Translated from Chinese by Sherwin Lu
EDITOR’S NOTE: Class antagonisms and ethnic conflicts have been the two major interwoven threads forming the history of Europe and the ever-expanding Westernized world at large since ancient times. The handful of privileged exploiting classes, whether slave-owners, or feudal lords, or monopoly capitalists-colonialists-imperialists, have always resorted to “divide and rule” tactics by exploiting ethnic differences among the oppressed and exploited so as to maintain their minority rule over the majority. On the other hand, some downtrodden ethnic Jews in Europe succeeded in winning their freedom by finding their way into the privileged few through likewise exploitative means, and at the same time changing history. This essay presents a vivid sketch of one aspect of the picture of modern Europe against a larger background of world history and provides an alternative way of looking at the past and the present.
THE TEXT
European capitalist democracy came about side by side with power centralization in the government at a time when the feudal system was disintegrating. Marx’s social development theory regarded capitalist democracy as the sole kind of political system that matches capitalist production relations. When this theoretical paradigm was applied to the study of Chinese history, it came into severe discord with historical facts, creating fundamental inconsistencies in modern Chinese official theory on history and resulting in serious misinterpretations and distortions of the historical development of the Chinese society.
Capitalist democracy has not been the sole political model, not even a typical one, that fits capitalist production relations. This is the crux of the matter. In Chinese history, after the collapse of the feudal system during Eastern Zhou dynasty (770 - 256 bc), China already entered the capitalist period in terms of production relations. This was a historical fact, unbelievable though it may sound to those who presuppose a priori that capitalist production relations must be matched exclusively by a democratic political system and then conclude through reverse deduction that without signs of the latter there could not have existed the former. But the a priori axiomatic presupposition about the exclusive matching between the production relations and the political system has never been verified either in theory or by facts. The fact of the matter is that power centralization in the government has been the normal political model for a capitalist society. This has been evidenced by the histories of development of the world’s major civilizations. Capital’s monopoly of political power in the form of democracy was a unique political model when it first took shape in northern Europe, made universal throughout the world only in modern times after it was established in social theories cooked up at its place of origin as the standard political model for a capitalist society. Its political and strategical implications are very obvious.
The difference between capitalist and feudal production relations lies in the ownership pattern: with the former, unlimited monopoly and separation between ownership and use right, in contrast with limited monopoly and unseparated ownership and use right in the latter case. While feudal ownership was graded according to the ranking system, allowing only limited competition, capitalist ownership is open to acquisition via free competition, leading inevitably to exclusive monopoly of ownership represented either by an emperor at the top of a centralized government or by the financial oligarchy behind the capital-controlled government. The wage labor relationship, made possible by the separation of use right from ownership right, is typical of the capitalist economic mode – employers profit by renting to workers the use right of means of production while workers receive wages by renting the use right of their labor to the employers. Taxes as the revenue source in the “centralized government” model are essentially rents collected for leasing to people the use right of government-monopolized land, mines and other natural resources, whereas interests as the revenue source in the “centralized capital power” model are essentially rents collected for leasing to people the use right of currency that is monopolized by big financial capital. In short, under the capitalist system with unrestricted competition for ownership, what kind of resources are monopolized by whom determines what political model is used, the “centralized government” model or the “centralized capital power” model.
Related to this, there has been another a priori conclusion characteristic of linear social theories, which says that capitalist production relations only fits large-scale industrial production. As a matter of fact, the use of natural power instead of man power in big industry was only a kind of progress in technology. There is no simplistic matching relationship between technology and production relations. The above linear way of thinking can be traced back to the social development theories in the European tradition, such as using bronze or iron to represent an age in the history of social development and also the corresponding social relations pattern and political system model of that age. This viewpoint of simplistic matching is not well grounded either in theory or in reality. It is like putting the cart before the horse in logical reasoning to say that, since there was no mechanized industry, old China could not have entered the capitalist era.
In fact, as early as the Warring States period (c. 476 – 221 bc), wage labor relationship started to become a mainstream phenomenon in production relations in China, such as hiring of farmhands, of other workers, and of government bureaucrats. Those landlords and merchants who hired other people for their labor made up the big capitalist class, who exercised decisive influence all along on the political and economic life of old China. Although in a capitalist society the resources being monopolized may not be fixed or uniform duo to unlimited mobility of capital, still it is too parochial in outlook to deny the capitalist nature of such landlords just because the resource they monopolized was the land. A capitalist is not defined by the nature of the business he is doing and the kind of resource he is monopolizing, but by his position in the production relations. Since those landlords and merchants were at the same time employers of wage labor, they were certainly not essentially different from capitalists in their class nature. Hence it is quite ridiculous for those many scholars who were misled by linear thinking to search for “germs” of capitalism in late Ming society, just like not seeing the forest for the trees.
Capitalist democracy essentially means allowing capitalists to manipulate the government. China and some other major civilizations have adopted the “power centralized in government” model that does not allow merchants to interfere in its affairs because merchants, or capitalists, can share equally with all other people the same political rights. A centralized government should not have become an issue so long as it does not exclude capitalists from entering its agencies and provides protection for all capitalists, big or small, officeholders or not. The change of political institutional model in the West was not brought about to mend any essential defects in the “centralized government” model per se, but triggered by the European governments’ anti-Semitist policy.
Since the Middle Ages, Jews in Europe had not been protected against tides of anti-Semitist atrocities and suffered from a destitute and unsettled life. Even when allowed to settle down there, they were confined in the ghettos. If they needed to go out, they were required to wear badges indicating their ethnic identity. Moreover, they were only permitted to engage in those occupations that Christians looked upon, such as trading and lending. But unexpectedly, this restriction turned out to be a blessing for the Jews: when they accumulated plenty of wealth by such means, they attracted the attention of the feudal lords, began to lend them money when the latter are financially strapped, and finally became the earliest financial giants exerting great influence on the society, known as “court Jews”. However, because of their special ethnic background, these court Jews could not be assimilated into the mainstream society and could only serve as instruments for the political establishment without guarantee of their social status, however rich they might be, even with sufficient capital power to lead the society. The court Jews could only exchange their service to the rulers for some minor political “privileges” such as exemption from wearing ethnic badges, which were actually universal rights everybody was entitled to. It is not difficult to imagine that such a great discrepancy between their social-political status and economic power would inevitably drive the court Jews to fight for their own interests.
By secretly manipulating the currency market and government finance through their influence in the courts, those Jewish financial tycoons finally managed to control the political process of European states and finally replaced the centralized Germanic aristocratic governments with capitalist democratic institutions, successfully reducing the elected governments into mere figureheads and gaining for themselves a firm control from behind the scenes over the superstructure of the capitalist system as well as the economic foundation of these countries. That was how, as Marx put it, the Jews won their emancipation in their own way. In other words, The capitalist revolution in modern Europe was in essence a national liberation movement of the Jews.
The reason why capitalist democracy needed a puppet government as camouflage was because there were no other alternatives for the Jews, who were prevented from gaining power due to their ethnic background and the long European tradition of ultranationalism. The first time for Jews to share state power in Europe was when the Bolsheviks were in charge of the Soviet Union, but it was not long before the Jews were driven out of power. Even today, though in control of a larger part of the world’s wealth, the Jewish financial capitalists are still staying behind the scenes. This has not only been a natural consequence of the development of European history but also rooted in the reality of long-standing conflicts between Jewish and native European capitalists.
In a word, the political system of capitalist democracy has been a freak offspring born of Europe’s parochial ethnic culture and been serving as a survival strategy for the Jewish people to fight out of their predicament. If it were not for the bondage and oppression imposed on the Jews by Germanic Christians, there would not have been today’s tit for tat conflicts involving the Jews. The capitalist political system is neither virtuous nor vicious and it is not advisable either to sanctify or to demonize its initiator, i.e., the Jewish people. The reason why China objects to capitalist politics and the Jewish financial big capital behind it is because they are threatening China’s national interests. On this issue, there should not have been disagreements between the Left and the Right, or between the elites and the common folks. But unfortunately, many people have been blinded by their respective ideologies and become sort of religious fanatics engaged in holy wars against each other, ignoring the sinking of our common foothold underneath.
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