From Commune to Capitalism

From Commune to Capitalism PDF Author: Zhun Xu
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583676988
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Socialism and capitalism in the Chinese countryside -- Chinese agrarian change in world-historical context -- Agricultural productivity and decollectivization -- The political economy of decollectivization -- The achievement, contradictions, and demise of rural collectives

How China Became Capitalist

How China Became Capitalist PDF Author: R. Coase
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137019379
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.

Acid Communism

Acid Communism PDF Author: Mark Fisher
Publisher: Pattern Books
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 72

Book Description
A short zine collecting an introduction to the concept by Matt Colquhoun that appeared in 'krisis journal for contemporary philosophy Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins' and the unfinished introduction to the unfinished book on Acid Communism that Mark Fisher was working on before his death in 2017. "In this way ‘Acid’ is desire, as corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, flowing through the multiplicities of communism itself to create alinguistic feedback loops; an ideological accelerator through which the new and previously unknown might be found in the politics we mistakenly think we already know, reinstantiating a politics to come." —Matt Colquhoun

The Third Pillar

The Third Pillar PDF Author: Raghuram Rajan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525558330
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
Revised and updated Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award From one of the most important economic thinkers of our time, a brilliant and far-seeing analysis of the current populist backlash against globalization. Raghuram Rajan, distinguished University of Chicago professor, former IMF chief economist, head of India's central bank, and author of the 2010 FT-Goldman-Sachs Book of the Year Fault Lines, has an unparalleled vantage point onto the social and economic consequences of globalization and their ultimate effect on our politics. In The Third Pillar he offers up a magnificent big-picture framework for understanding how these three forces--the state, markets, and our communities--interact, why things begin to break down, and how we can find our way back to a more secure and stable plane. The "third pillar" of the title is the community we live in. Economists all too often understand their field as the relationship between markets and the state, and they leave squishy social issues for other people. That's not just myopic, Rajan argues; it's dangerous. All economics is actually socioeconomics - all markets are embedded in a web of human relations, values and norms. As he shows, throughout history, technological phase shifts have ripped the market out of those old webs and led to violent backlashes, and to what we now call populism. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached, but it can be ugly and messy, especially if done wrong. Right now, we're doing it wrong. As markets scale up, the state scales up with it, concentrating economic and political power in flourishing central hubs and leaving the periphery to decompose, figuratively and even literally. Instead, Rajan offers a way to rethink the relationship between the market and civil society and argues for a return to strengthening and empowering local communities as an antidote to growing despair and unrest. Rajan is not a doctrinaire conservative, so his ultimate argument that decision-making has to be devolved to the grass roots or our democracy will continue to wither, is sure to be provocative. But even setting aside its solutions, The Third Pillar is a masterpiece of explication, a book that will be a classic of its kind for its offering of a wise, authoritative and humane explanation of the forces that have wrought such a sea change in our lives.

Between Capitalism and Community

Between Capitalism and Community PDF Author: Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583678883
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
Connects the Marxist construct of capitalism to systems of community In this book, Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning, Beyond Capital. Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences that are central to Marx’s analysis. In taking this approach, Marx tended to obscure not only the centrality of capital’s “immanent drive” and “constant tendency” to divide the working class but also the political economy of the working class (“social production controlled by social foresight”). In Between Capitalism and Community, Lebowitz demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community. Whereas Marx’s intellectual construct of capitalism treats it as an organic system that reproduces its premises of capital and wage-labor (including a working class that looks upon the requirements of capital “as self-evident natural laws”), Lebowitz argues that the struggle of workers in common and activities based upon solidarity point in the direction of the organic system of community, an alternative system that produces its own premises, communality, and recognition of the needs of others. If we are to escape the ultimate barbarism portended by the existing crisis of the earth system, the subordination of the system of capitalism by that of community is essential. Since the interregnum in which capitalism and community coexist is marked by the interpenetration and mutual deformation of both sides within this whole, however, the path to community cannot emerge spontaneously but requires a revolutionary party that stresses the development of the capacities of people through their protagonism.

Ours to Master and to Own

Ours to Master and to Own PDF Author: Immanuel Ness
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 160846119X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. With specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often underappreciated historical tradition. Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers’ control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to create a new world from the ashes of the old. Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and edits WorkingUSA. Dario Azzellini is a writer, documentary director, and political scientist at Johannes Kepler University in Linz.

Community Capitalism in China

Community Capitalism in China PDF Author: Xiaoshuo Hou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139620347
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Hou proposes to end the dichotomous view of the state and the market, and capitalism and communism, by examining the local institutional innovation in three villages in China and presents community capitalism as an alternative to the neoliberal model of development. Community is both the unit of redistribution and the entity that mobilizes resources to compete in the market; collectivism creates the boundary that sets the community apart from the outside and justifies and sustains the model. Community capitalism differs from Mao-era collectivism, when individual interests were buried in the name of collective interests and market competition was not a concern. This book demonstrates the embeddedness of the market in community, showing how social relations, group solidarity, power, honor, and other values play an important role in these villages' social and economic organization.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics PDF Author: Roland Boer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811616221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
This book covers the whole system of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, dealing with Deng Xiaoping’s theory, the socialist market economy, a moderately well-off (Xiaokang) society, China’s practice and theory of socialist democracy, human rights, and Xi Jinping’s Marxism. In short, the resolute focus is the Reform and Opening-Up. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is one of the most important global realities today. However, the concept and its practice remain largely misunderstood outside China. This book sets to redress such a lack of knowledge, by making available to non-Chinese speakers the sophisticated debates and conclusions in China concerning socialism with Chinese Characteristics. It presents this material in a way that is both accessible and thorough.

The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune PDF Author: Donny Gluckstein
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608461181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
For two months in 1871, the workers of Paris took control of Europe's most celebrated capital city. When they established the world's first workers' democracy--the Paris Commune--they found no ready-made blueprints, and no precedents to study for how to run their city without princes, prison wardens, or professional politicians. All they had was the boundless revolutionary enthusiasm of Paris's socialists, communists, anarchists, and radical Jacobins, all of whom threw their energies into creating a new society. As the city's bakers, industrial workers, and other "ruffians" built new institutions of collective political power to overturn social and economic inequality, their former rulers sought to thwart their efforts by any means necessary--ultimately deciding to drown the Communards in blood. By paying particular attention to the historic problems of the Commune, critical debates over its implications, and the glimpse of a better world the Commune provided, Gluckstein reveals its enduring lessons and inspiration for today's struggles. Donny Gluckstein is author of The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class and The Tragedy of Bukharin. He is a lecturer in history in Edinburgh and is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

From Commune to Capitalism

From Commune to Capitalism PDF Author: Zhun Xu
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583677003
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
An account of China's transition into a global capitalist economy, as agrarian reform in the 1980s led Chinese peasants to industrial cities and into poverty In the early 1980s, China undertook a massive reform that dismantled its socialist rural collectives and divided the land among millions of small peasant families. Known as the decollectivization campaign, it is one of the most significant reforms in China's transition to a market economy. From the beginning, the official Chinese accounts, and many academic writings, uncritically portray this campaign as a huge success, both for the peasants and the economy as a whole. This mainstream history argues that the rural communes, suffering from inefficiency, greatly improved agricultural productivity under the decollectivization reform. It also describes how the peasants, due to their dissatisfaction with the rural regime, spontaneously organized and collectively dismantled the collective system. A closer examination suggests a much different and more nuanced story. By combining historical archives, field work, and critical statistical examinations, From Commune to Capitalism argues that the decollectivization campaign was neither a bottom-up, spontaneous peasant movement, nor necessarily efficiency-improving. On the contrary, the reform was mainly a top-down, coercive campaign, and most of the efficiency gains came from simply increasing the usage of inputs, such as land and labor, rather than institutional changes. The book also asks an important question: Why did most of the peasants peacefully accept this reform? Zhun Xu answers that the problems of the communes contributed to the passiveness of the peasantry; that decollectivization, by depoliticizing the peasantry and freeing massive rural labor to compete with the urban workers, served as both the political and economic basis for consequent Chinese neoliberal reforms and a massive increase in all forms of economic, political, and social inequality. Decollectivization was, indeed, a huge success, although far from the sort suggested by mainstream accounts.
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