Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution

by Karl Gerth

What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism. Karl Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies actually developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949–1976) down to the present. Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire - wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges - Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people's lives.

Genres: China

394 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2020

Reviews

[Erhan Bilici · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cognitive dissonance at its finest:

You can summarize this work as 'Humans act like humans even after a bloody socialist revolution', which is apparently very shocking.

The author subscribes to the critical sociological theory of consumerism which is very popular in some parts of academia. He then, unsurprisingly conceptualize socialism as the opposite of consumerism.
tc;dr: consumerism (things that I observe) bad, socialism (things that I imagine) good

With these abstractions under his belt, he looks at Chinese history after the communist revolution and came across various human phenomena that are very similar to what he described as consumerism.
He then concludes that this social order cannot be socialism as people are still acting like consumers (mindless Pac-Man-like agents, searching for the next commodity to acquire), ​as one does.

What else could he do?
Question his priors, look for new theories of society and human behavior that can better explain the data?
That would be absurd!

[Harry C · Rating 4 out of 5]

People won’t like it, but the book succeeds on it’s own terms of calling into question the usefulness of calling the Mao era socialist - even taken on the the CCP’s own terms. Empirically rich, the evidence of widespread consumerism is hard to refute. If the conceptualisation is frustrating, it is also emancipatory