Class Struggles in India

Workers at Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India’s (HMSI) Tapukara plant in Alwar, Rajasthan, went on a strike bringing production to a complete standstill.

India is undergoing a crisis of semi-colonial oppression facing the deepening world crisis of imperialism. Today this is evident in the student struggles at JNU; the Honda strike and the ongoing war in Kashmir. But what is the history behind this crisis? India is economically backward as it became capitalist belatedly and continues to be a semi-colony. ‘Independence’ from Britain was a fraud, based as it was on a reactionary settlement that broke up the sub-continent and created hostile client regimes based on casteism and communalism, trapping the sub-continental working class behind colonial borders. Imperialist Britain left this legacy of ‘divide and rule’ as time bombs that would blow up as crises forced the capitalist contradictions to break the surface.

Reactionary Hindutva and Caste System

The big time bombs are the reactionary nationalist regimes founded on religion and caste which each ruling class uses to legitimate its rule. In India, the ancient Hindu caste system, a hangover from pre-capitalist tributary society, was used to maintain class rule. In Pakistan appeals to the authority of Islam also a living relic of a pre-capitalist society was used for the same purpose. Such communal ‘bombs’ created by the departing colonial power drove East and West Pakistan to war and created the war in Kashmir as a running sore.

But while pre-capitalist Hindutva and radical Islam are the main ruling class ideologies contested in these bloody wars, they face opposition by bourgeois ideology that opposes these reactionary ideologies as ‘fascist’ aberrations which must be defeated and replaced by the completed bourgeois national democratic revolution. The main proponents of ‘bourgeois democracy’ today are not the bourgeoisie but the petty bourgeoisie led by the Stalinist and Maoist currents in the sub-continent.

Reactionary Stalinism/Maoism

So when radical secular youth are attacked by Hindutva such as at JNU, the Stalinist/Maoists delude the youth into believing that Hindutva as an ancient cultural hangover can be replaced by completing the bourgeois national revolution. To them, this requires a minimum/maximum program to fight for bourgeois demands such as national independence, land reform, labour reform, electoral reform, the abolition of the caste system, nationalisation of large foreign and national firms, etc, (as minimum demands) to prepare the conditions for socialism in the future (maximum demand).

For example, for the Stalinists India’s occupation of Kashmir is defending the unity and integrity of capitalist India, while the Maoists/Naxalites advocate secession to create an independent capitalist Kashmir. And when Honda workers strike against the bosses to defend their jobs and conditions both Stalinists and Maoists mobilise their supporters to fight for fair wages based on fair bourgeois labor laws. For both Stalinists and Maoists the realisation of such a bourgeois democratic revolution creates the pre-conditions for future socialism.

The problem with this Stalinist/Maoist ‘two stage’ theory is that in the epoch of imperialism, monopoly state capital relies upon an increasingly authoritarian nation state to regulate and repress the working class and the poor peasantry. The national bourgeoisie, in turn, is clearly subservient to the various imperialist powers that are major investors in the economy. In order to extract their super profits, imperialist powers use their client states to suppress all such demands for democratic rights and freedoms making bourgeois parliaments incapable of implementing minimal demands.

Nationalism is Counter-revolutionary 

 Tying the hands of workers who are fighting for basic democratic and economic demands to the machinery of the capitalist nation state is in essence counter-revolutionary. Historically, concessions won from the national bourgeoisie as a result of mass mobilisations are granted only until the movement is contained or suppressed and such concessions can be conveniently withdrawn. That is why to sow illusions that the nation state can make even minimal political and economic concessions in the epoch of imperialism when periodic crises of capital can only be resolved by the defeat of all working class resistance, dooms that class to defeat.

To understand this, we need only look at the struggles in the sub-continent, betrayed by the false notion of the two-stage bourgeois revolution as advocated by the Stalinists and Maoists, which led to crushing defeats of revolutionary armed struggles. The clearest example of such a defeat as the result of the betrayal of the rank and file membership at the hands of the Stalinist and Maoist leaders is Nepal where the Prachanda regime helped the bourgeoisie to suppress the revolution. Only where workers rapidly overcome those illusions and resort to independent and armed organisations of proletarian revolution can there be any prospect of the winning of bourgeois democratic right as part of a victorious socialist revolution.

Trotsky and Permanent Revolution

Against the Stalinist/Maoist minimum/maximum stageist sellout to the bourgeoisie, there is the Bolshevik program kept alive by Trotsky in the Transitional Program of 1938. The Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) program for the Indian sub-continent was based on that program. Capitalist semi-colonies like India must fight to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution as part of the Permanent Revolution. Imperialism and their reactionary national bourgeois clients are counter-revolutionary enemies of workers’ democracy. The nations of the sub-continent must be re-united but as a Federation of Socialist Republics. 

This cannot happen unless the workers and poor peasants of the sub-continent are united behind an internationalist party with a revolutionary transitional program that fights to turn the incomplete national revolution into the Permanent Revolution.

So what must be done in the Student movement? The Hindutva can be defeated only if the students reject the Stalinist line of a bureaucratic bloc with the non-existent ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie or the Maoist petty bourgeois substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. Students can only defend their basic rights by building a class alliance with industrial workers and poor farmers across all castes, genders and national/ethnic identities.

The example of the Honda strike proves that the industrial proletariat is ready and willing to fight. What it needs is the unity and leadership to break from the Stalinist/Maoist labor bureaucracy which serves the interests of the bourgeois state. Students must take up the fight of industrial workers and build strikes and occupations as the basis of workers councils and militias capable of bringing a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government to power.

Students must take up the fight for self-determination for all the sub-continental nations and peoples by means of permanent revolution. Self-Determination in Kashmir and in all the other nations or regions like Nepal and the Punjab oppressed by India can be realised only under a socialist federation where all nations and peoples are free of oppression with a right to secede. 

For an internationalist revolutionary workers party!

For a Federation of Socialist Republics of South Asia!

China and the Socialist Future

Yue Yuen Shoe Strike (Nike Adidas) over unpaid pensions 2014

China’s current role as the world’s leading industrial nation is the result of its unique history as an former empire, a British colony, a ‘socialist’ republic and today, a new imperialist power. It is the most dynamic capitalist society today having emerged out of a centralised bureaucratic state ‘socialism’. This makes China’s role in the world unique but not exceptional. While China is recognised as being a ‘leader’ in growth, in consumption, and in new technology, to keep this leadership it cannot jump over the capitalist laws of history. 

China’s slowdown proves that it not immune to these laws. It is not a panacea for global capitalism’s decline. China is now facing its own capitalist crisis of overproduction which it cannot resolve without attacking the 1 billion Chinese workers. And despite its past defeats those workers cannot survive without fighting for a genuine socialist revolution. That is why China, more than any other the country, is where capitalism’s past and future manifests itself as a fundamental clash between the proletariat and the capitalist ruling class. 

 We can dispense with those pseudo theories that explain China’s rise as something to do with ‘market socialism’. This is a futile attempt to both recognise the truth that the capitalist market exists in China, yet somehow claim it serves the goals of ‘socialism. The reality is that the restoration of the capitalist market could not coexist with ‘socialism’ in its bastardised bureaucratic form of state ownership of property in China. It had to destroy those aspects of Chinese society that owe anything to ‘socialism’. First, it had to defeat the working class as the class that grew up under bureaucratic ‘socialism’. Far from advancing under ‘market socialism’ the workers met with an historic defeat.

The restoration of capitalism was a huge defeat for the millions of workers. Hao Qi says:

“During the country’s transition to capitalism, as the bonus-centered incentive system could not sustain itself, enterprises needed the existence of a reserve army to discipline workers and a segregated labor market to divide and conquer the working class. A continuous influx of migrant workers and the 30 million laid-off workers from the state-owned sector jointly expanded the reserve army of labor within a few years in the 1990s. The reserve army significantly depressed the power of the working class as a whole, and the segregation of the labor market also weakened the solidarity of the working class. This is why we have witnessed the major decline of labor’s share since the early 1990s.”

However according to the same writer the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 reversed that decline:

“There is a new turning point for the Chinese working class. After the outbreak of the global capitalist crisis, labor’s share in China began to recover. Along with this fact, one can also observe that the nominal wage level has grown faster than nominal GDP since 2008, and in 2012 China’s working-age population decreased for the first time in the reform era, which implies that the reserve army of labor will shrink in the near future. More importantly, there is a developing workers’ struggle for a decent living wage that is sufficient to afford the cost of living in the urban areas. The new generation of migrant workers who were mostly born in the 1980s and ‘90s insists on living in the urban areas. This has led to struggles for higher wages. Workers’ struggle for a larger share of the national income will eventually end the high-profit era for capitalists and thus open up a new era for the Chinese economy.” ibid

In sum, this ‘optimistic’ view of the labor movement in China is that it has recovered from its early defeats of the 1990s and has emerged ‘empowered’ and capable of increasing the share of labor. It argues that rising numbers of strikes and successes in improving wages and conditions will lead to higher consumption and overcome China’s economic problems. How realistic is this view?

Critics have argued that the ‘empowerment’ thesis is ‘false optimism’ and not backed by the reality. Strikes have in fact declined since the massive labor militancy in the early days of capitalist restoration in the 1990s. They question the claim that the reserve army of migrant workers flooding to the cities is slowing significantly and reducing downward pressure on wages. The rural reserve army is still 300 million strong. More important is the crisis which forces capital to increase the rate of exploitation of wage labor. There is a trend towards precarization of work, with shorter hours, atomization of the workforce, worsening conditions, employer corruption of unions etc. Even the purported ‘victory’ of rising wages reflects central government policy of boosting consumption rather than union power.

Whatever the evidence that the record number of strikes is linked to growing class conscious labor movement can we draw the conclusion that Chinese workers are any better or worse prepared than in other capitalist countries to fight back against the effects of a major economic crash on their lives? That would be to ignore the historical differences between the West and the East.

Just as the recent rapid rise of China as a major imperialist power is unprecedented (the last major power to emerge as imperialist was the USA before the First World War!) relative to the rest of the capitalist world, so we have to look at the developing class struggle in China in the same light.

Class struggle in China is conditioned by its history as an pre-capitalist empire for millennia, a capitalist colony for over a century (from the Opium war of 1840), then by a national revolution that broke from global capitalism from 1949 to the 1990s, followed by the restoration of capitalism and the rise of a new Chinese imperialism. This unique history has important implications for our understanding of China and global capitalism today.

What makes China different? 

 To explain the impact of the past on China today and on the prospects for a socialist future, we have to explore what makes China’s road to capitalism different from the West. Since China today is clearly capitalist the class struggle between the working class, poor peasants and the capitalist ruling class is like that of all capitalist states. However, there are important differences in the development of capitalism in China.

The First Chinese Revolution in 1911 led by the new bourgeois class overthrew the Qing dynasty. But because Chinese development was retarded by imperialism, no powerful national bourgeoisie had emerged capable of leading the democratic revolution in China. It was an already historically redundant class caught between the massive peasantry and the rising industrial proletariat on the one side, and the occupying imperialist powers on the other side.

The weak national bourgeoisie feared the peasants and workers more than the imperialist exploiters and sided with the latter. This fear was well founded as it was the workers and poor peasants who defeated Japan and the Kuomintang army in 1949, proving once again after Russia in 1917 that ‘backward’ countries in the epoch of imperialism can only become independent of imperialism through socialist revolution.

This unique history is the big difference between China and the West. In the West capitalist development in the 19th and 20th centuries occurred over centuries on the basis of the plunder of the colonial world including the plunder of the ancient Chinese empire. Modern imperialism allowed these nations to accumulate huge wealth and bribe large sections of the working class with colonial super-profits to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie as politicians in the reformist parties and bureaucrats in the labor unions.

Trotsky pointed out that this accounted for the success of the revolution in Russia and its failure in Europe. The strength of reformism in Europe tied workers to the parliamentary system whereas in Russia, a backward capitalist country under a Tsarist dictatorship, bourgeois democracy was yet to be born. The socialist revolution overtook the bourgeois democratic revolution and incorporated its tasks as part of the ‘permanent revolution’.

However, for the Bolsheviks, a successful workers revolution in a backward country could not lead to socialism in one country. Russia’s isolation and economic backwardness created the conditions for the emergence of a bureaucracy under Stalin after 1924. The Stalinist bureaucracy reverted to a Menshevik “two-stage” theory that 'backward' (colonial or semi-colonial) countries had to follow the example of the Western countries and go through a bourgeois democratic stage to prepare the conditions for socialism. In the absence of a Russian bourgeoisie Stalin reverted to the old Bolshevik formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasants” in which the workers and all the peasantry would complete the bourgeois revolution in the absence of a revolutionary bourgeoisie.

According to his unreconstructed Menshevik cynicism that the proletarian revolution was premature in Russia, Stalin turned this theory into the “bloc of four classes” i.e. a national front of the proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeois intelligentsia, and national bourgeoisie, to bring about the ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution. This would allow the Soviet Union to form alliances with 'democratic' capitalist countries to buy the time necessary to build ‘socialism in one country’.

Against this Menshevik theory, the Bolshevik concept of Permanent Revolution was defended by the Left Opposition between 1923 and 1928 in an effort to win the leadership of the CCP to lead the poor peasants against the national bourgeoisies, including the rich peasants (kulaks), and the imperialist bourgeoisies. So the ‘permanent revolution’ must start off as a bourgeois democratic revolution against imperialism but immediately pass over to the socialist revolution against the bourgeoisie.

Theory/program of ‘permanent revolution’

Karl Marx originated this theory after the failure of the bourgeois revolutions in Europe in 1848. Henceforth the bourgeoisie was incapable of completing its own revolution to extend bourgeois rights to the masses (as we saw when Napoleon revoked the freedom of the slaves in Haiti) and that historic task was now that of the proletariat as part of the world socialist revolution.

Marx foresaw that the colonial world would not need to follow mechanically copy the stages of growth of capitalism in the West. Once the West extended is rule over the whole world (coming to its full force as imperialism in the late 19th century) the colonies could complete their national democratic struggle for independence only by means of socialist revolution.

In 1850 Marx talking about ‘backward’ China wrote:

“Chinese socialism may, of course, bear the same relation to European socialism as Chinese to Hegelian philosophy. But it is still amusing to note that the oldest and most unshakeable empire on earth has, within eight years, been brought to the brink of a social revolution by the cotton bales of the English bourgeoisie; in any event, such a revolution cannot help but have the most important consequences for the civilized world. When our European reactionaries, in the course of their imminent flight through Asia, finally arrive at the Great Wall of China, at the gates which lead to the home of primal reaction and primal conservatism, who knows if they will not find written thereon the legend: “République chinoise Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” Review: January-February, 1850

Just as in Europe where the reactionary bourgeoisie was suppressing ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ for fear of the working class, in China the Taiping uprising in 1850 against the British invaders proved to Marx that that the working class had the potential lead the peasants to overthrow not only imperialism but also its own weak pro-imperialist bourgeoisie and complete the bourgeois revolution as the socialist revolution. Thus Marx anticipated the prospect of ‘socialist revolution’ (even if ‘bourgeois’ at the start) led by workers and peasants completing the bourgeois revolution as ‘permanent revolution’ in backward capitalist countries.

Such an eventuality was first proven correct in Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks moved quickly to complete the bourgeois revolution avoiding the death trap of the bourgeois Provisional Government between February and October 1917. They took over the program of the party of poor peasants, the Social Revolutionaries, for ‘land to the tiller’, to win them to the revolution. They expropriated foreign capitalists, repudiated the foreign debt, and formed the Red Army to defeat the military invasions of the imperialists. Even when widespread starvation caused by the Civil War forced the Bolsheviks to allow the rich peasant Kulaks and capitalists to profit from agriculture and trade, these enterprises were under the control of the workers state.

However, just as in Russia where permanent revolution was aborted by global capitalism and the Stalinist bureaucracy after 1924, in ‘backward’ China the CCP, as part of the Comintern dominated by Stalin, also adopted the Menshevik program of the Bloc of Four Classes and the two-stage revolution. The first ‘democratic’ stage of the revolution required a bloc of workers, peasants, intellectuals and ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie. This bloc would require the CCP to subordinate itself to Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist army and expose it to repression.

Trotsky and the Left Opposition from 1923 onwards opposed Stalin’s Menshevik theory as part of his betrayal of Bolshevism and his program for “socialism in one country” and fought against this policy in the CCP. They condemned Stalin’s treacherous role in the smashing of the Second Chinese revolution in 1927 when the bourgeois general Chiang Kai Chek unleashed his army to massacre the CCP leaders and the militant rank and file in Shanghai and Canton.

After the betrayal of the Second Chinese Revolution the CCP was led by Mensheviks like Mao who retreated from the cities to a peasant war of national liberation against Japan and the nationalist Kuomintang. Following its military victory in 1949 the CCP tried to negotiate with the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie only to find it had fled into the imperialists’ camp. The CCP had to amend Stalin’s bloc of Four Classes to a bloc of Three Classes led not by the workers but by the petty bourgeois CCP leadership. The result was the formation of a bureaucratic centralised state apparatus run by the CCP to complete the ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution but taking state power in the name of workers and peasants.

Capitalist property was expropriated and the market replaced by the plan administered by a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state. The CCP intelligentsia promoted itself as the state manager of ‘socialist’ property but in reality the workers and peasants had no say in how the state was run or the planning process itself. There was no workers democracy that could replace the bureaucracy and move China towards a genuine socialism. China as a bureaucratically deformed ‘workers’ state was stuck in limbo between its capitalist past and its socialist future. Its fate would be decided either by a political revolution in which workers overthrew the bureaucracy and took power directly to implement genuine socialism, or the defeat of the workers by the parasitic bureaucracy to restore capitalism under the ideology of “market socialism”.

Was the Chinese revolution ‘socialist’?

Was this the socialist revolution Marx spoke of? No, because the workers did not lead the poor peasants to the seizure of power. The struggle for national independence was led by a bureaucratic Stalinist party forced by the desertion of the bourgeoisie to base itself on the workers and poor peasants as a parasitic caste feeding off their labor.

After the revolution the bureaucracy had to industrialise to develop the forces of production to meets the needs of both the rural and industrial workforce as well as provide a surplus for the parasitic caste. The poor peasants who had formed the ranks of the national army were rapidly subordinated by the growth of industry and the rise of the urban working class.

The peasantry had no future as an independent class. The peasantry’s aspirations are limited to the horizon of petty capitalism or to private capitalist land ownership. The state blocked these aspirations by collectivising the land. So the fate of the peasantry was to become a rural labor force and a reserve army of labor to serve the needs of industry.

This change in rural society follows from the need to develop agricultural productivity to cheapen the wage goods of industrial workers and to create a surplus army of landless peasants who could migrate to the cities as a reserve of cheap labor. Thus wages in industry were driven down by migrant labor whose low wages were supplemented by subsistence goods in the countryside.

While this bureaucratically deformed workers state appears to bourgeois intellectuals as no more than a new ‘socialist’ elite administering the old centralised state of the ‘middle empire’, it was in reality now under the overall determining influence of the global capitalist economy. Rebuffed by the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy had to forcibly collectivise the agricultural labor of the old peasant family farmers to meet the needs of the industrial working class and generate a surplus.

But the bureaucracy could not claim the surplus as private property without stoking a political revolution of peasants and workers challenging its rule. It was necessary to resort to corruption and abuse of the norms of ‘socialism’ to maintain its privileges.

The bureaucratic plan led to the Chinese economy stagnating and a declining surplus. Because this threatened the material basis of the bureaucracies privileges by 1978 the party embarked on the first market reforms to increase output. The CCP had increasing difficulty justifying its reforms in terms of ‘socialist’ norms of freedom and equality to the masses which had the power to resist them. It stretched the concept of ‘socialism’ inventing “market socialism” to sell the restoration of ‘capitalism’ to the masses.

However, increasing opposition to ‘market socialism’ as market reforms to restore capitalism threatened the rule of the bureaucracy. The defeat of the 1989 uprising of Tienanmen Square that arose as a protest against growing corruption and enrichment of the party leadership at the expense of freedom and equality, was an historic defeat for the working class and marked the tipping point in the restoration process. The CCP Congress in 1992 for the first time recognised that the economy was now based on the market (law of value) rather than state planning.

Thus the inherent class contradiction of Chinese ‘socialism’ (between the bureaucracy as agent of global capitalism, and the peasants and workers) was resolved with the historic defeat of workers by the bureaucracy determined to convert itself into a capitalist class. The concessions to workers under the bureaucratic state – labor protection in the nationalised SOEs, peasant property, labor rights etc - were removed or subordinated to demands of capitalist profit. All the old ‘socialist’ protections of workers and peasants rights became increasingly eliminated.

Unable to escape the global crisis of capitalism which is now enveloping China, the Chinese working class is facing millions of redundancies as inefficient firms are closed down. They have to fight for the most basic demands, for the ‘iron rice bowl’ for jobs and a living wage etc for their survival. These struggles are leading to more strikes and occupations which will pose the necessity of taking control of industry. At the same time the struggle of rural collectives in the villages exposed to corruption and exploitation for decades remains the basis for the survival of the 300 million rural reserve army of labor.

Industrial workers and rural workers can only resolve China’s capitalist crisis in their own class interests by seizing power, overthrowing the Chinese bourgeoisie and replacing the capitalist state with a Workers and Farmers' State able to implement a socialist plan. The only ‘new era’ in the age of global capitalist decline and terminal crisis in which workers can win a living income will be the new socialist era. So how do we get there? And what would it look like?

A Transitional Program for China

Immediate demands
1. Return to the Rice Bowl! Jobs for all and a living wage! Free, universal health, education and social welfare!

2. Defend the collective land rights of villages! For a state rural bank to fund cooperatives!

3. Build fighting, democratic unions! Form strike committees! For workers occupation of industry, and workers and farmers’ councils!

4. For a mass independent workers and working farmers political party to put up candidates against the CCP!

5. For a world party of socialist revolution based on the revolutionary program of the communist internationals including the 1938 Transitional Program!

Democratic demands
1. Reject all historic oppression today! Full equality to all without discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability etc!

2. China is not returning to its “middle kingdom”, it is a modern, capitalist empire! No to Chinese great power chauvinism!

3. Against Chinese imperialism! In any war with other imperialist powers we are for workers turning their guns on their own ruling class!

4. Reject colonial oppression! For the right of self-determination for oppressed peoples and nations!

5. No to false Stalinist and Maoist national/popular fronts with the national bourgeoisies against imperialism!

Socialist Demands
1. Reject capitalist restoration under the guise of ‘market socialism’. Down with the CCP and its new Red Capitalist class! Down with the billionaires!

2. For the political general strike and workers insurrection! For a popular army, workers’ and peasants’ militias!

3. For a Workers’ and Farmers' Government based on soviets everywhere! For the immediate expropriation of the private property of Chinese and foreign capitalists!

4. For a workers plan based on soviets to plan production for need! From each according to the ability, to each according to their need!

5. For a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Asia-Pacific!

India: Struggle in Maruti-Suzuki at Manesar and the Workers Socialist Party

 
We reprint an article on the long standing workers struggle at Maruti-Suzuki by the Workers Socialist Party of India. 

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Two day protest dharna on 7-8 November, organised by the 546 dismissed workers of Maruti-Suzuki at Manesar, under the banner of now defunct trade union, Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU), failed to make any dent, as the pro-corporate media ignored it and its Centrist-Stalinist leaders isolated the action, consciously.


Giving no weight to the protest, Maruti-Suzuki India Ltd. announced that it is gearing up to increase production. “Production is normal at Manesar. By December, we plan to roll out 1,950 cars per day, compared to the 1,700 units we produced in July,” said a company executive.

At present 4000 workers are employed in the Manesar plant, which company is planning to increase to more than 6000, recruiting about 500 per month.

Earlier, Maruti Suzuki had cut by a third its regular workforce and dismissed 546 employees in connection with the violent labour unrest at its Manesar facility on July 18, out of which more than 160 are still languishing in jail.

Workers had been conducting struggle against the sweat shop working conditions and total absence of minimum trade union rights, since 2009, inside the Manesar plant. The month long strike in 2011, had resulted in production loss of 77,000 units to the company. Entering into a blind alley in face of determination of the workers to a spontaneous strike action in 2011, the management had smothered the struggle through outright purchase of the trade union leaders in 2011.

After the whole leadership of MSWU, headed by Sonu Gujjar, had betrayed the struggle, receiving hefty bribes from the company, the company had started to virtually pulverise the workers inside the Manesar plant. The result was a clash on 18th July 2012, between workers and the ‘bouncers’ appointed by the management, resulting in arson inside the plant, death of an official and injuries to many.

The trade union bureaucracies under Social-Democrats (HMS), Centrists (NTUI), Stalinists (CITU-AITUC) and Maoists (AICCTU, IFTU etc), took no time in condemning the ‘violence’ terming the same as ‘unfortunate’ or a ‘wrong turn’ to the ‘peaceful’ struggle.

Immediately after the incident, on 20th July, the Deputy Commissioner of the city called a meeting of trade union leaders to pacify the nerves of workers, preventing them from starting a broad solidarity action in support of the Maruti Workers.The trade unions affiliated to Social-Democrats, Centrists, Stalinists and Maoists of many hues, not only obediently came in attendance, but pledged support to all efforts aimed at “industrial peace”. These trade union leaders forthwith intervened to prevent the workers at other plants in Manesar, from starting a strike action. This emboldened the pro-corporate state to unleash a reign of repression against the struggling workers. The police immediately arrested more than 100 workers who had been most active in the struggle and started a blind hunt to rope in others. While the trade union leaders held back the Maruti workers to fight back and other sections of workers from coming to their aid, the police registered false cases against the workers, continued to arrest them and subjected them to most brutal torture, as is described in a later investigation by the PUDR team. With the implicit collaboration of these trade union leaders, police thus succeeded in imposing savage terror.

To further isolate the dismissed workers, the trade unions have facilitated the signing of a separate wage settlement with the management in September this year, stipulating historic increase in monthly salaries upto Rs. 14,800/-, and regularisation of 1870 contract/ casual workers. What is being done to meet the imperatives of future increase in production, would be used as a tool to isolate the dismissed and arrested workers.

To keep the movement under their grip and hold back the workers under their control, these capitulationists, covert servants of the capital, have forged an alliance among themselves into a 'unity forum' that includes 14 such trade unions affiliated with different stalinist-maoist-centrist parties and groups. The task of this forum is to keep the workers at Maruti within confines of legal action and insulate them from influence of revolutionary idea of initiating a class action against their class enemies.

Arrest of around 160 workers on fake charges of conspiracy, arson and murder had presented itself as a great opportunity for opening a huge political offensive against the Congress government in Haryana and at Centre. Bare fact, that majority of those arrested included the workers having roots in agrarian communities in surrounding villages of Manesar, cutting across the caste divides of dalit-jat-gujjar, the divide upon which rests the critical built-up of bourgeois politics in Haryana, was a ready bastion for united class action of workers and peasants against the corpoarte state and bourgeois parties. But the trade union leaders, those compromisers, pushed the workers into blind alley of 'peaceful and legal demands'.

Shamelessly opposing the proposal of activists of WSP for giving clarion call to the workers in Manesar and all over Haryana, for a indefinite general strike against the state government, these trade union bureaucrats, misled the workers towards alleged ‘peaceful’ means of sloganeering outside the Haryana Bhawan at New Delhi, representations to state authorities, sending fact-finding teams, legal action in courts etc.

While outrightly rejecting the idea to support the two day protest dharna of Maruti workers, Union leaders at the Gurgaon plant of Maruti-Suzuki, Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU), have indicated they would render limited support to protest rally on Thursday, as expression of ‘solidarity’. “We will not participate in the hunger strike but will support the rally on Thursday”, said Kuldeep Jhangu, general secretary of MUKU.

Trade union leaders have actively assisted the management, since very beginning of the struggle, in failing the workers’ struggle, by inducing divisions among the workers and thereby isolating the struggling workers. Firstly, they isolated the striking workers at Manesar plant preventing other sections of workers from coming to their aid. Then they divided the regular and contract/casual workers inside the plant. Then they isolated the dismissed workers from those who were still working. And lastly they isolated those who are under arrest, by cleverly restricting the demand for reinstatement only for those who are not implicated in criminal cases. “We want the reinstatement of all colleagues not charged by the special investigation team (SIT) and a proper and unbiased inquiry into the incident,” said Om Prakash, a member of HMS. Demand for a ‘proper and unbiased inquiry’ is yet another tool for reposing the faith in legitimacy of the openly pro-corporate state.

Workers at Maruti-Suzuki, despite all of their sincere wishes and best efforts, cannot win the struggle against the united might of corporates and the state under them, through their efforts alone. The struggling workers must join hands with their class brethren to launch a real and broad offensive against the combined might of corporate and the state.

Our Party- Workers' Socialist Party (WSP) calls upon the workers to first break away from the trade union bureaucracies and their false and opportunist leaders and turn to our Party, the only party of revolutionary marxism. Most militant of them must organise themselves in ‘action committees’ to head the struggle. These committees must be developed gradually into soviets of workers. The struggle at Maruti-Suzuki, and for that matter every serious conflict between workers and corporates, must be made a spearhead of a revolutionary offensive against the capitalist class and its political rule. Every such conflict must be looked upon as a conflagration having potential to lead to a real revolution, through dragging of working class to the whirlpool of political struggle.


Check Our Earlier Reports:

http://new-wave-nw.blogspot.in/2011/10/maruti-strike-workers-remain-resolute.html

http://new-wave-nw.blogspot.in/2011/10/unity-of-workers-at-maruti-suzuki.html

http://new-wave-nw.blogspot.in/2011/10/workers-strike-resumes-at-maruti.html

http://new-wave-nw.blogspot.in/2011/10/maruti-suzuki-struggle-social-democrats.html

http://new-wave-nw.blogspot.in/2011/09/maruti-suzuki-workers-struggle-at.html

Revolutionary Greetings to Workers Socialist Party of India

 

We reprint the revolutionary greetings we sent in response to the New Wave group who invited us to the founding of the Workers Socialist Party of India on the 95th Anniversary of the Great October Revolution.
 
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5th November 2012

Dear Comrades of the Workers Socialist Party of India,

Revolutionary Greetings on this auspicious occasion!

We send our warm greetings and solidarity on your launching of the Workers' Socialist Party from the new wave tendency.

We have followed the new wave for some years and have much agreement with your program.

We especially endorse your purpose in 'resurrecting' the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India.

Our Liaison Committee has much in common with your program in its general outline, though we may differ on your history of the liquidation of the Fourth International. We see those who opposed Pabloism as also complicit in the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution of 1952. Therefore we see the tradition of the International Committee as no better or worse than the International Secretariat.

While we agree with you that India is not an imperialist country we think that China and Russia are both emerging imperialist powers.

Nonetheless, we have one fundamental thing in common and that is the necessity to build a New World Party of Revolution based on the method and program of the Fourth International of 1938. Without such a World Party there is no prospect that the decline and decay of capitalism and imperialism will escape barbarism and make the transition to socialism.

We therefore welcome the formation of the new party and express our revolutionary solidarity in the immense tasks that you are taking on in the subcontinent and internationally.

We also look forward to discussing our agreements and disagreements to test the prospect for fusion.

Dave Brown for the Liaison Committee of Communists

Revolutionary Workers' Group of Zimbabwe
Communist Workers' Group of the U.S.A.
Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand

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7th November 2012 (Wednesday) at 12 pm
Press Club of India
1, Raiseena Road, New Delhi
(Nearest Metro Station: Central Secretariat)


Comrades,

As you know, years ago we had launched the struggle for a revolutionary program of working class and socialism. We proposed a draft program and comrades participated in the deliberations, leading to forging of a real program. More than one decade, we had mounted an offensive against alien currents inside the movement of the working class- social-democracy, stalinism-maoism and pabloism, and the political trends: bourgeois nationalism, petty bourgeois radicalism and reformism.

Needless to say that this struggle for a program was part of our overall struggle for forging a party of working class and to arm the workers with requisite logistics necessary to trigger the world socialist revolution. Presentation of the program and gathering of comrades around it over years, has created the conditions necessary for creation of such party.

We take pride in declaring that on the occasion of the 95th anniversary of Great October Revolution, we are making public declaration of our party, under the banner of  "Workers' Socialist Party". In organising the party, we are resurrecting the old BLPI, that existed in 1940's, the only revolutionary marxist party of Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky. Our program is the program of permanent revolution, the program of fourth international. Here is the link to our program:  http://new-wave-nw.blogspot.in/p/our-programme.html

You are condially invited to attend the Public Declaration and Press Conference.

Contact: 9810081383
e-mail: workers.socialist.party@gmail.com
facebook: facebook.com/workerssocialistparty

"The Most Dangerous Class": Chinese Workers and Farmers Confront Chinese Imperialism: For the Socialist Revolution! Draft statement for discussion

1900 striking workers at Honda's Foshan plant celebrate victory - May 2010

The Wukan rebellion has focused world attention on the role of the Chinese workers and farmers. In reality it is one fight among many over land that happens to have come to international media attention. It has to be seen in the light also of the many labour disputes that have broken out in recent years especially since 2008 when China recovered from the slowdown of the global recession with a massive injection of state investment in infrastructure. We will not document these struggles other than to point out that they are proof of the growing strength and militancy of workers and farmers facing the extreme pressure to increase productivity to maintain profits as the emerging imperialist Chinese economy competes with other imperialist rivals to make its workers and farmers pay for the global crisis.

The left is in disarray over China. Many think this wave of peasant and worker militancy is a pro-democracy movement against the ‘communist dictatorship’ inspired by the Jasmine Revolution. Others say labour disputes are the working class playing its role in bringing workers democracy and social equality which is lacking in China’s market socialism. Yet others recognise that China has restored capitalism and a new capitalist class is super-exploiting its workers and peasants, and then there are those like ourselves who say that China’s restored capitalism has developed into an emerging imperialism which has clear consequences for the class struggle.

We propose to critique the various positions (we could call them ‘post-Marxist’ since they abandon the ‘law of value’) to arrive at the truth about China today. The key to understanding China’s recent history is to discover how it combines pre-capitalist, capitalist and post-capitalist modes of production into a new capitalist imperialism. We need to develop a Marxist critique of this uneven and combined development which can explain how China’s transition from degenerate workers state back to capitalist state has been able to assert its economic independence to escape the trap of imperialist domination as an emerging imperialist power. Without such an analysis we cannot fully explain the historic leading role of the Chinese working class and peasantry in the current world situation.

The “most dangerous class”

‎Writing in the New left Review, Mike Davis says:

"Western post-Marxists—living in countries where the absolute or relative size of the manufacturing workforce has shrunk dramatically in the last generation—lazily ruminate on whether or not ‘proletarian agency’ is now obsolete, obliging us to think in terms of ‘multitudes’, horizontal spontaneities, whatever. But this is not a debate in the great industrializing society that Das Kapital describes even more accurately than Victorian Britain or New Deal America...Two hundred million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers are the most dangerous class on the planet. (Just ask the State Council in Beijing.) Their full awakening from the bubble may yet determine whether or not a socialist Earth is still possible”.

China is today the “great industrialising” successor to Victorian Britain and New Deal America, where Western ‘post-Marxists’ are ‘awakening’ to the class struggle. However, China has long been recognised as being more advanced than the ‘West’. To see precisely why the Chinese working class is the ‘most dangerous’ class for capitalism today we need to rewind and replay the historic scenario of its history as a revolutionary class. The Chinese working class played an important role in three revolutions, the bourgeois revolution of 1911, the workers revolution of 1925-1927, the Stalinist/Maoist revolution of 1949, and today after the restoration of capitalism it is once again centre-stage in the coming socialist revolution.

Karl Marx was the first to understand that not all nations had to repeat the development of capitalism in Europe and coming late to capitalism already a global system, ‘backward’ nations could rapidly make the transition from capitalism to socialism ahead of the European states in what he called ‘permanent revolution’.

Marx fully expected that China would rapidly catch up and surpass Europe in its bourgeois revolution. As in all ‘backward’ countries colonised by European capitalist powers, Marx expected that the national bourgeoisies would become weak and reactionary allies of imperialism and lack the capacity or class interest to unify the nation and win independence from imperialism, making it necessary for the revolutionary working class to take the leadership of the bourgeois revolution and complete it as the socialist revolution.

Writing in 1850, Marx says: 

“Chinese Socialism bears much the same relation to European Socialism as Chinese philosophy does to Hegelian philosophy. It is, in any case, an intriguing fact that the oldest and the most unshakable empire in the world has in eight years by the cannon-balls of the English bourgeoisie been brought to the eve of a social revolution which will certainly have the most important results for civilisation. When our European reactionaries in their immediately coming flight across Asia finally come up against the Great Wall of China, who knows whether they will not find on the gates which lead to the home of ancient reaction and ancient conservatism the inscription, ‘Chinese Republic – liberty, equality, fraternity’.” 


What Marx was foreseeing was that once its reactionary ‘Asiatic’ mode of production was opened to the modernising force of capitalism China had the potential to break free of European domination and make its bourgeois revolution without having to repeat European history. Not only was Marx correct in this prediction, he anticipated that in China the bourgeois revolution would be completed under the leadership of the working class as the socialist revolution. Marx was here making the point later taken up by Lenin, that the bourgeois revolutionary tasks were better expressed as the ‘national revolution’ since they would be carried out by the proletariat not by the national bourgeoisie. 

Marx was also anticipating Trotsky who from 1906 understood that the logic of this process in the epoch of imperialism would require a ‘permanent revolution’ in which the national and democratic tasks would be completed as part of an international socialist revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution put this theory to the test and proved that the national proletariat could begin to complete the national-democratic tasks, but that the permanent revolution would only be completed by the international socialist revolution. With the failure of the German Revolution in 1923, the Chinese Revolution became the next best hope for extending the Russian Revolution to the world.

Lenin lived to see the First Chinese national revolution of 1911. Trotsky survived long enough to see this revolution prove the universality of the theory of permanent revolution as the working class rapidly took the leadership of the revolution and made the Second Chinese Revolution as a workers revolution between 1925 and 1927. Trotsky, by then in opposition, fought against the Stalinist policy that betrayed the Shanghai workers revolution to the popular front with the Kuomintang. 

Permanent Revolution Betrayed

Here was the tragedy of the Bolshevik program of permanent revolution betrayed by the Stalinists popular front. So weak was the Chinese bourgeoisie that it had to seek the authority of the Communist International and the Russian Revolution to force the Chinese Communists into a deadly political alliance with the Kuomintang which then sent its army against the revolution. Against this murderous popular front the Left Opposition program or Trotsky was for a Communist Party independent of the bourgeoisie to lead the armed struggle for the national revolution i.e. the program of permanent revolution.

After the defeat of the workers revolution in 1927 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retreated to the countryside, fought a long civil war, and ultimately led a largely peasant revolution in 1949 that defeated imperialism, expelled the national bourgeoisie, and created a Degenerate Workers State based on socialised, or workers, property. It was ‘Degenerate’ because it reproduced the Degenerated Workers State in the USSR. The CCP was led by Chinese Stalinists who held that the national revolution could be won by a ‘bloc of four classes’ (peasantry, workers, petty bourgeoisie and liberal or patriotic bourgeoisie). This Stalinist/Menshevik program was based on the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ first promoted by Stalin in 1925 to defend ‘socialism’ in the Soviet Union by making alliances with ‘democratic imperialist’ states. In exchange for their support Stalin committed the Communist Parties in these countries to form parliamentary blocs with the national bourgeoisie and renounce international revolution.

Thus the Third Chinese Revolution in 1949 was one in which the Stalinist/Maoist CCP proposed to defeat imperialist occupation but remain a bourgeois republic with the cooperation of the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’. The Stalinist/Maoist leadership proposed to collaborate with the Chinese bourgeoisie but become the ruling fraction of the national bourgeoisie. However, as in Eastern Europe, the Stalinist/Maoist plan failed because the weak national bourgeoisie was much more interested in preserving its ties to imperialism than in being subordinated to a planned economy. So they declined the invitation and the Stalinist/Maoists had no choice but to expropriate the bourgeoisie. Thus the seizure of power in 1949 led to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by 1953 and the formation of a Degenerate Workers State (DWS) committed to defending workers property.


Nevertheless, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky knew that once the bourgeois revolution had begun in China the proletariat was the only class capable of completing that revolution as the socialist revolution. The advances and retreats of this ‘dangerous class’ could not be understood on the national terrain but as part of the international class struggle. Though the 1949 revolution was won on the national terrain by a peasant army under a Stalinist/Maoist leadership, it was the threat of the Chinese working class as part of the international proletariat that made the national bourgeoisie flee China forcing the Stalinist/Maoists to go further than they wanted, and to expropriate the bourgeoisie. Just as the Stalinists were obliged to defend workers property relations in the Soviet Union as the basis of their caste privileges, in China the Maoists were forced to create workers property relations to develop the forces of production where the bourgeoisie had failed.

While the working class was denied a democratic role in the CCP and the state, its potential was as the only historic class that had the social power to produce material wealth. The proletariat is the only ‘universal’ class that can replace the weak and declining bourgeoisie and lead an international socialist revolution against the decaying capitalist imperialist system. So while workers’ power was usurped by the Stalinist/Maoist bureaucracy in China, all that was required was a political revolution, in which the workers and peasants would smash the state machine, overthrow the parasitic bureaucratic caste and implement a genuine workers democracy and socialist plan. Failing that, the stagnation and decline of the DWS would lead inevitably to the restoration of capitalism and subordination of China once more to the existing capitalist imperialist powers.

Restoration re-opens road to Revolution


The question remains however, does the restoration of capitalism in a former DWS lead inevitably to submission to imperialism as a new semi-colony. Perhaps, the unique historical combination and development of a succession of modes of production would allow the former workers state to combine the law of value (or the ‘market’) with centralised state planning capable of developing the forces of production and accumulating sufficient capital to escape semi-colonial subordination and emerge as a new imperialist power. There is nothing in Marx, Lenin and Trotsky’s understanding of the uneven and combined development of capitalism to exclude such an historic outcome in China. In fact there is much in the Marxist tradition to point to the importance of a centralist state machine inherited from previous modes of production being ‘carried over’ to facilitate the birth of a new mode of production.

While most of this commentary is about the state forms that the bourgeoisie inherited from the feudal state, there is every reason to believe that the DWSs revived bourgeois-bureaucratic state institutions. In Russia one of the criticisms of the Bolsheviks by the anarchists and left communists, was that the Bolsheviks did not smash the state machine and retained some of the Tsarist state forms. Not true! Marx wrote after the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871 that the proletarian revolution must ‘smash’ the bourgeois state to build a workers state. In 1917 the Bolsheviks smashed the Tsarist/bourgeois state machine but had no compunction in forming a centralised workers’ state machine to impose the proletarian ‘dictatorship’ of the revolutionary soviets.

However when the soviets were usurped by the bureaucracy the degeneration of the workers state was facilitated by the same centralised state machine. The political revolution would therefore have to smash this bureaucratised state machine as the power base of the Stalinist/Maoist caste in order to open the road to socialism. However, with the failure of the political revolution smashed by the bureaucratic dictatorship this same state machine with its historic centralised institutions would become an important instrument the Stalinist/Maoist bureaucracy could use to transform itself into a new bourgeoisie and restore capitalism in a centralised and planned way.

We argue that this historic outcome is the reality today. Against those who say China never had a workers revolution; or that the CCP has ‘reformed’ socialism by using the market to stimulate growth in a New Economic Policy; or those who claim that the former workers state is now no more than a semi-colony of the imperialist powers; we argue that China has fulfilled all the expectations that Marx and the Bolsheviks had of the revolutionary role of the ‘most dangerous’ class; in revolution after revolution, combining modes of production to allow the economic independence of the degenerate workers state and the bureaucratised apparatus of the former workers state, to restore the law of value and make the transition to a new imperialist power. While the restoration of capitalism is a counter-revolution in the permanent revolution, Marx’s dialectical method reveals that a restored capitalist China today sharpens and condenses the contradictions of imperialism creating the objective conditions for the ‘dangerous class’ of hundreds of millions of workers to once again fight for the 'democratic' rights of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ by taking the road to world socialist revolution!

Marx would disown the ‘post-Marxists’

The self-proclaimed Marxists are in disarray on China. They have the advantage of outliving Marx for a century-and-a-half but the disadvantage of failing to understand Marx for the same length of time. They suffer from their own particular brand of uneven and combined development where the articulation of historically backward ideas is subordinated to bourgeois ideology. Marx raged against the bourgeois empiricism of surface appearances that separates culture and politics from the mode of production; that takes market relations for social relations; that fails to concretise the truth in any historical situation or draw historical laws of motion to explain events. In the Critique of the Gotha Program Marx already confronted the backsliding of his contemporaries towards the vulgar economics of the market and its ruling ideas. In the twentieth century the capitulation of the Second and Third Internationals to imperialism left Trotskyism as the only current that continued the revolutionary Marxism of the Bolsheviks. By the onset of the Second World War Trotsky argued that Marxism faced a crisis, and that the survival of capitalism after the War would be a major challenge to Marxism. Unfortunately the post-war Fourth International did not rise to that challenge. Not surprisingly, a more than half a century later, the extreme bankruptcy of capitalism in the epoch of imperialism beset by structural crisis today is matched by the extreme bankruptcy of ‘post-Marxist’ theories of capitalism dominated by the ideas of the ruling class.

(1) STATE CAPITALISTS 

State capitalists argue that the Soviet Union restored capitalism in 1929 (some say 1939) when the Stalinist bureaucracy transformed itself into a capitalist class. This ignores the key concept in Capital, the law of value, whereby the value of commodities equals the 'socially necessary labour time' (SNLT) to produce them, as capitals compete to reduce the price of production. The LOV is the dynamic law that underlies all the laws of motion of capitalism. Even in the imperialist epoch when Lenin argued that the tendency of monopoly capital was to suppress the law of value, it could not be totally suppressed and reappeared at the level of inter-imperialist economic rivalry and wars. Yet in the Soviet Union prices were set by the bureaucratic plan and not by the law of value with some minor exceptions. The result was the failure to reduce labour time, increasing inefficiencies, waste, and ultimately the stagnation of the whole economy. The law of value did not reappear in the Soviet Union until Yeltsin abolished the plan and allowed the LOV to restructure Soviet industry according to global SNLT after 1992.

In the case of China the state capitalists say that in 1949 the revolution in China did not create a workers state because the working class did not make the revolution. Therefore, China was state capitalist at birth. Trotsky already answered the state capitalists in the 1930s in In Defence of Marxism.

First, at the level of method, Trotsky critiques the state capitalists’ rejection of the dialectical method that treats reality as a unity of opposites. The state capitalists used bourgeois formal logic and split their analysis of the state superstructure from the economic base. They argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy became a new capitalist ruling class, and invented a new theory of state capitalism to justify the failure to defend the workers property and fight for a political revolution to remove the Stalinists. State capitalists cannot show that the LOV operated in the Soviet Union. Commodities were not produced for exchange so there could be no accumulation of capital, business cycles or crises of overproduction. Instead, prices are set by the plan and production extracts a surplus that fails to meet the needs of the workers or meet the plan and so increasingly the bureaucracy cannot maintain its privileges. Attempts by state capitalists, such as Neil Davidson, to make use of Trotsky’s concept of the law of uneven and combined development to explain the specifics of capitalist development, is rendered absurd when the key element, the LOV itself, is not understood.

Second, theoretically and programmatically, Trotsky argued that when the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939 and nationalised bourgeois property this represented an extension of workers property in the Soviet Union and created a new degenerated workers state. As in the Soviet Union, such extensions of workers property by means of Red Army occupations, such as in post-war Eastern Europe, must therefore be unconditionally defended as if it were part of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, such Stalinist occupations are at the expense of workers revolution internationally, and so to open the road to socialism the degenerated bureaucratic caste that rules in place of the workers has to be overthrown by a workers political revolution. 

On the basis of this dialectical method, Trotskyists argue that in the case of the Chinese revolution in 1949, the CCP modelled on the Soviet bureaucracy, nationalised bourgeois property, defeated the imperialists and created a new workers state albeit degenerated at birth. The state capitalists cannot explain why in China the ‘state capitalists’ have renounced its isolation from the market to join the WTO and allow imperialist penetration, and still accumulate vast amounts of capital which it is now exporting in competition with its long standing imperialist rivals in the re-partition of the world. Hence the abandonment of dialectics and the LOV leads directly to post-Marxist bankruptcy!

(2) MAOIST MARKET SOCIALISTS

In China today, Maoists argue that the CCP still controls the ‘communist’ state and is developing ‘market socialism’. It approves of the Keynesian policies that boost workers wages, but not the market ‘reforms’ that transfer wealth from poor to the elite. The solution to this problem is for the working class to counter these market reforms winning regulations that redistribute the social wealth to the working masses. Independent unions are a means of mobilising workers democratically to push for socialist reforms. For example this is the strategy promoted in the China Labour Bulletin which attempts to show how the ‘communist’ state responds to workers defence of their property, rights, living standards etc., by means of reforms. 

For the market socialists, the upsurge of worker and farmer protests is an expression of socialist democracy.  Despite the incursions of capitalism, the state remains in control. This position is very popular in the Bolivarian states in Latin America, where the ‘Chinese road to socialism’ is presented as the working class alternative to being exploited by the existing hated 'Yankee' imperialists. Cuba has recently turned also in the direction of China to mask its own restoration of capitalism behind the veil of the Chinese Road. 

Market socialists are essentially Mensheviks who understand capitalism in terms of exchange theory where income shares can be determined by state policies. Socialism requires the state to regulate and control the market. They are the same ‘Marxists’ that Marx himself castigated in The Gotha Program for abandoning his method in capital and backsliding to a fetishised exchange view of the capitalist market. Like all Mensheviks, the socialist revolution has to evolve in stages as the working class has the capacity to bring about the necessary changes to regulate the market when the conditions are ripe. The China Left Review presents this position clearly. Chinese workers are defending the rights one under ‘socialism’ in their fight against the inroads of the market. In that sense this is the prevailing Menshevik view of the proletariat as the ‘dangerous class’ forcing the market to adapt to ‘Chinese characteristics’.

In China the market-socialists play the same role as social democracy in the imperialist powers. They represent the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy that collaborate with the Chinese ruling class and defend its imperialist foreign policy as ‘social imperialism’ in the name ‘state socialism’ in return for sharing the plunder of China’s foreign imperialist super-profits. As we argue below however, the contradictions are so heightened in China today that the labour aristocracy will be squeezed between the new imperialist class and the most ‘dangerous class’ as it sharpens its weapons of class struggle.

(3) A DEGENERATE WORKERS STATE 

The Degenerate Workers State arose out of the 1949 revolution with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in 1953. A number of Trotskyist currents such as the Spartacists, International Bolshevik Tendency, claim that the DWS remains intact today as the influence of the market has not yet led to a transformation in the class character of the state. The argument goes like this. The revolution dispensed with the bourgeoisie and created a degenerated (those in the Spartacist tradition use "deformed") workers state. The degeneration meant that the revolution was incomplete as the bureaucracy had state power over workers property. The plan was imposed from the top down which meant that the economy stagnated. The bureaucracy therefore responded with NEP type reforms to introduce capitalism to stimulate the stagnating plan. The Chinese economy is still heavily dominated by SOEs, and state subsidies, so that the law of value does not yet determine the social relations. Moreover the impact of the global recession from 2008 has reversed the thrust away from capitalism back to the state owned economy.

The main argument however, is the same as that of the Maoist market socialists, that the CCP is still in power, it has not been overthrown by imperialism or Chinese capitalists  and that the state owned sector (and therefore the plan) dominates the economy. The workers, even if represented by a bureaucratic caste, or plagued by corruption, are still the ruling class in a hybridised or bureaucratised form of workers’ state because workers property is dominant. China has not yet had the counter-revolution. For that to happen the capitalist class has to kick out the communists and take direct control of the state so that it can free the market to operate without state regulation. 

This position breaks from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky’s definition of the class character of the state as defined by the property relations it defends and reproduces. It calls for political revolution and unconditional defence of the Degenerated Workers State when that state has already undergone a counter-revolutionary transformation into a capitalist state. However, as we argue below, the state is not defined by the extend of 'privatisation' but by the social relations it defends. The Chinese bureaucracy has committed itself to capitalist restoration by defending the operation of the LOV in all sectors of the economy under the name of 'market socialism' and defeated workers resistance to restoration. The road to power for workers is the socialist, not the political, revolution.

(4) CHINA: CAPITALIST SEMI-COLONY

Capitalism has been restored in China, and the bureaucrats have used the state to turn themselves into capitalists. But China remains a semi-colony exploited and oppressed by imperialist powers such as US, Germany, Japan, etc. rather than an emerging imperialist power. This leads to the position of defending China in wars with imperialist powers not only in the Pacific where the US is re-asserting its hegemony, and in every continent in the world where China is competing with US and EU powers for access to scarce resources.

This position is another instance of ‘post-Marxism’ which holds that a former workers state that restores capitalism must therefore remain a semi-colony while at the same time it is to be found in virtually every country in the world investing in scarce resources and extracting profits that match that of any imperialist power. As we argue in the document that we wrote challenging this dogmatic position in the FLTI, it is not credible that China acts as an imperialist in the Leninist/Trotskyist sense yet remains a semi-colonial proxy for the established imperialist powers. At the very least this would mean that China would not be accumulating capital in its own state banks and multinational corporations, but would pass this capital on as cheap inputs to its imperialist rivals. 

The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) thinks that China is a semi-colony of imperialism too, but makes the very important point that China accumulates surplus capital invested in property speculation and hence explains the pressure to privatise collective property. Yet it is a feature of an imperialist country, not a semi-colony, to accumulate a surplus of national capital so it seems that the IMT cannot explain the existence of surplus capital and the property boom and still hold that China is a semi-colony.


All these impressionistic theories fail to trace their origins to the material reality of China today as a unique combination of historically overlapping modes of production dominated by the capitalist mode of production and the law of value. They fail to show how uneven and combined development produced in China had a national bourgeois revolution that went further and faster than most other semi-colonies, but that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could only be completed by overthrowing bourgeois property relations and creating workers property relations that in the unique conditions took the form of a ‘degenerate’ workers state where workers power was usurped by a Maoist bureaucracy whose dictatorship caused the stagnation of the economy. This forced the bureaucracy to reintroduce capitalism under the banner of ‘market socialism’ which inevitably restored capitalist social relations in the whole economy but under conditions which allowed China to escape semi-colonial servitude and emerge as a new imperialist power. Only on the basis of this understanding is it possible to explain the dynamics of class struggle in China today as the basis for a revolutionary program to guide the masses to socialist revolution.

Chinese Imperialism and “the most dangerous class”

China today is an imperialist nation that has a unique historical development. Marx, writing in 1850 after the 1848 revolutions failed in Europe, foresaw that China’s bourgeois revolution would be a socialist one. It was prevented from victory by the degeneration of the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy. When the bourgeois revolution was completed it was by a Stalinist revolution from above that went further than it wanted to expropriate the national bourgeoisie and create workers property. But the working class never controlled planned production and the economy stagnated. With the collapse of the DWS in the 1980s and 1990s capitalism was restored. What no one foresaw however was that China’s national independence allowed it to restore capitalism without being subjected to imperialist oppression. Today it is emerging as the new global imperialist power competing with its rivals to repartition the world. It’s drive to expand super-exploits the semi-colonies on every continent and its own massive working class and poor farmers. These are the conditions under which workers and small farmers are fighting back today and to win they need a program that reflects and acts on that reality and transform it in a socialist revolution.

[a] SOCIAL RELATIONS ON THE LAND

Pre-capitalist China dominated by a ‘semi-feudal’, ‘Asiatic mode’ or ‘Tributary mode’ was overturned in 1911. But the bourgeois revolution was incomplete since China was dominated by warlords and imperialist partition. The Chinese bourgeoisie was weak and divided it had to join the Comintern and use the authority of the Bolshevik Revolution to drag the workers into a popular front trap. So as the working class took the lead in the national revolution it was exposed and betrayed by the Stalinist CCP leadership and defeated by the bourgeois Kuomintang army. Relations on the land remained dominated by semi-feudal and bourgeois relations. It took the peasant revolution of 1949 to finally complete the national revolution by overthrowing the bourgeoisie, unifying the country, defeating the imperialists, and liberating the peasantry from serfdom and wage slavery. So the farmers today are not the same as the pre-capitalist or capitalist peasantry who worked as serfs or agricultural labourers.

The 1949 revolution converted the peasants into collective farmers. The restoration of capitalist agriculture after 1978 reversed collectivisation causing a new class differentiation of the peasantry. While land was still collectively owned, land use was privatised, mainly to family farmers. Increasingly collective land was usurped by capitalist interests and family farmers dispossessed. But this process is far from complete. Poor peasants fought to retain their collective ownership and their family plots to augment meagre wages. So what constitutes the ‘peasantry’ today is an articulation of remnants of petty bourgeois, bourgeois and workers social relations, but now subordinated to restored capitalist social relations on the land, under the conditions of emerging Chinese imperialism caught in a global crisis of overproduction. Thus family farming is petty bourgeois production for subsistence and any excess is sold on the market. But land use under the pressure of emerging imperialism is privatising land on the basis of the law of capital accumulation.

Hence corruption and local crony capitalism are not the defining features of excessive market influences within ‘market socialism’, but defining features of capitalist appropriation where state power and monopoly capital employs crude methods of privatising land and labour. The process of separating farming families from their means of subsistence is not to serve the greed of Hong Kong land developers and local gangster capitalists but is necessary to create a ‘free labour force’ whose labor power is then subject to the law of value in the labor market. This has been going on since 1978 with the introduction of the market into agriculture. The peasants are dispossessed as land is aggregated and land use commercialised. Those cast off their land have become a reserve army labour of 10s of millions of migrant workers for China’s massive manufacturing and service industries.

What the Wukan rebellion shows is that since 2001 (when Wukan farmers first started resisting land privatisation), the countryside has been exposed to the demands of China’s transition to imperialism. Small farmers are the victims of the major restructuring of social relations in a capitalist imperialist economy facing a global crisis. So as well as the basic law of dispossessing workers of their means of subsistence, imperialism creates surplus capital which in China is redirected into capital exports but also speculation in land and property which leads to further dispossession. The the land rights and basic needs of the landless farmers and migrant workers cannot be realised by appeals to the CCP dictatorship but must be based on self-organisation, strikes, and occupation of the land and means of subsistence, combined with occupations and the socialisation of industry under workers control.

[b] LABOUR RELATIONS

The bankrupt Marxism of state capitalism cannot explain the causes of the labour struggles other than general abstractions and empirical impressions [note and cite]. The Market Socialists are proud of China’s rising living standards even if they are critical of the authoritarian state. Yet the so-called anti-crisis Keynesian policies to boost the economy in the world crisis are only possible given surplus capital. Such capital is not merely generated by banks and state policy, but by big balance of payments surpluses. Therefore accumulation of surplus capital is a feature not of market socialism or semi-colonial capitalism, both of which are usually bankrupt, but of imperialism. We can see then that it is not sufficient to explain labour ‘unrest’ in terms of market socialism, DWS, or semi-colonial conditions. The most dangerous class in China today is the result of the emerging imperialist class structure. The conditions prevailing in China today demonstrate clearly that China has become a new imperialist power competing against other imperialist powers in a global crisis of overproduction. The differentiation of the peasantry and the proletariat as well as a growing bourgeoisie all testify to this.

We will summarise the China Labour Bulletin report on the working class in China as proof of this point. The new generation of youthful migrant workers no longer see themselves as peasants. In other words they are now wage workers not dependent on subsistence on family or collective farming. As land is privatised migrant workers are forced to live entirely off their wage which means that they have no choice but to engage in labour struggles. They comprise 2/3rds of migrant workers and are the workers most involved in the waves of labour struggles in both foreign and Chinese owned manufacturing. The demands are mainly over wages which began from a very low point but have risen as China has rapidly invested in new technology to increase labour productivity. What this means is that while wages can rise and with it real living standards, the rate of exploitation is increasing and the share of new value produced is going mainly to capital as super profits. The upsurge in the period since 2008 is particularly significant. It represents the development of independent labour protests outside the official unions or party structures i.e. wildcats. The CCP has tried to revive the official union and impose state run collective contracts, but the wildcats continue. Increasing state expenditure on ‘social stability’ is unable to contain these wildcat struggles.

What this means is that in China today the extreme contradiction between labour and capital is materialising in the militant class struggle of the ‘dangerous class’ the proletariat. This is not the same as the Jasmine Revolution in semi-colonial North Africa. Nor the occupations of the indignados in the declining small imperialisms of Southern Europe. China’s class struggle reflects a rapid development of the forces of production by an emerging imperialist power which can only fully emerge as other imperialists decline. Not all the aspects of imperialist class structures are present. The SOE workers like state workers everywhere have lost many jobs. There is no time for the formation of a classic labour aristocracy tied to statised unions or the CCP. The labour/capital contradiction is so exacerbated in China that as the skilled workers emerge to challenge for a share in China’s super-profits they are at the same time being squeezed between the new layers of militant migrant workers and the imperialist ruling class. 

The most skilled and productive workers are the new educated migrant youth and that fact gives the Chinese working class more independence from the state and the employers than the older imperialist powers. These new layers of militant workers will not have the luxury of being bought off by colonial super-profits and will necessarily take up again the historic role of the militant vanguard of the ‘most dangerous class’. China as an emerging imperialist power competing with its established imperialist rivals has the advantage of a massive pool of labour. But as that labour force upskills the organic composition of capital grows and so does the downward pressure on profits. The revolutionary combativity of the dangerous class that came onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century is a century later now approaching its appointed time and task – world socialist revolution. The objective conditions are such that with a revolutionary leadership that incorporates the program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the Chinese proletariat can lead the world working class on the road to revolution.

Program for the Socialist Revolution!

· Jobs for all. Sliding scale of wages and hours! A living wage for all!

· For democratic, fighting unions, independent of boss and state!

· For self-organisation of rural village, city and workplace soviets, coordinated into regional and national soviets!

· For local workers and poor farmers militias, coordinated into regional and national militias!

· For the right to self determination of all national minorities such as the Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongols.

· No trust in the CCP to deal with corruption! Corruption is endemic to imperialist capitalism it cannot be reformed. We are for the workers and poor farmers in China to make a social revolution against the Maoist dictatorship! For Permanent Revolution!

· For all strikes and occupations to be generalised into an indefinite general strike to take state power and replace the new imperialist bourgeoisie with a Workers and Peasants Government to implement a revolutionary socialist plan.

· For the socialisation of land and its distribution to the users, the expropriation of the banks under the control of peasant representatives to finance production on the land.

· For the socialisation of industry and its subordination to a socialist plan can meet the needs of workers.

· China is capitalist and imperialist. We do not defend it in a war with the US, Japan or other imperialist powers. We call on the working class and poor peasants to refuse to be missile fodder in an inter-imperialist war. Form workers militia, split the standing army and turn your guns on your own ruling class!

· Revolutionary workers, build a new revolutionary workers party in the tradition of the Bolsheviks, the Left Opposition, and a new World Party of Socialism based on the Transitional Program of the Fourth International!

· For a Socialist Republic of China as part of a Socialist Federation of Asia and the Pacific!