The Chinese working class emerges

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The Chinese working class emerges
5 June 2010

The emergence of struggles by workers in China over the past few weeks is of
enormous significance for the working class internationally. Against those who
wrote off the proletariat as a revolutionary social force and declared the class
struggle to be old hat, the first outbursts of the working class in China,
following on from the strikes in Greece, are sending tremors through global
ruling elites.

The international financial press has followed with considerable concern the
strike by workers in Honda’s transmission plant in South China, which paralysed
the corporation’s production for almost two weeks. The mainly young workers
defied government intimidation, the state-run trade unions and management, and
only returned to work this week after being granted a significant wage rise.

Major corporations such as Honda now depend heavily on the super-profits
extracted from cheap, regimented labour in China. The reliance of international
capital on China has been magnified by the global financial crisis that erupted
in 2007-08. Any upsurge of the multi-millioned working class in China not only
directly threatens corporate profits, but would inevitably reverberate
throughout the world economy and financial system.

The vast scale of production in China was underscored by the media spotlight on
the wave of suicides at the Foxconn plant, which manufactures electronic goods
for major global corporations such as Dell and Apple. The plant, where 400,000
people work, constitutes a city in itself—huge, alienating and run like a
military camp. One comment on a Chinese online forum declared: “When I look at
Foxconn, I feel reminded of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They show a world in
which human beings are being degraded to gearwheels in a huge machine.”

The Foxconn sweatshop has provided images and put faces to the explosive
development of the Chinese working class, which has swelled from 120 million to
more than 400 million over the past three decades. Shenzhen, where Foxconn is
located, was a fishing village in the early 1980s and is now an industrial
centre of 12 million people. While Foxconn is one of the country’s largest
plants, there are others of similar size and countless smaller ones. In eastern
China, entire cities have been turned over to the manufacture of a single
product, creating “sock” towns, “zipper” towns and “air conditioner” towns,
involving millions of workers.

Instinctively, workers sense the necessity for international class unity. The
youthful workforces at places like Honda have grown up with the Internet and
mobile phones. They are well aware that their low wages are the source of
immense profits for international corporations. When the strikers sang the
Internationale, it was a recognition that they are in the same boat as workers
around the world, facing similar problems and common corporate enemies.

There is no denying the determination and courage of young workers at Honda, but
that will not spontaneously resolve the complex political issues they confront.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime might make a few temporary concessions,
but it is organically hostile to the working class and rests on a police-state
apparatus, which it has never hesitated to use. The CCP’s first actions in
seizing power in 1949, at the head of peasant armies, were to suppress workers
in the major centres.

Yesterday marked the 21st anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre,
when tanks and soldiers were sent to crush workers and students in Beijing and
other cities demanding democratic rights and decent living standards. For all
their crocodile tears, governments and corporations around the world understood
that Beijing was willing to go to any lengths to prevent unrest by workers.
Billions of dollars in foreign investment flooded into the country.

The CCP regime is acutely sensitive to the social time bomb on which it rests.
Having all but abandoned its previous socialist phrase mongering, it has, like
its counterparts in other countries, promoted crass nationalism in an effort to
create a base among middle class layers and to divide workers. Harking back to
China’s past as an oppressed semi-colonial country, the CCP argues that China
should now take its place among the world’s great capitalist powers. It has
deliberately fostered and encouraged anti-Japanese racism in particular.

The working class can only go forward by rejecting all forms of nationalism and
racism and consciously unifying its struggles internationally. The Honda
strikers in China face conditions no different from the millions of young
“freeters” in Japan, who make up the bulk of that country’s large casualised,
temporary workforce. With the onset of the global financial crisis, they were
laid off in their thousands from auto and electronics plants in Japan as exports
slumped.

It is not just the CCP that Chinese workers confront. The greater political
danger comes from those who claim to support workers and oppose the regime in
Beijing, but seek to block any independent political movement of the working
class. In this regard, the comments of Han Dongfang, the exiled leader of the
Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation, are significant and were highlighted in
the Financial Times.

Han played a prominent role in the 1989 Tiananmen protests and was influential
among layers of workers who joined the students to demand decent living
standards as well as democratic rights. Han’s perspective was never to overthrow
capitalism and the Chinese regime but to reform them. In the wake of the latest
strike, he emphasised to the media that labour rights and political rights had
to be separated. “I am doing my best to depoliticise the labour movement in
China,” he said.

To depoliticise the working class means to politically disarm it. In the
American media in particular, comparisons have been made between the Honda
strike in China and the sit-down strikes of US autoworkers in the 1930s. That
movement of the American working class graphically illustrated the consequences
of separating the defence of labour rights from a political struggle. The
AFL-CIO union bureaucracy, which purged socialists in the 1950s and subordinated
workers to the Democratic Party, functions today as the open agent of the
corporations in imposing their dictates on workers.

The task facing workers in China, as in other countries, is to learn the
essential political lessons of the key strategic experiences of the working
class internationally over the past century. In particular, that means a careful
study of protracted struggle of the international Trotskyist movement for
genuine Marxism against its polar opposite—Stalinism and Maoism. That is the
first step toward the building of a Chinese section of the International
Committee of the Fourth International as the necessary revolutionary leadership
for the emerging movement of the working class.

John Chan

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j05.shtml

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