If co-op implies a power-sharing arrangement where there is no hierarchy and no one is sovereign, do those really exist in China?
I honestly know very little about China and most of the time have no idea what people mean nowadays when they say "socialism", it can refer to literally anything: "the opposite of America" or "labor unions" or "everything I was taught to be afraid of" or "Stalin's USSR" or "Nancy Pelosi" or "Scandinavian social democracy" or "an anarchist commune" or "the Parisian decadence of the satanic pedophile Michel Foucault" or "literally Hitler", depending on what image has a grip on the speaker's imagination.
I do know the difference between Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism though, and any kind of power-sharing arrangement where there is no hierarchy and no one is sovereign is the latter, whether you call it a "worker co-op" or anything else.
Marxism is about seizing power from one class and bestowing it on another. There is still sovereignty, there is still centralized power: it is just that now it resides with the working class (i.e. with its representative, Comrade Stalin or Comrade Mao or some revolutionary parliament or whoever gets to be the sovereign). Obviously the utopian horizon is that all class differences be abolished but in the meantime etc.
Sounds like what this Floridian popinjay professed to believe in was anarcho-syndicalism? And it came to bite him in the ass?
|