Sixty years after the Chinese Revolution: Lessons for the working class

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Sixty years after the Chinese Revolution:
Lessons for the working class
1 October 2009

Today marks 60 years since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by
Mao Zedong seized power and proclaimed the Peoples Republic of China.

The revolutionary upheaval in China was part of a worldwide upsurge of
the working class and oppressed masses that followed the end of World
War II. As in other parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa, millions
of workers and peasants were determined to throw off the shackles of
colonial rule, which in China in the 1930s had taken the form of a
brutal Japanese military occupation. Despite the immense scale of the
struggle, however, the 1949 revolution was not socialist or communist.
It did not bring the working class to power, but the peasant armies of
Mao.

It is obvious today that China, in spite of its “communist”
pretensions, is fully integrated into the global capitalist economy as
its premier cheap labour platform. How else can one explain the
congratulations sent to Beijing from two conservative American
presidents—Bush senior and Bush junior—on the 60th anniversary of the
Chinese revolution, or the decoration of New York’s Empire State
Building with red and yellow lights—China’s revolutionary colours—to
mark the event? Wall Street greatly appreciates the contribution of
the Chinese police state in marshalling millions of workers to labour
for global corporations, not to mention its huge purchases of US bonds.

These celebrations are not at variance with Maoism and the 1949
Chinese Revolution, but rather their logical outcome. While the CCP
was formed in 1921 in response to the 1917 Russian revolution on the
basis of Marxism, it was rapidly impacted by the rise of Stalinism in
the Soviet Union. Under conditions where the first workers’ state was
isolated, the Stalin clique, representing the interests of a
conservative bureaucratic apparatus, usurped power following the death
of Lenin in 1924 on the basis of a rejection of socialist
internationalism.

Stalin specifically attacked Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent
Revolution which held that, in countries of a belated capitalist
development such as Russia and China, only the working class was
capable of fulfilling the national democratic tasks. Having taken
power at the head of the oppressed masses, the proletariat would be
compelled to implement socialist measures as part of the broader
struggle for socialism internationally. For Stalin, Trotsky’s
Permanent Revolution, which had proven such an accurate theoretical
guide to the events of 1917, became an intolerable threat to the
privileged position of the bureaucracy, whose interests were summed up
in the reactionary Stalinist theory of “Socialism in One Country”.

In China, to further his own opportunist alliance with the nationalist
Kuomintang (KMT), Stalin forced the young CCP to amalgamate with this
bourgeois party. In a direct repudiation of the lessons of the Russian
revolution, he declared that Chinese revolution would involve two
stages—first the completion of the national democratic tasks by the
Chinese bourgeoisie, then socialism in the distant future. In the
course of the 1925-27 revolution, however, the Chinese capitalist
class proved even more venal than its Russian counterpart. Terrified
at the revolutionary upsurge, the KMT drowned the CCP and the working
class in blood—a defeat that only strengthened the hand of the
Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow.

In the aftermath of 1927, two tendencies emerged inside the CCP. One
turned to the Left Opposition, which had warned of the disaster
prepared by Stalin, and embraced Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution. The
other, led by Mao, concluded that the problem was not Stalinism, but
the organic incapacity of the working class to lead the revolution.
The CCP expelled the Trotskyists and, under Mao’s leadership, tore
itself away from the urban working class and turned to the peasantry
and guerrilla warfare.

In a remarkably perceptive article in 1932, Trotsky pointed out that
Mao’s “Red Army” was a movement of petty proprietors hostile to the
working class. Their antagonism was rooted in the different class
outlook of the proletariat and the peasantry—the former represented
large-scale socialised production, the latter a section of the
decaying middle classes opposed to urban industry and culture. On
entering the cities, Trotsky warned, the peasant armies would suppress
any independent movement by workers, with sections of the command,
over time, becoming part of the bourgeoisie.

That analysis was vindicated in 1949. Like Stalinist parties
internationally after World War II, the CCP initially attempted to
form a coalition government with the bourgeois KMT, but failed.
Encouraged by the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union, KMT
leader Chiang Kai-shek launched a desperate civil war against the CCP.
The outcome was determined not by Mao’s much overrated military
capacities, but the profound economic and political weakness of the
KMT regime, which virtually imploded. As Trotsky had warned, Mao’s new
“communist” government suppressed any independent initiative by the
working class and protected private property. Nothing like the
democratically-elected workers’ councils or Soviets of the Russian
revolution were established. The regime’s abiding fear of the working
class was expressed in its jailing of Chinese Trotskyists in 1952.

The new regime’s guiding perspective was not socialism but Mao’s “new
democratic stage”, involving a coalition with capitalist parties and
figures that had not fled with Chiang to Taiwan. Its limited
reforms—the nationalisation of the land and land reform, basic welfare
measures and the outlawing of social evils such as prostitution and
opium abuse—were bourgeois measures. Likewise, the wave of
nationalisations amid the economic crisis generated by the Korean War
was not “socialist”, but paralleled the policies of national economic
regulation in countries like India. The CCP simply carried through
more consistently the program implemented by bourgeois leaders of the
anti-colonial movement like India’s Nehru.

Sharp divisions did emerge within the Maoist regime. The CCP was
compelled to rely on former capitalists and urban professionals to run
industry, as most of its peasant cadres knew nothing of modern
production. This contained the seeds of the future conflict between
the radicalism of Mao, who reflected the antagonism of the peasantry
to urban industry, culture and above all the working class, and the
so-called capitalist roaders, who concluded that large-scale industry
and the market had to be given free rein. Both factions remained
rooted in the nationalist framework of “Socialism in One Country”, and
were organically hostile to the socialist alternative for overcoming
China’s isolation—a turn to the international working class on the
program of world socialist revolution.

Mao’s utopian schemes for rural socialism, peasant communes and
backyard industry produced one disaster after another, culminating in
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that he launched against his
factional rivals in 1966. When workers began to take matters into
their own hands, a terrified bureaucracy rapidly buried its
differences and brought in the army to suppress the working class.
>From then on, while the CCP leadership created a cult around Mao to
justify its repressive measures, his program of peasant radicalism was
buried. After Mao died in 1976, the regime arrested the so-called Gang
of Four and ditched the slogans of the Cultural Revolution.

While the middle class radicals of the 1960s and 1970s glorified the
Cultural Revolution, the more conscious representatives of US
imperialism recognised the class character of “Red China” and the
Soviet Union were not the same. The latter remained a workers state,
albeit degenerated. At the height of “Cultural Revolution” in October
1967, Richard Nixon wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs that his
coming presidency would pull “China back into the world community—but
as a great and progressing nation, not as the epicentre of world
revolution”.

In the same issue of Foreign Affairs, another analyst noted that Mao’s
regime was not so dissimilar to bourgeois governments brought to power
by anti-colonial movements. The only difference was “the superior
effectiveness of Chinese communism in promoting the aims historically
associated with the capitalist mode of production and the social order
built upon it… The originality of Maoism lies in the methods of
mobilising the masses in the name of communism for the achievement of
aims proper to any national-revolutionary movement: the
industrialisation of China and the acquisition of military means
(including nuclear ones) adequate to the pursuit of great-power politics.”

In all its essentials, that is what has occurred during the past 30
years. Nixon met with Mao in 1972, laying the basis for an anti-Soviet
alliance and China’s initial opening to foreign capital. In 1978 Deng
Xiaoping vastly accelerated foreign investment and the reestablishment
of the capitalist market. This coincided with a turn by world
capitalism in the late 1970s towards the globalisation of production
and the establishment of cheap labour platforms. The inflow of foreign
capital became a flood, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre
demonstrated the regime’s willingness to use the most ruthless methods
to suppress the working class.

What achievements are being celebrated today? The limited reforms of
the 1949 revolution have been overturned as the CCP regime, and the
grasping Chinese bourgeoisie that it represents, preside over a
deepening social gulf between rich and poor. But while the CCP
bureaucrats join hands with the representatives of global capitalism
in toasting the Peoples Republic of China, they are casting a nervous
glance over their shoulders at a Chinese working class that has
enormously expanded and is closely integrated with workers around the
world.

Above all, amid the worst global crisis of capitalism since the 1930s,
they fear that the working class will begin to draw the political
lessons of the 1949 revolution, reject the dead-end of Stalinism and
Maoism, and return to the path of world socialist revolution. In
China, that means building a section of the International Committee of
the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, to provide
the essential revolutionary leadership.

John Chan

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o01.shtml

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