Fidel’s trajectory. They followed him at every step. His meeting with Herbert Matthews would be but the first of many memorable exchanges with the main U.S. opinion leaders, whom he turned, without telling them, into the people who would explain the Revolution to the audience of the irate adversary. As the Revolution concretized the Moncada program, Cuba’s enemies attacked Matthews mercilessly, holding him responsible for the new destinies of the island and even undeservedly claiming that he “invented Fidel”. The unrepeatable Ernest Hemingway, his friend since the dark nights of fire and death shared during the Spanish Civil War, would write: Herbert Matthews is the most severe, the most capable and the bravest of today’s war correspondents, he has seen the truth where it has been most dangerous to see it… he stands today as a giant beacon of honesty… Author Guillermo Suárez Borges is a researcher with the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba. Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World Archives February 2024 To say that I was awed is an understatement. Standing in front of Picasso’s 11.5 ft. x 25.5 ft. celebrated painting Guernica is one of the most sobering encounters I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing. Displeasure because the massive composition’s theme is revoltingly gruesome. Since that dastardly first-of-its-kind-waging-of-wars, nations have not learned to abide by and practice peaceful and harmonious existence. World War 2 was followed by wars in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Near East/Palestine (8 wars), Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza, to name but a few. And in each of these wars massive bombings and aerial bombardment have been the weapon of choice, resulting in the death of millions of human beings. Aerial bombardment is brutal, heinous, and vicious. Aerial bombardment is the cowardly weapon of arrogant, fascistic, hegemonic, and egotistical maniacs. Aerial bombardment is the screen behind which powerful thugs hide to absolve themselves of crimes against humanity. Aerial wars’ indiscriminate annihilation of mostly innocent civilians, reducing them to paupers and beggars, goes against every decent norm. For well over 35 years I’d been showing Guernica to my students, expounding on the painting’s blending of a heinously ghoulish theme executed in the cubist style on a-never-seen-before massive scale. One of the world’s most prominent museums, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia, is finally home to this one-of-a-kind artistic expression bearing witness to ghastly human depravity. On my last visit to Spain some 12 years back, I spent well over an hour studying Picasso’s ingenious blending of form and theme in monochromatic colors. Standing in front of the composition, I viewed it from every angle, and I relived years of lecture terms, phrases, descriptions, questions, answers, student responses/opinions, and so much more. On April 27, 1937, mostly German and Italian warplanes conducted the first large-scale aerial bombardment on the town of Guernica. Nestled in northern Spain and with the complicity of Franscico Franco, Spain’s Fascist dictator, the Germans wanted to test their newly fabricated war machinery – the Nazi Luftwaffe’s planes and their newly designed bombs – produced solely for destruction on a massive scale. Because of its remoteness, Guernica was chosen as the perfect out-of-sight out-of-mind target. Like today’s Gaza, Guernica was reduced to massive rubble shrouding innocent civilians whose flesh, blood, bones, and sinews cloaked the bleak landscape of rubble, rebar, and crater-size pocked apocalyptic destruction where once high-rise structures, streets, and alleyways existed. And hospitals, ambulances, mosques, churches, and schools are being targeted – deliberately and mercilessly. In response to this nightmarish bombing, Picasso isolated himself in his studio for a lengthy time and vented his fury by working long hours and in isolation on what is perhaps the world’s foremost artistic political statement. Here is what I see today in Picassos’ composition: to the far right is a Gaza woman holding her arms to high heaven; she is screaming, pleading, imploring the gods for deliverance. At the top is a light, accompanied by a hand holding a lamp as though to shed light on the unfolding carnage. Call this the 90 plus journalists killed by Israeli snipers and drones so as to draw a curtain on what God’s chosen are doing in Gaza, today’s “graveyard of children.” In addition to its military strength, Israel is adept at conducting its carnage under the cover of dark. And its powerful choking of US media is adept at portraying it as the victim. To the top left Netanyahu and Co., along with Biden and Co., prance bullishly over the devastation as they squash the emaciated mother holding on to her dead infant. How many white shrouds have to be buried to appease the Hebraic God of revenge? And how many corpses have to be pulled out, with bare hands, from under the rubble? And how many tattered remains have to be placed in makeshift bags? Careful scrutiny of the foreground depicts newsprint, Picasso’s manner of telling the world “I am Guernica: Remember Me, Remember What Heinous Crimes You’ve committed.” And the crushed supine figure holding onto a broken weapon represents trampled, crushed justice under the weight of brute force. It is worth noting that while Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and scores of mostly European artists have produced a massive volume of compositions under the title Massacre of the Innocents, a theme associated with Herod (the Not so Great), King of Judea, and around the time of Christ’s birth, Picasso’s Guernica stands in a class of its own. And is it not ironic that right around the time Christendom is about to celebrate the birth of its Savior, the Prince of Peace, the Redeemer, the Israelis are raining down 2000-pound bombs, some of them the awful phosphorus kind that vaporize their victims? To date the equivalent of three Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs have been dropped on a starved, thirsty, disoriented 2.3 million displaced citizenry. And could we say that to date, timed with Christmas 2023, Israel has massacred over 8,000 thousand innocent children – and counting. And the West, today’s bastion of Christianity, is abhorrently supportive and silent? Yes, in the last few years Fascism has slowly sneaked into our halls of justice, our public spaces, our airwaves, and our digital formats. Joe “I am a Zionist to the Core,” Netanyahu’s puppet and apologist, has draped himself in the Israeli flag and has fashioned and emblazoned his tie, his shirt, his suit, and his rhetoric in the same style and rhetoric of Netanyahu, his alter ego and master. On December 10, 2023, Spain, the only Western nation with the moral fortitude to express its outrage at the Gaza carnage, held a solidarity event in the Basque city of Guernica’s market square, the same square that was bombed by the Nazis and Fascist forces way back in 1937. An aerial view depicts a massive Palestinian flag (the size of the entire square) in mosaic form the tesserae of which were held by citizens, trade unionists, artists, anti-war and anti-fascist groups, along with a large depiction of Picasso’s image depicting the mother, her child in her arms, crying to the high heavens. And for a whole minute the sirens blazed in solidarity with Gaza’s mothers and children. Viva Espana. Viva Palestina. Author (Raouf J. Halaby is a Professor Emeritus of English and Art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener, and a peace activist. Courtesy: CounterPunch.) Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 Habonim Dror: How Israeli Regime Recruits Left-Wing Americans to Fan Zionism. By: Shabbir RizviRead NowOne of the most profound awakenings for Westerners since the launch of the Palestinian resistance operation Al-Aqsa Storm has been their understanding of how influential the Zionist lobby is. This lobby, which works in line with the US State Department when it can and independently and subversively when it cannot, tends to influence major arenas of societal interest. On the surface level, one can simply follow the money and understand the phenomenon: the Israeli lobby pouring millions of dollars into buying US politicians, Zionist hate groups unleashed to stifle Pro-Palestinian students on college campuses, celebrities and artists flown out to Israel to pose with Israeli Occupation soldiers in order to paint them in a positive light. However, more devious and subversive groups exist within American society, specifically designed to “normalize” the concept of not only an Israeli regime, but the imperialist-settler ideology of Zionism. These organizations are designed with the American “left” in mind: Using left-wing, pro-worker sloganism, Zionist groups specifically target left-wing movements, students, and youths in order to indoctrinate them into aligning with the Zionist cause. One of these groups is known as “Habonim Dror.” Habonim Dror is believed to have promoted the ideas of “social justice” and “peace” while running six Zionist student camps across North America. The group actively recruits young Jewish students from across the US and Canada (though they have more minor concentrations in New Zealand, Brazil, the UK, and other countries) indoctrinating them in their camps, and even including a year-long program to send them to Occupied Palestine. At first glance at their website and mission, it is clear that they are intent on separating themselves from the ruling Benjamin Netanyahu regime in Tel Aviv. Habonim Dror emphasizes the need for “Labor Zionism” and even goes as far as suggesting “ending the occupation,” but ultimately succumbs to the same-old “Two-State Solution” rhetoric that forces Palestinians to deal with an aggressive, genocidal and brutal “neighbor.” “Labor Zionism,” which can save you a few syllables if you just call it what it is - Zionism - was a mutated appeal to the labor movement in North America. Habonin Dror was established in the 1930s as an appendage faction of the mainstream Zionist movement, and it has until now taken a backseat role in picking up Jewish youth who at first were resistant to the idea of Zionism. For decades, the Israeli occupation has enjoyed total control of its image, and so its initiatives were less aggressive. Now, Habonim Dror represents a wave of Zionism meant to capture what would be dissenting Jewish voices and reprogram them to be tools for colonialism and imperialism. Its mission is designed to “meet the moment” of a resurgent left-wing movement in the United States, particularly after the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, the Bernie Sanders presidential run in 2016, and the George Floud Uprising of 2020 - all three of which propelled left-wing movements and revived an interest in socialism in an otherwise deeply reactionary society. Habonim Dror may use veils like “socialism” and “progressivism” to define itself. However, its “principles” mention nothing of anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism. The group’s “socialism” is a “national socialism” for its own fascist occupation - it is not rooted in internationalism or global worker solidarity. It is a corrupted “socialism” that uses sloganeering and symbolism that are aesthetic to socialism while driving a deeply reactionary and imperialist political line. Habonim Dror encourages its members, who can join as early as high school, to participate in local social justice issues, including police brutality, immigration reform, climate change, and other popular left-wing issues that have gained much attention in American society. It further trains participants to be (according to their website) “leaders, change-makers and activists in their communities.” Offering attractive scholarships, opportunities to travel to Occupied Palestine, a rich network of connections that could offer promising careers and formal leadership training programs, Habonim Dror seems similar to a fraternity or an innocent summer camp. However, it is adamantly dedicated to the Zionist cause - which demands the existence of “Israel.” It is a simple equation. Habonim Dror targets what would otherwise be neutral, uninterested, or otherwise hostile Jewish youth and codifies a “left wing” Zionism in them, then encourages them to embed themselves into their communities and local movements as leaders and changemakers. They represent the face of Zionism where Zionism would otherwise be unwelcome, and thus rebrand Zionism through a false definition. These initiatives are crafted to normalize collaboration with more “hardline” Zionists. By infiltrating otherwise progressive movements, ‘Labor Zionism’ agents can influence those around them to embrace Zionism and the Israeli occupation. Zionists know that principled left-wing movements outright reject their racist ideology. In order to adapt, groups like Habonim Dror have been crafted to mutate Zionism in order to appeal to a left-wing wave that does not have strong principles of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. The Palestinian issue is purposely framed as complicated and “sensitive” in American society. “Left Wing” Zionists can then be deployed to command the conversation in progressive circles, rejecting any idea of a true liberation for Palestinians. As long as Zionism itself is not seen as the main issue, the Israeli occupation is framed in a positive light. A prime example of the type of influencer Habonim Dror seeks to create is the aggressively Zionist and Islamophobic actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen joined the group in his late teens in the 1980s, attending summer camps and ultimately moving to the occupied Palestinian territories for a year, working alongside other Zionist youth. Later, he would play the roles of deeply racist caricatures that fueled the fire of Islamophobia at the height of post-9/11 hysteria in the United States. Cohen now spends his time as a critic of the US right-wing lobby while simultaneously spreading Zionist propaganda and continuing his racism against Muslims. He came out in fierce defense of the Israeli response to the Palestinian resistance operation Al Aqsa Flood. Clearly, even “Labor Zionism” falls short of condemning the occupation, despite its insistence that it does. Some Habonim Dror activists have established networks with influential politicians such as staunch Zionist senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. The very existence of Habonin Dror activists threatens to normalize “Israeli” existence within progressive movements in the US, which at a critical movement like now are condemning the Tel Aviv regime. The group further prides itself on the collaboration of groups that are not Zionist in nature, citing various statistics of group participation in outside movements and leadership positions held, all while demonstrating their loyalty to the Israeli occupation, despite their alleged denunciation of “occupation.” This is a key goal for Habonin Dror: Zionists understand that isolation will only bring about their disaster. Therefore, groups like Habonim Dror must branch out in order to normalize the Israeli regime. This is their main factor of success. If local movements aren’t careful, they could be collaborating with Zionist infiltrators that could subvert Palestinian solidarity when it counts the most. Picture this scenario: a climate activist group is concerned about the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, as US weapons used themselves are a climate issue. Moving to condemn the genocide, grassroots organizers are then blocked by leadership that is Habonim Dror “activists.” A key voice within the US political realm is then silenced because of meticulously devised Zionist infiltration within an otherwise left-wing group. Habonim Dror isn’t the only Zionist youth group seeking to build a generation of Zionist influencers and “activists.” There are many different Zionist youth groups - some that are more “left-wing” in nature, and others that are “hardline.” Careful attention must be paid in order to understand how Zionists can subvert movements, organizations, and ideas - especially by weaponizing “progressivism” when a progressive movement is beginning to take shape and action. Let it be clear: there is nothing “progressive” or “left-wing” about the Israeli occupation or Zionism. At its core, it will always be a racist, colonial ideology that threatens war, expansionism, and exploitation. No rebrand can ever take away these core features of Zionism. Author Shabbir Rizvi Political analyst that specializes in US foreign and domestic policy, geopolitics, and military science; Anti-war organizer. Republished from Islam Times. Archives February 2024 |
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