I replied as follows:
--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "Fred Feldman" wrote:
> Actually, if Green Lefters defend China as an oppressed nation against
> imperialism (not just "oppose an attack" but SOLIDARIZE WITH CHINA against
> an attack), that would be adequate since there is a basis for reasonable
> Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state. But in fact the
> trend seems to be toward proclaiming China an imperialist power (perhaps
> with the highly subjective category of "sub-imperialist" as a transitional
> characterization), which clearly implies no defense against anybody anytime.
>
> Thus a war between China and the United States or China and Australia would
> be an inter-imperialist war with "a plague on both your houses" as the
> indicated political stance.
>
> If Green Left's Marxism still includes "revolutionary defeatism" in a war
> between China and Australia, that would mean considering the defeat of
> Australia as the lesser evil in a war with China from the standpoint of
> making a socialist
> revolution in Australia. From this standpoint, Chinese revolutionaries
> would be expected to take the same stand - defeat of their "imperialism" as
> the lesser evil. Chinese people who took the side of their country against
> US, Japanese, and/or Australian imperialism would be regarded as traitors to
> socialism.
This shows how important the question of the character of the Chinese state is to revolutionary Marxists. Because it's so important it's crucial not to play fast and loose with the terms in which the characterization is made. To speak of a "trend" towards considering China imperialist while at the same time claiming that "there is a basis for reasonable Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state" is to play fast and loose with terms like "imperialism" and "Marxism", not to mention "reasonable".
Marxism would not "trend" towards a characterization in this way. Some Marxists might, but then the question would be how far a trending impressionist agrees with Marxist economic analysis, and whether this is "reasonable". Let's be clear. There is disagreement, even among serious revolutionary Marxists, about the class character of the Chinese state. But so far this has not been the subject of any serious large-scale debate. A key issue for those who originally held with the characterization of Deformed Workers' State seems to be how far the reforms of 1979 constitute a restoration of capital. But the bullet in this debate hasn't yet been bitten.
Why was the situation different in the mid-1930s regarding the Soviet Union? For this argument it's enough to say there was a revolutionary Bolshevik current in the USSR and the world that was strong enough and confident enough in its Marxism and place in the class struggle to bite the bullet and consider the hugely contradictory situation that had arisen after October succeeded in overturning the capitalist state of Tsarist Russia, but where this new non-capitalist state had either become capitalist once more or remained non-capitalist while displaying blatantly anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary characteristics.
I'm referring, obviously, to the Left Opposition and the embodiment of its Bolshevik leadership in Trotsky and those closest to him.
In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky came down firmly, Marxist-style, on the side of the most contradictory alternative - a state which was at the same time non-capitalist, anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary. He did this because it best fitted the facts, and his presentation of these facts and his reasons for interpreting them as he did convinced the non-Stalinist revolutionary left that was moving towards the foundation of the Fourth International after the catastrophic defeat of the workers movement in Germany.
The closest thing this movement has had to a similar decisive intervention concerning the character of a state is Peng Shuzi's work on The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party (www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm) and the debate leading to the characterization of Deformed Workers' State.
Neither Peng nor the Fourth had the theoretical or organizational authority of Trotsky or the pre-war Left Opposition, so there was little to deter impressionist non-revolutionary Lefts like Tony Cliff from proclaiming early in the 50s that The Revolution Betrayed had been mistaken, that the USSR was capitalist and that China was too. Their Marxism couldn't stand up to the combined pressure of bourgeois witch-hunting and Stalinist propaganda.
The problem for us today is that this has been happening by default within the genuinely revolutionary tradition of the Fourth and closely allied movements. The bitter contradictions digested in The Revolution Betrayed have not been understood as such. It could even be argued that the bitterness and scale of the contradictions inherent in the Chinese state and regime are even greater than those in the Soviet Union.
Whatever the case, the contradictions have not been confronted openly and massively, so the trial is not just not over, it hasn't even started.
Which presents us with a huge and responsible task.
Including the main reason for my present contribution, which is to disagree flatly regarding the term "sub-imperialism".
Fred declares that the category is "highly subjective" and used as a "transitional characterization". Maybe he meant "impressionistic" - in which case he should have said so. But "subjective" can be compared to "objective" and related to facts, which Fred doesn't do. As for "transitional", well, things change, powerful states and economies become weak and vice versa, so there is a case for terms describing such change to be labelled transitional. Trotsky and the Fourth labelled their programme "transitional" for good reasons.
Fred writes:
> The sub-imperialist category is misleading because it effectively eliminates
> the qualitative distinction between imperialism and not-imperialism,
> oppressed and oppressor nations, and it is infinitely expandable and
> basically un-scientific. If China is imperialist or sub-imperialist, why not
> Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, or even Vietnam? If India is imperialist or
> sub-imperialist, why not Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia?
But this is not so if sub-imperialism has been defined clearly in terms of transition from less powerful to more powerful, and its preconditions have been set out. In the first place, it is misleading to lump together "imperialism and not-imperialism,
oppressed and oppressor nations", simply because imperialist oppression is not the same as any old oppression of one nation (or entity) by another. So we'll ignore that, although it forms the basis of most of the arm-waving examples Fred gives. It is not in the least intrinsically "infinitely expandable", as that depends on the definition and preconditions.
For instance, sensible definitions of sub-imperialist would have to include such empirical qualities as great size, great population, and economic and military viability on a grand scale. The military viability would include things like complete impossibility of total invasion and occupation. The history of Russia gives an indication of the kind of countries that might come into consideration here. The "sub" would have to include the transitional element of not yet big enough and ugly enough to face down the US in an open confrontation, despite a desire to do so and probable capacity to put up a good fight.
There is nothing strange about any of this, and in fact the definition would enable a good description of the relative strength of such acknowledged imperialisms as Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, etc.
Lenin takes relative change between imperialist countries for granted when he writes of "aspiring imperialisms" such as Japan and Germany and compares them to the old established imperialist powers of Britain and France. And in 1900, the US was the biggest aspiring "sub-imperialism" of them all.
And the definition given here, preliminary as it is, would be able to handle the status of Korea, Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia without pausing in its stride.
Fred concludes by writing:
> The tendency is to envision an almost exclusively imperialist world - one in
> which almost every state not directly controlled by imperialism economically
> and politically like the Marshall Islands or Puerto Rico or Chad tends to
> "rise" to imperialist or subimperialist status, becoming a challenger to
> "old" imperialist powers for re-dividing the world (like Germany in the two
> world wars) and thus one of the driving forces toward world war. This is
> not theoretically impossible, but highly improbable in anything like the
> near future.
Which of course is as impressionistic as the approach he is criticising. Much as most governments would dearly love to elbow their way closer to the fleshpots and bury their snouts in the trough with the US, it is farcical for them, or us, to dream of such a thing, let alone "envision" it. Put this generally, it is in fact "theoretically impossible" - at least for a Marxist Marxist - and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not one or two of the most powerful and expansive non-acknowledged imperialist countries (say Russia and India, leaving China and Brazil aside for the moment) are in a position to challenge or actually even in the course of challenging the currently hegemonic imperialist power(s).
As I understand it, "sub-imperialism" refers to imperialist potential in a country that for a variety of reasons is still clearly 'sub'ordinate to the leading imperialist countries. Some countries might make it all the way, and watch once leading countries eat their dust as they fall by the wayside. Some might just hover mid-league for ever, so to say. But we have to acknowledge change as it happens, and do our best to grasp what's going on and why. That is our duty both to the working class as revolutionary socialists and to science as thinking citizens.
