Bhaskar Sunkara
speaker
1,609 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Dec 2022
Bhaskar Sunkara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, I think it's very similar to the Soviet case in that socialism came to China in
through not a base of organized workers in a capitalist country at a certain level of development and so on, but it came through the countryside and in conditions of civil war, strife, Japanese invasion, and whatever else.
And Mao built his base in the peasantry and then came down to the city
to govern and try to build a base and rule over workers.
So it was kind of an inversion of classic socialist theory.
Now, the same thing that I said before about Stalin and assessing the Soviet Union has to apply here.
Because obviously, you know, I oppose authoritarianism and, you know, all sorts of moral condemnations I should do.
But to look at what the Chinese Communist Party actually accomplished...
I think we kind of need to take a step backwards from our moral opposition to the means in which they accomplish it and just look at it developmentally.
China benefited greatly from the Communist Party's implementation of basic education and healthcare.
So in a lot of China, you had one of the conditions, women were absolutely terrible.
There was still foot binding and all sorts of like terrible backward practices.
You had a huge vast majority of the population that was illiterate without any access to basic education, and you had no health access, especially in the countryside.
So those are the three good things that China did.
Improve the status of women, get everyone into primary education, and improve the lot of health care.
Besides for that, their agricultural campaign was a failure, just like Stalin's for many of the same reasons I mentioned before.
The Great Leap Forward and crash industrialization didn't really work.
either um in a way is china better than india or other um countries that that didn't have the basic education and the strong state authority and and um the the health improvements and whatever i think maybe but i think that's why we need to sometimes go beyond just economic measures of success
Because if you told me tomorrow, the U.S.
will grow at 3% if we maintain democracy, but it'll grow at 8%, 9%.
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