Market Stalinism – The Danger Of Limited Revolution

What’s the limit of a revolution? That’s the question that keeps coming to me – in a decade or more of continuous international stagnation, in which everything in many developed countries is largely the same, but shabbier, as it was in 2008 or so, we can find that outside of that developed bubble things have kept on changing; and some of the most striking change appears to have occurred in a political system that a decade ago was receiving accolades such as “stagnant”, “sclerotic” etc. from anyone writing about it in English. In fact the term ‘revolution’ in its broadest sense of an instance of revolving, of large and inescapable motion, can probably be applied to what has happened in the People’s Republic of China since Hu Jintao, the Beijing Olympics and the ascension of Xi Jinping.

No one can quite agree on the orientation or cause or even size of the motion, but that motion has occurred is undoubtable, by reading the ripples of it from tamed Hong Kong or newly-independent-but-not Taiwan; from US politicians quibbling, suddenly, over decoupling and other fine words to the Chinese bourgeoisie themselves, who are either openly or quietly, via leaks and gossip, signalling their disagreement with wistful reminiscing about how it all used to be so much better. There are facts and non-facts; an anti-corruption campaign has occurred, or a dreadful purge dressed up as one, and it is easier perhaps to go to the doctor without having to fork over a big fat hongbao, but if you are an innovator you might get shut up for having one too many ideas (say people who insist they are innovators). You can no longer say some things, but which things exactly is a matter of who you ask. Socialism is back! Or in a quivering, indignant voice, socialism is back. Or sceptically, seeing all the capitalism everywhere: socialism is back? The air is less polluted and the public transport safer and they built all that high-speed rail. Rural villages are cleaner, more convenient; the absolute poverty of some – not all – left-behind areas has been or is being addressed. The police are much more confident than they were both for good and for ill, and there’s a lot more cameras. Nobody will buy a white guy a beer just because he’s white and can say ni hao anymore. Something, somewhere has shifted.

This is what officials have termed the New Era, but what exactly the New Era means is hard to locate, Chinese officialese as usual a mixture of obtuse and bland. Much of my time in mainland China has been spent trying to ponder this question, attempting to find somewhere what the New Era – named as such in 2017, but de facto existing for years hence, creeping up from history – is. Now I feel no wiser as to the answer. But what I am sure of is that this revolution – this motion, which has irrevocably changed China forever and yet seems to have no focal point except its figurehead, Xi Jinping, the Chairman of Everything – has reached its limit. Wait! That’s different from saying it has failed. In many respects, even in the fog of triumphalism that has hung about English-language China discourse since the end of the zero-covid policy late last year, it’s obvious the New Era, whatever it is, has succeeded to some extent, in that while our experts are prematurely proclaiming that the Chinese economy will never surpass the United States, they no longer seem to have the confidence to say, as they did at the last flashpoint in 2012, that the Communist Party is finished and it’s already all over. If the New Era, from the anti-corruption campaign to the national security campaign, to military reform and state enterprise consolidation and the return of the Party at the grassroots level, was meant to buttress the People’s Republic of China against the state of total collapse threatened by the 2000s, and to lessen the sting of the worst of the corruption and inequality of those wild years, then it seems by and large to have done that.

But all motion comes to a halt eventually, and we can say that here in 2023 that while there has been no complete stop as to political motion in China yet that the motor, perhaps, of the Xi Jinping years has begun to slow, that the revolution is now running on momentum, that the real and vast changes of the early 2010s have all settled down and there isn’t much else to do; or to be more precise, there is little space left for further motion within the context of this particular revolution, which has hit upon its limit. What limit, then, could that be?

To answer this question we need to look not at the Xi years but at what came before, the vast and ponderous process known as “reform and opening up”. Reform was as well a kind of revolution in China; a process of vast change proceeding unsteadily from Mao Zedong’s decision to reassert Party control at the height of the Cultural Revolution, to lead China’s national revolution to triumph over its democratic one. What do we mean by this? By abandoning the dramatic, anarchic democracy of the Cultural Revolution with his appeals to the army and the Party over the wild red guards and workers’ communes, Mao thereby ensured that political power in China, after passing through the hands of the PLA and then into the blundering grip of the radicals, would return to the survivors of 1966-67, who were not traitors or anti-socialists but merely saw Marxism less as the clarion call of a future, unimaginable society than as a tool for the national rejuvenation of China.

To this end “reform and opening up” was inevitable, as these Party veterans, coalesced around Deng Xiaoping, much as with their Soviet counterparts in the late 1920s and 1930s, created the space for the wholesale marketisation of society by allowing that development at any cost was the secret to securing the nation against exterior threats and therefore consolidating socialism. They and their proteges, the true “reformers” of the post-Cultural Revolution generation, men like Hu Yaobang, Xi Zhongxun and Zhao Zhiyang, were as anti-democratic as anything; heirs to the Chinese tradition of “self-strengthening”, attempting to carry out a long-overdue Meiji Restoration to protect China from the stronger powers, they did not start out as pro-market zealots, but only sought to lead the national revolution to success; and as pro-market reform seemed to be the easiest way to do this, this was how they proceeded.

This was the course of China’s reform era, which really existed as we imagine it from 1992 – after Deng restarted reform following Tiananmen Square and passed power fully to Jiang Zemin – to about 2012, when the Bo Xilai affair jolted the Party out of its complacent passing from history in-progress. If the New Era so far has been defined by political motion distorting the market, as its critics claim, then the reform era was market motion distorting politics. For a socialist state to implement the brutal, cutting reforms of the 1990s required that the state itself, nominally for the people, no longer fulfil its own purpose, becoming something that had to be utilised for its enormous power when necessary but as well crept around, subverted, misused and ignored whenever it got in the way of the imperative of spreading capitalism. The source of the monstrous corruption which in 2012 ended this process was not the Party itself – although we cannot ignore the role that the secretive methods of Marxist-Leninist democratic centralism played in lubricating it – but reform itself. “Only reform could save the Party” is a cliché repeated so often now it has come to be accepted without thought, but we should invert this: “If you open a window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.”, Deng famously said, but while he may have really held the illusion that reform would not severely damage not just the government but the very social fabric of the PRC, events subsequently proved otherwise, that reform was much bigger than that, and indeed by the 2010s it had completely rotted both Chinese society and politics to the point where – this is where the liberal optimism of that time comes in – the whole house, never mind one window, would have to be torn down and built anew.

This is where we glimpse the limit of 2012-2023. Reform was primarily economic motion distorting politics, or the economic foundation’s conversion to the capitalist mode of production unleashing titanic change onto the political, social and cultural superstructure. But that economic motion did not come about organically – the liberal myth of reform as a popular development that picked up as soon as the state eased off is self-serving, the same cloak of invisibility that capitalism has always tried to cover itself with. In fact the original motion that created reform was, as mentioned, the political choice of Mao Zedong in 1968 to save the party-state from the people, which led to Deng’s choices in 1978 and the efforts of he and the Party old guard in utilising the enormous power of the state to begin marketisation of the economy, first through experiments in agriculture and then in the Special Economic Zones. Reform was both a political and economic revolution in that it was motion occurring at both levels, base and superstructure, and that these changes fed into one another, as early reform experiments by pioneering cadres that worked led to further experiments by other emboldened cadres and officials, which led to rising living standards and the creation of a capitalist (ahem, patriotic entrepreneur) class, which together gradually created public consent for this process that wasn’t even codified as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” until a decade later. What it was not, then, was a popular revolution. The Chinese people were never consulted as to whether marketisation should go ahead, consent being created after the fact; by the true reform era’s beginning in 1992 there was no more room for politics except for discussions about the pace of its reform, never its rightness or wrongness, and this was only continuing how it had begun – how it had needed to be begun – without public consultation.

In other words, reform was an enormous political-economic event disguised solely as an economic one. The New Era that followed it, however, is the opposite – it appears political-economic, but in fact while Chinese liberals and western observers see it as an enormous break with and betrayal of reform, when we look closer we can see that in fact almost all of the New Era’s motion has been solely political; reform wreaked havoc on China’s politics to the point of non-functionality by 2012, while the changes in the New Era to the Party, its relationship to the state and to capital have been large, the distortions they’ve produced in the economy have perhaps not been as vast as the Wall Street Journal likes to claim. We are seeing Chinese businessmen complain about being squeezed by the state everywhere; we are seeing foreign capitalists complain about the same with even greater indignity. We are seeing the state exhort capitalists to be responsible, slapping fines on polluters, crushing especially terrible instances of corruption or official-business collusion, placing Party cells in all kinds of firms and cajoling, beating, bullying China’s business class into working towards not only their own narrow interests but those of the wider nation. And none of this is bad. But is it motion? It is motion, but it is motion of increasing smallness, tinkering around the edges; it does not match even the wholesale and vast reorganisation of politics that runs parallel to it. The decade since 2012 has shaken up China’s system, the scaffolding around society, but it has not touched at all the core of that society, which the reform era bequeathed to it. The relations of production remain exactly as Hu Jintao left them. “Reform and opening up will never end,” Xi Jinping said, and in his own words right there he has described the limit of his New Era. As long as that one thing – the core of reform, the core of Chinese modernity, the core of the national revolution – remains, and as long as the very essence of reform remains untouched, no amount of shifting what decorates it will truly be able to overcome its perpetual flaws – spreading corruption, social apathy, inequality, alienation and exhaustion.

What is that essence?

“Zhu Rongji,” Richard McGregor tells us in his The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, “recalled that year being shocked when asked by George Bush Snr. how China’s ‘privatization’ programme was proceeding. Zhu protested that China was corporatizing its large state assets, which was just another way of ‘realizing state ownership’. Bush responded with a nudge and a wink, saying that no matter how Zhu described the process, ‘we know what is going on’.” For many people China’s reform process was viewed through this lens; the lens of that almighty word, privatisation, which in debates worldwide about what happened in the 1980s and 1990s tends to take prominence as the key feature of the era. But I’d like to agree with Zhu Rongji here and argue otherwise. We know that many of China’s state assets were sold off, and that this undoubtedly was vital to the development of a private sector. Nevertheless, privatisation was limited by its binary nature, in which an enterprise was either private or public. You cannot convert an economy from capitalism or socialism merely by privatisation; from where does privatisation come? How does it emerge, politically, as a possibility? Conservative leader Chen Yun’s ‘birdcage theory’, in which following some limited privatisation the socialist Chinese state could act as the protective cage around a living private sector, the bird, or the very idea of the Special Economic Zones of the 1980s, was the limit of the old-school developmentalists, a halfway house between Maoist socialism and letting in the flies Deng had spoken of, a utilitarian premise not much different from Lenin’s NEP or even Stalin’s Soviet Union inviting in foreign specialists to build Soviet industry in the 1930s. This was where ‘privatisation’ could go, all on its lonesome.

Reform, the true reform process that created and carried on its own momentum, was embodied not by these timid ideas but by the work of Zhu Rongji: To quote McGregor again: “Zhu, in pithy Chinese fashion, boiled down the blueprint for state enterprise reform to a single phrase at the 1997 party congress–‘grasp the big, let go of the small’. The Party and the state would retain control of the large companies in what were deemed strategic sectors, such as energy, steel, transport, power, telecommunications and the like. In a formula that was rolled out for scores of state companies, a small number of their shares were listed overseas, while the government kept about 70 to 80 per cent of the equity in its own hands. Many foreigners often mistook these sales of minority stakes to be privatization. Smaller, loss-making enterprises in turn were to be sold off or left to be managed by local governments, much as the neo-cons had envisioned six years before.”

McGregor calls this process ‘corporatisation”, which is true insofar as it reflected the transformation of China’s SOEs from Soviet-style state enterprises to effectively capitalist corporations under ultimate state ownership. But ‘marketisation’ is a broader term to encompass both this, the outright privatisation of some assets which stole western attention and still serves to dominate discussion about Chinese ‘reform’, the liberalisation of prices and of foreign currency controls, and similar reforms in Chinese agriculture – from collective farming to the Township and Village Enterprises – and local government, where officials were evaluated according to KPI – Key Performance Indicators – which affected their career advancement in the future. All of these differing things, in differing ways, served the ultimate end result of the process of social marketisation; the marketisation of society itself, the scouring of the collectivist social relations of the Maoist period and their replacement with the individualist market relations of a ‘normal’ country. The essence of China’s reform era was not one or two policy planks – although Zhu Rongji’s mass lay-offs and corporatisation program marked the definitive shift from an attempted socialist mode of production to a capitalist one, the surrender of the last major economic holdover of the Maoist period to capitalist logic (set in political stone by Jiang’s Three Represents policy a few years later, which allowed capitalists into the Party), it was still only a larger part of the whole. This distinction is important because often the SOEs of today, propped up by state support in a violation of sacred market principles, are overemphasized, viewed by liberals as dinosaurs that are preventing the transition to full, utopian market relations; or they’re inversely viewed as proof of China’s commitment to socialism, that the state retains such a large degree of control over key industrial sectors. Rather we should say both of these views are superficial. The liberals have in fact already triumphed over the SOEs, and the state’s large degree of control in China is typical in its extent but not by itself indicative of anything. The existence of SOEs kept afloat by government money does not say much about the real nature of China’s political economy. The key is marketisation – are the relations of production capitalist or otherwise? Are organisations governed by market logic or not? The fact is that whether nominally private or public, corporate, employee-owned, officially state-managed etc. today almost all organisations in China are managed by the mechanisms of competition, market logic and private exchange.

Private companies compete for profit; government officials, treating their jobs as a kind of customer service, compete over KPIs that decide their future career advancement. State firms are propped up by government subsidies and treated as organs of the state but even then are organised, as McGregor says, like corporations, expected to attempt to pursue profit even if factually they are unable to. The state exercises control not through collective ownership or direct management but through itself owning shares in firms or through the award of privileges doled out via state resources, merely substituting itself for private shareholders, owners or business partners, while at the bottom workers compete with one another for higher salaries, bonuses and promotions, always shadowed by the threat of unemployment opened up by the existence of a reserve pool of labour consisting of other proletarianized individuals who themselves are competing to find openings in the job market at all. To put it starkly, a whole world of other incentives and alternate forms of social and economic organisation have disappeared since reform began. “There is no other way to mobilize interest in production among the masses, let’s admit it.” Deng once said in 1980, in the early days of reform, and it is this thinking – that the socialist alternatives are not possible, and so it only remains to do capitalism in a way that preserves the Party and therefore the nation and the socialist revolution – that has led to today, that Xi Jinping is prisoner to just as Deng was. Xi’s government has shaken the heavens, angered the gods, but not displaced them. The marketisation of 1978 and on is his limit; it might be the Communist Party’s limit. We don’t know for sure. But we do know what happens when this marketisation of all things is not halted but accelerated beyond repair. The answer is something like Liz Truss. But before we can get to Liz Truss, we have to start at Stalin.

The current strange situation of modern China has many roots, but probably the deepest of them is the broader developmentalist response to the nineteenth century European imperialisms which has taken myriad successful and unsuccessful forms, from Ottoman Tanzimat reforms to the Meiji Restoration and beyond; this tendency in China emerged through the aforementioned self-strengthening movement and evolved into the Kuomintang’s “Three Principles of the People”, and emerged in 1949 suffused with Marxism-Leninism, which had itself come out of a fusion of Marxism and the search for a uniquely Russian developmentalism that had dogged the last century of Tsarist rule. Marxism-Leninism, or Stalinism, possessed the dual character of being both internationalist and socialist and national and developmentalist, interested in the radical emergence of new modes of being beyond western liberal democratic capitalism and as well in the uncomplicated efficiency of top-down, managerial developmentalism which could merely surpass western capitalism. It is this that explains China’s turn to the market to sustain the party-state, but more fundamentally it explains both the fantastic vision of Marxism-Leninism and its incredible achievements as well as the low, cynical character of its worst moments, in which any concession or brutality was allowed by the primacy of the importance of the survival of the Party and the nation and revolution it saw itself as representing. Stephen Kotkin, in his Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilisation, describes it thusly: “By socialism was meant the party’s monopoly on power combined with the headlong expansion of heavy industry—carried out in a determinedly non-capitalist way. Capitalism, notwithstanding its historically “progressive role,” was said to have become a “fetter” to further development. Because socialism entailed the replacement of the “chaos” of markets with the assurance of planning, it would supposedly do a more effective job of industrializing Russia than capitalism (and foreign ownership) had or could. In short, socialism was a “higher” or “more advanced” stage of development, and one that promised to vault Russia into the first rank of nations.”

The tragic tale of twentieth century Marxism-Leninism is in how this narrower vision, of communism less as a path to the future to be explored than as a tool bent towards serving national development, both proved the most powerful on offer and then ultimately to have the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism itself baked into its very premise, as from the point of view of the managers socialism proved not to be more efficient at developing the nation than state-managed capitalism integrated into the American-led international market. This can be seen in both the Soviet collapse and the Chinese reform process, where the difficulties of non-capitalist development helped to create a growing managerial preference for the superficially easier path of capitalist development as soon as it was politically possible, which meant as soon as managerial control over the entire system could be solidified .i.e. after years of Brezhnevite ossification had weakened the Soviet political system heavily, or after Mao’s decision to hand power to the army in the 1960s had frozen the people out of Chinese politics. This is the meaning of Deng Xiaoping, a far more faithful Marxist-Leninist than the inconsistent and troublesome Mao Zedong. It is also the meaning of Stalin and of Stalinism; the resolution of the tension between international and national poles generally but ultimately in favour of the national is what defines the Stalinist system and sets it apart from other forms of Marxist politics in practice.

We should avoid, by the way, framing this emotively as betrayal; Stalin did not betray the thoughtful internationalist Lenin but only was the development of the contradictions always present in Lenin from the start, which came from his own mixture of Russian revolutionary and theoretical Marxist ideals. Stalin, then, represented a duality of his own, as his rule was the peak of Soviet power – the Party’s bloody-minded focus on national development at all costs built the mighty Soviet state that defeated fascism and stood as a superpower and yet, with “socialism in one country” placing the national interest above the international and creating a gap between the Soviet state’s founding multinational revolutionary coalition and its de facto coalition of competing nationalisms, the developments of this period in the USSR also condemned it to its own future Habsburg-style dissolution amidst the contradictions this contained. It is the edifice that presided over this tragic history that we can describe as “Stalinist” – a managerial state dedicated to top-down national construction, a paternal developmentalism that began as independent of capital and then, as external pressure from international markets and internal pressure from demands for working class democracy built up, gradually in order to avoid giving in to the latter – which in its incoherence and chaos might have jeopardized the national revolution’s achievement – chose the former, subsuming itself to capital’s will as an extension of that same hyper-developmentalist, managerial logic. In the USSR this process was ruptured by total state collapse, owing to the multinational Soviet state being unable to revert to a singular nationalism; in more cleanly nationalist China and Vietnam it is ongoing. In North Korea and Cuba it is beginning to sprout. And in England?

The UK, of course, was never a Marxist or even a socialist state, so its ‘Stalinism’ was not quite. But in The Rise And Fall of the British Nation David Edgerton highlights how in the twentieth century the British Empire gave way to a “British developmental state focused on changing the nation”, the post-war project to build a national Britain as a coherent nation capable of looking after its population as a welfare state, projecting power as a warfare state, and as well building on the industrial foundations of the empire as a developmental state. This project was built around ideas of “British genius”, of wartime myths of Britain alone struggling against fascism, of technical and high-quality development led by the same cadres of experts who had been so prominent in the later imperial and wartime phases of prior history. In this sense post-war Britain was at least in some sense a reply to the success of the Soviet developmental state as built by Stalinism, an echo of Meiji Japan and other developmentalist catch-up states, of which Stalinism was the epitome; a belief in the ability of managerialism to construct a political power in its own right, via careful and expert-led development. What Stalinism and post-war Britain shared was this preoccupation with progress, with moving forward via the setting of plans and targets; the wartime planned economy as a phenomenon in both countries influenced this but so too did the mood of the times, for scientific analysis, industrial and technical organisation, and rational long-term planning, and the determination to use these tools to build a better future out of a half century of strife without recourse to troublesome, inconsistent democracy. To some extent then the great project was the same on both sides of the Cold War’s ideological divide. Of course, the socialist states attempted to use more overt non-capitalist methods; the capitalist ones attempted to implement planning and the market together. Both ultimately came to the same end.

In both the UK and China, the apparent impetus for reform – that is, for marketisation – was the failure of the post-war project, whether in the supposed inefficiency of Britain’s nationalised and state-led capitalist technostate, or in the “wasted years” of first the Soviet-style state of the 1950s and then Mao’s experiments in radical democracy in the 1960s. Actually, as Eagleton argues, “without the investments of the post-war developmental state, the Thatcher revolution would hardly have been feasible” – the later transformation of the British state and economy, here termed the Thatcher revolution, was built upon the statist institutions, nationalist economy and top-down, authoritarian social model of post-war Britain even as it waged war upon it, as this revolution at once demolished large parts of that same post-war system that it used to transmit itself. The parallel with China’s reforms here is clear; Deng’s reforms cleared out anything inefficient or non-capitalist about China’s socio-economic system, while preserving the party-state with its outsize authority and organisation, not by accident but as the means of enacting the great levelling and then to preserve it against public agitation or political opposition. “China should maintain vigilance against the right”, he said, “but primarily against the left.”, and in tandem with incremental marketisation policies and reforms, this involved the building up of the reconfigured developmental state to wage class warfare. In China this was played out via the arrests of Cultural Revolution radicals and the regular police action against labour unrest which made the country so appealling to foreign capital, and which peaked most famously in the state crackdowns on the protests of 1976 and 1989, while in Britain it took the form of the Conservative government’s attacks on organised labour which most famously climaxed in the 1984 miner’s strike; these were paired with further marketisation policies which in Britain through the selling off of public housing created a new class of Tory-voting homeowners, ensuring electoral success, and in China created an indigenous capitalist-official class which itself had strong and obvious interests in furthering reform without nudging from Deng or other senior cadres. Thus was the marketisation process politically cemented, via a mixture of repression and top-down pro-market policy measures, to ensure the economy was free from (regulatory) intervention, a class struggle with the state returned to Marx’s conception of it as wager of open warfare on behalf of one side versus the other.

This was the “free economy, strong state”, as Andrew Gamble termed it, of neoliberalism. Or to return to our premise, in its 1997-2010 guise it was also called by the writer Mark Fisher “market Stalinism”; “an essential dimension of Stalinism”, Fisher said in Capitalist Realism, “was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force.” This true ‘Stalinism’, then, what does it represent? Once we erase the socialist element and the revolutionary element and marry Stalin to capital, what is there that is left? Only the urge to develop, to catch up, to progress – now, however, divorced from real production, left alone with itself, Stalinism becomes focused only upon images, targets, representations of absent truths. “The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies.” Fisher said. “Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labour which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output…in capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.”

This market Stalinism, then, is the phase beyond the simple configuration of a free economy and strong state – it is the evolution of it, as deep into post-Fordist, post-industrial inertia, unfettered by any real duties beyond maintaining and deepening neoliberalism, the remnant of the developmental state ceaselessly plugs away at itself, paralysed but constantly trying to act, announcing initiatives and policies and ideas that relate not at all to the real economy, which remains an ever-more “open”, “free” etc. mess of corruption, inequality and dysfunction. In the United Kingdom of Fisher’s time – the New Labour years – already this process was deep, but since then the UK has seen evermore grandiose fantasies proclaimed from the pulpit, coupled with ever-worsening marketisation that for all the bombast and drama of the last decade still remains fundamentally unquestionable. The Conservative and Labour parties both have been rotted to the core and will only commit to more of this, forever, while constantly asserting in booming voices plans and projects and targets that go absolutely nowhere except in the same direction – down the drain.

The real significance of China’s New Era is that it has – at the cost of reviving politics, of abandoning the affected apoliticism of the real reform era – for now prevented this from happening. The liberal critics of China are correct in saying reform has not advanced significantly this last decade – thank God, we say, wiping our brow. But already the central cause of market Stalinism is visible; while constant political action continues, the real economy, the core of things beyond tinkering with a consensus set decades ago that can never be departed from, remains untouchable, with enormous vested interests set on maintaining it all costs, and the state itself wrapped up so deep into market-logic that it has taken heroic effort to move it this far at all (effort that large parts of the very social classes essential to Deng’s reforms, the capitalists and the property owners, openly resent). The strange, uninspiring ideological cocktail of socialism with Chinese characteristics, from Deng Xiaoping Theory to Jiang’s Three Represents to Hu’s Harmonious Socialist Society all congealed into litany without much of a concrete meaning, with its endless list of numerical targets and PR-speak buzzwords, is not so far removed from Tony Blair’s Third Way, or David Cameron’s Big Society and Northern Powerhouse, or any of the other projects unveiled by the endlessly ambitious British political class since they stopped having ideas.

Xi’s own thought, the latest appendage of Chinese Marxism, is perhaps less empty, but only less. He is no ideologist. He is a career bureaucrat, and his bureaucratic ability has prevented, at the last gasp, the Englandification of China. But he is as well reform-era bureaucrat, a man of KPI. He may be closer to Chen Yun’s old half-way house birdcage theory – to post-war dreams of regulated capitalism – than to the hyper-liberal instincts of the good communists who lost out to him; but even the birdcage theory, we must remember, predicates that the free market is the living thing, and the strong state only its protective barrier. So it is that naturally the limit of his project is overthrowing the neoliberal order; just as the exhausted British politicians, he sees no alternative. The Chinese state’s much greater capacity for action, its lack of an electoral safety valve opposition which means it must take threats more seriously, and its ideological DNA which makes it perpetually more vulnerable to leftist populist agitation than little England nationalism makes the British Conservative Party, have led to the Party in the New Era having the political wriggle room to prevent absolute disaster. But the it remains the same beast reform warped it into; the liberals, the frothing free-marketeers, and the so-called pragmatists who are all the same people anyway are still waiting patiently for their chance. The market is still supreme. Not quite as supreme as the UK, the developed country where the water is turning into sewage and nobody really wants to do anything about it; but we must not mistake the state intervening to discipline a part of that market, wonderful as it looks from the outside, for the state being anything other than its partner in crime or its occasional unwilling saviour.

And this is where we finally get to the limit of the revolution. In The Party’s Over, an account of Conservative Party history since Thatcher, Philip Burton-Cartledge sums it up: “The decline of the Conservative Party, then, is not just a matter of boxing off growing sections of the electorate, thereby imperilling its mass support; it is also a story of a party increasingly in hock to certain sections of capital whose short-term interests sit uncomfortably with the collective interest of British capital as a whole.” In other words, the market-Stalinisation of the Tory Party has led to its complete surrender to its own mythology, its policies only a mixture of the propaganda image and the PR statement, and with that has come its utter detachment from sensible management of capitalism, which it is largely acknowledged now does require some regulation of its component parts to save the whole from itself. Lost in delusion the Conservative Party drifts in fantasies of Singapore-on-Thames, of ever-further unceasing liberalisation of an already immensely laissez-faire economy, of punishing migrants and scroungers and being hard on crime, of Britain reborn as a great power via a fairy godmother’s magic wand, of targets it will never even attempt to hit being announced constantly in booming voices nobody is listening to. This is the end of the neoliberal project, the end of developmentalism, the attempted ditching of class struggle in favour of all-in-it-together national unity, progress by any means necessary (which in fact, only cedes class struggle to the other side). When anything justifies catching up, the market is always there offering an easy way out.

That is the limit of Thatcher’s revolution and could well be the limit of Xi’s and of China’s, if the settlement of 1968 holds forever. It is my hope that China and its people can escape the tragicomic misery that has afflicted my home country. But what else is there, between undemocratic developmentalism and its terminal point in neoliberal farce? The only other option, for England and China and for everywhere, is the unlimited revolution of real, absolute democracy, the ugliness and beauty of a strike, a protest, a cultural revolution in blood-stained, hopeful, terrible bloom. My father’s generation in England, who witnessed the Thatcher revolution descend, are those who saw the hope of this real democracy die in their lifetimes; it’s my hope that in my lifetime I can see it flicker again and begin to burn. I saw Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 before the entire establishment had to mobilize to quash him, saving itself but discrediting its system forever in the eyes of the young; I see today how those same young people in Britain, whatever else they believe, however exhausted they are, at least seem to overwhelmingly reject the Conservative Party and barely tolerate its Labour-coloured doppelganger. Just as China’s own establishment once adapted neoliberalism from the seemingly-brilliant success of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and etc., now it might stand to look over at us and where we’re heading, and how that all turned out. But I’ve said all this before. I can’t imagine the future. But I know history a little, and what I’m convinced of now is that the history of the failure of the future, whether Chinese or English, tells us that the only way forward is a revolution without limits. Or to quote Chairman Mao: “If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it.”