60th Anniversary of Chinese Revolution

Defend, Extend the Gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution!

For Unconditional Military Defence! For Workers Political Revolution!

The following is based on forums given by comrade Ralf Neuer in Melbourne and Sydney in October.

Sixty years ago China experienced a profound social revolution as the peasant-based People’s Liberation Army (PLA) led by Mao Zedong’s Communist Party (CCP) overthrew the imperialist-backed bourgeois-nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang (GMD). The victory of Mao’s PLA destroyed the Chinese capitalist state, smashed the rule of the Chinese bourgeoisie and landlords and ripped the country out of the clutches of the imperialist powers. The 1949 Chinese Revolution brought enormous social gains to China’s workers, peasants and especially deeply oppressed women, and further ignited anti-colonial and revolutionary struggles across Southeast Asia.

However, unlike the 1917 Russian Revolution, which was made by a class-conscious proletariat guided by the internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik party, the Chinese Revolution, based on the peasant masses, was shaped by the absence of the Chinese workers struggling for power in their own right. Thus the People’s Republic of China was from its inception a bureaucratically deformed workers state with a nationalist petty-bourgeois bureaucratic caste resting atop the proletarian property forms issuing from the revolution. The CCP established a regime patterned on the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union which had usurped political power from the Soviet proletariat in a political counterrevolution beginning in 1923-24.

Against opponents of revolutionary Marxism such as the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), who argue that China has become capitalist, or others such as Socialist Alternative (SAlt) or Solidarity, who assert that China never ceased to be capitalist, we in the International Communist League (ICL) argue that despite decades of “market reforms” and the development of a sizable class of capitalist entrepreneurs (many of them former government functionaries and their children), the core of the Chinese economy continues to be based on collectivised property forms. State-owned enterprises remain dominant in strategic industrial sectors such as steel, nonferrous metals, heavy machinery, shipbuilding, telecommunications, electric power, oil extraction and refining. The nationalisation of the land has prevented the emergence of a class of agrarian capitalists socially dominating the countryside. The state that issued out of the 1949 Revolution has not been overthrown and replaced by armed bodies of men committed to the private ownership of the means of production.

In contrast, the DSP argue that China gradually became capitalist as a result of incremental privatisations and administrative measures by the bureaucracy. This constitutes a fundamental revision of the Marxist view of the state. It complements the reformist myth that the capitalist state, such as exists in Australia, could transform itself into a workers state by gradual nationalisations and parliamentary acts. Such “analysis” not only eradicates the need for workers revolution but also the necessity for a Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead that struggle. It is nothing but a cover for capitulating to the Australian ruling class and its drive to smash the Chinese deformed workers state.

That China is not capitalist can be seen in the context of today’s world capitalist economic crisis. The dominant weight of China’s state-owned enterprises and banks has prevented it from being dragged into the spiraling economic crisis that has ravaged most capitalist countries. Ongoing control over the financial system has enabled the Beijing regime to shield China from speculative money-capital, which often causes havoc in neocolonial countries. However, China is by no means totally insulated from the destructive irrationality of the world capitalist market. Over 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs since the onset of the world economic crisis, mainly from factories owned by foreign and offshore Chinese capitalists who produce for export.

In contrast to the stimulus programs designed to bail out the bosses in many capitalist countries, China’s stimulus program is centred on investment in infrastructure by state-owned enterprises and government bodies, and expanding loans by state-controlled banks has offset the massive decline in export earnings. While almost all capitalist economies have been shrinking, China’s rate of growth is about eight percent.

Indeed a comparison between China and India since 1949 shows the immense advantage of an economy whose motor force is not production for private profit. At the time at which capitalist India gained national independence shortly before the Chinese Revolution it was on a par with China both economically and in terms of human misery. Today, India’s per capita gross domestic product is only half that of China, while China’s poverty rate is half that of India. The malnutrition rate of children in China is one quarter that of India. In China, almost 90 percent of women are literate, roughly twice that of India.

To the extent that the CCP regime has opened up sections of the country to capitalist investment, it has acted as a labour contractor for the imperialists and offshore Chinese capitalists. But this does not equate to the rule of capital. As was the case in the former Soviet Union, the decisive arena in which a capitalist counterrevolution would have to triumph is at the political level, in the conquest of state power. The imperialists understand this very well. Seeking to reimpose unbridled capitalist exploitation, the imperialists aim to promote an anti-Communist political opposition tied to domestic and foreign capital. This is why they are constantly harping about “political liberalisation” and pushing China to open up its banking sector and privatise the core of its state-owned industry. It is also why they back reactionary religious-based movements, led by the likes of the Tibetan Dalai Lama, and promote the rabidly nationalist World Uighur Congress leader Rebiya Kadeer. As part of our defence of China we stood opposed to the counterrevolutionary riots in Tibet last year and have written a fine article on the communalist outbreak in Xinjiang earlier this year (see Workers Vanguard No. 941, 28 August).

Ever since the revolution the imperialists’ strategic aim has been to return China to the subjugation, exploitation and misery that existed prior to 1949. This they hope to achieve through a combination of economic penetration and military pressure. For their part the nationalist Chinese bureaucracy, seeking “peaceful coexistence,” are ever ready to collaborate with the imperialists. In recent years they have supported the U.S.-led “war on terror” under which banner the imperialists have occupied Iraq and Afghanistan while threatening one of China’s main oil suppliers, Iran. And the Beijing Stalinists have also helped orchestrate talks aimed at disarming North Korea. Any weakening of North Korea would weaken the defence of China.

Particularly since capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the U.S. imperialists, supported by their jackal Australian imperialist ally, have escalated military pressure against China. The imperialist powers have constructed a military chain extending from South Korea to the former Soviet lands of Central Asia. In 2005 the U.S. and Japan strengthened their security agreement issuing a joint policy statement avowing that Taiwan was “a mutual security concern.” Their backing of this brutal capitalist bastion, including placing anti-ballistic missile systems in the region, was an open provocation against China. In protest, our comrades in the U.S. and Japan produced a joint statement which demanded: “Down With U.S./Japan Counterrevolutionary Alliance! Defend the Chinese and North Korean Deformed Workers States!” (see Workers Vanguard No. 844, 18 March 2005). Likewise we denounced a subsequent 2007 Japan-Australia security agreement in the pages of Australasian Spartacist.

We stand opposed to demands pushed by the likes of the DSP upholding “independence” for capitalist Taiwan. Since ancient times Taiwan has been a part of China. We would stand with China in any military conflict with imperialist-backed Taiwan. Opposed to the Chinese government’s perspective to reunify with bourgeois Taiwan based on “one country, two systems,” we stand for the revolutionary reunification of China, based on workers political revolution on the mainland and a socialist revolution in Taiwan. Likewise we are for the expropriation of the Hong Kong capitalists.

Alongside their unequivocal support for the bloody U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Australian imperialists play an aggressive military role in Southeast Asia under the U.S. umbrella. This includes joint military exercises with the U.S., military agreements with blood-drenched capitalist regimes in Indonesia and the Philippines, and Australia’s own neocolonial military occupations of the Solomon Islands and East Timor. Earlier this year the Rudd Labor government released a Defence white paper which openly targets China while projecting the biggest build-up of the Australian military since World War II.

At the same time, increasing economic reliance on China tempers the imperialists’ anti-China military brinkmanship. This can be seen in the Australian government’s muted response to the arrest and imprisonment in China of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu on charges of bribery and obtaining commercial secrets. While there is strong nationalist prejudice against Chinese investment in Australia, the Australian bourgeoisie are somewhat divided over what measures are in their best interests. The chairman of BHP-Billiton, Don Argus, recently warned the Melbourne Mining Club against selling off “the farm.” Yet in September Queensland-based mining magnate, Clive Palmer, branded prejudicial treatment against Chinese investment in Australia as “racist,” which it undoubtedly is.

While the ALP government seeks to avoid jeopardising Australia’s booming trade with China it simultaneously foments racist nationalism while acting to militarise Australia’s north. This includes the police/military occupation of Aboriginal lands in the Northern Territory and the development of training grounds for the U.S. military. The U.S. satellite tracking device at Geraldton in Western Australia and other U.S. spy bases especially Pine Gap, which was first established as part of the military/spy network that targeted the former Soviet Union, are now part of a sophisticated network linked to facilities in Hawaii enabling U.S. military machinations in the Pacific and East Asia against China.

In fighting for a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia, we Trotskyists say: Down with the counterrevolutionary U.S./Australia alliance! U.S. bases out now! We call for Australian troops and cops to get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands and demand: Not one person, not one cent for the Australian imperialist military. A key aspect of our opposition to Australian imperialism is our unconditional military defence of the bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba—countries which have all overthrown capitalism through social revolutions—against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time we fight for proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies, whose bureaucratic mismanagement and appeasement of imperialism paves the way for capitalist counterrevolution. We in the ICL are committed to building internationalist Leninist-Trotskyist parties in order to lead the working class to victory on the road to world socialist revolution. On this 60th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution we say: Defend, extend the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution!

Permanent Revolution Vs. Menshevik Theory of Stages

The defining event of the last century, and indeed that of all human history so far, was the 1917 Russian Revolution—the first and so far only successful proletarian revolution, led by the Bolshevik party under V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The socialist revolution of October 1917 confirmed the correctness of Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution against the Mensheviks’ theory of “two-stage revolution,” which directed the workers to first fight for capitalist democracy and then some time in the future, i.e. never, there would be socialism. As 20th century history has proven repeatedly, the so-called “second stage” is in fact the massacre of the revolutionary masses.

In the theoretical debates leading up to 1917 the Mensheviks insisted that, in a country such as Russia, the proletariat could only be an appendage to the liberal bourgeoisie, which was supposedly striving to establish a democratic republic. Lenin, however, had fought to unite the workers and poor peasants in Russia against the liberal bourgeoisie by calling for the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” While irreconcilably opposed to the Mensheviks’ tailing of the bourgeoisie, Lenin accepted that the struggle for political freedom and the democratic republic in Russia was a necessary stage that would not undermine “the domination of the bourgeoisie” (Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, 1905). His algebraic formula was by no means terms for class peace but a battle plan for class war extending to the international arena. Lenin envisaged the destruction of the Tsarist regime would inspire European workers to take state power. They would in turn support the proletariat in Russia doing the same. But Lenin’s formula was inherently contradictory in that it projected a dictatorship of two classes with conflicting interests.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was distinct from those of both the Mensheviks and Lenin, but far closer to the latter. Like Lenin, Trotsky understood that the Russian liberal bourgeoisie had no revolutionary capacities, but in contradistinction to Lenin, Trotsky correctly argued that the peasants could not play the role of an independent partner, let alone leader, in the revolution. In sharp contrast to the Mensheviks, and drawing lessons from the 1905 revolutionary upheaval in Russia and studies by Marx and Engels, who in 1848-49 had raised the formulation “revolution in permanence,” Trotsky explained in his 1906 work Results and Prospects that in Tsarist Russia, which had the most concentrated industry in Europe surrounded by the most backward agriculture, the Russian workers could come to power without an extended “democratic” stage of capitalist class rule.

Trotsky explained that in Russia basic democratic rights, including national emancipation, could only be obtained through the dictatorship of the working class as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses. The only way to satisfy the longings of the poor peasants for land, was to break the power of the imperialists who were intertwined with the local capitalists and large landholders who made their lives a misery. Thus it was only the proletariat organised in the factories who could satisfy the demands of the peasants and oppressed masses through doing away with capitalist property relations and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. In carrying out the democratic tasks of the revolution, the proletarian state must inevitably make “despotic inroads into the rights of bourgeois property” and thus the revolution would directly pass over to the implementation of socialist tasks. It was based on this program that the so-called democratic revolution would then grow over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby become a permanent revolution. Conquest of power by the proletariat, Trotsky explained, did not complete the revolution but only opened it on an international scale because the completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable.

In April 1917, following the February Revolution that overthrew the Tsar, Lenin returned to Russia to wage a fight in the Bolshevik party against the then-leadership of Stalin and Kamenev who were misusing Lenin’s “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” slogan to conciliate the new capitalist Provisional Government and its war moves. Consigning those promulgating this slogan to the archive of “‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques” and threatening to split with those conciliating the Russian capitalists, Lenin, in his famous April Theses, argued that power must pass into the hands of the proletariat and poorest sections of the peasantry. Thus Lenin came over to the programmatic conclusions of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Soon after, Trotsky was won to Lenin’s insistence on the need for a complete break with opportunist groupings and the necessity for a vanguard party of professional revolutionists. Based on agreement on the decisive questions of the party and the class character of the revolution, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks led the Russian proletariat, leaning on the peasantry, to overthrow capitalist rule in October 1917, opening the road to world socialist revolution.

As proletarian internationalists, the Bolsheviks looked to successful socialist revolutions in the European industrial powerhouses, especially Germany, because they knew that the young Soviet Republic—in one of the most backward countries in Europe—could not survive long on its own. Revolutionary upheavals did follow all over Europe and beyond, but none of them resulted in the working class coming to power. By 1924 control in Soviet Russia had increasingly fallen to a conservative privileged bureaucracy as Stalin formally adopted and pushed the anti-Leninist policy of building “socialism in one country.” In economically backward Russia, this signalled the beginnings of a political counterrevolution, which had its material basis in the destruction of industry and the death of many of the most politically advanced workers during the civil war, combined with the defeat of revolutionary opportunities abroad, especially the 1923 German Revolution. The developing political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union was fought by supporters of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, many of whom were arrested and ultimately murdered by Stalin’s police.

Stalinist Menshevism Leads to Bloody Counterrevolution

The first Chinese Revolution took place in 1911. The Qing Dynasty was overthrown by a bourgeois-nationalist Republican movement. But the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution such as the national liberation and unification of China, agrarian reform or democratic rights for women to choose a husband or to own property could not be achieved. China’s native bourgeoisie was too weak, corrupt and dependent on imperialism, too connected to the rural landlords and too fearful of the working class and the peasant masses. The 1911 Revolution was carried out with the assistance of the imperialist powers and left China divided under the rule of the warlords and imperialists. The bourgeois-nationalist GMD was founded a year later.

By the end of World War I the Chinese proletariat had grown to 1.5 million including significant concentrations of women. China became a prime example of a country of combined and uneven development, similar to Russia before 1917 but even more economically backward and with a smaller proletariat. On the one hand there existed advanced industry in the expanding Chinese cities, while on the other the vast countryside remained a sea of feudal misery.

In 1919 China politically exploded with the May 4th Movement, a student-centred upheaval against the imperialist carve-up of China. The new and vibrant Chinese proletariat, inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, quickly began to make its presence felt. For example, workers mobilised in a nationwide general strike to back student protests against Western approval of Japanese imperialist spoils following the Versailles Conference. By this stage, disillusionment with Western capitalist “democracy” prompted important groups of intellectuals and students to look to the Soviet Union and communism for a solution to imperialist domination of China.

Out of this intellectual ferment and social upheaval, the CCP was formed in 1921 under the leadership of Chen Duxiu. Chen, a talented linguist, had broken with China’s traditional feudal-derived culture and became a Marxist who struggled to orient the party toward the working class. Li Ta-chao, another co-founder of the CCP, represented a different political tendency. Emphasising the nationalist, anti-imperialist aspect of the workers movement, Li developed a view that in China all classes had been turned into “proletarians” by imperialist superexploitation. By 1926 Li, whose views became increasingly race-based, projected an anti-imperialist socialist revolution based solely on the peasantry! Thus fundamental characteristics of Maoist peasant-based nationalism appeared in the CCP even before the defeat of the second Chinese Revolution in 1925-27 and the rise of Mao.

The Communist International (CI) directed the CCP to ally with and enter Chiang Kai-shek’s bourgeois nationalist GMD. Trotsky opposed entry into the GMD and voted accordingly in the Russian Politburo in 1923. The rise of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy and its politics of “socialism in one country” led to selling out revolutions abroad. In October 1926, in order to maintain the bloc with Chiang’s misnamed “Revolutionary Army,” Stalin ordered the CCP to call off a peasant revolt and forbade the formation of soviets (workers and peasants councils). Trotsky later remarked in The Permanent Revolution (1928):

“The official subordination of the Communist Party to the bourgeois leadership, and the official prohibition of forming soviets (Stalin and Bukharin taught that the Kuomintang ‘took the place of’ soviets) was a grosser and more glaring betrayal of Marxism than all the deeds of the Mensheviks in the years 1905-1917.”

To justify this class-collaborationist betrayal, Stalin lauded the GMD as a “workers and peasants party.” The bloc with Chiang Kai-shek left the Communists and their supporters politically and militarily disarmed. In April 1927, against criticisms of Trotsky’s Left Opposition and only a few days before Chiang Kai-shek was to stage a bloody counterrevolutionary coup against Chinese workers, Stalin defended him as a “reliable ally.” This prostration before Chiang resulted in the second Chinese Revolution being tragically drowned in blood as Chiang’s forces turned on the CCP and butchered the best of the Chinese proletariat in Shanghai. Under directions not to fight back, some 25,000 CCP members were slaughtered in 1927 alone.

Initially all five Central Committee members of the CCP opposed the entry into the GMD. But Stalin’s bureaucratic clique in the Soviet Union kept this opposition secret from Trotsky and his supporters. Nevertheless Trotsky did initiate a fight against Stalin’s policy, and unlike the CCP leaders, did not back down to Stalin and Bukharin (see “The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism” Spartacist No. 53, Summer 1997). In 1929 Trotsky summed up the defeat of the second Chinese Revolution:

“The Chinese Communist Party entered a bourgeois party, the Kuomintang, while the bourgeois character of this party was disguised by a charlatan philosophy about a ‘workers’ and peasants’ party’ and even about a party of ‘four classes’ (Stalin-Martynov). The proletariat was thus deprived of its own party at a most critical period.... The responsibility falls entirely on the ECCI and Stalin....

“Never and under no circumstances may the party of the proletariat enter into a party of another class or merge with it organizationally. An absolutely independent party of the proletariat is a first and decisive condition for communist politics.”

—“The Political Situation in China and the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition,” June 1929

As a result of the political fight around China, Trotsky confirmed there was no “anti-imperialist” wing of the bourgeoisie and generalised the theory of permanent revolution to countries of combined and uneven development. Trotsky’s later critique of Stalin and Bukharin’s “Draft Program” for the Communist International, including its section on China, are contained in his 1928 work The Third International After Lenin. This book not only armed the future cadres of American Trotskyism, but also Chen Duxiu and other communists in China who rejected Stalinism and founded the Trotskyist Communist League of China (CLC) on May Day 1931.

Mao Embraces Chiang Kai-shek … Again

A period of bourgeois terror and reaction followed the defeat of the second Chinese Revolution. The trade unions and other legal workers organisations were smashed or forced underground. Meanwhile the majority of the many-millioned poor peasantry continued to have almost no rights. Peasant women were so downtrodden that many were not even given names at birth.

The CCP turned away from the working class, shifting focus from the cities to the countryside, i.e., from the proletariat to the peasantry. Their perspective became one of mobilising the peasant masses to close in on the cities. This is borne out by CCP membership figures. In 1927, 58 percent of the ranks of the CCP were from the working class. In 1931, the figure amounted to less than one percent. By the early 1930s the CCP had become a peasant party with a declassed petty-bourgeois leadership.

In contrast, true to the theory of permanent revolution, the CLC remained in the cities, understanding that it was only the proletariat, leaning on the poor peasant masses, who could throw off the imperialist yoke, offer land to the tiller and win basic democratic rights through the expropriation of the capitalists and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship. Explaining this revolutionary perspective, Trotsky drove home the difference between the class position and training of the workers and the peasants. He wrote:

“The worker approaches questions from the socialist standpoint; the peasant’s viewpoint is petty bourgeois. The worker strives to socialize the property that is taken away from the exploiters; the peasant seeks to divide it up. The worker desires to put palaces and parks to common use; the peasant, in so far as he cannot divide them, inclines to burning the palaces and cutting down the parks. The worker strives to solve problems on a national scale and in accordance with a plan; the peasant, on the other hand, approaches all problems on a local scale and takes a hostile attitude to centralised planning, etc.”

—“Peasant War in China and the Proletariat,” September 1932

With the fall of its membership base in the cities, the CCP became increasingly stamped by their peasant environment and financially dependent on their rural supporters. This in turn made them reliant upon merchants and the wealthier sections of the peasantry, leading to the conciliation of the rich peasants. By September 1930 the so-called “Kiangsi Provincial Soviet,” a besieged CCP-controlled area in south-central China, adopted a new land law that even allowed the rich peasants to retain their own good land rather than requiring them to exchange it for the less fertile land of the poor peasants. It is no accident that all guerilla movements opt for a middle- or rich-peasant policy rather than taking the class struggle into the village; this is another reason why revolutionary Marxists oppose guerillaism and insist that the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class.

Not long after Mao’s forces had retreated from Southern China in the Long March, beginning in 1934, the Seventh Congress of the CI, under Stalin’s leadership declared that the threat of fascism demanded that the proletariat ally itself to the so-called anti-fascist sections of the bourgeoisie in a vast “People’s [or popular] Front.” In 1931, Japan had invaded and occupied Manchuria. As it became increasingly clear that Japan was threatening to invade the rest of China from its base there, the devoutly nationalist Mao quickly adopted the CI’s “People’s Front” line to push an “anti-Japanese united front” with the GMD.

By 1 August 1935 the CCP had issued an appeal to all “patriotic classes” to join the Communists’ fight against Japan. In doing so they issued new guidelines to moderate agrarian policies in order to win support from rich and middle peasants. By 1936 orders had been issued to CCP cadre to ban the use of the name “Communist Party” at the sub-district level and replace it with “Anti-Japanese National Salvation Association.”

The Japanese invasion of central China in 1937 saw the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War and a second “united front” between the CCP and Chiang’s GMD. In October 1938 Mao would grovel that, “Without the Kuomintang it would be inconceivable to undertake and pursue the War of Resistance … it has had two great leaders in succession—Mr. Sun Yat-Sen and Mr. Chiang Kai-shek” (Stuart Schram [ed.] The Political Thought of Mao Tse-Tung, 1969). But the alliance between the CCP and GMD was more on the order of a very unstable non-aggression pact, with Chiang’s forces staging repeated attacks on the Communist-led peasant armies. While Mao agreed (on paper) to disband the “soviet” governments that the CCP had set up in areas under its control and to share administration with the GMD, in practice the Communists maintained exclusive control over these areas.

In the war between imperialist Japan and semicolonial China, the Trotskyists adopted a policy of military support to China, while opposing Chiang Kai-shek politically. But when the GMD’s war effort became subordinated to U.S. imperialism following U.S. entry into the Pacific War in December 1941, and with American general Joseph Stilwell taking command of the GMD armed forces, military support to Chiang’s forces was no longer appropriate as it would have meant support to U.S. imperialism in the wider interimperialist conflict. However, given that Mao’s Red Army continued to wage an independent struggle against the Japanese occupiers and was not militarily subordinate to U.S. imperialism, revolutionary Marxists would have given military support to Mao’s Red Army against the Japanese, seeking to rally the urban workers while denouncing the Stalinists for suppressing social struggle.

The leading role played by Mao’s forces for national independence greatly enhanced the CCP’s authority and influence and expanded the area under its control by the end of WWII. At the same time Mao held religiously to his commitments to the “patriotic” capitalists and landlords in Red Army territory throughout the period of the “united front.” With the onset of WWII, he proposed the Menshevik pro-capitalist demand for “new democracy.” Under “new democracy” the CCP guaranteed bourgeois class rule. In January 1942 the peasants were “advised to pay rent and interest as well as to protect the civil, political, land and economic rights of the landlord” (Decision of the Central Committee on Land Policy in the Anti-Japanese Base Areas). In April 1945 Mao was even more explicit, stating that “the program of the revolution is not to abolish private property” and that “reasonable profits of state, private and cooperative enterprises” would be “guaranteed” (On Coalition Government). The anti-Japanese popular front remained CCP policy until 1945. To maintain a bloc with the landlords, the agrarian program was watered down to nothing: no land confiscation was permitted and land reform became rent reduction.

Military Victory of PLA Results in Deformed Workers State

In January 1946 Mao concretised the CCP’s class-collaborationist perspective at a “Political Consultative Conference” where he outlined the make-up of a bourgeois coalition government down to including 90 Nationalist army divisions and 18 CCP army divisions. This deal wasn’t consummated because of anti-Communist hostility amongst elements of the GMD military who, in an attempt to decisively crush Mao’s forces, escalated the war against the PLA. That Mao’s liquidationist course did not lead to a repeat of the tragic counterrevolutionary events of 1926-27 was also due to the fact that the GMD government was so corrupt that Chiang couldn’t afford to risk a coalition government.

It was only after Chiang refused to make a deal with the CCP that Mao put forward a radical land reform program, including confiscation of landlord property. This ignited support from the peasants. As Chiang’s brutal and despotic army ruthlessly plundered the areas they controlled, the peasant masses, often at the point of starvation, flocked to join the CCP’s Eighth Route Army. Across China, peasant uprisings broke out spontaneously against the vicious repression of Chiang’s forces. Indeed amid economic and social chaos from 1946-49 China was in a classic pre-revolutionary situation.

However, it wasn’t until October 1947 that Mao even raised the slogan for the overthrow of the GMD regime. The GMD’s occupation of the CCP base in Yenan finally made it clear that no compromise was possible and that a coalition government of a “new democratic type” was a pipe dream. Thus, and in violation of Stalin’s explicit orders, the CCP decided to strike out for state power. This decision to carry through a military victory occurred in the context of special conjunctural developments. The U.S. imperialist rulers had become so discouraged by the GMD government that they essentially withdrew backing in the period 1948-49. Meanwhile the Communist army, which had previously been deprived of weapons was suddenly supplied with large quantities of Japanese armaments following the Russian occupation of Manchuria. These factors led to the rout of the GMD forces and the toppling of Chiang’s regime.

The declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 marked the birth of a bureaucratically deformed workers state. With the victory of Mao’s forces the bulk of the Chinese bourgeoisie fled to Taiwan with the GMD, eliminating the crucial bourgeois element of “new democracy.” By October 1949 power was completely in the hands of the CCP and the state power was based on the military dominance of the PLA. With Soviet aid, the CCP then set about building up a state sector of heavy industry. This was accelerated with the onset of the Korean War when measures were taken against the remaining domestic capitalists beginning in 1952. However, the ideology of this new CCP regime reflected the provincial consciousness characteristic of the peasantry. The CCP acted to ensure that the working class was not a factor in 1949. It responded to worker uprisings, of which there were a few in Shanghai and other cities, by banning strikes. Mao’s anti-internationalism and hostility to mobilising the working class was highlighted by the fact that in December 1952 up to 1,000 Trotskyists and their sympathisers were rounded up by Mao’s police. Many served decades and/or died in jail.

The Chinese Revolution, deformed as it was, proved there is no third road between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The whole course of revolutionary events proved the revisionist character of Mao’s theories. There was and could be no extended democratic stage under capitalist class rule. While the CCP repeatedly sought to set up a “democratic” bourgeois regime, the property relations that resulted were those of a workers state. Given the complete powerlessness of the Chinese bourgeoisie, absence of the working class as an independent force, the predisposition of the CCP cadre for a state modeled on Stalin’s Russia and objective pressures towards centralised economic planning, the collectivisation of the economy flowed inevitably from the PLA victory in 1949.

The smashing of capitalist class rule and the ensuing collectivisation of the economy laid the basis for a vast growth in social production and living standards. The new regime swept away much of the feudalist garbage. The gains of the Chinese Revolution brought progress especially for women. This included stamping out arranged marriages, female infanticide, foot binding and the selling of peasant girls into concubinage. The revolution rapidly expanded literacy levels and vastly improved health care. Internationally the victory of the Chinese Revolution represented a huge defeat for the U.S. and other imperialist powers (including Australia). This was driven home by the intervention of China’s PLA in the Korean War of 1950-53, which helped prevent North Korea being overrun by the U.S. imperialists and their capitalist South Korean puppet regime.

Notably the political origins of the deeply anti-Communist SAlt and Solidarity groups go back to the Korean War. Bowing to anti-Communist Cold War hysteria, the late Tony Cliff (SAlt and Solidarity’s theoretical godfather) capitulated to the British bourgeoisie and the then-ruling Labour Party. Cliff and his supporters refused to defend the Soviet Union, China and North Korea against imperialist attack. Tony Cliff broke from the Trotskyist Fourth International along with some of his followers while others were expelled. Cliff’s anti-Marxist “theory,” which asserted the Soviet Union was “state capitalist,” was used as a justification for their class betrayal, just as this “theory” is used today by SAlt to justify their refusal to defend the remaining deformed workers states against imperialism. In contrast we Marxists stand for the unconditional military defence of the North Korean and Chinese workers states, including their need to have and test nuclear weapons, in the face of the nuclear-armed imperialist madmen in Washington and their junior partners in Australia. We also fight for the revolutionary reunification of Korea through workers political revolution in the North and socialist revolution in the capitalist South.

Maoist Bureaucratic Rule: Adventurism and Betrayal

Marxists define socialism as the lowest stage of a classless egalitarian, i.e., communist, society based on material abundance and on the highest possible level of technology. It can only be built on the basis of international planning. Crucially this requires the overthrow of capitalist rule in the advanced imperialist centres such as the U.S., Japan, Europe and Australia. Such a program was anathema for the nationalist Mao Zedong. Instead, the politics of Mao and subsequent leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and the current bureaucratic leadership are to appease imperialism and try to maintain the world status quo. Hostile to a working-class centred program, the Stalinist bureaucracy in China has oscillated between idealist peasant-based adventures such as the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), and the crazed intra-bureaucratic power struggle of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) while selling out worker and peasant struggles abroad.

In the 1960s, while under the gun of U.S. imperialism, Mao’s regime put forward a fake “anti-imperialist” posture, which attracted youth around the world. This amounted to promoting and conciliating bourgeois nationalist regimes in neocolonial countries, leading to tragic results. Based on the same class-collaborationist politics that led to the crushing of the 1925-27 Revolution, Mao backed the Indonesian Communists’ support to the capitalist Sukarno government. This subordination of the oppressed masses to the bourgeoisie paved the way for the crushing of the Indonesian Communist Party and the slaughter of up to one million Communists, workers, peasants, ethnic Chinese and other minorities in 1965-66.

Some years after the Sino-Soviet split between the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies of China and the Soviet Union, Mao sought and obtained an alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union at the height of the imperialist war against the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants in 1972. Disgustingly at the same time as U.S. warplanes were carpet bombing Vietnam, Mao was shaking hands with U.S. president, and war criminal, Richard Nixon in Beijing. This alliance was deepened under Deng Xiaoping. In 1979, acting as a cat’s paw for U.S. imperialism, Deng ordered the PLA to invade Vietnam, the main Soviet ally in East Asia. The battle-hardened Vietnamese forces resisted effectively and delivered a stinging defeat to the PLA.

In the 1980s the Deng regime supported the imperialist-backed Islamic fundamentalist Afghan mujahedin against the Soviet Red Army. From Australia, to Britain, to America the Cliffites pushed the same line and despicably sided with their own imperialist rulers against the 1979 Soviet intervention. In contrast we said “Hail Red Army!” and called to extend the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan people. We saluted the progress brought by this intervention especially for Afghan women. We also recognised that it was better to fight against imperialism in Kabul than in Moscow. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan by the Soviet bureaucracy was a betrayal of the Afghan and Soviet peoples.

In so many ways the Beijing bureaucracy aided the U.S. and Australian imperialists to fulfill their goal of destroying the Soviet Union. By its appeasement of imperialism the Stalinist bureaucracy in China has shown itself to be an obstacle to the defence of the Chinese Revolution and to the necessary international workers revolution.

Workers Political Revolution or Capitalist Counterrevolution

In 1978 when Deng Xiaoping came to power he introduced “market reforms” which he called building “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This was an attempt by the Chinese bureaucracy to use the whip of the market to overcome stagnating productivity caused by nationally narrow bureaucratic commandism. Over time, the regime abolished the so-called “iron rice bowl” which was premised on guaranteed employment. It opened the country to imperialist investment, gave up the state monopoly of foreign trade and substituted market mechanisms for a planned economy, including decollectivising agriculture.

It is true that, under Mao, China built a substantial industrial base. But without massive aid from abroad there could never be sufficient industrial development to revolutionise the countryside. At the time of Mao’s death China remained a predominantly rural country and the low agricultural productivity was a barrier to industrial growth. It was on this basis of low productivity, including inefficiency, that Mao promoted mythical self-sufficiency based on generalised scarcity.

It is incontestable that over the last few decades “market reforms” have resulted in economic growth. This has had the effect of proletarianising tens of millions of former peasants, many of them women. Today over 50 percent of labour is employed in manufacturing, construction, transport and the service sector. Forty percent of the population is urbanised. These are developments of significant historical progress from a Marxist standpoint. But “market reforms” have also massively widened the gap in living conditions and have created a wealthy new class of capitalists with links to CCP officials and the offshore Chinese bourgeoisie. Under the “reforms” millions have lost their jobs from the state-owned sector and been forced to work in the private sector for lower pay and none of the benefits provided by the state enterprises. And 150 million migrant workers have moved to the cities, where they are labouring under desperate conditions while being looked down upon by workers with urban residence permits.

These factors have resulted in an upsurge in defensive labour actions by workers that have seen attacks on corrupt managers and even pitched battles with the police. Meanwhile the CCP regime has responded with a mixture of repression and cash handouts to the more recently unemployed and the reversal of some privatisation measures. The Chinese bureaucracy is also aware of what happened in the Soviet Union and suppresses all political debate and opposition.

The Chinese workers and peasants have waged many struggles in the past ten years, but they are atomised and without a leadership whose perspective is to overthrow the political rule of the bureaucrats and place power in the hands of workers, soldiers and peasants soviets. The powerful Chinese proletariat standing at the head of the peasants and urban poor need a Leninist-Trotskyist party to direct struggles to the seizure of political power. A workers political revolution, establishing a regime of workers and peasants councils, would seek to take advantage of the international division of labour by promoting a high level of exports and imports, and would renegotiate economic agreements with U.S. and other imperialist powers in the Chinese workers’ favour. It would struggle to unify all sectors of the Chinese working class in alliance with the rural toilers, it would fight to ensure migrant workers all the rights accorded to legal urban residents and take up the fight against any and all Han chauvinist discrimination against China’s minority peoples.

A proletarian political revolution in China, based on defence of the collectivised economy, would re-establish a centrally planned economy and with it a state monopoly of foreign trade and ensure basic economic security for all workers. However, even the most farsighted communist leadership would not be able to overcome the limits facing China in a world dominated by powerful imperialist states. The establishment of a revolutionary government in China would spark revolutionary upsurges beginning in Korea and Japan through to the oppressed masses of Southeast Asia and here in Australia. Only through the overthrow of capitalist class rule internationally, particularly in the imperialist centres of North America, West Europe, Japan and Australia, can the material basis be laid for the all-round modernisation of China as part of a socialist Asia.

The social contradictions in China are growing and, when they blow, either capitalist counterrevolution or workers political revolution will be posed. The potential for workers political revolution was shown in the events around Tiananmen Square in 1989. Student demonstrations against bureaucratic corruption were joined by worker protests against the effects of high inflation. Workers began to protest, hold mass meetings and form assemblies in cities across China, which could have led to the formation of workers councils or soviets. The Chinese bureaucracy was initially paralysed when the first army units sent in failed to suppress the demonstration. For two weeks the regime could not implement its own martial law decree. Ultimately the regime was able to mobilise loyal army units which savagely crushed the protesters. The massacre overwhelmingly targeted the workers. We called to “Oust the Bureaucrats—For Lenin’s Communism! Workers and Soldiers Soviets Must Rule!” After the massacre, Workers Vanguard, the paper of our U.S. section headlined: “Defend Chinese Workers! Stop the Executions!”

Months later, amidst significant demonstrations in the East German deformed workers state, the ICL intervened to fight for the revolutionary reunification of Germany. This meant a proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the imperialist West, for a red Germany in a socialist Europe. As part of this struggle, in January 1990, we initiated a united-front demonstration to protest the fascist desecration of a Soviet war memorial in Treptow park in East Berlin. The then-ruling Stalinist party, feeling pressure from their base, took up our call and some 250,000 East Germans came out in solidarity with the Soviet Union against the fascists. From the platform of this demonstration there were two counterposed political programs, that of the Stalinists and that of revolutionary Trotskyism presented by us (see article on page 3).

In August 1991, when most of the fake-Trotskyists internationally, and the reformist left in Australia, including the DSP and the International Socialists (forebears of SAlt and Solidarity), cheered for capitalist “democracy” and sided with Boris Yeltsin’s counterrevolutionary forces in Moscow, we intervened in Russia distributing tens of thousands of leaflets calling for “Soviet Workers—Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!” Fighting against capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union we published and distributed Trotsky’s Third International After Lenin for the first time in Russian. We fought to bring authentic Marxism back to the homeland of the October Revolution. Our comrade Martha Phillips was murdered in the struggle to do so. Capitalist counterrevolution was a catastrophic defeat for working people in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world.

For an Internationalist Revolutionary Workers Party!

Our aim is to build internationalist revolutionary workers parties. In this country such a party will be built in political struggle against the ALP and the trade-union misleaders of the working class. The ALP’s anti-communist and racist roots run very deep. In 1949, the same year the Chifley Labor government sent troops to smash the powerful coalminers’ strike, it also dispatched warships to take supplies up the Yangtze River to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. The ALP has backed every war and every dirty colonial adventure by Australian imperialism. Backed by the reformist left, one of the ALP’s greatest crimes against the working class was its loyal service to the imperialists’ drive to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union, leading to the destruction of the world’s first workers state.

It was no surprise then, that earlier this year the capitalist Rudd Labor government fueled a xenophobic anti-China backlash, preventing a Chinese state-owned company from investing in the moribund Australian company OZ Minerals on “security” grounds. The racist and anti-Communist hysteria that was whipped up was designed to line the population up behind the counterrevolutionary aims of the Australian and American rulers against China. The invention of a Chinese “threat” was then used to justify the government’s proposed military build-up, which will be used to enforce Australian imperialism’s exploitation in the region and hawkishly targets China.

The Laborite trade-union misleaders back the bourgeoisie’s anti-China campaign. We all know that the bourgeoisie have been escalating attacks on the working class, cutting jobs and conditions. Rather than engaging in a class-struggle fight against the capitalist rulers, the union tops join with the bourgeoisie and whip up “buy Australian” nationalist protectionism, pushing the lie that workers overseas are stealing the jobs of workers in Australia.

For years this nationalist protectionist poison has particularly targeted China. For example last year, in response to a loss of 600 jobs at South Pacific Tyres, the manufacturing workers union in Victoria declared “the decision demonstrates a worrying trend of companies taking their work off-shore to places like China for cheaper unregulated labour.” In blaming workers overseas for job losses, such protectionism not only serves to divide workers, it also fuels racist scapegoating of immigrants and refugees and foments vicious racist attacks on minorities, such as the murderous spate of bashings of Indian and Chinese students. Targeting China, such protectionism is particularly destructive because it lines workers in Australia up behind their own capitalist rulers against the Chinese deformed workers state.

Against the chauvinism of the union tops, and the ALP to which they are connected, it is necessary to build a new leadership in the trade unions, one which begins with the understanding that the interests of the working class and the interests of the capitalists are irreconcilably counterposed. We stand for international class-struggle solidarity in defence of jobs and say: Down with all protectionist poison! The ALP is a bourgeois workers party, bourgeois in its outlook and program but based on the trade unions. An internationalist revolutionary workers party will be built by splitting the working-class base of the ALP away from its pro-capitalist leadership.

Such a Marxist party, based on the principles of scientific socialism and historical (i.e., dialectical) materialism, would fight to impart to the proletariat the dearly bought lessons from the international workers movement including the necessity to defend the gains that the working class has already won. Winning workers from Australia to Japan, to the U.S. and Europe to an understanding of the historic significance of the Chinese Revolution, including defending the gains which issued from it in the form of the core collectivised economy, is integral to winning them to a revolutionary perspective towards overthrowing capitalism at home.

Only when workers revolutions put the industrial capacity and technologies of the advanced imperialist countries to use in an international planned economy under the rule of the working class will the basis be laid for a socialist society of material abundance pointing to a communist future for all. This is what the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is fighting for: For the communism of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks and the reforging of the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.