Upstream - [TEASER] China Pt. 3: Bourgeois Democracy vs Socialist Democracy w/ Vijay Prashad

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

This is a free preview of the episode "China Pt. 3: Bourgeois Democracy vs Socialist Democracy w/ Vijay Prashad." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. It’s a difficult task to compare bourgeois democracies to socialist democracies—and not just because it’s difficult to be living in the belly of the beast as it enters into its death spiral all while watching social and technological advancements take place in what we’re told are “authoritarian” communist “regimes”—but because in many ways the democratic experiments of the Atlantic world originated in an entirely different context as the socialist democratic experiments in places like China—and they have almost entirely different aims. What are those aims? And how are they—and are they not—being advanced?  To explain the differences to us, we’ve brought back onto the show Vijay Prashad. Vijay is a journalist, political commentator, and executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He’s the author of many books, including Washington Bullets: The History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, and Red Star Over the Third World. In this conversation, Part. 3 of our China series here on Patreon, we explore the differences between bourgeois and socialist democracies more broadly before taking a deep dive into specific examples comparing China and the United States. We dispel a number of myths about Chinese society, ask Vijay to share his perspective on what is taking place with the Uyghers, the role of Western propaganda in destabilizing communism, and much more.  Artwork: Further resources: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Democracy Perception Index Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, by Vijay Prashad Reviving Erhai Lake: A Socialist Approach to Balancing Human and Ecological Development, Tricontinental Related episodes: China Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Jason Hickel China Pt. 2: Socialist Democracy and Democratic Centralism w/ Ken Hammond (Chinese) Socialism vs (U.S.) Capitalism The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. In China, the principle coordinate of freedom, as I said, of democracy is deprivation has to be removed. And that's Chinese democracy. That is what it is. You first have to deal with the question of getting rid of poverty, getting rid of illiteracy, getting rid of hierarchies,

and then you build institutions of representation, democracy and so on. And so that was the sequencing of their idea of democracy. And I think it's rather unfortunate when I read people saying, well, the authoritarian Chinese versus the democratic West. I mean, it's a total orientalist way of looking at China. It's also completely uneducated because you're not trying to understand what was the Chinese conversation around freedom from deprivation or freedom from this, freedom from that. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream, Upstream, Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn

everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. It's a difficult task to compare bourgeois democracies to socialist democracies. And it's not just because it's difficult to be living in the belly of the beast as it enters into its death spiral, all while watching the social and technological advancements take place in what we're told are

authoritarian communist regimes, but because in many ways the democratic experiments of the Atlantic world originated in an entirely different context as the socialist democratic experiments in places like China. And they have almost entirely different aims. What are those aims? And how are they and how are they not being advanced? To explain the differences to us, we've brought back on Vijay Prashad.

Vijay is a journalist, political commentator, and executive director of Tri-Continental, Institute for Social Research. He's also the author of many books including Washington Bullets, The History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations, and Red Star Over the Third World. In this conversation, part three of our series on China here on Patreon, we explore the difference between bourgeois and socialist democracies more broadly before taking a deep dive into the specific examples comparing China and the United States. We dispel a number of myths about Chinese society, ask Vijay to share his perspective on what's taking place with the Uighurs, the role of Western propaganda in destabilizing communism, and much more.

And now, here's Robert in to have you back on the show. It's great to be with you. Thanks a lot for thinking of me for this. This is a series of some importance, so I'm happy to be part of it. Yeah, well, we're very glad that you're part of it. And, you know, we have had you on the show before. We talked about the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But just in case anybody missed that episode or for some odd reason, might not be familiar with you yet.

I'm wondering if you can introduce yourself. Sure. I'm the director of Tri-Continental, the Institute for Social Research. And I think of importance to this particular conversation we're going to have. I'm one of the editors of the International Edition of Wenhua Zhongheng, which is a Chinese intellectual journal, which is partnered with Tri-Continental to produce an English, Spanish, and Portuguese edition of essays written by Chinese scholars and people involved in the conversation in China, who are in the midst of debating issues such as,

what is socialism? What is China's ecological transition? What is China's relationship to the continent of Africa? And so on. And we have a whole bunch of issues. We do two issues a year. And they are all available for free download at thetricontinental.org.

Amazing. That's such an amazing resource. Thanks so much for bringing that into the conversation. All right. So we're going to spend the hour with you looking at some key differences between US and Chinese democracy and of course we'll get into a whole bunch of other stuff as well but just to sort of lay the groundwork to set the table here it might be helpful just from your perspective to hear a

little bit about how the two systems work. So if you could compare bourgeois democracy, the type that we have here in the US, and China's system of democracy, and maybe if you want to bring in the mass line as well, that could be helpful, but however you want to tackle that. Well, you know, the first thing to say is that these are incomparable systems in one respect, not because these are two different kinds of human beings, but because they're really different ways of organizing social life. You know, one of the features of the democratic experiment that has taken place, let's say in the Atlantic world, you know, in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and in other

countries in the world, one of the features of that is to separate out the economic and social lives of people from their political and civic rights. So when we talk about democracy of freedom in the Atlantic region, one thinks typically of civic rights and political or electoral rights, the right to vote, for instance, or certain freedoms, freedom of expression, freedom of association and so on. I know these are all being curtailed in parts of the Atlantic world, but at least, you know, ideologically, the idea is this is the zone of freedom. But freedom means these kind of political and civic freedoms, not the freedom from hunger, freedom from want, freedom from illiteracy, freedom from deprivation of different kind, freedom of homelessness and so on. That's off the table. That's your private matter. What the state affords you is the right to enter into a kind of discourse around who do you want as your representative?

But what your representative does, that's a separate matter. That's a matter of negotiation. And to some extent, it's your luck and fortune and where you were born and etc, etc, etc. Okay. So that's basically the kind of pact that was established through a kind of liberal conversation, you know, which goes from John Locke onwards. It's a serious debate about what counts as democracy, what counts as freedom. These are not trivial matters. I mean, the people have thought about them quite hard and as a consequence of in a sense, the capitalist system, which does privatize suffering. What you have to sell is you have to sell your ability to work. You go to work, you get a wage.

If you can't make it on the wage, sorry, pal, your suffering is your own. It's privatized. Yeah. The state operates to keep the system going. And yes, you can, you know, elect a representative, your fortunate, who's going to argue for a better share of the surplus to the deprived people and so on. That's possible, but it's difficult because if certain people have a lot of money, then they can influence the political system. And then your freedoms are also curtailed in the political system. And there are serious debates in countries of the West about influence in politics, about money in politics.

It's not like these are strange things I'm saying. I mean, these are very straightforward things which liberals worry about. You know, liberals worry about the role of money in politics, about exclusion of people. I mean, why is it, for instance, a very interesting fact. And I'm saying this because I've looked into this a little closely that countries that came out of the Catholic tradition generally have their voting happen on

Sunday, which is a holiday. So everybody has a holiday on voting days in countries where it was largely a Protestant disposition like the United States, voting doesn't take place on Sunday. It takes place during the weekend. It's not a holiday. So that working class people have a hard time exercising their freedom of voting because they don't have time to go and vote. They are stuck on a low wage job and so on.

So the questions of what is democracy and what is freedom, these are serious issues of debate within Atlantic liberalism. I don't want to trivialize them and just say, well, it's a fake democracy. It's not true. They're real issues that people have grappled with and continue to grapple with.

Can you make a real democracy in a capitalist society? This is not a Marxist approach. This is actually a liberal worry. Liberals worry. There are books written by liberals about this very matter. You know, when you have a liberal saying this money in politics, voting day is not a holiday. There's no free public transportation on voting day. There's not enough machines in poor neighborhoods. They're talking about capitalism. You know,

they're reflecting on the limitations of liberalism and the democratic experiment. So in a capitalist society in the Atlantic world, there are certain kinds of electoral possibilities, but these are deeply constrained and the constraint, the critique of the constraint comes from within people themselves who are believers in that project, critique it. Okay, so that's in a sense that system. And why I said these are incomparable is that it's a different conversation, really, you know, to compare two different conversations is also a little unfair. Yeah.

You know, the Chinese experiment with democracy and freedom is an utterly different storyline because China suffered a hundred years of what they call the century of humiliation, great humiliation from the opium wars onward. Parts of their country was stolen, Hong Kong and Macau and so on, sections of their cities, Shanghai, they were not permitted to have police control

over their own city. The colonial powers had their own sections of the city and their own police officers, the French, the British, and so on. So this was a humiliation. And the nationalist, the commandant, and the Communist Party come out of an anger at the sense of humiliation.

Both shared this anger at the sense of humiliation. And so you had attempts to overthrow the humiliation. Let's even go further back than this 1911 revolution. It was the Chinese people who liberated themselves from the from the last emperor. We they overthrew we they created a republic led by San Yat Sen. And so there is this hunger in China for some sort of freedoms and democracy. You can't now write the liberal storyline onto them. This is not John Locke.

They have a different set of coordinates. The coordinates begin, let's say, with San Yat Sen and then later developed by by Marxists, at the universities in Beda and in Shanghai, and a young scholar, but from a very poor family, Mao Tse Tung is brought into this conversation. And Mao Tse Tung's very early writings in the 1920s are about, well, what about the peasants?

Who's going to free the peasants? There's no point having certain limited bourgeois freedoms in the cities. What about the peasants? And how can there be freedom without freedom from deprivation? This is a core sentiment in the democratic experiment in China.

The abolition of poverty is way more important than voting rights. It gets embedded into the system, into the culture, you know, that people should not starve, people should not be sleeping on the street. This is embedded into the culture of freedom, you know, as it develops. Not like China doesn't understand the word freedom. You know, to say it's an authoritarian country is to miss the fact that it is having a different conversation about what

is freedom, what is democracy and so on. So for the Chinese conversation, when you read Sun Yat-sen later, you read Mao Tse-tung, if you go and read Deng Xiaoping, in fact, it's very interesting because he's also gripped by the horror, the nightmare of poverty. You know, these are people who fought in the Chinese revolution. They saw the Chinese people suffer and die in very large numbers. China, World War II starts in 1937, two years before Europe, and it ends in 1949, four years after Europe. It's a much longer war, more gruesome. The Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, in Korea, you know, and in parts of mainland China, very poorly

documented, the massacre in Nanjing, you know, our coordinates for the atrocities of World War II are almost entirely, you know, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and in Germany. But we don't think of the millions of people in Asia that were butchered in World War II, you know, in Bengal, million people die. Maybe three million, says Amartya Sen in the famine of 1943. So these guys, Mao Tse Tung, Deng Xiaoping, Chuan Lai, they saw with their own eyes during the Long March and in the struggles to establish the base areas for the left, they saw the deprivation. So for them, freedom means freedom from want.

That's the principle coordinate, not freedom to vote for somebody. You know, also they understood very early that in China, literacy rates were very low. You know, you can hold an election, but you know, people can't read the ballot. Like, what are you talking about? You know, you have to first overcome the barriers of literacy. You have to overcome the barriers of propaganda, of monarchism and people feeling the hierarchies

of landlordism, you know, that has to be erased. See, land reform is not about distributing land. Land reform is about getting rid of the culture of landlordism, where the landlord is the king, the Lord, you know, literally the Lord, land Lord. They rule like a king. That consciousness has to change. What's the point in 1950 of holding an election? The Chinese Communist Party takes power in 49.

What election are you going to hold in 1950? You got a destroyed, broken country. People are super deprived. You've got the culture of landlordism still intact, foot binding, caste systems in parts of China. You've got the Lamas in Tibet who rule the people as serfs. You know, they're treated as serfs, slaves virtually. I mean, that's the reality of China in 14, what election are you going to hold in 1950? You know, it's not a great achievement to hold an election.

They could have done it in India. It was done 1952. It's not an achievement by itself. You know, it's interesting. Okay, India takes that part. But in China, the principle coordinate of freedom, as I said, of democracy is deprivation has to be removed. And that's Chinese democracy. That is what it is. The principle coordinate of freedom, as I said, of democracy is deprivation has to be removed. And that's Chinese democracy.

That is what it is. You first have to deal with the question of getting rid of poverty, getting rid of illiteracy, getting rid of hierarchies. And then you build institutions of representation, democracy and so on. And so that was the sequencing of their idea of democracy. And I think it's rather unfortunate when I read people saying, well, the authoritarian Chinese versus the democratic West. I mean, it's a total orientalist way of looking at China.

It's also completely uneducated because you're not trying to understand what was the Chinese conversation around freedom from deprivation or freedom from this, freedom from that. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with BJ Prashad. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream Podcast Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will have access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations

to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast.