THE CLASS CHARACTER OF CHINA

A discussion on FaceBook. Mine is the final comment.

DB:  Alan the Spart family are about the only groups that still hold to China being a DWS. Surely you recognise the long process of restoration of the LOV starting in the villages in 78, extending to the SOEs and SEZs in the 80s and becoming prevalent in the 90s and 2000 as China joined the WTO and rapidly expanded into the global market. Restoration was only possible because it did defeat workers opposition. The SOE workers fighting mass sackings in the 80s were defeated. The students and intellectuals fighting the corrupt party officials taking backhanders from capitalism were defeated at Tienanmen in 89. The CCP at the 14th Congress in 92 was then able to announce the adoption of the LOV and hence its defence of capitalist social relations. At that point the class character of the state changed. Your position is hardly different from the Maoists today who see China as still socialist because of the CP rules behind a veil of 'market socialist' ideology. They are dangerously deluded and so are you.
 A G:  So you have accepted that reformism in reverse has occurred in China with a state power seamlessly changing its class nature...
 D B: The defeats of workers in the late 80s and in the 1989 crisis were not 'reforms' but a series of counter-revolutions that destroyed the remaining potential of workers and peasants to stop the restorationists who by 1992 were able to change ithe class character of the state marking the decisive victory of the counter-revolution. From that point on workers and peasants would have to fight for a socialist revolution against a capitalist state.

CM: Sorry Dave, but the Sparts aren't the only ones to see China as a DWS or hold that neither a bourgeois counter-revolution or a restoration of capitalism has taken place. The only real historical parallel (ie guide) we have to  the process of restoration is the USSR. There we have seen extreme political degeneration take place in the late 20s and the 30s, with much bloodshed, and we have a Marxist analysis of the process provided by Trotsky in the Revolution Betrayed. Economic and full-scale bourgeois restoration took place formally, with the legal abolition of the workers state, in 1991.

Now, if we are to use this real historical development in our analysis of world events the first thing we must do is take note that even after a full-scale quasi-fascist political counter-revolution in the Soviet Union (Trotsky's characterization, not mine), the socio-economic foundations of the workers state were strong enough to hold back full-scale restoration (ie economic and social counter-revolution for six whole decades counting from 1930.

The character of this socio-economic counter-revolution is a NEW phenomenon. It's HISTORICALLY UNPRECEDENTED. And we have not yet had a serious full-scale Marxist analysis of it.

What we can say prima facie (just on the face of things) is that the working class has been hit in every aspect of its life by the restored bourgeois-capitalist state. Health, welfare, education, culture, security, legal rights (!!), working conditions, employment, exploitation of labour. Things weren't good under Stalinism (in fact they were fucking awful), but we have seen that there has been plenty of scope for further and more brutal deterioration.

The shocking thing for most of us (as Marxists) was that the counter-revolutionary coup was radically different from bourgeois counter-revolutionary coups we have witnessed - the Kissinger-Pinochet coup in Chile is paradigmatic.

Since the Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution was partial (ie political) and "peaceful", we should perhaps have been prepared to expect a similar chain of events during the bourgeois counter-revolution. The bloodshed and suffering came after the coup, not during it.

And the bourgeois counter-revolution was accompanied by an uprising of the people against the bureaucracy. The people helped throw the baby of the workers state out with the filthy bath-water of the counter-revolutionary regime. This is hugely paradoxical, but it's a logical consequence of the hatred aroused among workers and oppressed people in general by a repressive regime.

The bureaucracy paved the way for the socio-economic counter-revolution, but it only came to fruition after decades of deliberate neglect and mismanagement.

OK, so what has this got to do with China?

Everything. The Chinese revolution wiped out capitalism on the mainland, but the workers state it created was run from the outset by a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy - hence the term Deformed Workers State.

The rule of the bureaucracy as a bureaucracy managing (in its deformed and counter-revolutionary way) the new socio-economic system as a national whole has NOT CHANGED FUNDAMENTALLY. The bureaucracy as a massive whole is still VERY MUCH IN CHARGE. And it is supported by the army and militia which of course form an integral part of the bureaucracy.

What we need to understand is that THE BASIC INTERESTS OF THIS MASSIVE BUREAUCRACY  in the current world situation of capitalist crisis and political degeneration ARE NOT SERVED ONE JOT BY A FULL-SCALE BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESTORATION. They are doing extremely well thank you very much as things are now. THE MASS OF THE CHINESE BUREAUCRACY - and they are much more secure in their positions than any Soviet bureaucrats were - HAS EVERYTHING TO LOSE AND NOTHING TO GAIN FROM A FULL-SCALE RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM IN CHINA.

In my view this is the clearest description of the current situation in China. There is a political regime fundamentally deformed from the start, and extreme economic deformation. This economic deformation cannot be described as fundamental in any Marxist sense however. Yet. To become fundamental a real socio-economic counter-revolution is needed, and that hasn't happened yet.

It is impossible to imagine the horrors of a full-scale restoration in China with its massive but submerged class tensions (a circumstance note by Trotsky in relation to the Soviet Union in the Revolution Betrayed) and the extreme and murderous poverty lurking under the surface like dragons in the Yangtze River.

One more crucial factor is the HISTORICAL TIME SCALE involved. The USSR survived as a workers state for six decades despite the pressures brought to bear on it by an overwhelmingly hostile and aggressive imperialist world and the catastrophic mistakes of the Stalinist regime - the victory of Nazism in Germany and the Second World War, to only take the most obvious and appalling examples of this.

CHINA, after (say) two decades of similar but nowhere near as extreme pressure, has not been politically or economically threatened as a state by imperialism since the seventies. Imperialism has been in full crisis since then, completely unstable and completely dependent on destruction and global oppression for its survival. The only reason it was able to push the Soviet Union over the brink was the total destruction of the organizational and political independence and sense of identity of the working class achieved by the bureaucracy over seven extremely harsh decades.

The arena of the world class struggle today is determined by the growing decrepitude and desperation of imperialism, and the growing power and prosperity of China. (India is in the middle and Brazil is looking on, so to speak.)

While the nature of the world class struggle - as Trotsky stated in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International - is chiefly characterized by the lack of revolutionary leadership in the working class.

As I see it, we have to see this, acknowledge the EXTREME POLITICAL AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS in play, and realize that THE QUESTION OF CHINA IS ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL IN THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND OUR PART IN IT. WE MUST APPLY REVOLUTIONARY DIALECTICS TO UNDERSTAND AN UNPRECEDENTED WORLD SITUATION. Only then will we take the struggle forward and move beyond 1950.