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China & World Revolution
From International Socialism (1st series), No.78, May 1975, pp.25-26.
THE MOST important elements of China’s foreign and domestic policies are ultimately derived from Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Stalinism was the product of the defeat of the European working class, the defeat of the German revolution, the victory of Hitler in Germany, of Mussolini in Italy, of Franco in Spain, of mass unemployment, and finally the Second World War. It was also the product of the economic backwardness of Russia and the desperate drive of Stalin to build an advanced economy to protect Russia’s national power. The Bolsheviks – unlike the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 – had been in 1917 the leaders of a workers revolution. For Stalin to convert the Bolsheviks into the Soviet Communist Party as the political instrument of his power, he had to physically destroy the old leadership of the Party. The labour camps of Siberia were the gravestones of the October revolution.
Stalinism eliminated the idea that the working class is the agency of the socialist revolution, and that it is a world class. It substituted for the working class, class coalition, the ‘Popular Front’; and for internationalism, ‘Socialism in one country’. For workers’ power, it offered State power. For democracy, authoritarian planning. In Chile in 1973, just as in China in 1927, the class coalition policy proved catastrophic for the working class.
After the Second World War, capitalism went into a phase of unprecedented growth. It transformed the industralised countries. But now the system is again entering a phase of crisis. It is likely to be as severe as that which afflicted it between the Wars. That phase of crisis produced the largest upsurge of revolutionary feeling in the history of the European working class, culminating in the Russian revolution. The same dangers and heroic opportunities are looming up again.
The crisis is at its most savage in the economically backward countries. There the ruling classes are not only intriniscally weak. They are subject to a much more severe savaging from outside. Despite its great size, China is not immune to this onslaught. Political rivalry in the system – the threat of war-is likely to force China to shoulder yet a larger burden of expenditure, robbing the resources that should go to development. The price of China’s technically sophisticated imports is rising while its exports – mainly agricultural goods – stagnate China’s foreign trade is, relative to the size of its economy, small, but in terms of the modern industrial sector, vital. The petro-chemicals industry (particularly fertilisers) and the steel industry are currently dependent on imported plant for rapid expansion. In a whole range of other still small industries – aircraft, vehicles, shipping – the dependence is also great. China’s only strong card is its rising oil exports which indeed make possible the greater ‘self-reliance’ it so strongly urges on less favoured nations. But rapid expansion in oil exports also demands increased imports. Already there is strain in China’s balance of payments as a result of purchases over recent years – in November 1974, Peking was asking the Japanese to accept deferred payments for six months and extend credit for steel imports. It has also moved on from accepting short-term credit for imports to medium term credit (which is, for other backward countries, ‘aid’); the more difficult its payments position, the more tempted it will be to accept long term debts. To service the debts, to make up for sudden agricultural difficulties which are not at all ruled out yet, to finance increased defence expenditure, all requires an increase in the level of exploitation of Chinese workers.
The room to manoeuvre for each ruling class narrows as the crisis deepens. It becomes increasingly difficult to make any concessions, any reforms, to buy worker loyalty. A great hole is torn in the politics of reformism. The basis of reformism, the collaboration of classes, begins to split apart between the divergent class interests. If employers have to drive down real wages to survive, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade workers that this is really in their own interest, that the exploiters and their victims have a common ‘national interest’.
Much of the Left has believed in the reformism of ‘national revolution’. If only, it was argued, a fragment of the world economy, one nation, could be torn out of the world market, socialism could be built there. It did not happen. A new ruling class emerged to command the newly independent State. Of course, socialism is long overdue on a world scale. But on the scale of one poor country, trapped in the ghetto of its own pauperisation, it is not. The massive accumulation of capital, sweated out of the world working class is concentrated in the industralised countries. It needs to be fused to the needs of the poor nations. Then the great resources of stifled energy, initiative and enthusiasm of the world’s people will have the tools to do the job. But the one is not a simple substitute for the other. What it could be is the basis for a world class movement – the working class of an economically backward country can offer the same lead to the world working class as that given by the Russian workers in 1917.
Mao’s China cannot offer that lead. Its leadership clings ever more tenaciously to the politics of class collaboration. It is opposed to forming a new International within which the workers of the advanced and backward countries can forge a common class strategy to overturn the system. It does not form a base for establishing revolutionary movements in other countries, for that would be to ‘interfere in the domestic affairs’ of friendly ruling classes. It makes a virtue of national fragmentation and imprisons the energies and attentions of its followers within boundaries laid down by the ruling class. Social Democracy does the same, and in this, Harold Wilson and Chairman Mao are at one. As a result, China makes a virtue of the nationalist ‘divide and rule’ tactic of world imperialism.
If the revolution can be spread from its first starting point to encompass one or more industralised countries, then immediately the prospects are changed. The markets are opened, the capital resources and industrial goods become available, and the military threat that imposes such a burden of defence spending is ended. It becomes possible to see development taking place in China and elsewhere without exploitation.
But for all that, there can be no ‘peaceful co-existence’, no bribes to regimes that are simultaneously repressing working people. The Left has to reunite its politics with the working class once more instead of acting as the unofficial public relations men of ruling classes in backward countries. It has to adopt the aim of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, not ‘alliances of the people for the democratic revolution’, the old Popular Front. It requires a recreation of Lenin’s original strategy – the Russian bourgeois revolution would spark off the German workers revolution, which would then make it possible for Russian and German workers to move on to socialism together.
Why is it that there are in many countries good worker revolutionaries who adopt in international questions the standpoint of the Chinese Communists? It is quite understandable that, faced with the simple alternatives of a Russian reactionary nationalism and a Chinese radical nationalism, the choice is simple. Indeed the closeness of the thoughts of Mao to those of Stalin make it easy to move from one to the other without discomfort.
In practice, however, the thoughts of Chairman Mao are irrelevant to what revolutionaries do here in the organised labour movement. What has the Chinese experience to show Reg Birch or Mike Cooley in their work in the engineering union? Nothing. The rhetoric encourages high hopes, and it is comforting to feel that somewhere faraway there are heroic deeds – but in terms of serious and scientific analysis, strategy and tactics, there is nothing. At worst, the thought of Mao is a diversion because it proposes to workers that they can rely on some force other than their own collective strength, whether it is other countries or classes.
A divergence between theory and practice sooner or later trips a revolutionary, unless he substitutes for serious thought sectarianism or simple adulation. In either case, he makes himself irrelevant to that very purpose to which he supposes himself contributing, the revolution. Now more than ever irrelevance is the worst crime. For the opportunities are enormous, and we can build both a mass revolutionary party in Britain and a revolutionary International. But capitalism’s crisis is moving faster than ever. There is not much time for discussion and thought to decide whether we are prepared to dare. Either we make history, or we shall be its victims.
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