Archive for the ‘China’ Category
Hands Off Aleppo: Victory to the Syrian Revolution!
While the breaking of the siege of Aleppo is a victory for the revolution, its fate is up in the air because its defence has been weakened by Operation Euphrates Shield which has diverted troops away from its defence. Aleppo is at risk because parts of the FSA (Free Syrian Army) have been redirected to support Turkey’s intervention in the North which has the backing so far of both Russia and U.S. Now the proposed ceasefire is designed to isolate and smash the revolution in Aleppo.
The primary objective of the U.S. and Russia is to destroy the Syrian revolution which is a force for reviving the Arab Revolution. The war against Islamic State is a mere pretext to destroy the FSA fighters and the YPG fighters and stopping them from creating Arab, Kurd and Turkmen autonomous regions in the North. That, not a tame bourgeois Kurdistan at the beckoning of both the U.S. and Russia, is what the Turkish bourgeoisie fears.
We can see the current developments in the North and the South as evidence that elements of the FSA leadership are selling out the revolutionary fighters in the hope of forming a bourgeois Sunni state that emerges from a repartition of Syria by the Great Powers. It will be a major setback for the revolution if the FSA ranks fall for this class collaboration with U.S. and Russia to divide and rule Syria.
The only way to defeat the imperialists and all their stooges is for the FSA ranks and YPG (Kurd Peoples’ Protection Units) ranks to throw out their bourgeois commanders and unite their democratic forces to build a revolutionary workers’ federation that allows for ethnic and religious freedom. To back such a front, internationalist workers need to fight their imperialist rulers at home!
Ethnic Cleansing for Partition
In the South the rebel leadership has agreed to evacuating Darayya and transferring the population to Idlib which is under rebel control. The leadership claims its hands were forced as Assad demanded the fighters leave or he would target the civilians.
By itself it could be seen as a tactical withdrawal from an impossible situation. There have been previous evacuations and further evacuations are demanded by Assad. The UN is now backing the plan to create a rebel free territory from Damascus to the sea. We can see the logic behind these deals to remove rebel control from the South to form a geographic area ruled by the existing regime.
In the North the U.S. and Russia have backed the intervention of Turkey to fight ISIS and YPG alongside FSA factions. The U.S. however opposes Turkey’s intervention extending to ethnically cleanse Kurds from Syria (East of the Euphrates). The interests of Turkey and the U.S. will collide here. Turkey wants the military allies of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) to be expelled from Syria, whereas the U.S. wants the Syrian Kurds (YPG led-Syrian Democratic Front-SDF) to form part of a Kurdistan client state in Syria and Iraq.
Turkey is the wild card here because its main interest is to prevent any Kurd nation that could lead to secession of the predominantly Kurdish regions of South East Turkey. This interest it shares with Russia and China and their local proxies, Iran and Iraq. Turkey is already offside with the U.S. because Erdogan blames it for supporting the coup attempt. So either the U.S. is prepared to give up its plan to create a larger Kurdistan, or Turkey is going to move away from the U.S. and NATO further into the arms of Russia and China.
From the standpoint of the revolution any capitulation to any imperialist power is a serious setback. The FSA has long been pulled in the direction of using its militias as bargaining chips to negotiate a peace. We have opposed all these negotiations as futile and defended those in the FSA leadership that reject any deal with the Assad regime. Now we hear that in the South rebels who refuse to give in to Assad are being ordered to stop fighting and evacuate. At the same time FSA elements are collaborating with Turkey against the SDF.
Our position is that the FSA is in danger of compromising with imperialism while fighting alongside Turkey to defeat the US backed SDF which has recently attacked FSA positions in an attempt to create an autonomous Kurdish state in Northern Syria. We have always supported Kurdish national rights but not as part of a deal with imperialism to attack the Syrian revolution as we saw when the SDF joined Assad’s siege of Aleppo. However, if the FSA response is part of a military bloc with Turkey and Russia against the U.S. backed SDF then revolutionaries cannot be part of this imperialist military bloc any more than we can support an imperialist ceasefire.
Unlike most of the fake anti-imperialists in the West, we do not see the role of the U.S. bloc and Russia/China bloc in the Syrian revolutionary war as progressive on either side. To understand why the two imperialist blocs are fighting in Syria we need to understand its significance as a geopolitical hotspot contested by both blocs.
Syria: Geopolitical Hotspot
Against much of the left, we regard Russia and China as imperialist powers that have formed a bloc with a number of semi-colonies such as Brazil, India and South Africa. This bloc also includes Iran and the current Iraqi regime. While often labelled ‘emerging’ powers, in our view Russia and China have emerged in the last 20 years as new imperialist powers. As such they dominate and oppress the semi-colonies in their bloc just as the U.S. bloc includes a number of imperialist powers that dominate and oppress the semi-colonies in their bloc.
The U.S./NATO bloc includes all the European imperialist powers in its ‘coalition’ to “defeat ISIS”. It also includes its local allies, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Despite much speculation that the US includes Iran, Turkey and Egypt it its bloc, the truth is that Iran is closely linked to the Russia/China bloc. Turkey has been denied entry to the EU and is currently on a course towards the Russia/China bloc. Egypt, long a U.S. client state, is under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi negotiating a free-trade pact between Egypt and the Eurasian Economic Union, comprising Russia and several ex-Soviet states.
The Russia/China bloc has strengthened during the period of the war. The U.S. position was originally to remove Assad and find a ‘democratic’ alternative but it held back from active intervention along the lines of Libya. However, the resistance to Assad refused to capitulate to a new pro-U.S. leadership and has fought Assad to a standstill.
The two main facts about the resistance are that first, it is not significantly funded by the U.S. or its proxies. They are Syrian fighters many of whom defected from the Syrian army, not foreign ‘terrorists’. The ‘terrorists’ are the Assad regime and all the foreign mercenaries from Hezbollah to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Moreover, the U.S. blocked the provision of Surface to Air Missiles (SAMS) to the rebels fearing a revolution that would not stop at overthrowing Assad but spark an armed Arab uprising from Tunisia to Bahrain to kick out imperialism and its dictators.
Second, the resistance has become strengthened by Islamic currents such as al-Nusra (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) designated by Russia and the U.S. as ‘terrorists’ because they want an ‘Islamic State’. Yet this is a state defined by Fateh al-Sham as a non-sectarian Islamic republic. It is because the revolution is an authentically Syrian national democratic revolution against imperialism that it continues to win popular support and control large areas of the country refusing to sign a cease-fire deal that would allow Assad to stay in power.
That is why in mid 2015 Russia intervened militarily to break the back of the popular revolution in defence of its Syrian ally, and the U.S. has been forced to collaborate with it against both the ISIS and against the revolution. Unlike the Russians who have their own troops on the ground, plus major foreign forces such as Hezbollah, the Iranian national guards, and the Iraqi Shiite militias to name the most important, the U.S. bloc has few troops on the ground other than the proxy PYG led SDF. The Russian bloc has seized the advantage and stolen a march on the US bloc forcing it to collaborate in a fight that benefits Russia and its allies but poses big risks for the US bloc.
The U.S. has already acquiesced in a deal with Iran and accepts Iran’s control of the Iraqi regime. The U.S. has now publicly accepted that Assad can stay for now. But this agreement lasts only so long as the two parties can agree on who is a “terrorist”. As we have seen the current collaboration between the two blocs to defeat all “terrorists” may breakdown over the question of whether or not the Kurds are defined as “terrorists”. Russia has changed its position from regarding the Kurds as allies of Assad, to that of ‘terrorists’. The big question is will the U.S. pull back from its goal of a Kurd nation in Syria and Iraq, or pursue it in a trade off for the partition of Syria and Iraq to rewrite the Sykes/Picot ‘agreement’ with a new Kerry/Lavrov ‘agreement’ to repartition the Middle East between the two imperialist blocs?
For those ‘Trotskyists’ who reject the position that Russia and China are imperialists we ask how do they explain the role of Russia in the Syrian war? Is Putin no more than Obama’s “hitman”. To argue as the FLTI does that Russia is a sub-imperialist power (a state that is more than a semi-colony but less then imperialist), along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, cannot account for the advances made against US interests in the Middle East which favour Russia. Can a sub-imperialist Russia advance its bloc’s interests in the region (boosting Iran in Iraq and Syria, pulling Turkey away from NATO towards Russia, with China joining in training Assad’s troops, and India affirming the legitimacy of Assad’s regime) without significantly limiting US hegemony as a rival imperialist power?
For real Marxists, Leninists, and Trotskyists, this can only mean that the rivalry between the two big imperialist blocs today is a continuation of the ‘Great Game’ between Britain and Russia for control of Eurasia before the First Imperialist War of 1914-1918. If the imperialists are allowed to win, to smash the Syrian and Arab revolutions and force a re-partition of the Middle East along the Kerry-Lavrov proposals, then this will be a defeat for the world revolution as a result of more bloody wars and even a Third (and last) World War.
Epoch, Crisis, War and Revolution
The geopolitical stakes are high in Syria because the success of the revolution represents a victory for the Arab and World revolution. Alternatively if the revolution is defeated by imperialism and its client states, this would be a major setback for the Arab and World revolution. Of course for that to happen it must be over the dead body of the Syrian Revolution. This forces all those who profess to be revolutionaries to come out in defence of the Syrian Revolution and provide material aid on all four major fronts:
· (1) recognising that the regime is fascist and must be overthrown and not appeased by fake imperialist deals including ceasefires and/or the partition of Syria;
· (2) opposing the bourgeois factions masquerading as the FSA leadership against the revolution and replacing this leadership with those fighters committed to defeating Assad and all the imperialist interventions in Syria;
· (3) fighting the jihadists who want to usurp the national rights of Syrians, Iraqis and Kurds to form a reactionary bourgeois Islamic State;
· (4) exposing and defeating the fake left that sides directly or indirectly with the Assad regime and/or with Russian imperialism as defending ‘democracy’ against ‘terrorism’.
There is no question that for revolutionaries the fate of the Syrian Revolution is a fundamental test of their politics and program. What is at stake is the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Those who claim to be Trotskyists have to step up and put their program to the test so workers can recognise who are revolutionaries and who are treacherous enemies of the revolution. Who is for or against Permanent Revolution? What do we mean by permanent revolution?
The short definition of Permanent Revolution is that the bourgeois democratic revolution cannot be completed except as a socialist revolution. Hence the bourgeois democratic revolution does not represent a stage necessary to prepare for socialism. The national democratic revolution becomes a continuous, uninterrupted, and hence permanent revolution until it becomes an international socialist revolution.
How do Trotskyists advance the national democratic revolution (Arab Revolution) by means of Permanent Revolution? We base ourselves on the transitional method (dialectics) and the Transitional Program (Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International). Without an internationalist Trotskyist Leninist party there is no revolutionary leadership and no testing of revolutionary theory in the struggle. This situation was summed up by Trotsky in the 1930s as the “crisis of revolutionary leadership”! Today this crisis is that of the failure of the 4th International to build a revolutionary international party.
What we prize is the legacy of Bolshevism, Leninism and Trotskyism, embodied in Trotsky’s method and program up to 1940. We begin with our understanding that we are still living in the epoch of imperialism, the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions. Capitalism is objectively overripe for revolution, lacking only a class conscious proletariat to lead the socialist revolution to victory.
Today after successive crises, wars and revolutions in the 20th century which marked capitalism’s continuing decline, all previous revolutions have succumbed to counter-revolution due to the crisis of leadership. We face a current situation in which global capitalism faces its terminal crisis. Unless we build a new communist international first, this crisis will mean the end not only of capitalism but also of human civilisation.
In response to this crisis the Arab Spring in 2011 represented the refusal of the Arab masses to pay for capitalism’s terminal crisis. The reopening of the national democratic revolution in MENA included the Syrian uprising and the five year long revolutionary war. The Syrian revolutionary war is the advance guard of the Arab Revolution. That is why we insist that it is a definitive test of all those who claim to lead workers to socialist revolution.
This revolution exposes all those self-proclaimed Marxists, Leninists, and Trotskyists who fail this test and objectively end up in the trenches of the class enemy. They can be categorised roughly into two groups. Those who support Assad as an anti-imperialist when he is a stooge of both U.S. and Russian imperialism, and those who reject Assad as anti-imperialist but fall into the Menshevik dogma that Arab workers as not ready for socialism and must fighting alongside the national bourgeoisie to complete the national democratic revolution to prepare the conditions for socialist revolution.
In the first group are the Blind Assadists who regard the workers as ‘not ready’ for even the struggle for bourgeois democracy because they have been replaced by imperialist backed jihadists. They blatantly deny the existence of a popular national revolution in Syria. The most influential are those who say that the ‘rebels’ are no different to the ‘jihadists’ funded by U.S. proxies, Saudia Arabia, Turkey, etc. Hence they draw the conclusion that the Assad regime is waging a just anti-imperialist war against US imperialist proxies. These Blind Assadists include the cryptostalinist RT socialists who back ‘anti-imperialist’ Russia defending the Assad regime against the US-backed ‘rebels’.
In the second category are the Unconscious Assadists; those who recognise and support the Syrian revolution but do not see the working class as capable of socialist revolution without first exhausting the limits of bourgeois democracy. This grouping includes Mensheviks, Maoists and Trotskyist centrists, though their positions are far from identical. The Menshevik/Maoist view is that in the epoch of imperialist decay the bourgeois national democratic revolution must be completed before socialist revolution is possible. A good example is the US organisation Communist Voice.
Joseph Green of Communist Voice rails against Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution as denigrating the struggle for bourgeois democracy. Yet Trotsky did not reject bourgeois democratic demands such as the right to national self-determination, merely by rebranding them ‘transitional demands’. He rejected the Menshevik division between the ‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ program as substituting a pre-ordained stageism for the dialectics of workers taking the fight for immediate democratic demands that would be met inevitably by imperialist repression, all the way to the socialist insurrection. We will see below whether it is Leon Trotsky or Joseph Green who is right in the case of the Syrian Revolution.
For Permanent Revolution!
Our task is to expose those who reject or revise Permanent Revolution. For us there can be no stage in the national democratic revolution where fighting for bourgeois democracy dictates in advance the defence of bourgeois parliament. For the proletariat, the defence of bourgeois democracy is justified only when it advances the socialist revolution. Whether or not workers defend bourgeois parliament is a tactical question that depends on the balance of class forces, that is, the advance or retreat of the revolution.
Where the revolution is thrown back or has been defeated as in China in 1927 the retreat to bourgeois parliament becomes a tactic to rally the proletarian forces to prevent the closing of the road to revolution. When the revolution is advancing or where the proletariat has not been defeated, as in the Russian Revolution in 1917, Permanent Revolution requires the raising of revolutionary demands of workers power, insurrection and the overthrow of the bourgeois state including the disbanding of the bourgeois Constituent Assembly.
In Syria after 5 years of civil war where the armed revolution is in control of large parts of Syria, the revolution has not been defeated. Against all that U.S. and Russian imperialism and their proxies can throw at it, the revolution survives. Do we call for a peace deal with imperialism to partition Syria that betrays that revolution? No! Already the revolution has built new institutions based on popular democracy to administer the territory it occupies.
In other words here is the Permanent Revolution in the flesh. To defend the immediate bourgeois rights to live and of freedom of expression, workers, poor farmers, street vendors etc., have created workers rights through their armed struggle against “democratic” imperialism and their Syrian dictator Assad!
These are not institutions of bourgeois democracy but of workers’ democracy. They are the result of proto workers communes that if joined up would be the basis for an embryonic workers’ state. We do not defend the gains made, or respect the loss of life in the revolution so far, by retreating to even the most advanced bourgeois democracy, the ‘constituent assembly’. In Syria voting for bourgeois rights has been replaced by taking them arms in hand against the bombs and mercenaries of self-proclaimed ‘democratic’ imperialism. That is why our program in Syria is not for a Constituent Assembly but armed workers soviets everywhere!
The situation is critical. Aleppo is our Paris Commune. But we cannot win if the revolution is co-opted by one or other imperialism and their client states in the region. At the moment part of the FSA leadership is collaborating with Turkey while the YPG leadership is collaborating with the U.S. These rebel forces have been co-opted by Turkey under agreement of both Russia and the U.S. to remove the IS and the YPG from northern Syria. The planned outcome is a divided Syria along the lines of Russia/Assad/Iran aligned regime in the West and U.S./Jordan/Saudi aligned regime in the East.
The survival of the Syrian revolution for 5 years has forced the hand of both imperialist blocs to engage in a new redivision of MENA that reflects the geopolitical confrontation between the two rival blocs. While they are currently collaborating in smashing both the Arab and Kurd revolutions by dividing them and buying off their leaderships, these popular revolutions can defeat both imperialism and its client dictators by turning the tables in the war.
To do this we have to fight the Arab and Kurd national revolutions as one workers’ revolution. This is about class not nation. Turkey is carrying the can for U.S. and Russia to divide and defeat the workers’ revolution and create stable pro-imperialist statelets ruled by their bourgeois clients. There can be no victorious bourgeois national revolution anymore unless it is a permanent or socialist revolution. And socialist revolution in one country cannot survive unless it is international.
That is why the Arab and Kurd national revolutions cannot succeed unless the workers and peasants who do the fighting split decisively from their treacherous bourgeois and petty bourgeois class leaders and join forces with workers and peasants of the whole MENA. It is necessary for the ranks of the rebels to throw out the FSA and YPG leaders who are collaborating with the U.S. and Russia. It is necessary for Iraqi, Egyptian, Palestinian, Kurd, and Iranian workers and peasants to take the lead in their own national revolutions against imperialism, and turn them into victorious socialist revolutions.
They must reject the partition of Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq along sectarian lines, and fight for unity along working class lines. We must appeal to Turkish workers to reject Erdogan’s deals with Russia and the U.S. and join forces with the Arab and Kurd masses. We must oppose a new Sykes/Picot in the form of a Kerry/Lavrov deal and fight for a victorious Arab revolution hand in hand with a Kurd Revolution. If the FSA and PYG stopped fighting one another over who controls north Syria and formed a revolutionary bloc, they could unite not only all Arabs in Syria, Iraq and Palestine, but the whole of MENA against the deals being made by Russia and the U.S. to divide and defeat these two revolutions.
We want a permanent revolution in which the Arab workers and peasants unite across the whole of MENA to form non-sectarian, democratic, socialist republics in a socialist federation with the Kurd and Iranian revolutions.
Workers internationally must join this revolution, not only in MENA but also in their own countries. We have to fight on the four fronts internationally. Since it is clear that the Syrian and Kurd revolutions would have already succeeded without the intervention of imperialism and its client dictators, our main task, especially in the imperialist countries, is to defeat imperialism at home! The U.S./NATO bloc would be immobilised by militant working class opposition to imperialism at home. Russia and China would be immobilised by their own workers and peasants rising up to overthrow their imperialist regimes.
The world is on the brink of disaster. Facing its terminal crisis, capitalism can only survive by killing workers everywhere and destroying the ecosphere. For workers to survive, capitalism must die. Workers can do this only by organising internationally across the defunct borders of the bourgeois nation state; by arming themselves to defend their class against capitalist counter-revolution; by using their armed class power to overthrow and replace dying capitalism with a new socialist system.
This revolution has begun in Syria. We are at the crossroads; take the right fork and the revolution will be defeated and make the demise of our species that much harder to stop, take the left fork, it becomes a call to arms for workers everywhere to fight for socialism and the survival of our species.
China and the Socialist Future
Yeu Yuen Shoe Strike (Nike Adidas) over unpaid pensions 2014
Class Struggle in China
China’s current role as the world’s leading industrial nation is the result of its unique history as an former empire, a British colony, a ‘socialist’ republic and today, a new imperialist power. It is the most dynamic capitalist society today having emerged out of a centralised bureaucratic state ‘socialism’. This makes China’s role in the world unique but not exceptional. While China is recognised as being a ‘leader’ in growth, in consumption, and in new technology, to keep this leadership it cannot jump over the capitalist laws of history.
China’s slowdown proves that it not immune to these laws. It is not a panacea for global capitalism’s decline. China is now facing its own capitalist crisis of overproduction which it cannot resolve without attacking the 1 billion Chinese workers. And despite its past defeats those workers cannot survive without fighting for a genuine socialist revolution. That is why China, more than any other the country, is where capitalism’s past and future manifests itself as a fundamental clash between the proletariat and the capitalist ruling class.
We can dispense with those pseudo theories that explain China’s rise as something to do with ‘market socialism’. This is a futile attempt to both recognise the truth that the capitalist market exists in China, yet somehow claim it serves the goals of ‘socialism. The reality is that the restoration of the capitalist market could not coexist with ‘socialism’ in its bastardised bureaucratic form of state ownership of property in China. It had to destroy those aspects of Chinese society that owe anything to ‘socialism’. First, it had to defeat the working class as the class that grew up under bureaucratic ‘socialism’. Far from advancing under ‘market socialism’ the workers met with an historic defeat.
The restoration of capitalism was a huge defeat for the millions of workers. Hao Qi says:
“During the country’s transition to capitalism, as the bonus-centered incentive system could not sustain itself, enterprises needed the existence of a reserve army to discipline workers and a segregated labor market to divide and conquer the working class. A continuous influx of migrant workers and the 30 million laid-off workers from the state-owned sector jointly expanded the reserve army of labor within a few years in the 1990s. The reserve army significantly depressed the power of the working class as a whole, and the segregation of the labor market also weakened the solidarity of the working class. This is why we have witnessed the major decline of labor’s share since the early 1990s.”
However according to the same writer the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 reversed that decline:
“There is a new turning point for the Chinese working class. After the outbreak of the global capitalist crisis, labor’s share in China began to recover. Along with this fact, one can also observe that the nominal wage level has grown faster than nominal GDP since 2008, and in 2012 China’s working-age population decreased for the first time in the reform era, which implies that the reserve army of labor will shrink in the near future. More importantly, there is a developing workers’ struggle for a decent living wage that is sufficient to afford the cost of living in the urban areas. The new generation of migrant workers who were mostly born in the 1980s and ‘90s insists on living in the urban areas. This has led to struggles for higher wages. Workers’ struggle for a larger share of the national income will eventually end the high-profit era for capitalists and thus open up a new era for the Chinese economy.” ibid
In sum, this ‘optimistic’ view of the labor movement in China is that it has recovered from its early defeats of the 1990s and has emerged ‘empowered’ and capable of increasing the share of labor. It argues that rising numbers of strikes and successes in improving wages and conditions will lead to higher consumption and overcome China’s economic problems. How realistic is this view?
Critics have argued that the ‘empowerment’ thesis is ‘false optimism’ and not backed by the reality. Strikes have in fact declined since the massive labor militancy in the early days of capitalist restoration in the 1990s. They question the claim that the reserve army of migrant workers flooding to the cities is slowing significantly and reducing downward pressure on wages. The rural reserve army is still 300 million strong. More important is the crisis which forces capital to increase the rate of exploitation of wage labor. There is a trend towards precarization of work, with shorter hours, atomization of the workforce, worsening conditions, employer corruption of unions etc. Even the purported ‘victory’ of rising wages reflects central government policy of boosting consumption rather than union power.
Whatever the evidence that the record number of strikes is linked to growing class conscious labor movement can we draw the conclusion that Chinese workers are any better or worse prepared than in other capitalist countries to fight back against the effects of a major economic crash on their lives? That would be to ignore the historical differences between the West and the East.
Just as the recent rapid rise of China as a major imperialist power is unprecedented (the last major power to emerge as imperialist was the USA before the First World War!) relative to the rest of the capitalist world, so we have to look at the developing class struggle in China in the same light.
Class struggle in China is conditioned by its history as an pre-capitalist empire for millennia, a capitalist colony for over a century (from the Opium war of 1840), then by a national revolution that broke from global capitalism from 1949 to the 1990s, followed by the restoration of capitalism and the rise of a new Chinese imperialism. This unique history has important implications for our understanding of China and global capitalism today.
What makes China different?
To explain the impact of the past on China today and on the prospects for a socialist future, we have to explore what makes China’s road to capitalism different from the West. Since China today is clearly capitalist the class struggle between the working class, poor peasants and the capitalist ruling class is like that of all capitalist states. However, there are important differences in the development of capitalism in China.
The First Chinese Revolution in 1911 led by the new bourgeois class overthrew the Qing dynasty. But because Chinese development was retarded by imperialism, no powerful national bourgeoisie had emerged capable of leading the democratic revolution in China. It was an already historically redundant class caught between the massive peasantry and the rising industrial proletariat on the one side, and the occupying imperialist powers on the other side.
The weak national bourgeoisie feared the peasants and workers more than the imperialist exploiters and sided with the latter. This fear was well founded as it was the workers and poor peasants who defeated Japan and the Kuomintang army in 1949, proving once again after Russia in 1917 that ‘backward’ countries in the epoch of imperialism can only become independent of imperialism through socialist revolution.
This unique history is the big difference between China and the West. In the West capitalist development in the 19th and 20th centuries occurred over centuries on the basis of the plunder of the colonial world including the plunder of the ancient Chinese empire. Modern imperialism allowed these nations to accumulate huge wealth and bribe large sections of the working class with colonial super-profits to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie as politicians in the reformist parties and bureaucrats in the labor unions.
Trotsky pointed out that this accounted for the success of the revolution in Russia and its failure in Europe. The strength of reformism in Europe tied workers to the parliamentary system whereas in Russia, a backward capitalist country under a Tsarist dictatorship, bourgeois democracy was yet to be born. The socialist revolution overtook the bourgeois democratic revolution and incorporated its tasks as part of the ‘permanent revolution’.
However, for the Bolsheviks, a successful workers revolution in a backward country could not lead to socialism in one country. Russia’s isolation and economic backwardness created the conditions for the emergence of a bureaucracy under Stalin after 1924. The Stalinist bureaucracy reverted to a Menshevik “two-stage” theory that ‘backward’ (colonial or semi-colonial) countries had to follow the example of the Western countries and go through a bourgeois democratic stage to prepare the conditions for socialism. In the absence of a Russian bourgeoisie Stalin reverted to the old Bolshevik formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasants” in which the workers and all the peasantry would complete the bourgeois revolution in the absence of a revolutionary bourgeoisie.
According to his unreconstructed Menshevik cynicism that the proletarian revolution was premature in Russia, Stalin turned this theory into the “bloc of four classes” i.e. a national front of the proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeois intelligentsia, and national bourgeoisie, to bring about the ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution. This would allow the Soviet Union to form alliances with ‘democratic’ capitalist countries to buy the time necessary to build ‘socialism in one country’.
Against this Menshevik theory, the Bolshevik concept of Permanent Revolution was defended by the Left Opposition between 1923 and 1928 in an effort to win the leadership of the CCP to lead the poor peasants against the national bourgeoisies, including the rich peasants (kulaks), and the imperialist bourgeoisies. So the ‘permanent revolution’ must start off as a bourgeois democratic revolution against imperialism but immediately pass over to the socialist revolution against the bourgeoisie.
Theory/program of ‘permanent revolution’
Karl Marx originated this theory after the failure of the bourgeois revolutions in Europe in 1848. Henceforth the bourgeoisie was incapable of completing its own revolution to extend bourgeois rights to the masses (as we saw when Napoleon revoked the freedom of the slaves in Haiti) and that historic task was now that of the proletariat as part of the world socialist revolution.
Marx foresaw that the colonial world would not need to follow mechanically copy the stages of growth of capitalism in the West. Once the West extended is rule over the whole world (coming to its full force as imperialism in the late 19th century) the colonies could complete their national democratic struggle for independence only by means of socialist revolution.
In 1850 Marx talking about ‘backward’ China wrote:
“Chinese socialism may, of course, bear the same relation to European socialism as Chinese to Hegelian philosophy. But it is still amusing to note that the oldest and most unshakeable empire on earth has, within eight years, been brought to the brink of a social revolution by the cotton bales of the English bourgeoisie; in any event, such a revolution cannot help but have the most important consequences for the civilized world. When our European reactionaries, in the course of their imminent flight through Asia, finally arrive at the Great Wall of China, at the gates which lead to the home of primal reaction and primal conservatism, who knows if they will not find written thereon the legend: “République chinoise Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” Review: January-February, 1850
Just as in Europe where the reactionary bourgeoisie was suppressing ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ for fear of the working class, in China the Taiping uprising in 1850 against the British invaders proved to Marx that that the working class had the potential lead the peasants to overthrow not only imperialism but also its own weak pro-imperialist bourgeoisie and complete the bourgeois revolution as the socialist revolution. Thus Marx anticipated the prospect of ‘socialist revolution’ (even if ‘bourgeois’ at the start) led by workers and peasants completing the bourgeois revolution as ‘permanent revolution’ in backward capitalist countries.
Such an eventuality was first proven correct in Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks moved quickly to complete the bourgeois revolution avoiding the death trap of the bourgeois Provisional Government between February and October 1917. They took over the program of the party of poor peasants, the Social Revolutionaries, for ‘land to the tiller’, to win them to the revolution. They expropriated foreign capitalists, repudiated the foreign debt, and formed the Red Army to defeat the military invasions of the imperialists. Even when widespread starvation caused by the Civil War forced the Bolsheviks to allow the rich peasant Kulaks and capitalists to profit from agriculture and trade, these enterprises were under the control of the workers state.
However, just as in Russia where permanent revolution was aborted by global capitalism and the Stalinist bureaucracy after 1924, in ‘backward’ China the CCP, as part of the Comintern dominated by Stalin, also adopted the Menshevik program of the Bloc of Four Classes and the two-stage revolution. The first ‘democratic’ stage of the revolution required a bloc of workers, peasants, intellectuals and ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie. This bloc would require the CCP to subordinate itself to Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist army and expose it to repression.
Trotsky and the Left Opposition from 1923 onwards opposed Stalin’s Menshevik theory as part of his betrayal of Bolshevism and his program for “socialism in one country” and fought against this policy in the CCP. They condemned Stalin’s treacherous role in the smashing of the Second Chinese revolution in 1927 when the bourgeois general Chiang Kai Chek unleashed his army to massacre the CCP leaders and the militant rank and file in Shanghai and Canton.
After the betrayal of the Second Chinese Revolution the CCP was led by Mensheviks like Mao who retreated from the cities to a peasant war of national liberation against Japan and the nationalist Kuomintang. Following its military victory in 1949 the CCP tried to negotiate with the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie only to find it had fled into the imperialists’ camp. The CCP had to amend Stalin’s bloc of Four Classes to a bloc of Three Classes led not by the workers but by the petty bourgeois CCP leadership. The result was the formation of a bureaucratic centralised state apparatus run by the CCP to complete the ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution but taking state power in the name of workers and peasants.
Capitalist property was expropriated and the market replaced by the plan administered by a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state. The CCP intelligentsia promoted itself as the state manager of ‘socialist’ property but in reality the workers and peasants had no say in how the state was run or the planning process itself. There was no workers democracy that could replace the bureaucracy and move China towards a genuine socialism. China as a bureaucratically deformed ‘workers’ state was stuck in limbo between its capitalist past and its socialist future. Its fate would be decided either by a political revolution in which workers overthrew the bureaucracy and took power directly to implement genuine socialism, or the defeat of the workers by the parasitic bureaucracy to restore capitalism under the ideology of “market socialism”.
Was the Chinese revolution ‘socialist’?
Was this the socialist revolution Marx spoke of? No, because the workers did not lead the poor peasants to the seizure of power. The struggle for national independence was led by a bureaucratic Stalinist party forced by the desertion of the bourgeoisie to base itself on the workers and poor peasants as a parasitic caste feeding off their labor.
After the revolution the bureaucracy had to industrialise to develop the forces of production to meets the needs of both the rural and industrial workforce as well as provide a surplus for the parasitic caste. The poor peasants who had formed the ranks of the national army were rapidly subordinated by the growth of industry and the rise of the urban working class.
The peasantry had no future as an independent class. The peasantry’s aspirations are limited to the horizon of petty capitalism or to private capitalist land ownership. The state blocked these aspirations by collectivising the land. So the fate of the peasantry was to become a rural labor force and a reserve army of labor to serve the needs of industry.
This change in rural society follows from the need to develop agricultural productivity to cheapen the wage goods of industrial workers and to create a surplus army of landless peasants who could migrate to the cities as a reserve of cheap labor. Thus wages in industry were driven down by migrant labor whose low wages were supplemented by subsistence goods in the countryside.
While this bureaucratically deformed workers state appears to bourgeois intellectuals as no more than a new ‘socialist’ elite administering the old centralised state of the ‘middle empire’, it was in reality now under the overall determining influence of the global capitalist economy. Rebuffed by the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy had to forcibly collectivise the agricultural labor of the old peasant family farmers to meet the needs of the industrial working class and generate a surplus.
But the bureaucracy could not claim the surplus as private property without stoking a political revolution of peasants and workers challenging its rule. It was necessary to resort to corruption and abuse of the norms of ‘socialism’ to maintain its privileges.
The bureaucratic plan led to the Chinese economy stagnating and a declining surplus. Because this threatened the material basis of the bureaucracies privileges by 1978 the party embarked on the first market reforms to increase output. The CCP had increasing difficulty justifying its reforms in terms of ‘socialist’ norms of freedom and equality to the masses which had the power to resist them. It stretched the concept of ‘socialism’ inventing “market socialism” to sell the restoration of ‘capitalism’ to the masses.
However, increasing opposition to ‘market socialism’ as market reforms to restore capitalism threatened the rule of the bureaucracy. The defeat of the 1989 uprising of Tienanmen Square that arose as a protest against growing corruption and enrichment of the party leadership at the expense of freedom and equality, was an historic defeat for the working class and marked the tipping point in the restoration process. The CCP Congress in 1992 for the first time recognised that the economy was now based on the market (law of value) rather than state planning.
Thus the inherent class contradiction of Chinese ‘socialism’ (between the bureaucracy as agent of global capitalism, and the peasants and workers) was resolved with the historic defeat of workers by the bureaucracy determined to convert itself into a capitalist class. The concessions to workers under the bureaucratic state – labor protection in the nationalised SOEs, peasant property, labor rights etc – were removed or subordinated to demands of capitalist profit. All the old ‘socialist’ protections of workers and peasants rights became increasingly eliminated.
Unable to escape the global crisis of capitalism which is now enveloping China, the Chinese working class is facing millions of redundancies as inefficient firms are closed down. They have to fight for the most basic demands, for the ‘iron rice bowl’ for jobs and a living wage etc for their survival. These struggles are leading to more strikes and occupations which will pose the necessity of taking control of industry. At the same time the struggle of rural collectives in the villages exposed to corruption and exploitation for decades remains the basis for the survival of the 300 million rural reserve army of labor.
Industrial workers and rural workers can only resolve China’s capitalist crisis in their own class interests by seizing power, overthrowing the Chinese bourgeoisie and replacing the capitalist state with a Workers and Farmers’ State able to implement a socialist plan. The only ‘new era’ in the age of global capitalist decline and terminal crisis in which workers can win a living income will be the new socialist era. So how do we get there? And what would it look like?
A Transitional Program for China
Immediate demands
1. Return to the Rice Bowl! Jobs for all and a living wage! Free, universal health, education and social welfare!
2. Defend the collective land rights of villages! For a state rural bank to fund cooperatives!
3. Build fighting, democratic unions! Form strike committees! For workers occupation of industry, and workers and farmers’ councils!
4. For a mass independent workers and working farmers political party to put up candidates against the CCP!
5. For a world party of socialist revolution based on the revolutionary program of the communist internationals including the 1938 Transitional Program!
Democratic demands
1. Reject all historic oppression today! Full equality to all without discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability etc!
2. China is not returning to its “middle kingdom”, it is a modern, capitalist empire! No to Chinese great power chauvinism!
3. Against Chinese imperialism! In any war with other imperialist powers we are for workers turning their guns on their own ruling class!
4. Reject colonial oppression! For the right of self-determination for oppressed peoples and nations!
5. No to false Stalinist and Maoist national/popular fronts with the national bourgeoisies against imperialism!
Socialist Demands
1. Reject capitalist restoration under the guise of ‘market socialism’. Down with the CCP and its new Red Capitalist class! Down with the billionaires!
2. For the political general strike and workers insurrection! For a popular army, workers’ and peasants’ militias!
3. For a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government based on soviets everywhere! For the immediate expropriation of the private property of Chinese and foreign capitalists!
4. For a workers plan based on soviets to plan production for need! From each according to the ability, to each according to their need!
5. For a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Asia-Pacific!
Living Marxism 