Trotskyists at Historical Materialism Debate on China

One of the main plenary sessions at the first North American conference of the left academic journal Historical Materialism—held at Toronto’s York University in late April—was on “China and the Imperial Order.” Some 150 people attended the April 25 session, which was devoted in large part to debate on the character of present-day China. Panelist Leo Panitch, editor of Socialist Register, put forward the social-democratic argument that “a very venal Communist elite” in China had transformed itself into a bourgeoisie. For his part Li Minqi, a former Chinese student activist arrested for his participation in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, claimed that capitalism became “dominant” in China in the early 1990s. The viewpoint of the third panelist, Johns Hopkins University professor Giovanni Arrighi, amounted to overt agnosticism on the class character of China today, as he told the audience: “Is China capitalist? Socialist? I don’t know, I have no idea.”

A spokesman for the Trotskyist League, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), was called on first in the question period. We print below his remarks in lightly edited form. For a fuller treatment of these issues, see “‘Market Reforms’ Exacerbate Contradictions in China—Defend, Extend the Gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution!” (SC No. 153, Summer 2007).

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“I’m with the International Communist League. I just want to say in terms of the discussion here, there is this widespread belief that extends all across the political spectrum that China has either become capitalist or is irreversibly heading that way, and Leo Panitch answered in the affirmative. There are all kinds of pseudo-Marxist groups who promote this illusion in the service of lining up behind their own bourgeoisie, in the service of capitalist restoration in China.

“We insist that China remains a workers state since the 1949 Revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed by Stalinist parasitism and mismanagement. We think the biggest crime that the Stalinists have done is to promote the illusion that you can have peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world order. And right now we see that the strategic goal for the capitalist powers is to smash the Chinese workers state, to turn it into a vast sphere of untrammeled exploitation and superprofit.

“So we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution [interruptions from chair], the latest evidence of which can be seen in these counterrevolutionary riots in Tibet. We think there’s only two ways forward, two ways for China. Either it’s going to be ‘integrated’ into the capitalist world economy as subservient, as in the pre-Revolution days, as colonials of the imperialists [loud interruptions], or there is going to be a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy.”