China
in the Contemporary World Dynamic of Accumulation and Class Struggle:
A Challenge for the Radical Left
By Loren Goldner
Everyone recognizes the growing importance of China both for world
capitalist accumulation and for the remaking of the international
working class. But the variety of approaches to the question in the
broader “left” are as diverse as the old gamut of viewpoints on the
“Russian question”, and ultimately flow from the same theoretical
frameworks. The old Maoists and “Marxist-Leninists” argue for a return
to the pre-1978 system of Mao. Those who see China as
state-capitalist (as I do) or scattered “bureaucratic collectivists”,
or orthodox Trotskyists, all favor the removal of the Stalinist
bureaucracy by working-class revolution (although for the Trotskyists
such a revolution would be merely “political”, not social).
These different takes on the dynamic of China today, and how it got
there, lead to different conceptions of the practical tasks.
All of these debates are tied up with the potential emergence of China
as a future “hegemon” of the world capitalist system. Such debates
uncannily and eerily echo the 1980’s debates about “Japan as No. 1”,
and may well find themselves in the same dustbin down the road. The
very formulation of the problem in this way leads to a briar-patch of
further questions. Foremost is the 80-year old Marxist debate about the
“decadence” or “decay” of capitalism as a global system, and how that
analysis can explain and interpret the undeniable major development of
the productive forces in East Asia in the past 35 years (in South
Korea, Taiwan, and China, as well as in the “flying geese” such as
Malaysia, Thailand, etc.) and finally in the broader “emerging
economies” (e..g. Brazil, Russia, India) that are currently growing
rapidly. Most judgements about contemporary China stand or fall
depending on how one comes down on this question of “decadence”.
China undeniably has a long way to go before it can be a first-tier
capitalist power in any sense of the term. GDP is still ca. $1,100 per
capita. Total GDP in 2003 was $1.4 trillion, sixth highest in the
world, but Chinese statistics are (hardly unique to China) colored by
local politically-motivated reporting. Yes, China surpassed the U.S, in
2004 as the top
national recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI), and last year
foreign capital earned approximately $10-15 billion net returns on
investment. But global capital earned roughly the same amount
in…Australia. So far the post-1978 turn to the “socialist market
economy” has mainly improved the lot of about 200 million people in the
coastal regions, and of them, approximately 50 million enjoy
“middle-class” living standards. But one overriding social question in
China today is what is going to happen to the other 900 million people
(overwhelmingly peasants) as yet unaffected positively or affected
negatively by the market reforms. There are an estimated 100 million
people in the floating population that migrates from city to city in
search of work. A “rust bowl” has emerged in the northeast,
particularly in Manchuria. A net 20 million industrial jobs have been
lost, as the large “SOE’s” (state-owned enterprises) are downsized and
looted by their managers. (At the party congress of 1997 that
consecrated his replacement of Teng shao-peng, Xiang Zemin announced
100 million layoffs for the coming 10 years.) The banking system is
reportedly filled with “non-operating loans”, and the Western
capitalist press openly worries about a deflationary bust that would be
as bad as or worse than the bursting of the Japanese bubble in 1990.
In this context, the political and social situation seems in serious
ferment, if not yet outright explosive. Riots of workers, the
unemployed and retirees robbed of their pensions seem to have become
commonplace, particularly in the northeast, even if they have rarely
gone beyond a local framework. A recent New York Times article ( Dec.
2004) recounted a riot of several days in a medium-size town touched
off by an incident between an arrogant yuppie and a worker, The
article went on to say that 60,000 such incidents had occurred in the
past year. Any attempt at independent labor organization (i.e.
outside the government-controlled unions) is met with serious
repression, including prison, labor camps and outright execution of
militants. (China Labour Bulletin, coming out of Hong Kong, is a useful
source on these developments, but one must keep in mind that it is
funded by northern European Social Democracies and the British Labour
Party, undoubtedly hoping to see a Solidarnosc-type union movement
arise in China as a battering ram against the still-entrenched
Stalinist hard-liners in the party apparatus. ) Documents recently came
to light about a meeting in 2003 between top U.S. government officials
and the AFL-CIO to discuss the labor situation in China and what to do
about it, and there are allegations (which seem to make perfect sense)
that China Labour Bulletin has received serious funding from the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was behind the coup
attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2003.
The position and role of the Chinese “hard-liners” (essentially, people
hostile to the post-1978 market reforms from a Maoist viewpoint) is,
for different assessments, a major focus of contention. While
some people on the far-left and ultra-left glibly assume that the
emergence of full-blown capitalism in China is already irreversible, I
think (as the above assessment already shows) that it is highly
problematic, and that both factions of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) know they are riding the whirlwind. The pro-reform faction would
like to make China into a giant Taiwan or even Singapore, but the huge
peasant question (something faced by neither Taiwan and still less
Singapore) strikes me as a nearly-insuperable obstacle to such a
dream. The sophisticated Western capitalist think tanks and
financial press remain acutely aware that the non-convertibility of the
renminbi and the state monopoly of foreign trade (two factors that made
China immune to the 1997-98 Asian financial meltdown) have to be
dismantled to complete the integration of China into “globalization”. A
non-convertible currency, the state monopoly of foreign trade and
nationalization have nothing intrinsically “socialist” about
them, and all three existed in Nazi Germany (nationalization
being of course more muted but very real). The Stalinist old guard
seems to be the main constituency for maintaining them, and
currents such as orthodox Trotskyists point to them as proof of the
lingering “socialist” character of China. Thus a state-capitalist,
bureaucratic-collectivist or orthodox Trotskyist analysis of the nature
of Chinese society leads to different appraisals of both the social
dynamic and of the factional situation within the party elite. And such
appraisals lead us right back to the question of capitalist “decadence”.
Many people writing about China today (and now I am referring to a much
wider gamut of opinion than the Marxist or radical left debates) seem
to take it for granted that China will successfully become a major pole
of world capitalism by the mid-21st century, if not the actual hegemon.
As indicated above, I think such an outcome is anything but certain.
First, I think it could only come about through a process similar to
that by which the U.S. displaced Britain, the latter occurring through
three decades of world war, depression and social retrogression
(fascism, Stalinism). (Future historians may indeed look back on the
present era as the first phase of such a process.) Whatever happens in
China, however important China is and will be, will happen as part of a
WORLD dynamic. My own analysis is that China occupies, relative to
world capitalism, a position quite similar to that of Russia in the
decades before 1917, namely one in which the full constitution of a
capitalist- bourgeois society is threatened by the very real
possibility of a “permanent revolution” (an analysis applied by Marx to
Germany in 1848 and by Trotsky to Russia after 1905) whereby the
completion of the bourgeois revolution spills over into proletarian
revolution. The Chinese ruling elite is riding the
whirlwind precisely because its own necessary reforms are quite visibly
setting in motion social processes that could completely overwhelm it,
namely a working-class and peasant insurrection which would
necessarily assume a (truly) socialist content and would have to
link up with the world working class in a similar development, or (as
in Russia) be prone to lapsing back into some kind of closed
authoritarian autarchy.
I believe the U.S. capitalists are acutely aware that such an
insurrection in China would be even more dangerous for them for them
than the “mere” emergence of China as a new capitalist superpower
challenging or displacing the U.S. hegemon. China could also
disintegrate regionally (as it has in the past), and tens of millions
of refugees could potentially destabilize other parts of Asia. The U.S.
and Western capitalists’ ultimate goal (one which seems to me
extremely difficult to bring about) has to be stability and an
entente with a Chinese elite willing to “globalize”, i.e. fully
open the economy, and a Solidarnosc-type labor movement could help
achieve that. The CIA recently disclosed that the main thinking
of the Bush administration is (contrary to the post-9/11 cooperation in
the “war on terror”) that the U.S. and China are ultimately on a
collision course. I believe this is the deep meaning of the
post-9/11 U.S. military deployment in Eurasia, continuing the U.S.
success after the 1989-1991 disintegration of the Soviet bloc. The U.S.
has a strategy all along the borders of Russia and China, and it has
taken giant steps in achieving that strategy. Since I don’t think that
the American capitalists think (at least for now) in terms of permanent
revolution as a threat, their biggest nightmare is the emergence of an
East Asian capitalist hegemon (perhaps an Asian version of the EU)
and/or an Asian Monetary Fund of the type that Japan floated during the
Asian meltdown of 1997-98. There are great obstacles to the creation of
such a pole, namely the questions of Taiwan, of Korean reunification
and resurgent Japanese nationalism, all of which are simmering pots the
U.S. can stir to hinder Asian regional integration the way it can stir
the Palestinian question in the Middle East. Nonethless I
am convinced that there are important members of both the U.S. and
Asian elites who see precisely the emergence of such a pole as the
current stakes.
No assessment of the global role of China can neglect the fact that the
Bank of China (the central bank) holds over half-a-trillion in dollar
reserves, most of it recycled into U.S. government paper, and every day
brings new speculation about when China will tire of holding these
depreciating assets and “diversify” out of the dollar. Currents that
view China as an “anti-imperialist” force in the world have to explain
how China came to have such a role in world capitalist accumulation,
and is now emerging as a foreign investor (e.g. in Canada, in South
America and in Africa) in its own right.
I have referred several times to the framework of “decadence” or the
“epoch of capitalist decay” as necessarily part of any assessment of
where China is headed. This theory has various expressions. But all of
them come down to an assertion that there is something fundamentally
different (and “decadent”) about world capitalist development since
1914. Marxists who reject the decadence theory, on the other
hand, think that capitalism today is doing what is always did, namely
developing the global productive forces, and that China will
successfully push the U.S. aside as the U.S. pushed Great Britain
aside. As the main expression of capitalist decadence, I would cite the
billions of people, mainly in the Third World (but not exclusively)
(and hundreds of millions in China itself) who are living in extreme
precariousness because capitalism cannot profitably employ them, quite
analogous to the “reserve army of the unemployed” which Marx described
in a mainly national (i.e. British) context in the 1860’s. This
population, further, through world migration, above all to the
metropolis, is exercising a downward pull on working-class wages
worldwide, just as the “reserve army” did in Marx’s day. Thus my
general hunch is that China will emerge as a superpower or as “the”
hegemon only through a bloody reshuffling of the capitalist deck, and
not through the kind of “normal” development that achieved world
hegemony for Britain after 1815.
I think a debate on all aspects of these questions is a top priority
for the existing and future international revolutionary left.
March 2005
This article is from
the Break Their Haughty Power web site at
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner