3 August 2005Marc Blecher
The Sources of Hegemony
How did the thinking of most Chinese workers, even the most impoverished and politically active ones, become subject to the hegemony of the market and the state?
Markets have well-known structural features that entice those they dominate to accept them as the status quo. They also atomize those they subject, offering the prospect of individual solutions and undermining worker solidarity. The workers I interviewed tended to think that their best approach toward the difficulties they experienced was an individual one--work harder, seek out a new job, or get more education. They scoffed at collective action. Markets also divert away from politics the energies of people with leadership potential. The most dynamic workers I interviewed were, not surprisingly, those who were managing nicely in China's new economy, by maintaining good positions in their firms or through private entrepeneurship.
Markets also create experiences that mitigate against opposition to them. Where and when they work well, they create a pool of consumer goods that, while not lifting all ships, can have a decidedly soporific effect. Even unemployed, dispirited workers thought they would benefit through opportunities for their spouses or children; others thought growth was robust enough to hold out a reasonable hope of something coming their way, such as the much-hoped-for foreign buyer for their enterprise.
Memories of the Cultural Revolution also reinforce market hegemony. Even those who still think it a noble experiment generally also regard it as a failure because of its overwrought politicization, its perversions of class-based political struggle, and its social and economic havoc. This view still produces a palpable sense that there is no alternative to the "reforms".
Likewise, national (and nationalistic) comparisons have helped foster support for market-based development in China. The fact that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have prospered so well under capitalism--never mind that they in fact adopted a heavily statist variant--was specifically used by the Dengist leadership to mobilize support for its "reforms" in the early 1980s. And the fact that China is doing so well compared with Russia and much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia is, for many workers, the proof of the market pudding.
In looking at state hegemony, it is critical to note that, in China, the state has persuaded many workers that it is no longer responsible for an individual's economic situation or even capable of doing anything to solve these problems. The workers I interviewed tended to attribute their problems to their firms' management or to local leaders, rather than to the state as an institution. Many also considered China's high level of unemployment as a problem that overtaxes the state, rather than as one caused by the state. Yet they also give it credit for the overall prosperity and growth that China has achieved since 1978, and think that the state can protect them from the effects of the market by providing layoff allowances, unemployment benefits, and subsidies to the poor.
The Chinese state has worked to reinforce the structural bases for its hegemony. Hegemony operates most profoundly, of course, at the level not so much of what people think as of the categories in which they think. The press induces China's workers to think in terms of relatively harmless categories. In one very common example, a Workers Daily story on state enterprise "reform" tried to appear objective by presenting survey data. But all the questions were framed in terms of the specific characteristics of enterprises.
"When asked to choose whether they preferred to work in state-owned, private, joint venture, or stock companies, 58 percent chose state-owned. They were then asked whether they would approve if their factory were doing pretty well and were made to take over a money-losing plant. 55 percent said they would approve, 30 percent disapproved, and 15 percent said they would have to look at the situation to decide."
Such a story induces workers to think about their problems in terms of the ownership forms or the economic fortunes of their firms and not in terms of the market or of state policies themselves. Another typical story directed at workers blamed their plight in part on the unwillingness of enterprises to provide training, which directs workers' thinking to human capital rather than to capital or to the capitalistic state.
Likewise, the state works hard to persuade workers that problems come not from the state but from the market and their failure to adapt to it. This same survey "found" that workers thought the second leading cause of an enterprise's problems after "poor leadership" was "poor conditions in the market". The state also continues to hector workers about how they ought to accept market-based logic in their own lives. For example, Workers Daily published a reader's debate over a story it had published about a model worker named Ren Jianye, who turned down a cash prize that accompanied his honor. One of Ren's critics argued:
"For him not to accept it reflects a spirit of not asking for anything. But it has bad side effects. Not to accept it plays into the spirit of eating out of the same pot, in which some people rest easy on the fruits of others' work, in which some people work more but don't get more, all of which depresses the labor activism of many people. If people like Ren are paid more, this protects the people who work and contribute more, which in turn disturbs the people who waste their days."Here we begin to see a more insidious rhetorical approach that divides the working class. The same Workers Daily has depicted young workers as lazy "good for nothings" who lack pride in their work and are unwilling to upgrade their skills.
The state makes at least two other kinds of ideological appeals to the working class. First, it argues that the current situation facing workers coincides with modern international norms. For example, Britain's "workfare" program was cited favorably in support of a plan to deny any benefits to workers who do not join training schemes. Likewise, the 1995 Labor Law is justified because it is similar to legislation of other industrial countries. Second, it has argued that there is no alternative either to the "reforms" or to the problems that they have brought in tow for workers. "At some stages of development, unemployment represents and is a necessary stage for social progress," a Workers Daily reader wrote in its pages.
Aside from ideological appeals, a number of political factors have helped the state develop and maintain its hegemony over the working class. Its bold and decisive reversal of the overbearing political radicalism of the Cultural Revolution remains important, especially to those who lived through it. The state's willingness to respond positively or at least not aggressively in the face of many local protests both mollifies flash points and helps persuade other workers that it can play a positive role for them. Likewise, the state's willingness to open up limited space for grumbling and even criticism--some of it, as above, published in the official press--helps workers blow off steam and is meant to persuade them that the state is not an utterly implacable enemy. Finally, the fanfare with which the state publicly attacks corruption may actually help place it in common cause with workers angry at their shady bosses and complicit local officials.
Conclusion
The Chinese working class is a diverse lot of people in rapid flux. China's workers are responding to their lived experiences in a variety of ways. Many are participating in various forms of collective action. Balancing all this ferment is a set of countervailing forces that dampen working class collective action.How durable is the hegemony of the market and of the state over the thinking of the working class? The stunning rapidity with which hegemony of the market and the Dengist state emerged over the past two decades could affect that hegemony’s future either way. On the one hand, it might suggest that working class thinking is capricious, responding primarily to the immediately preceding crisis (in this case, of the Maoist period) and/or to the positive aspects of the macro-economic and political changes of the Dengist period. If this is so, then the hegemony of the market and the state might be fragile, particularly in the event of a serious and sustained economic crisis. On the other hand, the fact that many of the core political and economic values of the Maoist period were tossed aside so quickly might suggest that they had not really taken root. In this case, market and state hegemony would appear more durable.
For Gramsci, hegemony and counter-hegemony are built by political movements, a project requiring extraordinary patience, skill, and determination, as well as a civil society in which to grow. So long as the People's Republic continues to survive as China’s state in anything like its present form, there seems almost no likelihood that a robust working class political movement capable of building a counter-hegemony against the market or the state could emerge. And if the state falls, the ensuing political situation would, in all likelihood, be confused and unstable enough to provide a poor environment for a durable, vigorous anti-market social movement.
Of course, as a Marxist Gramsci also knew that economic crisis could undermine hegemony and create opportunities for the development of counter-hegemony. The state's hegemony is built upon its ability to guarantee and claim credit for China’s stunning economic expansion since 1978. Were that economic growth to end in a serious, sustained economic crisis, workers might respond with outbursts that could threaten the survival of the People's Republic of China. But even in that scenario, it is difficult to see how the hegemony of the market would be undermined. As my Oberlin colleague Steve Crowley has shown, in the last days of the Soviet Union, striking coal miners saw the market as their salvation from the grips of a corrupt state and a political economy that had failed them. In China as elsewhere, a deep economic crisis would be far more likely to incubate a movement against the state--which is, after all, an overt, palpable target--than against the market itself. The latter is, after all, far more diffuse and amorphous an object of political struggle. Mobilization against the market also requires a robust left in command of considerable political resources, something not at all likely in China. In short, even if state hegemony were to fail, market hegemony would probably survive, and might even be strengthened, at least in the short or medium run.
For a latter-day Gramsci interested in elaborating a working class political movement, then, China today provides good cause for the "pessimism of the intellect" professed by the master, and a sore test of the "optimism of the will" he strove so nobly to affirm.
Marc Blecher is a professor of politics and East Asian studies at Oberlin College.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=103&ItemID=8434
