Farley is correct in pointing out the misleading use of the word “profit” in the article. Profit is surplus value—the difference between what workers produce, on one hand, and the wages they get as well as other production costs, on the other—appropriated by capitalists through their ownership of the means of production. The majority of basic industry inside China today is state-owned. The managers of these companies run them using capitalist methods with the goal of “profitability” at the expense of the needs of working people. But these managers do not appropriate the ensuing wealth as individuals; the surplus value created by workers goes to the state. From there, it is apportioned by the ruling bureaucracy. Managers of state companies hope that the more “profitable” their enterprise, the greater their personal benefits will be—whether a fancy house, servants, cars, or other privileges that feed their bourgeois aspirations.

At the same time, the article was accurate in its description of the brutal conditions imposed on workers by Chinese companies in Africa. In a speech to the 1965 Afro-Asian conference in Algeria, Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban Revolution, said, “Socialism cannot exist without a profound change in consciousness resulting in new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level, within the societies where socialism is being built or has been built, and on a world scale…” The actions of the Chinese bureaucracy at home and abroad go in exactly the opposite direction by mimicking bourgeois values in their most unrefined and brutal form.

Guevara accused the governments of so-called socialist countries of “tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West” for their trade practices with the underdeveloped world. The imperialist powers set the terms: high prices, “cheap” labor power, and so on. But Stalinist bureaucrats or those of the Maoist variety use those terms to their own advantage.

China is a workers state, where workers and peasants overturned capitalist property relations and threw the capitalist class out of political power. There are individual capitalists in China today who own factories and mines, but they are not the ruling class. Their prerogatives and privileges are subordinated to the needs of China’s planned economy. The lack of revolutionary working-class leadership from the outset of the 1949 revolution means that working people have been driven out of politics. But the capitalist wannabes and the small bourgeoisie do not have carte blanche to exploit workers for personal profit, like in capitalist countries.

The bureaucratic ruling caste is motivated by the maintenance, and, if possible, expansion, of its privileged position in society. But its power rests on the nationalized property relations. Unlike a bourgeoisie, this caste is parasitic. It is not historically necessary. Its sole social function is administering and apportioning the wealth produced by working people in an unequal way, to its own benefit. To achieve this goal, the ruling bureaucrats resort to repressive measures and political alienation of the working class.

The Chinese government is not driven to export capital abroad as capitalists do in the United States or other imperialist countries. Marxists use the term “imperialism” to describe the expansionism of finance capital and other features of the highest and last stage of capitalism. The Chinese economy is marked by nationalized property relations and economic planning—however distorted in a workers state deformed at birth, which is degenerating further through “market socialism.” Under an economic system dominated by monopolies and finance capital, the capitalists are periodically driven to wars abroad to conquer new markets and resources to defend their profit interests. A parasitic caste can survive without using the same methods of plunder, while siphoning off wealth produced by labor and nature abroad through payments in kind.
 
 
Related articles:
Beijing expands trade, investment in Angola
Letters  
 
 
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