by Gerry Downing

The Aftermath. The protest movement of students that started in Tiananmen Square in 1989 ended in a blood bath with various sources claiming that between 1,500 and 4,000 demonstrators were killed and 10,000 wounded.
 

In their latest publication, Spartacist No. 69, August 2024 we get the 12,000-word article. Not Imperialist, Not Capitalist, The Class Nature of China. The polemic is waged against those who assert that China is both capitalist and imperialist, in particular against the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) an Austrian-based international led by Michael Pröbsting, and the Ted Grant influenced movements, The Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) led Hannah Sell who succeeded Peter Taaffe in 2020. They had split from what became Socialist Appeal (SA) in 1991 over whether to work within the Labour party. SA has now, April 2024, become the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) with a new international group Revolutionary Communist International (RCI, June 2024). Alan Woods with Rob Sewell are the leaders of this grouping.

The first part of the polemic sets out to prove that China is not an imperialist power, and we have substantial agreement with these arguments. Socialist Fight has made most of these same arguments over the years to the extent that we might be tempted to accuse them of plagiarism. But we must admit it has drawn everything together in a single piece better that we have done in the past.

We disagree with the estimate of that the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1979 and Deng’s Southern Tour represented “political continuity, not rupture”. Our understanding is that whilst Deng Xiaoping, the former Paramount leader of China, initially supported the student protestors who paraded an effigy of the Statue of Liberty to signal that they were indeed ‘colour revolutionists’ who wanted to import a bourgeois democracy based on the US model he, and the entire CCP bureaucracy, reacted in horror when independent unions brought masses of workers to the Square who began to sing the communist anthem The Internationale. A workers’ revolution was now clearly threatening.

The terrible massacre of several thousand was undoubtedly ordered by Deng, although he then fell into disgrace in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for initially supporting the students. Deng promoted his “Reforms and Opening-up” programme in southern China in his tour of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou and Shanghai, from January 18 to February 21, 1992. When he began that Southern Tour he was ignored by the party press. But then change happened, they began to publish glowing reports of his triumphant progress two months after his return when President Jiang Zemin won the internal battle in the Politburo. He then took the 14th Congress, October 12-18, 1992, by storm. At that point a capitalist state was restored in China; we totally disagree with those who say it was and is a ‘hybrid state’ or this it was a transitional state from 1978 when Deng came to power.

Rupture and not Continuity

This was rupture and not continuity, at last Deng had achieved his goal and retained the CCP as the instrument to introduce the new capitalist economy. So to the second part of the polemic, why China Is Not Capitalist. They say:

“For Marxists, the crux of the question is the state itself, that is, the armed forces and the bureaucracy. Which class dictatorship do they defend? Despite the great possible variations in the political forms a state can take (democratic, bonapartist, fascist, etc.), it always represents the rule of a distinct class. Summarizing Engels, Lenin explained: “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.” —The State and Revolution (1917)

So, in a deformed workers state the dictatorship of the proletariat is represented by the state Stalinist bureaucracy, albeit in in a profoundly repressive, undemocratic manner. Likewise, a capitalist state in its many forms defends capitalism; the class character of a state is determined by the property relations a given state guards and defends.

But now a problem arises. Although, as admitted, the Bolsheviks did not immediately expropriate the capitalists upon taking power in October nonetheless none would doubt that that was their intention. They did not do this until January 1918, not because they were relying on workers control up to then but because, as a vey new working class, it did not have sufficient class struggle culture to impose themselves on the capitalists from below; in a certain sense the Bolsheviks had to substitute themselves for the class.

Although the class, via its soviets, workers councils, dominated in the big cities the Bolsheviks had to impose the new regime by force in areas whilst winning the civil war. That war was won by the Red Army led by Trotsky.

So, what happened at the end of WWII? In all the regions and countries conquered by the Red Army, (behind the Iron Curtain) Stalin installed ‘Peoples Democracies’ that is capitalist states where there were no capitalists because the Nazis had dispersed them all under its rule. So we had rule by the ‘shadow of the bourgeoisie’ and the largely unplanned economy was run on capitalist lines.

But Marshall Aid was offered to the allies of the US after the war and some of these ‘Peoples Democracies’, Romania and Poland, indicated their willingness to accept such aid. Stalin was forced to install what the Trotskyist came to call ‘deformed workers states’ almost everywhere the Red Army dominated and abolish capitalist property relations by about 1948. Yugoslavia and Albania arrived at the same relations semi-independently, but occupied Austria was handed back to the capitalist west by the Red Army in 1955 during the ‘Khrushchev thaw’. The capitalist state was never overthrown in Afghanistan despite the rhetoric of the Great Saur Revolution of April 1978.

What happened in China? Contrary to the Spartacist account,

“When Mao’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) defeated the nationalist forces of the Guomindang, there was no ‘joint dictatorship.’ The bourgeoisie overwhelmingly fled to Taiwan and those who did not were expropriated. The PRC—a dictatorship of the proletariat—could not be conciliated with its antipode, a clear confirmation of Marxist theory”.

A deformed workers state was not initiated in October 1 1949 when Mao Zedong took power. He had fought the Long March against the Kuomintang on the basis of the ‘bloc of four classes’ theory. He insisted that he had initiated a ‘New Democracy’ of the ‘four revolutionary classes’, the peasantry, proletariat, petite bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie.

Crucially this made a sharp distinction between the ‘comprador’ bourgeoisie, who were simply agents of western imperialism and had fled to Taiwan and the ‘nationalist bourgeoisie’ who were good, patriotic capitalists and so could remain in power in the new, anti-imperialist capitalist state, they claimed.

But the nationalist, ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie in the northeast ‘betrayed’ him and began to make super-profits manufacturing and selling arms to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during the Korean war, 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953.

When US invasion was threatened in the course of that war then their loyalty was obviously questionable, so he expropriated them. Mao nationalised the property of the ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ in 1949 but did not expropriate the ‘national bourgeoisie’ until late 1951 and 1952 in the mass mobilisations of the ‘Three-anti Campaign’ and the ‘Five-anti Campaign’.

Mao Zedong proclaiming the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, on October 1 1949. A deformed workers state was not initiated until late 1951-52.
 

Eight indices of a capitalist state

Let us list the capitalist features of the Chinese and Russian economies and states:

1. The Chinese “iron rice bowl” of Chairman Mao is basically gone. His welfare state has been abolished apart from in a few urban places. This happened catastrophically under Yeltsin in Russia from 1991.

2. There is a thriving capitalist sector in China with its own class differentiated bourgeoisie and working class.

3. There is a Stock Exchange and capitalist banks in both Russia and China, although, a la Bismarck, Stolypin, and Keynes, they are state-controlled (unlike in Britain under Blair and Brown) to ensure the better development of capitalism. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states had/have no stock exchanges. This is not neo-liberal capitalism, but it is capitalism, nevertheless.

4. The monopoly of foreign trade collapsed in 1991 in Russia, but it was also gone in theory in China since the 1992 restoration but far more so since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

5. Few now doubt that Russia was a capitalist state after August 1991, even if the attack on the parliament of October 1993 was the last attempt of the privileged Stalinist bureaucracy to reverse the process. The scramble by the state functionaries for privatised state assets doled out by Yeltsin was obscene; these wealthy oligarchs emerged almost overnight whilst life expectancy fell by ten years in places.

6. China and Russia seek to become imperialist powers; their investments in Africa, South America and Sri Lanka etc. are for purely commercial and strategic/military purposes. This is unlike the practice of the USSR where support for national liberation movements and investment were to strengthen their hand and give them more pawns in the chess game of achieving peaceful cooperation and compromise with world imperialism.

 The Chinese bureaucracy, under both Mao (after he opposed the Shanghai Commune of 1967) and Deng, sought to conciliate US imperialism. Mao’s three worlds theory put first the ‘great powers’, the US and USSR who were ‘imperialists’, second the other advanced capitalist nations and the third world was China and the semi-colonial countries. Neither China nor Russia can become fully fledged imperialist powers in the Marxist sense as long as the US remains the global hegemonic imperialist power.

7. China now has three stock exchanges: Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen (shadowing Hong Kong). The Beijing stock exchange was abolished in 1949 and restored in November 1990, the year after the crushing of the political revolution in Tiananmen square and  almost two years before the state became capitalist. Shenzhen was founded at the same time. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia also have stock exchanges, but Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), North Korea, the only remaining deformed workers’ states, do not.

8. The special economic areas and measures of capitalism in both countries are heavily controlled and do resemble the NEP in the USSR from 1921 to 1928 in many ways. Or at least they have not morphed over into the controlling project of the state, meaning they are not yet capitalist states. But they are moving strongly in that direction but in very different ways; Cuba still relatively popular but increasingly unequal and North Korea very Stalinist repressive isolationist/nationalist.

Conclusion: Revolution necessary!

The conclusion of the Spartacist article argues very strongly for a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, which they say still controls deformed workers state. Whilst we believe this to be wrong, nevertheless their acknowledging that a revolution is necessary to remove this ruling cast/class means we have a level of agreement as against those who seek to defend and prettify President Xi’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ so beloved of the Morning Star and various other leftists. We can therefore go along to a large degree with their concluding paragraph:

“Whether or not the PRC can be saved from counterrevolution will be decided by the political leadership standing at the head of the working class. If pro-capitalist forces are allowed to take the lead, the PRC is doomed. If Stalinism, whatever its form, is conciliated, the PRC is also doomed. The only road to victory is that of the Fourth International: ruthlessly opposing imperialism, defending the social gains of the revolution, overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy and forging an international working-class alliance for socialist revolution. Just as China’s unique development was the product of the international class struggle, so too will its future destiny depend on uniting with the workers of the world. This is the task at hand.” ▲