Tuesday, September 02, 2014

Workers of the World, Untie!

Could China have a proper Marxist revolution?

I only ask because China did not have a proper Marxist revolution. Marx considered urban workers the building blocks of a communist revolution and thought rural peasants were too tied to the land to mobilize.

Mao adapted Marxism for China where he lacked urban workers but had lots of peasants.

But as China has abandoned Marxist economics while relying on Leninist governance where the Communist Party is the vanguard of whatever proletariat you have, China is also urbanizing a great deal.

Peking, for example, is teetering from massive growth:

Effectively doubling the city’s population [to over 42 million], or simply increasing it to 30 million within the next decade, would exacerbate a whole host of problems. Aside from pollution, being able to effectively incorporate such a large influx of what will likely be mostly rural migrants will further strain the city’s limited social services and infrastructure. This could very well create political tension in the Chinese capital that the ruling Chinese Communist Party will be unable to avoid.

I only bring up the problem of growing cities filled with poor ex-peasants from a Marxist point of view because, as I noted in this post about China's plans to build safe cities to counter unrest and separatism in China's far west, China may suffer from not appreciating the threat that can build in cities from a Marxist point of view.

And if not a Marxist revolution, could a faction of the Chinese Communist Party longing for real Communism look to a power base in the cities to fight their rivals?

Maybe the cities will be the source of a breakdown of central authority.