My TakeChina to America: No way to treat the guy who saved your life

In the 1990s, when I got out of college and started work, Marxism was dead, and free-market capitalism and Western democracy were the only game in town, for every country and every culture, for all eternity. At least that was the zeitgeist. It was, after all, the end of history. Even China was going capitalist. The irony was that “the end of history” was originally a Marxist notion.

How times have changed! Intellectual fashions are a lot like the fashion in clothing. Marxism might have been as dead as bell-bottoms in the two decades after the end of the Cold War; now it’s back in style. Bookshops in Germany reported sales growth of books by and about Karl Marx were up by 300 per cent after the last global financial crisis. For a time, Capital was a bestseller on Amazon. I read somewhere that the Communist Manifesto is the second all-time bestseller, only after the Bible.

Of course, Marxism was never out of fashion in Western academia, and Japanese universities. I recently bought a book titled Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, by a Japanese political scientist, Hiroshi Uchida, and read that throughout the Japanese economic bubble of the 1980s and after its collapse, the economics departments of the country’s universities, including the most prestigious ones, were populated by Marxists.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Francis Lui Ting-ming, a former chair of the economics department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, once recommended to me a book by a Japanese economist who tried to express Marx’s key ideas in Capital in linear algebra. I never got around to finding that book. But it could be an interesting read now that I have finished volume one of Capital. The falling rates of profit as Marx conceives the idea as the downfall of capitalism can indeed be expressed in simple secondary school algebra. Marx himself sets out the basic formulas in chapter 18. Here’s a simple algebraic demonstration on YouTube.

Now, it strikes me that the theory of capitalism’s collapse in Capital perfectly – and paradoxically – explains China’s rise and its two corollaries, that is, (1) how it helped maintain the profitability of the capitalist West, especially the American economy and (2) then its survival. I am not arguing anything original, of course, just an intellectual reading exercise to amuse myself. David Harvey, the great Marxist geographer and urban planning theorist, has long argued China in fact saved Western capitalism after the 2007-08 financial crisis.