Expropriate the Hong Kong Capitalists!

Chris Patten’s Cuckoo’s Egg Hatches

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 825, 30 April 2004.

In a blow against Hong Kong’s imperialist-backed “democracy” movement, the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) declared on April 6 that any move toward “free elections” in that city would first have to meet with Beijing’s approval. In response, some 20,000 marched in Hong Kong on April 11, the most recent in a series of protests against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime and its local executive.

Last December, the U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong, James Keith, issued a call for “universal suffrage” and for a debate on “constitutional change” in a clear attempt to weaken Beijing’s hold over the city just seven years after its rightful return to China following 150-plus years of British colonial rule. For maximum impact, Keith issued this demand as talks were being held in Washington between Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and George W. Bush. On January 1, some 100,000 marched in a demonstration led chiefly by Hong Kong’s anti-Communist, pro-Western Democratic Party under the banner of—you guessed it—“universal suffrage” and the right to choose their own chief executive (currently appointed by Beijing). On March 4, the founding chairman of the Democratic Party, Martin Lee, arrived in Washington for briefings with the U.S. Senate and Secretary of State Colin Powell. No curtains necessary for the American imperialist puppet-masters.

Ever since the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the U.S. has had one and only one aim toward the People’s Republic—to reverse the expropriation of the imperialists and their Chinese comprador-bourgeois and landlord lackeys. That expropriation is now jeopardized by the policies of the bureaucratic caste that has ruled over the Chinese deformed workers state since Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with his Guomindang army remnants. In pursuit of capitalist restoration on the Chinese mainland, the U.S. imperialists have maintained Taiwan as a well-armed camp, recently giving billions to the regime there as part of building a “theater missile defense” directed against China. During the 1950-53 Korean War, the U.S. hoped to cross the Yalu River into China, an aspiration happily quashed by the intervention of up to two million Chinese troops. In Hong Kong today, the U.S. seeks to reinforce the position of the city’s wealthy financiers and other businessmen and to encourage a counterrevolutionary “democracy” movement spreading to the mainland.

The International Communist League stands opposed to this campaign, however gussied up in the trappings of “universal suffrage” and “free elections,” as an elementary defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialist-sponsored capitalist counterrevolution. A glimpse of what awaits China’s toiling masses if the 1949 Revolution were to be overturned can be seen today in East Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, where most find their very ability to survive in question and where such “democracy” as exists is solely for the newly minted capitalist class, which is rather sleazy even by robber baron standards. The turnover of Hong Kong to China took place under the rubric of Deng Xiaoping’s “one country, two systems” formula, which guaranteed bourgeois property rights in Hong Kong. Leading up to the handover, Britain’s final colonial governor, Chris Patten, added a few “democratic” trappings to the draconian British regime and actively promoted the formation of the Democratic Party, while Beijing agreed to uphold autonomy for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) for the foreseeable future.

The ICL joined in cheering as the last major colonial holding of the rotted British Empire reverted to China. But we warned that with the venal Stalinist bureaucracy’s pledge to maintain Hong Kong’s capitalist system, the takeover “is a dagger aimed at the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution” (WV No. 671, 11 July 1997).

Indeed, since 1997 Hong Kong’s capitalists have increasingly concentrated industrial investment on the mainland, as have investors from Taiwan, taking advantage of cheaper labor costs to operate thousands of sweatshop-grade factories. The main section of Hong Kong’s bourgeoisie, primarily represented by the Liberal Party, opted to collaborate with Beijing. As we stated in response to last summer’s “democracy” protests (WV No. 814, 21 November 2003): “As part of our struggle to defend and extend the gains of the 1949 Revolution, we call for the expropriation of the Hong Kong bourgeoisie, including their holdings on the Chinese mainland. But to carry out this task poses the need to sweep away the Beijing bureaucracy, which by its policies is undermining the defense of the Chinese workers state, through workers political revolution.”

Who Will Prevail?

Deng’s unhappy foray into theory set only one condition for the hybrid union of capitalist Hong Kong with the PRC: “that patriots form the main body of administrators, that is, of the future government of the Hong Kong special region” (“One Country, Two Systems,” 22-23 June 1984). A patriot, according to Deng, “is one who respects the Chinese nation, sincerely supports the motherland’s resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong and wishes not to impair Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability. Those who meet these requirements are patriots, whether they believe in capitalism or feudalism or even slavery.” Louis XVI and Robespierre, Abe Lincoln and Jefferson Davis—happily together at last.

For Deng and his epigones, the peaceful coexistence of counterposed social classes poses no problems. Such illusions were not entertained by Patten and his Anglo-American masters. Last summer the cuckoo’s egg Patten laid in the nest of the Chinese deformed workers state began to stir. In response to the CCP-sponsored Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law—legislation that would have allowed Hong Kong’s chief executive to more easily suppress putatively seditious groups—Patten’s Democratic Party and the Hong Kong branch of the Roman Catholic church led hundreds of thousands in protest.

The ICL opposed Article 23, recognizing that it would be used a hundred times against militant workers, the unemployed and leftists before being used once against counterrevolutionaries. At the same time, it was not difficult for us, given the effusive support by the British and American imperialists for the demonstrations, to recognize these demos as serving the purpose of establishing Hong Kong as a bastion of counterrevolution in China. In the face of the protests, the CCP quietly withdrew Article 23 from consideration, supposedly to be reconsidered at a later date. The Democratic Party went on to make substantial gains in December’s district council elections, routing the pro-Beijing allies of the current Hong Kong chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa.

Recently, however, Beijing has questioned the “patriotism” of those involved in the demonstrations. This has unnerved not a few in that city’s middle and upper classes who are well aware that, in the final analysis, the state power in Hong Kong is the People’s Liberation Army, period. In the unlikely event that the CCP, to shore up its bureaucratic caste dominance, felt obliged to quash the counterrevolutionary political parties in Hong Kong, we would defend such action against the inevitable imperialist hue and cry.

But the Beijing bureaucracy’s preservation of Hong Kong as a capitalist enclave within the PRC is in keeping with its 25-year-long policy of opening whole areas of China to investment by the offshore Chinese bourgeoisie and by the U.S., Japanese and European imperialists, while maintaining state-controlled production in large-scale industry. Mao’s CCP bureaucracy, which spawned today’s leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, subscribed to the Stalinist pipe dream that China was “building socialism”—a classless society based on material abundance—with its own unaided efforts. The present CCP leaders believe that they can modernize China, transforming it into the world’s next superpower, through ever greater integration into the world capitalist economy.

The proliferation of capitalist market forces, within the framework of the Chinese workers state, bears resemblance to Soviet Russia under the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP, launched in 1921, was a series of concessions to market forces, including letting peasants market some of their produce, encouraging small-scale private industry and allowing a certain leeway for foreign investment. By such measures, the Bolshevik regime of V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky sought to restart the economy that had been devastated over the years of World War I and the Civil War that followed the 1917 October Revolution. For Lenin and Trotsky, the NEP was intended as a temporary retreat. Severe restrictions were placed on the hiring and acquisition of land; crucially Lenin emphasized the need to maintain the state monopoly on foreign trade.

In Whither Russia? (1925), Trotsky analyzed the contradictions produced by the NEP under the conditions of a world economy dominated by advanced capitalist countries. Trotsky noted that these contradictions “constitute a struggle between two mutually exclusive systems—socialism and capitalism.” He pointedly cited Lenin’s formulation of the problem at the onset of the NEP: “Who beats whom?” Trotsky stressed that the outcome depended not only on the rate of growth of the Soviet economy, but on two other factors: the relative strength of the capitalist and socialist sectors of the Soviet economy, and the relative growth of the Soviet economy compared to that of the capitalist world economy.

By January 1924 political power had been usurped from the Bolshevik vanguard by an emerging bureaucratic caste. In late 1924 Stalin proclaimed the possibility of “building socialism in one country.” Initially developed as a rationale for economic autarky, this anti-Marxist dogma later served as the bureaucracy’s ideological justification for forfeiting the cause of proletarian revolution internationally in a futile effort to appease world imperialism. Coming to the fore as a leading theoretician for Stalin, Bukharin argued to “build socialism even on a pauper technical basis” and made greater concessions to the wealthy peasants (kulaks) and private traders (NEPmen). These forces threatened to strangle the young Soviet workers state. With the kulaks withholding grain from the market and the country driven to the brink of disaster, Stalin broke with Bukharin in 1928 and implemented—albeit with adventurist and brutal methods—key policies advocated by Trotsky’s Left Opposition, including the collectivization of agriculture and greatly speeding up the tempo of industrialization.

While Stalin’s about-face staved off the immediate threat of capitalist counterrevolution, Stalin and his heirs rejected the Bolshevik understanding that a successful resolution to Lenin’s question of “who beats whom” could ultimately only be realized on a world scale. Even as the NEP was instituted domestically, the Soviet regime of Lenin and Trotsky fought for the international extension of the revolution and the overthrow of imperialism worldwide, the prerequisite to building an international planned economy and establishing a socialist society of plenty. The nationalist betrayals by the Soviet bureaucracy under Stalin and his heirs ultimately led to the final undoing of the October Revolution in 1991-92.

Stalinist Gravediggers of Revolution

Beijing’s “market reforms,” which can be described as the NEP run amok, have greatly encouraged not only the offshore Chinese bourgeoisie and imperialists but domestic capitalist-restorationist forces as well. There is only one social force in China with the unmitigated interest to defeat these forces and expropriate the offshore bourgeoisie’s holdings: the proletariat, sections of which, unlike its counterparts in East Europe and the USSR prior to counterrevolution, have already experienced the depredations of capitalist exploitation and attacks on state property. Fearful of the combative proletariat, the CCP regime dares not offer a glimmer of the political openness that accompanied the final demise of Gorbachev’s Moscow Stalinist regime.

It is the Chinese working class that during the 1989 Tiananmen uprising displayed the awareness that bureaucratic caste rule was undermining the gains of the 1949 Revolution and that has the coherent social power to sweep away the CCP bureaucracy through proletarian political revolution. Such a revolution would have enormous effects throughout the region. It could evoke a working-class socialist overturn in Taiwan and encourage the proletariat of Japan, Asia’s industrial powerhouse, and South Korea to overthrow their capitalist rulers. It would invigorate the worker and peasant masses of Vietnam and North Korea to cast off the Stalinist bureaucratic castes there. It would encourage as well the impoverished masses of the former Soviet Union to enter the road of proletarian revolution against their new capitalist rulers. The impact of a proletarian political revolution in the most populous country on earth would be worldwide, for example in South Africa, where smashing apartheid and instituting bourgeois “democracy” has manifestly not satisfied the aspirations of the masses.

The Chinese working class, before and since the Tiananmen upheaval, has engaged in thousands of local and regional strikes—in recent years, to the point of virtual insurrection against individual exploiters or the CCP betrayers. But without revolutionary leadership, that is, lacking a party based on the Leninist-Trotskyist program, the working class will not find the road to consummating proletarian political revolution. Unlike the social revolutions needed to overthrow the rule of the capitalist class in the U.S., Japan, etc. and institute a nationalized, planned economy, proletarian political revolution in China would be based on defense of nationalized property. The task of such a revolution would be to dismantle the bureaucratic CCP state apparatus and replace it with organs of proletarian class rule, that is, soviets (councils) of workers and peasants such as those that formed the basis of proletarian state power in the 1917 Bolshevik-led social revolution in Russia.

The Chinese working class must be broken from the nationalism preached by the CCP, becoming a rallying point for international proletarian revolution in the advanced countries. This is the only solution to the backwardness of their country which is starkly revealed by the overwhelming weight and wretchedness of peasant China. It is the rejection of such internationalism that links the leadership of Mao Zedong and his protégés to that of Deng Xiaoping and his followers.

Mao set the utopian goal of China going it alone without the vitally necessary access to advanced technique and methods that could be provided by socialist revolution in an advanced society. Mao’s anti-internationalism eventually led him to side with the imperialists in their efforts to undermine the USSR. The current CCP leadership, following in Deng’s wake, looks to the imperialist entrepreneurs and the reactionary offshore Chinese capitalists as the answer to China’s backwardness—i.e., to those who would bury the 1949 Revolution—rather than to the class allies of the Chinese working class throughout the world, while continuing Mao’s policy of consorting with the imperialists. To defend the gains of 1949, it is urgently necessary to assemble the cadres committed to building the revolutionary party of the Chinese working class as a section of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International.

“Left” Apostles of Social Counterrevolution

This necessity of cohering a genuine Trotskyist nucleus is underscored by the fact that the self-described Trotskyists in Hong Kong march under the banner of bourgeois democracy, gilding the counterrevolutionary mobilizations in that city with the fool’s gold of “self-determination” and people’s “democracy.” This is not surprising given that these groups, October Review and Pioneer, are supporters of the fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat, which hailed Polish Solidarność, the company union of Wall Street and the Vatican, as it led the first of the capitalist counterrevolutions in East Europe. The United Secretariat went on to cheer the overturn of the October Revolution led by Yeltsin and George Bush Sr.

On the very eve of Hong Kong’s return to China, October Review (30 June 1997) offered the following: “We propose that the focal theme for the fights for political and economic rights can revolve around the demand for a democratic election of a Hong Kong People’s Congress which makes major decisions relating to self-rule of Hong Kong by the people. In this struggle for political and social rights, the people of Hong Kong are now much more linked to the people of the mainland.” That this statement amounted to a call for Hong Kong to act as a “democratic” spearhead for counterrevolution on the mainland was made clear by the fact that it made no mention of defense of the gains of the 1949 Revolution. Nor did it so much as mention the Hong Kong proletariat, doubtless because those workers are organized mostly in a trade-union federation linked to the Democratic Association for the Betterment of Hong Kong, which politically supports the CCP central government in Beijing.

Somewhat slicker, the Pioneer group (formerly New Sprouts Society) allows that a struggle under the bourgeois slogans of democracy and freedom could “only create conditions prevalent in today’s Russia and East Europe” and that “The collapse of the Soviet workers states is objectively certainly a great defeat for the working class.” But this is just so much cynicism, as Pioneer simultaneously claims that since the workers of the former Soviet bloc had been subjected to reactionary bureaucratic rule, the collapse of the Communist Party governments was “not a direct defeat of the working class: the worker masses do not feel that they have been defeated, and as a result do not suffer from deep depression and pessimism. On the contrary they feel on some level that it is the beginning of liberation” (“Fight for People’s Socialism,” resolution passed at the 1993 New Sprouts Society conference).

While Pioneer likes to put forward a “proletarian” face by lacing its statements with elementary economic demands, such as a minimum wage, and calls to “tax the corporations,” it brazenly supports the anti-Communist protests in Hong Kong. In a New Year’s Day 2004 statement, Pioneer proclaims: “The Great July First Demonstration and the defeat of the Loyalists in the District Council Elections have expanded the people’s aspirations and destroyed the prestige of the SAR government.” Leaving no doubt as to what piper calls its tune, Pioneer blazoned in the headline of its statement: “For General Elections Through Universal Franchise and Free Nominations!”—a call virtually identical to the demand issued by U.S. imperialism’s representative in Hong Kong the month before.

For all the hemming and hawing about the pluses and minuses of the workers states under bureaucratic caste rule, Pioneer’s real message is that “democracy is a very urgent need in China and it would indeed be a gigantic step forward if bourgeois democracy is realized there” (“Fight for People’s Socialism”). But capitalist restoration in China would be a brutal process that would subject the masses to immense social dislocation, providing no basis for bourgeois democracy. In East Europe and Russia the only “liberation” experienced by the workers has been from the burden of living a too-long life, their now-earlier demise hastened by the joblessness, poor health care and hopelessness they face in the aftermath of capitalist counterrevolution.

In his 1918 polemic The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Lenin answered those who brandish bourgeois “democracy” in order to attack the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule, counterposing the proletarian democracy of workers soviets:

“[Kautsky] fails to see the class nature of the state apparatus, of the machinery of state. Under bourgeois democracy the capitalists, by thousands of tricks—which are the more artful and effective the more ‘pure’ democracy is developed—drive the people away from administrative work, from freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc. The Soviet government is the first in the world (or strictly speaking, the second, because the Paris Commune began to do the same thing) to enlist the people, specifically the exploited people, in the work of administration. The working people are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments (they never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks) by thousands of obstacles, and the workers know and feel, see and realise perfectly well that the bourgeois parliaments are institutions alien to them, instruments for the oppression of the workers by the bourgeoisie, institutions of a hostile class, of the exploiting minority.

“The Soviets are the direct organisation of the working and exploited people themselves, which helps them to organise and administer their own state in every possible way.”

In embryo, the various workers organizations that arose in China during the Tiananmen upheaval, an incipient political revolution, displayed not a few of the characteristics described by Lenin. It was these groups that helped organize resistance to the declaration of martial law on 20 May 1989, forming a “workers picket corps” and “dare to die” teams to protect protesting students against repression. Workers groups began to take on responsibility for public safety after governmental authority in Beijing evaporated in the face of the mass protests and the police vanished from the streets. And it was the organized workers who prepared for the tasks of transporting food and other vital necessities, preparations cut short by the June 3-4 massacre. It was during the period immediately before the massacre and under the protection of the workers groups that the streets of Beijing were crowded with ordinary people arguing about politics, expressing their opinions on the way forward and appealing to troops sent to crush the protests. In short, during the Tiananmen upheaval it was the workers groups that, in deed, defended and oversaw this blossoming of freedom and prepared to take the functions of society in hand.

But even during these events, the workers groups on their own did not go beyond upholding “democracy” as freedom from bureaucratic constraint and not as the product of rule by workers soviets. Not infrequently, the workers looked to supposedly sympathetic elements of the bureaucracy for guidance. Moved to rebel by the bureaucracy’s attack on the “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed jobs, housing and other benefits, the workers did not arrive at the understanding that they needed to effect a proletarian political overturn to preserve and extend the gains of the 1949 Revolution.

What was crucially missing in China in 1989 was a revolutionary party—or even the nucleus of such a party—representing the interests of the proletariat, to provide the necessary leadership to the workers in struggle. Since that time, some of the workers leaders, notably Han Dongfang, have become advocates of a “democratization” in China such as was visited on the proletariat in the aftermath of the counterrevolution in East Europe and the USSR. The Chinese working class has demonstrated its valor and, if necessary, willingness to die to preserve the gains of the 1949 Revolution. But without a party committed to defending the existing gains of the working class—for example, the overturns of the capitalist order in Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea as well as China—without an international party committed to forging links between the Chinese working class and the powerful Japanese proletariat, without a party that is a tribune for all those wronged by the imperialists and by bureaucratic caste rule, it cannot triumph. It is only revolutionary Trotskyism that provides the program necessary to build such a party. And it is the International Communist League that has fought for that program against those who sing hymns of praise to bourgeois democracy and counterrevolution.