Down With U.S./Japan Counterrevolutionary Alliance!

Defend the Chinese and North Korean Deformed Workers States!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 844, 18 March 2005.

Japan and the United States issued a significant joint policy statement on 19 February avowing that Taiwan is "a mutual security concern." This is another ominous move by Tokyo and Washington to strengthen their security agreements and reposition their military forces, including placing antiballistic missile systems (ABM) in the region. These are dangerous provocations against the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states.

The Spartacist League/U.S. and the Spartacist Group Japan, sections of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), stand for the unconditional military defense of China and North Korea—as we do for the other remaining deformed workers states, Vietnam and Cuba—against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution. This includes the right of China and North Korea to possess and test their nuclear arsenals as part of maintaining a necessary deterrent against imperialist nuclear blackmail. China has been criminally trying to get North Korea back to the six-party talks that aim to disarm North Korea. The illusion of the Beijing Stalinists that there can be "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism only undermines China's own defense.

The U.S. and Japan will not hesitate to crush any challenge in their drive to exploit the working masses of the region. Both Korea and Taiwan (Formosa) were colonized by Japan around the turn of the 20th century through the end of World War II. In 1937, Japanese imperialism was responsible for the Rape of Nanjing and during the war it enslaved the ianfu (comfort women). In 1945, the U.S. became the only power ever to use atomic weaponry, causing the death of several hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings served as a warning to the Soviet degenerated workers state. During the Korean War in the early 1950s, U.S. imperialism was responsible for the death of some three million Koreans. China's heroic sacrifices defended the North Korean deformed workers state, stopping "United Nations" forces led by General Douglas MacArthur from grabbing the entire Korean peninsula and turning it into a neocolony of the U.S. During the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, more than three million Vietnamese were murdered by U.S. imperialism's losing attempt to smash the social revolution there. We fight to build revolutionary workers parties and a Leninist-Trotskyist international to lead the proletariat and oppressed in the overthrow of both rapacious imperialist powers. Reforge the Fourth International!

Following a war of conquest against China in 1895, Japan colonized Taiwan and later used it as a staging area for assaults on southern China, the Philippines and Southeast Asia during World War II. After the defeat of Japan, the Chinese nationalists were given Taiwan. The counterrevolutionary Nationalist Army and the Chinese bourgeoisie fled there after the victory of the People's Liberation Army in the Chinese civil war. Since the 1949 Chinese Revolution, from which the Chinese deformed workers state emerged, Taiwan has been an outpost for U.S. imperialism's counterrevolutionary schemes, military threats and interference in Chinese internal affairs through the puppet Chinese bourgeoisie. Taiwan has been since ancient times a part of China, and we Trotskyists will stand with China in the event of any military conflict with imperialism over Taiwan.

The overturn of capitalist property relations freed China from imperialist subjugation and resulted in the construction of a collectivized economy. Though deformed by the rule of a parasitic, nationalist Stalinist bureaucratic caste, this victory meant enormous social progress for workers, women and peasants, such as the right to a job, housing, education, childcare, social insurance and medical care. We do not minimize the danger posed to the Chinese deformed workers state by the capitalist economic penetration to which the Stalinist bureaucrats have opened the Chinese economy. However, the core of China's economy remains the collectivized state industries. We are opposed to the Stalinists' plan of reunification with Taiwan embodied in "one country, two systems." Instead, we advance a program for the revolutionary reunification of China, which requires a workers political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy on the mainland, a proletarian socialist revolution in Taiwan to overthrow and expropriate the bourgeoisie, and the expropriation of the Hong Kong capitalists.

The anti-Communist military alliance between Japan and the United States was, during the Cold War, directed primarily against the former Soviet Union. China's criminal alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union, begun under Mao Zedong in the early 1970s and continued under Deng Xiaoping, contributed to the eventual counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR in 1991-92. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and across East Europe created a "unipolar" world of unbridled military aggression by U.S. imperialism abroad, as seen today in the bloody occupation of Iraq. This has been coupled with more savage attacks on workers, women, minorities and immigrants in the imperialist centers and greater plundering of all the colonial and semicolonial countries. As in the Soviet Union, the destruction of the Chinese deformed workers state would lead to widespread impoverishment of the population as the imperialists scramble for the spoils. The fate of China and the fate of workers the world over are inextricably linked, economically and politically.

Sixty years ago, Japan and the U.S. fought a bitter interimperialist war. At this juncture, their imperialist rivalry is subordinate to their anti-China/North Korea alliance. Over the past decade, the Pentagon has strengthened its military deployment in the Pacific Rim region and, with its incursion into Afghanistan and Central Asia, has thus significantly strengthened its military vise around China. In signing on to the U.S.-led "war on terror," Beijing has only encouraged U.S. imperialism in its counterrevolutionary drive.

Japanese imperialism is determined to throw off the constraints of the "defeated nation" syndrome with which it emerged from World War II and to boost its military might. To accomplish this, the ruling class needs to impose a domestic policy of economic austerity, whip up nationalist poison and reinforce the oppressive apparatus needed for the maintenance of capitalist law and order. In the U.S., under the guise of the "war on terror," the rulers have further reinforced their arsenal of repression, union-busting and immiseration of the working class and oppressed. Revolutionary workers parties, leading the struggle against Japanese and U.S. imperialism, must necessarily have an internationalist program and perspective. Smash the counterrevolutionary U.S./Japan alliance through workers revolution on both sides of the Pacific!

13 March 2005