Defend, Extend Gains of 1949 Revolution!
The Spectre of Tiananmen and Working-Class Struggle in China Today
For Proletarian Political Revolution!
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 836 and 837, 12 and 26 November 2004.
We print below, slightly edited for publication an October 9 forum in Oakland, California, by Spartacist League spokesman Keith Markin.
One of the most hotly debated subjects throughout the world, especially in China, is whether China is capitalist or socialist. The significance of the Tiananmen uprising in the spring of 1989 is another subject of debate in China. What is going to happen there? One thing is certain: it's not very stable. There's a book, appropriately entitled One China, Many Paths, which has contributions from the intelligentsia within China, that deals with these questions. I'll refer to articles from this book.
China's economy continues to grow. It has emerged as the number one steel producer in the world. At the same time, there is an increasing gap of social inequality exceeded by only a few countries. While there are some people that can buy a $30,000 car with cash, many more live in abject poverty, especially in the countryside and in the west of China. The wealthy living on the east and southern coasts have access to the most modern comforts.
The lie of building "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has led to China losing 15 million manufacturing jobs in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) between 1995 and 2002. Prostitution is skyrocketing, and female infanticide is rampant in the countryside. There are over 100 million people living on less than $106 per year. The United States has about 40 percent more acreage under cultivation than China, yet the Chinese agricultural labor force is 100 times larger than that of the U.S. And the U.S. has over six times as many tractors as China. These dire conditions have forced as many as 130 million rural Chinese to become migrant laborers in search of work on the eastern and southern coasts.
The workers no longer have their "iron rice bowl," which guaranteed a job and benefits for workers in SOEs. A journalist traveling in the northeast of China, where millions of workers have been laid off, explained that in the past an "average worker could—just based on a letter of introduction, something equivalent to current credit card or privileged position in these times—get excellent treatment at a hospital." He says, "This is something of a legend to young people [in China] who do not know their history."
After crushing the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, the Stalinist regime waited a few years before they began more aggressive market policies, such as the increase in free-trade zones, where a section of the Stalinist bureaucracy functions as labor contractors for the imperialists and offshore bourgeoisie. But the proletariat and peasantry have been far from silent. It is reported by the police that from 1993 to 1999 there was an increase of protests from approximately 8,500 per year to 32,000. According to unofficial Chinese reports, the number of public protests has probably risen each of the last three years.
In the spring of 2002, thousands of workers from the northeast provinces protested against the massive layoffs and the failure to receive back pay and pensions. This area used to be the industrial heartland of China; it has become a rust bowl. During the protests, banners proclaimed such slogans as "The army of industrial workers wants to live!" and "It is a crime to embezzle pensions!"
The spectre of the Tiananmen uprising looms large. This has led the ruling Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao regime to adopt a more "populist" style than the technocratic Jiang Zemin regime which preceded it. The central government has since promised to invest in the northeast region to appease the workers. What happens in China is not a foregone conclusion. It will be determined through social struggle.
Peter Taaffe, leader of the Socialist Party, a left group centered in Britain, commented on the 16th Chinese Communist Party Congress two years ago: "China is on the road to complete capitalist restoration, but the ruling clique are attempting to do this gradually and by maintaining their repressive authoritarian grip" (Socialist, 22 November 2002). Maoists and neo-Maoists outside China— the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) is a good example—believe that China is capitalist, and has been for some time.
Neo-Maoists within the bureaucracy want to reform the bureaucracy by changing its policies. They are opposed to the "market socialist" economy, though they believe China is still "socialist." The Chinese "New Left" is heterogeneous. Most support the market economy, but they are critical of the ramifications of the market: corruption, the gap between rich and poor, etc. They consider themselves part of the anti-globalization movement. Wang Hui, a prominent spokesman of the Chinese "New Left," says that after Tiananmen China "has completely conformed to the dictates of capital and the activities of the market." We Trotskyists sharply disagree with all of these characterizations of China and the conclusions drawn by the Chinese "New Left."
I want to clarify three points today: first, in Marxist terminology, China is a bureaucratically deformed workers state because the core of the economy is based on collectivized property. This is the basis for the International Communist League's unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. Second, there is a privileged bureaucratic caste that politically rules the workers state. The bureaucracy's policies of "market socialism" are paving the way for either capitalist restoration or for a new revolutionary explosion. What happened during the Tiananmen uprising, as well as the current class struggle in China, shows the contradictions of the deformed workers state and the dual character of the bureaucracy. And third, the historical task of the Chinese proletariat is to build a revolutionary party—not its Stalinist or Maoist perversion. A revolutionary party is necessary to lead workers, peasants and the oppressed to defend the gains of the 1949 Revolution through a proletarian political revolution that establishes workers democracy. The key political question for such a party is to break the Chinese proletariat from the nationalist dogma of "socialism in one country" and win them to an internationalist, proletarian perspective. For those new to Marxism, I will explain just what all this means.
What Is Marxism?
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency. We are based on the politics of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. The debates in China are framed by a false identity of Maoism with Marxism.
In order to understand what I'll be talking about and how we are different from the other political tendencies, I want to explain some basics about Marxism. First of all, Marxism is a science. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "physics" as a science that deals with matter and energy and their interactions. Marxism is the science of changing the world through international proletarian revolution. It deals with the relationship of class forces in the class struggle and the political consciousness of the international proletariat. The starting point for a Marxist is the understanding that the interests of the capitalists and of the proletariat are irreconcilable.
I've already jumped the gun. You're asking: What's a class? I want to quote Leon Trotsky. He, along with Lenin, led the Russian Revolution, which took proletarian revolution out of the realm of theory and gave it reality. In The Class Nature of the Soviet State, Trotsky explains just what a class is and why the Chinese bureaucracy is not a class (he was referring to the former Soviet Union):
"The class has an exceptionally important and, moreover, a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A class is defined not by its participation in the distribution of the national income alone, but by its independent role in the general structure of the economy and by its independent roots in the economic foundation of society. Each class (the feudal nobility, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat) works out its own special forms of property. The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule. The existence of a bureaucracy, in all its variety of forms and differences in specific weight, characterizes every class regime. Its power is of a reflected character. The bureaucracy is indissolubly bound up with a ruling economic class, feeding itself upon the social roots of the latter, maintaining itself and falling together with it."
Another important Marxist term is the state. A state consists of armed people and institutions that defend particular types of property. A capitalist state defends private ownership over factories, natural resources and banks (called the means of production). Capitalist production is based on what is most profitable for the private capitalist. A workers state defends collectivized property in the means of production. Production is based on what is actually needed by society. Another name for a workers state is the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Through international proletarian revolution, the system of private ownership of the means of production is replaced by a system of collective ownership of the means of production. A socialist revolution must establish a workers state to defend collectivized property against both the indigenous capitalists and imperialism. It is a step toward the international revolution. In order to remove the social rule of the working class, a social counterrevolution is necessary to re-establish a capitalist state, the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Capitalist production played a very important role in human history. It led to the development of modern sciences and technology. Humanity has the means to feed the world, but the capitalists and their system of production, which breeds imperialist wars, are obstacles that must be gotten rid of. Marxism seeks to resolve the problem of scarcity concerning food, clothing and shelter in the world through international proletarian revolution. Socialism is a classless, egalitarian, international economic system based on material abundance. Under a socialist system the problem of scarcity in the world can be resolved.
Both the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the Russian Revolution established collectivized property in the means of production and workers states to defend this type of property. The collectivized economy in the Soviet Union and China laid the basis for a leap in social progress, in particular for women. In China, the barbaric practice of foot-binding, which symbolized women's miserable status, was banned. But there was a qualitative difference between the two revolutions. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was carried out by a class-conscious proletariat led by Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party, which won the support of the poor peasants, and saw the seizure of state power as the first step toward world socialist revolution. The Chinese Revolution was the result of peasant guerrilla war led by Mao. The proletariat did not struggle in its own right for power in China.
The 1949 Revolution was deformed from its inception under the rule of Mao's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. Mao was a Chinese Stalin; the political regime of the Chinese workers state was modeled on that of Stalin, who represented the privileged bureaucracy in the Soviet Union that usurped political power from the proletariat in 1923-24.
The bureaucracy derives all its privileges by sitting on top of the collectivized economy, like a parasite. This is the basis of the contradictory character of what we describe as a bureaucratically deformed workers state. China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea are all deformed workers states. Because there was workers democracy in the Soviet Union before the Stalinist bureaucracy usurped political power in 1923-24, we characterized the Soviet Union as a "degenerated" rather than a "deformed" workers state. You see, the Bolshevik Party won a majority in the workers and soldiers soviets in 1917. There has never been workers democracy in China, Cuba, North Korea or Vietnam.
The bureaucracy rules in the name of the working class because all its privileges are derived from the collectivized property of the working class. It defends the workers state insofar as it can protect its privileged position atop the workers state. So it defends the workers state by its own methods.
The bureaucracy is opposed to the perspective of workers revolution internationally. The Stalinist bureaucrats adopted the nationalist dogma that socialism— an international, classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance—could be built in a single country. This means the bureaucracy prefers to accommodate world imperialism in the hope of maintaining the status quo, so that they can continue to feed off the workers state. In order to replace the political rule of the bureaucracy and change the political form of a workers state to workers democracy, a proletarian political revolution is necessary, not a social revolution. The economic foundations of the state remain the same.
Another significant difference between the Russian and Chinese Revolutions is that the Russian bourgeoisie was destroyed as a class; the Chinese bourgeoisie wasn't. The offshore bourgeoisie in Taiwan and Hong Kong, along with the imperialists, are the main forces for counterrevolution in China, and the Stalinist bureaucracy strengthens these forces.
In our article "China: Defeat Imperialist Drive for Counterrevolution!" (WV Nos. 814 and 815, 21 November and 5 December 2003), which is now out in Chinese, we explain why China is a bureaucratically deformed workers state. It is the core collectivized elements of the economy that continue to be dominant, though not in a stable, coherent manner. The private (including foreign-owned) sector consists for the most part of factories producing light manufactures by labor-intensive methods. Heavy industry, the high-tech sectors and modern armaments production are overwhelmingly concentrated in state-owned enterprises. It is these enterprises that have enabled China to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to ward off the American imperialists' threat of a nuclear first strike. Also, all major banks in China are state owned. Government control of the financial system has been key to maintaining and expanding production in state-owned industry and to the overall expansion of the state sector. The Beijing bureaucracy's abandonment of the strict state monopoly of foreign trade serves to facilitate Wall Street's plans for counterrevolution. It is precisely these core collectivist elements of China's economy that the forces of world imperialism want to eliminate and dismantle.
The ICL fights for unconditional military defense of all the deformed workers states against imperialism and internal capitalist counterrevolution because these states are based on collectivized property. That means we don't pose as a condition for defense that the Stalinist bureaucracy be overthrown before we will defend China. Why is this so important here in the U.S. and other capitalist countries in the world? If the proletariat of the U.S., Japan and Germany don't understand the historic significance of the gains of the Chinese Revolution, like the collectivized economy, then they will never understand the importance of making a revolution against their "own" bourgeoisie. We are for the revolutionary reunification of Taiwan with China: this means socialist revolution in Taiwan, expropriating the bourgeoisie in Hong Kong, and proletarian political revolution on the mainland.
Tiananmen, Incipient Proletarian Political Revolution
First, the background—three key events in China shaped the Tiananmen uprising: the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), China's anti-Soviet alliance with U.S. imperialism, and the market reforms begun in 1978.
Mao's Cultural Revolution is important because it significantly shaped the political consciousness of Chinese workers, peasants, students and intellectuals through the 1980s. Essentially it was a fight between two wings of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Maoists had to purge the conservative wing of the bureaucracy (led by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Xiaoping), who had led China during its recovery from the devastating results of Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s.
Millions of students were mobilized as Red Guards, supposedly to fight against bureaucratism, and, according to the RCP, against the restoration of capitalism. It played out quite differently in the real world. In January 1967, when workers in Shanghai organized a general strike to defend their standard of living, along with a national railway strike, Mao sent his Red Guards and they smashed the strikes. The orders the Red Guards were given by Mao could be summed up as the "Two Whatevers": "Support whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made and follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave."
There is a prejudice derived from class society that the rulers would only work with their brains while the slaves would only work with their hands. The idea of resolving this class prejudice of the Chinese intelligentsia by sending students, intellectuals and professionals out to the countryside for a period of time to learn by toiling with the peasants has real merit. But, implemented by Mao's bureaucracy, this became brutal punishment for long periods of time for many of those who disagreed with Mao, especially intellectuals and professionals.
The Cultural Revolution polarized Chinese society along the wrong lines by pitting subjectively revolutionary student youth against workers defending their standard of living. There was no side for revolutionaries in this fight within the Stalinist bureaucracy. More people died in the Cultural Revolution than in the suppression of Tiananmen. Yet the RCP hails Mao's Cultural Revolution.
After Mao died, the Deng wing of the bureaucracy resumed control of the government. The market reforms, begun in 1978, spawned a new class of rich peasants in the countryside and petty entrepreneurs. This, along with increasing unemployment in the cities, has laid the basis for the huge disparities in wealth that exist in China today.
Students and the intelligentsia were fervent supporters of the market reforms. Deng denounced the Cultural Revolution, and this sparked a period of debate within the intelligentsia in the early 1980s. The mainstream outlook for Chinese intellectuals became what is called the "New Enlightenment," which was in large measure seen as emancipation from what they thought was orthodox Marxism. The intellectuals of the "New Enlightenment," which greatly influenced the students protesting at Tiananmen, knew very little about Chinese history. They had simply imported Western ideas into the reform process. In particular, the students and intellectuals had a lot of illusions that "democracy" would necessarily go together with a market economy.
For Marxists, democracy is one of the political forms of a state. As I said earlier, the class nature of the state is determined by what type of property ownership over the means of production is defended by the cops and army. When we Marxists refer to "democracy," we ask: For what class? Many students and intellectuals had illusions in the bourgeois democracy of the U.S. This was conditioned by China's alliance with U.S. imperialism.
Wang Hui of the Chinese "New Left" points out in "The New Criticism" that, while China has always been involved in foreign trade, "The Open Door policies of Deng Xiaoping demanded a much deeper insertion of China into the world market. How did that happen? A key step in the process was China's invasion of Vietnam in 1978 [sic—1979]—the first war of aggression by the PRC after 1949." When China invaded Vietnam, the Spartacist League/U.S. raised the slogan: "China: Don't Be a Cat's Paw of U.S. Imperialism!" But why did China invade Vietnam? In the first place, it was only four years after the Vietnamese workers and peasants drove U.S. imperialism out of their country. This was a historic military defeat for U.S. imperialism. China had volunteers fighting in Vietnam against U.S. imperialism, too.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao's China became very hostile to the Soviet Union. Mao argued that the Soviet Union, not U.S. imperialism, was the greatest threat to the world. This led to Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972, where he embraced Mao at the very moment that U.S. warplanes were bombing Vietnam! Vietnam was a close ally of the Soviet Union. In addition to invading Vietnam in 1979 (by the way, they got whupped by seasoned Vietnamese troops), China aided the CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan.
Both Mao and Deng shared great-power aspirations based on the nationalist and anti-Marxist dogma that socialism could be built in one country. China's criminal anti-Soviet alliance with the U.S. happened because the U.S. changed its policy toward China, not the other way around. "Socialism in one country" necessitates accommodating to imperialism. China's alliance with U.S. imperialism contributed to the downfall of the Soviet degenerated workers state. The fact is that without the Soviet nuclear shield the Chinese Revolution would have very likely faced nuclear destruction by U.S. imperialism.
The increase in wealth from the market reforms only affected a very small fraction of the Chinese population. Skyrocketing inflation exacerbated this economic disparity and corruption became rampant. The "New Enlightenment" began to diverge on this issue. The government, led by Zhao Ziyang, implemented anti-corruption campaigns, but students wanted a more effective campaign.
Within China, illusions in American "democracy" and the benevolence of U.S. imperialism began to take off in 1972. In mid February 1989, Gorbachev withdrew the Red Army from Afghanistan. The Tiananmen protests began about two months later.
The occupation of Tiananmen began with a memorial gathering for former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary general Hu Yaobang, who had died on April 15. Hu had been widely respected for the simple fact that he was one of the few leading officials not personally tainted with corruption. Teams of youth took their demands to working-class neighborhoods to stress that they did "not oppose the government or the party."
By May 4, 300,000 people had flocked to Tiananmen. It was the 70th anniversary of the May 4th Movement of 1919, which began with anti-imperialist student demonstrations and led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party two years later. At the 4 May 1989 protest students and workers were singing together the revolutionary workers' anthem, the "Internationale." Following the May 4 protest, student leaders—without any social power and fearful of mobilizing the working class—decided to launch a hunger strike to force concessions from the government.
Sympathy with the hunger strikers led to another huge demonstration on May 17. At this demonstration, there was massive participation of factory workers from around Beijing. The students, with very little social power, had sparked the seething economic discontent of the Chinese proletariat. The workers wanted to do something about the attacks on their "iron rice bowl" of previously guaranteed jobs and social benefits, and about rising inflation. They began organizing independently of the bureaucracy, like the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation (BWAF). The BWAF demanded a wage increase, price stabilization, and opposed corruption within the CCP. They called to "make public the personal incomes and possessions of top party officials." The social power of the working class gave the protests their potentially revolutionary nature.
Li Peng, hatchet man for Deng Xiaoping and his regime, went to Capital Iron and Steel to discourage and intimidate workers there sympathetic to the students' protest. It was the threat of a general strike that led Li and Deng to declare martial law on May 20. The 38th Army was ordered to put down the so-called "counterrevolutionary" uprising. However, these troops were based in Beijing and refused to move on the crowds.
The fledgling Chinese workers organizations began to organize resistance to the declaration of martial law. They formed "workers picket corps" and "dare to die" teams to protect protesting students against repression. Students and workers fraternized with the troops. The streets of Beijing were crowded with ordinary people arguing about politics, expressing their opinions on the way forward. The police vanished from the streets.
After governmental authority in Beijing evaporated, workers groups began to take on responsibility for public safety, taking over essential services like transporting food and other vital necessities. A group of People's Liberation Army generals sent a letter of protest to Deng Xiaoping. The army was politically split. Not horizontally, as in a social revolution where the ranks split from the officers, but vertically. This is what an incipient proletarian political revolution looks like. For two weeks the order of martial law was not implemented.
On June 3, Deng was able to mobilize the 27th Army to implement the orders for martial law. The bloodletting began. It is reported that when the troops reached Tiananmen in the early morning of June 4, their first target was the workers' station at the western end. One student leader saw tanks flatten the tents of the BWAF, killing 20 people. In contrast to the war waged against the working people of the city, most of the students were allowed to leave Tiananmen Square without punitive actions being taken.
Why the savage repression at the very first signs of working-class protest? The Stalinist bureaucracy is a parasitic caste resting upon a collectivized economy. The bureaucrats do not own the means of production. They do not have the myriad threads of social control of a ruling capitalist class, such as the right to pass property ownership to their children. Their power stems from monopolizing political control of the governing apparatus. Since they claim to rule in the name of the workers, they cannot tolerate any independent workers organization. Any real workers movement necessarily challenges the legitimacy of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This is the contradiction of every deformed workers state.
The exact toll of the massacre is impossible to determine, but it is likely that several thousand were killed or wounded. Yet the army's terror failed to quell the rebellion. In fact, it served to generalize proletarian resistance, at first, as "dare to die" corps erupted all over China. Protests spread to over 80 cities, and that was only the official count. However, lacking a cohered leadership, the uprising was eventually smashed through state repression. One prominent U.S. left group, Workers World, actually defended the massacre, rehashing Deng Xiaoping's lie that the protesters were counterrevolutionary and for bourgeois democracy. That also happened to be the line of the bourgeoisie internationally. During this period, this is what WV said: On May 26, "Upheaval in China: Oust the Bureaucrats—For Lenin's Communism! Workers and Soldiers Soviets Must Rule!" (WV No. 478). On June 9, "Beijing Massacre—Civil War Looms; For the Unity of China Under the Leadership of the Workers!" (WV No. 479). On June 23, "Defend Chinese Workers! Stop the Executions!" (WV No. 480).
The Lessons of Tiananmen
Wang Hui argues in his article "The 1989 Social Movement and the Historical Roots of China's Neoliberalism": "The direct cause of the movement's failure was violent suppression by the state. However, the indirect cause lay in the movement's own inability to bridge the gap between its demands for political democracy and the demands for social equality that had been its mobilizing force." This is very perceptive. What political program could bridge this gap?
During the Cultural Revolution, society was polarized between students and workers. At Tiananmen, both students and workers protested together, not without their differences, against the bureaucracy. Only a Leninist and Trotskyist party fighting for a proletarian political revolution could have bridged the gap between the demands for political democracy and social equality. But the workers groups did not go beyond upholding "democracy" as freedom from bureaucratic constraint. A revolutionary party that could instill the lessons of past struggles into the political consciousness of the workers was necessary.
The two weeks during which the army refused to implement martial law were a critical juncture. There was a political vacuum. Even a tiny Chinese Bolshevik organization could have been decisive in 1989, especially during those two weeks. The nascent situation of dual power—in which working people were beginning to take control of the cities in their own hands—needed to be developed into a fight for political power. This would have meant struggling to transform the informal workers assemblies into workers councils open to all except openly counterrevolutionary tendencies.
Lenin described soviets (workers councils) as "the direct organization of the working and exploited people themselves, which helps them to organize and administer their own state in every possible way." Migrant workers would be critical to help spread this type of organization into rural communities. Coordinated nationally, these organizations could have been the basis for a revolutionary regime of workers democracy counterposed to the Stalinists and pledged to fight to the death against capitalist restoration.
Because there was a lack of clear leadership, overtly reactionary elements were allowed on some occasions to make their voices heard, including some who raised slogans in favor of the Guomindang. Socialist aspirations were often mixed with great illusions in the U.S. and bourgeois democracy—exemplified by the "Goddess of Democracy" statue. But from the beginning, the protesters' demands, centrally for more democratic rights and an end to corruption, were egalitarian in nature and within the framework of a workers state. Workers marched into Tiananmen Square carrying pictures of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, not Chiang Kai-shek.
In order to win workers, soldiers and students, a Bolshevik party would have to argue head-on against the nationalism of "socialism in one country" and clarify the fact that Mao and Deng were merely two sides of the same anti-Soviet bureaucratic coin. It would have been important to make an appeal to the workers of the world for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states of East Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. A political revolution in China would have been a spark for the workers of the world, from Japan and South Korea to West Europe and the U.S., but especially in the Soviet Union.
In an interview published by Revolutionary Worker in 1999 (they recently reprinted it this June), Li Minqi, a student protester at Tiananmen in 1989, explains the lessons he learned from the uprising and how he was won to what he believes was Marxism (that is, a sort of neo-Maoism): "Initially I shared the general dominance of bourgeois ideology among Chinese students. The student movement did not expect to become a mass democratic movement. But by May 17, when the workers really came into the streets, I began to realize that this was totally different from what I expected. I was saying to myself: this is more and more like a revolutionary situation."
Explaining his political development, Li says: "In the movement, I already sensed that something was wrong. The student leadership did not dare to mobilize the workers, did not dare take steps to organize to take political power, and that resulted in the failure of the movement. So I began to rethink what I had believed, what I had taken for granted—Western ideology and Western-style democracy. I began to think maybe some alternative ideas are needed. And the most obvious alternative idea is Marxism."
Li was arrested by the Deng regime and spent two years in prison. He's now an émigré. Without seeing an alternative to Maoism, Li drew some wrong conclusions from the defeat. He blames the increased nationalism in China on the new Chinese capitalism. This is wrong on two counts: China isn't capitalist, and "socialism in one country" is the basis for today's Chinese nationalism. In a dialogue transcribed in One China, Many Paths, when Li was asked about his view of China's war with Vietnam in 1979, he said he had nothing to say on the issue. But Li's experience shows how the impact of the working class wielding its social power during Tiananmen changed the political consciousness of some students. With a revolutionary Marxist leadership, the working class can change the course of history.
The Spectre of Tiananmen, the Intelligentsia and Working-Class Struggle Today
A few years after crushing the uprising, the bureaucracy went on the offensive with their market policies. Between 1993 and 1999, protests against the market reforms quadrupled. By the late '90s, there was a divergence within the Chinese intelligentsia reflecting the renewed social struggle against the market reforms: neoliberal intellectuals and hardliners within the CCP essentially support the repression at Tiananmen. They argue that if the movement had not been stopped, China would not have become a wealthier nation. The neoliberal intellectuals dubbed their antagonists the "New Left" to imply they are Marxists, because the "New Left" opposed the worsening conditions of the masses. They opposed the repression of the Tiananmen uprising, too.
The neoliberals complain that there hasn't been enough privatization and that, therefore, China is still "socialist." The "New Left" believes there is enough privatization to call China capitalist. Wang Hui recognizes, however, that China is not like other capitalist states because it was the only state to navigate successfully through the 1997-98 East Asian financial/economic crises. Wang says that this is because of the nation-state. But Thailand and South Korea were nation-states, too. Wang Hui believes that internationalism and Marxism are old-fashioned.
It is the collectivized property that is responsible for the ability of China to have navigated successfully through that financial/economic crisis. Continued state ownership of the financial system has enabled the Beijing regime up to now to effectively (though not totally) control the flow of money-capital in and out of mainland China. China's currency, the yuan (also called the renminbi) is not freely convertible. It is not traded (legally) in international currency markets.
Knowledgeable spokesmen for Western imperialism recognize that the privatization and especially internationalization of the financial system is a necessary step in breaking the CCP regime's grip on the banks. However, the bureaucracy can't control the fact that the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong is an ever-widening breach through which illegal currency transactions flow in both directions. The expropriation of Hong Kong's financiers and other sections of its bourgeoisie is vitally necessary to protect China's economy from the destructive onslaught of the imperialist bankers.
Referring to the savage privatizations that followed the counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union, Wang Hui commented on the debate about amending the Chinese constitution to render "private property rights inviolable": "A decade later, the question of property rights has become the most pivotal social issue in China. The principle that private property should receive protection under the law does not divide intellectuals." Wang Hui understands that the key question is private property, but he and the "New Left" draw the wrong conclusion. Their difference with the neoliberals is how one gets the property. The neoliberals condone illegal expropriations; the "New Left" is opposed. This amounts to being for capitalism with a human face. Where Wang runs into his own contradictions is on the question of privatizing land. He recognizes that if land were privatized, ordinary peasants would be ruined overnight. Marxists understand that the only class, besides the poor peasants themselves, whose interests are against the privatization of the land is the proletariat.
The National People's Congress, this spring, passed a law that stated: "Citizens' lawful private property is inviolable." It was only a matter of time before such a law was passed. Last year they legitimized party membership for entrepreneurs. In fact, that law did not introduce a significant change in either the social composition of the CCP, which has 66 million members, or its functional ideology. According to an official survey, of China's two million private business owners, 600,000 are party members and have been for some time. The overwhelming majority of these were longtime CCP managerial cadre who took over the small state-owned enterprises they were running when these were privatized over the past several years.
State-owned industrial enterprises can to a degree be buffered from increased import competition by additional government financing via the banks. But there is no way that China's peasant smallholders can compete with the capital-intensive, scientifically managed agribusiness of the U.S. and other major food-exporting countries. The basic line of the regime's agrarian policy is not to protect the multitude of peasant smallholders. It is rather to move toward large-scale, de facto privately owned farms.
Ultimately, the only way to resolve the shortage of arable land in China in the interests of workers and poor peasants is by extending the revolution to an industrially advanced capitalist state like Japan. But the bureaucracy is opposed to this perspective. In the meantime, a government based on workers and peasants councils would not only prohibit or restrict the hiring of labor and leasing of additional land by rich farmers, but it would also promote the recollectivization of agriculture. It would propose material incentives, like the best tractors and chemical fertilizers, and offer reduced taxes and cheaper credits to peasants who joined collectives. An increase in agricultural productivity would raise the need for a huge expansion of industrial jobs in urban areas to absorb the vast surplus of labor no longer needed in the countryside. Clearly, this would involve a lengthy process, particularly given the limited size and relatively low level of productivity of China's industrial base.
Realizing this perspective hinges on the aid that China would receive from a socialist Japan or a socialist America. You see, all roads lead to the necessity of international revolution. Both the dire living conditions suffered by Chinese peasants and their view that conditions will only get worse is the reason why over the last decade China has seen many large-scale peasant protests and riots, especially against increased taxation and corruption.
An indication of serious problems for the Stalinist bureaucracy was reported in a Herald Tribune article (3 June): "In contrast to Tiananmen in 1989, the police increasingly admit that most demonstrators are motivated by legitimate grievances against rapacious managers and corrupt local officials, and are not just pawns of anti-Communist conspirators. Conceding that protest is widespread and enjoys growing popular sympathy, the police are scrambling to learn new anti-protest techniques aimed at containing and defusing, rather than brutally squelching, demonstrations."
The bureaucracy's pace of market reforms is limited by its fear of the proletariat, especially the spectre of another Tiananmen. Fuxin, which is northwest of Shenyang, in the northeast, by late 2000 had produced 530 million tons of coal. That's enough to fill trucks with 60 tons each and line them up end to end until they encircled the Earth 4.3 times! On January 31, 2003, Wen Jiabao spent the Chinese New Year's Eve together with miners 720 meters underground. He had a very good reason. Official statistics claim that 200,000 of the Fuxin Mining Bureau's 400,000 miners have been laid off. One article points out: "In the workers' way of thinking, there is one bond that may not be broken: China's mining resources belong to the state, and ‘the working class is the master of the state and the master of industry,' so why is it that in actual experience the ‘masters'' jobs can be bought off one by one in exchange for a paltry ‘subsistence provision'?"
This goes to the heart of the contradictions of the Chinese deformed workers state. The following examples show that a section of the working class sees the necessity of defending collectivized property, they understand that capitalism has not yet been restored, but their political consciousness has real limitations and contradictions.
In another interesting article, entitled "Industrial Restructuring and Workers' Resistance in China," Feng Chen (of Hong Kong Baptist University) describes how workers in the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have different perceptions of property rights than workers in private enterprises. The latter primarily strike for wages and the conditions of their labor, whereas some SOE workers are concerned over the question of forms of property and corresponding property relations when their factory is "restructured" (privatized). Feng says that in some factories there was an open challenge to the transition to capitalist property relations.
One method of obstructing privatization involves occupying the factory. For example, when workers at a plastics factory in Shanghai heard that their factory was being forced to merge with another one (with the implication of layoffs), they blocked all the entrances to the factory and refused the party secretary entry. The workers justified their occupation of the factory as defending public property to which they had legitimate rights. If these protests were organized, they could spark a conflagration of struggle.
Feng says, "This form of action can be traced back to the tradition of working-class struggle in the final years of the Chinese Revolution. As some workers proudly described it, their action of defending the factory was similar to that of their predecessors on the eve of the communist takeover in 1949, when pro-communist workers formed ‘worker guard teams' (gongren jiuchadui) to protect factories from sabotage by the Guomindang" (interview, January 2000).
In some cases, workers' protests against restructuring eventually brought the disputes to workers and staff councils (WSC). While these WSCs are, according to law, meant to scrutinize management, they are actually for the most part powerless because the trade unions—which the WSCs are based on—are powerless on the shop floor. While workers are pretty cynical about the WSCs, there are cases where they have become a critical arena for contesting restructuring.
At the SL Company, the WSC held a company referendum and the privatizing scheme was rejected by 80 percent of the workers and staffers. According to the workers there, this was the first time in the factory's history that they had voted to decide something important to their interests.
Workers from Changjiang Sugar Factory in July of 1999 argued in their petition letter to the provincial trade union: "How to restructure the form of property should be democratically determined by workers. The county government cannot unilaterally decide it.... Workers are the master of the enterprise and the main body (zhuti) of reform. Restructuring without consulting the workers' and staff council and selling the factory without informing workers are serious violations of workers' democratic rights. We demand to get back our democratic rights."
This is a powerful example that workers are not prepared to raise the white flag concerning collectivized property. They have an answer to the question "democracy for what class?": Democracy for the workers to fight in defense of collectivized property. An important political limitation is that they need to defend the collectivized property of the workers state in general, not just of their factory. They need to understand that they are part of the international proletariat. This underscores the necessity of a Leninist party to bring this consciousness into the proletariat.
An important misconception that I'd like to deal with is that maximizing productivity and egalitarianism are counterposed in a workers state. This view contends that only the market can discipline managers and workers in order to maximize production and that egalitarianism is only possible through a command- planned economy. The false political framework of this narrow view is that the only political form of a workers state is the political monopoly of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The only thing the neo-Maoists within the bureaucracy can offer is a command-planned economy. Its limitations are that the workers, technical intelligentsia and managers don't identify themselves with the government that issues the plan, which leads to ignoring and subverting the plan at its base. Thus there is an inherent tendency for Stalinist regimes to replace centralized planning and management with market mechanisms in order to discipline the workers and managers. Trotsky, commenting in The Revolution Betrayed on the command-planned economy under Stalin, stated that "The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative—conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery." Workers democracy is key to bridging the tasks of maximizing productivity and egalitarianism within a workers state. This necessitates a revolutionary proletarian party.
Workers of the World, Unite!
I have clarified that China is a bureaucratically deformed workers state because the core of the economy is collectivized property, and that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a privileged caste with a contradictory nature, not a class; it can't be reformed. Reinstituting the "iron rice bowl" with the bureaucracy still grasping political power will not resolve the main problem: the bureaucracy is opposed to the workers mobilized in their own, revolutionary internationalist interests. Its policies, based on building "socialism in one country," undermine the defense of the workers state. The bureaucracy must be removed by the workers.
The examples I gave clearly show that the program of proletarian political revolution, based on unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state and the establishment of genuine workers democracy, is no pipe dream for Chinese workers. Building a revolutionary internationalist, Leninist-Trotskyist party is necessary to make it a reality. This is the most fundamental historic task of the Chinese proletariat. For such a party, a political revolution establishing a workers democracy and instituting a centralized planned economy with a strict monopoly of foreign trade is part of the program of international proletarian revolution. Workers in the SOEs must tie their struggle to the struggle of workers in private enterprises—to expropriate those enterprises—to migrant workers, to the poor peasants, to women, and to oppressed minorities. The party must be a tribune of all the people. Nationalism is false consciousness.
It is critical to understand that the Japanese proletariat can be an ally of the Chinese proletariat. There is a history of the Japanese proletariat's opposition to Japanese imperialism's aggression against China. In 1927 the Japanese Communist Party called for unconditional withdrawal of Japanese troops from Manchuria and for the right to strike and organize of Chinese, Korean and Japanese workers. In 2001, the Sasebo dock workers refused to load a ship with arms bound for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Workers of the world can unite. The ICL fights to reforge Trotsky's Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution.
The Chinese "New Left" is rife with contradictions. Most defend the inviolability of private property in principle, but they don't like the "down side" of the market. In particular, they understand that if the land is privatized the poor peasants will be ruined. The Chinese "New Left" seeks the impossible: capitalism with a human face. Only the proletariat supported by the poor peasants can defend the nationalized land. Besides, China won't be modernized through capitalism. Capitalist China will look like a mix of the warlordism following the first Chinese Revolution in 1911 and post-counterrevolution Russia today.
The question of "democracy" cannot be separated from the class nature of the state. For example, the fake-Trotskyist affiliate of the United Secretariat in Hong Kong, Pioneer, blazoned in the headline of its New Year's Day 2004 statement in support of the protest that day: "For General Elections Through Universal Franchise and Free Nominations!" This call is virtually identical to the demand issued by U.S. imperialism's representative in Hong Kong the month before. The first order of business in Hong Kong is the expropriation of the bourgeoisie there. These calls for "democracy" with no intention of defending collectivized property on the mainland are a cover for not-so-"democratic" counterrevolution.
For all those who call China capitalist, here's a short anecdote from a novel by Ha Jin, The Crazed. During the Tiananmen protests a reactionary shouted to the workers: "Don't be slaves anymore!" A locksmith responded: "How dare you call me a slave." Chinese workers are not prepared to surrender; they are not slaves. They want to fight to defend collectivized property. They can be the masters of their state, but they need leadership.
To finish, I wanted to make a few points about the ICL's intervention into the incipient proletarian political revolution in East Germany in 1989-90. The tasks of the international proletariat are immense. Our intervention showed that it is possible when there's a small crack, during a revolutionary situation, like the two weeks it took to enforce martial law at Tiananmen, for a revolutionary program to have tremendous impact. Workers came to us and asked, how do we form workers soviets? Enough East German workers considered what the ICL was fighting for, that when the fascists desecrated the Treptow Soviet war memorial the ruling Stalinist government felt compelled to join a united-front protest we initiated against the fascists and in defense of the deformed workers state. A quarter of a million workers participated. For the first time ever in a deformed workers state, Trotskyists shared a platform with the Stalinists. We were fighting to become the revolutionary leadership. From the platform, our speaker called for "Workers and soldiers soviets to power!"
This was the best defense against capitalist counterrevolution. Two programs were competing: ours, of proletarian political revolution, and the Stalinist program of capitulation and counterrevolution. The Treptow mobilization frightened the powers that be, both East and West, and our forces were too small. We lost. The lessons of that struggle and of Tiananmen must be assimilated by the international proletariat. The key question is not how to modernize China, but how to establish an international soviet system that can resolve the problem of scarcity in the world.