The China Model w/ Ali Kadri

Speaker 1: You remember Din-Din-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Hakimaki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hakimaki, unfortunately not joined by my usual co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, who of course is historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. And it'll be a couple of episodes before Adnan is back, at least in terms of the date of recording. Adnan has some hearing problems right now, but when they are back and fixed, he'll be back on the show. So be aware listeners that it's going to be mostly just me for the next couple of episodes from here. But with that being said, we have a terrific guest today and a terrific topic. It's a returning guest, fan favorite. Before I introduce him though, I just want to remind you that you can help support the show And allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. And you can find the show on various social media platforms, although they've all been blocked in Russia. So I am not really able to post on them as at the moment, but you can find Guerrilla History on the various social media platforms. With that being said, we do have a terrific returning guest. We have my friend, Professor Ali Qadri. Ali, it's nice to see you. How are you doing today?

Ali Qadri: Very well. Thank you. Thank you.

Henry Hakimaki: So listeners, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that we've had many episodes with Ali over the last couple of years, but particularly in the last several months, we've had kind of a mini series with Ali discussing various topics that he has been examining and analyzing. And today we have another one, which is completely different than the previous ones, but one that I'm sure will be very exciting for you. It is on the China model. So Ali, of course, China features into our conversations that we have very frequently. I would say in most, if not all of our conversations, we've talked about China for at least some portion of time. But with that being said, there is still a lot of I don't want to say confusion about what the China model actually is, but there is different interpretations of what the China model is. I'm wondering if we can start this conversation with kind of a foundational question, which is laying out your analytical view of what the foundational model of the China model is and the rooting of it in Marxism-Leninism.

Ali Qadri: There's a very interesting article I came across when I was writing a book. I live in China most of the time, now less so than before, and I probably would have written the book slightly differently because one learns as one lives in the place and experiences the politics and the life of the place. But there's an article, a very nice article, which says, whose title is, What a Difference a Revolution Makes. I'm not sure that the author himself goes through, thoroughly through the material that needs to be discussed in this article, but the title itself is very catchy. As I was writing and researching, I came across it. I said, you know, maybe that explains everything. In a sense, if you've had a people's revolution and people came to power, represented by the Communist Party, and that Communist Party has a motto to serve the people, basically, to better the lives of the people and so on. And so it is really a government by the people for the people in this case, which is by the working class for the working class, to be sure, because the people, society, is the working class, grosso modo, except for the few who basically are parasitic and live off the toil of the working class. In this case, it draws a comparison between countries like India and China. One sees in India, for instance, and I've Recently, I met Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, and they have a lot to say about India. They're not happy with the social conditions in India. You know, the figures, they sort of spoke of the conditions of poverty in India, simply not in any way expressing the rates of poverty in the $2 or the $3 It's not in money terms. They expressed it in caloric terms. That is, millions, hundreds of millions in India do not receive the necessary caloric intake every day. Whereas when we speak of China, this is a completely different story. And one of the latest figures, for instance, in the last 30 years, we've seen wages treble, you know, triple the American English. Every 10 years. So the rate of growth in wages was three times. The average yearly growth would be around 12% in wages. I mean, if you consider that China's growth rate in that period was 8%. And if you assume that the rate of productivity is proxied by the rate of growth, then we have a wage rate which far exceeds the rate of productivity, which means that the gains of productivity, the gains of technological gains, the gains that societies are making, are mainly going to labor. And then they speak of alleviating poverty in China, and this is the biggest project and so on and so forth. But then I researched the model. I mean, I went into the statistics of China and elsewhere, and I've looked at the statistics of the early period of the revolution. I mean, here you're looking at a country which is... I was taught by Arthur Davis, who visited China before and after the revolution. Arthur K. Davis. And he speaks and he has data on the conditions of China before. Then we became friends, Art and I, and he used to tell me that China was so poor, it It was commonplace to see sometimes bodies floating down the Yangtze River and so on. So this was one of the poorest countries in the world, it seems, according to statistics. And the life expectancy was a little over 30 years. Some say 30, some say 33. At that time, statistics was not so clear cut. And so I've researched the old data and under Mao and in the early stages of the revolution and there we see that between, let's say, 1950, 1949, 50, to about the mid-70s, which is Mao's period, we see that the rate of growth was, the real rate of growth was 6%. Now, that's a very high rate of growth already. But what we also see is, why was it 6%? Because in 61 and 62, the time of the Sino-Soviet split, because the Chinese economy was completely dependent on the Soviet economy at that time. And when the split occurred, the fall in income in China, the fall in income was enormous. tremendous. I don't remember the figures exactly, but there's a huge dip to around 20 or 25 percent in income in those two years. So if we really calculate without these two years, then the rate of growth between 50 and 75, 1975, 1950, 1975, was actually 8 percent. It hasn't changed. And that's the real rate of growth in the period before. So when we speak of poverty before, during the Mao's period, when we speak of poverty at that time, we should take into account that there wasn't much in the country. There was a very poor capital stock. The first thing that Art Davis, who wrote a couple of articles way back in 1960 about China and the revival of China, the first thing we notice is that When people speak of the earlier period, there wasn't much to go over. Poverty was structural, was inherent because of the destruction of the colonial war and the independence war. And a whole century of humiliations by which small states like Portugal could actually exact a concession on China. So what we have is a situation where actually we cannot speak of, and we cannot speak of poverty then because no matter what you do, what you did, You were left with nothing to work with. You were left with no capital stock, no technology, nothing to boost productivity. And without growth and productivity, you cannot eliminate poverty. So what the Soviet Union did, and we're recalling that, China's development, China's independence experience, China's struggle is not independent from the involvement of the Soviet Union. In fact, Joseph Stalin has a point in which he says that I want to see a greater Asian Soviet, and I want to see China in the leadership of that greater Asian Soviet. And so it is not aloof, it's not independent, as I said, from Soviet strategy in South Asia and in Asia. So keep in mind, in that sense, what I'm saying here is that to say that there was poverty before is to say that there was poverty in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, poverty was endemic to the system because that was a system of low productivity. and high mortality. And what we have in China in 1950 is basically a relic of the middle ages. So even if a communist party came to power, it cannot immediately galvanize, catalyze a growth process. But what socialism does is it has a different development criteria. Its criteria is not a moneyed criteria. Money works for the people, works for the people and not for the few. And so the criteria of socialism is what is beneficial to society as a whole. How do we employ growth and how do we employ productivity gains in order to help society? And in order to do that, you must mobilize resources. You must mobilize labor, land, and capital, everything you have under the capitalist profit criteria. If we have a capitalist development, you do not mobilize all of resources because you are conditioned by short-term profits. And short-term profits are always subjected to the vagaries of the market and to the fact that the market is is competing and overproducing for few people who could buy. So in the end you leave a lot of factories, a lot of land and a lot of people unemployed because you're short termish and you have this profit constraint and the profit constraint is also constrained by the overproduction to the small markets that you sell for constraint. And so this is a criteria that is already going to displace a lot of people and a lot of resources that could go into development. Whereas the socialist model has a long-term view of development. And it may take losses in the short term for gains in the longer term. Because the life of society is not a short-term life. It's society lives and stays on. And so what socialism in China did is it mobilized all the resources. There were mistakes in every, you know, whoever does, does mistakes in a sense. But there is a learning process and a learning curve from which China benefits so much. And what helped China is its brand of socialism was not dogmatic, was not I am right no matter what happens in reality. If reality is wrong, I'm going to change myself. If we look at the history of China, it's all because it's an admixture of all Chinese philosophy and Marxism-Leninism. They... The credo of old Chinese philosophy is a credo of learning by doing and testing in practice and truth and consciousness emanate from practice. Practice is everything. And also for Marxism-Leninism, practice is everything. But at the same time, you see in Marxism-Leninism sometimes there's a tendency to be overly idealist in the sense that we want to leap over the realities that we encounter. And when we encounter such poverty and indigency and misery in China, we must work with what we have and develop and develop under different efficiency criteria, which is a social efficiency criteria, not a profit efficiency criteria. And that's true for all the socialist governments. So what we have, what I want to say now, is that we cannot say that there was poverty that is socially inflicted and socially perpetrated under Mao. Poverty was an endemic to the system, was sort of... genetically or let's say embedded into the system congenital of sorts you know I mean if they use the word loosely and so but then we have a rise of 8% a growth rate of 8% every year and a mobilization and the first thing art used to visit and do hands on And he met Mao Zedong, and he used to do hands-on activity in China. And he says in a matter of one decade, there were light bulbs and schools in the countryside, things that weren't there before. you see in China. And a little after, there were also doctors in the countryside and so on. So we have a situation which pays off. And they always have this long term, this really socialist, I mean, you can call it Chinese cultural Chinese, but it's also socialist because socialism is about what is good for society over the long run, what's good for humanity over the long run. Society for socialism is humanity, not a particular social group or ethnicity or some identity, tradition of sorts. So in a sense, what we have is a betterment of conditions And then, of course, the issue is they realized, I mean, I think they came to the realization that when they are technologically backward, they cannot, they will not be able to resist the imperialist system. And my own take on this, and I could be wrong, because assessing when people have this epiphany, this rise in consciousness, It's because of the Korean War. Because in the Korean War, remember, they faced better military technology and they lost hundreds of thousands, if not a million people martyred in fighting off the imperialist forces in Korea. And the losses were staggering. Of course, North Korean losses were also staggering. In some estimates, a quarter of the population perished in that war. And short of using nuclear bombs, what they've done is they've used conventional weapons to the tune of hundreds of nuclear bombs. And so they left nothing behind in North Korea. So the Chinese came to realize that there is a tremendous, and so the debate within the party, within a party which is quite practical in its approach to theory, and it revamps theory when it comes into contradiction with something in practice. They came to the realization that we need to have a new economic plan like Lenin did in the early 20s in Russia. And that plan worked for many many abroad who followed the Marxist-Leninist line, they thought that this is a swerve, that this is a betrayal of the Marxist-Leninist principles. And the market economy and its temptations is going to restructure as Chinese society to create a new class that is going to rest the reins of power and take over and bring China into a type of rule they call democracy, because democracy is anything really, because you can have either bourgeois democracy or people's democracy, into a democracy. The free market is going to crowd in a free political practice as in democracy, that is, in the Western sense. But that didn't work. Obviously, we know after the fact that this did not occur, that what we've had is pretty much an ironclad hold of the party and of the people on the process of interfacing with more advanced capitalists. For many who were against this reform, if one looks at Mao's writing towards the end, Mao was actually inclined towards this. And Deng Xiaoping also has taken over from the writings of Mao that we need to have a new economic plan. Because if we do not develop the productive forces, we are not going to be able to resist the assault, because we have one assault in Korea, we have another assault in Vietnam, we're going to have another assault in Taiwan, we're going to have another assault in Japan. Imperialism is a state of constant assault against the masses of the third world. And in that sense, what we have is a situation where they were capable of resisting, they had an ironclad hold on the culture and on the political processes that were occurring, and they made many gains in the process. But it wasn't a rupture in theory. It was actually a development of the latent Maoist position on how to implement a new economic plan that Deng Xiaoping followed. Many were not happy with the rapprochement between America and all, but this all turned out to be like a Trojan horse. The Chinese, the CPC, the Communist Party of China, has managed to do this, and it's not pretty much by bluff. It's much more interesting than to put it in, there is no such thing as bluff in history. Yeah, they understood that capitalism has an undercurrent of avarice, that they require a supply chain that is solid, that they require cheaper resources, cheaper labor and so on, and they cannot resist the lure of higher profits from the Chinese market and their association with the Chinese market. So it is this I call, it's like a subconscious of capital. This idea, profit at any rate. So they were speaking of crowning in bourgeois democracy in China, but at the same time, they couldn't wean their corporations off the benefits that they made from that. And the Chinese knew that. That capital is not that smart after all. Its organizational platform, the one that says we want to crowd in the free market, will crowd in bourgeois democracy, that was actually overtaken by the fact that there is corporations that we saw. The German chancellor, when the Chinese were upset, bringing the top corporate executives from Germany to meet with the Chinese leadership. We saw that. And so these corporations work with this subconscious thing. and subconscious drive. But the Chinese also knew that to make productivity gains, to climb up the technology ladder, may grow their productive force. Productive force is a broader term. It's a Marxist term. It's not just technology, but it's also the labor that is subject in technology and the culture of industry, which is a subject in technology. It's also the social relations that draw the development of technology. They knew that they're going to have to free the value relation. Freeing the value relation, value relations are really a deadly, you know, value is a deadly relationship. What is the value relation? Value relations is I want to make more profits from the labor of people. And how do I make more profits? By making people very miserable. utterly, extremely poor and killing people, literally. I mean, there is no, you know, and actually killing people becomes a business in itself. That's what I write all the time. And so they knew that there is a price to pay and there was a price to pay. There was dislocation from the countryside. Because of mechanization there was a huge flux of labor, outflow of labor from the countryside. The environments of the cities were drowning in dust and pollution. But at the beginning, if you come to China now, you will see completely. I live in an area which is the metropolitan area in which I live in South China, 64 million people. And in this area, if you look at the quality of the air, it's always excellent all year round. And, you know, the amount of effort that is taken to protect the environment here is tremendous. So there was the long-term strategy of China. There was a trade-off. We're going to free value. That value is going to do us a lot of harm. But we're going to basically be in command. And in the future, we are going to remake this better for the people. But there was always protection for the people. There is always a law, the household registration law, huku, and other things that made sure that no one was left completely bereft of the essentials of life. And so when we look at China now, we're looking at an experience that is mind-boggling, a real world miracle in every sense of the world. And the huge part of humanity is developing strides and presenting itself as a ever that is going to not only lift China but lift the rest of the world with it.

Henry Hakimaki: It's a very wonderful and extensive answer Ali. I have a follow-up question which is both related and also I think will take us further on. So talking about the foundation of the China model there's also It'll be interesting to talk about the core theoretical underpinnings that differentiate China's development path from capitalist models a little bit more explicitly. I know you touched on that in the previous answer, but it might be interesting to talk about the theoretical underpinning of those decisions on that developmental path. But then also... Talking about the strategic role of the state and the party in the development of China I think is also a particularly interesting and useful point for us to make at this point because that of course is something that dramatically differentiates the way that China under its socialist experiment has carried itself versus the way that capitalist models fundamentally do. So can you address those points?

Ali Qadri: Well, as you said, rightly so, there are many other things to talk about in the developing experience of China. I mean, we know also that if we take the Soviet model of planning There were hundreds of thousands of people only involved in the assessment of inputs and outputs of various industries into the final products and assessing shadow prices, the real prices, and the real costs of things. There was a shortcoming. In that until, you know, now the cybernetics, the whole science was deployed in order to basically overcome that. But still the planning worked. Because if we look at the Soviet experience, we also have tremendously high rates of growth under socialism in the earlier periods and so on, especially between the mid-20s to the late 30s. We have 15 years where the rate of growth has been the highest in the world, never around 15%. I don't recall the number exactly, but the average is the highest globally. So planning took a lot of effort. But we know it worked because we had eliminated illiteracy. We had promoted universal health care, universal education, and a betterment of living standards for countries which were completely devastatingly poor. Now, China came across this problem also, the problem of inputs and outputs, and how to basically marry the market economy with its planning system. So how to make prices as signals, because prices always act as signals for where resources are going to be invested in the next period. But it depends on whose prices, because a price is a symbol. If I'm a capitalist and I have... power and I will power over society, I'll make the price I want and it will symbolize what I want in order to serve me rather than serve society. But not in the case of China. They were capable of disciplining the price system in such a way when I say that wages rose three wages a price. It rises three times, three folds. Every 10 years, that's a tremendous gain in social welfare, what we're looking at. And it's higher than productivity gains, which means all the productivity gains that society is making are going to labor and to society rather than the few. So when we look at these things, they were capable of managing the price system to meet the socialist planning objectives. That's a very smart thing to do. And they were also capable—I mean, one thing, of course, that no socialist country and no intelligent country would do is—because we know that the money that we use in the country is the store of value of what that country holds, the store of wealth of what that country holds. So we cannot let that money fly abroad. And, you know, we cannot let somebody who's very rich, who's accumulated a lot of wealth because we're letting them out of it, take that money abroad. That money must be reinvested in the system. And the system is, you know, the money, the backing system and the money system is a state-owned system. It's a public system that works for the public. So, all the rich people must redeposit their wealth, and the state also, because the state itself is rich, redeposits its wealth in the public backing system. and reinvest this wealth in building the infrastructure, the social and the capital infrastructure for society. That's why we see so many, you know, they say China poured in more cement in four years or five years than the United States did since 1945. And you can see that. I mean, if I go for one year and come back, I'll see a different place. That's how fast growing the place is. And so there is a circuit of money capital and the circuit of value that is regulated by the state. And the price system as signal tallies and corresponds to what a socialist price system would do. Because even under socialism, we have prices that act as signals. And so all of this is now working in tandem. And developing, you know, the greater society that we have and the better society. But we must keep in mind that all of this would not have been possible without the successes of the early period of China. especially the success of agriculture. You know, we are looking at a country which was very hungry. Now, after the revolution, we're looking at a country that is being fed with all the resources. It's being fed and by feed, you know, it's being fed and feeding people does not cost much. So what that means is that When the state holds all moneyed capital, if you don't spend too much on food, if workers don't spend too much on food and so on, There is a lot more in the pot for the state to reinvest in industry and capital development. And that's a crucial thing. Without a success in agriculture, you can't go anywhere. And that success in agriculture occurred before. And we can see it in the market now. how agriculture is buoyant in China. And that success, it's because the commune system was a very successful system of production. And we see it afterwards because land is still owned by the state and there is a different way of managing the land that is owned by the state. But there is growth and productivity and China exports many agricultural products. So we have capital controls. We have prices which are signals that serve like socialist prices for the allocation of resources. And we have a strong base in agriculture. We also have this absorptive capacity of China. Because what socialism does, and the Soviet Union did this, it promotes pure sciences, it promotes the natural science, the study of the natural sciences. It gives people the freedom to study and develop. And so when you come with new technology, more developed technology, If you come to a place like Saudi Arabia, where after 20, 30, 50 years, which they have had an ethanol or some tertiary products of petroleum running in the country that the Dutch have installed there. They still don't know how the factory works. But if you come to China and if you store anything in China, the next morning you will see somebody else replicating this and bettering it. And so that's because the absorptive capacity is already inbuilt in the fact that socialism promotes the study of the science. So it's easy to absorb technology when the sciences have already been developed. The sciences do not cost much. And that's what you have in the month. Now, as to the role of the state, there is no model of development without state intervention, without state guidance. If we look at South Korea, for instance, In South Korea, you have the Americans needed to prime South Korea in order to create a workforce that's going to make some gains. And the gains that it makes are said to be a byproduct or a residual from capitalist development. And therefore, they're going to espouse the ideology of capitalism. and be an anti-socialist base in Asia. Now, even in South Korea, people who know the history of South Korea and who worked on the development of South Korea, not only was their state, not only Al-Manin, the United States was offering something like 10% of GDP in aid every year, but it was making sure that this A huge amount of money went to developing industries and they made sure that agriculture, they had land reform agriculture. They wanted to make sure that agriculture worked. For capitalism to basically make better fed workers that are going to espouse them, the ideology of capitalism, they needed to make socialist-like land reforms in South Korea. So there is no abdication of the role of the state and development. So the role of the state, and the state is the principal apparatus that assigns, that does the allocational and distributional activities. And it is the state that has managed to basically make sure that the price system, when they let the free market enter, they never really let the free market take over everything. That's not possible. I mean, the state here is... I mean, if we look now at what the state is, it's all... But at the time, even at the time when China was... pretty much export dependence and so forth. Even at that time, the state sector was the predominant sector across China, and vastly so. And so the state was never really out of the picture. It was all state-led developed and all state orchestrated. And it's a conversation with reality that the state holds all the time. It's a conversation with reality based on the socialist principles of serving the people. We see what happens, for instance, if you look at the rise in prices in the 1980s when they were beginning to experiment in the rise in prices. And there was agitation because they have these various levels of consultations in the way they arrive at something. And all people are involved in these consultations on how they arrive on drawing policy. So they realize that The policies they've done, their heating prices and prices are rising and people are uncomfortable with the rise of prices. So they intervene right away and reverse the policies that have caused the rise of prices. They are aware, they keep their ears on and they listen to the people, they consult the people and there are many layers of consultations and special groups, special advisors, special party people who get engaged on the grassroots level to find out what is happening. Now things are happening. And so this is a model, in a sense, that for now it is universal. But the fact of the matter remains, where we say with Chinese characteristics, it is this resilience. This capability of negotiating while adhering to the principles of socialism. And that comes from all Chinese philosophy. I'm not a buff of all Chinese philosophy myself, but from what little I know, I can see from visits here and there, so on, and reading a few things. That it is this idea of the teacher. The teacher has to be experimented with. He has followers. They don't start with the dogma that my God is better than yours. They don't have that debacle, that constraint to begin with. They view things differently. So there is the Chinese. All I have said until now has nothing to do with the peculiarity of tradition. What the tradition influenced is this idea. that you can still be ethical and give and take and have a trade-off in time in the long term, between the short term and the long term. We're going to suffer a little bit in the long term and the short term, but we are aware of what is taking place, but we are going to move there. Because if we don't move to a better place, we are going to be crushed. This understanding is pretty much a Maoist understanding of imperialism. And that's really what makes the state an intelligent apparatus. And that's what we have so far.

Henry Hakimaki: And we'll get to anti-imperialist resistance and models of anti-imperialist resistance and the Chinese conception of anti-imperialist resistance in a little bit. But I just wanted to say a couple of things before I present the next question to you, Ali. You know, you're talking about this Chinese idea that you don't just have a dogmatic view of what should be and then you place it on the people and you follow it unthinkingly, uncritically, because this is what we have determined. As you mentioned, that's something that belongs in ancient Chinese philosophy, but also that was exactly what Mao talked about when he was talking about the mass line. The mass line, you put together a policy, you first conduct a analysis, you think about what theory says you should do, you put together a policy, you put the policy into place, But then you analyze what's happening in real world conditions as you are implementing that policy. You make consultation with the masses. You determine what the masses are saying about how that policy is working, what could be changed, if it could be altered for the better, or if it's something that isn't working at all in that case. Then it goes back to the party in order to revise or replace as the conditions determine. That's something that Mao had been talking about, and that's something that the Chinese government seems to still be carrying out today in terms of not every policy that is put into place is carried through to fruition. It's put in place, consultations are made on the ground, and revisions are made in the governing structures. And I also just wanted to say, before we get to the next kind of topic, and I'll allow you to respond to this if you want to as well, Ali, You mentioned agriculture. I would be remiss to not take the opportunity to recommend an old episode of the show. It came out years ago at this point, but it was a slightly critical take on the way that the agriculture industry in China went during the Deng period and after that period as well. It was with our friend Sun Shu, Professor Sun Shu, the episode title, and if I remember, I'll link it in the show notes, but otherwise, listeners, you can find it by looking for the title, Commune to Capitalism, Decollectivization of Agriculture in China with Sun Shu. based off of his book of the same name, a very interesting book. I got a lot out of that book and it was a really fascinating conversation. And I highly recommend you listeners to listen to that as well for both the companion to that discussion Ali had, but then also a slightly different perspective than you have Ali on it. I think that it's complimentary, but critical. And I think that if you haven't heard it as well, Ali, that might be an interesting episode for you to listen to as well. But that is to say that these policies don't always come fully formed. They don't always come perfectly. They're not always implemented perfectly. But when there is an analysis on the ground that it does make it back to the party and then revisions are made, and that requires not only the role of the state driving things, but also the party keeping its roots in the communities, in the masses. And if the party is not representing the masses, and if the masses are not invested in the party, the system is going to fail. So if you have anything to say on that, Ali, feel free. Otherwise, I also wanna talk about, it was actually the next topic that I had marked down, overcoming imperialism and promoting a new order internationally and the role of China in this. So I know that you had brought up that notion of a Maoist conception of imperialism at the end and how China orients themselves vis-a-vis how to analyze imperialism and also how to resist imperialism. That is a really big topic, but it's an incredibly important one, especially as we look around the world and we see there's various conceptions of how an anti-imperialist block or anti-imperialist nodes could be formed, anti-imperialist relations between states. And the question of China is always raised in terms of what could China do? What is China doing? What is China not doing? And in order to understand why China does what it does or doesn't do what it doesn't do, an understanding of the conception of imperialism as held by the Chinese state is important as well. So that's the next topic that I have for us, but also feel free to respond to anything I said earlier.

Ali Qadri: Right. I mean, there are mistakes, obviously. I mean, you know, one remembers not only the mistakes with, you know, de-collectivization and the early blunder, but also the, you know, the birds, for instance, when birds were taken off the mare, you know, and so on. But there's a learning process. I, you know, I'm not saying this was all brilliant in any sense, no, but... But in a sense, in the end, you know, it all turned out to be fine and, you know, it met the purpose. Now, as to, you know, imperialism, there is again, there is a... There's the issue of the principle contradiction. The principle contradiction has developed, and Torkel Laussen says something to that effect. That is now that between China and the USA. Before that, the Soviet Union apparently, in hindsight, we can't say from, you know, that it really was pretty much the Soviet bloc was not an adequate to the capitalist world system, given the end result of what has occurred. But China is now leading the contradiction of labor against capital, that principle of contradiction. When the balance of forces globally changes, when China resumes its course of development and develops into a power that is capable of curtailing the US empire, or we develop into a multi-polar system of sorts, then we will have a different world. This has not yet happened. And that's why we see what we see today, the aggressiveness of the United States, its capabilities, you know, let's bomb and snatch presidents and so on and so forth.

Henry Hakimaki: I should just make a brief mention. Sorry to interrupt, Ali, but we're recording this, listeners, on January 3rd. So just a couple of hours ago, it came out that the United States bombed Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro. And the situation is still unfolding at this moment. It'll be a couple of weeks before this episode is posted. So surely a lot more will be known and there will be a lot more information. Movement in that situation will come up by the time you hear this, listeners, but just be aware we're recording this like middle of the day Russia time of January 3rd. So just after the event took place that Ali is referring to. But anyway, sorry for that interruption, Ali. I just wanted to orient the listeners as to where we are at this moment.

Ali Qadri: Well, and so the point is to limit, you know, the aggressiveness. The Soviet Union was capable of limiting some aggressiveness, but in the end, unsuccessfully, because it was aggressed itself and failed. There is a class, you know, Marxist thing in class terms, and there are class reasons why this occurred. There are, you know, classes are... power relations as well. They've lost their hold on power, the masses lost their hold on power, and when the masses lose their hold on power through the governing apparatuses that they have, they lose. There's a schism in the representation of the masses. The masses lose, and the representatives and the masses. So, but now we have a different story, and we have a much bigger foe for the United States. It's much bigger economically. It's much bigger, and it's catching up technology. In some areas, I'm not an expert on who does better in technology, but many reports say that... Chinese are leading in many areas of technology and STEM and so forth. So we have a much bigger foe, a much more formidable foe for U.S. empire and for the civilization of capital. And so when that general picture changes, when the general picture changes, we expect, but with time, that the particular conditions around the world, the particular conditions that breed a new consciousness, a consciousness of resistance against imperialism of the working class, because without consciousness, Without revolutionary consciousness, nothing will happen. Without a consciousness that targets the principle of contradiction first, the United States imperialism, European and United States imperialism first, nothing happens. We will get nowhere. We will get stuck in this idea of social movements. And we will have an Arab Spring-like or a colored revolution-like situation where the general ideological tide is anti-socialist, and yet they're usually funded by Soros and other people. And so you have socialists who basically sing the tune of the capitalists. who afterwards ratchet up or instill in the masses more defeatism as a result of the defeatism that has occurred. And so what I want to say is that when the general change, the particular is going to change, but we don't know what the time lag is. That hasn't happened yet. That hasn't happened. And to ask China to be more interventionist on a global scale when that ideological tide is not yet ripe. when we don't have world consciousness like that we had after the 1917 revolution, where everybody was a socialist of one sort or another globally. And at one time, two-thirds of the globe was claiming to be socialist. And so on. When we have that, when we don't have that, you know, or national liberation movements that don't basically claim to be socialist, but are anti-imperialist, seriously anti-imperialist, we, you know, you cannot invest, China cannot invest in such, I think, you know, they have their own calculus, of course, they know what they're doing. They're not going to, you know, pour water in a sieve. It's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to fill anything. It's going to create the conditions for corruption at the level of the proletariat and so forth, because the ideology of resistance is not there. The consciousness of resistance is But at the same time, and this is an important point I think, China's investments abroad and its capitalization of developing countries abroad, its investments in infrastructure and other areas that cement the power of the people abroad is an anti-imperialist form of struggle. What imperialism is about in the third world is to destroy the capital of the people, to destroy the productive capacity of the people. and to take the resources, to basically massacre them and take the resources for as little money as possible. And if you can, through the massacring process, make money out of the massacre itself and the loss of life, you also monetize the loss of life and you create money out of the process of death itself, death cells. And that's what imperialism is doing at this late stage. And so if we think about China, China is re-empowering states through investments. It's re-empowering Iran, for instance, which is a foe of the United States in the region. It is providing for Russia an alternative trade and investment output. and for many other nations around the world. So it is actually pivotal in resituating the global balance of power, reshaping the global balance of power, and making sure that a better world order is about to be birthed. But the problem remains is that, and I think, it chives away, and that's from an ideological indoctrination, as the Soviet Union did. I'm not sure I'm in a position to judge whether this is going, whether you allow the demonstration effect, the fact that we are building capacity for the people so they have something to rely on in their fight and they have something to lose if imperialism comes in, that sort of thing, and you let that process itself percolate a consciousness of resistance. That is bred in the national culture and in the national conditions themselves. Or would it be better to follow the Soviet model of ideological indoctrination? I am going to basically have relations with communist parties. and our national liberation movements and so on and so forth. There is a balance to strike between these two. I think now, given the aggressiveness of the United States and the way it is acting globally, it's assault on Venezuela, it's assault on Iran, it's assault on Russia, and the assault on the developing world people everywhere, especially the Arab people in Palestine and Gaza. and everywhere in the Arab world and Africa. That sort of aggression, I don't think one can, and that's my own point of view, can just sit and wait for the process, for the slow gestating process to transpire into some revolutionary consciousness on a time of its own. Because Imperialism and capitalism own the means of production of knowledge and they can produce money by how much power they hold. So basically when they print money in order to buy people's will and to buy people's so that they betray their countries and so on. This is an investment for them because if they invest in the weakening of the other, they gain power. And when you have power, you can print money at will. And the money that basically is your debt becomes your wealth because people hold that money, cherish that dollar as a form of credit and it holds the world's savings. So there is now, we are at a point where, you know, Lenin says delay is a crime. And one has to keep that in mind because the world is not only suffocating at the level socially at the hands of imperialism, it's also suffocating environmentally. Most environmental studies say there isn't going to be anything worthwhile in the future, left. And so that means we've accumulated so much destruction and so much wasted lives and wasted nature. So waiting at this time is not easy when we see what is happening. And we need to incentivize, to catalyze, to mobilize the masses in anti-imperialist trouble. I think there is enough for the world to see that the Chinese model is no different than any other socialist model that basically says that I want to deploy resources for the benefit of the people and I'm going to trade off the short-term losses for long-term gains. But with all with keeping in mind that without sovereignty and national security, and a national security and a sovereignty that is, whose backbone is the security of the proletariat of that country, of the working class of that country. This is a mathematical formula for security and sovereignty. The proletariat is sovereign and the proletariat is represented in the state. The body of the state is the body of the proletariat and all these things. So without an understanding of these preliminary ABC principles of socialist development. We cannot go anywhere. But it is a moral dilemma, in a sense, on how to conduct. I'm not sure I know enough if I wasn't in the position of the Chinese Communist Party to judge on how to intervene globally to rebalance the global power structure in favor of the global proletariat.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's something.

Henry Hakimaki: And while you say you don't know enough about it, that's more or less the point that I want to end this conversation on because, and this is just to tease the next conversation that I'm going to have with you, Ali, and hopefully soon, our next conversation is going to be about the state of the imperialist world system today. And inevitably, China is going to feature quite heavily in that conversation as well. But I think that we can kind of preface that conversation with a concluding question here. And I'm going to take I guess, two points and put them together into one, which is to think about the role of China for the Global South as an alternative to the West for the Global South, and also as a model for the Global South to look to. So in this question, I first want to talk about Western Marxism, a topic that you and I talk about quite a bit in our private conversations between each other. We're often talking about Western Marxists and... Well, anyway, that's for us, Ali. We'll talk more about Western Marxism later. But... In any case, the limitations of Western Marxism, and this is as you say, is its tendency to be predefined by imperial rent. And one part of this question is how does the China model offer a living, evolving Marxist-Leninist framework that's uncompromised by the historical contradictions? providing a more relevant theoretical and practical guide for global revolutionary movements as they come. And then also, when we're talking about development, in Arab Development Denied, you've written about the subordination of national bourgeoisies to American global power. I also want to think about how the China model can provide a blueprint for countries in the assert a true national liberation, sovereignty and development and overcome the compradorial dynamics that you describe in some of your work. So do you have any thoughts about those aspects and how China can provide a model for the Global South when we think about these aspects of development?

Ali Qadri: Oh, yes. Well, I mean, socialism should be, you know, and in many forms. It's putting back in people what you've taken out of people. That's, you know, as simple as that. It's, again, sort of a formula, like, you know, if we take so many hours of work... If we take too many trees from their land, we're going to replant the trees and pay the adequate price for their hours to live a better life, better life all the time, and so on. So that's what socialism is about, is not to let... And the model that the private investment, the incentive, and the privateer is capable of developing better than the social, there is no such thing as private. The private is itself... pretty much a product of the social. And if the social controls the private, it does what the private wants. The private does what the social wants it to do. If you look at China, for instance, you have millionaires in China. But these millionaires, as I said, they're just high-paid employees who cannot spend all the money they save. They must deposit it in their Chinese bank. They can't take it abroad. And the Chinese banks reinvest it in society. And in better wages. And I said, so they have, in China, they have a better understanding of the money system. You know, that money is actually, serves the people again. You know, money works for the people instead of people working for the money. So the money fetish is... is taken out of the picture in this case. So socialism is not just a model for China. Now socialism is an imperative for the planet. It's no longer a choice given the environmental catastrophe that we have. The social catastrophe, one can always speak in the language of the British aristocracy and say there are too many people and wars limit the number of people and famines limit the number of people. So they have a sort of moral justification, their moral justification, for eliminating too many people prematurely around the world. But when you eliminate nature as well, you kill nature prematurely, so much so that it doesn't support life anymore in the next 60 or 70 years, as has been said. or that if you can cause a disequilibrium in the course of natural development, such that the planet will not be in the shape we're seeing now because of some disequilibrium that occurs in the clock of nature, then things are completely... And that could occur before 70 years, given the rise in average temperatures and so forth. So what we have is a situation Where socialism, it should be a model for all of humanity, not just, you know, no longer just for the South, really. Unfortunately, again, which brings the rent issue, you know, the rent issue is when you have a system of two-tiered system of South and North, and the South is actually the what we have, what we, you know, what dies in order to make the North lives. And you have a system that grows like that. The death of the South is the life of the North. But altogether, the whole system is dying. But none in the North realizes that this is the case, that this system is not sustainable. And in that case, we can go on forever because the North is pretty much capitalist and the North owns the means of production of knowledge and they've weaponized theory. If you read, Who Paid the Pipers by Gabriel Rockhill, a book which has been published recently. And it speaks of the obvious, really, that there's so much that's being done to subvert and twist the minds of people so that they conform to the capitalist ethos. And all of this is done clandestinely. And yet, you know, there's so much evidence to prove that. In the mainstream, nothing's... Very little is being said about that. It's a huge area of political science and international relations. But if you dig into political science and international relations, the minute you bring this issue, they'll tell you it's a conspiracy theory. It is not a conspiracy theory. The second, I mean, even it is higher than defense spending anywhere because it's the propaganda spending. It's both hidden and unhidden spending. So imagine that we have a social science that is incapable of dealing with the fact that much of the world runs the way it does, you know, in the horrific state it is in, on the fact that you have a process, an engineered and a sui generis process, a process that grows out of its own momentum to twist the minds of people and to buy intellectuals and to dominate the intellectual airwaves and to basically dumbed down the masses and so on. So you have a system of this nature. Now what we have in the Chinese model in particular is its economic weight. Because China is literally the biggest economy, because it's about 40% of world manufacturing, and that 40% is bigger than the OECD put together, I think, you know, some estimates, right? So when you have 40% of world manufacturing, you're the richest nation. Because that's where the wealth is. The wealth is in product, the real wealth. It is not in the future value of an IT company in the States. It's in the real value of the assets that we have now, which also have a real future value, not a debt-inflated future value, a fictitious capital-inflated future value like Google's and all these companies. and the AIs and so on which create bubbles and the transom bubbles, but the bubbles are themselves, the bubbles are created to pauperize and to induce more wars. They're created on purpose because war and pauperization are the modus operandi of the way of things work for the system to grow because exploitation means And oppression means killing people, killing and making poor and killing and so on. So in a system that runs like this, in a system which is two-tiered, which has, you know, then you have the Chinese model, because of its weight, it's now showing us a different path of development, a path of development which we need. which corresponds to our conditions of being, to our conditions of existence. But yet, the ideological victory of capital, the fact, you know, Lenin encountered this when he says, I am here faced with a tremendous culture that capital has created. I'm not just fighting you know, the whites or the aggression of the foreign armies as they step in. But I'm fighting also the traditions and habits and the culture of the old system, which has been built over centuries of that ragged class system. And so the point is, Under these circumstances, China is faced with the same thing, and we are faced with the same thing, that we have a world which is dominated by a culture that endears and makes the class system sacrosanct. It does everything with the notion that there is scarcity when we live in a world of overproduction as well. It doesn't see the actual facts anymore. People are so blinded, blinkered in their vision of reality because of the ideological. And what is more, as I said, I think I talked about this before, is that the mode of reasoning, they've not only, you know, fed people through rote learning the wrong things, the wrong ideas, they've actually made the brains of people think with the wrong methods of reasoning such that they arrive at the wrong ideas that pervert reality and that obscure reality. And so there is a state, if we think of a mental illness, somebody who's mentally ill, he doesn't realize the whole picture, he doesn't see the whole thing. Somebody who's mentally ill cannot see the whole picture. And because the masses, men, much of the masses globally do not see the whole picture and do not act upon it, the way things are, there is a And they do not act on it. There is a sort of general social mental illness, a mental illness that is being actually reproduced by capital and capitalism. And it's that mode of consciousness which needs to be reworked. You know, when you say I want to propose historical materialism as a different way of thinking, as a different method of reasoning, what historical materialism does is not so obscure. It is to situate things in history in real time and to think that history changes. And every time that changes, it becomes a qualitatively... It becomes in a qualitatively different state. And if it's in a qualitatively different state, it is no longer comparable with what was before because of the different quality of what is before. We have apples and oranges, so to speak. The introduction of the dimension of real time, the dimension of history in thought to infuse a consciousness with a sounder mode of reason is no longer there. Capital has won, from what we see now, capital has won this game so far. But there is a point, there is a threshold at which this will change. Nobody can tell what this threshold is. We are yet to see what's going to happen.

Henry Hakimaki: I think that that's a great note to end on, Ali. And like I said, I think that this final point that we had here in this discussion will fit in very well with the conversation that we'll have next time, which again, I'm hoping is very soon on the state of the imperialist world system today. Again, listeners are guests. is a fan favorite. I'm sure that you're already very familiar with his work, Ali Qadri, as well as a personal friend of mine. Ali, I'm hoping you visit sometime soon. We've got our villages waiting for you. But in any case, is there anything that you would like to point the listeners to? I know that you said... with the situation in Gaza, you've been doing a lot of speaking and not as much writing these days, but is there any work that either you have done, speeches that you have made, or even work that you have been reading from other people that you would particularly recommend to them at this time?

Ali Qadri: I strongly recommend Torquil Lawson's book and the recent book and Gabriel Rockhill's Who Paid the Piper? These are very, very good books and they're good comrades. And my book on China was translated to Mandarin recently, but for those who read Mandarin. And I was in Tunis, there was a fantastic conference by a group that works on agriculture, and I was there with Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, and many others, and I also recommend people listen to this brilliant, because this was a fantastic conference, and I recommend that people listen to the conference. It's online, so I'm sure people can find it.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, and hopefully I remembered to include the link to it in the show notes, but listeners, check the show notes. Hopefully I have the links to Torkel's works, which his most recent works have come out through ISCRA, and I worked on one of them, so that was a great pleasure. as well as Gabriel's book, which I know he recently had an episode with Adnan on the Adnan Hussain show. And we'll be releasing that audio on our platform as well sometime soon. And the conference that you mentioned in Tunis, I'll try to get the link into the show notes for that as well. So with that being said, then, Ali, it was great to see you again. Listeners, just a reminder that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. And you can find me and Guerrilla History on various social media platforms. But as I said at the beginning, and as I've been saying in basically every episode recently, I have not been online at all because everything is sanctioned these days. So you can still follow us, though, if you would like to. And with that being said, and until next time, then, listeners, solidarity.