Notes on China from the JRCL-RMF of Japan
Dear comrade Munzer,
We the JRCL hope your 'theoretical schools on the war and the Chinese question' will be fruitful. I am writing you what I thought after reading your position on China, suggested in your letter dated October 20th last year, wishing this to be a contribution to your discussions.
Chinese rulers have taken advantage of the current situation where the imperialist state of America has revealed its decline in a quagmire of the pandemic and economic depression. They are rushing towards their goal of obtaining hegemony over the 21st century world while intensifying their autocratic ruling system at home to prevent workers and peasants from rising in revolt. I have recognized in your letter that you are facing up to their actual moves mentioned above. This has a positive significance in that you are attempting to analyze them according to Marxist principles.
But I still have a couple of questions.
(1)
You call the current Chinese government 'the government of the "red businessmen"'. Literally, this means that the government is composed of capitalists (or entrepreneurs). Or otherwise, you mean to say that the government represents the interests of capitalists?
The current government of the Chinese state is seized by the bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party. From our point of view, the party-state bureaucrats themselves, with the aim of realizing their own bureaucratic and state interests, have been inviting foreign capitals, fostering and utilizing new capitalists, and promoting capitalist reforms in state enterprises. I would like to hear your view on this point.
'Don't fear making use of capitalism' while steadfastly maintaining the communist party's autocratic ruling system - this was an order issued by late Den Xiao-ping. According to this order, Chinese bureaucrats have tried to overcome the economic backwardness of the country. This is based on 'a lesson' that they drew as Stalinists from the collapse of the USSR. I will write about this point later.
(2)
You write that the government 'was strengthened again' and that it is 'acquiring a Bonapartist character'. I would like to know the grounds on which you say so.
In his Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky characterizes the Stalin regime as 'a new type of Bonapartism'. He describes that it 'rests on the basis of the workers' state'. The FLTI's position as I understand is, however, that the proletarian dictatorship was abolished in China in 1980s. I think that 'a Bonapartist character' you mentioned is not one based on a workers' state. What do you mean by 'a Bonapartist character' when you talk about China after 1990s and of today?
By writing that 'the government was strengthened again', you may imply that today's Chinese government is not merely a passive substance, such as 'an agent of foreign imperialists' or 'a hire of multinationals', but a government of an independent state (which has its own national interests and which tries to realize them externally and internally). I would like to hear from you about this.
(3)
A practical issue. Today, so-called Trotskyists including Mandelites have abandoned struggles against Stalinism and even Trotskyism itself, joyfully saying 'Stalinism is no more after the collapse of the USSR' (with the worst example of those who fabricate a 'theory' that China is imperialist). On the other hand, there are various self-styled 'lefts' praising China and Cuba as 'socialist'. It is only the FLTI, as we see, that denounces such degenerate Trotskyists and confronts Stalinism in promoting revolutionary struggles for the liberation of the working class. I would therefore like to ask you how you, as such a revolutionary leftwing, see Stalinism in today's China and how you are fighting against it.
Here I will try to sum up our position. In our view, Chinese Stalinists have been pursuing to achieve the economic development of the country in a totally pragmatic way in order not to make the same 'mistake' as that of the former USSR. While steadfastly maintaining the state of bureaucratic autocracy, they have been promoting a capitalist transformation in the economic structure, i.e. the substructure, using the bureaucratic state as leverage. In order to justify this attempt, they fabricated the anti-Marxist concept of 'socialist market economy' and even abandoned the traditional fake doctrines of Stalinism related to the bureaucratically centralized planned economy. (That is why we call today's China a neo-Stalinist state.)
It is this state of bureaucratic autocracy called 'people's democratic dictatorship' that rules the Chinese working class. The working class must overthrow this state power and establish a true proletarian dictatorship state. In order to organize the Chinese working class as the Subject of revolution, we revolutionaries must encourage them to awake to the neo-Stalinist nature of the CPC as well as the current Chinese state and to make a firm resolve to overthrow it, thus liberating them from the organizational and ideological chains of neo-Stalinism.
I hope my notes would be of any contribution to your discussions in the FLTI Congress.
My warmest hug to all.
SK
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