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Socialistic Rule & Workers Struggle in China
28-08-2023: The world today stands on the brink of a Western led world war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The imperialist powers, led by the United States of America (US) and trailed by the former European colonial powers especially the United Kingdom (UK) and France, as well as minor imperialist powers such as Canada, the Netherlands and Australia, are in the throes of launching what would be a cataclysmic crusade. If such a war is not prevented, millions could perish and the economies of major nations could be reduced to a shadow of what they once were. The relentless economic rise of the PRC in the face of faltering and anemic performance of the Western economies are the base reason for what is a suicidal and confrontational campaign waged by the Western ruling classes of the citadels of an ailing empire. Unable to compete with the PRC’s economic, scientific and technological advances, and after multiple failed attempts at fomenting internal destabilisation and chaos inside parts of the vast lands of China, the West is resorting to brute military force.
The class nature of the PRC
To be best prepared to prevent a hellish war in Asia unleashed by the imperialist powers, workers the world over must be clear on the class nature of the PRC. With some exceptions, the masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America understand that the PRC operates a type of socialism, at least as far as their understanding goes. However, in the West the impressions are largely the opposite. Many workers and leftists in the West struggle to comprehend China’s 20th century history and its progress today on social, economic and political grounds, and cannot accept that the PRC’s decades long progress on many fronts may be connected to its ground-breaking socialist revolution which triumphed in 1949. Even many Western activists, who are knowledgeable on many aspects of Marxist theory, nevertheless denounce the PRC as “capitalist”, “state capitalist” and even “imperialist”. Instead of rallying workers to defend the PRC (however far from the ideal it may be), they seek to undermine it through attempting to rally working people in the West and in China against its “regime”.
The Workers League argues that such a stance is profoundly mistaken. No one, not even the PRC’s most ardent supporters, claim that socialism has been achieved or is anything like complete on the Chinese mainland. In their time, Karl Marx and Frederick Engles wrote about the higher phase of socialism (or communism) where there is no state, no government, no police, no army, where money has been abolished and there is complete self-rule in society. We do not know if humanity will reach the higher phase of socialism, for currently there is a potential for a civilisation ending nuclear world war and/or ecological collapse. If, however, survival into the 21st century and beyond is assured, it is likely that a classless society can only be achieved on a worldwide basis, or close to it. Today, we can only say that the first step towards socialism can be achieved in our time – via a revolution which overturns capitalism, establishes a workers’ state, and begins to operate a collectively owned and planned economy. The PRC has well and truly achieved this, and its development over some 70 years means it is now in a position to overtake the formerly advanced capitalist economies of the West.
Hence, while socialism per se may not be achieved in the PRC, it certainly retains socialistic rule which ensures that the “free enterprise” that is employed poses little challenge to the driving forces of economic, political, cultural and social development. Public ownership of the major means of production predominates, and despite many zig zags in its history, the PRC appears to be intent on maintaining such a path. What is more, it is public ownership of the major and strategic sectors of the economy, administered by a general socialistic plan, which drives the unparalleled growth and awe-inspiring infrastructure construction the masses in the PRC now almost take for granted.
Bureaucratised leadership
It should not be denied, however, that the PRC is saddled with a political leadership which cannot lead it or the world further towards socialism. The PRC remains a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state, stemming from the predominantly (though not wholly) peasant-based nature of its 20-year civil war which led to victory in 1949. In addition, the Communist Party of China (CPC) came to be led by Mao Tse Tung, who was a devotee of the Stalinist wing of what became the Soviet bureaucracy – which had carried out a political counter-revolution against Lenin’s former leadership and October 1917. Maoism became a variant of Stalinism, despite Mao’s undoubted contribution to the liberation of China from its colonialist imposed “century of humiliation”. We aver that only a genuine Trotskyist analysis of the twin Stalinist policies of “socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence” can grasp the nature and practice of today’s leadership emanating from the CPC. As such, we contend that what the PRC requires today is a proletarian political revolution, which would sweep away the monopoly of political power held by the conservative bureaucracy and establish workers’ councils open to all those elements willing to defend and extend the gains of 1949.
From 2020 to 2023, the CPC (not “China”) capitulated to the nonsensical “Covid pandemic” narrative imposed by the Western imperialist powers, which was ultimately an attempt to re-start a declining capitalism which could not compete, ironically, with the tremendous economic growth of the PRC. The CPC imposed ludicrous and harmful lockdowns across parts of China, but notably they were not able to implement tyrannical vaccine mandates, like the imperialist governments in the West. Some pro-PRC leftists took the situation to mean that Covid was genuine and that the CPC was therefore providing the lead in “public health”. In reality, the CPC’s genuflection before the West and its deliberate attacks on the working class is yet another example of the extreme lengths a Stalinist leadership will go to in order to help prop up and preserve capitalism outside the PRC.
Despite this, the PRC is at the same time playing a somewhat positive role in warding off some encroachments of imperialism. Undoubtedly, the PRC’s vast publicly owned and planned economy is the mainstay of the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) trade, economic and political bloc. The BRICS bloc is offering an alternative counterweight to a world dominated by the old imperialist powers contained in the NATO and G7 alliances. In fact, with many of the G7 economies (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada) in or near a recession, the BRICS bloc potentially represents the final end of Western capitalist plunder of the globe. This is not to endorse the politics of any of the leaderships of the BRICS nations, some of which are anything but progressive.
Socialistic Rule and Workers Struggle in China is today being re-released by the Workers League to further clarify the class nature of the PRC at a crucial time. The task of preventing an imperialist war on China is a vital one for working people internationally. The references contained within were current at the time of writing, i.e., 2014. For more recent referenced information about developments in the PRC, please visit this section of Red Fire:
https://redfireonline.com/category/peoples-republic-of-china/
Workers League
E: workersleague@protonmail.com
Image: Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1966.
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