"A comrade of mine was doing political work in Poland and came in contact with comrades of Worker Solidarity who had split off from Solidarity. She described to us the struggle of the solidarity movement since 1979 which began with the occupation of the Gdansk shipyards. How General Jaruzelski had siezed power in 1981 to try to crush this workers movement. Although they were unable to accomplish this due to the strength of the movement they were able to divert it to an extent. An unholy alliance of the Stalinists and the Catholic church set out a program of brutal suppression of the workers leadership in Solidarity while wooing the right wing elements including the opportunist Lech Walesa. They had enough success that the round table conference of 1989 was able to sell out the country to imperialism while deflecting the workers demands. Another reminder that the crisis of the leadership of the working class is the all important question today.
What is the relevance of this to China? Well I was doing some digging around in our archives on the 10th. anniversary of the Tiananman square massacre and found out several things. First of all the Chinese beaurocracy had taken a keen interest in the events in Poland and Jaruzelsky's policies. A book of his essays was translated into Chinese and published, Also he was the guest of honour at a special celebration laid on by the Chinese leadership some months before Tiananman.
Any study of the Tiananman massacre shows clearly that it was aimed at the working class wing of the emerging opposition movement. Robin Black, a member of USEC, who wrote a book about these events, described how the student leaders were negotiating with the army for a way out of the square while at the ither side tanks were crushing the tents of the workers.
This defeat of course played a big part in enabling the superexploitation on which the regime rests today."
I replied:
There is absolutely no disagreement on the counter-revolutionary (counter socialist bolshevik-leninist workers revolutionary) character of the Chinese regime. Just as we have no disagreement on the counter-revolutionary character of the Stalinist bureaucratic regime in the USSR. However, as Trotsky made clear in The Revolution Betrayed, the counter-revolutionary quasi-fascist character of this regime didn't mean the USSR was no longer a workers state - ie non-capitalist.
There is general agreement among us that China and some other countries made successful anti-bourgeois revolutions after world war 2 and got rid of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. And we characterized them as deformed workers states. That is, they were already in the condition right from the start that the Soviet Union degenerated into under the Stalinist regime. So Trotsky's principled argument goes for them too, regarding the relevance of the character of the regime (however vicious) to the character of the state (ie workers/non-capitalist or bourgeois).
But you don't take up question of the economic character of the Chinese state at all. Attacking workers leaders and beheading revolutionary organizations was and is part and parcel of Stalinist rule. Not just crushing a popular mobilizations in a capital city, but destroying whole socialist revolutions (China, Spain, Greece). China too has destroyed a whole revolution and with it a mass workers leadership (Indonesia).
To determine if China is still a deformed workers state or not we need to look at its mode of production and the economic relations defended by its armed forces and police, and if these are now *qualitatively* different from the early years. If they are qualitatively different we have to show exactly how and when the qualitative change occurred.
Water changes quantitatively if you heat it from 0 to 100 degrees Celsius. It gets much much hotter, but it's still remains water. It changes qualitatively - from water to steam - at 100 degrees. The change is sharp and general. It can be pinpointed easily in relation to any number of criteria.
The qualitative change from the non-capitalist Soviet Union to Russia (and from the non-capitalist Eastern Bloc to Balkanized capitalist ministates) was a bit messy, of course, but still sharp and general. Like the qualitative changes brought about by the English Revolution and the French Revolution, not to mention October 1917.
So, in relation to China, when did the qualitative change from deformed workers state to bourgeois state take place? An event like this is world-shaking, as in 1640, 1789, 1917 and 1990.
This is the question we have to ask ourselves, and I'm not ready to give a definite answer yet. However, from what I've observed there has been no sharp or general qualitative change. Not even the opening of the Shanghai stock exchange, or the absorption of Hong Kong with its capitalist structures almost entirely intact. The enclaves handed over to imperialist exploitation don't represent this kind of change. (In passing, I don't think "super-exploitation" is much use as a category - it reflects our impressions of exploitation, not its essential economic character) These enclaves developed quantitatively rather than qualitatively, as more and more potentially threatening joint ventures, as far as I can see at the moment.
These are indisputably acts of class collaboration and extreme cases of class betrayal. Yet we should recall the situation in the Soviet Union of the 30s, say. The dialectic tensions involved there almost defy belief, but Trotsky was able to bring them into a single polar relationship (opposed poles of the same phenomenon) by the analysis leading to the characterization of Degenerated Workers State. In some ways China strains the dialectic even more intolerably than the Soviet Union did (as in the examples I've mentioned). In other ways not (China hasn't paved the way for Nazism or an imperialist world war by its policies - yet).
But strains of this kind are quantitative, not qualitative. Qualitative is when the hawser mooring a big ship snaps. We don't have to argue the toss about the risks caused by the huge quantitative tensions that have been building up in it. We don't have to ask ourselves if it's broken yet - even if there can be doubts while some of the individual steel threads making it up are ripping apart.
Big questions I want to resolve in my mind concern the land, the stance (and social weight) of the lower and middle strata of the bureaucracy, and particularly the composition and attitudes of the mass of the armed forces, the troops, NCOs and lower officers.
And in all this we shouldn't forget the significance of India as a parallel and contrast.
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