In a capitalist society, the bourgeois media and statistical agencies are responsible for two tasks: first, to use大量虚假数据 to gloss over the economic development of capitalist countries and to deceive workers; second, on the premise of the first, to bury some real information so that the entire bourgeoisie can obtain expanded exploitation, providing information and guidance for capitalist operation. The statistics under the socialist phase of the Chinese renovation are the same: they exaggerate the prosperity of the economy, yet must include some real data. Therefore, as long as we compare and analyze these data, we can still obtain some useful information from the data of the National Bureau of Statistics of the Zhongxiu (Mid-Reform) state and discern the economic situation under the Zhongxiu socialist society.
Real information is generally highly specialized and not easy for people to understand.
There is nothing abstract or trans-class professional about it. It feels like October’s wind comrade is saying that the bourgeoisie, in order to develop the capitalist economy, needs information sharing and to publish some real data for capitalists to reference for exploitation, but at the same time wants to keep the people outside, attempting to keep the people in the dark. So they feint and use some jargon of bourgeois economics to mislead. The bourgeoisie’s professionalism is nothing more than to achieve such reactionary aims.
I personally think that information obtainable only through learning is not very helpful. It’s like you’ve seen how dark this society is, but you already know it; any additional information you receive would just serve as further corroboration.
In the field of economics, truly helpful information has a gatekeeping barrier. It’s not a barrier of knowledge, but a barrier of class. An ordinary person, even if they understand economics well, if they cannot access the core circles or insiders, their judgments about the economic situation will be incomplete or inaccurate.
In other words, we should categorize information as “meaningful” and “meaningless,” rather than “true” or “untrue.” That’s a small personal insight.
What you said is incomprehensible. The bourgeoisie indeed wants to water down information related to the economy to create illusions and deceive the broad masses of people.
But in order to be convincing, the bourgeoisie also has to acknowledge some real, effective content in its own economically related information. For example, even today the Nazis had to acknowledge the serious unemployment rate among youth.
The reason why the various economic data of the bourgeoisie are obscure and hard to understand is twofold: on one hand, the bourgeoisie itself has created a variety of obscure terms to mislead the masses and prevent workers from directly understanding the country’s real economic situation. On the other hand, under the capitalist system, the division between head and body means that the broad working people have little opportunity and condition to access political economy knowledge. However, as Marxists and revolutionary intellectuals, we have an obligation to study political economy and, through political economy, clearly study the essence of the various terms of modern bourgeois economics and explain them in content that the broad working people can understand, so as to expand propaganda.
The notion that “no single class understands the state’s conditions clearly” is an agnostic view. For the bourgeoisie, understanding these things is certainly easy—they are, after all, the masters of the country and the actual holders of the means of production. However, the bourgeoisie has its own ways of understanding the state economy, and the proletariat naturally has its own. On the one hand, it is based on data provided by bourgeois government, and on the other hand, it is through labor practice and contact with the broad working people that one can truly feel the Nazi economic reality and its impact on the lives of the broad working people.
So I think what you said is incorrect.
You are right, but pursuing understanding in the way you described will ultimately be limited. Because a lot of information is not public, rather than “not understanding.”
Because the only economic data you can see are the financial reports of listed companies and data published by national statistical agencies. And the finances of many trusts and hedge funds are completely not public. Therefore, ordinary people have no way to detect signs before they truly act to influence, while their destructive power can be enormous, affecting a company, an industry, or even a country, with a significant impact. And these effects are completely unavoidable for ordinary people who are not within their class.
To give an example. We all know that in 1997 Soros bet against the Thai baht. His Quantum Fund, and the international capital behind it, most of their financial状况 are not public. This led to Thailand being completely unprepared, causing the economy to directly crash, and the Thai people suffered substantial losses. But conversely, if one is in the same stratum as them, they might receive the news in advance, or even participate to take a share. This is what I mean by the function of inside information. In such a situation, any public financial reports and historical data from statistical agencies lose their meaning. People can only passively bear the losses.
Short selling the Thai baht in 1997 was incidental; the timing could be a year or two earlier or later, perhaps by Soros, or by some other financial monopoly bourgeoisie. But at that time Thailand’s economy was already at the brink between prosperity and crisis. The reason it could maintain a prosperity illusion was entirely due to capitalist lending relations that extended the payment chain, creating fake needs with purchasing power and ultimately manufacturing a false prosperity. The most典ical data representation is high debt ratios and stagnation of total factor productivity. Why does a large flow of capital continually enter, bringing more advanced technology, a higher capital composition, and higher productivity, yet fail to raise the rate of surplus value of per unit of capital? Because a large portion of goods could not be sold at all. In this situation, there is an inevitable possibility of the baht being shorted. Even if no one shorts it, in a few years it would collapse on its own. What is called insider information decides when the bourgeoisie profits from this deal, but the bourgeoisie cannot issue orders to the economy itself.
Your statement is completely inexplicable. Throughout history, Marxists in various countries have used publicly available bourgeois data to conduct detailed analyses of a state’s economy. History has proven this is possible, and many posts on the forum have provided detailed analyses of today’s Nazi China’s economy. I suggest you review the analyses before judging.
Second, the fundamental purpose for Marxists to understand the economic situation is not to speculate in stocks or to make money, but to expose the true face of capitalist exploitation and wage slavery, the miserable conditions of workers under capitalism, and to prove the reactionary nature of capitalism. The bourgeoisie, on the contrary, especially on the eve of capitalism’s demise, their economic theorists’ primary aim is to oppose Marxism. As economists, they cannot derive scientific conclusions; it is precisely these old fellows who claim to possess all the economic materials who, after a comprehensive analysis, find that their conclusions do not match the real economic situation at all.
Thus it is clear that the most fundamental thing is not to rely on power to obtain core data, but on class position and political line.
What is helpful and what is not? Marxists require overthrowing capitalist society, which means collecting the experiences of countless workers and peasants and analyzing them with Marxism to reach a rational understanding. We must see the darkness of this society, not only so that we can see it, but also so that some intellectuals in the petty-bourgeoisie who have been blinded can see it; not only to see the darkness of society, but also to know why society is so dark, why under private ownership society must be dark, and why this darkness—this domination—inevitably ends in decline both politically and economically. This should inspire people to struggle to abolish this exploitative system and give people the confidence to win. The “helpful” information you refer to, does it mean the so-called “insider information”? This is somewhat useful to us, because as evidence that reveals the capitalist class’s enormous wealth in wartime profiteering, making profits at the expense of workers’ unemployment and death, it is very powerful and timely to know in advance, so as to oppose certain policies in advance. The capitalist class and the worshippers of the capitalist class, who worship the petty bourgeoisie that wants to become capitalist, crave insider information like this because they want to plunder huge profits when the financial capitalist class triggers an economic crisis.
But for the workers and the general laboring masses, opposing individual events is fundamentally insufficient to solve their difficulties; they demand overthrow of the entire capitalist system. The role of this information, compared to the powerful analysis of Marxism, is micro-scale.
Comrade Huazhou, the October wind, posted this to analyze and discuss some jargon in bourgeois economics with everyone, right? I’m very looking forward to the update. I myself used to think economic news is too dull to understand, so I stopped paying attention to economic news for a long time; the less I read, the less I understand, and I stayed uninterested in the economic news of China and other countries for a long period. But the economic base determines the superstructure, and many important contents such as policies and diplomacy are shifted based on economic development and economic interests, so it is indeed necessary to read economic news seriously and change my state of not knowing anything. Previously, Comrade Fenghuo posted about economic analysis on the forum, and after reading it carefully, it really helps people understand what the substantives of some economic policies in China are, I learned a lot. I very much look forward to this post update.
I started this post with the intention of discussing China’s first-quarter economic data, because the authorities are bragging about this year’s first-quarter economic miracle, claiming that in January and February the profits of large-scale industries surged by more than 15%, and prices moved out of deflation. I believe it is necessary to expose this illusion, especially to expose the wrongdoing of the authorities profiting from Iran’s war, and some possible evidence of the militarization of the national economy.