The Chinese Question:
a key question for the 21st century Marxism
Letter from the Fifth Congress of the FLTI
to the JRCL-RMF of Japan
Dear Comrades of the JRCL-RMF
First of all, we wanted to send you a fraternal greeting from the delegates who met for more than three days at the last FLTI Congress. Like other literature of Marxist currents, your letter on China of 01/11 was translated, distributed and debated in our Congress.
In relation to this question, a rich discussion and a first exchange of opinions on the positions you sent to us on that letter on China was opened.
The FLTI voted to set a date for a conference in April.This time it will be open not only to delegates, but to all our audience and supporters. In that conference we will discuss the Chinese and Cuban questions, which are highly relevant in the 21st century and which they are a great debate in the international Marxist movement.
The Congress ratified that we agree with your vision on the survival of Stalinism after 1989, when it openly sold out the former workers' states. Imperialism and the bourgeoisie preserved Stalinism at the head of the unions and workers' organizations, receiving the invaluable contribution of the renegades of Trotskyism who put it on their shoulders and legitimized from the left, as you can see that we denounce in our writings.
That is what the survival of Stalinism is all about: to save the capitalist system and to be the basis for the emergence of new counterrevolutionary leaderships.
The delegates discussed and many comrades suggested that imperialism preserved Stalinism, as we have already seen, as a counterrevolutionary force in the West, where they had proven their ability to strangle the proletariat for decades. Itwas also preserved in the former workers' states such as China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea.
In these former workers' states, in our view, Stalinism acted as a direct agent of capitalist restoration. They were the counterrevolutionary guarantors of the emergence of a new ruling class, associated with imperialism and its investments there. In those countries they established Bonapartist governments based on totalitarian regimes of the old Communist Parties and on the crushing of the masses as happened in Tiananmen in 1989, in Korea, etc.
This role of Stalinism was also strengthened in sectors of the semi-colonial world because, allied to the native bourgeoisies, they expropriated the anti-imperialist struggles of the masses, promoting class collaboration fronts as happened with the “Bolivarians” in Latin America and in open pacts with imperialism, like the one carried out by the Castros with Obama. It was nothing different from the 1975 pact between Nixon and Den Xiao Ping, to install the transnationals in southeast China.
FLTI delegates are very interested in this discussion. There was a question regarding your letter: how do you consider today the class character of those states such as Cuba, Vietnam or China, based on the same regime and government of the Communist Parties?Are they workers or bourgeois states?
Stalinism, as a petty-bourgeois layer that controlled the former deformed or degenerated workers' states, has absolutely no contradiction in becoming a new party of an openly bourgeois character, which conceals and is itself part of the emergence of a new ruling class and new property relations, and this partyis the one to defend those new property relations with the sword and the whip against the masses.
We believe that you, like us, do not characterize that this is the role of Stalinism in the former USSR and in the former workers' states of Eastern Europe. There, these Communist Parties openly splintered. We call this not "bureaucratic restorationist counterrevolution", but "direct bourgeois restoration", carried out through other agents such as Yeltsin, a product of the outbreak of the old CPSU, or new counterrevolutionary "democratic" forces such as the Church, social democracy, etc. .
Then, the center of the debate is in this question: according to you, the class character of these states, is it worker or bourgeois? For us, capitalist restoration was imposed there, beyond the superstructure that guarantees and reproduces it, which in the cases of China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea, are the Communist Parties themselves.
On this point about the class character of the State, we believe is the core of the discussion so that we can continue to advance in understanding the different positions.
In relation to the regimes in China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc., we consider them totally Bonapartist, like any civil-military regime in any capitalist country. The governments in those former workers' states are effectively Stalinists, of the Communist Party. But the state is defined by the class character of the relations of production, whichin China are bourgeois, openly capitalist. Trotsky argued that capitalism reproduces automatically but socialism does not. In these countries, the automatic reproduction of capitalism and a State with all its institutions of domination at the service of it has been openlyoperating for some time.
From this point of view, the Marxist dialectic allows us to understand more precisely what we are saying here. A Communist Party is not equal to a Communist Party: one, before 1989, administered in his own way the former workers' state, be it deformed or degenerated, taking advantage of it and benefiting from enormous privileges. Meanwhile, in certain cases, those same Communist Parties became direct agents of capitalist restoration and are the ones who guaranteed, crushing the masses, the emergence of a new bourgeois state, which today they control manumilitari.
Yesterday they were useful to imperialism to contain and restrict the revolutionary processes, as we saw in the Yalta and Potsdam Pact. And then they were useful to establish the restorationist counterrevolution.
On the question that China has become a new “power”, we agree. The point is the meaning we give to this definition.
In that country, we see a powerful Chinese bourgeoisie, but it depends of the world imperialist capitalist system. The Chinese bourgeoisie is powerful and independent as it is guarantor of the exploitation of millions of workers and its labour force, which was thrown onto the world market at evil prices. The Chinese bourgeoisie at the same time is dependent, as it needs the technology, the huge investment of the transnational companies and depends of the world division of labour of the capitalist economy which is ruled by imperialism. This allows China to sell the products made by hundreds of millions of workers that the capitalist restoration put in the world market. It also guarantee huge superprofits for the transnational companies and the imperialist finance capital, keeping a substantial part of the surplus value mass from that labour force. This acts as a counter-tendency to the crisis and plunging of the world capitalist system as a whole. Over the last years, the introduction of imperialist finance capital was increased and it took over most of the bank capital of China, where there’s absolute freedom for the international banks to buy the majority of Chinese banks shares.
This enslaver Chinese bourgeoisie, also, is dependent from the world market as its trade surplus is at disposition of supporting the US deficit, buying US T-bonds and T-Bills. It is also dependent because of different international trade agreements, especially with Africa and Latin America, to get cheap raw materials, minerals, oil and commodities to the transnationals that produce in China. It is in these sectors where a huge and powerful Chinese bourgeoisie and a high consumption domestic market have emerged, with which US imperialism and the European imperialist powers now need to stay, in the middle of their economic marasmus.
This contradictory character is what we see in China today: that of a huge political, economic and commercial power, but totally dependent on the dominance of the world-economy by imperialism.
This contradiction prepares huge world confrontations. Is that the bankrupt imperialism needs to stay directly with all the businesses and markets existing in the former workers' states, without intermediaries.
China is not a US colony or semi-colony, for the moment.Neither is the Great Russia, the one in charge of supplying cheap raw materials to the imperialist Maastricht and associated with French and German imperialism, usufructs a powerful industrial-military apparatus, inherited from the former worker state.
The rising of these new states since 1989 has created a contradiction for imperialism. This is our view. On the one hand, the capitalist restoration in the former workers states injected fresh blood in the sclerotic veins of the imperialist capitalist system. But on the other hand, this is not enough and the successive world crisis in the 21st century push, more and more, world imperialism to seek the semi-colonization or colonization of these states.
The alternative is clear. Either the dictatorship of the proletariat is restored under revolutionary ways, or there’ll be imperialist counterrevolutionary invasions, or Stalinism and the counterrevolutionary bourgeois governments that control those bourgeois states (former workers’ states) will end up negotiating, agreeing or bowing to the imperialist masters. In this dispute, the imperialist powers will try to bite China and the rest of the former workers states. The one that advances the most in this way will have the best conditions to walk through the world crash.
This process is opened. It is not only about a clash between states, but, as Marx would say, history of humanity is the history of the class struggle. This question will be solved, ultimately, by the Chinese, Russian, Vietnamite proletariat and, in the first place, by the working class in the US, Europe and the world.
In China, we see that the proletariat showed and keeps showing a huge struggle capacity. It has even filled wings and fractions of the very Communist Party with contradictions, as it happens with sectors of the youth that wake to political life and tend to openly confront the regime and Stalinism.
Meanwhile, the US heals its wounds after Trump's attempted direct trade war against China. Biden has refloated the Pacific Pact with Japan, to block and surrender Greater China.
In this bankrupt world-economy there are too many imperialist powers. The world is already partitioned. The imperialist bourgeois gangs cannot redistribute the world market again without new wars, as Lenin said. It is precisely these tensions that are preparing new military conflagrations and, if the proletariat does not prevent it, new world wars.
Your letter opened and deepened this reflection on the delegates of our Congress who decided to publish your note on our website and in our materials, so that it may be known by the revolutionary workers' vanguard of the West, as an enormous contribution to the fight, to conquer a theory and a revolutionary strategy in the face of the new phenomena that have developed since the end of the 20th century with the imposition of the capitalist restoration.
Also, we think you should know a brochure from the Rudolph Klement Socialist Publishing House on the Chinese question, with which, in 2010, we split with a current that was part of the FLTI, the CWG of New Zealand, which had the position that China was a consolidated imperialist power. Undoubtedly, this insufficient and incorrect theoretical definition led the CWG to have a totally reformist program, since if a semi-colonial or colonial country or a former workers' state where capitalism was restored can become an imperialist power, why do we fight for the socialist revolution? This current today claimsthe need to set up Labor parties like the British one, all over the world. This is a demonstration that the theoretical questions in Marxism are then expressed in the program.
Here, then, we advance only a synthesis of the reflections that we debate on the Chinese question, but clarifying an issue that we consider very important. The question of Stalinism and its new counterrevolutionary role as of 1989 and the passage with arms and baggage of the renegades of Trotskyism to legitimize it and then to sustain it on its left flank at the international level, update and sharpen the thesis of the Trotskyist program that the objective conditions for the proletarian revolution are more than mature and are decomposing and that what defines the world situation is the exacerbation to extreme degrees of the crisis of leadership of the proletariat from 1989 on. All Trotskyist renegades have passed on the side of the New Left along with Stalinism, embracing and reconciling as it was in the Havana Pact of 2019. They have long since abandoned this thesis of the crisis of leadership as a determining factor of the already unbearable conditions of existence of the worldwide working class. These currents find in the exploited masses the "immaturity" of the socialist revolution, when this is nothing more than a consequence of the historical betrayals imposed by social democracy, Stalinism and already openly in the 21st century, the selling out of the IV International.
In the debate with you on this important issue, many delegates stated that your contribution had given us a more global vision of the role played by the world Stalinist apparatus since the capitalist restoration at the end of the 20th century. Our positions and elaborations tended to underestimate and not give fair value to the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism in the administration of capitalist businesses in the former workers' states where the capitalist restoration was imposed. This makes the policy of the dealers of the Fourth International much more perfidous, cruel and treacherous.
Your insistence on this point allowed our current to take an enormous step forward, to better understand our praxis and the crisis conditions of leadership of the world proletariat. We also hope that our reflections will serve as a contribution to the revolutionary Marxists of the Pacific.
Comrades,
On the other hand, we are closely monitoring the situation in Myanmar, where a revolutionary general strike facing a military coup is shaking that nation and the entire region. We have read the position of the fraction that broke away from the English current of Peter Taaffe. This statement describes the military coup and the development of a general strike that is already confronting it violently with fierce fighting in the streets throughout the nation. This general strike is led by a powerful proletariat of the maquilas, exploited by the whip of a brutal slave bourgeoisie.
Beyond the discrepancies that we have with some of the programmatic positions of this declaration, we consider it a starting point since it raises a class vision of these events. This view, in our understanding, does not propose a full program to transform that general strike into a victorious insurrection, when that is the task of the moment calling for the soldiers' committees and the generalized arming of the masses to be set up, of course, the need for a call from the Myanmar working class to unify all the workers of the different ethnic groups in the nation and to prevent all oppression and martyrdom that exists over some of them. This question can only be guaranteed by a provisional revolutionary government of workers and peasants. In the program of this statement, this question is approached correctly, including the right to self-determination to conquer the unity of the working class, but without taking it all the way. We consider it a contribution and as such, we will be publishing it. The weakest point of this statement is that it does not call for the Chinese working class to rise up to fight together against Chinese Stalinism and its support for the Myanmar generals who, whip in hand, come to crush the proletariat to have him enslaved and put them under his knees in the imperialist companies that plunder that nation.
From now on, this struggle of the Asian proletariat that impacts the working class of China, Thailand and the entire region, is already becoming a new and true revolutionary focus on a world level. We would like to know your position in this regard, as well as the situation of the Chinese working class that you follow on a daily basis.
We await your reply. We greatly appreciate your input. As always, we remain ready to fight together across borders.
Revolutionary Greetings,
Carlos Munzer and Paula Medrano
PS, On the Syrian question, we have fought a huge battle for the 10th anniversary of the revolution, to break the isolation and the siege. We have already sent you the videos with the enormous solidarity that was manifested internationally on March 15th. Here we attach the speech made by our Syrian delegates at the FLTI Congress. There,you will be able to appreciate the quality of the revolutionaries who are inserted in the midst of the resistance, fighting with a program of class independence to all the invading troops and the bourgeois gangs that at every step try to sell it out.
|