> Guard labor is wage labor and other activities that are said to maintain (hence "guard") a capitalist system.
I'm confused by the emphasis on "a capitalist system" here. Wouldn't it be much more fruitful to study guard labor in the context of communist systems? Guard labor in communist systems is much more prevalent, reaching an immense scale. Think 2% of the East German population belonging to one agency of the secret service (the Stasi), the immense forced reeducation camps in Xinjiang, or the extensive censorship and monitoring that has taken place in all communist countries.
Isn't it kind of a waste of time for scholars who want to study guard labor to focus on capitalism?
>> Guard labor is wage labor and other activities that are said to maintain (hence "guard") a capitalist system.
> Isn't it kind of a waste of time for scholars who want to study guard labor to focus on capitalism?
No, it isn't. That's a lot like saying it's a waste of time for political scientists to study democratic governments, when they should be focusing on (mostly defunct) Soviet-style ones, which is nonsense. I've never heard of this "guard labor" concept before, but it seems to actually lend some insight into the still-existing system that we actually live in.
Honestly, your comment kind of reads as an attempt (maybe even subconscious) to distract attention away from contemplating and critiquing the capitalist system.
The East German system was capitalist, not communist. The guards were paid wages.
By definition, wages can't exist in a communist system, because there's no currency in communism. Thus wage labor can't exist, thus guard labor can't exist.
Guards certainly can, sure, but not guard labor. I think the wikipedia article is just making clear that this term only applies to capitalist economic systems.
The concentration camps in Xinjiang from the CCP's genocide against the Uighur Muslims isn't an artifact of communism, it's a result of Han Supremacy and a totalitarian government creating an Other. Further evidence: The CCP doesn't identify between minority populations anymore. There is only Han and Other. The CCP isn't communist: they jail communists. A famous one (in the PRC literary circles) just killed himself after years of cops breathing down his neck. [1] . I, and many others, argue that the PRC operates a state capitalist economy [2].
EDIT: Sadly I'm a bit of a troublemaker and am limited to 5 posts on HN a day. I'm beginning a motorcycle trip for the next couple of days so please allow me to respond here to some people kind enough to challenge me:
To habibur:
> That's focusing too much on pure definition of words and terminologies.
I think, especially for words like "communism," nothing is more important than fighting mightily for the proper definition. Developed nations the world over are undergoing a resurgence of communist thought and workers-rights movements, and the establishment is leveraging the purposefully negatively-tinged word "communism" to fight against worker's rights. "Communism" is being abused right back to McCarthy era flexibility.
Definitions are being abused. Right-leaning political parties across the world are turning workers against eachother by poisoning leftist terminology. I've had more conversations than I can count with people who profess to be hardline conservatives, and then drop line after line of strongly leftist, pro-worker dialogue.
To Supermancho:
There is always currency in capitalism. Communism is a radically different philosophy regarding the organization of society. Actually, perhaps not as radical as you might think, there's ample evidence that many societies operated under proto-communist systems for the first hundred thousand years of human pre-history, and this continued straight into the age of discovery, as recorded by European explorers in the Americas and Africa.
That currency "has always existed" is something economists often postulate but fail to provide evidence for. I'm speaking of course of the classic barter->simplification of means of exchange->currency myth. Common ownership has existed for a very, very long time.
As I understand it, the current CCP is a product of the cultural revolution being widely recognized as a mistake and consequently people with different ideas coming to power after Mao was dead.
It seems too glib to say "oh they're not communist" as it sounds to me like saying they're just not true to the revolution for no particular reason.
Well, I'm happy to get into more detail as to why I and many others argue that they aren't communist.
From first principles [1] for example, a communist society is one whose:
> socioeconomic order [is] structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.
To start, I hope we can agree to leave aside American McCarthy-esque definitions of communism, which I will rather glibly but also partially seriously describe as "anything and anyone Americans don't like." If you'd like, I can provide ample examples of American politicians throughout history describing things that are unarguably not communistic, as communist. Good faith means I think we can avoid this.
Ok, so first principles.
1. The PRC doesn't have common ownership of the means of production, nor did it ever. At the start, production was done through enforced labor in camps. There's no common ownership there, merely what I would argue is some kind of serfdom, if not outright slavery. Nowadays, there still is no common ownership, not only because PRC industry isn't very nationalized, and the parts that are couldn't be considered "commonly owned" because the People have very little say in the activities of the government, and those that do have dramatically larger net worths and buying power, which brings me to
2. The PRC has massive income disparity [2], with each income class having very different standards of living and material comfort. Not even housing or food is guaranteed in the PRC. This isn't classless society. It isn't even close.
3. The PRC obviously operates in a moneyed society. They not only print currency, they also operate many international banks. I really can't think of anything more capitalist than a bank :P
4. Though an oft-argued aspect of the first principles of communism (when I looked at this wikipedia page a few days ago, it was written as "sometimes state," and the week before that it was written as it reads now), at the very least one could argue that a totalitarian centralized government with utter control of the currency, speech, media, and general activities of every one of a billion people across several thousand square kilometers, does not satisfy the "lack of state" requirement of communism.
Marxist-Leninists and tankies would at this point say something like "the PRC needs to industrialize before it can achieve Communism" or that they're on the path to communism for some other reason, but I argue that productivity was at a level that could support communism as early as 30 years ago, and furthermore, the PRC has quite obviously no plan for achieving commuism, and Xi Jinping's multiple power-grabbing moves indicate to me that the CCP will never voluntarily rescind power back to the People.
>Marxist-Leninists and tankies would at this point say something like "the PRC needs to industrialize before it can achieve Communism" or that they're on the path to communism for some other reason
I am very much not an expert on this, but would they really? Wouldn't they be on the side that Khrushchev betrayed all that was right and good and so did Deng Xiaoping, so the bad guys won?
I ran across a reddit group once that appeared to consist of unironic, and self-identified "tankies" and I don't recall them discussing China much. They mostly defended Stalin and North Korea.
My impression is that Marx himself did envision communism developing out of industrial capitalism, it seems vaguely plausible to me that someone would consider the US and Europe, and say, clearly, communism must lie on the other side of that sort of capitalism, and we must develop to that point first. But these presumably would not be the "tankies".
My understanding is that the word "tankie" came about as a CCP focused ideology, insomuch as we describe them as people who preferred tank man would have been run over.
East Germany had public capitalism. Surplus (profit) was disbursed to the government.
Whereas the USA also has private capitalism. When surplus goes to private investors.
We also have public investment and private profit. Wags call it "socialism for corporations" and the like. Kleptocracy? Whatever we call it, it's not capitalism.
You made a lot of good points but startin goff witht he wages = capitalism therefore communism has never existed kind of doomed your post. By that logic any sort of token exchange system is capitalism, but I think your definition is over-expansive.
> By definition, wages can't exist in a communist system, because there's no currency in communism.
There is always currency and there is always an exchange of currency for services, regardless of what you want to call the system humans are operating under.
ie In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
> Guard labor is wage labor and other activities that are said to maintain (hence "guard") a capitalist system.
I'm confused by the emphasis on "a capitalist system" here. Wouldn't it be much more fruitful to study guard labor in the context of communist systems? Guard labor in communist systems is much more prevalent, reaching an immense scale. Think 2% of the East German population belonging to one agency of the secret service (the Stasi), the immense forced reeducation camps in Xinjiang, or the extensive censorship and monitoring that has taken place in all communist countries.
Isn't it kind of a waste of time for scholars who want to study guard labor to focus on capitalism?