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	Workers Vanguard No. 909	29 February 2008

German Social Democracy Promotes Capitalist Counterrevolution

For Unconditional Military Defense of Chinese Deformed Workers State!

For Proletarian Political Revolution!

The following article is translated and reprinted, in edited form, from Spartakist No. 169 (Winter 2007-2008), newspaper of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

German chancellor Angela Merkel’s reception of the Dalai Lama marks, for now, the high point in the continued anti-Communist campaign by the bourgeoisie and its ideologues against the Chinese deformed workers state. After Merkel, U.S. president Bush received the Dalai Lama—surely no coincidence. Crocodile tears are being shed over the “oppression of Tibet,” while the Communist Party of China (CCP) is warned to observe “human rights.” All this will escalate in view of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Merkel’s provocation set off harsh diplomatic reactions in Beijing. Welt online (15 November 2007) writes: “Beijing strategists are following not only the course the EU takes toward China, but also how closely Europe, which under Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder had distanced itself from the USA, is again approaching Washington. The new closeness doesn’t suit Beijing. Thus the paper Global Times appeared with the disapproving headline, ‘England, France and Germany compete in sucking up to the USA’.” In fact, at the end of November the EU began to exert massive pressure to get the Chinese currency, the yuan, revalued, and the chairman of the Euro group, Jean-Claude Juncker, has issued a barely veiled threat of trade war against China: “Protectionism is in the air,” warned Juncker (Handelsblatt, 29 November 2007). In the meantime, the U.S. imperialists have concluded an anti-Chinese military agreement with Japan and are arming Taiwan with Patriot missile systems. The imperialists’ common goal is to increase the military and economic pressure on China and isolate it politically via a new “human rights” campaign.

Merkel’s reception of the Dalai Lama led to disputes within the SPD/CDU coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Foreign Minister Steinmeier of the SPD criticized the confrontational course of the CDU:

“But basically—and the Foreign Minister and Chancellor stick to this—they are betting on differing approaches towards improving the human rights situation in China.... [Steinmeier] is promoting ‘long-term structures’ in [Germany’s] China policy, recalling Schröder’s project, which initiated a dialogue about a state founded on the rule of law seven years ago, an academic project of German and Chinese jurists. For economic contacts, it was claimed, the rule of law was necessary—this is the way Beijing was being enticed at the time—and part and parcel of this were human rights.”

—FAZ.NET, 23 November 2007

The SPD and CDU both want to destroy the Chinese workers state by counterrevolution but are pursuing different strategies whereby German imperialism can achieve its interests. The SPD is concerned that Merkel’s closeness to the U.S. might damage German interests in China (and Russia). As chancellor, Schröder went to China with an economic delegation almost every year. The SPD likewise is pushing the anti-Communist “human rights” campaign, but more from the background. While Merkel strikes a note that recalls Ronald Reagan in Cold War II, SPD policy is a continuation of their “Ostpolitik” toward East Germany (DDR) developed by Egon Bahr (SPD) in the mid ’60s and described as “change through convergence.” Here “change” always meant capitalist counterrevolution, but in the name of “democracy,” “a social market economy,” “human rights” and—even more cynically—“workers’ rights.”

As in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the imperialists understand by “human rights” above all one thing: the right of the bourgeoisie to unlimited exploitation and enslavement of the working masses. And this “right” was “violated” in China by the 1949 Revolution, which drove the bourgeoisie off the Chinese mainland. In spite of the market reforms, China is not capitalist. The private sector created by the market reforms, including foreign companies, is predominantly light industry. Heavy industry—steel, non-ferrous metals, heavy machinery production, telecommunications, energy, petrochemicals—is concentrated in state-owned companies, which are strategically far more important. State ownership of land has prevented the development of a layer of rich large landowners dominating the rural areas. State control over the financial system has so far been able to protect the People’s Republic of China from the maneuvers of speculative capital, which have ruined the economy in so many capitalist neocolonies.

As the strongest of the remaining deformed workers states, China has been drawn into the cross hairs of the imperialists especially since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the deformed workers states of East Europe and, in particular, the destruction of the degenerated workers state of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. As a result of the treacherous Stalinist policy of “socialism in one country” and its associated illusions in “peaceful coexistence” between the Chinese workers state and imperialism, the Chinese bureaucracy has been making concessions to the imperialists. Thus, it supports the “war against terror,” the sanctions against Iran and the campaign for the nuclear disarmament of North Korea. Nonetheless, China is surrounded today by a whole system of U.S. military bases. Along with North Korea, it is on the Pentagon’s list as a potential target of a nuclear first strike by the U.S., while the U.S. program of National Missile Defense has the strategic goal of neutralizing China’s modest nuclear capacities. Japan and the U.S. are cooperating militarily, subordinating their rivalry to their common hostility to the workers states in Asia. We are in favor of China and North Korea developing, testing and producing nuclear weapons to defend themselves against U.S. and Japanese imperialism. We fight for the unconditional military defense of China and the other deformed workers states of North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam against imperialism and internal counterrevolution.

The “Free Tibet” cause originated with the machinations of the American CIA and other imperialist forces intent on fomenting capitalist counterrevolution in China. Until its overthrow following the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the Tibetan “Lamaocracy” ruled a society where slavery was rampant, medical care nonexistent and literacy the preserve of (some of) the ruling priest-caste. As in the case of other horribly benighted and backward countries, even a modicum of modernization can only come from without.

In 1950, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) occupied Tibet in response to counterrevolutionary resistance fomented by U.S. imperialism and Taiwan. In 1959, a rebellion inspired, armed and financed by the CIA (with help from Taiwan and India) culminated in a monk/aristocrat-led uprising in Lhasa, which was crushed by the PLA. Against the imperialist hue and cry over “poor little Tibet,” the Trotskyists stood forthrightly for the defense of China. Following the defeat of the counterrevolutionary uprising in 1959, the Chinese deformed workers state abolished ulag (forced peasant labor), slavery and the myriad of mandatory taxes paid to the aristocracy and monasteries. The land, livestock and tools of the aristocrats who fled into exile were distributed to the peasants, as were the land and chattels of the monasteries that had participated in the uprising. It is because Tibet is part of a deformed workers state that life expectancy has dramatically increased (from 35.5 years in the 1950s to 67 by 2001) and infant mortality has dramatically decreased (from 430 per 1,000 births in 1959 to 6.61).

The call for an “independent Tibet” at this time can only be a rallying call for capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time, the Chinese proletariat must combat the Han chauvinism of the Stalinist bureaucracy and oppose all discrimination against Tibetans, the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang and other national and ethnic minorities. The fate of the Tibetan people is inextricably bound up with the struggle for proletarian political revolution in China and socialist revolution in the capitalist countries—from the Indian subcontinent to Japan and other imperialist centers.

The fate of China, the most populous land on earth, where the bourgeoisie was expropriated by the 1949 Revolution, is of central interest to all the workers of the world. The international proletariat must be won to the understanding that it must defend China against internal counterrevolution and against its own bourgeoisies. Ultimately, only a political revolution in China can lead to the rule of workers soviets, and only the extension of the Chinese Revolution can ensure the defense and development of its gains. In Germany, the central obstacle to this revolutionary consciousness is the social-democratic program of pursuing nationalist protectionism and class collaboration with the bourgeoisie at home, and promoting counterrevolution in the remaining workers states under cover of “human rights” and “democracy.”

“Market Reforms” Sharpen Contradictions in the Chinese Workers State

In order to promote counterrevolution, the imperialists are on the one hand putting more military pressure on China and on the other intensifying their economic penetration by utilizing China’s “market reforms.” The market reforms of the past decades have enormously sharpened the contradictions in the Chinese deformed workers state. But contrary to the widespread belief on the left that China is already capitalist or irreversibly on the way to becoming capitalist, the Stalinist bureaucracy is not capable of bringing about a cold, step-by-step restoration of capitalism from above. In 1936, in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explained in regard to the Soviet degenerated workers state that “a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy.”

The ruling Stalinist bureaucracy is a fragile, contradictory caste, not a homogeneous class based on private ownership of the means of production. The accumulating contradictions in China will lead sooner or later to the collapse of Stalinist bonapartism and the political shattering of the ruling Communist Party. But whether this is followed by a capitalist counterrevolution that breaks the resistance of the Chinese working class and destroys the workers state, or by a proletarian political revolution that overthrows the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy, establishing the political rule of workers soviets in China and fighting to extend the Chinese revolution internationally, will be a question of struggle. Basing ourselves on our unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, we fight for proletarian political revolutions to bring down the Stalinist bureaucracies and establish the rule of workers soviets.

With the Chinese Revolution of 1949, capitalist rule was smashed and Chinese society fundamentally transformed. This victory was won by Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army, which was based on the peasantry. The capitalists and large landowners fled to Taiwan, where they were protected by U.S. imperialism. Mainland China, which had been divided and plundered by the imperialists, was unified. China was reconstructed as a workers state with a centrally planned economy; this was a huge social leap forward. Over the next few years, land was distributed to the peasants, the key industries were expropriated and a significant component of state-owned industry was built up. The liberating effect of the Revolution is evident in the status of Chinese women, who made enormous progress over their previous miserable existence, symbolized by the barbaric practice of footbinding.

But the Chinese CP was not a party based on the working class; rather it rested on the peasantry. After the bourgeois Guomindang had massacred the insurrectionary workers in Shanghai in 1927, the CP abandoned the working class. Only due to an exceptional historical situation was it able to smash capitalism two decades later. The working class had been atomized by the horrific oppression of both the Guomindang and the Japanese imperialists. After the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, bourgeois rule was unstable, and the Guomindang regime was decaying from within. An additional factor was the existence of the Soviet workers state, which was able to offer economic and military assistance to the new People’s Republic. From the start, the CCP regime suppressed independent action by the working class, while falsely claiming to be building “socialism in one country.” This stood in sharp contradiction to the beginnings of the Soviet Union in the October Revolution of 1917, a proletarian revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party that translated Marxism into deeds. The October Revolution showed that the working class can take power and wield it through democratically elected workers soviets. The internationalist early Soviet Union became a beacon to the working class and oppressed worldwide.

To the Bolshevik leadership, it was clear that workers revolutions in more advanced countries were necessary to establish an international planned economy and produce the social growth rates and abundance which are the necessary foundation for socialism—a society based on equality and without material want. But the revolutionary uprisings after World War I, in particular in Germany, were crushed through the betrayal of the pro-capitalist social democrats and because there were no experienced parties, like the Bolsheviks, that could have led the masses to conquer state power. In the wake of these defeats, especially that of the German Revolution in 1923, a conservative nationalist bureaucracy took political power in the Soviet Union in late 1923-early 1924. In the course of the degeneration of the workers state, Stalin and his clique turned away from proletarian internationalism and created the anti-Marxist dogma of “building socialism in one country.” A few years later, seeking “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, they sabotaged revolutionary possibilities abroad, not least the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, which they betrayed by subordinating the young Chinese CP to the bourgeois Guomindang.

Historically, the anti-revolutionary character of the Chinese bureaucracy can be seen in its alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union, a logical consequence of the search for “peaceful coexistence” with the rulers in Washington. In 1972, as bombs were raining down on Vietnam, Mao Zedong received U.S. president Nixon in Beijing. These politics were continued by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping. In 1979, four years after the heroic Vietnamese had defeated the U.S., Chinese troops criminally invaded Vietnam. Shortly thereafter, China supported the murderous Islamic mujahedin in Afghanistan, who were fighting against the Soviet Red Army. In many respects both the Mao and Deng wings of the bureaucracy helped imperialism destroy the Soviet Union. And, not least, it was Mao’s alliance with U.S. imperialism that prepared the way for Deng to open the door to imperialism’s economic penetration of China.

The market-oriented reforms initiated by Deng in 1978 were made possible by the previous successes of the planned economy under Mao. They were an attempt to tackle the incompetence of the bureaucratic command economy, within the framework of Stalinist bonapartism. As we wrote in the 1980s:

“Within the framework of Stalinism, there is thus an inherent tendency to replace centralized planning and management with market mechanisms. Since managers and workers cannot be subject to the discipline of soviet democracy (workers councils), increasingly the bureaucracy sees subjecting the economic actors to the discipline of market competition as the only answer to economic inefficiency.”

—“For Central Planning Through Soviet Democracy,” printed in Spartacist pamphlet, “Market Socialism” in Eastern Europe, July 1988

The Stalinist bureaucracy opened the country to imperialist investment, privatized strategically unimportant companies and ultimately abandoned the state monopoly of foreign trade. The planned economy was replaced by market mechanisms and agriculture was decollectivized, so that peasant families could get their own little piece of land on a long-term lease. Over time, the regime abolished the “iron rice bowl,” which was based on guaranteeing workers a job for life and was seen by urban workers as an important gain of the 1949 Revolution. But a country as poor and backward as China could obviously not offer hundreds of millions of peasants a job in state industry, guaranteed for life and at a significantly higher wage rate than the income of members of a rural commune.

In fact, industry has grown enormously, and over half the working population is now employed in manufacturing, transport, construction and the public service sector. Up to 150 million peasants became proletarians since “market reforms” began. According to Monthly Labour Review (July 2005), there were twice as many industrial workers in China as in all the G-7 states together. This is a progressive development of great historical significance. Development in China puts the growth in capitalist neocolonies in the shade, whether it be “tiger states” like Indonesia and South Korea, or India, which won its independence around the same time as China but remained capitalist. India’s per capita gross national product is only half that of China, while the poverty rate of China is only half that of India. Child malnutrition is 75 percent lower in China than in India. In China, almost 90 percent of women are literate, almost twice as high as in India.

China today is a country seething with discontent. On the one hand, economic penetration by the imperialists has enormously strengthened the forces for internal counterrevolution. A class of capitalist entrepreneurs has developed with family and financial connections both to the CCP bureaucracy and to the Chinese capitalists in Taiwan and Hong Kong. A layer of well-to-do managers, professionals and technocrats has been created that enjoys a lifestyle like that in the West. On the other hand, the policies carried out by the Beijing Stalinists have come at the cost of a significant part of the working class and rural toilers, driving them into poverty. Important social gains such as health care have been eroded, millions of unemployed are looking for new jobs, and if they find work at all, they are employed in the private sector under much worse conditions, without the social benefits of the state sector. Some 150 million migrant workers have moved from the countryside into the cities, where they toil under wretched conditions with few political rights and are often scorned by urban workers. The result is massive struggles: workers protesting against non-payment of wages, layoffs or poor working conditions; peasants protesting against corruption and illegal theft of their land by party bureaucrats or against environmental pollution. We support these struggles. The ruling bureaucracy is clearly split between elements who want to pursue the economic “reforms” unabated, those who want more state intervention and others who want to return to a bureaucratically planned economy.

According to the bureaucrats’ official statistics, there were 87,000 protests in 2005 alone. But militancy at the economic level is not enough. The working class must take up the struggle at the political level. What’s needed is a revolutionary vanguard party in China to fight for a proletarian political revolution. Such a party would fight to unite all sectors of the working class in an alliance with the rural workers and the urban poor. Migrant workers must receive all the rights of legal residents—including access to health care, housing and public education—and equal pay for equal work. The imperialist investments in the private sector must be renegotiated in the interests of the working class.

As we explain in our article “China’s ‘Market Reforms’—A Trotskyist Analysis” (WV Nos. 874 and 875, 4 August and 1 September 2006), a real reduction in the gap between the city and the countryside requires a massive redistribution and reallocation of economic resources. The introduction of modern technology in the countryside demands a qualitatively higher industrial base than that which exists today. Correspondingly, a growth in agricultural productivity would necessitate an enormous extension of industrial jobs in the urban areas in order to absorb the huge workforce which would no longer be required in the countryside. This would no doubt be a lengthy process, especially given the still limited size and relatively low productivity of China’s industrial base.

All this shows the strategic necessity of extending the Chinese revolution to advanced capitalist countries like Japan and of establishing an international planned economy; both the tempo and ultimately the viability of this perspective depend upon it. A red China of workers councils would be a beacon for the oppressed working masses of Asia and the entire world. A victorious proletarian political revolution would deal a deathblow to the bourgeoisie’s “death of communism” propaganda, and it would lift up the downtrodden masses of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and inspire the workers of Western Europe.

Protectionist Campaign Against China

There is a mounting campaign by the bourgeoisie in Germany to conjure up the image of a “Chinese threat.” In its 27 August 2007 issue, Der Spiegel vituperates in its lead article: “The Yellow Spies—How China Spies on German Technology.” The article fulfills its promise of racist and anti-Communist witchhunting: “Every student, every businessman” from China is presented “as an informer, as a stool pigeon,” “800,000 informers” worldwide and “in Germany alone there are more than 27,000 Chinese students.” Then China is accused of having infected government computers with “Trojans”—an action which the German government is now planning against its own citizens!

Der Spiegel waxes indignant over the Chinese workers state: “In this way it not only steals government secrets—that alone would be bad enough. At the same time, it is also stealing national wealth: German know-how. That is the only raw material worth mentioning that the Federal Republic has to offer in the international competition for prosperity.” This pushes the lie that it is China’s economic development that threatens the living standards of the working class in Germany, and not the German bourgeoisie, which is continually intensifying exploitation here. This campaign is intended to create a climate in which the bourgeoisie’s all-sided theft of wages and social benefits from the working population can be further intensified, so as to amass more profit and to expand against the imperialist competitors.

As far as “German know-how” is concerned, a short look at history shows us that it is by no means as German as the chauvinist Spiegel would like us to think. The industrial revolution in Germany was carried out in the 19th century with know-how that was stolen lock, stock and barrel from England, the leading industrial power of the day. Be it the steam engine, mechanical looms or steel production—that was all spied out during factory visits in England and then copied, or it was brought into the country by the recruitment of English engineers. And Japan and the other capitalist powers which rose after England proceeded no differently.

More fundamentally, all nationalist protectionist campaigns serve to throttle workers’ struggles to defend wages and social benefits. The trade-union bureaucracy constitutes the transmission belt bringing this bourgeois program into the working class. Instead of mobilizing workers to defend their interests in class struggle against the bosses, the union bureaucrats, with their program of class collaboration, act as advisers to the capitalists on how to run the shop better.

While protectionism is a possible option for the bourgeoisie, it is deadly poison for the working class, splitting the working class along national lines and subordinating it to its own bourgeoisie. And this is how the union bureaucracy pits the multiethnic German working class against the working classes of other countries, e.g., against “low-wage competition” from China or Eastern Europe. The Social Democratic union bureaucracy quite consciously refrains from demands for import controls or customs duties since it deeply shares the nationalist logic of “Standort Deutschland” (Germany: the place for investment and industry), knowing that the welfare of German industry depends on exports.

One example is Hamburg. The harbor workers’ willingness to struggle against the Port Package attacks on wages and working conditions was diverted by the union bureaucracy onto a protectionist track behind their “own” bosses, using the slogan “harbor work for harbor workers,” which is directly aimed against seamen. Hand in hand with this, the union tops explained to the workers at a demonstration on 11 January 2006: “If in the future powerful global players from Hong Kong and Singapore can buy into the Hamburg harbor company, then it won’t be much longer before Asian social standards with day labor, mini-wage and hire and fire come to these shores.” The picture painted here by the ver.di service sector union bureaucrats serves as nationalist propaganda, which they use to try to rally the workers behind their “own” bosses and their government. In fact, there hasn’t been a strike in the Hamburg harbor for decades, in spite of relentless attacks by the German bosses, while even the 24-hour strike on 11 January 2006 was organized so as not to hurt the bosses. Against the poison of nationalist isolation, the working class must be won to a class-struggle program on an internationalist basis: Equal pay for equal work, regardless of who carries it out! The harbor workers must solidarize with everyone who unloads ships, whether seamen or immigrants, organize them in a union and fight for the full contract wage for all. The same applies to the truckers in the harbor and all the other workers who have to slave below contract wages in the harbor. Harbor contract for harbor work! Organize the unorganized! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Down with the work ban against East European workers!

A 21 April 2005 article by the Wolfsburg local of the IG Metall metal workers union summarizes the protectionist justifications employed by the union bureaucrats to sell out the struggles that were going on against the bosses’ massive attacks on strategic sections of the working class, as at VW and DaimlerChrysler:

“For some time now, announcing a [possible] relocation has no longer been a threat, but reality, according to [Frank] Patta [second in command of IG Metall Wolfsburg]. The trade unionist calculates that ‘1,000 jobs are lost daily in Germany’.... But, Patta admits, saving jobs doesn’t mean making them secure: ‘Our processes and structures must again become more efficient. Only if we produce and sell competitive cars at Volkswagen will our jobs also remain secure—until 2011 and beyond’.”

After concessions were made by IG Metall-Wolfsburg to the VW bosses, production of models from Brussels and South Africa was then shifted to Wolfsburg, and more than half the jobs in Brussels were axed. While the IG Metall bureaucrats and plant council princes like to prattle about international solidarity from time to time, the struggle of the Belgian VW workers for their jobs was brutally betrayed here for a further dirty deal with the VW bosses.

The working class in Germany must solidarize with the powerful Chinese proletariat on the basis of defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against the common enemy: the imperialist bourgeoisie. A counterrevolution in China would not just mean greater immiseration of the Chinese working masses than is presently the case in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union—a counterrevolution would also encourage the imperialists to carry out another wave of attacks against the working class here, just as they did following the destruction of the DDR and Soviet Union.

The Counterrevolutionary Role of the Social Democracy

This support of their own bourgeoisie by the trade-union bureaucracy and the social democracy via nationalist protectionism is amplified by their regurgitation of the bourgeoisie’s “human rights” campaign, which they extend with an even more dangerous variant, “workers’ rights.” Since the October Revolution of 1917, the social democracy has raved against the workers states in the name of “democracy.” This derives from the character of both the SPD and the Linkspartei (Left Party) as bourgeois workers parties, parties whose base lies in the working class, above all via their connection to the trade unions, but whose program and leadership are entirely dedicated to capitalism. Social democracy is based on a thin privileged layer of labor aristocrats who are bribed by the bourgeoisie with the help of superprofits from the exploitation of the neocolonial peoples. In August 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, an imperialist war of conquest, the social democracy openly went over to the side of their respective bourgeoisies, mobilizing the workers as cannon fodder against their class brothers in other countries.

Following World War I a revolutionary wave shook the capitalist world. Led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, in October 1917 the workers in Russia had overthrown the bourgeoisie, smashed their capitalist state and erected a workers state. In Western Europe the social democracy managed, due to the inexperience of the young, newly founded Communist parties, to save bourgeois rule. In Germany, the SPD organized the Freikorps (paramilitary bands) and had Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered, beheading the young German Communist Party (KPD). While the SPD leaders Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske drowned the revolution in the blood of thousands upon thousands of workers, “left” social democrat Karl Kautsky of the social-pacifist Independent Social Democratic Party ranted against the dictatorship of the proletariat and propagated the illusion of “pure democracy.” In 1918, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Lenin explained that “democracy” is a type of state. And the state—at its core the police, army and courts—is not neutral. So the question always posed for Marxists is: democracy for which class? Marx drew the decisive lesson from the Paris Commune of 1871 that the proletariat cannot simply take over the bourgeois state machinery, but must smash it, “shatter” it and replace it with its own state: the dictatorship of the proletariat. And that is exactly what Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks did in the October Revolution of 1917.

The SPD’s agency for all kinds of hidden counterrevolutionary activities is the fittingly named Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES). Ebert was the Social Democratic hangman of the November Revolution of 1918-19, famous for having said: “If the Kaiser fails to abdicate, then social revolution is inevitable. But I don’t want it, indeed, I hate it like sin.” The FES is a classic “non”-governmental organization (NGO) closely linked to the leaderships of the DGB (trade-union federation) and the SPD. From time to time it presents itself as an organization of the German workers movement. But it serves German imperialism and seeks to promote its interests around the world. Thus the FES acted as a conveyor belt for CIA and other monies in order to suppress revolution in Portugal in 1974. When leftist insurgents in Latin America sought power, it intervened heavily in order to prevent them from following the Cuban road and smashing capitalism. And it was in the front lines of the drive to counterrevolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It is the instrument that is supposed to make counterrevolution palatable to Chinese workers in exchange for a bit of worker participation (Mitbestimmung) and of course “democracy.” To this end, it employs the real conflicts in Chinese society, presenting to the workers an image of being on their side against exploitation, frightful working conditions and the like.

The Social-Democratic DGB bureaucracy does the same thing. IG Metall-Wolfsburg reported as follows on the first official visit of a DGB delegation since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989:

“The ACFTU [All-China Federation of Trade Unions] has well over 100 million members. But it is not a trade union in the Western sense. For this it lacks the necessary prerequisites such as political independence, freedom for oppositions, and democratic structures. The Chinese unions see themselves more as a front-line organization of the Communist Party. Nonetheless the German unions want to enter into a critical dialogue with the Chinese organization. Following the visit, [DGB International Division head] Karl Feldengut put it this way: ‘We want to use our growing economic contacts with China in order to promote free trade unions, co-determination and wages based on collective bargaining there’.” (19 April 2005)

For the DGB union bureaucrats to lecture the Chinese union federation on “democratic structures” and the lack of “freedom for oppositions” has got to be a bad joke. The DGB is bureaucratically controlled by the social democracy—the SPD and, since 1990, increasingly the PDS/Linkspartei. This control has been enforced by the social democracy with purges and expulsions in a fight to the finish against communists and other leftist opponents. The fight for unions independent of the Stalinist bureaucracy in China must be based on unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state. Independent unions must stand in irreconcilable opposition to the imperialists and their ideological agencies like the FES and the whole pack of counterrevolutionary NGOs. Defense of workers’ rights presupposes above all the defense of the Chinese workers state and its collectivized economy.

SPD “Ostpolitik”: Counterrevolution in the Name of “Workers’ Rights”

As far as “free trade unions” are concerned, Polish Solidarność should serve as a warning for Chinese workers and leftists. In Poland the aspirations of the working class had repeatedly been disappointed by the Stalinists, so that by 1980 a majority of the traditionally pro-socialist Polish proletariat had been driven into the arms of the Catholic church. By September 1981 Solidarność had consolidated around a program of capitalist counterrevolution—its demand for “free elections” was intended to carry out a capitalist restoration under the cover of parliamentary governmental activity. We described Solidarność at the time as a company union for the CIA and the bankers, from whom they received millions of dollars, and demanded, “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!” We emphasized that the Polish working class needed a Trotskyist party. When in December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski suppressed Solidarność’ grab for power, we supported this measure. At the same time we warned that the Stalinists were capable of selling out the Polish workers state to capitalism, as they ultimately did in 1989-90. By contrast, the fake-Trotskyist left wallowed in “solidarity with Solidarność” and criticized the SPD for not being aggressive enough! In Poland today you can see the results of defense of “workers’ rights” à la the SPD: large parts of the Polish economy—mining, heavy industry and textiles—have been massively destroyed, unemployment is around 20 percent and there are hardly any unemployment benefits. Women’s rights have been smashed and a reactionary clerical capitalist system established.

A good example of how the campaigns for plant councils and co-determination serve counterrevolution is the DDR in 1989-90. In the fall of 1989, a few months after the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing, the Stalinist Honecker regime collapsed. A proletarian political revolution began to develop in the DDR. We mobilized all the forces of our international organization in order to build a revolutionary leadership with the East German workers. Without any ifs, ands or buts, we fought against capitalist counterrevolution. We fought for the revolutionary reunification of Germany, i.e., for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy in the DDR and for social revolution in West Germany to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie, for a red Germany of workers’ councils. We called for the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, in order to organize the working class as a class for itself, as a contender for political rule. Against illusions that the SED-PDS could be reformed, we fought to build a new egalitarian Leninist party. We warned against the SPD as the Trojan horse of counterrevolution. A detailed report can be found in “Revolution vs. Counterrevolution in Germany 1989-90,” WV Nos. 730 and 731, 25 February and 10 March 2000. Our intervention is evaluated in Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 47-48, Winter 1992-93.

And the SPD likewise intervened. At the beginning of October 1989 the SDP, the East German Social Democratic Party, was founded; it was composed essentially of Evangelical (Protestant) clerics. This was no accident, since from the very beginning the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) played a central role in working out and implementing the Social Democratic “Ostpolitik.” For instance, as early as 1965 in its “Memorandum on the East” the EKD called for recognizing the Oder-Neisse line as Germany’s border, so as to create closer ties with the East, in a break from the then prevailing open revanchism. Erhard Eppler, a member of the SPD Executive from 1970-91, was a central connecting link between the Evangelical Church and the SPD. In the early 1980s, with the rise of the nationalist peace movement in West Germany, the SPD intensified its contacts with petty-bourgeois pacifist opposition groups in the DDR via the EKD.

Counterposed to our call in 1989-90 for “Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils to Power!” the capitalists, social democrats, Stalinist combine directors and DDR opposition groups like the United Left (VL) campaigned for plant councils and co-determination. As we warned in Spartakist No. 68, 1 March 1990: “PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) chairman Gregor Gysi said in a January 7 speech kicking off the election campaign that ‘co-determination of the working people’ was necessary in the case of ‘joint ventures,’ and plant councils were supposedly a form of ‘democratizing the economy.’ To the contrary, what is at stake here is the sell-out of our economy, of our VEBs [state-owned plants], of the workers, of the DDR.” The intention was to disguise the fact that with the sellout of the DDR workers’ factories to West German capital, they were to be disempowered as a class. “Co-determination” is the class-collaborationist illusion of a reconciliation of the interests of the exploited with their exploiters; this was brought home after reunification, when DDR industry was smashed by the bourgeoisie through the Treuhand (an agency set up to privatize DDR industry). We wrote:

“But at a conference of plant councils called by the VL initiative group, reports about the real conditions of ‘co-determination’ in the Federal Republic had a ‘sobering’ effect, according to Neues Deutschland (5 February [1990]).

“Thus the call for factory councils often serves to mask a program for the restoration of capitalism. Against this, the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany calls for workers and soldiers councils to power. In our ‘Open Letter to all Communists’ (Arprekorr No. 18, 12 January [1990]) we wrote: ‘The SED-PDS now suggests creating plant councils “before capital comes” (ND, 11 January [1990]). The Spartakists call for building workers and soldiers councils to stop capital from coming!’”

The potential for a proletarian political revolution in the DDR was expressed on 3 January 1990 in the pro-socialist, united-front rally against the fascist desecration of the Soviet war memorial at Berlin-Treptow and in defense of the DDR and the Soviet workers states, which we initiated and which was taken up by the SED-PDS. In front of more than 250,000 demonstrators, we Trotskyists called for political revolution and warned against the SPD as the Trojan horse of counterrevolution. Gorbachev became aware of the danger of a political revolution that might have spread to the Soviet Union. He saw his wheeling and dealing with the imperialists in danger and drove the capitalist reunification of Germany forward at greater speed, carrying it out with the CDU of then-chancellor Helmut Kohl.

The SED acceded to this betrayal and became the social-democratic PDS under Modrow’s slogan, “Germany one fatherland!” This capitulation demoralized the pro-socialist workers who had looked to the SED-PDS in the hope that it would be an obstacle to counterrevolution. More backward sections of the working class and the DDR petty bourgeoisie, who had fallen prey to the illusions of social well-being via Anschluss, were encouraged. Thus the conservative electoral coalition, financed with many millions of deutschmarks by the West German bourgeoisie, won an overwhelming electoral victory in the Volkskammer (East German parliament) elections on 18 March 1990, sealing the fate of the DDR. As we wrote in the document of our second international ICL conference, the ICL intervention in the DDR clearly demonstrates that our program of political revolution and defense of the gains of the October Revolution stood opposed to the Stalinist program of capitulation and counterrevolution (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 47-48, Winter 1992-93).

In 1992 the SPD defended itself against charges from the bourgeois camp that they had not been sufficiently anti-Communist and had courted the SED: “No, the Social Democrats have no reason at all to hide their light under a bushel. Their Ostpolitik was successful: it embraced the opponent, the SED, until it ultimately suffocated in our friendly clutches. This is how it should be viewed, soberly and without any ideological idealization” (“The New Society,” Frankfurter Hefte, 1992). Indeed they were and are today a Trojan horse of counterrevolution.

Fake Left Tails Social Democracy

The trade-union left trots along behind the Social Democracy. At Labournet.de, a forum of the union left, you find a lot of articles on China which conjure up anti-Communist “human rights” and “workers’ rights.” The “Asia House” in Essen plays a central role here, overseeing various projects which have to do with “democracy” and ecology. The Asia House is financed by, among others, the development service of the Evangelical church, the Environment and Development Foundation of North-Rhine Westphalia and the Greens’ Heinrich Böll Foundation. An editor of taz with ties to the Asia House criticized Merkel’s China policies on the Internet paper of Asia House, under the headline: “A new tune doesn’t mean a different policy” (3 September 2007). This means that Merkel still isn’t anti-Communist enough for them. Then he serves up all the filth of the imperialist anti-China campaign: “Here at home, China’s image has rapidly deteriorated in the recent period because of dangerous cheap products, ecological over-exploitation and brazen spying on government computers.” Even if cleansed of the deeply racist “yellow peril” tones, this conjures up, just as in Spiegel, a “threat” to Germany, indeed to the whole of Europe:

“The rise of the Middle Kingdom is seen here in this country less and less as an opportunity, and more and more strongly as a threat. But like the German image campaign, this only reveals the real relationship of power. The Chinese are sure of their continued political and economic ascent, while the Germans are struggling to stay in the same league, while also having to court the Chinese.”

Labournet is full of links to articles from China Labour Bulletin (CLB). The CLB and its founder Han Dongfang have direct connections to the European and American imperialists. Han, who is also called the “Chinese Lech Walesa” after the leader of Solidarność, has for years been a regular spokesman for Washington’s Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the CLB Web site provides a link to RFA. The RFA is the radio station of the CIA, operating under the direction of, among others, Condoleezza Rice, who is on its board of directors. In Europe, CLB spokesman Cai Chongguo offers himself to the imperialists as a China “expert.” The French fake Trotskyists of Lutte Ouvrière (LO) invited Cai Chongguo to their annual LO Fête, where Cai baldly admitted in his opening remarks: “I speak three or four times a week for the BBC, Radio Free Asia, Radio France Internationale and Deutsche Welle. And naturally also sometimes for the Chinese department of Voice of America.” Two weeks before this, Cai had been invited by the EU to speak in Berlin on the topic of “labor law”; the invitation was cancelled following protests by the Chinese government. Our French comrades of the LTF denounced LO for inviting Cai, a continuation of LO’s historical support for similar counterrevolutionary forces in the Cold War against the Soviet Union (see WV No. 896, 3 August 2007).

On 14 March 2007 there was a forum in Hamburg held by Labournet, Asia House and the group of trade-union leftists “Jour fixe,” associated with the Linkspartei, at which Chinese women workers reported on the wretched working conditions at the Gold Peak concern, where they and other women workers were poisoned with cadmium. The sort of solidarity the forum had in mind was made clear right at the beginning by a ver.di speaker. He pointed to their history of “successful support” to workers struggles, especially their invitation to representatives of Solidarność, which they supported at the time. Our comrades warned against counterrevolutionaries like Han Dongfang and explained how Solidarność counterrevolution had plunged the Polish workers into poverty. It is for the purpose of counterrevolution that the forum organizers sought to misuse the just struggle of the Gold Peak workers.

Fake Trotskyists for Counterrevolution in China

The majority of the social-democratic fake Trotskyists claim that China is capitalist. This is not an erroneous analysis, but an anti-Communist program for counterrevolution. The method is not new. The centrist social democrat Karl Kautsky labeled the Soviet Union “state capitalist” in order to justify his anti-Bolshevik tirades. During the Korean War at the beginning of the ’50s, Tony Cliff served up this “theory” again, in order to justify his public refusal to defend the North Korean deformed workers state against his own British imperialism. This was a cowardly capitulation to the then-governing Labour Party, for which Cliff’s followers were expelled from the Fourth International. In 1991 it became clear where the Cliffites’ imaginary “third camp” was located when they were on Yeltsin’s side of the barricades and hailed his counterrevolutionary putsch: “‘Communism has collapsed,’ our newspapers and television declare. It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991). Very far from being a “step sideways,” as the Cliffites claim to this very day, counterrevolution in the Soviet Union was a devastating step backwards. The economic collapse is without parallel for a modern society. Between 1991 and 1997, the gross national product in Russia fell by more than 80 percent. In the year 2000, life expectancy was lower than at the end of the 19th century. Unemployment and poverty are rampant. A counterrevolution in China would have even more devastating effects than in the Soviet Union.

The Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), which in Germany is Socialist Alternative (SAV), also claims that China is capitalist:

“Capitalism in China has been recreated under the tutelage of the Stalinist ruling party, in close interaction with overseas capitalism through the process of globalization. The Chinese capitalist class is extremely dependent on this state, primarily to protect it from the working class, and for this reason its democratic ambitions—and desire for regime change—are almost nonexistent.”

—“China at the Crossroads,” www.chinaworker.tk, 24 May 2007

So according to the CWI the Stalinist bureaucracy transformed itself into a ruling class and in this simple way the workers state became a capitalist state. As Trotsky explained in 1933 in “The Class Nature of the Soviet State,” this is winding in reverse the reformist film of a peaceful step-by-step transition from capitalism to socialism, as the deeply social-democratic program of the CWI does in fact project. For them, “socialism” is the “transfer of the banks and concerns into public ownership” by a social-democratic majority in the bourgeois parliament. In fact, a capitalist counterrevolution would have to triumph at the political level and destroy the Chinese workers state. This is why the imperialist bourgeoisie is profoundly hostile to the Chinese workers state, screaming for “democracy” along with its social-democratic stooges.

Thus the CWI calls for “permanent revolution” in China for “democratic change.” This is a perversion of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, a denial of the class character of the Chinese state so as to make common cause with counterrevolutionary forces to destroy the deformed workers state in the name of “democracy.” This can be clearly seen in the CWI criticism of CIA favorite Han Dongfang. The CWI reproaches Han for having illusions in the Stalinists, because he supposedly wants to win the official union federation “to a democratic, fighting standpoint.” This is “completely unrealistic,” they say! In contrast the CWI stands for “independent” unions, just as they did when helping to build Solidarność in the 1980s. Indeed, the CWI hardly veils its call for legalization of the utterly counterrevolutionary Guomindang (GMD), which was driven from the mainland by the 1949 Revolution: “Marxists support the right of all parties, except fascists (which use terror against the working class and all democratic rights), to organize independently of the state. This means we would not oppose legalization of the GMD, however much we reject its anti-working class policies.”

This stands completely in continuity with the CWI’s support for counterrevolution in the deformed workers states of East Europe and in the degenerated workers state of the Soviet Union. In 1991, they supported Yeltsin’s counterrevolutionary coup in the Soviet Union, in the name of “democracy.” Today they carp over capitalist Russia, created with their support: “But ten years on, Russia and Indonesia are hardly blossoming democracies. On the contrary both are pseudo-democracies in which real power rests with unelected elites rather than the elected politicians.” Here these parliamentary fetishists glorify bourgeois democracy. In their classically social-democratic worldview, “socialist democracy” will be achieved by “elected politicians” who win “genuine power” through a majority in a bourgeois parliament. As Marx and Lenin explained, every state is an instrument of class rule, including the modern bourgeois republic, where the democratic forms of government conceal the rule of the bourgeoisie particularly effectively. Lenin asked Karl Kautsky, just as he could ask the CWI today: “Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers?” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918]). What is necessary is a socialist revolution that smashes the bourgeois state machinery and replaces it by the dictatorship of the proletariat, a fact which the CWI, like Kautsky, abhors.

The CWI prefers even more backward capitalist states with “pseudo democracy” to the Chinese deformed workers state. For instance, the CWI supports independence for Taiwan, which it justifies by redefining Taiwan as a separate nation. Peter Taaffe explains: “There is now clearly a consciousness of a separate entity, Taiwan, and a broad ‘national consciousness’ amongst the majority of the population” (“Marxists, Taiwan and the National Question,” China Worker online, 26 August 2005). Taiwan has been part of China for centuries. In 1949 the Chinese bourgeoisie fled there from Mao’s troops, where they ruled under the protection of U.S. imperialism. For the imperialists, above all Japan and the USA, Taiwan is a dagger at the throat of the Chinese deformed workers state and a springboard for counterrevolution on the mainland. So they arm it to the teeth. In a military conflict between China and Taiwan—which could certainly result in a counterrevolutionary imperialist attack on China—we naturally side with the deformed workers state, which we unconditionally militarily defend. The Beijing bureaucrats are following a policy of “one country, two systems,” which the bureaucracy intends as a signal to the Chinese bourgeoisie that in the case of reunification their property would be respected. We, on the other hand, fight for the revolutionary reunification of China and Taiwan through proletarian political revolution on the mainland and social revolution to bring down the Chinese bourgeoisie in Taiwan.

As against this, the CWI takes a side with the Taiwanese bourgeoisie and the imperialists, whom it supports. The real reason is again social-democratic support for “democracy”: “Nevertheless, the Chinese regime is a dictatorship. Moreover, from the standpoint of the Taiwanese masses they would not wish to place themselves under its control, preferring the democratic rights, however limited, which they enjoy under a bourgeois-democratic regime, as in Taiwan.” In 1989-90 in Germany—which was until capitalist reunification one nation separated, like China today, by a class line—the CWI argued the reverse. At that time they trumpeted: “The SPD’s Germany Policy—An Offensive for Unity and Socialism Is Needed” (February 1990), stating: “We support the unification of every nation—even the German one—as a historically progressive development and as a democratic right” (Voran supplement, 25 January 1990). In both cases one thing remains the same for the CWI: They are always on the side of counterrevolution, of “democratic” capitalism against “Stalinist dictatorship,” which in reality was a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, albeit deformed.

That certainly doesn’t go over well today, especially with their East German members, who with their families are directly experiencing the “joys” of capitalist parliamentary democracy in the former DDR: deindustrialization, 17 percent unemployment, over one million emigrants since 1990, Nazi terror on the streets against leftists and immigrants, right down to “national liberated zones,” etc. And that’s why today the Taaffeites seek to justify their support for counterrevolution in the DDR in 1989-90 by saying that the SAV’s leadership in West Germany made a mistake in thinking back then in February 1990 “that Germany could be reunified only on a socialist basis.” This is simply a cover-up and nothing has changed in their social-democratic politics. Today they are at it again, supporting counterrevolution in China by persuading workers and leftist youth in Germany that there is nothing to defend there, hand in hand with pushing the worst kind of conciliation with their own “democratic” imperialist bourgeoisie.

On the one hand, the market reforms have fed the growth of enormous forces in China for capitalist counterrevolution. On the other hand, there has arisen in China one of the most powerful industrial proletariats in the world, which is attempting in numerous struggles to defend its economic interests. As Trotsky stated:

“The workers’ state must be taken as it has emerged from the merciless laboratory of history and not as it is imagined by a ‘socialist’ professor, reflectively exploring his nose with his finger. It is the duty of revolutionists to defend every conquest of the working class even though it may he distorted by the pressure of hostile forces. Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones.”

—“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events,” 1940

The question of revolution and counterrevolution in China is of central interest to the working class of the whole world. We fight to build Trotskyist parties worldwide. The working class in Germany must be won to the understanding that it is necessary to defend China against the German bourgeoisie and its social-democratic agents. This constitutes a central component of breaking workers from their illusions in bourgeois democracy and ultimately mobilizing them to overthrow German imperialism and to set up a red Germany of workers councils as part of a Socialist United States of Europe.