The Communist University (CU) 2023 – Haunted by the Spectre of Marxism/Trotskyism
Leave a comment26/08/2023 by socialistfight
by Gerry Downing
Controversy on several fundamental issues for Marxism arose during the CU week of August 13 to Saturday August 19 in the discussions that I attended that need clarification:
1 Defence of the Russian Revolution as the greatest single event in human history. Defence of the personal political integrity of Lenin and Trotsky, (and the Bolsheviks in the first four congresses of the Communist International), in leading that revolution and Trotsky and the early Fourth International in defending its heritage.
2 How do we define the class character of any state? What are or were workers’ states, degenerate or deformed, how and when did they come into being and how and when did they cease to be?
3 Identification of Stalinism, together with international Social Democracy/Labourism as counter revolutionary. When is entry work in Social Democratic parties necessary and when is it necessary to abandon this work? Identification of Social Democracy internationally as bourgeois workers’ parties (for whom we may vote) and the US Democrats as simply bourgeois (for whom we must never support or vote).
4 What is imperialism; are Russia and China imperialist today? If we agree Russia is not imperialist, why we must reject dual defeatism in the war in Ukraine
5 The methodology of the dialectic: what is the Transitional Programme and what is the difference between Bolshevik/Trotskyist transitional demands and the methodology of the minimum-maximum demands of Karl Kautsky’s Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International?
6 Do all nations and nation states, primarily oppressed, non-imperialist nations, have the right to self-determination? What states do not constitute legitimate nation states now and historically?
1. Defence of the Russian Revolution
Defence of the Russian Revolution as the greatest single event in human history. Defence of the personal political integrity of Lenin and Trotsky, (and the Bolsheviks in the first four congresses of the Communist International), in leading that revolution and Trotsky and the early Fourth International in defending its heritage.
That revolutionary heritage is contained in these four Congresses: The First, founding Congress in 1919, the Second Congress in 1920 which build it internationally, the Third Congress in 1921 where the united front and transitional demands as the communist tactics towards the rest of the organised working class were elaborated and the Fourth Congress in 1922 where the Bolsheviks developed these transitional demand for the workers’ government and sought to guide the German Revolution. [1]
These four congresses are not above criticism but they are clearly in defence of the world revolution and there is no suggestion in them that socialism may be possible in a single country. Beginning with the Fifth Congress in 1924 with Gregori Zinoviev as head there began a conservative rejection of world revolution. John Peterson, of the Socialist Party of England and Wales, wrote in In Defence of Marxism, 20 December 2019:
“After holding yearly congresses in the midst of a brutal civil war and imperialist encirclement, just three more congresses were held over the next twenty years: the Fifth, in 1924; the Sixth, in 1928; and the Seventh, in 1935. This alone speaks volumes about the changes that had taken place. This is a long and tragic period which includes the defeated German, Chinese, and Spanish Revolutions, the rise of Hitler, the outbreak of World War II, Trotsky’s assassination, and much more.” [2]
And going on to analyse what happened after the Fifth Congress in 1924 he wrote:
“The “Bolshevisation” campaign meant the “Russification” of the national parties, the forcible reorganisation of the internal life of all the national sections of the Comintern, bureaucratically from above, with all dissenters being unceremoniously driven out. Tens of thousands of comrades around the world trusted the Russians and the Comintern to provide objective and balanced political advice—not advice based on factional interests—and this led to disaster in one country after another. Unprincipled manoeuvres replaced political debate. Mindless careerists and bureaucrats were favoured over talented individuals who may have made some mistakes or who thought independently.” [3]
The Sixth Congress in 1928 adopted the lunatic Third Period programme where all other working-class parties, petit bourgeois, nationalist and bourgeois parties were characterised as social fascist or outright fascist. This divided the working class in Germany so fundamentally that Hitler took power without a shot being fired as the Stalinists allied with the Nazis against the Social Democrats whom they dubbed “the main enemy”. Even after Hitler assumed office on 30 January 1933 they assured their followers, “after Hitler us”. That is until they found themselves in concentration camps or forced to flee for their lives abroad.
The Seventh Congress in 1935 led to the adoption of the Popular Front theory of anti-fascism, where revolution was explicitly repudiated for alliances with France, the UK, and the US internationally and with the liberal bourgeoisie and clerics domestically. Georgi Dimitrov defined fascism as, “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital” (not a product of capitalism as a whole in crisis – GD) intent upon wrecking organized “terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia.” With respect to its foreign policy, Dimitrov condemned fascism as “jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations” (unlike the US, UK, France etc. – GD) which would eliminate, “the democratic liberties of the working people”. At that point they ceased to be communist in any meaningful way; they scuppered a revolutionary situation in France in June 1936 where a general strike brought the country to a standstill and crushed an actual revolution in Spain from 1936-39, where the workers and peasants had seized the factories and land and were driven out by armed Stalinist thugs. [4]
In defending the heritage of the Russian Revolution, we are at the same time duty bound to defend the personal political integrity of its central leader, Lenin and Trotsky. We reject the propaganda of Stalinism that he was the genuine political successor of Lenin and so the legitimate defender of the Russian revolution. Likewise, we reject imperialism’s political apologists who make the same claim the other way around; The policies pursued by Lenin and Trotsky inevitably led to Stalin and they were ultimately as bad as him.
To make clear what the popular front meant politically on March 1, 1936, Stalin granted an interview to Roy Howard, President of Scripps-Howard Newspapers, which was reported in the New York Times, in Pravda on March 5 and in official Communist journals internationally. This is the relevant exchange:
Howard: Does this, your statement, mean that the Soviet Union has to any degree abandoned its plans and intentions for bringing about world revolution?
Stalin: We never had such plans and intentions.
Howard: You appreciate, no doubt, Mr. Stalin, that much of the world has long entertained a different impression.
Stalin: This is the product of a misunderstanding.
Howard: A tragic misunderstanding?
Stalin: No, a comical one. Or, perhaps, tragicomic.[5]
Two recent books and an older one make these propaganda points against the Russian Revolution and Lenin and Trotsky:
1. Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937, Life of an old Bolshevik by Barbra Allen, Verso, 2023
2. Travellers of the World Revolution, A global history of the Communist International by Brigitte Studer, Brill Academic Publishers, 2015
3. The Conscience of the Revolution, Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia by Robert Vincient Daniels, Clarion Books, 1960.
The Barbra Allen book is “published with the generous support of the Lannan Foundation [6] and the Wallace Global Fund” [7].
Brigitte Studer’s book has the following blurb and is well worth reading:
“The Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of this transnational organisation founded in 1919 by Lenin and Trotsky and dissolved by Stalin in 1943, telling the story through the eyes of the activists who became its “professional revolutionaries”. Studer follows such figures as Willi Münzenberg, Mikhail Borodin, M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, Tina Modotti, Agnes Smedley and many others less well-known as they are dispatched to the successive political hotspots of the 1920s and ’30s, from revolutionary Berlin to Baku, from Shanghai to Spain, from Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Moscow. It traces their journeys from revolutionary hope to accommodation, defeat or death, looking at questions of motivation and commitment, agency and negotiation, of life and love, conflict and frustration. In doing so, it reveals a forgotten Comintern, the expression of a multi-dimensional revolutionary moment, which attracted not only working-class but feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist activists, highlighting the role of women in the Comintern and the centrality of anti-colonialism to the Communist project. The book concludes with a reflection on the ultimate demise of a historically unique undertaking.” [8]
The RV Daniels 1960 book is very detailed and so academically rigorous with copious references and a large bibliography but is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, [9] no lovers of the socialist revolution.
2. How do we define the class character of any state?
What are or were workers’ states, degenerate or deformed, how and when did they come into being and how and when did they cease to be?
The first workers state in history was the Paris Commune of 1871. The French revolutionary government had ruled Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871. Lenin closely analysed those events to prepare the Bolsheviks for the October Revolution in 1917. In October 2018 Gerry Downing, wrote, What is a workers’ state, how does it come into being and how does it cease? Mistakes of Trotskyists post-WWII. [10] It was theoretically based on Richard Price’s 1995 work extended to the collapse of the Chinese workers state in October 1992 who began his section, Mechanical Materialism and the Theory of the State, thus:
“Those who still regard the countries of Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union as deformed / degenerated workers’ states rest their case – with varying degrees of sophistication – on the continued existence of predominantly nationalised economies. Despite the existence of bourgeois restorationist governments, the state remains, they argue, the superstructural reflection of the base. Taken in isolation, some of Trotsky’s writings can appear to support such a position. Those who care to look will find numerous examples of “political shorthand”, where Trotsky appears to equate the existence of the workers’ state with the survival of nationalised property; for instance: “So long as the forms of property that have been created by the October Revolution are not overthrown, the proletariat remains the ruling class”.
“The task of Marxists, however, is not to mindlessly repeat sacred texts, but to grasp the underlying method of Marxism. To begin to provide a definition of the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union, it is necessary to return to the most basic question – what is a workers’ state?
“According to Trotsky’s succinct definition, “The class character of the state is determined by its relation to the forms of property in the means of production” and “by the character of the forms of property and productive relations which the given state guards and defends”. [16] This implies a dialectical rather than a mechanical relationship between base and superstructure: it is not merely a question of the existing forms of property but of those which the state defends and strives to develop.
“Underlining this approach, Lenin argued in early 1918 that: “No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognised as a socialist order.”
“Thus, despite the fact that between 1917 and 1918, the Bolsheviks ruled over a bourgeois economy, only economistic pedants would deny that the infant soviet regime was a workers’ state. Not only did workers hold state power directly through soviets, but the Soviet regime was committed to expropriating the bourgeoisie.
“Elsewhere, we have attempted the following definition: “At root, a workers’ state is one in which the bourgeoisie is politically suppressed, leading to its economic expropriation as a class. This is what such apparently disparate events as the October Revolution of 1917 and the bureaucratic overturns in Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba after 1945 have in common . . . We reject both purely “economic” and purely “political definitions of a workers’ state.’
“… The cutting edge of distinction between bourgeois states and workers’ states is not some decisive degree of nationalisation (Militant / CWI), nor the existence of “central planning” (Workers Power / LRCI), nor the alleged “commitment” of the state apparatus to defend the socialised forces of production (ICL and IBT), but which class interests the economy and the state apparatus ultimately serve.” [11]
We set out our position on China in 2009 in reply to the Spartacist ‘family’ (the International Communist League – the ‘parent’ group, the Internationalist Group (League for the Fourth International), the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Bolshevik Tendency, and the Bolshevik Group (Korea):
“If the IBT, along with the rest of the (Spart) ‘family’ were to ask that very empirical question, what relations of production does the Chinese state defend? Then they could give only one answer – the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy used statised property to defend and develop capitalist property relations. This is the total opposite to what Lenin did via the NEP and what all USSR bureaucrats did, even Gorbachev up to late 1990; they used certain measures of controlled capitalist production and distribution to guard and develop collectivised property relations. The IBT (Spart family – GD) theory is a reversion to the old Grantite/Militant theory that a workers’ state is defined by the degree of nationalisation. Ted Grant, in The Colonial Revolution and the Deformed Workers’ States written in July 1978 gave us the following hilarious list: ― “In Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea, Burma, Syria, Angola, Mozambique, Aden, Benin, Ethiopia and as models, Cuba and China (which in their turn had the model of Eastern Europe as a beacon showing the way) there has been a transformation of social relations.” When he made his speech to the International Committee Third Conference in 1966 James Robertson had enough common sense and was sufficiently aware of the importance of empirical evidence to ridicule the Healy/Lambert (British/French) line on Cuba (a capitalist state with a weak or phantom bourgeoisie); While the nationalisation in Algeria now amounts to some 15 percent of the economy, the Cuban economy is, in essence, entirely nationalized; China probably has more vestiges of its bourgeoisie. If the Cuban bourgeoisie is indeed weak, as the I.C. affirms, one can only observe that it must be tired from its long swim to Miami, Florida.” Whilst wrongly relying on nationalisation alone Robertson’s empirical examination of reality proved far superior to Healy’s dialectics which railed against the facts because that was empiricism. But he cannot do the same for China today:
“…During the Tiananmen Square protests Deng Xiaoping, the Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978 to the early 1990s, strongly supported the demonstrators, as did his pro-market ally General Secretary Zhao Ziyang until the ranks of the student restorationist leaders began to be swamped by the working class who started to make their own political demands. Martial law was declared on 20 May. And surely only Deng had the authority to order the massacre on 4 June. The Chinese authorities summarily tried and executed many of the workers they arrested in Beijing. In contrast, the students, many of whom came from relatively affluent backgrounds and were well-connected, received much lighter sentences (Wikipedia). The ‘family’ have never noticed this dichotomy; why did they not call for the repression of Deng’s allies, the restorationist students, here?
“The CCP then began to deal “strictly with those inside the party with serious tendencies toward bourgeois liberalization”. Zhao Ziyang was put under house arrest and Deng himself was forced to make concessions to anti-reform communists. He denounced the movement; “the entire imperialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the socialist road and then bring them under the monopoly of international capital and onto the capitalist road”. But it was only a tactical retreat. Resistance of all types, from the immediate restorationists as well as from bureaucratic defenders of the state and its nationalised property relations was thoroughly crushed by the 30,000 party officials charged with expulsion during this grisly task. Deng was then in a position to win over the last holdout hardliners. This is how Wikipedia reported Deng’s legendary southern tour:
“To reassert his economic agenda, in the spring of 1992, Deng made his famous southern tour of China, visiting Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and spending the New Year in Shanghai, in reality using his travels as a method of reasserting his economic policy after his retirement from office. On his tour, Deng made various speeches and generated large local support for his reformist platform. He stressed the importance of economic construction in China, and criticized those who were against further economic and openness reforms. Although there is debate on whether or not Deng actually said it, his perceived catchphrase, “To get rich is glorious”, unleashed a wave of personal entrepreneurship that continues to drive China’s economy today. He stated that the “leftist” elements of Chinese society were much more dangerous than “rightist” ones. Deng was instrumental in the opening of Shanghai’s Pudong New Area, revitalizing the city as China’s economic hub.
“His southern tour was initially ignored by the Beijing and national media, which were then under the control of Deng’s political rivals. President Jiang Zemin showed little support. Challenging their media control, Shanghai’s Liberation Daily newspaper published several articles supporting reforms authored by “Huangfu Ping”, which quickly gained support amongst local officials and populace. Deng’s new wave of policy rhetoric gave way to a new political storm between factions in the Politburo. President Jiang Zemin eventually sided with Deng, and the national media finally reported Deng’s southern tour several months after it occurred. Observers suggest that Jiang’s submission to Deng’s policies had solidified his position as Deng’s heir apparent. Behind the scenes, Deng’s southern tour aided his reformist allies’ climb to the apex of nation. In our view Tiananmen Square set in motion the chain of events that enabled the CCP to purge the party and state apparatus and neuter the working class. The development of capitalist property relations was prioritised consciously by the entire bureaucracy and state in 1992 when Jiang capitulated to Deng (and his decision was ratified by the 14th Congress in October – GD). China then ceased being a workers’ state in any way. [12]
The current economic crisis in China arising from unsustainable debts and falling property prices is part of the global crisis of capitalism and is driven by market forces which remaining central state planning is now unable to prevent.
3. Identification of Stalinism, together with international Social Democracy/Labourism as counter revolutionary. Identification of Social Democracy internationally as bourgeois workers’ parties (for whom we may vote) and the US Democrats as simply bourgeois (for whom we must never support or vote).
When is entry work in Social Democratic parties necessary and when is it necessary to abandon this work?
“Some voices cry out: “If we continue to recognize the USSR as a workers’ state, we will have to establish a new category: the counter-revolutionary workers’ state.” This argument attempts to shock our imagination by opposing a good programmatic norm to a miserable, mean, even repugnant reality. But haven’t we observed from day to day since 1923 how the Soviet state has played a more and more counter-revolutionary role on the international arena? Have we forgotten the experience of the Chinese Revolution, of the 1926 general strike in England and finally the very fresh experience of the Spanish Revolution? There are two completely counter-revolutionary workers’ internationals. These critics have apparently forgotten this “category.” The trade unions of France, Great Britain, the United States and other countries support completely the counterrevolutionary politics of their bourgeoisie. This does not prevent us from labelling them trade unions, from supporting their progressive steps and from defending them against the bourgeoisie. Why is it impossible to employ the same method with the counter-revolutionary workers’ state? In the last analysis a workers’ state is a trade union which has conquered power. The difference in attitude in these two cases is explainable by the simple fact that the trade unions have a long history and we have become accustomed to consider them as realities and not simply as “categories” in our program. But as regards the workers’ state there is being evinced an inability to learn to approach it as a real historical fact which has not subordinated itself to our program.” [13]
It is mandatory for serious revolutionary socialists to work within bourgeois workers’ parties like social democracy internationally, e.g., the British Labour party, and also within Communist/Stalinist parties internationally if sufficient internal democracy allows us to fight openly for our programme or at least the essential parts of that programme. It is questionable whether that space still exists in British Labour, we should spend most of our efforts in publicly building our own revolutionary current outside it today. Obviously, it was impossible for Trotskyists and other oppositionists to work within Stalinists parties when they were being murdered wholesale on Stalin’s instructions from the middle 1930s, and in some places still today. We will elaborate on this in the section on transitional demands. Likewise anti imperialist united fronts with Stalinists or bourgeois nationalists in conflict or outright war with imperialism or their proxy forces (Russia today in the war in Ukraine) are dependent on the relationship of forces on the ground; we do not foolishly advocate entering such groupings or their armies when we would be killed or jailed at best at their first opportunity.
The question of work within the Democratic Socialist of America arose in the CU debates. We believe it is mandatory for us to work within the DSA but to make no concessions to those who advocate voting to the Democrats as a whole or for individual leftist candidates like AOC. [14] We should fight for a break from the Democrats and for an independent party of labor based on the trade unions. As Trotsky wrote in 1932:
“I affirmed that American politics will be Europeanised in the sense that the inevitable and imminent development of a party of the working class will totally change the political face of the US. This is a commonplace for a Marxist. The question was not of a “Labor Party” in the specific English sense of that word, but in the general European sense without designating what form such a party would take or what phases it would pass through.” [15]
4. What is imperialism; are Russia and China imperialist today? If we agree Russia is not imperialist why we must reject dual defeatism in the war in Ukraine
Michael Roberts gave an excellent talk on what imperialism was, how it sucks the life blood out of Africa, Southeast Asia, etc but undermined it by telling us that China today was still on the road to socialism. I had cited the four-part reports in the Morning Star by Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, where he enthusiastically endorsed President Xi Jinping’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. It was illegal to force workers to do more that a 44-hour week, he assured us. But then there was the case of Jack Ma, China’s richest billionaire as was, who publicly boasted that his workforce had a ‘996’ week, that is from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, an illegal 72-hour week, which is the norm in most of the workplaces in China, Wikipedia tells us:
“Jack Ma stated that workers should consider 996 “a huge blessing” as there is no way to “achieve the success [one] want[s] without paying extra effort and time”, while Richard Liu, founder of JD.com, said that “Slackers are not my brothers!” Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur and angel investor, describes 996 as “the same exact work ethic that built America… The 996 working hour system was deemed illegal by the Supreme People’s Court on 27 August 2021. However, it has been doubted (!!! – GD) whether it will be fully enforced… Labour Law of the People’s Republic of China states: Chapter 4 Article 36 The State shall practise a working hour system wherein labourers shall work for no more than eight hours a day and no more than 44 hours a week on an average.” [16]
As Roberts [17] explains so well Xi’s capitalist ruling class in China has split the working class into two counterposed groups. [18] In fact Xi’s officials refer to the hukou workers as the “low-end population” bringing to mind the old Nazi terms, ‘Untermench’ (the lower orders) as opposed to Übermensch (the ruling elite). Deng Xiaoping had already begun this dirty work before the capitalist state was restored. Firstly, we have the urban group, some two thirds of the workforce at most, retaining many rights from the old ‘iron rice bowl’, Mao’s welfare state. Competing with them are the migrant rural workers, at least one-third of the workforce in the cities with almost no rights and terrible poverty for them and their families when evicted and forced to return to their rural homes, where some 50% of the population live.
This split between a privileged labour aristocracy and a mass of workers with few rights is classic capitalist divide-and-rule tactics. Of course, this super-exploited workforce also functions to put downward pressure on the wages and conditions of the established urban workforce. Xi, and Deng before him, have taken it to its extreme form; it operates far more efficiently there than in any developed imperialist metropolitan country, bourgeois democracies in Marxist terms. This is what attracted that flood of imperialist investments after Deng’s open-door policy was adopted by the CCP in late 1978. This sought economic growth through foreign capital and technology while hypocritically “maintaining its commitment to socialism”. This is explained well in Robert Campion’s WSWS article from 2017 and Willy Wo-Lap Lam’s Prime Asia News article here. [19] Dexter Roberts’ book explains all this in greater detail, particularly in his Introduction. [20]
How billionaire Jack Ma with his illegal 996 72 hour working week is treated stands in stark contrast to how this courier for Ma’s Alibaba, Chen Guojiang, was treated. He fought against wage cuts and formed a mutual aid network to address day-to-day needs, including legal advice and housing. In 2019, he helped establish a Delivery Riders Alliance and took the pseudonym Mengzhu, short for “leader of the alliance.” He set up chat groups with some 15,000 drivers, posted videos, and encouraged his “takeaway brothers” to take collective action against injustices. Chen Guojiang, on being convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” was given a six-year sentence. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was reported to be extremely jealous of Ma’s privileges over his workers.
He was arrested on February 25, 2021, under charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble. He called for drivers to stop work when faced with unfair working conditions. China’s gig economy now has some 7 million food delivery “riders”. Chen posted a video on his WeChat account in 2022 in which he appeared to have been released, but he has stopped talking about strikes.
And poor Jack Ma temporarily fell from grace, he largely disappeared from public view and his projected stock market launch of a subsidiary of his company Alibaba was blocked, which cost him some $3 billion dollars and reduced his wealth to only $23 billion and he is only the fourth richest man in China today. Our heart bleeds for him. He was thus humiliated because his stock market launch was bringing him far too close to the US finance houses and he was speaking of opening up the economy to them. This would end the domination of the Chinese Communist party eventually and the privileged position of the Chinese billionaire ruling class (more of them that the US, but not as wealthy). He was never prosecuted for his illegal 72-hour week and nor are any of the rest of the billionaires, although some have been jailed basically for their disloyalty to Xi and preference for international capital.
However, Jack Ma has made a comeback. Arjun Kharpal their Senior Technology Correspondent, reported in Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC) on 28 March 2023:
“Alibaba said Tuesday it will split its company into six business groups, each with the ability to raise outside funding and go public, in the most significant reorganization in the Chinese e-commerce giant’s history. Each business group will be managed by its own CEO and board of directors. Alibaba said in a statement that the move is “designed to unlock shareholder value and foster market competitiveness.” Alibaba’s shares popped and closed more than 14% higher in the U.S.
“…Around $600 billion of value has been wiped out since Alibaba’s share price peaked in October 2020. Since then, the Chinese government has cracked down on private technology businesses, introducing a slew of regulation and increasing scrutiny on the practices of domestic giants. Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group was forced by regulators to cancel its mega public listing in November 2020. And in 2021, Alibaba was fined $2.6 billion as part of an antitrust probe.
“The company sees the creation of the six businesses as a way to be nimbler. “This transformation will empower all our businesses to become more agile, enhance decision-making, and enable faster responses to market changes,” Zhang said in a statement. The reorganization also comes at a time when there are signs that Beijing is warming back up to technology businesses, as the government seeks to revive economic growth in the world’s second-largest economy. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s outspoken and charismatic founder who was out of the public eye and travelling abroad for several months, has returned to China, in a move perceived as an olive branch from Beijing.” [21]
Arjun Kharpal followed up on 29 March 2023:
“But China has faced weak economic growth over the past year due to its now-scrapped “zero-Covid” policy. Beijing has meanwhile worked to reinvigorate the economy. Allowing Ma back into the fold could be a recognition from Beijing that it needs private businesses to do that.
“Economic growth back on track is probably the greatest political priority the [Communist] Party faces at the moment, and a more optimistic entrepreneurial class is key to this,” Xin Sun, senior lecturer in Chinese and East Asian business at King’s College London, told CNBC via email. Sun said he suspects there was “some sort of deal” between Ma and the government for him to return and be seen in public. In so doing, the government intends to signal its warmth towards the private sector and investors — if even Jack Ma is perceived as having been pardoned, everyone else should feel safe and welcome,” Sun said. [22]
So, President Xi has been forced back into reliance on the US stock markets and investors to save Alibaba and its high-tech industries. However, President Biden has now moved to crackdown on these investments. The Guardian reported on August 9:
“Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order that will narrowly prohibit certain US investments in sensitive technology in China and require government notification of funding in other tech sectors. The long-awaited order authorises the US treasury secretary to prohibit or restrict certain US investments in Chinese entities in three sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies and certain artificial intelligence systems. [23]
Michael Roberts did partially withdraw his claim that China was on the road to socialism here:
“…China has grown exponentially not just because of cheap labour but also because of massive productive investment promoted and controlled by the state sector. Actually, as a result of that investment expansion, consumption spending is also growing very fast.” [24]
Michael Roberts also wrote:
“Indeed, the Wren-Lewis’s of this world [Simon Wren-Lewis was a senior economic adviser to former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn] never advocate or even mention the idea of the nationalisation or socialisation of capitalist sectors. For them, Keynesian policy is government spending to ‘stimulate demand’.
“China’s policy in the Great Recession was not just ‘fiscal stimulus’ in the Keynesian sense, but outright government or state investment in the economy. It actually was a ‘socialised investment’. Investment is the key here—as I have argued in many posts—not consumption or any form of spending by the government. The Great Recession in the US economy was led and driven by a fall in capitalist investment, not in personal consumption or caused by ‘austerity’. In Europe, 100% of the decline in GDP was due to a fall in fixed investment.” [25]
Contrary to the International Bolshevik Tendency, the IMT are basically correct against them and Michael Roberts and the contradictions they pointed to then are now emerging strongly in an outright capitalist crisis caused by falling property prices, as in the UK:
“2008’s stimulus may have kept the economy growing, but it laid the basis for the depth of the coming crisis. It was delivered not with the socialist method of planning to meet need, but with the capitalist methods of speculation and credit. It was achieved by China’s state-owned banks lending money to local governments and others to spend on infrastructure projects, mainly. As a result, bad debts have ballooned. According to Reuters in 2019, “Officially, non-performing loans at China’s commercial banks total around 1.5 trillion yuan. But some analysts say the bad debt is as much as 14-times higher, because lenders use various methods to conceal the true figure.” Any new fiscal stimulus big enough to rescue the world economy would have to be far bigger than in 2008. But China’s financial system is already clogged up with non-performing loans, and another huge stimulus would only add to this mountain of bad debts. [26]
Here Michael Roberts sets out his excellent line on imperialism:
“Direct political control through colonies has mostly disappeared (although not completely); so imperialism operates mainly through economic control now (while throwing in the occasional coup or proxy war). After all, that is the aim of the imperialist powers: to appropriate as much value and resources from the dominated as possible. In that sense, the economic determines the political.
“If we focus on the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist economies, there are several ways that this is achieved. There is value transfer through unequal exchange in international trade; through global value chain flows (transfer pricing) within multi-nationals; through factor income flows (debt interest, equity profits and property rents); through seignorage (i.e., control of the money supply: dollar is king) and through capital flows (foreign direct investment inflows and portfolio flows. ie buying and selling financial assets).
“So, which are the imperialist countries? Carchedi and I define them as those countries which get a long-term appropriation of value from subaltern countries. And this is achieved by the appropriation of surplus value by high technology companies (and countries) from low technology companies (countries). So imperialist countries can be defined as those with a persistently large number of companies as measured by their high national average organic composition of capital (OCC) and whose average technological development is higher than the national average of other countries.
“In our work, we used the IMF data on net primary income flows between countries. These are cross-border flows of profit, interest and rent. We found that when these flows are netted out, there are about 10 countries at the most that fit the bill as imperialist. Indeed, nothing much has changed in the 100 years since Lenin wrote his analysis of imperialism: it’s still the same countries. No others have made it from dominated to imperialist status. Net primary income per head is concentrated in the G7 plus a few other small states and the tiny tax haven states). Every other country is an ‘also-ran’.
“The G8-plus countries own the vast bulk of all the foreign-owned assets. Even the so-called Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) own little abroad compared to the imperialist countries. The G8 has six times as much FDI stock as the Brics.” [27]
And this from John Smith:
“Imperialism is today manifested in an apartheid-like global system of racism, national oppression, cultural humiliation, militarism and state violence that… has converted [southern nations] into reserves of super-exploitable labour-power for transnational corporations and their suppliers to feed on.
“The systematic violation of equality between proletarians profoundly affects the global operation of the law of value—how could it be otherwise, given that value relations are social relations? The systematic violation of equality between proletarians is incontrovertible, and so are the divergent rates of exploitation that necessarily flow from this.” [28]
We have insisted that in a war between imperialist countries or blocs Marxism say we must be dual defeatist, as the Bolsheviks were in WWI (with opposition from Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev) and in the Trotskyists were in WWII. However, in wars between imperialist countries and workers’ states (degenerated or deformed) and colonial or semi-colonial countries we are for the defeat of the imperialists and the victory of the workers’ states and/or oppressed countries, regardless of the political character of the leadership. Russia and China are not imperialist as Michael Roberts has proven beyond doubt, so we are for the defeat of the US/Nato forces and its proxy, the Kiev regime, in this Ukraine war today.
We reject the position that Russia and China are “transitional states”, a violation of the Marxist understanding of the state (see below) or that they are “hybrid states” or that we cannot say what they are, as some claimed in the CU discussions, and others have claimed elsewhere. They are advanced semi-colonial states that have achieved a certain measure of political independence from imperialism, like the other members of the Brics; Brazil, India and South Africa. We reject all theories of ‘sub-imperialism’ which designate these states as lesser imperialist powers; the Alliance for Workers Liberty even designated Argentina as such in the Malvinas/Falklands war of 1981, Iraq and Iran also beginning with the wars in that region to defend the profit rates of global hegemonic imperialism, the US and its allied/subordinate imperialisms.
This from Gareth Martin:
“From Russia’s perspective they cannot help but conclude that NATO, and specifically the USA, is preparing for war, and wants war. NATO gave assurances in 1990 that it would expand “not one inch eastward”, but then broke its word. The US withdrawal from the ABM treaty strongly suggests it is now sufficiently confident in its technology that it can act with impunity.
“If Russia were to resort to nuclear weapons, then it should not at all be assumed that they will be used within the territory of Ukraine. Not only would it be thoroughly foolish to use such weapons on their own border, but they consider themselves to be at war with NATO, and that NATO is the real enemy. NATO is keeping Ukraine in the war; if NATO were successfully deterred from arming Ukraine, they would win. And therefore, NATO will likely be the target of any such nuclear demonstration. The whole world needs Russia to win the war. Because if it doesn’t, we will all be on the brink of a global thermonuclear exchange that will utterly destroy technical civilization as it exists today.” [29]
This graph from Michael Roberts’ blog correctly indicates who the imperialist powers are, and which are the most efficient in super-exploiting the global south. Sweden is the top super-exploiter, and this explains why imperialist apologists cite it so often as the most generous in its welfare state provisions but are careful not to mention the source of the ‘generosity’; its transnational corporations extracting super-profits from the impoverished masses in Africa and Southeast Asia.
5. The methodology of the dialectic: what is the Transitional Programme and what is the difference between Bolshevik/Trotskyist transitional demands and the methodology of the minimum-maximum demands of Karl Kautsky’s Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International?
During the CU debates some comrades asserted that we start from what is necessary, not for what is possible right now. Here is the erroneous defence of the Minimum/Maximum approach and the rejection of the Transitional Method. Because we must have some link between current reformist demands and where we want to go, the socialist revolution. Reformist demands like a windfall tax and a wealth tax are entirely progressive as part of a revolutionary programme to advance the class consciousness of the working class and oppressed masses on the back small victories won which increase their self-confidence to make more advances; “if getting little, they will ask for more”. The orientation of Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921 was to develop transitional demands like ‘for the workers’ government’ to a guide the German Revolution. The ultra-lefts opposed this as reformist.
In the The Origins of the Transitional Programme Daniel Gaido of the National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina makes the following points:
“The origins of the Transitional Programme in Trotsky’s writings have been traced in the secondary literature. Much less attention has been paid to the earlier origins of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International between its Third and Fourth Congress, and in particular to the contribution of its largest national section outside Russia, the German Communist Party, which had been the origin of the turn to the united-front tactic in 1921. This article attempts to uncover the roots of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International. This task is important because it shows that the Transitional Programme’s slogans are not sectarian shibboleths, but the result of the collective revolutionary experience of the working class during the period under consideration, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the founding conference of the Fourth International (1917–38).
“…The united-front tactic found its first formulation at the initiative of the Stuttgart metalworkers in December 1920, and became the official policy of the KPD with the publication of the ‘Open Letter’ of the Zentrale of the United Communist Party of Germany, drafted by Paul Levi, on 8 January 1921. The ‘Theses on the United Front’ were adopted by the Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI) in December 19211 and were then presented to an expanded 1 Adler (ed.) 1980, p. 400, and Riddell (ed.) 2011, p. 1164. 88 Gaido Historical Materialism 26.4 (2018) 87–117 plenum of that body in February–March 1922. After an extended debate, they were adopted by a divided vote. In the ECCI Debate on the ‘Open Letter’, held on 22 February 1921, Karl Radek, who was involved in the drafting of the ‘Open Letter’ with Paul Levi, stated: ‘The Open Letter is a partial action for transitional demands’. Further discussion took place at a second expanded plenum in June 1922. Finally, the ‘Theses on the United Front’ were officially adopted by the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, with a very important addendum not mentioned in Broué’s otherwise-masterful history of the Communist International: the anti-imperialist united front, prescribed as a tactic for the Communist parties of the colonial and semi-colonial countries in the ‘Theses on the Eastern Question’.
“…The Third Congress of the Communist International (22 June–12 July 1921). The Third Congress of the Communist International centred around the debates on the putsch attempt known as the ‘March Action’ in Germany, as the outstanding English edition of the proceedings by John Riddell makes clear. In the course of debates, Lenin and Trotsky, with the help of the German minority delegates headed by Clara Zetkin, succeeded in steering the International away from its previous ultra-left course known as the ‘theory of the offensive’, initially supported by most of the delegates, including Zinoviev, Bukharin, Béla Kun, Karl Radek and August Thalheimer. The Congress reoriented its work toward winning the support of the majority of the population for the Communist Party before launching an insurrection, a strategy summarised in the congress’ slogan ‘To the Masses!’. The price that the Bolshevik leaders had to pay for this reorientation of the International’s strategy away from the suicidal course formerly followed by the KPD was to reach a compromise by which the Congress declared the ‘March Action’ (as a result of which the International lost about 200,000 workers in the industrial heartland of Europe) to be a ‘step forward’, though in rather incoherent terms. The tactic of the united front, in turn, was rescued at the price of sacrificing the person who originally developed it, Paul Levi. [30]
The final two sentences above make it abundantly clear that Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Programme was in line with, and a development of, the Third Congress debates and not the ridiculous opportunist charges laid against it by Jack Conrad during the CU debates. It is not jumping on the next bandwagon that comes along but making the case for the revolution to the vanguard via propaganda and to the masses via agitation. No one who has read it and seriously thought about its implication could reach such a conclusion.
But in June 1923 Kark Radek made his Schlageter speech in which it is clear that much confusion reigned over the issue in these vital years in Germany from 1921-23. Hitler named a warship after Schlageter and held annual commemorations on 26 May, the date he was shot by the invading French army. Although Radek argued strongly for the united front in that speech and most of what he said is entirely correct surely we have to say that he went too far in the following statement:
“We are not sentimental romanticists who forget friendship when its object is dead, nor are we diplomats who say: by the graveside say nothing but good, or remain silent. Schlageter, a courageous soldier of the counter-revolution, deserves to be sincerely honoured by us, the soldiers of the revolution. Freksa, who shared his views, published in 1920 a novel in which he described the life of an officer who fell in the fight against Spartacus. Freska named his novel The Wanderer into the Void. If those German Fascisti, who honestly thought to serve the German people, failed to understand the significance of Schlageter’s fate, Schlageter died in vain, and on his tombstone should read: “The Wanderer into the Void” (my emphasis- GD). [31]
United fronts seek to win the masses, including backward, racist, sexist and homophobic and transphobic workers (the lumpen proletariat) to the cause of socialism and the revolution but certainly not by capitulating to their prejudices like this.
6. Do all nations and nation states, primarily oppressed, non-imperialist nations, have the right to self-determination? What states do not constitute legitimate nation states now and historically?
This is an extract for a document I wrote in 2016, Lenin Begins his Last Struggle:
Having promised a reply I found that I would have to reassert the politics of Leninism and Trotskyism against Stalin and Stalinism and to do that I would have to begin with Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin. This involved three issues in particular on which Lenin fought with all the remaining strength he had in the period after his first stroke on 26 May 1922. As he fought for life itself his political struggle grew ever more intense as he understood things were going seriously wrong with the first workers’ state. The three issues were 1. The defence of the principle of retaining the monopoly of foreign trade. 2. The fight against the bureaucratisation of the state to keep the revolution alive. The third issue was what is known as the Georgia controversy which spanned the entire period of his illness and grew to its more bitter on 6-8 March 1923, on the eve of his third and totally debilitating stroke which took his speech. Here is the course of his illness and struggle:
Timeline of Lenin’s Last Struggle
1922 — May 26 Lenin suffers his first stroke.
1922 — November 20 Lenin’s last public speech.
1922 — December 15 Lenin suffers his second stroke.
1922 — December 22, Stalin’s telephone call to Krupskaya.
1922 — December 24 Lenin writes his Testament.
1922 — December 24: Politburo orders that Lenin be kept in isolation.
1922 — December 25, Lenin adds the rider about removing Stain.
1922 — December 30 Formal establishment of the USSR.
1923 — March 2 Lenin against the rising bureaucracy; Better Fewer, But Better.
1923 — March 9 Lenin suffers his third stroke. No longer able to speak.
1924 — January 21 Lenin dies from his fourth stroke.
- The Georgia controversy – the rights of nations to self-determination
Lenin’s last struggle is centrally concerned with the rights of nations to self-determination, concentrated in the Georgia controversy against Stalin in particular. The last letter which he wrote on 6 March 1923, on the eve of his debilitating third stroke, showed his personal commitment to this question, now given priority in his mind over all others:
To P.G. Mdivani, F.Y. Makharadze and others (leaders of the Georgian opposition):
Top Secret, Copy to Comrades Trotsky and Kamenev
Dear Comrades:
I am following your case with all my heart. I am indignant over Ordzhonikidze’s rudeness and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. I am preparing for you notes and a speech. Respectfully yours, Lenin. [32]
Of course, the central thrust of Lenin’s argument from 1913 against the Austro-Marxists, the rights of nations not only to autonomy but to separate if they wished, is here defended as he had done also against Rosa Luxemburg in 1915 [33] and he never yielded on this aspect of the matter. In a recent controversy with the International Bolshevik Tendency [34] we took issue with their use of the following quote from Lenin of 1913:
‘‘Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just’, ‘purest’, most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism… [35]
We would contend that Lenin developed his position on the national question from 1913 when he praised Stalin’s very Second International mechanical work on the question. [36] Certainly by 1920 and the Second Congress of the Communist International Lenin was sounding very different from this (out-of-context) quote, which certainly does not accurately reflect his position on the question even in 1913:
“First, what is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses? The distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations. We emphasize this distinction–in diametric contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy. In the epoch of imperialism, it is particularly important for the proletariat and the Communist International to establish the concrete economic facts and in the solution of all colonial and national questions, to proceed not from abstract postulates but from concrete realities.
“The characteristic feature of imperialism is that the whole world, as we see, is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, which command colossal wealth and powerful armed forces. The overwhelming majority of the world’s population, more than a thousand million people, and very probably 1,250 million–if we take the world’s total population at 1,750 million–or about seventy per cent of the world’s population, belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in a state of direct colonial dependence or are semi-colonies such as Persia, Turkey and China, or else, having been defeated by the armies of a big imperialist power, have become greatly dependent on that power by virtue of peace treaties.” [37]
We should emphasise here that Lenin’s distinction is between oppressed and oppressor nations, and he does not limit this to the conflicts between imperialism and colonial and semi-colonial peoples. He did not, of course, identify the USSR as an imperialist state but he understood that, nevertheless, its entire history was of exploiting and oppressing the nations in the Russian Empire and its immediate periphery and he knew this reactionary attitude was still extant and dangerous, even in the ranks of the Bolsheviks and in its leadership. So Lenin says on 31 December 1922: “Unless Great Russian chauvinism was fought to the death, the party’s support for anti-imperialist national liberation movements would be completely hypocritical: we ourselves lapse … into imperialist attitudes towards oppressed nationalities”. This is his most relevant quote for the situation in the Ukraine today; it is this quote that must inform our attitude to Vladimir Putin.
We observe this also in the leading nations of other former semi-feudal Empires where the national liberation movements from the mid-19th century to WWI were directed in part at least from the top down by semi-feudal aristocratic landlord and capitalist forces. We would cite Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Greece, Iran, Serbia and Croatia to mention a few who have no global finance capital to speak of yet tend to have a supremacist attitude to their neighbour; they are of a higher culture, intelligence etc. This is not to give credence to the totally false line that dubs advanced semi-colonial nations “sub-imperialist” (Argentina, Iraq, etc.) to avoid giving them unconditional support in conflict and wars against imperialism and its proxies.
The largest nation without its own state is the Kurds, of which there are between 30 and 45 million people. “Kurdish people are an Iranian ethnic group native to the mountainous region of Kurdistan in Western Asia, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria. [38] It is a just and progressive demand that the Kurdish nation gets its own state. We asserted at the CU debates that there were certain states that were not genuine nation states but existed nonetheless as illegitimate states. We define such states as those who deny equal citizenship to all, that is, have a privileged race and/or religion with supremacist status to others, alleged or legally defined as second class citizens, so inferior human beings. The racist slave-owning states of the deep South of the USA before the civil war, below the Mason-Dixon line, Algeria under the French colons, Apartheid South Africa as was, the Northern Ireland state, Kashmir, Israel and Ukraine. [39]
Finally, what about imperialist nation states? Was it legitimate to demand the right to self-determination of the French nation when it was under occupation by Nazi Germany and their proxy, the Vichy regime? We have asserted elsewhere that it was, knowing how this demand could be used simply as an excuse for French national chauvinism. Of course, we absolutely condemn this use against Germany, particularly when the French Communist party and their leader Maurice Thorez went along with the slogan at the end of WWII “everyone must kill a Kraut”.
This from David Broder when he was still in the Alliance for Workers Liberty in 2008:
“Hostile to all strikes and independent working-class action which might undermine the Allied war effort, the Communist Parties instead focused on agitation against Germans — in France the Communist Party raised the slogans “everyone, united against the Krauts” and “everyone must kill a Kraut”. The anti-German chauvinist hysteria promoted by Stalin, who portrayed the war to his own subjects as just another chapter in the Slavs’ struggle against the Germans, must be held responsible for the vengeance exacted on the German people at the end of the war, including hundreds of thousands of rapes by Russian troops. This was a far cry from the disciplined behaviour of the real Red Army (under Trotsky – GD) in the 1918-21 civil war.” [40]
“The entire contents of Arbeiter Und Soldat here on the ETOL are the result of the efforts of David Broder, who put them up on the Alliance for Workers Liberty website. Broder translated the entire surviving contents of Arbeiter Und Soldat from the German.” [41] We must acknowledge this as an invaluable service to the entire labour movement and revolutionary socialism.
Notes
[1] See the following from the Spartacist International for quite a good elaboration of the content of these congresses: 12 August 2003, The First Four Congresses of the Communist International A class series given for comrades of the International Communist League (FI), https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/marxist-studies/9-1st-4-Congresses-of-Comintern.pdf
[2] See the following for a comprehensive analysis of the degeneration of the Comintern: In Defence of Marxism, John Peterson, 20 December 2019, Zinoviev and the Stalinist degeneration of the Comintern, https://www.marxist.com/zinoviev-and-the-stalinist-degeneration-of-the-comintern.htm
[3] Ibid.
[4] See In Defence of Trotskyism No 30, Genesis of Trotskyism, (The first ten years of the Communist
International/Left Opposition), By Max Shachtman, January 1933 (as a Trotskyist before he sold out to imperialist pressure over Stalin’s occupation of Finland in December 1939), https://socialistfight.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/idot-30.pdf
[5] J. V. Stalin, March 1, 1936, Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm
[6] Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity in support of exceptional contemporary artists, writers, and activists through our Art, Cultural Freedom, Indigenous Communities, and Literary Programs. https://lannan.org/about
[7] Wallace Global Fund supports people-powered movements that advance democracy, protect human rights, and fight for a healthy planet, https://wgf.org/mission/
[8] Brigitte Studer, Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International Hardcover – 20 Jun. 2023, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Travellers-World-Revolution-Communist-International/dp/1839768010
[9] The Carnegie Corporation, explore content about the key areas of our work and the work of our grantees to advance democracy, education, and international peace, https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/
[10] Socialist Fight, Gerry Downing, 28/10/2018, What is a workers’ state, how does it come into being and how does it cease? Mistakes of Trotskyists post-WWII, https://socialistfight.com/2023/08/22/what-is-a-workers-state-how-does-it-come-into-being-and-how-does-it-cease-2/
[11] In defence of Marxism, Theoretical journal of the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency, No. 3, 1995. The Marxist Theory of the State and the Collapse of Stalinism, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/ltt/ltt-idom3.htm
[12] In Defence of Trotskyism, Number 1. Winter 2009-2010, China: deformed workers‟ state or rising world imperialist power? Reply to the International Bolshevik Tendency and the Spart “Family”, https://socialistfight.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/in-defence-of-trotskyism-no-1.pdf
[13] Leon Trotsky, October 1939, In Defense of Marxism, Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/04-again.htm
[14] Wikipedia, The Squad (United States Congress), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They have since been joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri following the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections, and Greg Casar of Texas and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania following the 2022 elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Squad_(United_States_Congress)
[15] Leon Trotsky, 19th May 1932, On the Labor Party Question in America, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/xx/lp.htm
[16] Wikipedia, 996 working hour system, https://tinyurl.com/56t2mz88
[17] Asian Review of Books, Jonathan Chatwin, 29/12/2020, “The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World” by Dexter Roberts, https://tinyurl.com/mrxbmp7c
[18] Socialist Fight, 23/10/2021, What is China Today? https://socialistfight.com/2021/10/23/what-is-china-today/
[19] Prime Asia News, Willy Wo-Lap Lam, 12/11/2017, Xi Jinping’s false promises and the expulsion of the “low-end population” (untermench! – GD) from Beijing, https://tinyurl.com/yc2at479
[20] Socialist Fight, 19/11/2022, Capitalist China is a super exploiter of its own working class,
[21] CNBC, Arjun Kharpal, March 28 2023, Alibaba to split into 6 units and explore IPOs; shares up 14% in the U.S. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/28/alibaba-says-it-will-split-into-6-units-that-can-raise-funds-and-ipo.html,
[22] CNBC, Arjun Kharpal, March 29, 2023, Alibaba founder Jack Ma is back in China after months abroad in a sign Beijing may be warming to tech, https://tinyurl.com/bdfccezz
[23] The Guardian, Reuters, 9 August 2023, Biden bans range of US high tech investments in China citing national security risk, The order – to be implemented next year – restricts investments in semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum tech and AI, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/09/biden-executive-order-us-investment-chinese-technology
[24] Michael Roberts blog, China workshop: challenging the misconceptions, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/china-workshop-challenging-the-misconceptions/
[25] Michael Roberts blog, China’s ‘Keynesian’ policies, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/chinas-keynesian-policies/
[26] In Defence of Marxism, Daniel Morley, 18 March 2020, Deep economic crisis being prepared in China, https://www.marxist.com/deep-economic-crisis-being-prepared-in-china.htm
[27] Michael Roberts blog, November 14, 2019, HM2 – The economics of modern imperialism, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/hm2-the-economics-of-modern-imperialism/
[28] John Smith, November 2019, Exploitation and super-exploitation in the theory of imperialism,
[29] Socialist Fight, Gareth Martin, 21/8/2023, The whole world needs Russia to win the war in Ukraine, https://socialistfight.com/2023/08/21/the-whole-world-needs-russia-to-win-the-war-in-ukraine/
[30] Historical Materialism, Daniel Gaido National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina 26/4/2018, The Origins of the Transitional Programme https://philarchive.org/archive/GAITOO-3
[31] Karl Radek, June 1923, Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void, https://www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1923/06/schlageter.htm
[32] Lenin, Works, volume 45, page 608.
[33] Whilst expressing great admiration for the “Junius pamphlet” and its attacks on the Social Democracy reformists Lenin differed only on its failure to continue to defend Poland’s right to self-determination despite the reactionary and semi-feudal character of the nationalist leadership. The principle applies even more so to Ukraine. See Lenin, The Junius Pamphlet, Works, Volume 22, pages 305-319.
[34] Gerry Downing, Ireland and Palestine: the rights of oppressed nations to self-determination https://socialistfight.com/2016/01/28/ireland-and-palestine-interpenetrated-peoples-and-the-rights-of-oppressed-nations-to-self-determination/
[35] Lenin, Critical Remarks on the National Question (1913), Works, volume 20, pages 17-51.
[36] J. V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm
[37] Lenin, On the national and colonial questions (Report to the Second Congress of the Communist International, July 1920) http://www2.stetson.edu/~psteeves/classes/lenincolonial.html
[38] Wikipedia, Kurds, https://tinyurl.com/547mb577
[39] See Socialist Fight, Gerry Downing 3 March 2016, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin on the rights of nations to self-determination, A reply to some Stalinist Comrades, https://tinyurl.com/2dkaxw7t
[40] David Broder, June 2008, Arbeiter Und Soldat, Worker and Soldier, Trotskyism in occupied France, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/soldat/broder.htm
[41] Arbeiter Und Soldat, Worker and Soldier, contents by issue (1943–1944) https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/soldat/index.htm
Socialist Fight 