Features » December 3, 2007

China’s Valley of Tears

Is authoritarian capitalism the future?

By Slavoj Zizek

Beijing citizens ride bikes near the new CCP-controlled China Television Center.

The explosion of capitalism in China has many Westerners asking when political democracy—as the “natural” accompaniment of capitalism—will emerge. But a closer look quickly dispels any such hope.

Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism’s development in Europe itself. In the early modern era, most European states were far from democratic. And if they were democratic (as was the case of the Netherlands during the 17th century), it was only a democracy of the propertied liberal elite, not of the workers. Conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by a brutal state dictatorship, very much like today’s China. The state legalized violent expropriations of the common people, which turned them proletarian. The state then disciplined them, teaching them to conform to their new ancilliary role.

The features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, freedom of the press, etc.) are far from natural fruits of capitalism. The lower classes won them by waging long, difficult struggles throughout the 19th century. Recall the list of demands that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made in the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto. With the exception of the abolition of private property, most of them—such as a progressive income tax, free public education and abolishing child labor—are today widely accepted in “bourgeois” democracies, and all were gained as the result of popular struggles.

So there is nothing exotic in today’s China: It is merely repeating our own forgotten past. But what about the afterthought of some Western liberal critics who ask how much faster China’s development would have been had the country grown within the context of a political democracy? The German-British philosopher Ralf Dahrendorf has linked the increasing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a “valley of tears.” In other words, after the breakdown of state socialism, a country cannot immediately become a successful market economy. The limited—but real—socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessary and painful. For Dahrendorf, this passage through the “valley of tears” lasts longer than the average period between democratic elections. As a result, the temptation is great for leaders of a democratic country to postpone difficult changes for short-term electoral gains.

In Western Europe, the move from welfare state to the new global economy has involved painful renunciations, less security and less guaranteed social care. In post-Communist nations, the economic results of this new democratic order have disappointed a large strata of the population, who, in the glorious days of 1989, equated democracy with the abundance of the Western consumerist societies. And now, 20 years later, when the abundance is still missing, they blame democracy itself.

Dahrendorf, however, fails to note the opposite temptation: The belief that, if the majority of a population resists structural changes in the economy, an enlightened elite should take power, even by non-democratic means, to lay the foundations for a truly stable democracy. Along these lines, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria points out how democracy can only “catch on” in economically developed countries. He says that if developing countries are “prematurely democratized,” then economic catastrophe and political despotism will soon follow. It’s no wonder, then, that today’s most economically successful developing countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) have embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule.

Isn’t this line of reasoning the best argument for the Chinese way to capitalism as opposed to the Russian way? In Russia, after the collapse of Communism, the government adopted “shock therapy” and threw itself directly into democracy and the fast track to capitalism—with economic bankruptcy as the result. (There are good reasons to be modestly paranoid here: Were the Western economic advisers to President Boris Yeltsin who proposed this approach really as innocent as they appeared? Or were they serving U.S. strategic interests by weakening Russia economically?)

China, on the other hand, has followed the path of Chile and South Korea in its passage to capitalism, using unencumbered authoritarian state power to control the social costs and thus avoid chaos. The weird combination of capitalism and Communist rule proved to be a blessing (not even) in disguise for China.

The country has developed fast, not in spite of authoritarian rule, but because of it. With Stalinist-sounding paranoia, we are left to wonder, “Maybe those who worry about China’s lack of democracy are actually worried that its fast development could make it the next global superpower, thereby threatening Western primacy.”

Today, the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward is repeating itself as a comedy. It has become the rapid capitalist Great Leap Forward into modernization, with the old slogan “iron foundry into every village” re-emerging as “a skyscraper into every street.” The supreme irony of history is that Mao Zedong himself created the ideological conditions for rapid capitalist development. What was his call to the people, especially the young ones, in the Cultural Revolution? Don’t wait for someone else to tell you what to do, you have the right to rebel! So think and act for yourselves, destroy cultural relics, denounce and attack not only your elders, but also government and party officials! Swipe away the repressive state mechanisms and organize yourself in communes!

And Mao’s call was heard. What followed was such an explosion of unrestrained passion to delegitimize all forms of authority that, at the end, Mao had to call in the army to restore order. The paradox is that the key battle during the Cultural Revolution was not between the Communist Party apparatus and the denounced traditionalist enemies, but between the Communist Party and the forces that Mao himself called into being.

A similar dynamic is discernible in today’s China. The Party resuscitates big ideological traditions in order to contain the disintegrative consequences of the capitalist explosion that the Party itself created. It is with this in mind that one should read the recent campaign in China to revive Marxism as an efficient state ideology. (Literally hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars are spent on this venture.)

Those who see this as a threat to capitalist liberalization totally miss the point. Strange as it may sound, this return of Marxism is the sign of the ultimate triumph of capitalism, the sign of its full institutionalization. For example, China has taken recent legal measures to guarantee private property, a move that the West has hailed as a crucial step toward legal stability.

But what kind of Marxism is as appropriate for today’s China? First, let’s look at the difference between Marxism and Leftism. Leftism is a term that refers to any talk of workers’ liberation—from free trade unions to overcoming capitalism. But the Marxist thesis says that developing the forces of production is the key to social progress, and it is this type of Marxist development that fosters the conditions for the continuing fast “modernization.”

In today’s China, only the Communist Party’s leading role can sustain rapid modernization. The official (Confucian) term is that China should become a “harmonious society.”

To put it in old Maoist terms, the main enemy may appear to be the “bourgeois” threat. But, in the eyes of the ruling elite, the main enemies are instead the “principal contradiction” between unfettered capitalist development that the Communist Party rulers profit from and the threat of revolt by the workers and peasants.

Last year, the Chinese government strengthened some of its oppressive apparatuses—including forming special units of riot police to crush popular unrest. These police are the actual social expression of what, in ideology, appears as a revival of Marxism. In 1905, Trotsky characterized tsarist Russia as “the vicious combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock market.” Doesn’t this characterization still hold for modern-day China?

But what if the promised democratic second act that follows the authoritarian valley of tears never arrives? That is what is so unsettling about today’s China: Its authoritarian capitalism may not be merely a remainder of our past but a portent of our future.

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• Reader Comments

  Poor Zizek.  His slavish devotion to his impossible Marxist dream has addled his brain, not to mention that it has muddled his thinking.  But I suppose Zizek’s muddled thoughts are no greater or less than Marx’s own muddled thoughts.  But that is no excuse, of course.

  Consider:  There has been an irregular but inexorable progression from the primitive to the current advanced state of personal freedom and economic development.  If the current situation is not perfect, neither has it terminated.  Democracy, the rule of law, and free-market capitalism have contributed to this advance, and there is no end in sight.

  And what has totalitarianism, particularly Marxism, contributed to this advance?  One hundred million innocent dead, profound corruption, and mind-boggling inefficiency.  That’s it.  Marxism’s contribution to human advancement has been entirely, and monumentally, negative.

  Listen to some of the nonsense Zizek signs his name to:

  The features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, freedom of the press, etc.) are far from natural fruits of capitalism.  ...  Recall the list of demands that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made in the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto.

  These freedoms are the fruits of the Enlightenment, a philosophical development predating Marx and Engels by a hundred years, and finding its ultimate expression in the Constitution of the United States, also predating Marx and Engels.  Both trade unions and businesses are expressions of the freedom of association recognized by the Constitution.  The rule of law, businesses, and workers conspire to create the wealth we enjoy.  Has a Socialist country ever created significant wealth?  Naaa.  The best the Socialists can do is to copy what the free markets are doing, meaning they are forever playing catch-up.  That is not the way to get ahead.  Once in a while, a Socialist entity tries to expropriate the wealth created by us capitalists, but that has never worked (Chile, and now Venezuela).

  The German-British philosopher Ralf Dahrendorf has linked the increasing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a “valley of tears.”

  Read that statement (and the paragraph) slowly and carefully.  Dahrendorff (and Zizek) are saying that the progression is from “state socialism” to revolution to a “valley of tears” to prosperity and democracy.  And then they blame the “valley of tears” on democracy!  That is insane.  Do you think that a corrupt, inefficient Socialist system might be to blame for this “valley of tears”?  Not to mention that Russia spent seventy years in a “valley of tears” and death, and seems headed back the way it came. 

  In post-Communist nations, the economic results of this new democratic order have disappointed a large strata of the population, who, in the glorious days of 1989, equated democracy with the abundance of the Western consumerist societies. And now, 20 years later, when the abundance is still missing, they blame democracy itself.

  Are you sure that is right?  Who is “they”?  I do not see anyone in Eastern Europe clamoring to get back within the Soviet Union.  East Germany was the most productive of the Soviet colonies, and it was hopelessly behind West Germany.  Now all of the East European states are prosperous and growing, led by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.  Estonia’s GDP is now over $20,000 per person, two-thirds that of France, and up from near zero under the Socialists.

  Posted by scorp on Dec 3, 2007 at 8:03 PM

  In Russia, after the collapse of Communism, the government adopted “shock therapy” and threw itself directly into democracy and the fast track to capitalism—with economic bankruptcy as the result. (There are good reasons to be modestly paranoid here: Were the Western economic advisers to President Boris Yeltsin who proposed this approach really as innocent as they appeared? Or were they serving U.S. strategic interests by weakening Russia economically?)

  Zizek is not “modestly paranoid”, he is big time bonkers.  Russia was already bankrupt; that is why it collapsed.  “U.S. strategic interests” required Russia to survive and prosper.  We definitely did not want a nuclear-armed chaotic collapse in Russia.  To stabilize Russia, the United States sent many cargo aircraft loaded with $100 bills to inject liquidity into Russia, tens of billions of dollars in total.  Since the ruble was worthless, there had to be a stable currency or else there would have been economic and social collapse, like Weimar in the 1930s.  While we succeeded in avoiding physical collapse, the endemic corruption of the Soviet system carried right on over to post-Soviet Russia.  There was no Russian leadership with the courage, insight, and imagination to take advantage of the gift of freedom.  So sad. 

  Zizek’s muddled Mickey Mouse/Marxist thought process and lack of factual understanding leave him with a confused concept of the world.  Consequently, he understands nothing about China, the subject of the article.

  There has never been a situation on the scale of China today, and there has never been a situation where an authoritarian political system has successfully teamed with a free-market economy.  Even Socialist Europe is failing to grow, both economically and demographically.  To the extent that a totalitarian system controls the economy, that economy cannot reach its full potential.

  Most people are impressed with China’s recent growth, a product of limited free-market trade with Europe and the USA, and are largely unaware of the unpaid costs China is incurring to participate in that trade.  Huge chunks of state-owned Chinese enterprises, perhaps a trillion dollars worth, are not producing and are being propped up by an increasingly weak banking system.  Pollution is out of control and threatening health and lives.  Water resources are being exhausted.  Corruption is rampant.  The Chinese stock markets are in a huge bubble, larger than the Japanese Bubble of 1991 that essentially ended Japan’s rapid growth following WWII.

  But Zizek’s limited view sees nothing of this.

  Posted by scorp on Dec 3, 2007 at 8:05 PM

  What Mr Zizek’s “authoritarian capitalism” has in common with its 19th century predecessor is an intriguing subject.  But, would Gladstone or Disraeli or Bismark or Buffet have declared for a “New Socialist Countryside” or have promoted a “socialism with [british, german, french, etc] characteristics?” Would they have sanctioned the organizing of their industrial workers into national trade unions?  Or countenanced the official study of Marxism?  Lenin’s NEP is probably a whole lot closer to the author’s “authoritarian” or “state” capitalism, and Lenin himself would have been deeply flattered by the phrase, as it would have meant that Russia, largely a nation of peasants of serfs, was further along the road of economic development than most observers (himself included) popularly supposed.  I think what you have developing in China (and in Russia with some qualifications and amendments) is “neo-communism”; an outsized and ultimately decisive role by the state in the functioning of economic and civil life, coupled with a vigorous but subordinate private sector.  Unlike Mr Zizek, I believe the role of the Chinese state will loom large for some time to come and will ultimately determine the outcome of this period of Chinese history.  It is still early to predict that the modern neo-communist state will become humanity’s New Model of Governance but, given the collapse of the social market economies of Europe and the bedevilment of American aspirations worldwide, it is a distinct possiblity.

  Posted by LouisGodena on Dec 4, 2007 at 4:02 PM

  Good take, Louis.

  You might point out that Lenin strained mightily to fit medieval Russia into Marx’s philosophical industrial economy model. 

  The industrial world had developed over a period of several centuries when Marx made his observations, positing that industrial workers would take control of their own futures.  Marx’s scientific socialism “proved” that history was inexorably moving toward a socialist Utopia, and that the state would wither away.  The advanced state of capitalism was necessary to make workers aware of their exploitation, and that in turn was a necessary step toward Socialism. 

  So, how did Russia get from a medieval past to a Socialist future without going through the industrial and capitalist phases?  Simple.  Lenin declared that a hundred years of capitalist development was compressed into the ten months of the Kerensky government in 1917-1918.  Oh, well, logic was never the Socialists’ strong point. 

  ... bedevilment of American aspirations worldwide ...

  I would be interested in hearing you expand on this point.  In the last one hundred years, the number of democracies has expanded from about twenty to about one-hundred twenty, and global wealth has expanded geometrically.  It has not always been easy, but it does seem to be inexorable, unlike Marx’s silly prattle.

  Posted by scorp on Dec 4, 2007 at 7:58 PM

  Scorp..."Most people are impressed with China’s recent growth, a product of limited free-market trade with Europe and the USA, and are largely unaware of the unpaid costs China is incurring to participate in that trade.  Huge chunks of state-owned Chinese enterprises, perhaps a trillion dollars worth, are not producing and are being propped up by an increasingly weak banking system.  Pollution is out of control and threatening health and lives.  Water resources are being exhausted.  Corruption is rampant.  The Chinese stock markets are in a huge bubble, larger than the Japanese Bubble of 1991 that essentially ended Japan’s rapid growth following WWII.”

  Sounds a bit like the United States. Let’s see....water resources in the US are being exhausted (particularly the West and South), we are in the midst of a popped housing bubble (who knows how low the house values will go?) which may in fact expose that the stock market is also a bubble, corruption is rampant (name a part of the US society that doesn’t have thieves and liars running the show whether it’s politicians, religions, corporations), pollution goes on (recently an Indiana power company was allowed to dump MORE mercury into Lake Michigan...thanks Indiana I’m from Michigan).

  Let’s add a few more items. We have set historic records for deficit spending, our national debt just topped $9 trillion which thankfully countries such as China and Saudi Arabia help prop up that debt because they have to do something with those weakening pieces of paper called dollars. We don’t even pay for our wars any more, it’s all put on the government credit card (and what a great card, you don’t have to make payments just run up the bill). War, corruption...oh yeah, forgot about Iraq.

  Democracy? What a bunch of clowns the duopoly is offering us for president this time. But no surprise, after all someone has to follow Bozo. Polling shows disapproval of Bush at 70% and Congress at like 85%...we vote for people we don’t even like and we will do it again in 2008. Our democracy is based on money and image, not on ideas. It’s who can raise the most money to run the worst commercials.

  China? They will have their problems whatever their system. But we have our own problems and they aren’t getting any better.

  Posted by Jon B on Dec 5, 2007 at 4:31 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 30 posts.

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