Critique of Michael Roberts: on China’s Socialist Transition

 

                  Socialism with Chinese Characteristics Lü Yanchun (吕延春), 

                            Northeast Chinese Households (关东人家), 2005

China is now at the center of the world. The biggest economy in terms of industrial output, the largest manufacturer, and its population as measured by purchasing power parity, or PPP, (how much of the real wage does a McDonald’s burger cost) is already at a higher living standard than the USA. By every economic metric it is the only major power that has grown economically by more than 5% a year in the 21st century.  How do we explain this? For most Marxists there are two basic positions – China is either capitalist or socialist. Some however, argue that it is undergoing some intermediary ‘transitional’ position between them. The transition option is used by those who want to reject the reality that China is an imperialist world power, and keep alive the dream that it has some progressive, pro-socialist characteristics. In this case China’s growth must be explained not by its restoration of capitalism which is globally in decline but by its ‘transition’ to socialism.

Foremost among those who argue China is undergoing a ‘transition’ is Michael Roberts the British based Marxist well known for his defence of Marxist economics and the law of value, most notably against Michael Heinrich, (see In Defence of the Labour Theory of Value). He has also defended Marx’s key law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the LTRPF, against David Harvey,  who rejects it as the necessary cause of crises of overproduction, and ultimately setting the historical limits of the capitalist mode of production. Roberts’ defence places him directly in the tradition of Marx for whom value is the product of social labour, and the LTRPF the expression of the ultimate contradiction - the class struggle between the proletariat to retain the labour value it produces, and of the capitalist ruling class to extract surplus labour value.

However, the class struggle is not only over the rate of exploitation during the production of value. It is mediated by the state which rules on behalf of the ruling class to reproduce these exploitative class relations. To understand China today we have to determine for which class does the state rule. Transition in the historical context of China’s revolution can only be from the rule of capital to the rule of labour. The transition ends when the law of value as the basis for setting prices of production in the world market is replaced by the workers’ plan which sets prices based on social labour time. Roberts however, argues that the ‘transition’ to socialist planning was ‘trapped’ after the state opened up to the market from the late 1970s, because the Law of Value (LOV) is as yet not ‘dominant’ in the state. 

So for Roberts there was no transition back to capitalism because the state could ‘manage’ the LOV so that it did not ‘dominate’ the economy.  We argue that Roberts arrives at his conclusion by confusing levels of analysis. Marx’s abstract model of capitalism where the state is left out of the picture is superimposed on the real world of 21st C state monopoly capitalism.  Roberts claims the state intervenes in the market to suppress the domination of the LOV when its actual role is to manage the LOV on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. How is this different from the rest of the monopoly capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism?  We will show that since 1992 when the CPC decided to reintroduce the LOV to set the prices of production within the global economy, it has become a monopoly capitalist state, and that particular historical circumstances (many historical determinations) drove it to become imperialist. To make the transition from monopoly state imperialism today we need a socialist revolution that will expropriate all capital (‘public’ and ‘private’) and develop the conditions necessary to build socialism, the first stage of communism, which in ending class society, and therefore the state, will usher in communism itself.  

No workers’ revolution means no socialism

We say that there is no evidence that China was or is socialist.  China did not have a workers’ revolution which is the necessary condition for socialism. The revolution in 1949 was a peasant revolution led by a Stalinist party comprised of bureaucrats modeled on the degenerated revolution in the USSR after 1924 when the bureaucracy aligned with the peasantry and advocated a ‘bloc of four classes’, workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. The CPC took power after it defeated the bourgeois nationalist forces of the KMT which fled to Formosa (Taiwan). In that event the revolution was based on an alliance of only two classes, the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie. Trotsky had anticipated the possibility that such a petty bourgeois revolution, led by Stalinists based on the peasantry, would find it had to go further than it intended and expropriate the bourgeoisie, leading the bourgeois democratic revolution itself.

In fact Trotsky had already been proven right. It had happened in Eastern Europe after 1945 when Stalin’s plans to form popular fronts (the ‘bloc of four classes’) with the national bourgeoisies fell through as they all reneged on such a bloc as soon as the Cold War iron curtain came down. For those who understood Trotsky on Ukraine, these states became extensions of the Stalinist USSR where the bourgeoisies were expropriated by the bureaucracy rather than the workers. They were therefore characterized as deformed-at-birth workers’ states in defence of workers’ property.

Was the situation in Eastern Europe analogous to the Chinese Revolution? We say yes. In both cases the bourgeoisie decamped to join the Cold War and the Stalinist bureaucracies had no option but to nationalise private property as state property. The Chinese revolution was also deformed at birth as workers’ played no role in the revolution having been suppressed since the counterrevolution when the KMT liquidated the CPC leadership in 1927.  So what resulted in 1949 was a petty bourgeois bureaucratic revolution that by 1951 was forced to expropriate the bourgeoisie, at the same time making sure the working class played no active role in the advance of the revolution towards socialism. 

The petty bourgeois bureaucracy held state power balancing between the only two classes that could act as the ruling class - either the bourgeoisie or the working class. The petty bourgeoisie was a class intermediate between the two capitalist classes - the proletariat and bourgeoisie, which were locked in a class struggle over the production of value. The bureaucratic state was neither capitalist, nor socialist, but rather a ‘transitional’ state in which the petty bourgeoisie had to return to capitalist rule or go forward to proletarian rule.  Resolving this class transition was pressing given the new state had to solve the dilemma of restoring capitalism without succumbing to recolonisation by imperialism. 

Therefore, as a petty bourgeois formation the state bureaucracy had an interest in administering the state to advance and consolidate its power by becoming the new national bourgeoisie. This would involve restoring capitalist social relations ruled by a ‘socialist state’.  The CPC at the head of the bureaucracy decided to do this gradually in the name of  “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. The decision became more urgent as the bureaucratic plan which suppressed workers’ democratic participation failed to raise productivity and the economy began to stagnate. 

CPC restores capitalism

Within the CPC the Maoist faction campaigned to enforce greater worker productivity in the name of the revolution. This campaign was a disaster that led to mass famine. By 1978 further stagnation in the economy prompted a rival faction around Deng to call for a return to capitalist market forces - that is, the LOV - to set the prices of production as the basis of market exchange. However this would only work if China re-joined the world market in which world prices would guide the application of the LOV. Labour-power would become a commodity in the market and socially-necessary labour-time would be the economic measure of value and surplus-value (or profits). This in turn would set the prices of production which included the share of profits.

In 1992 the 14th Congress took the decision to allow the LOV to set prices in the whole economy including the state owned sector to increase labour productivity. The rule of the LOV was carefully managed. Private investment in production on the land and in industry was now allowed subject to capital controls which restricted private trade and investment abroad. More importantly, tariff free economic zones for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) were now established within strict limits including the requirement of joint ownership to prevent foreign takeovers, and the transfer of intellectual property to allow China to develop the forces of production. 

For Marxists who recognize the LOV as determinant under capitalism, the CPC decision in 1992 is the qualitative point at which capitalism was restored in China. The bureaucracy led by the CPC was now converted from its role in the state as an intermediary bureaucracy serving the petty bourgeoisie, into a new ruling capitalist class serving collective capitalism. This ended the period of ‘transition’ from a Stalinist-led peasant revolution forced to expropriate the Chinese bourgeoisie, to a bourgeois counter-revolution that restores the national bourgeoisie.  Everything the bureaucracy had done over this transitional period in the name of ‘socialism’ was to create the conditions for the restoration of capitalism. This was managed within the framework of a state controlled by the Stalinist CPC presenting the return of capitalism as a ‘bloc of four classes’ as a necessary condition for socialism. 

Of course, there have been many attempts to insert extraneous conceptions of China to explain its capitalist growth as some ‘exceptional’ aspect of its ‘transition’ to socialism. As we have seen, Michael Roberts claims that while China has established a capitalist market, its growth is not explained by market forces as such, but by the state which does not represent the private capitalists.  He argues that the state sector of the economy plans production for use and not profit.  The private sector exhibits the usual laws of motion of rising and falling profits typical of the capitalist world market while the  ‘public sector’ can escape those laws. What is ‘exceptional’ is its ability to avoid the ‘domination’ of the LOV and create a surplus that is not distributed as profits to private owners, but accumulated as a sovereign fund. This enables China to subsidise the production of commodities more cheaply than its capitalist rivals and at the same time make millions of workers ‘middle class’. 

This claim is therefore a sort of ‘Marxist’ variant of US propaganda that calls China a ‘cheat’ in under pricing its exports (and therefore its currency) and massively underwriting the infrastructure and development of its many, and growing, economic partners. Only the authoritarian CPC can manipulate prices of production by intervening  in the private market. For Roberts, so long as the state is not formally ‘dominated’ by the market, this is a good thing. It shows that something progressive has emerged from the legacy of the peasant revolution that may contribute to the transition to socialism. What needs to happen is that workers have to progressively impose workers’ democracy on the CPC to socialise planning and ‘dominate’ the LOV! If we were to extend such reformist dreams from China to the BRICS+ then ‘win win’ economics can spread across the globe creating a wave of new middle classes, and the transition to international socialism can be completed on the installment plan.

From the ‘abstract’ Capital to the ‘concrete’ real world

But how can a state which is so influential in re-establishing and regulating the LOV in the market not be ‘dominated’ by the LOV which operates as the determinant of prices in the global market? How is it possible for a nation state not to be fully integrated in capitalist production of value and surplus value when it contributes to the prices of production of everything that China produces globally up and down the value chains?  As we noted, Roberts’ claims the state does not produce profits because profits can only accrue to the private owners of capital. 

For Marx, ‘capital’ could only exist in the form of different capitals; otherwise, there was no more compulsion to accumulate. Consequently, capital could only exist in the form of ‘different capitalists’, that is, a social class constituted so that each part of it was, by compelling economic interest, tied to the survival of ‘its’ own unit of production or circulation. Consequently the ‘thirst for profit’ of each part of that class and the ‘drive to capital accumulation’ are identical, the second one being only realizable through the first (the attempt at profit maximization of each unit or firm). If there is no competition, and the allocation of resources are not left to the decisions of individual capitals and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market’, then there is no capitalism. Capital cannot exist as one capital, the state. (Carchedi and Roberts, 2023, 219) 

Roberts fails to translate the level of abstraction of Marx’s three volumes of Capital (and the ‘Fourth’ on Theories of Surplus Value) to the real world. The real world comprises concrete social relations that are the result of ‘many determinations’ originating from the operation of the laws of motion. Prices of production which assumed the ‘free competition’ and averaging out of the profit rate that Marx used to demonstrate the operation of the LOV in the circuit of capital was never intended to correspond to the concrete reality of capitalist development. The working out of prices of production in the real world are NOT determined by an abstract market, but by the class struggle in which theory is subjected to practice.   

John Smith in his Imperialism in the 21st Century has a useful discussion of how Marx’s method anticipated the way the LOV works in the epoch of imperialism. (224-251) Production of value requires the exploitation of labour, as Capital demonstrates, but due to the monopoly ownership of capital its distribution is now characterised by super-exploitation where wages are paid below their value. That is, the value of labour power as a commodity with a use-value to produce surplus value is determined by a class struggle in which monopoly capital can exercise power over labour power to set its price and extract super-profits. 

In fact, we argue that in the real world competition has never been free from the intervention of state power in service of corporations.  From its inception to its decline and decay the capitalist state has always played the role of manager and broker in establishing and maintaining the production and circulation of capital. Originating in genocidal wars against pre-capitalist peoples to extract rent from privatised property, its epoch of decay ends in more genocidal wars over land and rent, so that production becomes parasitism where monopoly rents accrue to corporate warlords who monopolise production, distribution and exchange. 

Roberts, by projecting Marx’s abstract level of analysis in Capital onto the actually existing world in which the state is the overseer and regulator of the LOV, is blind to the rise of state monopoly capitalism in the transition from so-called ‘competitive’ capitalism in the 19thC to monopoly state capitalism in the 20thC.  

“Moreover the view that the likes of China and Vietnam are a new form of capitalism, ‘state capitalism’, suggests that world capitalism is now today stronger than it ever was before in history. Alongside the decline of the imperialist powers, state capitalism has apparently a new and sensational phase of the development of the productive forces, in a backward country like China, and thus much more impressive even than anything Marx described for 19^th century capitalism. (Carchedi and Roberts 2023, 218)

What is State Capitalism? 

Roberts’ method applies abstract assumptions to arrive at his ahistorical conclusions. A ‘new form’ of state capitalism in China arising out of the deformed workers’ state cannot be dismissed until it has been put to the test of  ‘many historical determinations’ that make up that history.  First, China after 1949 was not (on Roberts’ own figures) a backward country relative to the GDP growth of capitalist semi-colonies, keeping pace with the South Korean ‘tiger’ and well ahead of India. Marxists agree that state planning in the degenerated or deformed workers states, despite the limits imposed by bureaucratic planning, generally allowed the forces of production to develop beyond the semi-colonial world. Second, let’s identify the historically specific conditions that allowed China to restore capitalism as a new ‘state capitalism’ in the late 20^th century and launch a ‘sensational phase of development’ despite the decline of world imperialism.  We argue that the CPC took the decision to restore capitalism in 1992 and on the basis of its historic legacy of deformed state planning combined with the prevailing late capitalist development of state monopoly capitalism in the world economy.

To explain this development we need to understand the role of state monopoly capitalism over the last century or so. Before we do that we need to say what ‘state capitalism’ is. The first case is  ‘state capitalism’  was used by Lenin to explain the necessity of using market forces (the LOV) to determine prices in Russia under the New Economic Policy in  the attempt to solve the ‘scissors crisis’. Lenin explained that this was ‘state capitalism’ to counter the charges that Soviet Russia was restoring capitalism.  Far from it, prices of production set by the market were ‘dominated’ by a healthy workers’ state which had not yet degenerated under the Stalinist bureaucracy. The struggle of the Left Opposition against this bureaucratic degeneration called for the defence of workers’ democracy to ensure workers’ control of the state. These historic conditions never existed in China and bear no resemblance to state monopoly capitalism today! 

Second, we agree with Trotsky (see Carchedi and Roberts footnote 21 p256) in giving no credence to the renegades of Trotskyism who abused his name while he was still alive by claiming that ‘state capitalism’ had been restored in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1939. Workers’ property in Russia was the legacy of a workers’ revolution and the bureaucracy was forced to defend that property rather than the LOV. Trotsky denounced those who refused the unconditional defence of the SU claiming that capitalism was restored when workers’ property was still being defended against the LOV. We argue with Lenin that no scientific concept of ‘state capitalism’ exists outside the reality of State Monopoly Capitalism. 

State Monopoly Capitalism

Trotsky argued in Revolution Betrayed, that the political revolution that overthrew the bureaucracy would restore a healthy workers’ state. But he could not exclude the possibility that the capitalist counter-revolution would bring about the restoration of capitalism in Russia. State property could be easily adapted to the operation of the LOV in the epoch of state monopoly capitalism. The personnel of the bureaucratic state would overnight convert to the role of capitalists in the new state to serve the interests of collective capital. The main object would be to restore the private ownership of property. New state policies to manage the  productive, distributional and monetary tasks  would serve to regulate the market as a whole to produce capital goods, infrastructure, and the accumulation of capital. Concretely, the state would enter into the productive circuit to facilitate the formation of constant capital (plant and machinery etc) and variable capital (wages and the social wage). 

Marx had anticipated growing state intervention on behalf of capital in its administration of the  public debt which emerged in the 19th C to further the concentration and centralization of capital by taxing wages and accumulating savings. For Lenin the role of the state was central, in fact defining, to the age of state monopoly capital. State intervention in the market competition for existing value was proof that the laws of motion of capitalism could not be avoided. First value had to be produced by labour to be exchanged and accumulated by finance capital. The LTRPF would cause recurring crises of overproduction and the imperialist powers which resort to the counter-tendency of paying labour less than its value.

The extraction of super-profits and absolute rent would inevitably create deeper crises and wars between rival national blocs of capital. As a result the LTRPF downloaded deepening crises onto the backs of workers so that the class struggle would erupt into revolutions and counter-revolutions. In summary, the short 20th century from 1917 to 1992 was ultimately all about imperialism destroying the Bolshevik revolution and restoring its hegemony over the capitalist world to re-divide the spoils among the victors. 

While the LOV always dominated the history of capitalism, in both corporations and states, it does not do so under the same conditions. The revolution at the beginning of the short 20^thC was an historic defeat of global capitalism. Yet the counter-revolutionary end to the Cold War in 1992 which restored capitalism to Russia and China did not completely destroy the legacy of the revolution. Those who celebrated that counter-revolution as the end of ‘socialism’ and a victory for capitalism did not anticipate the contradictory blowback of the legacy of the former bureaucratic workers’ states. Notably the relatively high level of development of the forces of production, and the centralized command economy, that helped restore capitalism and create new imperialist rivals in the ‘great game’ for Eurasia and the World.

The counter-revolution in the revolution enabled the new capitalist states to benefit from the decay and decline of global capitalism. China was able to restore capitalism’ without submitting to ‘recolonisation’ and imperialist domination. This explains its ability to convert a transitional petty bourgeois national revolution into a state monopoly capitalist counter-revolution with the capacity to regulate and manage the LOV within the limits of rising organic composition and the LTRPF. But these benefits will be illusory for the great mass of workers and peasants.  China’s rapid rise is creating a reactionary response in the West which is already on the brink of world war over the repartition of Eurasia with escalating wars already on three fronts between the two imperialist blocs around the US and China. 

So the legacy proved progressive only in the sense that it allowed China to escape re-colonisation and quickly adapt a dynamic state monopoly capitalism to develop the forces of production over a two decades leap in growth. As part of that legacy  it carried with it the inescapable terminal crisis of overproduction in a dying and decaying global capitalist world.  The question is this, how long can China’s state capitalist management of the LOV create growth in the productive forces within the BRICS bloc and further the pre-conditions for socialism, before the inevitable determination of the laws of motion of capitalism explode the contradictions of class war, crises and inter-imperialist wars on the lives of workers and poor farmers? The answer is surely that only the world’s working classes can resolve this question by rising to the struggle to take power and plan a new society without exploitation, ecological destruction and nuclear war. 

 

Roberts on China transitioning to socialism https://www.redreview.ca/p/prc-75-today-the-transition-to-socialism

Roberts on China as a transitional economy to socialism  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/48713461.pdf

 Carchedi and Roberts (2023) Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century – Through the Prism of Value. Pluto

`           John Smith ttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/281225444_Imperialism_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

ILTT Draft theses on imperialism  https://www.cwgusa.org/?p=3021

 

The Victory of the Syrian Revolution over Assad and the Resurgence of the Arab Spring

                              Mass  celebration of the insurrection in Aleppo, December 8th  

After 13 years, the Arab Spring is reawakening with the Syrian Revolution overthrowing Bashar Al Assad. October 7th changed the chapter of the struggle in the Middle East, canceling the agreements of imperialism and the bourgeoisie that maintained a permanent counter-revolution against the permanent Revolution. To what extent will the example of the Syrian Revolution be recognized by the masses? How can we build a United Front in support of the Palestinian and Syrian Revolution to recognize the quantitative and qualitative changes that are taking place? 

The external and internal situation in Syria has opened up a possibility that HTS (Hayat Tahir Al-Sham – Committee for the Liberation of the Levant), the leading opposition force in the offensive against the Assad regime, could not let pass! The US and Israel are weakened by the war in Gaza. The regime’s allies, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are involved in their own wars, leaving Syria in the background. The Assad regime was unsustainable: absurd inflation, rationing for everything, energy only a few hours a day and totally dependent on foreign powers. HTS was the most isolated and relatively independent opposition force. HTS was watching Turkey negotiating with Russia for a conciliation with Assad, which would be its end. The other largest opposition forces are the SNA (Syrian National Army), led by former ministers and generals of Assad who are puppets of Turkey and fight the Kurds, and the other force is the Kurdish PKK, totally dependent on the US that never fought against the regime. 

HTS is considered a terrorist organization by the US, EU and UN, as well as by Russia. It is a jihadist, petty bourgeois organization that broke with Al Qaeda and has governed Idlib for some years. Idlib is the region of Syria that had the least economic importance and is predominantly rural, where many revolutionaries went after Assad took over several cities such as Aleppo and the outskirts of Damascus. HTS faced a lot of popular opposition in Idlib due to its authoritarianism and attempts to impose Sharia. It was in this context that it began to change its policy to a more moderate one. In an interview, HTS leader Al-Jolani stated that the most important thing he learned was that institutions need to exist and that they need to function. With the lessons learned from governing Idlib and the time it had to structure its military forces, HTS was the largest force and led the offensive against Assad and overthrew the half-century regime on December 8. With each liberated city, we are seeing this policy being put into practice in a very pragmatic way. 

In Damascus, HTS put Assad’s own prime minister on national television to announce the transition of power and the maintenance of institutions, and was kept as part of the transition of power process. Armed rebels are prohibited from entering civilian institutions as well as any hostility against religious minorities, and they are visibly disciplined to follow these guidelines. HTS has already made statements saying that its fight is against Assad and that it is not against Russia and Iran or other external and internal actors. The external actors, the US, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Iran, all view HTS with great distrust. HTS has enough power to negotiate. It has very strong popular support at the moment and will have to take this into account. The imperialist forces, whether from the US or Russia, will not be able to attack HTS without having to bomb a large part of Syria, which will not be as easy as in 2015. 

 Much will depend on the conversations that HTS will have from now on with all these internal and external agents. Russia/BRICS are coming out of the situation demoralized. Will it sell out the revolution to make deals with one of the imperialist blocs? Will it be pressured to maintain its popular support and deny deals that betray the revolution? Some discontent with the amnesty granted to agents of the deposed government is already emerging. The actors involved in the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah and Iran, are already appearing to change their position in relation to HTS. What will this relationship be like from now on? Will Hezbollah, without its imperialist ally Russia, turn to the forces on the ground? Will the SNA and Turkey seek their share of Syria or the government? Will the US maintain its control of the part it occupies together with the Kurdish PKK? This alliance puts the US on the opposite side of Turkey. 

Since the fall of the regime, Israel has been bombing Syria incessantly, especially on ammunition and weapons depots and strategic military points to prevent them from falling into the hands of the rebels. In addition, it has been advancing deeper into Syrian territory. This shows that the fall of Assad is not an easy victory for the US/Israel but rather a movement of the axis of resistance in Palestine towards a more popular base. The counterrevolution is already underway to divide Syria with Turkey in the North and Israel in the South by intervening militarily. They want to turn it into another war on terror against ISIS that all the imperialists and their proxies have been fighting since 9/11 and the imperialist social left is providing them with more ammunition. We have to convey the urgency to the base of the anti-Zionist movement to unite behind HTS with our transitional program for permanent revolution. It is the vanguard of the Arab revolution while the Zionists are the vanguard of the Islamophobic counterrevolution. 

 We will continue to analyze the actions of the numerous agents involved in the process that has caused so much general confusion when it comes to Syria, from the perspective of a revolutionary solution, with the tactics of military support and support in situations that serve to advance the revolution, without any illusions in the bourgeois leadership and maintaining independence from the imperialist powers in dispute. As Leninist-Trotskyists, we have no illusions in the petty bourgeois leadership of the HTS. We give military support, but not political support. The policy to advance the Syrian Revolution must be a government based on popular councils and a planned economy that expropriates the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois institutions must be replaced by workers’ institutions. The Syrian Revolution must advance to support the Palestinian Revolution and solidarity with the struggle of workers throughout the region. The Arab Spring was the great uprising of the masses against failed neoliberalism and the great global crisis of capitalism. 

Only the socialist revolution can put an end to the misery and wars in which the world is plunged. The failure of the left to have a revolutionary program to present to the masses in struggle, especially a program of independence from the imperialist blocs that have dragged the world towards a third war, is the main factor in the defeat of the masses and the working class that tries to resist misery and capitalist tyranny. The left that defends Russian/Chinese imperialism and supported the infamous Assad regime is demoralized. The social imperialist left has succumbed to Islamophobia and the “war on terror”. Unfortunately, a large part of the left that supports the Syrian Revolution is part of the “democratic” pro-imperialist left of the US/EU and supports them in the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine. 

 The lack of revolutionary leadership is the crisis of the working class. We defend a United Front of the working class that builds a program in the struggle with class independence in the face of the intensification of the inter-imperialist dispute between the US and China/Russia blocs. It is necessary to build a World Socialist Party that builds parties throughout the world. To move forward, the Syrian Revolution needs class solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution. 

 International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 12/10/2024

Class Struggle, No 150, Spring, September-October 2024

Class Struggle 150 by dbedggood on Scribd

Class Struggle 149 Winter June-August 2024

Class Struggle 149 June-August Winter 2024 by dbedggood on Scribd

May Day: Facing the Crises of Genocide, Global War and the Destruction of Our Planet!

 

Walking in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on April 16. Agence France-Presse

The Gaza genocide, unlike past genocides like that of the Congo, is being watched on smart phones around the world. The Zionist propaganda machine reveals itself as ‘white washing’ the colonial settler state and its 75 year project of Palestinian expulsion. The Zionists claim that any criticism of the Zionist state is anti-semitic and based on Jew hatred. This lie has been exposed in the streets in ten thousand demonstrations around the world where anti-Zionist Jews join arm in arm with Palestinians and their millions of supporters to oppose the genocide. 

The Western world bourgeois regimes have lined up behind the genocidal strategy, while the rest of the world is screaming its support for the Palestinian bourgeois democratic right to self-determination. The means to fight genocide is limited only by the fact that workers lack a world party of socialist revolution which turns Palestinian national liberation into the cause for the global overthrow of the rotten and corrupt capitalist system which can survive only by means of genocide. The crisis of the survival of humanity as a whole comes down to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class, ending capitalism and creating a socialist world.

In Israel, the U.S. and Germany, traditionally protected democratic rights to protest and speak out are being denied to students, academics and activists. Academics with tenure have been fired, suspended and hounded out of the profession. Student protesters are arrested and suspended from schools and universities and solidarity activists are targeted by the state and denied the right to speak to public forums.

Sustained protests for the duration of the genocide is radicalizing youth, many of whom were already politicized during the Black Lives Matter uprising and the strike wave that followed the end of the lockdown. This generation has already witnessed the false hope of the Democratic Socialists of America corralling activists as a left fringe of the imperialist Democratic Party. Kim Moody of Labor Notes writes in New Politics the electoral enthusiasm around Sanders and the Squad has faded as measured in hard currency contributions of small donors! It is past time to break with the capitalist parties of war, racism, sexism and strikebreaking!

As Marxists, we reject bourgeois pragmatism which began with genocide in the 16th century on the basis of racism and sexism. We reject electoralism which cannot cover up for genocide in Ukraine and Palestine. We defend the fundamental democratic right of youth to take to the streets and we recruit them to our PMP (proletarian military policy) alongside the ranks of the unions who need to organize self-defense militias against the state forces of imperialist powers of a system that is in its death agony. We know that class consciousness cannot blossom short of the lived experience of workers in struggle. And for that they need a political party that unites them on the basis of their common interest as workers creating the wealth, against racism, sexism and nationalism  which the ruling class uses to divide and destroy our class.

By organizing our class in fighting labor parties we will destroy the hold of pragmatism, electoralism and divisions in our ranks and build a revolutionary movement. One capable of smashing the imperialist states and their proxies to raise up workers’ governments around the world that will expropriate the centuries of stolen wealth to build a socialist society. An egalitarian society which restores the harmony between humans and nature and creates the conditions for the survival of our planet.

Only fatalists think it will happen by itself! Even the capitalists’ spy agencies know better; that’s why they target the organizers of the workers and oppressed. We need an army of such organizers and leaders, a party to train them, and a class struggle that demonstrates its own power, independent and based on workers’ democracy! To begin, in the Unions we need class struggle caucuses that redirect the memberships’ thought and action away from class collaboration and to actions implementing a transitional program. These caucuses will fight to replace the class collaborators with ever more militant vanguard layers.

Only Trotsky’s Transitional Program for Permanent Revolution can arm the international working class to resolve the accelerating global terminal crisis of capitalism in decay. Unable to reverse the system in its terminal decline, the capitalist rulers have blown through every global warning marker. Oceans are warming, the poles are melting, reefs are dying, fisheries are depleted, climate systems change faster than the infrastructure designed for the 19th-20th centuries can be patched up by the capitalist grafters. The contending imperialist powers have turned trade wars into proxy wars over control of resources, markets and for strategic advantage. No surprise these rivalries are catastrophic for populations who find themselves in the way.

The Ukraine, Taiwan and Israeli regimes are wholly dependent on U.S.A. funding. The NATO encirclement of Russia is backfiring as the Ukrainian proxy regime is running short of ammunition and troops. Troops are mutinying, swimming across the Dnieper to safety. ‘Slava Ukraine’ is close to collapse as more men escape abroad rather than die in the meat grinder. Israel’s fragility is exposed; it is dependent on the U.S.A./UE (European Union) and NATO for both arms and defense. It cannot get away with its genocide of Palestine without the collaboration of the U.S.A. and the UE. Taiwan, despite its recognition as part of China, has been taken over and militarily occupied by the U.S. as a new proxy for the coming war: with China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and the AUKUS partners mobilizing for war, coming perhaps as soon as next year.

In the imperialist nations vital resources are channeled away from social programs and into military production. In the U.S.A. the equivalent amount of the entire national debt has been spent on the military budget since 2000. Despite the enormous outlay, Russia has fought the US/NATO proxy Ukraine to a standstill in what is an inter-imperialist conflict. The $95 billion just allotted for wars in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan by the bi-partisan neocon cabal in Washington can’t match Russian missile production, let alone sustain Israel in a regional war. Those billions will never be more than a digital blip on Ukraine or Israel’s financial radar; the profits will go to Raytheon, Boeing, Rand, GE and the military industrial complex.

In the semi-colonies a national bourgeois comprador class participates in the imperialist parasitism perilously navigating between the declining USA/EU bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc. To the imperialists they offer the resources of the nation and the working class chained to the factory floor and broken by their ideological servants in media, academia, the union leaderships and the reformist and centrist parties. The economic crisis and imperialist competition expresses itself acutely in semi colonies. The burden of the capitalist system failing to counteract the Law of Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPTF) compounded by the necessary imperialist dynamic to dump the burden of the crisis on semi-colonies makes the working class in these countries super exploited.

South Africa, is threatened with sanctions for exposing the Gaza genocide to the world at the International Court of Justice. The sanctions only drive South Africa deeper into the China camp. The ANC and its left flank are hoping to attract Chinese investments which they then sell as ‘win-win’ deals to the masses as a path to a progressive form of state socialism modeled on China. U.S. imperialism responds by preparing for a ‘color revolution’ (HR 7256) backing the Democratic Alliance Party. Across the globe the workers, small farmers and oppressed are caught in a tug of war between these great powers!

In Zimbabwe, the state is attacking workers through capturing the dominant faction of the main trade union federation by enacting a Labour Amendment Act that criminalizes calling for and organizing collective job action. The state is maintaining a multi-currency system that they, together with business, manipulate to pay slave wages, giving the Chinese license and encouragement to disregard labor and environmental rights. Now they are introducing a new currency based on the theft of the value of workers incomes and savings. This goes along with the continued crackdown on basic worker rights to organize and strike and increased authoritarianism in defense of capitalist production with looting and corruption by the comprador bourgeoisie.

The rise of China as an imperialist state has found expression in the southern African region through fake anti-imperialist stances camouflaging the ongoing exploitation of labor power and the environment. Workers in the region must organize independently of both wings of imperialism and move beyond the collaborationist union leaders and bureaucrats through building shop floor controlled action bodies prepared to utilize tried and tested working class methods.

Imperialism is a death sentence for the workers of the world and only we can stop it! To do so we need our own political party, one based on working class political independence, based on our class experience of how labor is exploited by capitalism and how only class struggle and a transitional political program can resolve the crisis by building worker organizations to smash the capitalist state and create workers’ governments. Now is the moment to build a fighting workers-labor party and the revolutionary workers international needed to lead and coordinate the class struggle.

Our transitional program rejects the ideologies of pragmatism, patriarchy and post-modernism as the decadent genocidal culture of a dying capitalism throwing up and turbocharging all the old crap of past crimes against humanity. We reject racism, sexism and national chauvinism and denounce it as counter revolutionary. We affirm the positions of the Bolsheviks; down with Eurocentric white supremacy, national chauvinism of all shades, and the historic oppression of women. We build on the rich legacy of the historic collectivist struggles of slaves, women, peasants and workers in our struggle today. Workers and oppressed everywhere have the power and the will to resist and fight back.

The horror of the Zionist Israeli state violence against the Palestinian people cannot be stopped through moralist appeals to the parasitic exploiter class or their politicians! We need coordinated international actions: mass protests and worker actions such as labor political strikes, hot-cargoing of imperialist war goods to Israel, and sit-down strikes in the war industries. Workers parties, as part of a new Workers International, would organize and coordinate these actions on a world scale. But first we need to build our own mass revolutionary workers parties in every country to marshall the resources of the working class and poor farmers as one fist rather than atomized, decentralized, and apolitical protests sucked into single-issue dead ends and diversions in election years.

Independent workers parties and a workers’ international are needed that will take the rich historical lessons of the workers movement and encapsulate these lessons into a political program of transitional demands based on the method of Trotsky’s Fourth International that recognises the necessity for socialist revolution to halt the rush to extinction. For our class and species, we demand a future! For workers to live, imperialism must die!

Free Palestine!

Victory to Palestine! Defend the Palestinians! Drop all charges and free all Palestinian solidarity protesters! Down with Israel and theocracy! For a Socialist, federated West Asia!

We need to convene a new Zimmerwald to build a revolutionary opposition to inter-imperialist wars such as Ukraine and to agitate for dual defeatism to turn these wars into class wars at home against our “own” imperialist and proxy ruling classes.

Not one person, not one penny for the imperialist militaries! Billions for public works! Jobs for all through a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay! For a 100% cost of living increase linked to inflation!

For free quality healthcare, childcare, housing and education! For free abortion on demand! For women’s liberation through socialism!

The capitalists will only ever offer exploitation, war, racism, poverty, climate catastrophe…and fascism as their last line of defense. We need a Workers’ Government based on workers councils and defended by a workers militia to smash capitalism and carry out the tasks of building a socialist future.

For the nationalization without indemnification of the commanding heights of industry under democratic workers control as part of a centralized, planned world socialist economy.

Build Revolutionary Workers Parties and a new Revolutionary Workers International! For the World Socialist Revolution! Workers of the World Unite!

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/25/2024

Smash the Genocidal Zionist state! U.S.A. Hands off Iran! U.S. Imperialists Out of West Asia, Now! The tail does not wag the dog! Stop funding Israel! Zionists Out of Gaza and the West Bank Now!

An MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter lifts off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it transits the Strait of Hormuz off the waters of Iran [File: US Navy/Reuters]

Netanyahu has been trying to drag the U.S. into its ongoing ‘shadow war’ against Iran for decades. The U.S. wants its war with Iran but on its own terms, economic isolation, limited proxy engagements, shots across the bow, tepid challenges for sea lanes. None but the most flagrant neocons want tit-for-tat sparring  to escalate to full blown and  potentially nuclear warfare. Yet today sectors of the Israeli establishment seriously consider the Samson Option. The west holds its breath as Netanyahu’s war cabinet considers its options. 

The working class needs its own intervention to stop the escalation towards WWIII! The UN and International Court of Justice have proven themselves as feckless talk shops of the imperialist dominated by ‘world order’ which negate any independent action of the Global South.  Today workers and oppressed people need a New Zimmerwald to organize an internationalist class struggle against war and the root cause of war today–capitalist exploitation at home and imperialist oppression abroad.   

By bombing the Iranian embassy in Syria and killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, Israel  provoked Iran in hopes of a retaliation of measured proportion which would stiffen the  U.S.  resolve. Losing the media war, Israel needs to turn world attention away from the genocide in Gaza and to  reassert  its role as the primary victim of irrational international anti-semitism. Zionism’s war has  exposed its character as the bulldog of western imperialism  so it  needs  to change the world’s conversation from its attempt to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, to the Iranian response. Never mind the fact that bombing the embassy violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations article 22, which made the premises of foreign missions inviolable. 

Invoking Article 51, Iran responded on April 13,th 2024 by hitting Israel with dozens of drone and missile strikes targeting military installations, emphasizing their adherence to rules of engagement by not targeting civilian populations. The U.S. and UK responded as could be expected placing the blame on Iran and employing its resources to shield Israel from the incoming. This of course stands in stark contrast to the fact that they not only stood by failing to protect the civilians of Gaza while Israel bombed them, but continued to provide arms and logistical support to the Zionist aggressors even after having been exposed in the international court of Justice. 

Western media brushes aside the provocation attempting to rally international outrage at Iran–as if history started yesterday! This won’t work in the Global South! The masses are applauding Iran’s action and have been hoping someone would intervene on behalf of the Palestinians!  Of course, Iran will not press on to liberate Palestine, citing violations of their sovereignty as cause.  In an alignment of forces even the Arab theocracies which are today navigating the space between the Chinese and U.S. imperialisms do not speak for their own people  while they close their air space to Iranian overflights, distancing themselves from the Iranian action. 

The hawkish Democratic Party, dominated by the neocons in Washington, are committed to the defense of Israel regardless of the 34,000 dead in Gaza. Arms keep flowing despite the feigned outrage at the deaths of a few aid workers! Biden feels the pressure on the campaign trail as Democratic party events are being disrupted by Palestine Solidarity activists  and his government stands accused of participation in the genocide by arming the Zionist settler state. Netanyahu, observing the backpedaling of the  U.S., has been stoking the fires of regional war, cashing in on the  U.S.  promise of unconditional defense and catching Biden in the crosshairs. Trump, sniping from the sidelines, claims this would never have happened on his watch. 

Biden, losing in the polls, has made gestures to counter the Arab American community’s  campaigns of withholding votes in  the Democratic primary. Netanyahu also wants to stay in office to stay out of jail and could not let Biden play big daddy and broker an unwanted peace. Provoking war with Iran is a gambit to pull Biden off the fence. But the U.S. does not want nuclear war and knows the unhinged Netanyahu with fantasies of Biblical proportions could cross that trip wire. No doubt after Iran took its shot, Biden was on the horn with Netanyahu trying to calm the whole affair down. Biden lost Afghanistan, or so the story goes….he does not want to lose Israel, at least before the election. The next few hours will be a walk back from the brink. But the masses in the streets want a resolution that ends the genocide in Gaza and the accelerating pogroms and occupations in the West Bank. So neither Biden nor Netanyahu can resolve the contradictions that are foremost in front of the world today. The Zionist colonial settler state must be smashed. For workers revolution and a socialist Palestine! For a Socialist Federation of West Asia!

The terminal decline of capitalism offers up a cesspool of the most reactionary ideas. Ideas which the ‘forward thinking’ intelligentsia presumed were shadows of a long buried past are today normalized in the rantings of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Trump and and even many old fashioned liberal Democrats.  They dehumanize oppressed people from Haiti to Gaza as pests, gangsters and terrorists. This is awkwardly reminiscent of how every oppressor throughout history has demonized the oppressed! 

Zionism is losing the propaganda war because the mainstream media is rigged by its corporate owners in favor of imperialism, and everyone knows it, so they can no longer maintain the hypocrisy that white supremist colonialist regimes are forces of democracy! 

Israel is a puppet state which cannot survive without the U.S. backing. The  U.S. won’t swat them down because it is the U.S. aircraft carrier on land in the region. It stands as a bulwark against the regional powers and serves to divide the Arab nations and their Iranian neighbors. Israel serves to keep the national bourgeoisie of the neighboring nations tied to imperialism and committed to stopping the masses from advancing the permanent revolution and winning socialism by defeating imperialism. 

Israel is an occupier founded upon the mutual interest of Western Imperialist intention to control Arab oil and Jewish  capitalists’  class  interests.  

Palestine is the last of the 20thC. settler colonial states in struggle for its liberation. 75 years of determined struggle hardened ideological lines on both sides. 

So we need an international proletarian military policy to turn war in Palestine into war against the actual puppet master, the U.S. ruling class, and all the other imperialist governments who support the Zionist Israeli state. In the unfolding war between the U.S. proxy Israel and Iran we stand for the unconditional military defense of Iran without giving any political support to its theocratic capitalist regime.  

Build  the mass actions in solidarity with Palestine and Iran up into labor struggles internationally against the imperialist backers of Israel (USA, UK, France, Germany and their proxies Ukraine etc). Create teach-ins at every labor council, to debate Palestine in front of the working class.  Fight for the political independence of the working class! Give no votes to capitalist and popular front parties!

Win the workers movement to political strikes in defense of the Palestinians, against the arming of Israel and against all Israeli and imperialist military actions. Block military shipments. Dockers must initiate strikes to refuse loading Israeli  commercial ships and hot cargo and divert military and humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. This is how anti-imperialist workers must turn the imperialist proxy war into a class war at home! 

Propagandize the soldiers, sailors and airmen; show them the facts that they are to be used for genocide in order to hold back the working masses and keep oil profits flowing between the comprador bourgeois oil barrons and big western oil interests. 

Victory to the Palestine Resistance!  Defeat the IDF! Defend Iran! Build revolutionary workers’ parties in the imperialist nations and throughout West Asia!  For a new Zimmerwald to organize against imperialist wars! For a new Workers International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution! 

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/14/2024

US Hands off Haiti! For a Socialist Republic in a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Americas!

 

Haiti is experiencing yet another moment of great instability as state power is disintegrating. Hunger and misery plague the country and armed gangs are spread across the capital, blocking roads and taking over public buildings. A consequence of centuries of control and exploitation by French and later US imperialism of the country.

Haiti had the only successful slave revolution. Its military defeat of France in 1804 sparked the wave of national independence across Latin America led by Simon Bolivar who began his struggle to ‘liberate’ Latin America from the European powers from an already liberated Haiti. 

Yet Bolivar refused to come to the aid of Haiti fearing that it might inspire workers and peasants to overthrow the Latin American bourgeoisies. Isolated without support from the Bolivariains,  Haiti was re-colonised by France and Napoleon forced the free slaves to pay the price of their freedom as part of the national debt well into the 20th century.

Imperialism and the Latin American bourgeoisies never accepted Haiti’s freedom because it stood out as the only example of a national liberation struggle led by slaves. Since that time it has suffered countless occupations and interventions by American imperialism which regarded it as the poor child on its back door step, either occupying or creating puppet governments for more than a century until the election of Aristide in 1991. The populist priest  Aristide was elected President in 1991 but ousted by a US backed military coup that same year. Another US military occupation followed and Aristide returned in 1994 to complete his term of office. Aristide was re-elected in 2000 but fell out with the US and its neoliberal policies and was forced out of the country in 2004 by a US/French coup.

In 2004, MINUSTAH, a US intervention fronted by the UN, militarily occupied Haiti, which lasted until 2017. Under the pretext of taking care of security, it imposed terror on the population and ensured that American companies could control oil and other resources etc without risk of democratic intervention. 

MINUSTAH was led by Brazil, which at the time was governed by Lula, a Popular Front government that served the interests of imperialism, whether at home or abroad. The general that Lula sent to command MINUSTAH in Haiti was the general who later became Bolsonaro's right-hand man in his government.

Haiti is the historic expression of naked capitalist barbarism from colonisation in the 15th C to its terminal crisis today. It turns the imperialist narrative of the civilizing mission on its head when slaves were the only exploited class to win freedom from bourgeois rule. In a time of decadence in American imperialism, which is in dispute with rising Chinese imperialism, the USA intends to hold on to Haiti at all costs. Through the UN, it is trying to create a security force in Haiti that appears to be independent of the hated US and UN occupations. Its attempt to use Kenyan police officers is opposed both in Kenya and in the Global South. In Haiti, the rebels have rejected all external intervention outright.

In the face of all imperialist exploitation and attacks, workers and poor people in Haiti have always resisted. Today, many of the gangs that the media demonizes are organizations that were formed in neighborhoods for self-defense against state abuse and crime. One of those who is recognized as the main leader of the popular revolution, Jimmy Cherizier, who has united a number of territorial ‘gangs’ into the G6 which fights corruption and crime and seeks to organise all the working masses in an armed struggle. 

Cherizier makes it clear that he is fighting against the foreign intervention that has led the country to misery and chaos for decades. Tired of government leaders who are just puppets of imperialism, he demanded the departure of the US favoured Prime Minister Ariel Henry and prevented his return to Haiti. He is now fighting the installation by the US of a Presidential Transition Council that is not elected by the people and does not represent them.

We support the rebels who take up arms and resist imperialist domination and the national bourgeoisie who only follow orders from their international leaders. It is a basic democratic right to rebel against hunger, famine, poverty, lack of infrastructure and corruption that plague the country. 

We strongly oppose the demonisation of working class rebels like Cherizier as ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists’ on the part of the bourgeoisie and the fake Left. It is patronizing and racist to label the descendants of revolutionary slaves as doomed to fight among themselves and incapable of resisting their oppressors. The duty of the revolutionary left is to come to the aid of such incipient armed anti-imperialist rebellions and fight for their national self-determination. 

It is also the duty of the revolutionary left to win the resistance to the permanent revolution for a socialist republic and prevent the revolution being overwhelmed by the bourgeois counter-revolution. Haiti was betrayed by the first Bolivarian revolution and now by the second of Castro/Chavez. The G6 led by Cherizier needs to advance towards the organization of workers and poor peasants into armed committees who make this fight in an organized and classist way. Haiti has no way out of the barbarism it finds itself in without the seizure of power, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the expulsion of imperialism.

It is necessary to build a party of world revolution that guides workers in this moment of instability that affects countries around the world, especially in the global south. The so-called global south means the semi-colonial countries exploited and controlled by imperialism and which today are suffering the instability of a world order in which the decadence of the USA puts it directly in dispute with the ascending imperialisms of China and Russia, transmitted to the semi-colonies and moving towards a new world war.

We are for a new Zimmerwald to bring together a revolutionary left and build a program of transition to socialism for the working and poor masses in the struggle for the world revolution. A revolutionary leadership that fights Castro-Chavism as a counter-revolutionary force that prevents class independence and leads workers to an International Popular Front with the Chinese imperialist bloc and to die in inter-imperialist wars.

For class independence, for the World Party of Socialist Revolution based on Trotsky's Transitional Program! For Permanent Revolution!