What kind of question is that?
Hard to say what was more fun — watching the Olympics or reading Anthony Lane’s two-part report from Beijing, published by the New Yorker and available here and here. Lane’s account is full of close observation, amusing trivia, and the kind of stories that the television coverage mostly overlooked. And of course it is all presented in Lane’s almost perfect prose, with its lovely turns of phrase, its wit, and its virtuoso metaphors. Lane usually likes to keep things light, but at the end of the second piece his thoughts return to another aspect of the Games mostly overlooked by NBC, for obvious reasons:
China has taken the gamble of seeking to make people rich before it has made them free. By the standards of the Enlightenment, that is either an illusion or a cruel con, though a free marketeer might argue that the liberties bestowed by trade and consumption—the strange half-freedom of the television commercial, for example, which enslaves us even as it promises the wealth of the world—are not to be sniffed at, and may, indeed, be what most of us ponder and pursue. (We shouldn’t worry more about the price of gas than about human rights in China, but we do.) As I dined, one day, on a Big Mac in a thunderstorm, seeking and failing to find refuge in a packed McDonald’s beside the Olympic Green subway station, I heard the Olympic theme song, playing on a tape loop inside, and watched a Chinese teen-ager in the doorway. She sucked on her milkshake and then sang along, swaying; she was, at once, everything that the capitalist corporation could hope for, and everything that the Communist Party had planned. I tried to talk to her, but she spoke no English; besides, what young person wants to be asked if he or she feels free? What kind of question is that? I thought of the sign I had seen on the first full day of the Games, in the Forbidden City, as I headed back from the cycling. “Hall of Earthly Tranquillity,” it read, and then, at the bottom, in smaller letters, “Made Possible by the American Express Company.” One world. One dream.
“I heard the Olympic theme song, playing on a tape loop inside, and watched a Chinese teen-ager in the doorway. She sucked on her milkshake and then sang along, swaying; she was, at once, everything that the capitalist corporation could hope for, and everything that the Communist Party had planned. ”
Is that really Marx’s, Lenin’s and Mao’s vision of what the people should become? Sucking milkshakes in McDonald’s, swaying to canned music? I’d think they’d be rolling in their graves!
This is interesting.
Bear with me for a moment.
As I mentioned recently in another comment, Quentin Skinner has a book called Liberty before Liberalism where he talks about a debate that went on in England during the 16th century (a formative period for our notions of liberty) when people were trying to define it.
One camp claimed that one was “free” is one’s personal liberty was not being actively violated. Another camp claimed one was “free” if the state lacked the ability to violate one’s freedom. In the event, the first camp won the debate. However, it was never completely resolved and lives with us here today in our acrimonious discussions about things like the torture of prisoners and the government’s power to eavesdrop on its citizens. A common conservative argument says that liberty is not violated if the government is spying on or torturing domestic “terrorists” as long as they are not torturing me. A common liberal argument is that if the government has the power to torture and spy on domestic “terrorists,” it in effect has the power to do it to me too (whether it actually is or not) and unless this is put under firm interdiction, one’s own liberty is in danger.
Now if we look at the Chinese situation, while they lack formal freedoms that we have, it may be a different question altogether as to how their citizens view this lack of formal freedoms. They may not feel oppressed by them personally (in general). And as the country becomes more prosperous, they may feel even less and less oppressed individually. The Chinese government may have figured out from the Western (or at least the American) experience, where class radicalism declined as prosperity grew and formal rights become less important as a day to day issue for most people. The government maintains its power by providing order and prosperity allowing the devil to take the hindmost (the hindmost consisting of selected dissidents or groups that are considered marginal by everyone else).
And Jim, yes, this is exactly what Marx, Lenin, and Mao thought. Marx speculated that the quality of life would reach its ultimate quality potential under communism. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a definition of what this quality might look like. Since he preached “materialism”, one could expect that this quality would be utterly materialistic, so why not McDonalds and milkshakes? The idea that Reds were puritans was something dreamed up by Western Communists, who were probably more influenced by Calvin than Karl.
I’ve seen it said that for Americans “freedom” means the freedom to buy. I’m not sure that’s the case, but the notion might fit the Chinese, and McDonald’s and a car become the end of life for them. What will happen when they are more educated and realize that there are other freedoms? Hmm.
I don’t know about that. We have a tendency in the US (on the left and the right) to reassure ourselves vis a vis other countries by comparing what is best about us with what is worst about the other country. When we think about other countries, we tend to put ourselves, as we our (in our heads) into the country as we see it (in our heads). China looks like an intolerable place to many; a place where the Tibetans are repressed and where it is dangerous to be a member of Falun Gong.
But the people on the ground may not feel this oppression the way that we imagine we would if we were they. It’s not that they are stupid. It’s also not that politics on the national scale and issues of what the political system is is unimportant. It’s that national politics is removed from the local scene. Sometimes it intrudes if the government tries some sort of local repression or sometimes if the government attempts some kind of local mobilization. But we should know from our own experiences that it is really difficult and time consuming for individuals to try to really understand what is going on and to really project themselves a different context (time or place) to see the implications for themselves of what a government is doing.
I remember watching what went on in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It all seemed so obvious to me that the students were correct. But I used to be a Red a in the old days with perhaps a bit more interest in how these sorts of things would go. Whether the students were in fact right or not, I knew that the key to this protest would be whether the peasants joined them. (There was a strong and recent parallel to this is France in 1968, but the question then was whether the workers would join the students or not). The core of the Chinese Communist Party was the peasantry. If the peasantry came out in support of the government, the students would be perceived as having no real popular base and the government could repress them. When I heard that the peasants had in fact been rallying for the government I knew that the students were doomed. This happened a day or two before the government crushed the rally.
We in the US saw this as a repressive government destroying a grass roots democratic movement. The Chinese government portrayed itself as saving the Chinese revolution. The mass of the people may not have liked what happened, but in the course of things, this political event seems to have been no more than a bump in the road of China’s relentless development and from the mainland Chinese I have spoken to about it since then (not that I have necessarily spoken to a representative sample) they seem more relieved that the country didn’t descend into any Cultural Revolution style chaos.
In the great liberty debate that I outlined in the first post, I come down on the side of those who said that we don’t truly have liberty if the government has the capability of repressing us. But I admit that most people are not going to find this very relevant on a day to day basis. We don’t use most of our freedoms. And in a sense, the less we use them, the less they matter. We have built a civilization here on the basis of the principle of the individual acquision of wealth. This form of individuality makes religion politically irrelevant (since it is seen as a personal choice) and carves out a great realm of power for the government to operate, since all it really has to do to maintain an adequate level of popular support is to stay out of the way of most individuals (or at least seem to most individuals that it is staying out of their way). The most powerful political party in the United States (and probably in China, Russia, and even Iraq before we invaded it and politicized the entire country) is the “Leave Me Alone” Party.
Sorry about all the grammatical errors above. My computer started to lock up before I could edit this and I had to hit submit before I lost everything.
“And Jim, yes, this is exactly what Marx, Lenin, and Mao thought. Marx speculated that the quality of life would reach its ultimate quality potential under communism. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a definition of what this quality might look like. Since he preached “materialism”, one could expect that this quality would be utterly materialistic, so why not McDonalds and milkshakes? ”
According to their 2007 annual report, McDonald’s operates restaurants in 118 countries. Their revenue was $23 billion. Their market capitalization, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculation, is about $75 billion. At the time of her death, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s mogul Ray Kroc, had a net worth estimated at $1.7 billion – not amazing by the standards of the dot-com pirates, and probably about a millionth of the amount of US government debt held by the Chinese government, but still not chump change.
In my perusal of the annual report, I didn’t find the average hourly wage for a McDonald’s fry cook, but the franchises are not known for generous wages, and my guess is that their restaurant employees, on average, earn less than the mean wage earner in the US. I’m told that our local PADS shelters have among their clientele McDonald’s assistant managers and their families. But who knows – maybe by Chinese wage standards, dumping the fries into the warming pan and tossing salt on them is a high-paying job.
Be that as it may, McDonald’s would seem to be the poster boy for capitalism run amok, by the lights of Communist theorists. I’m not saying that their presence in Beijing or wherever that vignette was observed is a bad thing – just the opposite. But capitulation doesn’t seem too strong a word.
One of the ironic beauties of modern socialism is that is uses capitalist legal ideas. All that is required in China is that the workers (in the form of the State) own the means of production. The surplus value created through their labor therefore “legally” belongs to them and under socialism, the exploitation of the workers is supported by the myth that they are actually working for themselves. (The operative myth in capitalism is that the workers are freely contracted and are also working for themselves under terms they themselves negotiated for and chose).
McDonald’s, of course, cut a deal with the government, and gets some of the surplus value in the form of profit. But from the Chinese government point of view, the deal is structured in such a way that the State gets more surplus value from the deal than they would have realized without it. This is to say that McDonald’s profit in this case is reclassified as part of the State’s investment expense, just like the machinery.
As for McDonald’s wages, two things. First, I have a cousin who runs a couple of them. His take is that it is not so much that they suppress the wages as that they constantly screw down on maximal productivity and eliminate labor as such. Remember a few years ago that they put a time limit on how long it would take for them to fulfill the order and if they missed the time limit the customer got the order for free? This was nothing less than a novel attempt to enlist the customer into the management’s enforcement of increased productivity.
Second, in the Chinese case, if the workers own the means of production and therefore all the surplus value is owned by themselves, then wages don’t fit into the picture in the way they do here. The socialist Chinese state provides a lot of state services that are a bigger part of the wage picture from the worker’s point of view. From the point of view of the worker in China, it’s not so much what the wage is but how much of the wage the worker gets to put towards personal consumption. In a socialist country, this is also in part dependent on whether consumer goods are available. In the case of China, both have been rising steadily. I would expect that if a job opening comes up at a McDonald’s in China, they have to beat the applicants off with a stick. Maybe even literally.