MAOIST INTERNATIONALIST MOVEMENT
POSITION PAPER ON STATE OWNERSHIP
Last edit: 8/26/92

We Maoists often hear from Chinese students that the
Third World is held back by too much state ownership.
A lot of students even tell us that countries like India
and most of Africa are socialist. This belief stems from
Western economic "theories" and simplistic textbook
descriptions that divide the world into "planned" and "market"
economies.

We Maoists do not believe like Deng Xiaoping or the
other revisionist "Marxists" that state ownership
is the same thing as socialism. Worker and peasant
control of the means of production is the key. In China
bureaucratic capitalists rule just as surely as they did
under Chiang Kai-shek or in Peru today.

If a class other than the workers themselves appropriates
the workers' labor, the system is capitalist, not socialist.
The workers certainly do not run production in China today
as demonstrated by the many changes allowed in state-capitalist
China from the days of Maoist revolution--unemployment, firing,
inflation and the end of mass mobilization campaigns in which
workers sought to gain administrative and political experience.

As it turns out though, state ownership does not hold back
development. According to the bourgeois economists attached to the
Harvard Institute for International Development, which is
mostly funded by the U.S. government, state-owned enterprises
are responsible for a LARGER share of production in the
industrialized countries than in the developing countries.

Below are the facts:

% of production from state-owned firms             countries

0-3%                                       Nepal, Philippines, Guatemala
3.1-6%                                     Columbia, Thailand,
                                          Argentina, Paraguay, Bangladesh,
6.1-10%                                   Benin, Botswana, Kenya, Liberia,
                                          Mali, Sierra Leone, Korea, Sri
                                          Lanka
10.1-15%                                   Ivory Coast, Tanzania, India
                                          Taiwan, Bolivia, Chile
15.1-20%                                  Senegal
20.1-30%                                  Guinea, Tunisia
Above 30.1%                               Zambia, Guyana

(Gillis, Perkins, Roemer, Snodgrass,Economics of Development, 3rd ed.
(NY: WW Norton, 1992), p. 299.

Recalling that Hitler Germany, apartheid South Africa and European
countries like France have had a state role in the economy exceeding
one-half of all investment made, we see that the "command" versus
"market" distinction is pretty useless, except to promote the myth
that an elite makes economic decisions only in "command" economies.

Lest anyone wants to argue that Nepal, Philippines and Guatemala
are the most developed countries economically, we should drop the
idea that private ownership brings about development. Those three
countries have the highest share of private ownership in the economy.

>From this list, we should also see that for other purposes, it is
misleading to refer to very many Third World countries as socialist.
Only a tiny handful have state-ownership of even more than half the
economy. The vast majority of the world's population, which is poor,
LIVES UNDER CAPITALISM.

To compare capitalism with socialism, we must include what happens
in those countries that still allow private ownership to predominate
in production. That means we must count what happens in most
Third World countries as capitalism, often with semi-feudal remnants
of the kind Mao did the whole world the favor of leading struggle
against. As we argued in previous posts, without arduous and violent
communist struggles, Taiwan and Korea never would have had land reform.
It was the communist movement that broke the landed classes in those
countries, which were then able to serve as lynchpins in the U.S.
sweepstakes-development strategy. The United States opened its
import market to the Taiwanese and Koreans and made sure it could
point to as "winners" in the sweepstakes of general imperialist
exploitation and "development."
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