China: Marxist Idealogy vs. Market Reality

[Howell]

The Communist Party has launched a campaign among political leaders and senior
academics to modernize Chinese Marxism, seeking to reconcile increasingly obvious
contradictions between the government's founding ideology and its broad free-market
reforms. The campaign involves the allocation of millions of dollars to produce new
translations of Marxist literature and to update texts for secondary school and
university students obliged to study the official philosophy, officials said. In
addition, the campaign will promote more research on how Marxism can be redefined to
inform China's policies even as private enterprise increasingly becomes the basis of
its economy, they explained. The undertaking, which coincides with an 18-month
campaign to reinvigorate the party rank and file, seems designed as a response to
frequent complaints about the chasm between official discourse in Beijing --
emphasizing "socialism with Chinese characteristics" -- and the growing reality of
often unbridled capitalism in which party officials are eager partners. Unease over
this gap has become particularly apparent among university students, who often chafe
at their required classes on Marxist theory. A prominent university's party
secretary recently told a visitor that his school had resolved the problem by simply
teaching traditional Chinese philosophy during the time set aside for the study of
Marxism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/04/AR2005120400982.html

 

[Tannin]

Hmmm ... sounds like we are going to get a whole new version of alleged Marx which will, if I am any guess, bear little relation to the version of alleged Marx published by the Maoists in the past, and still less to what the great scholar actually wrote.

Sometimes - well, often actually - I wish that the Maos and Lennins of this world would stop pretending to base their philosophy on Marx. It is just as bad as what Cardinal Richelau and the Spanish Inquisition did to a perfectly good little religion some hundreds of years ago. Well, worse actually, as Marx (in the orignal, not in the buggerised-about rehashes we usually see) makes a good deal more sense than any religious text I ever read.

Of course, it's not a fair comparison, as it's a fair bet that what Christ actually said in person, not as reported at fifth-hand in a book edited by committee and hand-copied by a thousand different scribes, would have made a good deal more sense than the versions we can read today.

Marx himself put it best. When confronted, late in life, with some of the silliness being perpetrated by his not-very-bright so-called followers, he simply remarked "I am not a Marxist".

 

[sechs]

Let's call it the great leap sideways and be done with it.

I doubt these folks have even read the Communist Manifesto....

 

[Explorer]

The new manifesto probably has opening statement "Workers of the world unite!" replaced with "Serfdom employed by multi-national corporations, obey!"