BY JACK BARNES
From the recent nuclear weapons "spy-scare" to the continued
conflicts over trade, the workers state in China is a central
target of U.S. imperialism today. The following excerpts from
Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the
Millennium help to explain why.
The selections are from the second chapter, which is based on a talk and closing presentation to a regional socialist educational conference held in Los Angeles, California, over the 1994-95 New Year's weekend. Capitalism's World Disorder is copyright (c) 1999 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The Chinese revolution shattered racist lies and assumptions about the oppressed peoples of color that had been perpetuated for centuries by the major colonial and then imperialist ruling classes of Europe and North America. Malcolm X deeply appreciated what that revolution meant to oppressed and exploited peoples around the world. He had many wonderful things to say about it during the last year of his life.
"There was a time in this country when they used to use the expression about Chinese, `He doesn't have a Chinaman's chance,'" Malcolm told a rally in Harlem in November 1964, just after returning from a trip to Africa and the Middle East. "Remember when they used to say that about the Chinese? You don't hear them saying that nowadays. Because the Chinaman has more chance now than they do.... It was not until China became independent and strong that Chinese people all over the world became respected.... It's the same way with you and me."(1)
I vividly remember sitting with some other comrades in the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit earlier where Malcolm was speaking and hearing him say that what frightened Washington the most about the Chinese getting the atomic bomb was not that they might develop advanced missiles, but the knowledge that hundreds of millions were ready to hand-carry the bomb if need be to defend their revolution.
But the Stalinist regime headed by Mao Zedong made it impossible for the Chinese toilers to become as powerful a force as they could have been to advance the struggle for national liberation and socialism in Asia and throughout the world. To the degree the Maoist regime did influence fighters, it turned them away from proletarian internationalism toward petty-bourgeois nationalism. Nowhere was there a greater gap than in China between what the working class and peasantry had shown themselves capable of accomplishing and what they were blocked from doing by Stalinism. The Stalinist apparatus in China is still in place today, but the influence of the Beijing variant of Stalinism is qualitatively weaker in the workers movement in Asia than at any time since the 1950s.
Some 80 million of these former peasants, the article says, have migrated to big cities, especially along the coast, where many live in wretched conditions. In search of a livelihood, millions of toilers from the countryside in China continue to head toward the cities, to head toward the small towns, to head toward the factories and manufacturing establishments large and small.(2) What is happening to them is comparable in many ways to what happened to those pushed off the land in England several hundred years ago, described by Marx.
Because of the Stalinist "population policies" imposed in China, working people there are required to carry ID cards and are supposed to seek permission before moving. As a result, the article reports that many of the rural toilers who have migrated to urban areas are denied legal residence in the cities and thus are not able to send their children to school or to use public health facilities. (These reactionary population measures also include forced sterilization and abortions, as well as economic and other penalties against families with more than one child.)
Horrible living and working conditions are being created in the swelling proletarian neighborhoods and in both the huge state-owned enterprises and rapidly expanding capitalist-owned factories in China today. Workers face low wages, extremely long hours, and often appalling health and safety conditions.
Because of the socialist revolution, however, workers and peasants in China have a different view of themselves, of what they are capable of, and of their social rights earned as part of the working class. Toilers in China have a different attitude toward their right to land; their right to a job; their right to a certain level of education and health care; their right to a place to live at a payable rent; their right to jobless benefits and a retirement pension.
This is what the imperialists confront in attempting to restore the dominance of capitalist social relations. This is not the China whose land, resources, and cheap labor the U.S. rulers lusted for coming out of their victory over Japan at the end of World War II. The U.S., Japanese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and other capitalists setting up shop in China today - as well as the expanding capitalist layers and wannabe capitalists within China's dominant social caste - are already meeting resistance from workers and peasants. As these class battles develop, we will see in practice why the socialist revolution in China and the fact that a workers state still exists -no matter how horribly deformed - remains the key to politics there.
Clashes are also bound to sharpen inside the Stalinist bureaucracy in China, which still dominates the country to a greater degree than in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where these apparatuses have shattered since 1990. Big sections of the bureaucratic caste in China, including in the armed forces officer corps, are determined to maintain centralization and control over the departments and state enterprises from which they derive their power and privileges. This brings them into conflict not only with workers in these enterprises, but also with other sections of the bureaucracy trying to open up China more to capitalist relations and foreign investment.
Giant struggles are coming in China. And given the massive urban migrations, the coming history of the countryside there will be settled more than ever by what happens in the cities, not vice versa.
For communists, it will be a great pleasure to be part of the changes that hundreds of millions of Chinese workers on the march will bring to the world working-class movement.
Notes 1. "The Homecoming Rally of the OAAU" in Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (New York: Pathfinder, 1970, 1992), p. 136. 2. The estimated number of migrants reached 100 million by late 1998.