Market Freedom, Political Freedom, and the State Form

And Mao’s call was heard—what followed was an explosion of unrestrained passion to delegitimize all forms of authority, so that, at the end, Mao had to call in the army to restore order. The paradox is thus that the key battle of the Cultural Revolution was not between the Communist Party apparatus and the denounced traditionalist enemies but between the army and the Communist Party, and the forces that Mao himself called into being. Duane Rousselle, a Canadian sociological philosopher, perspicuously noted the basic ambiguity in the desperate search for the alternatives to capitalism: “If the radical philosophers, including Marx and Bakunin, were quick to ask, ‘What about the alternatives?’ then it was because they sometimes failed to see that capitalism has assumed the position of the ‘alternative.’ Capitalism is the alternative (to authoritarianism, dogmatism, socialism, and so on).”80 It is not only that capitalism can only thrive through permanent self-revolutionizing, as Marx pointed out; it is that capitalism again and again emerges as the only alternative, the only way to move forward, the dynamic force that continues when social life gets stuck in a fixed form. Today, capitalism is more revolutionary than the traditional Left, which is obsessed with protecting the old achievements of the welfare state—just recall how much capitalism changed the entire texture of our societies in the last decades.

Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) from the early 1920s, which allowed, to a certain degree, private property and a market economy, was obviously the original model for Deng’s reforms that cleared the way for a capitalist free market (under the control of the ruling Communist Party). Now, instead of a half-decade of market liberalization in China, there is already half a century of what they euphemistically call “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” So has China, for over half a century, followed a gigantic New Economic Policy? Instead of making fun of these measures or simply denouncing them as a defeat of Socialism, as a step toward (authoritarian) capitalism, we should take the risk and extend this logic to its extreme. After the disintegration of Eastern European Socialism in 1990, there was a joke that insinuated that Socialism was a transition from capitalism back to capitalism. But what if we make the opposite move and define capitalism as a Socialist New Economic Policy, as a passage from feudalism (or premodern societies of domination in general) to Socialism?

With the abolition of premodern relations of servitude and domination, with the assertion of principles such as personal freedom and human rights, capitalist modernity is in itself already Socialist. No wonder modernity, again and again, gave birth to revolts against domination, which had already pointed toward economic equality (large peasants’ revolts in Germany in the early 1500s, Jacobins, etc.). Capitalism is the passage from pre-modernity to Socialism in the sense that it is the form of a compromise: It accepts the end of direct relations of domination (i.e., the principle of personal freedom and equality), but (as Marx put it in his classic formulation) it transposes domination from the relations between people to the relations between things (commodities). In other words, as individuals, we are all free, but domination persists in the relationship between commodities that we exchange on the market.

The big question that haunts us from the twentieth century is: Can you abolish market freedom without abolishing political freedom? You certainly can abolish political freedom without abolishing market freedom; China proved that. In another case of List der Vernunft, the Chinese Party won, but the final result of its rule seems to be to provide a new form of authoritarian capitalism that will replace liberal capitalism. Is China, then, the biggest threat to a genuine democratic emancipation?

Commentators who are eager to avoid Eurocentrism warn us that China is not a nation-state in the European sense, but a heterogeneous territory united by a shared civilization that encompasses a specific spiritual tradition as well as a thick cobweb of manners and everyday rituals. (Just think about drinking tea in contrast to drinking coffee, which is central in Western socializing.) But is this still the case? Have we not been witnessing a whole series of clear steps toward a strong nation-state? In China, there has been nationalist patriotism and distrust toward foreign (Western) cultures, resulting in things such as the imposition of Han as the official language. This move toward the nation-state should worry us because a sovereign nation-state implies a certain stance toward war, made clear by Hegel.

Each state disciplined/educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them in the guise of state power, but the relationship between different states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, and each period of peace was nothing more than a temporary armistice. As Hegel conceptualized it, the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state. Is today’s North Korea, with its ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons and rockets, not the ultimate example of unconditional nation-state sovereignty?

There are clear signs China is moving in this direction. I was informed by friends in China that authors in Chinese military journals complain that the Chinese Army needs a real war to test its fighting ability. The U.S. Army is permanently testing its ability in Iraq. For decades after the failed intervention in Vietnam, China didn’t have the chance to do this. Recently, the Chinese official media openly claimed that since the prospect of a peaceful integration of Taiwan into China is dwindling, a military liberation of the island will be necessary. As they ideologically prepare for this, Chinese nationalist patriotism and suspicion of all things foreign has grown. This suspicion is accompanied by accusations that the U.S. wants war for Taiwan. In the fall of 2021, top Chinese authorities advised people to stock enough food supplies to survive for two months if, due to a non-specified event, food distribution was disturbed—a strange warning, which was generally perceived as an announcement that war was to come.