E. Mett

Faced with economic collapse the bourgeoisie can no longer pretend that there is no crisis. In the face of skyrocketing trade and payments deficits, the bourgeoisie of each country must seek to make its national capital competitive on the world market again.

Everywhere events impose one policy and only one policy on the bourgeoisie: draconian austerity programs. To make the national capital competitive, to take away markets from rivals, and to restore an adequate rate of profit for capital, requires drastic cuts in “social” spending (education, health care, public transportation, housing) and the installation of controls over wages.

...

China is in fashion. Enthusiasm for China can be found amongst liberals, technocrats and members of the World Bank. In the popular view “the people are brave and the culture squeaky clean.”

Maoists and proto-Maoists proclaim China as a genuine Socialist country, valiantly struggling through the unity of its three “classes”—the peasants, workers and the glorious Peoples’ Liberation Army—to industrialize without the bureaucratic distortions of the revisionist USSR.

...