Let’s look at some opening paragraphs from Baker’s recent report on Mein Trumpf and Chinese president Xi Jinping’s meeting in Washington yesterday:
It was quite a striking contrast, as Baker suggests: the supposed “leader of the free world,” the US president, banning members of the American “free press” from a major world event on White House grounds while state media from openly authoritarian China are welcomed.
So far, so good.
But then things get problematic:
“The scene on Pennsylvania Avenue on Thursday morning” [,Baker continues,] captured a surreal week in the life of Washington. The president of the United States barred American reporters because he labeled them a threat to national security, while welcoming Chinese reporters who answer to the communist dictatorship in Beijing.”
“This would be the same president who is running government-paid television advertising vowing to stop the United States from becoming socialist or communist in the same week that he held a friendly meeting with the democratic socialist mayor of New York and rolled out a literal red carpet for the communist president of China. The same president who is waging economic war against the prime minister of Canada while inviting the president of Russia to visit his Florida golf club.”
China is Capitalist
Wait, hold on. What “communist dictatorship in Beijing”? What “communist president”? What’s with the neo-Cold War bullshit here? China is capitalist, having abandoned socialism and communism following Mao’s Zedong death in 1976.
Half a century later, “China is capitalist,” in the words of Eli Friedman, Professor of International and Comparative Labor in Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. As Friedman explained six years ago:
“Twenty-first century China is capitalist… a dramatic transformation for a country that had basically eliminated private ownership of the means of production by the end of the 1950s, while engaging in some of the twentieth century’s most radical political experiments during the following decade” — a transformation reflecting “the profound reorganization of the relations of production over the past forty years.”
Further:
‘Indicators of Chinese capitalism abound. The country’s metropolises are adorned with Ferraris and Gucci stores, foreign and domestic corporate logos are emblazoned across the skyline, and high-rise luxury housing has sprouted in every major urban core. China’s rapid evolution from one of the most economically equal countries in the world to one of the most unequal is suggestive of major structural shifts. We might also see China’s membership in the WTO, the government’s continued insistence that it is in fact a market economy, or Xi Jinping defending globalization in Davos and advocating for the market to play a “decisive role” in resource allocation, as signs that the state is embracing capitalism. Similarly, one can find widespread cultural expressions that suggest an underlying capitalist orientation, including the valorization of hard work, crass consumerism, and the worship of the unique genius of corporate heroes from Steve Jobs to Jack Ma.’
Going beneath these surface effects of capitalism, Friedman showed how 21st Century “communist” China exhibited core and hallmark characteristics of capitalist social and political orders: universalized commodity production, commodified labor power and capitalist labor relations, the merciless exploitation of wage-earners, and a “state [that] now rules in the general interest of capital.”
“As with every other capitalist country,” Friedman wrote, “the Chinese state has its own relative autonomy, and one may quibble about which state has more autonomy. But it is apparent enough that the state has hitched its wagon to the star of capitalist value, which has effected a profound shift in governance” — a shift seen in the “communist” Chinese state’s fierce “political subjugation of the proletariat.”
I recommend Friedman’s full essay, which goes in greater depth than can be dealt with here on how “the logic of capitalist value production has insinuated itself into the economy and state, dramatically reformulating China’s social structure.”
But don’t take it just from a Marxian academic. Thirteen years ago, no less a pro-capitalist “free market” institution than the Cato Institute argued that “Over the past 35 years, China has embraced capitalism” and “not just in the economy.”
Contrary to Baker, China is not a “communist dictatorship” and its president is communist in name only[1].
(Note also how Baker brings New York City’s progressive, social-democratish and democratically elected mayor into the discussion, as if having a “friendly” meeting with Mamdani is somehow alignment with the big bad authoritarian left. Creepy.)
Trump Has “Long Given the Impression He May Be” for Autocracy
Finally, get a load of this opening sentence in the fourth paragraph in Baker’s report: “In the epic contest between democracy and autocracy, Mr. Trump has long given the impression that he may be on the other side.”
There must be some kind of award for understatement that we can send to Baker for that statement! Good grief, Mr, Baker, ya think? Did you get that impression, maybe a bit? You might be on to something there!
For God’s sake, Trump is a flat-out fascist bidding along with his fascist regime and party (full of people far more coherent and effective than him) to remake the US along genocidally racist, patriarchal, xenophobically nationalist, fundamentalist, arch-militarist, and dictatorial lines, beyond previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law, replete with a vast ethnic cleansing campaign, an expanding network of deadly concentration and torture camps, militarily occupied cities, a federal militarized police force of masked thugs, the regular defiance of court orders (as last night with the banning of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from covering the state dinner with Xi) and a rolling coup against what’s left of free and fair elections in “the land of the free.”
Yeah, Peter Baker, it seems like Trump may on the side of autocracy! The “impression” is correct.
Note
+1. I highly recommend this important book on the difference between actual revolutionary communism and the “phony communism” of the USSR after the 1950s (dedicated to “material incentives” for workers, the end of revolutionary struggle after state ownership of the means of production, bureaucratic commandism, and peaceful co-existence with world capitalism) and China after 1976: https://revcom.us/en/avakian/ba-phony-communism-is-dead-long-live-real-communism.html