Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 1163	18 October 2019

70th Anniversary of Chinese Revolution

Defend China! Down With Reactionary Hong Kong Protests!

For Workers Political Revolution!

Part One

We print below the first part of a forum, edited for publication, given on October 5 in Vancouver by Angela Swanson, editor of Workers Tribune, English-language press of the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada. Forums were also held in Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles and Oakland.

Seventy years ago, a social revolution in China smashed capitalist class rule and liberated the country from subservience to Western and Japanese imperialism. The 1949 Revolution, carried out by a peasant-guerrilla army under the leadership of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP), created a workers state and built an economy that to this day remains centrally based on collectivized property forms. The revolution fundamentally transformed society, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of dire poverty and laying the basis for significant advances in industry.

After years of civil war, the CCP came to power as the imperialist-backed nationalist Guomindang forces fell apart. The capitalists and large landowners fled to Taiwan, where they have been protected by U.S. imperialism, as well as to Hong Kong and elsewhere. Mainland China, which had been divided and plundered by the imperialists, was unified. In the first several years after the revolution, land was distributed to the peasants, key industries were expropriated and a significant component of state-owned industry was established.

The revolution swept away much of the age-old social backwardness. For China’s hideously oppressed women, this included ending the barbaric practices of arranged marriages and the selling of peasant women into concubinage. Education levels and health care were greatly expanded and improved. All of this shows the immense advantages of an economy whose motor force is not production for profit. China has gone from a backward, overwhelmingly rural country to a majority-urban one capable of landing a lunar rover.

While the reconstruction of China as a workers state was a huge leap forward, that state was bureaucratically deformed from the outset. The proletariat played no independent role in the revolution, and the ruling CCP has politically suppressed the working class. From Mao to Xi Jinping, the bureaucracy has been fundamentally similar to the one that came to power in the Soviet Union in a political counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin beginning in 1923-24.

Unlike the Chinese Revolution, the October 1917 Russian Revolution was based on a program of proletarian internationalism. A class-conscious proletariat took power under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The Bolsheviks knew that Russia’s social and economic backwardness could not be decisively overcome without the extension of proletarian revolution to the advanced industrial countries. This was all the more the case for China, which at the time of the 1949 Revolution was even poorer and more economically backward than Russia in 1917.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution and the end of World War I, there was a series of revolutionary uprisings that ended in defeat. This was in the main due to a crisis of leadership, as the working class was betrayed by the pro-capitalist social democrats. Fledgling Communist parties outside of Russia proved too weak, politically or otherwise, to provide alternative leadership. In the wake of these defeats, especially that of the German Revolution of 1923, a conservative, nationalist bureaucracy took political power in the Soviet Union. While Stalin did not restore capitalism, he betrayed the liberating and internationalist goals of the Russian Revolution.

It is crucial to understand the class nature of the Chinese state, so I will speak a bit on this. For Marxists, the state is composed of the armed bodies of men (the police, prison guards, army, courts) that are charged with defending and protecting the ruling class and its interests against the dominated classes. In Canada and the U.S., we live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, where the rule of rich financiers and industrialists is masked by the facade of parliamentary democracy. A workers state is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is necessary after the overthrow of capitalism to reorganize society and suppress counterrevolutionary machinations by bourgeois forces. Karl Marx explained this in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, writing: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The state administered by the CCP is based on the revolution that expelled the Chinese bourgeoisie and created a collectivized economy, a precondition for socialist development. It is on this basis that we Trotskyists have always called for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against capitalist forces. At the same time, a proletarian political revolution is needed to remove the parasitic, nationalist ruling caste. Standing as an obstacle to the achievement of socialism, the Beijing Stalinist bureaucracy defends the status quo of the imperialist-dominated world order.

Hong Kong Counterrevolutionary Protests

The 1949 Revolution was a historic gain for the working class internationally and a huge defeat for the U.S. and other imperialist powers. Ever since, the imperialists’ strategic goal has been the overthrow of the revolution and the return of China to capitalist enslavement. These bandits have wielded a combination of approaches, including military provocations and economic penetration aimed at strengthening the internal forces of counterrevolution.

The recent protests in Hong Kong are an expression of this counterrevolutionary drive. Before I get into that, let me make a few points on the nature of Hong Kong. Hong Kong was transferred to the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China in 1997 after a century and a half of British colonial rule. The CCP made a deal to maintain capitalism, under Beijing’s political rule, and Hong Kong was integrated into the workers state as a Special Administrative Region.

At the time, we joined in cheering as the British Empire finally lost its last major colonial holding with the lowering of the bloody Union Jack and the raising of the red flag of the People’s Republic. But we also warned that “in the hands of the venal Stalinist bureaucracy, which has pledged to maintain Hong Kong’s capitalist system, the takeover of the territory is a dagger aimed at the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution” (“Beijing Stalinists Embrace Hong Kong Financiers,” WV No. 671, 11 July 1997). The policies of the Stalinist misleaders have allowed Hong Kong to remain a capitalist enclave within China, a bridgehead for counterrevolutionary forces. To advance the interests of working people throughout China, we call to expropriate the filthy rich Hong Kong tycoons.

The pro-imperialist aims of the current movement were on clear display at the September 8 rally near Hong Kong’s U.S. consulate. In an open appeal for American intervention, protesters sang the Star-Spangled Banner, waved U.S. flags and held up a large blue-and-white banner that read: “President Trump, Please Liberate Hong Kong.” The rally urged the U.S. government to pass legislation called the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. This bill, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, is a declaration that the U.S. imperialists will intervene in the sovereign affairs of China. The counterrevolutionary forces see it as a wedge for restoring capitalist rule on the mainland.

The U.S. State Department and British and Canadian foreign offices have declared support for the Hong Kong protests, while Washington has funded, advised and helped to organize their leaders. The U.S. rulers’ National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has poured millions of dollars into groups behind the demonstrations, from the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor and the parties of the “pan-democratic” camp to the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, an affiliate of the anti-Communist International Trade Union Confederation. Such organizations are the main components of the Civil Human Rights Front, the chief organizer of the rallies. Based among the petty bourgeoisie, the protests are hostile to the working class. Workers were attacked during the airport occupation in August, and the offices of pro-Beijing trade unions have been vandalized.

The anti-China rampage is a litmus test for groups that claim the mantle of Trotskyism. As I will show later, the majority of fake Marxists have joined the camp of capitalist reaction. As authentic Trotskyists, we wrote in WV No. 1160 (6 September):

“Today in Hong Kong, we have a military side with the forces of the Chinese deformed workers state, including the police, against the anti-Communist mobilizations. This position stems from our unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and domestic counterrevolution. Such defense does not imply the least political support to the Beijing bureaucracy, whose backing of capitalism in Hong Kong under its ‘one country, two systems’ rubric bears no small responsibility for the current crisis.”

As Trotskyists who seek to make the proletariat conscious of its historic task of bringing about a socialist future, our perspective is the mobilization of the working people of Hong Kong and mainland China to stop the forces of counterrevolution.

The toilers of Hong Kong should be natural allies of the powerful and combative proletariat on the mainland. Decades of land speculation, endorsed by the CCP, have fueled a housing crisis. This has produced sky-high rents that are out of reach for many working adults. Hong Kong’s wealth gap is said to be the highest among all developed countries and regions. Office employees commonly work 12 hours for eight hours pay in this white-collar sweatshop. A fifth of the population falls below the official poverty line. Among the most oppressed are domestic workers, overwhelmingly from Indonesia and the Philippines. Those considered “immigrants” from mainland China also suffer chauvinist abuse.

Under pressure to respond to the housing crisis, the Beijing government has backed a proposal to buy up land owned by developers that has lain empty for years. This is framed as a delicate “rebalancing act” between private property rights and the public interest. Our call to expropriate the tycoons in Hong Kong is directly linked to the need to replace the CCP regime with a government that supports the interests of workers and the oppressed.

Stalinism and “Socialism in One Country”

So this raises the question: Why is the CCP reluctant to do away with the tycoons? From the bureaucracy’s perspective, the preservation of capitalism in Hong Kong is necessary to maintain China’s world trade and ensure foreign investment in the country. The CCP bureaucrats act as a transmission belt for the pressures of the capitalist world market into the workers state. As in the former Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy in China is not a class, a social stratum with its own unique relation to the means of production. Unlike a capitalist class, it does not own these means of production. Rather, the bureaucracy’s power stems from a political monopoly of the government apparatus. Occupying an unstable position atop the workers state, it is beset by enormous contradictions. Many CCP officials take advantage of their administrative positions for private enrichment. Yet the bureaucracy is at times compelled to defend the workers state in its own way, whether out of concern to maintain its privileges or due to pressure from the working class.

Leon Trotsky, who led the fight against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union, explained the material roots of the Soviet Stalinist regime in his 1936 book The Revolution Betrayed:

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It ‘knows’ who is to get something and who has to wait.”

This analysis is fully applicable to China today.

Stalin’s dogma of “socialism in one country” was a nationalist and anti-Marxist schema which expressed the material interests of the bureaucratic caste that had usurped political power. This would lead to pursuing “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism and the betrayal of revolutions internationally. For Lenin’s Bolsheviks, in contrast, the proletarian dictatorship was a bridge to international revolutions. Lenin wrote of “the creation of a single world economy, regulated by the proletariat of all nations as an integral whole and according to a common plan,” adding: “This tendency has already revealed itself quite clearly under capitalism and is bound to be further developed and consummated under socialism” (“Theses on National and Colonial Questions” [1920]).

Capitalism itself shows that the current level of world productive forces is incompatible with national boundaries. Even in a workers state developing from an advanced capitalist society, it would be impossible to build socialism—a classless society based on equality and without material want—in isolation. While economic construction in a single workers state is immensely important, it will be limited and contradictory outside of a global planned economy. The social growth rates and economic abundance that are the necessary foundation for socialism can only be achieved through the most advanced levels of production.

Despite its massive growth, China’s economy remains backward relative to even the lesser capitalist-imperialist powers. Though labor productivity is increasing, it is far lower than that in the major imperialist countries: the U.S., Germany and Japan. China still has a large peasantry, and more than a third of the labor force consists of migrant workers from rural regions. There is a burning need to further bridge the gap between city and countryside, but that requires a huge development of resources based on the most advanced technology.

In stark contrast to Lenin’s revolutionary internationalism, the CCP’s national narrowness, which is at the root of “socialism in one country,” bore its bitter fruit in the betrayals of revolutions internationally. A key example is the CCP’s backing the Indonesian Communist Party’s policy of support to the capitalist Sukarno government. This disastrous class-collaborationist policy paved the way for the 1965 massacre of over a million Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese by the Indonesian military.

It is in the nature of Stalinist bureaucracies to pursue their own alliances with imperialist powers, including at the expense of other workers states. This was blatantly shown when Mao struck a criminal alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union following the split between the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies in the 1960s. Such appeasement of the imperialists has continued under all subsequent CCP regimes, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.

[TO BE CONTINUED]