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The visit of Hu Juntao to the united $tates brought out a spate of bourgeois news stories about China's rising economic power. Recently, China passed England and France on the list of the world's global economies to reach fourth place by annual output referred to as "Gross Domestic Product."(1) According to a bourgeois British paper, in 2045, China will pass the united $tates in total economic size.(2) Right now though, the u.$. economy is more than five times China's size, as is the EU economy, because the imperialists suck the surplus-value out of China--not because China actually produces less than other countries.
The fact that China just passed England and France and stands just behind Germany is important to MIM's observations about the global class structure. China has 20 times more people but only an economy equal to that of England or France. That is a rough sense of the disparity in living standards. That much any bourgeois economist may find suitable for discussion.
China is also the location of over half the world's exploitation; even though China has only one quarter of the world's people. One reason for this is that China has wages much lower than the world average, because people in the West are overpaid. Another reason that China is so important to global exploitation is that over half of the world's industrial production now occurs in China by itself.(2)
Readers of MIM's website have kept up with the facts, that the industrial sector in China dedicated to exports alone surpassed the industrial sector of Western Europe a decade ago. MIM has steadily pointed out that old views tying the communist movement down to its historical roots in Europe need to pass from the scene as unrepresentative. Other organizations in the West calling themselves communist and not allied with MIM just don't get it. They end up standing for the demands of parasites. One party calling itself "Marxist" goes so far as to advocate for the wages and conditions of workers in the government-controlled armaments industry. Hence Western supposed Marxism has gotten far off-base, even in terms of its original mission.
Marx and Engels were smart guys who brought great prestige to the study of Western labor conditions. Yet to call the people of the West as they are today "proletariat" is something Marx called adopting a class analysis of "scribblers worse than Malthus." Today's Malthus would be someone like Judith Banister, a persyn Marx would rather discuss with than most supposedly socialist or communist parties today referring to white-collar, pink-collar and service workers as "proletariat."
Today it's time to move on from the days of excitement about the Western proletariat's struggles. China is propping up the economies of the united $tates and European Union by doing the actual work and letting the West have the so-called jobs in soldiering, spying, bombing, torturing, pornography-spreading, drug-dealing, lawyering, stock-trading, real estate speculating, banking, advertising and now, even blogging.
Notes:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29
2. Clifford Coonan, "America meets the new superpower," April 19, 2006,
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article358568.ece