Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision. Satyananda J. Gabriel

Abstract

Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision, by Satyananda J. Gabriel. London: Routledge, 2006. [xii] + 194 pp. £75.00 (hardcover). In this book, Satyananda Gabriel uses the tools of Marxism to understand the social and economic transformation of China since reform began in the late 1970s. His is an Althusserian, post-structuralist version of Marxism, most closely associated with the journal Rethinking Marxism. In a span of only 173 pages, Gabriel introduces his theoretical tools, discusses the changing social contract in China, examines the transition to labor markets, studies the changing characteristics of both township and village enterprises and state-run enterprises, reviews the transformation of agriculture, considers the emergence of reformed and of new financial institutions, and reflects on the interactions between all these changes and China's increasing engagement with the global economy. Throughout this gallop, Gabriel deploys two principal theoretical tools. One is the concept of overdetermination, the notion that a process reflects the totality of other social processes, rather than being produced by a subset of important factors (the remainder being insignificant). A process is understood as a constellation of events that produce a state of being: the state of being exists only insofar as the constellation of events continues to be reproduced. A transition, then, occurs when one set of processes is replaced by another, and a shift in the prevalence of one class process to another is a class transition. No factor is the sole determinant; all processes and so all transitions are the effect of other processes, no single one of which is determinate. The other is a particular definition of class, which-following Resnick and Wolff-is understood as the relationship by which humans engage in the performance, appropriation and distribution of surplus labor. This definition differs from a classical Marxist definition in which class is identified with the nature and extent of property ownership: for example, in capitalism, capitalists and workers are separated by their ownership (and non-ownership) of the means of production, a separation that is the key to understanding the mode and relations of production. Likewise it differs from what Gabriel calls the modernist Marxist focus on technology (forces of production) as the key determinant of social change. As is clear from the shortness of the book and the breadth of topics covered, Gabriel's contribution is principally theoretical-his interpretation of change in China-rather than empirical. He makes several claims. The first is that struggles for the political control of the Chinese Communist Party have been principally struggles over versions of Marxism. On the one side were the Maoists, who understood class struggle to be the principal driver of social change-struggle, that is, over the conditions under which surplus labor is performed, appropriated and distributed. On the other side were (and are) the modernist Marxists, including Zhou, Deng, Jiang and Hu, to whom technology rather than class is the principal driving force of history. It is explicit in this argument that the post-Mao reformers were and are Marxists (of a particular kind). The second claim is that post-revolutionary China was feudal. In other words, the transition that is embodied in the post-1978 reforms is a transition from (state) feudalism. Gabriel understands a feudal class process as one in which direct producers (people who actually do the physical work) are obliged by socially constituted ties to perform surplus labor for a specific individual or institution. During the Great Leap Forward, in the late 1950s, both rural and urban direct producers became bound to serve the state, to produce a surplus for the state and receive in return certain welfare protections. …