memes

Norton was just an example, I view him as sort of the champion of the Marxist China wishcasters in the current day, but there are many people with virtually identical beliefs who will tell you most of the same things.

Have you read a lot of Xiaohongshu's posts?

There are no Marxist voices in the mainstream today. All the distinguished Marxist economists have long been banished to the humanities and social science departments long ago. They do write books, sometimes articles/blogs on the internet, and newspaper columns, but they have very little influence on policymaking. The mainstream is full on dominated by Western economists these days.

If you actually listen to the debate, both sides are openly making fun of the Mao era central planners for being inefficient lol.

Also FYI the correct term for Marxist economics in China is “political economy” (政治经济学). Nobody uses the word Marxist economics. Similarly, neoclassical economics is called “Western economics” (西方经济学). If you don’t know the correct terminology in Chinese, it can be very difficult to search for the relevant information you want.

https://hexbear.net/comment/6291342

I personally know someone who grew up under Mao, who was sent to work in a factory as a teenager under his policy (and doesn't really cherish those memories but maintains a life-defining respect for him). He's a huge revisionist and makes silly claims about China if you start from a zoomed-out ideological standpoint (claims silly enough that I refuted them in seconds such that he admitted they weren't right), but has plenty of knowledge about the state of the country in many more concrete respects (he can talk my head off about manufacturing), and everything that he's told me in terms of concrete facts comports with Xiaohongshu's characterizations: Marxism exists in academia, but when people are studying economics, they are studying Western economics and those are the lines along which they debate economics, it just manifests very differently because China has different circumstances from places like America and has threats to its sovereignty that are a lot more imminent than merely imploding under its own weight, which is America's only threat (and one that is still killing it anyway). That is why a basically nationalist project remains historically progressive.

Another one from our comrade:

That was before Hudson and Harvey went to the Marx conference in Beijing in 2018, where they were both stunned that Capital Vol. 3 was never taught in China.

Read his interview from 2018 here: China’s housing: It Doesn’t Have to be This Way

You’d think that China would have learned this by looking at the West, or at least by reading Volume 3 of Capital. In fact the Peking University meeting, the Second World Conference on Marxism, David Harvey gave the opening and closing speech. His point was that the Chinese should read Volume III of Capital to understand why and how the volume of debt and credit grows exponentially. As banks get richer and richer, the One Percent get richer. They need to nurture more and more markets for their credit and debt creation. So they lend on easier and easier terms, at a rising proportion of the home’s value. So it’s bank credit that has been inflating the price of housing.

David Harvey asked how China can let the price of housing go up so high in Shanghai (the most privatized city) that almost everybody who has a house is a millionaire. How can China expect to remain competitive in exporting industrial products when the cost of housing is so high?

Unfortunately, his talk and mine were almost the only economic talks at the meeting in Peking. As one of the Russian attendees pointed out to me, “Marxism” is the Chinese word for politics. “Marxism with Chinese characteristics” means to doing what they want politically. But economically they’ve sent their students to the United States, to attend business schools to learn how U.S. financial engineering practices.

Shanghai is where Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys came in the 1970s and early 80s, because the Chinese government worried that if western Marxists came over, they would tend to interfere with domestic Chinese politics. So actually, China had less exposure to foreign Marxian economics than to U.S.-style neoliberal teaching.

https://hexbear.net/comment/6313832

I won't pretend that my views are identical to theirs, that is not remotely true, but the central point in this branch of our discussion is something where I believe they agree with me.