Defend China, North Korea! U.S. Hands Off the World!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 843, 4 March 2005.

China, North Korea, Syria, Iran...this is the short list of countries overtly threatened in the last few weeks by the nuclear-armed maniacs in Washington, while they continue their devastating occupation of Iraq. Although the U.S. can't come up with any proof that Syria is responsible for the bomb that killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, it vows Syria must be made to pay. Then there's Iran, rumored to be developing the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Unmanned spy drones have been flying over Iran for a year, and, thumbing his nose at anxiety in "old Europe," Bush vows that all options, including military, are possible. This saber rattling against Syria and Iran—neocolonial capitalist states—is part of redrawing the map of the Near East in Israeli and U.S. interests.

U.S. imperialism picks its targets carefully, and throws its overwhelming military might against states that can't defend themselves—such as Iraq. North Korea, which claims to have developed limited nuclear capacity, has not been attacked. We defend the right of the North Korean deformed workers state to have nuclear weapons. China is foolishly trying to get North Korea back to the six-nation talks which aim to disarm North Korea...thereby opening a flank for U.S. imperialism against the Chinese deformed workers state itself. China's heroic sacrifices stopped General MacArthur from grabbing the entire Korean peninsula and turning it into a neocolony of U.S. imperialism. Illusions of the Beijing Stalinists, that there can be "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism, can only undermine defense of China.

Pursuit of capitalist counterrevolution in China, whether through military pressure (as was used to economically bleed the Soviet Union in the arms race) or through economic penetration or both, is a prime goal of the U.S. bourgeoisie. Neocon Cold Warrior Irving Kristol speaks for his protégés in the White House and Pentagon, by saying, "Work for the fall of the Communist Party oligarchy." This is not a new Bush policy, but the resumption of a goal that was temporarily deflected by the September 11 attacks. That China signed on to the U.S. unlimited "war on terror" has only emboldened Washington. As a result of capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a renewed U.S. military presence in the Philippines and expanded nuclear presence in Guam, China is now squeezed in a dangerous military vise.

The United States and Japan issued a significant joint policy statement on 19 February avowing that Taiwan is "a mutual security concern." This comes fast on the heels of the U.S. enlisting Japan and Australia to deploy its over-hyped antiballistic missile (ABM) shield against China (see "Japanese Trotskyists Say: Down With Japanese Provocations Against China, North Korea!" WV No. 842, 18 February). Although arrayed against North Korea, the main ABM target is China's missile force. Ever since the victory of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, Taiwan has been an outpost for U.S. imperialism's counterrevolutionary schemes and interference in Chinese internal affairs through the Chinese bourgeoisie on the island. During the Korean War, MacArthur described Taiwan as the U.S.'s "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the Western Pacific.

We fight for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution, as we do for the other remaining workers states—North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. Taiwan is part of China, and we Trotskyists will stand with China in the event of any military conflict with U.S. imperialism over Taiwan. We do not minimize the danger posed to the Chinese deformed workers state by the growing social weight of the Taiwan and Hong Kong capitalists, some of whom have family ties to top Chinese government officials. Nor do we deny the danger of the newly fledged entrepreneurs on the mainland. Nonetheless, the core of China's economy remains the collectivized state industry, and the economic policies of the ruling bureaucracy are constrained by fear of popular and working-class unrest that could topple it. We advance a program for the revolutionary reunification of China, which would require a proletarian socialist revolution in Taiwan, the expropriation of the Hong Kong capitalists, and a workers political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing.

Sooner or later, the explosive social tensions within Chinese society will shatter the bureaucracy. Then the fate of the most populous country on earth will be starkly posed: proletarian political revolution to open the road to socialism or capitalist enslavement and imperialist subjugation. Working people all over the world have a stake in this struggle. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and across East Europe created a "unipolar" world of unbridled military aggression by U.S. imperialism abroad, coupled with more savage attacks on workers, women, minorities and immigrants. So too would destruction of the Chinese deformed workers state be a terrible global defeat. The fate of China and the fate of workers the world over are inextricably linked, economically and politically.

The unchallenged global military hegemony of the U.S. stands in sharp contradiction to its declining economic base. The tendency of the Bush administration and correspondingly wide sections of the American ruling class to view the world through the apocalyptic theological lens of Armageddon has its roots in this objective contradiction. Having presided over the deindustrialization of the country and driven by the pursuit of greater profit margins exacted from the labor of workers abroad, the American capitalist class cannot now easily reverse its industrial decline. This is the material basis for the rabid behavior of the Bush administration. Its outlook brings to mind the siege mentality of the Afrikaners in South Africa, the Ulster Protestants in Northern Ireland and the Zionists in the Near East.

After World War II, when the U.S. emerged on top among capitalist imperialist powers, it took the lion's share of the plunder and placed the world on dollar rations. Particularly after 1971, when President Nixon announced the U.S. would go off the gold standard, the rest of the world was pressured to hold reserves in U.S. paper currency, worth nothing except for belief in the almighty U.S.A. But now the U.S. is the biggest debtor nation, and with its huge balance of trade deficit, foreign competitors are compelled to hold U.S. reserves, for fear that a collapse of the American economy would seal off imports and thus plunge their own economies into collapse.

"The Dollar's Crisis & Ours," a perceptive article by Loren Goldner (Against the Current, January/February 2005), keenly draws the connection between the decay of American capitalism and the nuclear brinksmanship of the faith-based Bush administration:

"The American capitalists understand that their decline requires keeping not only all potential rivals, but American working people themselves, permanently off balance. Everything will be done to make the consequences of decades of American decline appear instead as the work of terrorists, or China, or (as in the unbelievable French-bashing in the run-up to the Iraq war) even of Europe."

That capitalism has outlived its usefulness is a terrible understatement. Fulfilling basic human needs such as health care, education, jobs, requires ripping power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and rebuilding society on the basis of a global collectivized planned economy, socialist egalitarianism and working-class rule. The terrible impact of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union has hurled the consciousness of workers back, such that few now identify their struggles with the ideals of socialism. This is the reality we confront, and, though our task to build a party of the Bolshevik type to lead struggles ahead is surely harder, it is no less urgent.