Understanding the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China: reflections on a posting

Understanding the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China: reflections on a posting
A fellow member of my trade union asked my opinion of an online article by a British socialist, John Ross: The historical significance of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China – Learning from China .
This union colleague and I have worked together over quite a few years as part of a grouping in a teachers’ union here in England which aims to build the union at its base and in its leadership. This group has had considerable success and our union is now well-placed and playing a significant role in the re-awakening of organised resistance by the UK working class to the effects of the economic crisis This work is earning significant support from wide sections of the community. We are also known throughout our union for the emphasis we lay on international solidarity issues.
Several of the better-led trade unions here are organising resistance to attacks on wages, living standards, access to public service and welfare entitlements on the part of finance capital, employers and the current UK government. In the process we are standing up for the interests of the broader community. This is not an isolated trend. There are similar struggles across North America, the Caribbean and in southern Africa, for example.
It is worth stressing this because the topic under discussion – the current state of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) and its role in world economy and politics – is not a matter of abstract interest or of concern just for political nerds. The posting by John Ross under discussion here is a very explicit attempt to establish a dominant position for the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and its policies in the workers’ and progressive movement across the world. The role of the PRC and CPC is undoubtedly having an impact among workers, activists and trade unionists here and elsewhere who are striving to renew their own outlook, political consciousness and understanding of their place in the world.
Instead of forming fighting solidarity with workers’ movements around the world, we see the Chinese government forming cosy relationships with regimes which practice exploitation, bow down to trans-national corporations and very often deny basic rights to their own citizens.

We have to do our best to arrive at a sober and objective grasp of these matters but we are hampered by the prevalence on all sides of biased propaganda, misinformation and downright lies blaring out on huge variety of available media.
An offer accepted
Since the article in question is comparatively short and available online, there is no point picking out lengthy quotations from it in this response. The article starts by listing the considerable economic achievements of the PRC since the adoption of the policy of “Reform and Opening Up”, following contacts between US and Chinese leaders in the 1970s. Statistics and graphs are presented to back the assertion that the development of the PRC in the period since then has done more to eliminate poverty than any previous process of industrial development (the British industrial revolution, the US after 1865, the Pacific Tigers after World War II …).
There can be no denying this! However, the article also claims that it was made possible by a development of Marxism-Leninism on the part of the CPC leadership. Many will find the references to Marxism-Leninism a bit outlandish. One of the advantages of Marxism, in my view, is that it encourages us to look behind headline statistics to find the social relations and tendencies underlying them. For John Ross, in contrast, it is a matter of uncritically extrapolating a rising graph: China was a low-income country; it has become a middle-income country; it will therefore in time inevitably become a high-income country. He ascribes this success to the persistent wisdom of the CPC leadership. Any real statistician (“Marxist-Leninist” or not) would think twice about such an approach.
Indeed, the trajectory he traces started at a specific point of economic globalisation in the 1970s. There was a specific relationship of forces at the time, which deserves some attention. US capitalism had emerged as the main power in world economy after 1945, and had assumed the leadership of capitalism around the world. This was a mixed blessing for the US! Besides successful revolutions in China and Yugoslavia, the USSR had by the end of the war made huge territorial gains in Eastern Europe. Colonies like India and Indonesia were achieving independence, while other colonies and semi-colonies across the world were also involved in independence struggles. To try to staunch any further progress of this sort, and to adjust to new circumstances, the rulers of the US had to build up buffer states in Western Europe. This involved big concessions to the working class there and back home in terms of jobs, living standards and social benefits. They also had to restore the Japanese economy and build up the economy of South Korea in order to confront and contain the PRC.
By the late 1960s, these allies in Western Europe and Japan were turning into significant competitors for US business. Meanwhile the US faced a military defeat in Vietnam. Later, in the early 1980s, the US suffered the ignominious failure of its attempts to rescue her Iranian embassy staff in the fiasco of Operation Eagle Claw.
How did US imperialism react? Of course, we know that they never for an instant relaxed their military efforts utterly brutally to assert world leadership. We should not, however, forget their economic and diplomatic efforts in the same direction.
There had been a post-war boom based on “reconstruction” of areas devastated by war, but it was beginning to peter out by the mid-1960s. Starting in the 1960s and increasing as domestic contradictions grew in Western capitalist economies, investment and industrial activity was switched to “emerging economies”, first of all in southern Europe, and then in Turkey, Africa, South America and all the while in Asia. Labour was cheap and plentiful in those parts.
In the process, traditional areas of industry and of working-class activity were run down. This pulled the rug from under powerful working-class struggles to defend jobs, wages and conditions and the social benefits that they had gained. The emergence of the “rust belt” in the US, the defeat of the British miners and many other workers in metallurgy, manufacturing, construction, seafaring, printing and the docks here was the background for the “opportunities” thus offered to “emerging economies”. Effectively, imperialism managed to set workers in different parts of the world against each other. Ross refers to this globalisation process as “socialisation”, but it was also the exact opposite of genuine socialisation.
The exponential growth in international finance was a necessary part of this process. In this sphere, also, “in Marxist terms” the struggle between workers and employers over the creation and sharing-out of value is expressed in the series of crises in banking and finance which are a feature of world economy and of all national economies.
Under US President Nixon, an offer was made to the CPC leadership to become part of the “offshoring”. “Reform and Opening-Up” represents the CPC’s eventual acceptance of this offer. Now it is dressed up as an historic development of Marxism-Leninism, but at root it was a deal with imperialism which had a savage impact on workers and their organisations in the USA and western Europe.
Class relations in China
There has indeed been a colossal development of the productive forces in the PRC, but at the cost of reinforcing or even re-creating historically-outdated capitalist social relations. The last 50 years have brought the world’s largest working-class into being, but also a very powerful and ambitious capitalist class.
Ross’s graphs shine no light on the distribution of wealth in boomtime China. A comparatively small number became extremely rich, while a large middle-class also grew. Meanwhile, a huge mass of the rural poor was sucked into the new industries as a working class. This working class is highly exploited, working long hours under extremely oppressive conditions. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but by any standard workers’ wages and conditions in China lag far behind those in the old industrial countries. According to a World Bank report, wages in China as a share of GDP declined from 53 per cent in l998 to 41.4% in 2005, as compared with 57 per cent in the US. While Chinese legislation officially forbids over-work and super-exploitation of labour, these abuses, actually, seem to flourish unchecked. Independent trade unions run by their members are not tolerated. Campaigners who support workers’ rights suffer brutal state repression. Workers who do not enjoy settled status are denied access to housing and other benefits. You can look at one report describing conditions at What You Need to Know About Labor Conditions in China – RELEVANT (relevantmagazine.com) . If you suspect that this US-based material is deliberately biased, you can also look at this 2009 report: https://www.waronwant.org/news-analysis/sweatshops-china .
Since Ross refers rather freely to Marxism-Leninism, it is worth recalling how Marx reacted to the expansion of capitalism in Britain in the period referred to in his article. Marx said this at the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association – the First International:
“It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivaled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce. In 1850 a moderate organ of the British middle class, of more than average information, predicted that if the exports and imports of England were to rise 50 per cent, English pauperism would sink to zero. Alas! On April 7, 1864, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delighted his parliamentary audience by the statement that the total import and export of England had grown in 1863 ‘to 443,955,000 pounds! That astonishing sum about three times the trade of the comparatively recent epoch of 1843!’
And what, Marx asks, was the impact of all this on poverty? He quotes “the Sixth Report on Public Health, published by order of Parliament in the course of the present year. What did the doctor discover? That the silk weavers, the needlewomen, the kid glovers, the stock weavers, and so forth, received on an average, not even the distress pittance of the cotton operatives, not even the amount of carbon and nitrogen ‘just sufficient to avert starvation diseases’. ‘Moreover:’ — we quote from the report — ‘as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogeneous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire) insufficiency of nitrogeneous food was the average diet’. (Address to the International Workingmen’s Association, Marxist Internet Archive).
Marx continues:
“These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness; in all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food is for the most part excessively prolonged. The report brings out the strange and rather unexpected fact: ‘That of the division of the United Kingdom … the agricultural population of England,’ the richest division, ‘is considerably the worst fed’; but that even the agricultural laborers of Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire fare better than great numbers of skilled indoor operatives of the East of London. Such are the official statements published by order of Parliament in 1864 … at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House of Commons that ‘the average condition of the British laborer has improved in a degree we know to be extraordinary and unexampled in the history of any country or any age’.”
Not a good look
Chinese entrepreneurs and workers take the social relations described above with them when they settle abroad, for example in southern Africa. A typical report is this protest from the Zimbabwe Diamond Miners’ Union: https://newsofthesouth.com/zimbabwe-diamond-and-allied-minerals-workers-union-zdamwu-press-statement-over-the-shooting-of-employees-at-redeem-mine-in-the-midlands-province/. They claim that two members of the union were actually shot when they went to see Chinese managers about unpaid wages.
The Rossing uranium mine in Namibia saw a terrific struggle against exploitation by western mining interests when the country was ruled by apartheid South Africa. Liverpool dockers and other trade unionists boycotted the movement of ore from this mine. Workers won a battle for union recognition and decent conditions. When Rio Tinto sold the mine to the China National Nuclear Corporation a few years ago, promises were made about continued recognition of the Miners Union of Namibia (MUN) and agreements at the site. However, since then the entire local site leadership of the MUN has been sacked and workers’ rights are under attack.
Trade unionists at Piraeus, near Athens, complain that after much of the port (and large parts of the town around it) were taken over by the Chinese company COSCO, they found the culture of the new management showed absolutely no understanding of industrial participation and workers’ rights. This account of a strike over a death at work in the port highlights lack of consultation over health and safety issues and the dangers involved in “back-to-back” shift working: Piraeus Port Workers Announce 48 Hour Strike Over Workplace Safety After Death Of Colleague (greekcitytimes.com).
Workers at a Chinese-owned copper mine in eastern Serbia held a protest on January 12 to demand higher wages and improved working conditions. Several hundred workers at Zijin Bor Copper, located in the town of Bor, participated in the protest, calling for the Chinese company to respect the laws of Serbia and its Serbian workers.
Protester Srecko Karadzic told RFE/RL that he took part because of working conditions and because wages have not kept up with inflation.
“Insufficient respect for workers, insufficient respect for wages and standards,” he said. “Everything is more expensive, and wages are the same.”
Goran Nikolic, who also works at Zijin, told RFE/RL that the workers are intimidated and said there are lists of workers who protest. These workers are then transferred to other workplaces, making others afraid, he said.
A final point on Ross’s statistics: He evokes historic periods of capitalist growth, but stops short at mentioning what happened next. At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s dominance of world trade came under attack from newcomers such as Germany, Japan and the US, and this led to two world wars. The US is still top of the tree at the moment, and has been for nearly a century, but she is clearly struggling and flailing around economically and militarily. Japan and Germany are no longer the “miracle economies” that they were forty years ago. Chinese strategists are famous for taking the “long view”. If the system of imperialism continues, how could the amazing economic growth of China’ business economy and influence not lead to further convulsions and wars, as did the arrival of previous new claimants to imperial power? China obviously has the right (as should Venezuela and Cuba too) to engage in world trade without sanctions or boycotts. But China now engages in world trade as an industrial, trading and financial rival to the US and Europe. Without a profound shift in social relations and economy across the world, a shift in which the working class comes forward as the leading force able to remodel society, events must follow the same trajectory as they did in 1914 and 1939.
Marxism-Leninism: A miracle-cure?
Here it becomes necessary to quote more extensively from John Ross’s posting:
“If the achievements of the CPC in improving the conditions of human beings are unparalleled the question is then obviously how was this achieved, what made it possible? This leads to an accurate measure of the achievements of the CPC in ideas, in theory.
“As is well known the CPC was founded under the impact of the 1917 Russian revolution, the first successful socialist revolution – which took place in an imperialist country. This fact, and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism which were learnt from these events, was on the one hand an immense initial advantage for China – as these were the world’s most advanced economic, social and political ideas, the practicality and success of which had been proved by the 1917 revolution. But simultaneously, because these ideas were international, and not specifically developed for China, the CPC then had to undertake a long historical process of the “Sinicization” of Marxism – to integrate the analyses of Marxism, developed not only in a different country but in a different continent, with an understanding of China’s specific reality.
“This led to mistakes by the CPC in its early period. As Xi Jinping noted: ‘The young Communist Party of China once simply applied the general principles of Marxism-Leninism on the proletarian revolution and copied the experience of the Russian October Revolution in the urban armed uprisings, without fully considering China’s national conditions and the reality of the Chinese revolution, causing the Chinese revolution to suffer serious setbacks.’
“This, and other major errors, resulted in the defeat of the urban based Chinese revolutionary wave in 1927. It was following this defeat that Mao Zedong progressively took undisputed leadership of the CPC. Mao Zedong’s new strategy centred on a rural based revolution and victoriously culminated in the creation of the PRC in 1949.”
Where to begin? For one thing, the Russian revolution could never be reduced to just “urban armed uprisings”. In both 1905 and 1917, military defeats for the Russian Empire led to revolts in the army, whose rank-and-file consisted mainly of peasants. These played a highly significant role in the mass movements which in 1917 culminated in the establishment of a soviet government. The Bolsheviks were extremely aware of movements in the countryside and debated the issue carefully and continually.
The political training of the newly-formed Communist party of China and its leaders fell upon the Communist International (CI), which was established at an international congress in 1919. There can be no real understanding of the historical period evoked without some consideration of the role and ultimate fate of this body. Its aim was to share all the experiences of the revolutionary movement around the world and assist in the development of strategy and tactics. Naturally, the Russian revolutionary leaders had terrific authority in this, but the Bolsheviks devoted the same careful analytical attention to developments in other parts of the world as they had previously to social developments in the Russian Empire.
The Comintern Second Congress (1920) spent a considerable amount of time discussing the revolution in developing countries. It is particularly important for what happened later in China that they weighed extremely carefully what role the various social classes might play in the struggle against imperialism and the prospects for socialism. The Indian delegate M.N. Roy and the Korean Bolshevik Pak Chin-sun submitted theses to this Congress which dealt in some detail with these matters. Pak Chin-sun in particular explored social relations in the East and possible developments:
“The acute economic crisis in Asia, which is inevitable at the moment of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the imperialist great powers’ barbaric policy in the colonies have created favourable conditions for revolution there. This policy has aroused strong nationalist tendencies in the East. Granted, the first stage of the revolution in the East will be the victory of the liberal bourgeoisie and the nationalist intellectuals, nevertheless, we must begin now to prepare our forces for the second stage by drawing from the depths of the peasant masses, enslaved by the feudal regime, organised forces to carry out an agrarian revolution in Asia as soon as possible. The industrial proletariat in Asia, excluding Japan, is too weak for us to entertain any serious hopes of an early communist revolution, but the victory of the agrarian revolution is certain if we are able to master the immediate tasks of the great and bloody struggle”.
He points out:
“The question now is, what forces are propelling the revolution in the East? The majority of the former nobility, the liberal bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, which represent the intellectual forces of the revolution in Asia, have learned from the long years of struggle against foreign subjugation and from a process of agonising mental struggle. They have understood that the rebirth of the East is not possible except through the rule of the broad toiling masses”.
Pak Chin-sun added: “Two opposite roads lie open to Asia’s nationalists: the one leading to personal prosperity, based on the perpetual suffering and gradual degeneration of the great masses of the people; the other leading to the social revolution …”
“Certainly, even in the revolutionary milieu there are also elements that unite with us, internationalists, only to attain national political liberation … But should the revolution one day require it, we will know how to turn our arms against the ‘allies’ of yesterday”. (See Riddell [ed], Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite. Volume II of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, Pathfinder 1991 pp 860 and 861”.
The Communist Party of China was established in 1922. While it grew very quickly, it was also pitched very quickly into massive and dramatic struggles. The political training of its leadership was a major duty of the Communist International. However, at the same time the most powerful force in the CI, the Russian (after 1922 Soviet) leadership was undergoing a rapid degeneration into a party-state bureaucracy, not without determined resistance from the genuine followers of Lenin. In the course of this struggle, the developing bureaucracy adopted anti-Communist measures such as suppressing discussion among the party membership, intimidating and harassing opponents. It also increasingly developed the cult of the infallible leader. All of this it imposed on the national parties affiliated to the CI. It also abused its position in the CI to bolster its own domestic situation, rather than to advance effective policies in each member Communist Party. (One of the most disgraceful aspects of the CPC 20th Congress is the full-on return to the personality cult and exceptional powers granted to a single individual, Xi, directly copying the degeneration in the Soviet Union in the 10 years after the Russian revolution.)
China was in a profound crisis in the 1920s. The revolution against the Qing dynasty and the age-old social relations of the Chinese empire had broken out in 1911. This movement struggled to establish itself and at the same time to confront foreign imperialist inroads. The national movement which crystallised in Sun Yat-sen’s Guo Min Dang (KMT) was unable to establish a new national government. Large swathes of the country were controlled by local warlords.
In the mid-1920s, the CI and the CPC provided enormous practical support to the KMT’s military campaign to defeat the warlords (“the Northern Expedition”).
Unfortunately, they convinced themselves and others that the bourgeois-dominated KMT (run after Sun Yat-sen’s death by Chiang Kai-shek) would continue to be the vehicle for social progress in China for a considerable time, and that it was dominated by a left-wing sympathetic to the masses of workers and peasants. This was the “line” passed down from Stalin and Bukharin.
But it turned out that the social conflicts in China could not be contained in that way. Workers and peasants responded massively to the campaign in their own way. In response, the right wing of the KMT rallied its forces, side-lined the weak KMT Left and inflicted serious defeats on the movement in Canton in 1926 and in Shanghai in 1927.
The veteran Communist Peng-Shu-tse described events in this way:
“Thus, even though the CCP led the Shanghai workers in an armed insurrection on March 21, 1927, which succeeded in destroying the control of the Northern warlords and occupying Shanghai (except for the foreign concessions), with armed workers organised to maintain peace and order, they could not establish a revolutionary regime based on the working class. Such a regime would have initiated a dictatorship against the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and, in particular, would have opposed and defeated the coup plotted by Chiang Kai-shek’s bandit gang. They could not do this because it would destroy ‘KMT-CCP collaboration’, obstruct the line of a ‘bloc of four classes’ and especially disrupt the business of Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition. Even though the CCP had taken Shanghai and gained the support of the entire working class and a majority of the lower petty-bourgeoisie, along with the sympathy of a section of the soldiers, in order to adhere to the Comintern’s policy of a ‘coalition government of four classes,’ the CCP could do nothing but establish a Shanghai provisional government in collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Those representatives of the bourgeoisie ‘elected’ to serve in the provisional government used sabotage and opposition, under Chiang Kai-shek’s direction, to paralyse the government and prepare the way for Chiang’s next coup.”
Understandably Peng continues: “Under these circumstances, the CCP slipped into a period of exceptional distress and dilemma.” (Peng Shu-tse, introduction to Leon Trotsky on China, Pathfinder, 1976, pp 64 and 65). It was not that the principles of Marxism-Leninism were abstract truisms which requires translation from some Olympian height into the particular circumstances of each separate country: in fact it was Stalin who imposed a political “line” in China in defiance of the views of Marx and especially Lenin. This line, of subordinating the workers and peasants to the Guo Min Dang, disoriented the movement and led to a serious defeat. The leaders of the USSR after Lenin’s death did try to impose “one size fits all” political lines on Communist Parties around the world. This was clear in the sectarian policies of the “Third Period” after 1928, and the switch to “Popular Front” alliances after 1933. Stalin’s Marxist opponents insisted that the general features of world politics are expressed in different proportions in each country, demanding political solutions appropriate to local conditions, and sharp awareness of developing events and changes; but their voices were stifled.
“Under these circumstance”, Mao’s turn to the countryside was more a pragmatic adjustment to a catastrophic situation than an original development of Marxist theory. (It is true that he learned enough to take future Soviet advice with a pinch of salt!).
How fundamental a principle was the turn to rural guerrilla warfare? For fifty years after the establishment of the PRC, leftist forces around the world have tried to emulate Mao’s success through guerrilla warfare. There have been inspiring and determined struggles. Huge sacrifices have been made in the East, in Africa and in Central and South America. However, as we stand today, the results are mostly very disappointing. From Algeria to Zimbabwe, through the entire alphabet in Africa, states which have won independence at least in part through guerrilla struggles have ended up run by local kleptocracies where hints and clues of some sort of socialism are increasingly rare and the main “growth” has been in the oversees bank accounts of the autocratic rulers.
Cuba is an exception. But even the Cuban government now spends a lot of its time helping former guerrilla movements, as in Colombia, to make peace deals with the capitalist client states they have been fighting for 50 years. The balance sheet of half a century of imitating the Maoism of the 1930s and 1940s is this: that many of the imitators have spent the last two decades or more trying to disentangle themselves from it.
And now, while Ross celebrates the “Marxism-Leninism” of Mao, Xi urges supporters around the world to collaborate with the local capitalists. He proposes the exact same mistake that was inflicted on the young CPC by Stalin in the mid 1920s.
As the apartheid regime was being taken apart in the early 1990s, Nelson Mandela assured trade unionists there that the country’s wealth would be nationalised. At the same time the advice he actually adopted – from the Chinese – was to leave foreign multi-national corporations in charge of extracting and processing the country’s minerals.
What sort of “Marxism-Leninism”?
Ross contrasts the ultimate failure of the USSR to the heady successes of the PRC, against the background of a rather terse account of 20th Century economic history:
“…the great crisis of the 1930s, which culminated in the Second World War itself, was dominated by two economic features. First domestic investment collapsed, second international trade and investment radically declined. Expressed in Marxist terms, therefore, from 1929 to World War II socialisation of labour was drastically reduced, leading to the prediction of a huge recline in production – which duly occurred”.
What “socialisation” meant for Lenin we shall see in a moment. Ross’s bald account of the events in world economy since 1929 could figure in any account (by a “Marxist-Leninist” or any moderately well-informed economist). For Ross, imperialism is a matter of different policies followed at different times by imperialist powers: now low-investment, leading to falling world trade, autarky and mass unemployment; at another time lively investment, especially internationally, leading to growing production and expanding trade. The decisions of those in charge, for Ross, do not flow from the very nature of imperialism as a stage in capitalist society, blundering from crisis to crisis. Following his approach, one might wish that world leaders had set up the WTO and the World Bank in the early 1930s, and avoided all the unpleasantness that followed!
The actual Lenin had a very different understanding of imperialism:
“From all that has been said above on the economic essence of imperialism, it follows that it must be characterised as capitalism in transition, or, more precisely, as dying capitalism. It is very instructive in this connection to note that the bourgeois economists, in describing the newest capitalism, currently employ terms like ‘interlocking’, ‘absence of isolation,’ etc; banks are ‘enterprises which, by their functions and course of development, are not purely private business enterprises; more and more they are growing out of the sphere of purely business regulation’. And the same Riesser who spoke these last words, declares in all seriousness that the ‘prophecy’ of the Marxists concerning ‘socialisation’ ‘has not been realised’.
“What then, is the meaning of this word ‘interlocking? … When a big enterprise becomes a gigantic one, and, working on the basis of exactly computed mass data, systematically organises the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds or three-fourths of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when those raw materials are transported to the most suitable places of production, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from each other, in a systematic and organised manner; when one centre controls all the successive stages of working up the raw materials right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers … then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production going on before our eyes, and not mere ‘interlocking’; that private business relations, and private property relations, constitute a shell which is no longer suitable to its contents, a shell which must inevitably begin to decay if its removal is postponed by artificial means; a shell which may continue in a state of decay for a comparatively long period (particularly if the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.” (Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”).
Whatever “socialisation” means for Ross, in Leninist terms it refers to the revolt of the productive forces against the relations of production, or as Marx said:
“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.” (Marx, Capital vol. I).
For Lenin “private business relations, and private property relations, constitute a shell which may continue in a state of decay for a comparatively long period (particularly is the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed”. The CPC leadership has “improved” and “developed” this Marxist-Leninist conception to the point of vastly expanding the “opportunist abscess”.
Ross’s article on the significance of the CPC 12th Congress, and his version of the history of that party, present Marxism-Leninism in terms which considerably confuse the matter.
Bob Archer
February 2023




What We Can Learn From The Crisis in NUMSA

 

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa is not just any old union. It was built by black industrial workers fighting exploitation by multinationals keen to use the repressive, racist apartheid regime to secure super-profits. It was built with support and advice from Marxist activists. These workers asserted themselves as an independent revolutionary force, quickly grasped the core ideas of socialism, and fearlessly fought to bring down the whole apartheid system. They established workers’ democracy as the working principle of their union.

The settlement which ended apartheid rule in the early 1990s cheated these militant workers of the opportunity to take the road to a socialist South Africa. An alliance between the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) not only dropped any socialist policy (such as nationalising the mining and metal-refining industries, returning the land to the toilers who work it, etc.); it actually forged ahead with a policy of widespread selling-off of public utilities. At the same time, the leaders of this alliance neglected no opportunity to enrich themselves.

For over 20 years, the triple alliance was actually able to ride out any working-class opposition which was provoked as a succession of government policy initiatives failed to provide progress in jobs, welfare and living conditions or in mass black access to education and agricultural land.

Working-class resistance was reflected in internal wrangles within the alliance and the regular-rapid turnover in national Presidents, with Thabo Mbeki replaced by Jacob Zuma and Zuma in turn replaced by the former miners’ union leader, Cyril Ramaphosa. Each successive incumbent became mired in accusations of corruption and incompetence.

Working-class resistance broke out into the open in the middle of 2012 with the shooting by the South African Police Service of thirty-four striking miners at Marikana and the subsequent wave of industrial militancy.

Correctly identifying this as a pivotal moment in the class struggle in South Africa, NUMSA convened a Special Congress in December 2013 which undertook a serious campaign to re-establish a socialist and internationalist workers’ movement. The decisions of this Special Congress are summarised at What Numsa decided in December 2013 – wirfi (workersinternational.info).

These Special Congress decisions amounted to a carefully considered understanding of a way forward to revive the workers’ movement, workers’ democratic organisation and workers’ political power as a class.

However, progress along the lines sketched out at the Special Congress has been far from smooth. Old mistakes and embedded illusions have persisted in the very leadership of this trade union. This leadership is quick to point out the failings of post-apartheid rule but has never really taken on board any analysis of the real lessons of these failures. They have therefore neglected many of the decisions of the December 2013 Special Congress and taken the union in quite a different direction from the one chosen by delegates.

Differences over these matters have led to a crisis within the trade union. This came to a head over preparations for the 11thNational Congress of the Union slated to start on 25 July 2022. An opposition group of political activists alleged serious abuses of democratic process by the national leadership of General Secretary Irvin Jim in the course of local and regional gatherings to discuss policies and select and mandate delegates. Leading figures in this opposition – all elected office bearers at various levels within the union – went to court and obtained a ruling that the Congress should not go ahead. The majority of the national leadership of the union nevertheless went ahead with the Congress. They obtained a ruling from another court that some slight last-minute changes they made were adequate to meet the terms of the previous injunction.

A Secretariat Report to the NUMSA NEC Meeting held on 28 and 28 October 2022 reveals at some length the attitude, orientation and methods of the current NUMSA leadership. This Secretariat Report makes no direct or systematic attempt to defend this leadership against any of the charges made against it. It is nevertheless worth studying, as it reveals some very basic weaknesses and problematic attitudes in that leadership, as well as underhand ways of dealing with political problems. The underlying roots of the problems in the leadership of the union, the reasons why an opposition had to arise and challenge this leadership can be traced and identified by analysing aspects of this Secretariat Report. This present article delves into some of this.

A dishonest slander

The report comes, in effect, from the office of the General Secretary of the union, Irvin Jim. It is a robust and obstinate attempt to justify the current leadership of the union, but it does not provide any systematic analysis of the crisis in the union and the soil out of which it grew. In the places where it does deal with that background, the report actually reveals the author’s own political weaknesses and mistakes, but by then a far murkier objective has been attempted.

From the very start of the report, the opposition within the union is repeatedly described as “individuals”. It is never referred to as what it actually is: a strong and rooted trend which is an organic part of NUMSA’s history and a source of the union’s strength.

The word “individual” has a very specific weight in a workers’ organisation, especially one allegedly guided by Marxism. To describe opponents systematically and repeatedly as “individuals” is to place them outside of and at odds with the collective of a workers’ organisation. This is doubly deceptive here since all the “individuals” involved have been fighting consistently for nothing more that the collective rights of the working-class membership of the union, enshrined in its constitution and methods. Their complaints have all related to breaches of the constitution and departure from the methods of workers’ democracy on the part of the Irvin Jim leadership.

The opposition has produced various statements, submissions and appeals which present a devastating picture of financial chicanery, abuses and constitutional breaches on the part of the union leadership. The Secretariat Report brazenly reproduces a number of these with barely any comment or analysis and certainly no detailed rebuttal. The only “argument” involved is the kind of subliminal propaganda that the advertising industry has mastered. The unspoken but clear message is: “How dare these ‘individuals’ raise their voices at all! What insolence on their part! What saboteurs and wreckers!”.

As the Secretariat Report goes on, the “individuals” become, bit by bit, a “group of individuals”, and a little later “a group of individuals inside the union”, but working insidiously to undermine it; a “group of individuals” who are feted in various media outlets (and therefore obviously work hand-in-glove with the class enemy), and so on.

One hundred pages later, the Report works itself up into a climax. The opposition becomes “a loud hailer for anti-NUMSA right-wingers, speaking rubbish about NUMSA and believing that they could change NUMSA policies and constitutional decisions through some Cape Town television studio called ‘Workers World Media’.” It goes on: “To be blunt we have allowed ourselves as the union through our good heart and generosity to be abused by a tiny, loony, racist white left that has no relationship with the working class as a result of being open to everyone who claim to advance the interests of the working class”. (The opposition justifiably points out that they are fighting FOR the carrying out of the decisions of the 2013 Special Congress and that the NUMSA leadership has abandoned these decisions and gone off in a different direction. The accusation of racism a vile slander).

All this abuse is piled on in order to avoid addressing the very serious accusations of wrongdoiny which are detailed in the various opposition documents actually copied into the Report. It is all very well to brag about “NUMSA policies and constitutional decisions”, but pointless unless you actually address the reality of the complaints about branch-stacking meetings with unelected “delegates”, sending thugs to disorganise union meetings and so forth.

The slander comes to a spittle-laden climax: “it is important to raise everybody’s level of consciousness about NUMSA as an organisation and refocus our energies towards what NUMSA has always been, a preparatory school for class struggles and fighting against the system of capitalism in pursuit of socialism”. This is bound up with “characterising and deepening our understanding about the forces that have consistently plunged the organisation, putting it under siege and causing instability. Part of such a struggle has to do with being firm and not being liberal and being prepared to call a spade a spade” (My emphasis – BA).

What an insult to the very concepts of “consciousness”, “class struggles”, “fighting capitalism” and “pursuit of socialism”! The Secretariat Reportimpliesthat the opposition is guilty of treachery and malice, but utters not a singlepoliticalword or idea in characterising that opposition.

In fact, the Secretariat Report has no political answer to the charges raised by the opposition within the union. The Report is reduced to name-calling in a style that would have made old Andrey Vyshinsky proud – that lying, slandering and cold-bloodedly murderous prosecutor at the notorious Moscow Trials in the 1930s. “A preparatory school for class struggles and fighting against the system of capitalism in pursuit of socialism” is indeed what a trade union can and should be. However, while the methods and conceptions of the Irvin Jim leadership remain Stalinist, that leadership will train and educate not class-conscious proletarian fighters, but sheep with no mind of their own, bleating the meaningless phrases inculcated into them by their leaders.

There is also no direct reply to the allegations that the business interests attached to the union are not serving their intended functions and are instead used for the benefit of individual leaders and to buy influence among union members. Instead, the Report announces that “We can report to the NEC that we have met the necessary compliance and we have made a submission to the Department of Employment and Labour and have committed to respond to the pack of lies championed by faceless people who speak on the basis of anonymity, when clearly their mission is to destroy NUMSA and put it under administration”. So, there is the promise to “respond” to the Department of Employment and Labour, but no proper response to the union delegates and members!

At the same time, the Report announces there will be special training for local and regional officials of the union to keep systematic minutes and financial records, as if they were to blame for the alleged abuses.

Stalinism a counter-revolutionary force in the working class

From out of the tomb, Stalinism extends a ghostly hand whose touch threatens to wither the promising green shoots of a working-class revival. The current leadership of NUMSA is making a hash of the course of action established at the union’s Special Congress in December 2013 because it does not grasp the problems presented to the working class by the bureaucratic, mechanical and authoritarian methods and conceptions bred under Stalin’s rule in the USSR. These are the methods and conceptions which shaped the character of the SACP-ANC-Cosatu alliance which assumed rule over South Africa after 1990. Even three decades after the collapse of the USSR these methods and conceptions still have a remarkable grip on the workers’ movement.

The Bolshevik Party built and led by Lenin engaged in a dogged and profound struggle to master theoretical problems in order to provide clear, correct and reliable guidance to workers and the broader masses at every evolving stage in their struggle. That struggle itself presents a constantly shifting and changing picture as different social forces square off against each other. For the Bolsheviks, loyalty to Marxist theory was not at all a slavish and silent subservience to a line imposed from above. Even working under conditions of illegality and the risk of imprisonment, exile and death, Bolsheviks arrived at their political policies and practices in a process of discussion. Those who claim to be Marxist leaders had to – and still must – justify that assertion by honestly accounting for the outcomes of the policies they propose. This is not “liberalism” but a necessary attribute of revolutionary organisation.

A very different relationship between party leaders and strategy and tactics took root after Lenin’s death. Once a bureaucracy had usurped state power in the Soviet Union, and extended its grip over the Communist Parties around the world, policies and tactics became subordinate to the needs of the Soviet leadership at any given time. It was in this process that workers became accustomed, under duress, to adopting uncritically whatever the Party Line might be at any given moment, however much that line contradicted the Party Line the day before and the day after. The methods and practices of purges, frame-up trials and the Gulag had their impact in parties and trade unions run by supporters of the Russian (and later Chinese) leadership across the world.

We have room here for just a few examples of the problems caused by the bureaucratic approach: Finding reliable allies for revolutionary Communists workers in their struggles (and knowing exactly how reliable they are and for how long) is a question of immense importance for our movement. Under Lenin, the Communist International developed the tactic of the United Front in order to overcome the grip of reformist socialist parties on the working class. However, in the hands of the new leadership in Russia in the mid-1920s, the tactic of the United Front became a reckless reliance upon agreements with the more radical trade union leaders in Britain and with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Guo Min Dang in China, fighting the warlords who dominated large parts of the country. What should have been necessary temporary alliances were kept going even as the right wing of the Guo Min Dang slaughtered Chinese Communist workers in their thousands and the British TUC leaders closed down the 1926 General Strike after 9 days.

At the same time, the Soviet government was prolonging far beyond its shelf-life the “New Economic Policy” which had been adopted as a necessary but temporary path to economic recovery after the terrible destruction inflicted upon Russia during World War I and the civil war following the revolution.

By the end of the 1920s, the richer peasants in the USSR were starting to stir up opposition to the Soviet state in the countryside. Faced with setbacks to its policies at home and abroad, the bureaucracy turned to its notorious “class against class” policies of the so-called “Third Period”. The world revolution was proclaimed to be imminent. Reformist socialists were all denounced as traitors and as “twins” of fascism. War was declared on the entire Soviet peasantry in the form of the murderous forced collectivisation of agriculture. Communist workers in many countries around the world isolated themselves from other members of their own class by adopting a string of sectarian practices and actions.

Policy zig-zags

The “Third Period”, described above, made any united resistance to fascism by socialist and communist workers impossible and led directly to the defeat of the German working class in 1933 at the hand of the Nazis. The response of the Soviet bureaucracy was to switch abruptly to a policy of alliances with “democratic” capitalist states and “popular fronts” with the reformist socialist and radical bourgeois politicians who had so recently been denounced as “twins” of fascism.

Even in the early 1920s, the Stalinist-leadership of the Communist movement had already abandoned any hope of the revolution spreading around the world. Communist policy internationally was reduced to any initiative that might strengthen the hand of the bureaucracy in its grip on its home territory in the USSR and its negotiations with Western capitalist governments. Stalinism had at times a radical, demagogic face and at times a face turned towards the democratic bourgeoisie (or even, at times, to German Nazism). What it never really had was a genuinely revolutionary Marxist conception of really revolutionary tactics.

Each switch to a new “line” led to the expulsion or resignation of some in the party who had believed too firmly in the previous one. Where the Soviet leadership held sway, that could lead to imprisonment and death. The question for those who found themselves in that position was and is: do they understand the political roots of the degeneration which hit them? Many have not. This seems to be particularly the case with Irvin Jim. He split noisily with other members of the South African Communist Party nearly ten years ago over the obvious failures of the South African ANC government. Now he seems to be keen to patch up differences, and looks to the possibility of working with the SACP on the issues which he raises in the Secretariat Report.

His split was not thought through to the end. The Secretariat Report reveals massive illusions in the revolutionary potential of the SACP and its traditions. It refers to the 1969 Morogoro conference of the ANC, called to deal with frustration in the ranks of the SACP and Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the movement. Chris Hani and others had been suspended for voicing their radical criticism of the passivity of the ANC. At the conference, the protests of Hani and others were headed off with revolutionary-sounding bluster from Joe Slovo, the very Slovo whose rhetoric is quoted approvingly in the NUMSA Secretariat Report to the October 2022 National Executive Committee. Back in 1969, the suspended activists trooped tamely back into the ANC, which adopted aStrategy and Tactics of the African National Congress document, drafted by Slovo.

While acknowledging generally “an international context of transition to the socialist system”, the text of Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congressemphasises: “We in South Africa are part of the zone in which national liberation is the chief content of the struggle”. It emphasises the obstacles to national liberation throughout southern Africa at that time (1969), and insists that “The strategy and tactics of our revolution require for their formulation and understanding a full appreciation of the interlocking and interweaving of international, African and Southern African developments which play on our situation”. Thus, the struggle of the masses in the colonies of the time is severed from the movement of the working class in the imperialist powers of the day and firmly placed under the control of middle-class black liberation leaders. Diplomatic and strategic considerations which are said to be beyond the grasp of ordinary workers and activists mean that only “the leadership” is equipped to judge what strategy and tactics are appropriate.

The section which refers to “Unending Resistance to White Domination” hails the “emergence and development of the primary organisation of the liberation movement – the African National Congress”, as well as groups representing “the Coloured and the Indians” and “the creation of economic and political organisations – the South African Communist Party and trade unions which reflected the special aims and aspirations of the newly developed and doubly oppressed working class”. This whole schema conceals the fact that “unending resistance” on the part of the black middle-class and tribal leaders not only experienced long periods of slumber, but also had a different aim and social content from that of black worker, which are relegated to “special aims and aspirations”.

There follows very extensive logic-chopping about an “armed struggle” which barely ever got off the ground in South Africa itself. Slovo here is anxious to defend the ANC against accusations that “they were not really revolutionary or that it was only in the early ‘60s that they began to appreciate the correct strategy … in other words was its policy not a revolutionary one?” Clearly, critical voices in the SACP had said something very much along these lines. Slovo’s answer is to explain that “radical changes are brought about not by imaginary forces but by those whose outlook and readiness to act is very much influenced by historically determined factors”. He goes on: “To ignore the real situation and to play about with imaginary forces, concepts and ideals is to invite failure. The art of revolutionary leadership consists in providing leadership to the masses and not just to its most advanced elements; it consists of setting a pace which accords with the objective conditions and the real possibilities at hand”. (Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress, 1969)

The problem with all these wise words is that the decision about what “objective conditions and the real possibilities at hand” really are, what tactics might be appropriate, and when, is left to the “political leadership” which has already been vested in the African National Congress, and the ANC is what Lenin used to call a ‘bourgeois nationalist” movement with its own aims and objectives quite different from those of black workers. Stalinist policy (as expressed by Joe Slovo) had already walled-off “national liberation” struggles from the struggles of workers in developed capitalist countries and now it placed the struggles of workers in colonial countries (as mere “special aims and interests”) under the control of a movement expressing the aspirations of a black elite.

And today the result of that is notorious. Thirty years of ANC rule in South Africa have brought all the abuses for the working class that the 2013 Special Congress statements and resolutions and even the current Secretariat Report detail. But the response of the Secretariat Report is to evoke the voice of Chris Hani, who tamely submitted to the terms ofStrategy and Tactics of the African National Congress and returned to the Stalinist fold. One is justified in suspecting that, despite all the bluster, that is exactly what the current leadership of NUMSA is planning to do.

Despite the sharp break with the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance in 2012-13, the current leadership of NUMSA never broke, as a whole, with the Stalinist politics in which that alliance was rooted. The Secretariat Report flays the ANC rhetorically:

“ … the ANC for more than two decades squandered and missed what an opportunity given its revolutionary history of class struggle as the only guarantee for fundamental change”.

And:

At the back of the country’s minerals what the ANC failed to do was to champion manufacturing and industrialisation through a job-led industrial strategy”.

And:

the African majority has remained economically marginalised pursuing this campaign to influence the ANC …”.

And, most tellingly about the illusions this leadership of NUMSA still harbours about the whole historic policy of alliance with the ANC:

This means in our country that racism and apartheid in our country’s economy has continued by other means in that the African majority has remained economically marginalized, landless, and disposed. In pursuing this campaign to influence the ANC which must be understood in its proper context that we were not calling on the ANC to adopt a new revolutionary line, we were simply calling on the ANC to stick to its liberation vision which can be characterised as the true essence of the national democratic revolution as the ANC once claimed it was pursuing. During such a difficult phase when we were being purged by the ANC led alliance, constituted by the ANC, SACP and COSATU, before they expelled us in 2014 we consistently reminded them of the following quote from the Morogoro Conference in 1969. Of course, we knew that Chris Hani, for doing the same, was viciously punished for agitating for convening of the Morogoro Conference of 1969 through the infamous memo which he was extremely hated for penning it which led to him being sentenced to jail for 6 months. Below is what we consistently reminded them of: ‘In our country – more than in any other part of the oppressed world – it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow existing economic forces to retain their interests intact, is to feed the root of racial supremacy, and does not represent even the shadow of liberation. Our drive towards national emancipation is, therefore, in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation.’ Morogoro Conference 1969

And yet, in the face of the SACP and ANC leadership at Morogoro, this same Chris Hani could not put any content into the fine words about “the return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole”. He backed down and was accepted back into the fold, as a tame sheep. And that was just an anticipation of the treachery of the ANC, the SACP, and their various backers and patrons at the beginning of the 1990s

After more than sixty years, is it not time to draw the lesson that not only the ANC, but the SACP too, is a busted flush? The SACP never took forward any serious fight of the working class in South Africa that challenged the ANC. The reasons for that lie deeply embedded in the political culture inculcated by Stalinism. The workers’ movement needs to actually draw out the lessons of its own history, overcome Stalinism in theory and practice, and on the basis of that re-assessment take a genuinely revolutionary road. The illusions peddled by the Secretariat Report show that nothing essential has been learned from history by the current leadership of NUMSA. No talk of “vanguarding ourselves” has any value; all bragging about “consciousness” is but “a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, empty noise unless the speaker can understand and deal with the essential nature of Stalinism and its break with Leninism.

Back in 2012 and 2013, NUMSA correctly aligned itself with the growing working-class opposition to the Alliance of ANC, SACP and the union confederation COSATU. Within COSATU, NUMSA pressed for a break with the alliance, stood their ground and only moved to set up the new trade union federation (SAFTU) when they were expelled from COSATU for their principled stance. Now that COSATU too has been pushed by the working class to pass a motion of no confidence in the ANC, the vacillating top leadership of NUMSA seeks reconciliation with the very same political forces from which it was forced to break in 2013.

Now, unity of the workers’ movement in practice is a fundamentally vital issue in the struggle, if we are to talk seriously about strategy and tactics that can lead to victory. NUMSA and SAFTU should indeed be exploring how to find unity in action with trade unions still affiliated to COSATU, and even with supporters of the SACP. At best, this could lead to serious gains for genuinely revolutionary socialists, and at worst (if COSATU etc. will not join or later back out) it will clarify in the eyes of wider groups of workers who they can trust and who they cannot trust.

What kind of organisation?

The real problem with the hand which the NUMSA leadership extends to the SACP is the conception of working-class revolutionary organisation which the current NUMSA leadership appears to have brought with it from its days in the SACP. We saw earlier that at the outcome of the Morogoro conference, Hani and Slovo both joined in the chorus that the leadership knows best and that the “individual” must accept that the “leadership” is the true and correct voice of the rank-and-file members. Irvin Jim appears to be stuck in the same place

In Lenin’s hands, strategy and tactics were, first of all, connected with genuine commitment to the revolutionary role of the working class. It is with that aim in mind that it becomes vital to actually know and understand reality as it changes and develops. The “line” – the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary party – was for Lenin grounded in an unyielding determination to bring theoretical knowledge to bear in order to guide the struggle for socialism, not in a bureaucratic desire to protect one’s own power and privileges. Strategy and tactics had to provide the party members, the working class and the masses, with an opportunity to test and judge party policies and decisions. Working-class organisations such as leading and local party committees, trades union workplace groups, branches and districts should not be there just to rubber-stamp leadership decisions but to provide an arena for debate. Support for a particular party and leadership should be based on the test of experience and cannot be imposed by rhetoric and shouted assertions. Strategy and tactics should help equip workers with the consciousness needed to abolish capitalism.

Political education

At the heart of the NUMSA October 2022 Secretariat Report are empty words, dressed up with rhetorical references to really significant matters and torn-out-of-context. At one point the Secretariat Report makes a fleeting allusion to Lenin’s little book What Is To Be Done?.Interestingly, this reference comes just before a long series of reports on NUMSA successes in negotiations with employers, as the Secretariat Report lulls the delegates present with encouraging reports, assuring them that industrial matters are not being neglected and that the union leadership is doing a good job in defending members interests.

Anybody who has actually studied the pamphlet in question, What Is To Be Done?,will know that in this early work Lenin expressed his concern about “only trade-unionism”. At the time Lenin was a leading member of a party that belonged to the Second (Socialist) International. He had learned from the revolutionary leaders of the Second International (whom he respected in their best days) like Kautsky and Plekhanov that in their experience (based largely in western Europe) the opposition to revolutionary politics within the movement, the reformist wing of the socialist party, rested largely upon leading trade-unionists. In What Is To Be Done?Lenin goes to great lengths to argue that the backbone of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party he was helping to set up under extremely oppressive conditions in Tsarist Russia should be provided by resolute and competent “professional” revolutionaries totally dedicated to that vocation, rather than trade union officials. However, he never expected workers to automatically and passively accept every “line” that was handed down. He also insisted that workers should always be encouraged to set their sights much higher than immediate (and of course essential) questions of wages and conditions and focus on how they can make their political strength and influence felt. In What IsTo Be DoneLenin frequently expressed contempt for theoreticians who believed that revolutionary class-consciousness arises in the humdrum daily struggle over wages and conditions, without a sharp and conscious struggle for socialist theory. And a real struggle for socialist theory involves a lot more than passively and uncritically absorbing teachings from above.

We must say a word about the way, since the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Communist International, that this pamphlet (What Is To Be Done?) has been misused and abused by both Stalinist and bourgeois thinkers. Mistaken ideas about this have had an influence on all parts of the workers’ and socialist movement. The idea has been spread that, without actually earning it and just by virtue of their position, self-proclaimed Communist leaders deserve the right to act like petty dictators, to silence opponents in their own ranks and in the wider working class where they have influence, and to decree and impose this or that strategy, tactic or policy without letting the rank-and file have any say.

This certainly did not reflect Lenin’s own thinking, and in 1920 when he published another pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder), he used the opportunity to correct the impression and explain that Communist leaders can only enjoy the support of the masses to the extent that these masses can see out of their own experience that the leaders’ proposals and programmes make sense.

The Secretariat Report talks a lot about “being the vanguard”, “vanguarding ourselves” and “political consciousness”. It even starts with a quotation of several paragraphs from the Communist Manifestowritten in 1847 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the foundation text of the Marxist movement. This long quotation seems to have been placed here purely for show. It seems to be asserting: “We are Communists and we support and uphold the movement that Marx and Engels started”.

In the Secretariat Report there is plenty of rhetoric along the following lines:

38. The current ANC leadership led by President Ramaphosa and all of them previously failed to understand what does not need to be researched, it is a simple understanding which is understood by everybody that political power without economic power is an empty shell. Regardless of our political party logos, representing black African majority for the liberation struggle. We as revolutionary forces without pursuing an economic struggle where we must affirm into ownership and control the majority of the South African people, who are black and African, we must forget about total emancipation of our people. We must forget about the struggle for socialism. We must forget about winning the battle against crime, corruption, poverty, unemployment and inequalities as the continuing racist capitalist system in our country, as all over the world capitalism will continue to breed all these social ills. The future is socialism!”

For all the talk about “vanguarding ourselves” and “consciousness”, the Secretariat Report deliberately showcases the thoroughly discreditable attitude to party building of Chairman Mao. Here, the NUMSA leadership finds a tradition that they can accept and which buttresses their position. This Response to the NUMSA Secretariat Report has said quite a lot about Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, because the understanding of “consciousness” and “vanguard” which the leadership of NUMSA presents in the Secretariat Report is quite different from that of Lenin and his comrades.

The current NUMSA leadership has no ammunition with which to attack the actual politics and struggle of the opposition, The Secretariat Report says not a word of real analysis about the abuses about which the opposition complain. It has nothing to say about the actual policies and tactics of building a working-class movement that were adopted at the 2013 Special Congress of NUMSA. The Secretariat Report can list the shortcomings of the South African government and the problems faced by the masses, but the only practical proposals put forward are to seek closer relations with the SACP and COSATU leaders and to pursue a purge of the opposition. With this in mind, the Report evokes the memory of Mao Tse-tung:

Again, there is no better person than Commissar Mao Tse Tung who articulates the importance of organisational discipline, which is extremely important to a revolutionary, red union that is in the trenches for the struggle for socialism.”

Let us just spend a moment on the nonsense of a “red Union”. The idea of “red unions” was put forward by the Stalinists during the Third Period zig-zag to the ultra-left. Communists, acting hastily, have often enough courted both sacking by their bosses and disciplinary action and expulsion from established trade unions led by reformists, with the result that they could often become isolated from the main movement of their class. During the period from 1929 to 1933, in the expectation of immediate revolutionary struggles and the line of “class against class” Communist workers were encouraged by the Communist International to act extremely provocatively, initiate actions in isolation from the main membership of their unions and set up independent, communist-led minority trade unions. Experience taught serious Communists that this created a serious obstacle to them gaining the support of the majority of class-conscious workers.

It is astonishing enough that the Secretariat Report abuses the opposition in NUMSA in the same breath as both “loony” left and “right-wingers”. It is impermissible that this Report itself revives the ultra-left nonsense of “red unions”.

But “Commissar” Mao (surely Chair of the Chinese Communist Party was title enough!) is evoked as an authority for a very specific reason. The Report quotes Mao as writing:

This unity of democracy and centralism, of freedom and discipline, constitutes our democratic centralism. Under this system, the people enjoy extensive democracy and freedom, but at the same time they must keep within the bounds of socialist discipline.”

Now, a trade union is not a political party, still less a revolutionary political party. Its duty is to organise and support workers in their struggles. It should enrol and organise workers without reference to their political, religious or any other affiliations. This union – NUMSA – has decided that a revolutionary political party of the working class is needed, and that is a good decision and the Union already has a road-map towards achieving that goal, without strutting around presenting itself as if it already was that party.

The reason why the union leadership of NUMSA has picked on this quotation from Chairman Mao is, that it purports to give the union leadership powers to act arbitrarily as a handful of National Office Bearers see fit. Under the banner of Chairman Mao, dissidents can be expelled, awkward questions can be silenced and the leaders cannot be challenged. The description of “democratic centralism” quoted above ends with a chilling set of rules:

We must affirm anew the discipline of the Party, namely:

  1. the individual is subordinate to the organisation
  2. the minority is subordinate to the majority.
  3. the entire membership is subordinate to the Central Committee.
  4. Whoever violates these articles of discipline disrupts Party unity.”

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, 1957

NUMSA did adopt a series of steps towards reviving the South African working-class movement and providing it with a political leadership. This itself arose in a process of discussion throughout the union. The policy was adopted by a majority of delegates at a Congress in December 2013. Some of us abroad were so enthusiastic about the policy that we travelled to South Africa to see if we could help and get involved. Some of us encouraged workers in struggle across southern Africa to approach NUMSA for comradeship and support. That, for us, represented an international duty. All of this went in vain. The leadership of NUMSA did not follow up on the polices adopted by the membership and has not put into effect the measures that members called for.

Members of trade unions have rights. They have the right to shape the policies of their union. They have the right to expect support from their union when they need it. They have the right to call their leadership to account when it does not carry our democratically-decided policies.

Members of political parties have rights, including members of revolutionary Leninist parties. They also have a duty, when their leaders make mistakes and even commit offences, to protest and insist that things are put right.

We in Workers International know this from bitter experience. Even organisations which were committed to a struggle for revolutionary Marxism have become dictatorial sects, exploiting and abusing individual members. Working out and defending a correct political line is half the battle: it cannot be done without a permanent and devoted struggle to defend the methods and the health of the internal life of the organisation and its connection with the working class.

This is not liberalism. The class struggle requires selfless devotion on the part of conscious political activists – Communists. But these qualities are too easily exploited by proto-bureaucrats to undermine the self-confidence which is also an essential quality in a revolutionary, the determination to stand up on a question of principle.

No leadership can be exempted from the duty genuinely to account for its actions and the proposals which it places before its members and the working class.

Bob Archer

November 2022




The crisis in Numsa: The lessons and the way forward

The crisis in Numsa:

The lessons and the way forward

We, the members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), firmly commit ourselves to a United South Africa, free of oppression and economic exploitation”

This proud and defiant statement opens the Preamble to the Numsa Constitution, which goes on to assert “that this can only be achieved under the leadership of an organised and united working class”.

The Preamble lists the conditions under which this struggle can be successful, including:

(a) fight and oppose all forms of discrimination” in the trade union, the workplace and society.

(c) ensure that all levels of the union are democratically structured and controlled by the members themselves through elected worker committees.”

(d) encourage democratic worker leadership and organisation in our factories and in all spheres of society.” (“Preamble to the Constitution” at: https://numsa.org.za/numsa-constitution/)

And yet, it seems that this crucial trade union has fallen under the control of a dictatorial and corrupt special-interest clique. Union activists claim that this clique imposes its authority in flagrant breach of the principles expressed in the Preamble to the Union’s Constitution.


They complain about the union-linked “3Sixty Life” insurance scheme which has “been placed under curatorship by the court because it was not having sufficient funds to guarantee pay-outs for Numsa members who are policyholders”.

They mention an auditors’ report “which shows how millions were paid out to people for dubious reasons such as undefined services rendered and monies going to a birthday party for (National Secretary Irvin) Jim and a laptop to his daughter.”

Lindi Lee WaliWorking Class Friends Of Instimbi Ayigobi).

Numsa’s history of struggle

It was the rise of the working class organised in trade unions like Numsa which forced the imperialists and their racist supporters in South Africa between 1990 and 1994 to abandon apartheid and adopt some of the trappings (if not the substance) of an advanced democracy.

The activists who built Numsa strove to mobilise the whole masses to overthrow imperialism-capitalism as the cause of South Africa’s subjugation. They expressed their stance in the Workers’ Charter (adopted by Numsa in 1987) which explained:

“…the most urgent task facing us as workers, as black workers and as part of the black oppressed, is to use our organised strength both at the point of production and among our communities, to put an end to the race tyranny and to help bring about a united, non-racial, non-sexist democratic South Africa based on one person one vote, as broadly defined in the Freedom Charter.

Foremost among the “conditions for the building of a socialist society” is the matter of revolutionary leadership, an international party through which the masses “can complete the liberation objectives in all spheres of social life”.

The advanced workers who framed this charter could only conceive it being carried out by ensuring “that all levels of the union are democratically structured and controlled by the members themselves through elected worker committees” and encouraging “democratic worker leadership and organisation in our factories and in all spheres of society” as we saw above.

SACP and ANC

The officially-recognised liberation movement for South Africa was dominated politically by an alliance between the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC). The SACP was in turn dominated politically by the line of “peaceful co-existence” between the Soviet bloc and the imperialist world that was promulgated by the USSR under Stalin and his successors. Against the thrust of the “Workers’ Charter”, Stalinists deliberately confined the struggle against colonialism and imperialism to the achievement of national independence and alleged democratic goals, leaving the fight for a socialist society to some unstated time in the future.

Stalinism’s allies in the African National Congress were in turn mainly tribal and middle-class elites and their supporters. They tolerated and even adopted a radical political rhetoric which they never had the slightest intention of following through once they achieved their own, limited class aims.

At the same time, dissenting voices in the black townships in South Africa were brutally silenced by kangaroo courts and “necklacings”.

Prominent leaders associated with the ANC-SACP alliance, like Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa went on to become Presidents of the country. With cold contempt for the working class and the masses, they set about enriching themselves while their country saw growing poverty, lack of service delivery and general instability. Ramaphosa was able to dislodge and replace Zuma because the latter was so blatantly in the pocket of the Gupta business clan, but Ramaphosa himself was exposed when other, less prominent, thieves made off with large sums in illicit cash that had been concealed in the furniture at his farm.

The whole tradition of the ANC and SACP alliance is one of high-handed contempt for the ordinary workers and their organisations. It was the revolt of workers and young people that made it impossible to carry on with the apartheid regime, but the government of South Africa was eventually passed to the Mbekis, Zumas and Ramaphosas courtesy of the international bodies of imperialism and the mining and other companies which, from Europe and America and elsewhere, still loot the country’s resources and benefit from cheap African labour. Soviet and Chinese leaders also stood as godparents to the new state.

(For a fuller understanding of the history and role of the ANC and its relationship with working-class organisations, see at the end of this article, the appendix The ANC and Numsaby my comrade Hewat Beukes).

Stalinism and Pan-Africanism

Above all, the new liberation leaders of South Africa were trained and brought up in the tradition of Stalinist politics which prevailed in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death and which explicitly abandoned the international struggle for socialism. In place of that struggle, the leaders of the USSR and the world movement which they brutally dominated looked for “peaceful co-existence” with whatever (capitalist) allies they might find abroad. The specific application of this in colonies and former colonies was to find allies among national elites keen on independence but equally keen on maintaining their privileges.

Organisations like South-West Africa Peoples’ Movement (Swapo) devoted great efforts to achieving recognition at the United Nations and elsewhere as the one and only true liberation fighters, meanwhile deliberately slandering and side-lining the genuine liberation fighters in Namibia.

The roots of bureaucracy

In the 1920s, after the Russian Revolution, in the USSR a social caste came to the fore which usurped the power of the working class exercised through the workers’ and peasants’ soviets and also closed down – often violently – any debate in the Communist Party. Trotsky described and analysed this development in his well-known study, The Revolution Betrayed. What interests us here is what Trotsky says about the character of this bureaucracy and its regime:

The men and women who led the Russian Revolution of 1917 were members of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (later re-named the Communist Party). They stood out for their steadfast devotion to the cause in the face of Tsarist brutality and dictatorship. They were equally devoted to training themselves theoretically and practically to guide the working class and broader masses. They frequently had to pay with their lives for their convictions.

But after Lenin’s death and once the new bureaucratic caste administering the new state had usurped workers’ soviet democracy, all these characteristics were turned on their heads. Loyalty to the cause of the working class was replaced by blind loyalty to the Party and ultimately the Party leader. The practical and theoretical discipline required to defeat the Tsarist police state was replaced by unquestioning subservience to allegedly infallible leaders.

Already in 1920, during the Second Congress of the Communist International, Lenin had this to say to certain over-enthusiastic and dogmatic “Left-Communists”:

“…Here are the most deep-rooted origins of the high-handed arrogance of trade union leaders like Irvin Jim, as of “liberation” leaders like Zuma, Ramaphosa, Nujoma and Geingob. Jim has surrounded himself with a clique bound together by self-interest, and this clique is lashing out at anyone who stands in its way. They expel members of the union, close down regions, disrupt meetings and remove the essential personal protection of “dissident” leaders of the union.

This whole monolithic approach to differences and debate is the creation of Stalinism. First, we must say that political parties of the working class require a different set of mutual obligations between leaders and members from what needs to prevail in trade unions, which by their nature must embrace at least the majority of workers in a particular trade, sector or region, irrespective of their ideology and politics. Workers’ unity in action can only be achieved through the broadest possible discussion and freedom of expression. That is the significance of the passage written by Lenin and quoted above.

Comrades will – or should – know that in building the party which ultimately led the Russian Revolution to victory, Lenin and his supporters laid enormous stress upon the responsibilities a revolutionary party imposes upon its members. They openly broke (in 1903) from others who had a much more relaxed attitude to this very question. Experience showed that the Lenin faction (Bolsheviks) went on to lead the Russian Revolution and the opposing faction (Mensheviks) attempted to strangle it.

Nevertheless, it is wrong and out of place to impose the constitution of a revolutionary political party onto the functioning of a trade union.

Numsa specifically has a well-established tradition of free and open confrontation between different political tendencies.

In any case, in any part of the world any major action by workers is always prepared by a seething low-level but widespread process of argument and debate at the workplace, in the pub, on the terraces of a sporting event or at home and with the wider family and even sometimes in religious congregations. That is the springboard for the official discussions and decisions at workplace meetings, union branches, regional and national executives, etc. Nothing could be further from the mark, by the way, than the accusations in the bourgeois media that this or that trade union leader can “call their members out” on strike at the drop of a hat.

But even in a political party, even a revolutionary party operating under conditions of illegality, as Lenin’s Bolshevik Party did for many years, it is a myth that a “line” elaborated by some “lider maximo” was submissively adopted, passed on and carried out by automatons in the ranks. Unfortunately, it is that very mistaken conception that has since then been accepted as “democratic centralism” in many circles, even among groups who claim to oppose bureaucratic methods.

On top of demanding automatic obedience, would-be bureaucrats in the movement skilfully pick on alleged “bourgeois” traits in members and activists who might raise awkward questions or oppose some nonsensical “line” that is being promulgated. All sorts of sly comments and innuendoes can undermine those who are genuinely trying to build the movement and want to question the “line” that is being handed out. Not infrequently false accusations that this or that person is an “agent” can be used to side-line the person concerned and contribute to an atmosphere of paranoia.

Often, activists are driven into huge and fruitless rounds of activity which turn out to be pointless and lead to demoralisation. Such methods have unfortunately become widespread, and are often sanctified as “Bolshevik”.

This is what Trotsky said about the culture of revolutionary parties in 1936 in The Revolution Betrayed:

The inner regime of the Bolshevik Party was characterised by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right to define the direction of the party policy. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of the epoch of decline”. (ibid.pp 94-95).

These profound issues of working-class organisation and leadership may seem to be forgotten details of history. But they assume new significance as the working class around the world awakens after a period of setbacks and defeats to a new round of struggles. It is hard to overstate the scope and significance of these past experiences now, as the economic crisis, openly acknowledged and unresolved for over a decade, lumbers on and both established and “wannabe” imperialist powers square up against each other, beating the drums of war.

One of the very earliest signs of this working-class recovery was the wages struggle of platinum miners at Marikana in 2012, their sharp confrontation with officials of the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa, the planned and coldly executed murder of striking miners by the South African police and the subsequent mass strike wave. It was within the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa that the most positive response to these events was raised. The subsequent development of that initiative, the different tendencies involved and the methods by which they propose to carry forward the struggle, deserve careful thought and attention. Vital past experiences of the working-class movement need to be revived in the process of educating a new generation of fighters.

The meaning of Marikana

The deliberate killing of 34 miners at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, Rustenberg, North West Province, by the South African Police Service on 16 August 2012, at the instigation of the mine’s UK-based owners and with the agreement of the then South African government minister (and now President), Cyril Ramaphosa, underlined in the most dramatic way possible how correct the Numsa Constitution Preamble was to say that the ending of “oppression and economic exploitation” can only be achieved “under the leadership of an organised and united working class”.

Under a “liberation” regime of African National Congress, South African Communist Party and trade union confederation Cosatu, “independent” South Africa had to try to move forward with economic power still vested chiefly in the great imperialist monopolies and banks which had grown rich by exploiting labour of every country and ethnic background and plundering natural resources around the world.

Political democracy and effective administration on behalf of the people of South Africa has remained a fantasy while political power has been exercised by puppets of these monopolies and banks, by the Ramaphosas, the Zumas and the Mbekes. Such politicians can only function as the boot-lickers and facilitators of imperialist oppression and exploitation.

At the most basic level, they have led a systematic looting of the nation’s wealth and resources for personal gain. At a political level, they very quickly abandoned any progressive policies for the development of the country and instead adopted wholesale the nostrums of the neo-liberal International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other imperialist agencies of world governance. Their venal incompetence has added economic chaos and widespread lawlessness to the existing poverty of the majority.

This was what was at stake in the preceding conflict discussed above between Numsa’s “Workers’ Charter” and the politics of the ANC-SACP.

But as apartheid was dismantled between 1990 and 1994, the issue was fudged. ANC leaders declared that workers’ demands could be accommodated within the scope of the Freedom Charter. They assured trade unionists that, for example, South Africa’s mineral resources now belonged to the people, although in fact, the imperialist monopoly groups kept a grip of the extraction, refining and export of the nation’s wealth, and thus of their enormous profits. Dissenting voices were drowned out in the wave of publicity greeting the new order, and by violence and the threat of violence.

The fudge continued. While the ANC-SACP government moved over more and more clearly to abandon any hope of progressive legislation and towards directly neo-liberal policies, there was opposition from trade unionists. There were angry confrontations, but they were contained within the Tripartite Alliance of ANC-SACP and the union confederation Cosatu.

The real rupture did not emerge until after Marikana, the massacre and the massive wave of strikes across different trades and industries which followed.

Numsa Special National Congress 2013

In the wake of the Marikana massacre, Numsa led a fight within Cosatu to break the trade union federation from the alliance with the SACP and the ANC. For that reason, Numsa was expelled from Cosatu and, alongside a number of other trade unions, established a new South African Federation of Trade Unions” (Saftu). Numsa also worked towards and held a Special National Congress in December 2013 to draw the lessons of the Marikana massacre and chart a new course of independent socialist struggle.

The documents of the Numsa Special National Congress held in December 2013 (after a through debate throughout the trade union) still make compelling reading:

2.2 The South African Communist Party (SACP) leadership has become embedded in the state and is failing to act as the vanguard of the working class …

For the struggle for socialism, the working class needs a political organisation committed in theory and practice to socialism …

3.2 As Numsa, we must lead in the establishment of a new UNITED FRONT that will coordinate struggles in the workplace and in communities …

3.3 … we must explore the establishment of a MOVEMENT FOR SOCIALISM as the working class needs a political organisation committed in its policies and actions to the establishment of a socialist South Africa”.

Also, the union must: “Commission an international study on the historical formation of working-class parties. As part of this study we need to explore the different type of parties, from mass workers’ parties to vanguard parties. (Quoted in Movement for Socialism! South Africa’s NUMSA points the way”,Workers’ International, 2014, pp 4 and 5)

While the resolutions and documents of the 2013 Special National Congress clearly name and identify the direction of travel of the SACP, ANC and Cosatu leadership, there is no clarity about the treacherous political tradition underlying it – Stalinism. A weakness of the Special National Congress decisions was that they still expressed illusions in the Stalinist politics of the settlement which ended apartheid and the hope that the Freedom Charter might leave a door open for future progress.

The 2013 Congress documents correctly identified how “In many post-colonial and post-revolutionary situations, liberation and revolutionary movements have turned on labour movements that fought alongside them, suppressed them, marginalised them, split them, robbed them of their independence or denied them any meaningful role”. (ibid p.4).

However, under the sub-heading “ANC has abandoned the Freedom Charter and any change in property relations”, the Declaration of the Numsa Special National Congress says:

The Freedom Charter as the basis of our existence as an alliance, the glue that brought the alliance together, has not found expression in government policies. In fact the ANC no longer adheres to it. The ANC has not only departed from the Freedom Charter, but also from the Morogoro Conference core values and the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP).

The ANC-led government continues to ignore and duck the question of how to fundamentally change property relations in the country”. (ibid. p. 22)

It reads as if most comrades had grasped that the liberation regime in South Africa has not brought the benefits which were promised, but had not yet taken on board the fact that the SACP’s Stalinist politics of an alliance with the bourgeois nationalists had always meant that imperialism-capitalism would stay in the driving seat. The Irvin Jim leadership never resolved the contradiction at the heart of the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance, that as a “liberation” regime it acts as a caretaker or “Comprador” (local business agent) on behalf of imperialism.

The policy of Stalinism has lived on even after the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union has gone into the dustbin. The departing gift of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy to imperialism was to replace apartheid with a group of politicians in charge in South Africa who were very ready to enrich themselves by selling out the masses.

Stalinism’s afterlife

Stalinist rule in the USSR and her satellites collapsed over thirty years ago. It is dead and buried. How are we to explain that Stalinist methods have been reborn at the very head of Numsa, a trade union born in mass workers’ struggles which has consistently been foremost in fighting in a principled way for workers’ interests against all comers?

Since the 1970s. US imperialism had been wooing the Chinese Communist Party government of the People’s Republic of China. Mao and the leaders who followed him gladly facilitated a massive transfer of industry from North America and Western Europe to China. While this has led to spectacular (and desperately needed) economic growth and development in China, it has deeply damaged the ground on which the US and European workers’ movements stood. Whole working-class communities have been undermined, weakened, and demoralised as jobs were transferred abroad. It was a movement which had been underway for decades, but the open door into China has accelerated it massively.

At the same time, attempts by the Soviet bureaucracy to self-reform blew up in their faces. In the early 1990s the Soviet Union fell apart. The oppressed and resentful masses in the Soviet bloc “satellites” seized their chance at independence. Many workers had had their hopes in a socialist society dashed by their experience of nearly five decades of brutal rule from the Kremlin through local satraps. Very quickly they were plunged into economic and political chaos as the old links with the disappearing Soviet Union and Comecon were not immediately or easily replaced by new ones.

On top of the industrial devastation of the old working-class centres came a huge deluge of propaganda against socialism which aimed, especially, to discredit the idea that the working class can play a revolutionary role in the transformation of society. This very idea has been bitterly attacked, and those who upheld it marginalised, not least by many former activists in and around Stalinist parties.

All these conditions have combined to keep a generation or more of workers away from socialist politics. This was reflected in the growth of xenophobia amongst workers, and the domination of left-wing politics by middle-class, university-educated people and moralistic or what are nowadays called “cultural” issues and methods. Indeed, it has been among these layers that such obvious signs of the crisis of capitalism-imperialism as the financial crisis which started in 2008 led to a renewed interest in Marx and Marxism. The unemployed and the poor flocked into the squares across the USA and Europe to demonstrate and protest and shake a fist at the rich, without any practical political programme, while the intelligentsia crowded into the libraries to study and write about, among others, Marx.

Meanwhile the passing decades have re-shaped world economy. Parts of the Americas south of the Rio Grande, the Pacific Rim (Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, India and Pakistan), parts of the Middle East (Turkey, Egypt) have considerable industrial bases, and have in some cases become significant financial centres. Russia and her Confederation of Independent States (CIS) partners have become an important source of raw materials, hydrocarbons, and grain (as we know now from painful experience!).

China is now “workshop of the world” with one of the largest economies – second only to the United States. While state power (which includes great power of the economy and banking) lies in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, this economy is an integral part of world imperialism. For decades it has depended on exploiting the Chinese working class to an extraordinary degree and on selling the products of their labour on the world market. Chinese businesses are now among the biggest and most advanced in the world.

In today’s clash of imperialist rivals, China strives to extend her commercial and economic power in order to engage effectively in competition with the United States and Europe. In the nature of imperialism, behind commerce and diplomacy lurks the threat of war. Imperialist rivals clash over territorial control in order to gain access to raw materials and markets. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch, British and French East India Companies established commercial networks which provided the capital to start the industrial revolution. Although purely commercial at the beginning, these networks soon required the establishment of naval and military bases. Later, these networks hardened into formal colonial empires.

Today, China is starting a similar process based on the “New Silk Road” initiative to set up her own network. Like any imperialist power, China needs pliant customers and willing providers of cheap raw materials in its dependencies around the world, as well as robust logistical links.

In past centuries, Britain extended her imperial rule by “liberating” parts of Latin America from Spanish rule. American imperialism assumed the same mantle of the “liberator” in Cuba and the Philippines in the early twentieth century, and in the name of freedom and democracy supplanted Britain, France and Holland in most of their former colonial possessions after World War II. With remarkably few actual colonies, the USA has been the main colonialist-imperialist power for nearly a century. Now China offers her support to countries chafing under the economic domination of the United States. In all these cases, subject populations need to scrutinise very carefully indeed the credentials of any would-be liberator.

Multipolar World

One feature of imperialism is that formerly insignificant and weak nations have been able relatively quickly to claw their way to a powerful position at the top table among the great powers. In the 19thCentury, previously quite unimportant nations, like Germany and Japan, were able to hurtle into prominence over a comparatively short period, in mere decades. Of course, they could not achieve this by the tried and tested and time-consuming means of a bourgeois revolution and the achievement of modern democracy, as happened in Britain, Holland, the USA and France.

By-passing a final knock-down, drag ‘em out confrontation between the rising bourgeoisie and the old feudal rulers, Germany and Japan under powerful central governments cherry-picked the aspects of the technical, industrial and political achievements of the earlier capitalist states that would enable them to become great powers, successfully applying the very latest techniques in all these fields. The achievements which had cost the older states centuries to bring about were absorbed in their latest developments and as a massive transfer of knowledge, science and theory. This could only happen under a very tight central control, which is why some Marxists refer to it as the “Prussian” road to capitalist development.

The capitalist class of the USA was playing with fire when they started to provide the People’s Republic of China with access to world markets and specifically the advanced technology on which modern industry is based. Maybe they assumed that the development of capitalism in China would undermine the rule of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. To be sure, that state has had to change in significant ways to accommodate the changes in Chinese society since the 1970s.

However, China has followed the real logic of the modern imperialist epoch. The Chinese state made it clear in the way it dealt with the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 and the re-integration of Hong Kong more recently that there is no intention of introducing any measures of democracy. To succeed in an imperialist world, China has to be able to face down the present great powers of imperialism.

The claim that what the CCP is doing is a sort of extended form of the New Economic Policy adopted in the Soviet Union at the end of the Civil War and the wars of intervention in order to restore a national economy which had been largely destroyed is by the way laughable. A wealthy Chinese bourgeoisie has grown up in the decades since Nixon’s first visit. Rule by the CCP, protection by the CCP and support from the CCP have made this a rich class. Its wealth and privileges are tightly bound up with the Chinese state, and depend on how the Chinese state conducts its diplomatic, economic, and political affairs.

There are indeed inevitable contradictions between the interests of that state and the functioning of those Chinese businesses which, for example, would like to trade their shares in US stock markets. Some big Chinese operators with interests abroad who probably hoped they were too big to push around have been brought sharply to heel by the Chinese government recently. But this does not mean that the CCP is about to abolish capitalism in China anytime soon.

The old imperialist powers confront China militarily, asserting the right to send naval battle groups to patrol China’s home waters. They confront her diplomatically and politically.

China goes ahead modernising her armed forces and building up her trading networks across the world. These are both elements of hard power, reflecting the weight of China’s capitalist economy.

China also deploys soft power, seeking allies and front-men around the world to enhance her image and reputation.

So, money is spent resurrecting the old traditions of Pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism and the Bandung movement of “non-aligned” states. In the past, these were deployed in order to win allies for the USSR, while deflecting genuinely revolutionary movements (which only caused trouble as far as official Communist Parties were concerned). Although the USSR no longer exists, the idea of backing China (supported by Russia) as a rival to US hegemony is put forward and finds fertile soil because so many political careerists with a past in the Stalinist movement resonate to this logic of development without a workers’ revolution. China presents herself as a friend of the local bourgeoisies in the “Global South”, a big sister who will support them against the fatal effects of US imperialism.

What of the masses?

The only problem is the working class and the masses. In China itself, as throughout Asia, Africa and South America, the working class is exploited more ruthlessly and thoroughly than it still is in Europe, North America and Australasia, where there are still remnants of the social gains workers made in the 20thcentury. The conditions in the rest of the world are such that in many of these countries up to 40 percent of the population are without any access to the means of production – they are unemployed.

Small-scale farming is squeezed out by big agricultural monopolies. The history of imperialism has littered the scene with remnants of national, ethnic and religious groups excluded from modern life. Millions scrape an “informal” living in modern slums. No “radical” alliances with allegedly-progressive capitalists are going to equip these masses with a way forward. Of all the classes in the “global south”, only the working class is a progressive force able to weld all the other oppressed and exploited groups together and point the way forward. This is the real meaning of the 2013 Special National Congress of Numsa and the policies that it adopted, even if that was not completely clear to those who pushed ahead on that.

So, the promise offered by Numsa’s Special National Congress has been frustrated. Building a United Front and an alliance with the impoverished communities never happened. No “Movement for Socialism” was established. There was no clarification of how a mass workers’ party can be built on revolutionary principles, because along the way towards making international allies, Irvin Jim turned away consistently from any working-class alliances and met up with apostles of “multipolarity” and “a new Bandung” such as Roy Singham. The Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party that arose from that encounter and which also brings in some independent “leftists” in South Africa has made zero impact on the masses in South Africa because it has done nothing to overcome the terrible political legacy of Stalinism. Nor have any of the petty-bourgeois socialists who have joined up with it themselves shaken that off, whatever label they identify with politically.

But Numsa members have refused to be limited by the bankrupt leadership of Irvin Jim. As these members of Numsa carry forward their recognised class interests as workers against the current Numsa leadership, they will need to enrich their activity with the theoretical lessons of those revolutionaries who opposed Stalinism at its origins and upheld real Leninism. The Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the USSR, together with its scattered supporters around the world, started the struggle to rescue the real party and international of Lenin. That struggle was later taken forward in the formation of the Fourth International. It is that international which must be rebuilt to that the working class can carry through to the end the struggle for a socialist society.

Bob Archer

9 October 2022

Appendix: The ANC and NUMSA

(from https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/formation-sanncanc)

The formation of the SANNC/ANC

Bloemfontein is the birth place of the SANNC, which became the ANC in 1923, one of the largest organizations in later years to struggle for freedom and justice in South Africa. Between 1908 and 1909, constitutional discussions towards Union took place which prompted numerous meetings organized by Africans, Coloureds and Indians to protest the Whites-only exclusivity of these constitutional discussions.

In 1909, a group of Black delegates from the four provinces attended the South African Native National Convention (SANNC) in Waaihoek, Bloemfontein, to propose ways of objecting to the draft South African Act, and the Union constitution. The SANNC meeting convened by John Dube and Dr Walter Rubusana decided to send a delegation to London to convince the British government not to accept the Union in its present form. The delegation led by former Prime Minister William Scheiner failed in its aims as White supremacy was entrenched under a unitary state.

On 8 January 1912, several hundred members of South Africa’s educated elite met at Bloemfontein to establish a national organization to protest against racial discrimination and to appeal for equal treatment before the law. The group comprised of South Africa’s most prominent Black citizens: professional men, businessmen, journalist, chieftans, ministers, teachers, clerks, building contractors and labour agents. This meeting was the most significant in the history of Black protest politics as it was the first joint meeting of Black representatives from all four self-governing British colonies and indicated that Blacks were capable of united action.

History of the African National Congress

Although it was not the first African political organization in South Africa, its formation marked a clear break from the past as the focus of Black politics previously centered on electoral activity in the Cape Colony where Blacks with the required property and educational qualifications could vote and stand for office. 

Their voice in politics at the Cape was significant. At the turn of the century Black voters constituted nearly half the electorate in five constituencies, which contributed to the belief that the most effective way of accelerating Black political advancement was to use their vote to influence the election men who would be sympathetic to Black aspirations.  But the years succeeding the Peace of Vereenigning in 1902 witnessed the declining force of this argument. The founding of the SANNC marked the realization in middle-class Black circles of the contention that Black interest could best be promoted by action by Blacks themselves and not through sympathetic intermediaries.

Several reasons contributed to this change in opinion. Some members of the Black elite had hopes raised initially by the defeat of the Republics in the South African War and were bitterly disappointed. Despite expressions of imperial loyalty intermingled with polite phrased reproach at the prevalent discrimination against educated Black men with good character and ability, the British government made it clear that its paramount concern was White unity in South Africa.

Hopes that non-racial Cape franchise would be extended to the defeated republics were rapidly dashed as preparations for the Act of Union indicated that existing rights would not be respected in future. The Act removed the theoretical right of enfranchised Blacks to be elected to parliamentary seats which had existed in the Cape and also provided for the removal of the franchise from Black voters through a two-thirds majority vote of both houses of parliament in joint sessions.

By 1912, Black concern moved further than constitutional issues. The first post-Union administration, responding to the mining industry’s labour demands and the disquiet of White farmers squeezed between capitalist agricultural companies on the one hand and competitive Black peasants on the other, moved swiftly to safeguard its position with these groups. Regulations were introduced, which made breaking a contract a criminal offence. Blacks were also excluded from skilled industrial jobs. The prohibition of rural land ownership by Blacks, or occupation outside the reserves dispossessed many landowners and leasing or tenant-farming relationships between Blacks and Whites were outlawed.

It was therefore made clear that there was more at stake here than just the interests of a small group who through their education at mission stations had come to form an identifiable petty bourgeoisie. The Land Act of 1913 and its complementary labour legislation were the tools used to destroy a whole class of peasant producers, forcing them into already crowded reserves or driving them to seek work as farm labourers and mine workers, and later in the least skilled and most badly paid positions in urban industrial, municipal and domestic employment.

The group of men that assembled at Bloemfontein was well aware of the wider dimensions of the social tragedy being enacted around them. But their particular concern, the fear of any petty bourgeoisie at the time of crisis, was being thrust back into the ranks of the urban and rural poor. The main aim of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) was to represent the concerns and anxieties of the small professional middle class which was mainly responsible for convening the Bloemfontein meeting.

The Congress intended to function as a national forum to discuss the issues which affected them and to act as an organized pressure group. They planned to agitate for changes through the following: peaceful propaganda, the election of Congress sympathizers to legislative bodies through protest and enquiries and finally through passive action or continued movement

From it the class nature of the ANC was well established by 1912. Its impetus was the Failed expectations of in specific a tribal royalty. Its history until now simply echoes the basic principle that the class nature of an organisation cannot be changed except by total destruction.

The rise of the working-class mass struggles since 1971 in Namibia and since 1973 in South Africa uncovered the basic reactionary and anti-working-class nature of the tribal petit-bourgeoisie represented by organisations like the ANC and SWAPO. The self-organization of the working class was met with hostility, treachery, and violence. The SWAPO in 1971 distanced itself from the general strike in Namibia by publicly condemning its leaders as irresponsible elements. The emerging leadership of the working class were confronted with severe repression from the side of the South Africans and slander by the tribal nationalists. Since 1976 working class leaders that fled south Africa and Namibia were liquidated physically in exile. Inside South Africa the forms of liquidation were necklacing and summary execution facilitated by the South African state, the latter that operated its official liquidation.

The ANC and SWAPO were vehemently opposed to new working-class organisations that developed since 1976 and earlier. They slandered and ostracized the leaders as collaborators, agents and spies.

The Communist Party that developed out of a severely deformed working class, contradictory struggles, and the indelible influence of Soviet Stalinism became the transmission belt for liberal bourgeois politics into the mass struggles and sustaining the ANC and SWAPO.

The period after 1980 saw the replacement of the leadership of the working-class organisations with tribal nationalists especially in the trade union movement. That explains the rapid and frantic privatization after 1994.

A significant exception was NUMSA, a union of the industrial working class that was well outside the influence of the extremely primitive right wing tribal petit bourgeoisie.

The dichotomy in South African politics that arose after 1994 reflected in NUMSA and the ANC must be understood from the foregoing. The attempted expulsion of NUMSA leaders can perhaps be explained by the strengthening of anti-working class policies by Chinese Stalinism. It is an attack against especially the industrial working class, but it is proof that organised working-class politics is still existing in South Africa. The SAFTU seems further proof of that.

The discussion and understanding needed is about Stalinism and its true class nature in relation to working-class politics in South Africa. It cannot be treated as an ideological current in the working class, but a reflection of degeneration and confusion. But, most seriously the expression of capitalist objectives and political destruction within the working-class movement. Its methodology needs to be dissected and understood as alien and against the methodology of Marxism.

Hewat Beukes

October 2022




Ukraine is a warning to workers everywhere

Comrade Leonardt, a trade-unionist and socialist in Namibia, asked a few days ago for an explanation for the crisis and war in Ukraine.

He speaks for millions of people all over the world, who have been increasingly horrified by the growing savagery of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is right to denounce this appalling brutality on the part of the Russian government and it is right, as many people are now doing, drop their daily routines and make a great effort to support the millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country.

But it is not enough. We have to do our best to understand the driving forces behind this crisis situation, which is a warning to everybody in the world.

The mounting crisis points to a central feature of world politics, economy and diplomacy: the growing rivalry between the established “Western” (or “First World”, to use that repulsive and misleading term) powers and the rising economic, diplomatic and military powers of Russia and China.

Just over a month ago (January 31, 2022) these words were posted on the “LA Progressive” website:

This moment in history will be remembered for the massive shift in global relations currently underway. On one side stand the forces of peace and multipolarity led by China, Russia and their allies in the Global South. On the other is the forces of empire and conquest spearheaded by the US and its allies. The conflict between these two camps is about much more than competing visions for planetary development. World politics has transitioned from a war between socialism and capitalism to a protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself”.

(As the US threatens endless war with Russia over Ukraine, confidence in China surges, by Danny Haiphong).

The Russian invasion of independent sovereign Ukraine has literally dropped a bombshell into this type of wishful thinking. Millions of people around the world are deeply shocked and revolted by the cynicism, brutality and lies with which the Russian state has set about destroying an entire people.

Following immediately on the heels of the wordy joint declaration by President Xi (China) and President Putin (Russia) during the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has severely embarrassed the Chinese state. President Xi’s government urgently needs to distract world public attention from its own treatment of the Tibetan and Uighur peoples and to paint in the most appealing colours possible its seizure of Hong Kong, its intention to seize Taiwan, and its broader ambitions around the world, including the Belt and Road Initiative (“The New Silk Road”) to extend Chinese trading, financial and diplomatic relations around the globe.

Where does Modern Imperialism Come From?

Danny Haiphong and those who think like him understand imperialism simplistically as “the forces of empire and conquest” and specifically identify this solely with “the US and its allies”, as if there had never been any other imperialists in modern times. On this point, as on others, Danny Haiphong is putting aside the discoveries of generations of socialist thinkers and activists who have probed beyond the appearance of “empire and conquest” to discern the social and economic driving forces of the phenomenon.

A good starting point is Chapter 31 of volume 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital, which locates the beginnings of “empire and conquest” in the “genesis of the industrial capitalist” in Europe, specifically in Britain. Moreover, a few pages later in his discussion of what colonialism reveals about the inner workings of capital, Marx explains the direction in which the laws of capitalist society push the whole system. He talks about:

“… the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical development of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market, and with this, the International character of the capitalist regime”. (K.Marx, Capitalvol 1, London 1974 pp 714-715.)

In the same passage, Marx explicitly talks about the way forward in:

“… It was upon these conceptions that Lenin based his analysis of capitalism in its imperialist phase during World War I. His quite short and readable book, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,is essential reading for anyone who really wants to understand what is going on.

Imperialism is not the result of “bad” or “evil” people (although it certainly spawns monsters), but of the social relations of capitalism. By reproducing these contradictory relations on a world scale, imperialism ushers in not only constant rivalry and war, invasions and annexations, between imperialist powers and also against their victims, but also the epoch of world revolution of the working class to achieve socialism.

What is the “Global South”?

The “Global south” is a confusing euphemism for the huge territories exploited and oppressed in various ways by imperialism over many centuries and still today. The first point to make about these territories is that they have become part of “the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market” and “the international character of the world market”, albeit under very different conditions from those in the imperialist nations.

Imperialist nations (like the USA, UK, EU, Japan, Russia and China) certainly have “allies” in these parts, but these are either “compradors” (businesspeople who facilitate the exploitation of their compatriots by the imperialists) or outright corrupt puppets. There is no “third road” forward in these countries. Not one of them is going to find a peaceful way forward through a peaceful capitalist development. The end of imperialist exploitation can only come when masses of people join the “revolt of the working class” and fight to end the capitalist system. The very few polities that will be able to become imperialist powers themselves (as, for example, Germany and Japan did in the late 19thcentury, and Russia and China are doing now) will only be able to do so through brutal dictatorship and the ruthless exploitation of their own people and the oppression of other peoples. The rulers of Myanmar present a good example of a bourgeoisie with that type of ambition.

What is Russia? What is China?

What can Russia and China now bring to the “global south”? These regimes (the Peoples Republic of China and until 1992 the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics) were the products of mass revolutions whose original inspiration was the insights of Marx and Lenin. But for decades their leaders have followed a “capitalist road”. The Chinese government maintains in words an appearance of socialism, and the country is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, which maintains a continuing but distant relationship with the actual ideas of Karl Marx. But 30 years ago, the Russian state, the USSR, simply collapsed.

The last “Communist” leaders, Gorbatchev and Yeltsin, threw themselves upon the mercy of the “Western” imperialists. The USSR fell apart. Many national minorities had suffered grievously under Stalinist rule. This was particularly true of the peoples of the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and of Ukraine, who demanded autonomy. (It should be remembered that there were also significant number of Russians living in these areas). The huge state-controlled industry and economy of the USSR was “privatised” under conditions which resembled piracy. Gorbatchev and others promised Russian workers that they could join in a “common European home” and enjoy “western” standards of pay and conditions, but the reality was very different. Bandit Russian entrepreneurs fought like jackals with rapacious foreign “investors” over the corpse of the workers’ state. Living-standards plummeted as jobs disappeared and welfare and health services suffered. Life expectancy actually fell in the former USSR.

The “Pacific Rim” financial and monetary crisis of the late 1990s was a body-blow to the fledgling Russian stock market and banking system. The new Russian (bandit) capitalist class lacked the depth of experience and culture of rule of its foreign counterparts and was not able to deal with this situation. With the working class in disarray and leaderless, the only force which could restore a certain amount of order was the old security authorities of the former Soviet Union, and accordingly the kind of electoral dictatorship which we see today was established around the person of what is increasingly looking like President-for-life Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Putin’s state echoes the brutal barbarity of the Tsarist Empire. The President enjoys wide and unchallengeable powers. The electoral campaigns of opposition politicians encounter novel and inventive obstacles. Serious opponents are shot, poisoned and imprisoned. Personal freedom is curtailed by officially-imposed standards of conformity. Even slightly outrageous behaviour in public is viciously suppressed. The Russian Orthodox Church with all its taboos and prescriptions is the mentor of people’s private lives as well as a source of nationalist fervour. Those like the “Pussy Riot” protestors who took pot-shots at both the patriarchal stupidity of the church and the stifling conformism of the government suffered appalling reprisals. Now, with the invasion of the Ukraine underway, thousands or anti-war demonstrators are brutally arrested and worse, and all independent media outlets are suppressed.

While retaining Communist Party rule, considerable state industries and above all state control of the country’s main banking institutions, the People’s Republic of China some fifty years ago chose a “capitalist road”. US and other Western politicians were at bay against on the one hand a growing independence movement in their (official or unofficial) colonial dependencies and on the other a working class at home determined to preserve the gains it had made in the class struggle and press ahead to make more gains. This struggle of the working-class bit deeply into company profits, while body-bags coming back from Vietnam fuelled a national resistance to imperialist war. Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon looked around for allies – and found them in the Chinese Communist leadership.

The alliance with the Chinese and Russian leaders enabled the USA to broker “independence” deals in the colonies and semi-colonies which left the basic imperialist economic structures in place under new but pliant “liberation” leaders. It enabled the US, British and European capitalist classes to close down industry after industry at “home” and simply pull the rug out from under their “own” working classes, and it meant that the same capitalists could get their products made by Chinese labour in Chinese factories and mines at a fraction of the cost of production “at home”.

By doing this, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have, over the last forty years, called into being two significant and numerous classes. The first is the now massive Chinese working class, by far the biggest contingent in the world proletariat. The second is the new Chinese entrepreneurial class, the bourgeoisie. For the moment, the CCP has been able to keep the lid on the class struggle between these two classes because for China the economic story of those forty years has been one of almost continuous and massive growth. However, that growth has now stalled. Meanwhile, Chinese businesses have become major players in technical advances and on stock markets around the world. On the other hand, China is now well on the way to projecting her economic power around the world.

No wonder President Xi has taken very public steps to punish high-level corruption, rein in the most powerful business leaders and reassure workers that the next ten years will see improvements in their living standards. “Communist” China has to face the implications of a domestic class struggle just like any nation with a largely capitalist economy dependent on world trade.

China’s Belt and Road initiative has organised logistical, commercial and political arrangements to facilitate the movement of strategic resources, food and raw materials into China and manufactured good out of China. Chinese loans are offered to struggling nations in order to provide the infrastructure that will underpin these arrangements. No doubt, given the moral character of many “liberation” governments, much of this “aid” is understood as a contribution to the President’s retirement fund, but it is still a debt which will have to be repaid one way or another.

When the Chinese state and businesses approach vulnerable foreign territories, their aim is to penetrate into new markets for their products, win new access to raw materials, or gain a strategic or logistical advantage. Like Portugal, Holland and Britain in previous centuries, China establishes trade routes, bases, harbours and transport links around the world as well as investing in foreign countries and buying political influence.

Whatever “allies” China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, do have in these places are in many cases the corrupt and bankrupt local satraps of imperialism dressed up as “liberation” leaders. And China and Russia have played their part in corrupting them.

Many years ago, Russian politicians cut off military aid to the Cuban soldiers who were beating Apartheid South Africa’s forces in Angola. These Soviet politicians stood godfather to the puppet regimes which were established under the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and South-West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) in Namibia at the end of apartheid. Gross forms of discrimination were done away with, while imperialism kept its control of the mineral resources and industry. Poverty, unemployment and oppression is still the lot of the masses there.

After the negotiated withdrawal of the apartheid regime, it was Chinese politicians who persuaded Nelson Mandela to leave the mining industry in South Africa in the hands of capitalist monopolies. They told him that it would be a mistake to take the socialist road. What this meant became evident in 2012 with the massacre of 34 striking miners at the Lonmin owned Marikana platinum mine.

When CNNC bought the mine from Rio Tinto, promises were made that the union and its local executive would continue to be recognised and that there would be no change in workers’ terms and conditions. However, quite soon there were indeed attacks on workers’ health provision and other issues and new middle-management were employed recruited from abroad. The company unilaterally imposed changes in workers’ terms and conditions of employment against the wishes of the workers and their representatives. The local executive of the Mineworkers’ Union of Namibia protested and its officers were unlawfully sacked. They are still in a battle to establish their legal rights to a labour court hearing and to get their jobs back.

The revelations of the “Fishrot” scandal in Namibia heavily implicate Swapo government figures. Foreign interests have bribed ministers and government official to grant fishing quotas above and beyond sustainable levels. The companies which own the fishing fleet have ridden roughshod over crew members’ constitutionally-recognised trade union and health and safety rights. These crew-members, who went out on strike and maintained that strike for several years, were let down by a trade union dominated by Swapo politicians. They were denied access to justice by venal lawyers and corrupt judges.

Thanks to an agreement the government of the People’s Republic of China reached with western imperialist powers during the 1970s, which developed into China’s entry into the world market as a capitalist power herself, the country is now enjoying growing prestige and strength. However, it will inevitably become more and more deeply involved in rivalry and conflict with the established world power, the USA.

The Russian government’s attitude to Ukraine very closely matches the attitude the British ruling class had for many years to Ireland. They thought that Ireland “belonged” to them and that it was part of Great Britain’s “sphere of influence”. It cost the Irish people a great deal of pain and effort to teach them otherwise.

To return to the LA Progressive: It is true that a “massive shift in global relations” is “currently underway”. It is true that there is a “protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself”. But the points presented in between are a farrago of confusion and deception.

The “shift in global relations” is the emergence of China and Russia as claimants to the role of global imperialist hegemons, challenging the position that the USA has occupied since the mid-20thcentury.

To dress this “grab for world power” as inspired by “peace and multipolarity” is an enormous misrepresentation of the real world, a misrepresentation which is elaborated as the paragraph goes on. Danny Haiphong asserts that the conflict between socialism and capitalism is a thing of the past. This is the constant message of all enemies of the working class and the constant refrain of all apologists for capitalism. It is a message which disarms workers at the very point that they face the fight for a future.

For nearly two centuries, the movement of the working class to overcome capitalist social relations, which inherently involve oppression, exploitation, war and conquest, has made advances and it has suffered setbacks. The imperialist epoch concentrates all the tensions and contradictions of these social relations and creates the necessity and at the same time the possibility of a socialist revolution. The environmental damage caused by enslavement to the profit motive also makes this revolution essential if humanity is to have a future at all. The key issue is whether the force of progress, the working class, can develop the kind of leadership which can guide that revolution successfully.

Workers International to rebuild the fourth International will work loyally alongside all workers and groups of workers who set about resolving that crisis of leadership.

Bob Archer

10 March 2022




China and the crisis of imperialism

For about four decades, the west and China engaged with each other economically and diplomatically to the benefit of both. But this era is at an end. The crucial question now is to what extent a process of mutual decoupling can be managed to minimise the economic fallout and avert the risk of conflict.”

(“Averting the risk of a China-US conflict”, Financial Times, 23 December 2021)

During the 1970s, the supposedly Marxist and Communist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government of China threw a life-line to the crisis-ridden imperialist states of the US and Western Europe. This provided China with access to world markets, modern technology and finance markets. No one can deny that the people of China have a right to all of this. However, the political side of this deal was deeply reactionary, as we will show below. Fifty years down the line, a hugely changed China emerges as a redoubtable rival, within the system of international imperialism, to the powers which have been her quasi-allies for nearly 50 years.

Chinese workers and peasants paid a price for this deal. For almost half a century their underpaid and sweated labour has enriched both a Chinese bourgeoisie and Western finance capital. The price that workers in North America and Europe paid was to undergo a debilitating war of attrition on their class as industry after industry was closed down and “exported”.

Marxism provides an irreplaceable weapon for working-class activists in the shape of Lenin’s 1915 study: Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism. As far as I know, the best and most systematic attempt to at least sketch out an account of the entanglement of economic, social and political developments in the development of the world since Lenin wrote this is contained in Marxist Considerations on the Crisis by the late Balazs Nagy. Nagy concentrates on the period during and since World War II and has a great detail to say about the situation in the 1970s within which the nefarious alliance between Western imperialism and the leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) came about. Both these works can easily be consulted online by searching the Marxist Internet Archive.

Imperialism in crisis

By the 1970s, an economic boom based on replacing the massive destruction of productive forces during World War II was coming to an end. Part of this boom had involved US capitalists financing growth in Japan, Korea and Western Europe in order to provide a barrier to further expansion of the Soviet bloc and China. However, these clients were now turning into competitors, and they enjoyed the advantages that their work-forces were cheaper and their plant and technique were more modern. Working-class struggles at home, and investment tied up in often ageing plant, made it difficult for UK and US businesses to compete.

A really valuable part of Nagy’s Marxist Considerations is devoted to Marx’s thoughts on what money is, its place in the overall system of capitalism, and how that was reflected in the events of the 1970s.

Imperialism was flailing around in a crisis and the class conflict was heating up. From the early 1960s onwards, increasingly desperate attempts to claw back working-class gains by the employers and their state machines led to ever more bitter class struggles.

These problems, and the growing competition that the established capitalist powers faced from newcomers such as Korea and a resurgent Japan, were reflected in the monetary crisis. After 1944, all the world’s major currencies had been valued by reference to the US Dollar, which itself (and it alone), was anchored in a fixed relationship to gold. But as time passed, this became a burden which the US economy could no longer bear. They could no longer sustain the promise to sell gold to all comers at $35 to the ounce of gold. It fell to President Nixon to take a step into the unknown and break the link between dollars and gold in 1971.

Meanwhile, the masses in the colonial possessions and dependencies of the various capitalist states were fighting for and in many cases winning independence. This threatened the super-profits, which the capitalist states had previously obtained from cheap labour, and their control over valuable sources of raw materials and energy. Where the imperialists could not directly prevent this, they looked for ways to corrupt the new “liberation” regimes and retain what they could of their economic advantages and privileges.

Intensified class struggle

A notable example of the intensified class-struggles in western Europe was provided by the May-June events of 1968 in France, whose impact was felt across Europe and internationally. These events led to an electoral defeat for the “strong man” president Charles de Gaulle. In Britain, Labour governments (under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan), and a Conservative government under Edward Heath, struggled in vain to tame working class militancy.

And all of the contradictions of imperialism were concentrated in the United States, where the Republican President Nixon was grappling with powerful working-class resistance to attempts to claw-back their hard-won gains in wages, working conditions and social rights. Meanwhile the US was losing the war in Vietnam and facing increasingly widespread opposition to the war at home.

It was Nixon’s “fixer”, Henry Kissinger, who lined up a way for his imperialist masters, if not to end their crisis, at least to hold off the collapse of their system. The relationship between President Nixon and his Secretary of State was unusually close and confidential.

From behind the scenes, Kissinger orchestrated the military coup which toppled a left-wing elected government in Chile and murdered President Salvador Allende. 130,000 suspected left-wing activists were rounded up. Thousands were tortured, murdered or simply “disappeared” at the hands of the “Caravan of Death”. At the same time, Kissinger encouraged the government’s “dirty war” against left-wingers in Argentina, where military death-squads kidnaped and murdered activists. He also secured US support for Pakistan’s genocidal war against Bangladesh.

The busy Mr. Kissinger finds allies in Beijing

At the same time, Kissinger had to get the Vietnam war over and off the agenda. His visits to Beijing and Moscow opened the door to the Paris Agreement which achieved that goal. It also opened up a more relaxed relationship with the Soviet Union’s leadership and much closer relations between the US government and the Chinese leadership. A meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971 in Beijing established a growing alliance between the US and Chinese governments and deepened China’s split with the USSR.

By the late 1970s – not without considerable disruption in Chinese society and the political leadership of the CCP – the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was preparing to benefit from the opening up of trade relations with western imperialist partners such as the USA and the UK.

The sheer extent of the “technology transfer” which started then is staggering. Under Deng Xiaoping, a crash programme was started to train 800 000 research scientists in the fields of energy resources, information technology, laser and space technology, high-energy physics and genetics. Plans were laid for 88 new universities. Schools were instructed to identify gifted pupils and prepare and enter them for the highly competitive entrance examinations for these universities. Hundreds of students were dispatched to the US and other countries to catch up with the latest developments in all these fields.

None of this was happening by accident, nor could it have done, given the international relations which had prevailed during the “Cold War”. From 1949 until 1978, Western imperialist countries had inflicted a virtual trade boycott on Russia, Eastern Europe and China – the same policies used today in an attempt to strangle states like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, who in any way refuse to be dominated by imperialism. This was the other limb of the huge military effort the imperialist states undertake to encircle, isolate and intimidate these countries.

Indeed, no state can survive for long or make real progress towards a socialist society in isolation from world trade, world economy and the international development of industry and science. It was for this very reason that Lenin and the leaders of the Russian Revolution established the Communist International in 1919 in order to lead and organise the world revolution against capitalism/imperialism.

But after Lenin’s death the new leaders who rose to prominence in the USSR undermined the Communist International politically, turning it into a mechanism for imposing their own bureaucratic methods and approaches and Russian-nationalist interests on the Communist Parties around the world. This led to terrible defeats for working class struggles, in particular in China (1926-1927), Germany (1929-1933) and Spain (1936-1939).

By the way, as we will discuss below, not all states that stand up to, resist and even compete with the existing imperialist powers do so on the basis of socialist internationalism. Some nourish their own imperialist ambitions. South Korea and many of the Asian “tigers” we will discuss later had an alliance with US or British imperialism but also advanced their own interests. For example, during the economic and monetary crisis engulfing the Pacific Rim in the late 1990s, many of the “tiger Economies” in the region defied America’s proposed solutions quite robustly. The rulers of Syria and Iran, who are far from being freedom-loving democrats and a very long way away from being socialist revolutionaries, also face and oppose crippling imperialist blockades and boycotts. This does not lend these regimes a progressive social character.

China’s reactionary alliance with western imperialism

In order to win access to world markets, modern technology and sources of vital raw materials and energy, China rulers entered, at a certain level, into a political alliance with Western Imperialism. This alliance freed the hands of capitalists in the USA, Britain, etc., to continue their economic domination of liberated former colonies and dependencies in Africa and South America while handing over governments to often compliant and/or corrupt “independence” regimes, and at the same time enabled these same capitalists to pull the rug out from beneath the feet of their “own” working classes at homeby a massive transfer, or export, of industrial production.

Meanwhile, Western capital has for over a century dreamed of opening up a new area of exploitation in the shape of China’s massive natural and human resources. Rather ageing businesses in the west were able to warm their hands at the fire of China’s industrial development and huge market for consumer goods. The City of London and other finance centres underwent a revival through dealings connected with, for example, selling raw materials like metal ores to China

On 1 January 1979 full diplomatic relations were re-established between the PRC and the USA (the PRC had already ratified a treaty of peace and friendship with Japan). To ram the message home, to make it absolutely clear which side the government of the PRC was taking, the Chinese government at around that time publicly condemned a treaty which the victorious Vietnamese revolutionary government signed with the Soviet government, and denounced Vietnamese efforts to put a stop to Pol Pot’s murderous regime on Cambodia.

Now American manufacturers were able to pull their investments out from the industrial areas of the USA and re-locate their production in China. Back home in the USA, they were hamstrung by trade unions, workers’ rights (limiting the rate of exploitation on the job) and the “on-costs” (“fringe” benefits above and beyond the wage packet) of labour in an advanced capitalist society. American employers (and their British and European counterparts) resented the burden of taxation upon their profits in order to pay for public health, education, sanitation, housing, policing and justice for working-class communities.

China offered a huge reservoir of cheap, adaptable and above all disciplined labour. US and British manufacturers of textiles, clothing and footwear, automobile parts, electronics and novelty goods very quickly shifted their production to China to escape the limitations to profit-making imposed by the US working class. Locally-owned private capitalist concerns also emerged in China as many state industries privatised production and new businesses started up with local capital made accessible by the government via the state-controlled banking system. The key to their success was a consistently-high economic growth rate based on supplying goods to western retailers very cheaply because of the very low wages and very straitened conditions of Chinese workers and the fact that the new Chinese industries could benefit from the latest technical and scientific developments. While the state-controlled Chinese trade unions dominated whatever labour organisation existed, a new breed of business managers was set free to get rich at the expense of workers’ rights and conditions. Much of the labour force was in any case recruited from the countryside, and existed as a disenfranchised semi-illegal population on the fringes of the industrial megacities which sprang up.

Devastated industrial heartlands

Shocking encounter with Chinese employers abroad

Wherever Chinese companies have set up in the West in recent decades, workers have been shocked to discover at first-hand what “labour relations” in modern China really look like. H. Jauch and L. Sakaria paint a bleak picture of the experience of working for Chinese businesses in Namibia:

Chinese firms have little tradition of unions and organized labour at home. While a detailed survey of labour relations in China is beyond the scope of this paper, we can note that the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) call attention to ‘severe restrictions on trade union rights’, with China not having ratified the core ILO conventions of freedom of association and collective bargaining (ITUC, 2010). In particular, workers are not free to form or join trade unions of their choice, only the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which is part of the government and party bureaucracy, is recognized in law. In a study comparing labour right in East Asia, China scores at the bottom on both de jure and de facto rights. De facto rights are considered particularly fragile due to weaknesses in terms of political rights and rule of law, with reports of the use of arrests, detention, and violence to harass labour activists and suppress labour rights (Caraway, 2009).” (Chinese investments in Namibia: A labour perspective report,Labour Resource and Research Institute, Namibia (2009).

When the China National Nuclear Corporation bought the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia from Rio Tinto, they guaranteed that workers’ rights and conditions and union recognition would continue as before. The good rights and conditions which workers enjoyed at the mine had been fought for and won in historic struggles against the contract labour system prevalent in South West Africa under South African rule. However, very soon the new management imposed many changes which undermined all these gains, and when the local executive committee of the Miners Union of Namibia tried to object, they were unlawfully sacked and they have a real fight on their hands to assert their legal rights against obstruction by the Namibian state.

Employees of the Chinese-owned Piraeus Container Terminal in Greece have had a similar experience. They report that most of the labour hired to staff this significant investment are not directly employed but “outsourced”. Workers’ collectives and organisations are thus fragmented, with the result that labour regulations and collective bargaining have become “empty shells”.

In 2018, journalist Despina Papageorgiou described how an employee who reported abysmal working conditions in the Chinese part of the port:

“… was allegedly fired for trying to raise concerns about safety violations and promote a workers’ committee He sued COSCO in 2012. Urinating in bottles due to a lack of toilet breaks, horrendous safety conditions, and being called to work at the last minute were among his accusations. Reports verified such accounts. Dock workers addressed an open letter to the Greek president in 2013 voicing similar concerns.

COSCO employees went on their first-ever strike in July 2014, called by a general assembly. They worked up to 16 hours daily and claimed that work accidents were not registered. Apparently to avoid paying them the proper wage, dozens were registered as ‘figs and raisins packaging workers’. The workers managed to found a union, the Union of Container Handling Workers in Piraeus Port (ENEDEP), in 2014. Through negotiations and strikes, the union achieved improvements like breaks, a minimum daily wage, and minimum monthly wages. Until then, every subcontractor paid workers according to a different wage system. However, daily wages remain fixed—not taking into account weekends and holidays.

In 2017, shortly after the Chinese took full control of OLP and Pier I, a new OLP General Staff Labour Regulation extended working time from 7.5 hours per day and 37.5 per week to 8 and 40, respectively, while providing for a seven-day work week without extra pay on weekends or holidays, “flexible” forms of labour, and simplified lay-offs. Critics argue this regulation paved the way for extending subcontracting in Pier I.”

At the time of writing, car workers at the Chinese-owned First Automobile Works (FAW) plant in Gqeberha, South Africa, including casual workers, were involved in a struggle for a wage-increase, help with medical costs and full-time employment for all the casual workers. A key issue for the NUMSA union is to get the company to sign up to the Automotive Manufacturers Employers Association and accept collective bargaining. Workers report that the Chinese management constantly renege on verbal promises.

Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative

The Chinese Government has established a China/Pakistan Economic corridor (CPEC) with the government of Pakistan, and the China Overseas Port Holding Company (COPHC) has taken over the operation of the strategic Arabian Sea port of Gwadar in Balochistan on a 40-year lease, monopolising the lion’s share of revenues from the port and the Gwadar Free Zone. The UK Guardiannewspaper (20 August 2021) reported:

Protests have erupted in Pakistan’s port city Gwadar against a severe shortage of water and electricity and threats to livelihoods, part of a growing backlash against China’s multibillion-dollar belt and road projects in the country.

This week, demonstrators including fishers and other local workers blocked the roads in Gwadar, a coastal town in Balochistan. They burned tyres, chanted slogans and largely shut down the city, to demand water and electricity and a stop to Chinese trawlers illegally fishing in the nearby waters and then taking the fish to China. Two people were injured when the authorities cracked down on the protesters.”

Asian tigers fore-runners of China’s growth

When they opened their alliance with China in the 1970s, the imperialists had learned from the way capitalism had been adopted by Japan in the second half of the 19thcentury, and how the “tiger” economies had developed after 1945.

Western capitalism, for its part, had developed in an extended process, spread over many centuries, which involved the emergence of a modern bourgeoisie at war with the structures and ideologies of the feudal middle-ages. They had to fashion from the ground up and in a series of revolutionary convulsions the political and social instruments and structures through which society as a whole could overcome this past. This involved popular revolutions and the establishment of political democracy. The intellectual movement known as The Enlightenment enthroned scientific practices against received dogma and superstition as the basis for reliable knowledge. (Nevertheless, this movement’s roots in bourgeois social relations and practices is revealed, for example, in the justification of African slavery by a number of its prominent luminaries, and their formulation of so-called “scientific” race theories).

Japan, however, entered the process at a much later stage, when capitalism was already morphing into modern imperialism. Rather than a revolutionary bourgeoisie, a tightly-integrated sector of the old ruling class switched to capitalism (not without internal struggles) and simply imported wholesale the best available models offered by the advanced capitalist west.

The late Balazs Nagy explains the process very well in his book Marxist Considerations on the Crisis, and a significant section of that book deals with Japan’s road to capitalism. The working class which provided the labour force in Japan did so under extremely adverse conditions of oppression and exploitation.

And this became the template for the so-called “tiger” economies which arose in South-East Asia after World War II, in particular in South Korea. The essay The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation(attached as an appendix to this article), which, by the way, makes no academic claim to be more than a useful background reading on the topic, gives a lively account of how authoritarian South-East Asian governments have bulldozed a quite different path to capitalist economic success from the traditional “western” route.

How they Justify all this

The Chinese Communist Party authorities still try to foster around the world, at least among a layer of political, trade union and academic personnel who have roots in former Communist movements, a conviction that the Chinese state is still in some sense pursuing a Communist or a Marxist “line”.

Characteristic arguments along these lines can be found on the Learning from Chinawebsite which publishes articles over the name of the former member of the International Marxist Group in the UK, John Ross. (https://www.learningfromchina.net)

The basic argument they present is that China’s truly unparalleled economic progress in the last 40 years justifies everything and trumps every possible criticism. This is asserted in the same gruff, overbearing and triumphalist tone that trade unionists encounter when their Chinese employers brusquely inform them that they are about to tear up existing collective bargaining procedures and bypass long-established and legally enacted labour rights.

Next, it is argued that the Chinese Communists have learned from the Soviet “mistake” of complete state ownership and control of the economy after 1928, which, it is asserted, was the cause of its failure and the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s (1). Elements of this argument can be found in every bourgeois critique of the USSR and of Communism in general.

Sensing that more needs to be said, Ross goes on to reveal that the author of the 1978 turn of the Chinese leadership was none other than Karl Marx himself! Marx had noted, in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, that in the early years of its existence, a socialist state would not yet be able to go beyond the wages system, where the level of a worker’s pay is established by the workings of the market.

Only later, once economic planning has brought about a massive improvement in the means of production, could a thoroughly socialist system be introduced, where each person gives according to their abilities to the common stock of goods and services and takes according to their needs.

Ross’s sleight of hand here was to insert the idea that, in that early period, Marx somehow proposed that the (large-scale) means of production should remain in the hands of capitalist owners, as happens now in many cases in the PRC.

Marx proposed no such thing! He devoted several pages of comments to point 3 of the programme which the newly fused German socialist party adopted at the 1875 Gotha congress, but he did not say a word about privately-owned capitalist enterprises surviving at all, let alone as a major economic force. The “defects” he anticipated in “the first phase of a society, as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth-pangs from capitalist society” were connected with the fact that the conceptions of “rights” embodied in the wage system under capitalism will persist for a while even after the abolition of the capitalists.

All in all, the arguments of those ideologues who support the main lines of the policy of the Chinese state amount to three ideas:

  1. All those who oppose the Chinese state really back and support the western powers, who are rapacious and brutal imperialists. All we can reply is: No we are not: Workers International has consistently opposed imperialism in every shape and form, whereas the CCP have been in an alliance with the chief imperialists for nearly 50 years!

  2. Everything that the Chinese state and various Chinese capitalist enterprises do is justified by the incredible (and they are incredible) achievements of Chinese economy over recent decades. On this, all we can reply is: China as a world power is no less of a danger to the people of the world than Britain or the USA. Imperialism as a system is still as Lenin described it in 1915. The question is, can the working class and the masses organise their forces to overcome this system?

  3. Common Prosperity”: the standard of living of the Chinese working class may be unacceptably low now, say the apologists, but within a few decades the rich and powerful will be forced by a wise and benevolent government to make concessions which will improve the standard of living of the masses. To this, Workers International replies: Marx did indeed write (as Ross solemnly informs us): “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby”. The “turn” of the CCP leadership in the 1970s has called into being a rich and powerful capitalist class alongside a huge working class. Class divisions and class conflict continued to exist in Soviet Russia after the revolution of 1917, and they clearly continue to exist in China today. After several years of the “New Economic Policy” adopted in Russia as a temporary emergency measure in the early 1920s, the better-off peasants won the leadership of the countryside and felt confident enough to challenge Soviet power itself. The bureaucratic clique which had seized control of the Communist Party ignored frantic warnings from the Left Opposition that an urgent programme of industrialisation was needed to provide the mass of the peasantry with mechanical and technical resources which would have made collectivisation a popular step forward. Nothing was done until the threat became palpable, and what was done (forced collectivisation and chaotic and break-neck industrialisation) was by then a series of grotesque crimes against humanity. How will China fare as the newly-rich bourgeoisie and the newly-numerous working class square up to each other? Promises of moderate improvements in working-class living standards in twenty or thirty years’ time might not be enough to control the situation.

What is China?

Many of us insisted in defining the Soviet Union (when it still existed) as a deformed workers’ state. That definition was based on a precise analysis of the forces involved in the October Revolution, Soviet power, and the subsequent fate of the Soviet Union, the Communist International and the world revolution. We pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which put an end to the deformed workers state, was in its own way a confirmation of that definition. We still defend the correctness of that definition against those who asserted that the Soviet Union had in its lifetime become a “state capitalist” formation.

A class definition of the Chinese Communist Party, its assumption of power in 1949 and the resulting state and economy is more difficult. The character of the historic Chinese empire does not fit easily into social categories familiar in European history. The first three decades of the life of the CCP involved horrific sacrifice and struggle in the midst of the collapse of the Empire, ruthless foreign intervention and a three-sided civil war with warlords and the Guo Min Dang. The full story of that period and a proper understanding of nature of the county a hundred years ago as that struggle started are minimum requirements for reaching a conclusion on that. Heroic tales (and the real history abounds with tales of resistance, heroism and sacrifice) do not resolve the question.

A look at the history of the People’s Republic of China since 1949 does not establish beyond doubt its credentials as a workers’ state. That is hardly surprising since the population in 1949 consisted so overwhelmingly of peasant farmers. However, the history since then does not demonstrate the actual existence of workers’ power in the state. Because of the Hukou system, large parts of the new working class which has arisen since the 1970s do not enjoy access to education, health provision and housing. The savings to the employers which this provides resemble the super-exploitation of a semi-colonial workforce. For many of these workers, health services are far less than what workers in the UK enjoy and expect. It is more tempting to see a country run by a bureaucracy ruling and remaining in power by dint of an adroit and very often brutally cynical balancing act between opposing forces.

Nearly half a century of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has produced a very unequal society. The promises made in connection with the policy of “Common Prosperity”, as well as the steps taken to curb conspicuous consumption and wayward behaviour on the part of the newly-rich and celebrities (and to deal with over-extended growth in some sectors) are indications of what the CCP will face more and more in the future.

The People’s Republic of China is clearly integrated into the system of world imperialism. Workers everywhere who come into contact with Chinese businesses or work for them judge them as workers will judge their employers, and their judgement is damning. Chinese companies in China treat workers badly. Chinese pay is low compared with pay in the west. Working conditions are worse. The official unions do not provide a channel of protest, but form a wing of the state. Protest leads to beatings and imprisonment.

The defence of workers’ rights, and of the masses around the world, depends of the construction of an international workers’ party based on Marxism and a confrontation with all imperialist and quasi-imperialist forces which seek to feather their own nests at the expense of the working class and the masses.

Bob Archer, January 2022

Footnote:
1. Posing the problem this way allows Ross to avoid any mention of the very full and detailed debate over the New Economic Policy (NEP) when it was adopted in Soviet Russia in 1921-1922 and subsequently. These were measures to re-establish the bases of an economy torn apart by years of war, revolution and civil war. The Bolsheviks certainly did introduce temporarily a number of market reforms which did enable industry and agriculture to recover – which they started to do. However, the Soviet State retained a large measure of control and, for example, never abandoned its monopoly over foreign trade.

There is not space here to debate the whole matter, but Ross should recall that the Left Opposition (of which he may have some distant memory) understood very well that if the NEP became embedded, and unless the state’s own manufacturing industry could make real planned progress, the social forces that particularly prospered under NEP, the NEPmen traders and the richer peasants, would threaten the existence of the Soviet State itself.

These warnings were ignored by Stalin, Bukharin and others, who urged precisely these forces to “enrich themselves”. But when the warnings from the Left Opposition were borne out, and the Soviet Union was threatened in the late 1920s by a revolt led by the rich peasants (Kulaks), the bureaucracy led by Stalin had to switch in utter panic to a thoroughly military-bureaucratic set of solutions, “liquidating the Kulaks as a class” during a murderous and unspeakably violent “collectivisation” of the peasantry and a development of industry at a breakneck pace which was underpinned by convict labour.

The failure of Soviet economy was not rooted in state planning, but in the weaknesses of bureaucraticstate planning. The twin roots of the failure were the bureaucracy which had seized power in the workers’ state and the lack of access to the world economy.

All these issues are discussed in detail in Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed, which indeed becomes more relevant than ever in today’s world.

Appendix

Tiger Countries” (The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation)The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation

Bruno Marshall Shirleynload PDF

Oct 16 2014 

Development, Legitimacy, and the Role of the State: The Asian Tigers from Independence to Industrialisation

Note: Whenever possible Simplified Pinyin has been used throughout for the transliteration of Chinese names and places for its ease of use and predominance in modern literature. As Taiwan typically uses the more archaic Wade-Giles system readers may be unfamiliar with Pinyin names for individuals like Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek in WG) or even Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung in WG), but they have been employed for consistency throughout.

As recently as the early 1960s South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong (the “Asian Tigers”) were considered to be a part of the third world: Harvey and Lee rather unkindly refer to it as “economic backwardness.”[1] Since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, praise of the “Asian Miracle” has dwindled in academia,[2] yet the Tigers still stand as rare examples of states which have successfully “developed” in a manner no one could have predicted 50 years ago – and at a considerably faster rate than any of our current efforts at third-world development seem to be proceeding. Are there lessons to be learnt from the rapid economic growth of the Tigers, from the 1960s through to the 1990s, and do these have a practical application in contemporary development?

In 1949 Harry Truman introduced the concept of development to the world, identifying it as a key priority of the West in order to maintain peace and prosperity amongst all the people of the world.[3] In the beginnings of the great ideological war against Communism, he took care to articulate that his program of development would be “based on the concept on of democratic fair-dealing.” This vision shapes the nature of development even today, with economic development and state-building more generally predicated on the assumption that if liberal democracy is established then all other aspects of development will naturally follow. We see this in IMF loan conditionality, requiring liberalisation of economies in regions where the government formally had tight control,[4] and even in post-conflict statebuilding exercises, where the end goal is often the establishment of democratic elections.[5]

I will not dispute the value of democracy, but there is a fundamental difference between a thing being good in its own right and a good thing leading to other good things. The examples of the Tigers show us an alternate path to development: a strong central government guiding the economy rapidly forward through distinct stages of development until it reaches full industrialisation. This hypothesis, the “developmental state,” is one that has been argued for by a number of economists for some time now. However if we accept this as a viable method of development two questions remain unanswered: why was it particularly successful in East Asia, and how can we transplant it to other parts of the world in need?

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: How Economists Think the Garden Grows

Before examining the economic development of the Asian Tigers it is important to identify the theoretical framework in which they might sit. Models for economic development are as varied as there are development economists, but at the risk of sacrificing diversity for ease of analysis we can broadly identify three distinct models. These three models are less cohesive blueprints and more categories of development policy broadly derived from the Neoliberal, Keynesian and Heterodox economic traditions respectively, which for our purposes we can identify as Market-led, Interventionalist and State-led models for economic development.[6]

The Market-led development model is that traditionally pushed by the IMF, advocating market liberalisation following a classical faith in the rationality of market actors.[7] The blame for the failures of some economies and the success of others is placed at the feet of interfering governments, and the removal of tariffs and other barriers to trade liberalisation are seen as an important initial step in the development process.[8] According to advocates of this model for development, a free market will naturally result in development of those industries that are most efficient, described in HOS theory as specialisation in production of goods produced using their relatively-abundant factor (to the world market).[9]

In practical terms, the liberalisation of both the domestic market and international trade is expected to result in semi-sustainable economies relying on export of either raw materials or (in land-scarce, labour-abundant states) perhaps even the product of light industry to balance the import of the machinery and other tools needed for these industries.[10] While critics point out that this leaves high value-added industries controlled by the developed countries of today, with the countries pursuing this model stuck with low-value-added industries like agriculture, resource extraction, and at best light industry, advocates would respond that it is still a clear improvement over the current situation of developing states.[11]

The second model for economic development proposed is what we might call the Interventionalist model. This model broadly follows from the writing of Lord Keynes and his views on the role of government in moderating the errors of the free market when necessary.[12] The Interventionalist development model acknowledges the role of actors in the free market but also the need for government action and intervention in stimulating growth and reducing unemployment.[13] Actors may be rational, but oversight is needed to stabilise output. Chandavarkar, while refuting the existence of a Keynesian model for development, does concede that he presented the first “economic rationale for a central bank as a development agency,”[14] setting the stage for a development model in which both government and market work together to achieve economic growth and ultimately development. The actual policies pursued by the state will be highly reactive and tailored to the needs of the market.

This skepticism regarding the ability of market actors is taken to its logical conclusion in our third model for economic development, the State-led model. This is borne out of the Heterodox tradition, as it refutes a basic principle of classical economics that what is good for the rational actor is good for the economy as a whole. The criticism is hinted at above in the limitations of market-led growth, as rational actors will always focus on the optimal activity available to them at the time of decision making, whereas development should always focus on improving future activities. The clearest way to illustrate this is with an example in the two-factor HOS tradition: given Country A’s high level of industry and skilled labour, and their trading partner Country B’s high level of unskilled labour, the optimum activity for entrepeneurs in B to engage in would be along the lines of light industries or resource extraction. This unfortunately reinforces the imbalance in value-added activities between A and B. For B to develop its industrial base and ultimately engage in higher value-added activities in the future, it would require considerable investment in activities that currently are sub-optimum. As rational actors would never engage in sub-optimum activities, it requires the guidance of the state to invest in those industries which will (hopefully) pay off in future, and therefore develop the economy as a whole.

This model is essentially a reworking of the “developmental state” hypothesis used by commentators to explain the very cases we will be examining, but it has not received much favour as a model for development. Chang and Grabel suggest that this results from the challenge a state-centric development model posed to the Neoliberal establishment, an argument discussed in a later section.[15] As a model, Chang and Grabel suggest the following policies should be pursued by the government seeking development: trade protectionism while new industries are developing, a clear strategy for systemic development of higher-value-added industries, a cautious approach to privitisation and the nationalisation of some industries where appropriate, a relaxed approach to intellectual property law and strict control of both capital and foreign debt.[16]

As we will see below, and unsurprisingly given its origins in analysis of the Asian Tigers themselves, all of the countries under discussion conform to the state-led development model in contrast to the market-led or state-intervention models. However supporters of the market-led and interventionist models would argue that while state-led development may have been effective in East Asia, it is not applicable to other parts of the world.[17] The failures of state-led economies like China under Mao, North Korea and the Soviet Union all indicate that strong states do not necessarily mean strong economies – there must be some other factors missing from past analyses of development in the Asian Tigers that can make the state-led model work.

The Tigers’ Stripes: Case Studies in Succesful State-led Development

South Korea

In 1945 South Korea was finally made independent of Japanese rule, only to immediately be placed under US military occupation.[18] The long-awaited autonomy it achieved was rapidly overshadowed by the Korean War (1950-3) with the North, which destroyed two-thirds of existing production facilities worth some three times the GNP.[19] The long road from these humble origins to its current position in the G20 can be analysed as a systemic movement in four discrete phases, beginning in the Rhee era but mostly taking place under the Park government (both before and after the establishment of yushin government).

The first phase of development constituted recovery from the devastation of the war, with an average of 15.9% of GNP coming from US aid (with a peak of 22.9% in 1957).[20] 64% of investment savings were US-owned, and Import Substitution Industrialisation was adopted with 30% of aid going towards agricultural equipment.[21] Worker’s unions were suppressed by the Rhee government to keep labour cheap.[22] Korean economic growth in this period was highly dependent on US aid and investment savings and vulnerable to intense fluctuations.[23]

The Park coup in 1961 demarcates the second phase of Korean economic development: the development of light industries and export-oriented growth. Having recovered from the war and no longer entirely reliant on US aid to pay for imports, the Korean economy could now begin to utilise its cheap labour force to grow through exportation of light industrial goods. Here we begin to see the first clear departure from the Market-led or even Interventionalist models of growth in the adoption of the First Five-Year Economic Development Plan (1962). This established clear macro-economic growth targets in investment, industrial structure and trade balance, and established trade policy, industrial policy, and macro-economic policy in pursuit of these goals. This was called “guided capitalism,” in which “the state shall either directly participate or indirectly render guidance” to key industries, particularly the labour-intenstive light industries that would lead to rapid export growth.[24]

To return to classical terminology, the optimum activity at this phase in Korean history for an individual actor to participate in would be those same light industries. Unfortunately if this were the case then the Korean economy would have been perpetually stuck in the same phase with no high-value-added industries being developed. Obviously this did not happen. While growth in the early 1960s was fantastic, as high as 10% in some years, the Park government did not see this as a sustainable means of growth. The foreign currency earnt through this explosion of export was reinvested in the advanced technologies and machinery which was necessary to progress to the next stage of development, while tariffs and subsidies were used to shield growing advanced industries from the international market.[25]

This set up the third stage of development, articulated in Park’s second Five-Year Plan: the development of heavy and chemical industries, supported by legislation and key policy instruments.[26] Foreign capital, though still under heavy government restrictions, was sought to help bolster growth and exports grew at almost 39.2% per annum.[27] This phase of development has lasted the longest of any thus far, with export-driven growth from heavy industry carrying Korea forwards until the early nineties. During this period factor input increases, both in capital accumulation and in quality of labour through education, accounted for a massive degree of growth in industrial output, setting up Korea well for the next phase of development.[28]

The 1990s saw a number of significant changes in the South Korean economy and marked the fourth and current phase of development, the push into high tech industry. The World Bank data on high-technology exports sadly only extends as far back as 1988, but even this shows a dramatic change. In 1988 high-technology exports made up only 15% of total export, but this number increases almost by an entire percentile every following year.[29] This international demand for Korean goods, coupled with a dramatic increase in domestic consumption and higher standards of living across society, marked the definite movement of Korea into “successful state” status.

All of this was driven by the central state with a clear end-goal in mind and a range of effective legislative and policy tools for implementation. Aggressive reinvestment in infrastructure, state-owned industries and clearly communicated economic plans over a long period of time allowed for a progression through distinct phases of development even when reinvestment in the newer phases would have appeared the less optimal to individual market actors.[30] It was this incessant push forward that eventually led to Korea’s development as a fully industrialised and technological economy.

Taiwan

Taiwan shares a similar story to Korea, although at least in economic terms its origins are marginally less humble. Our story again begins at the end of a war, but Taiwan itself was left relatively unscathed by the fighting and still bearing the remnants of Japanese colonial attempts at development: some established agricultural exports in rice, sugar and pineapples, basic food processing plants and a handful of textile factories.[31] Leadership initially adopted a policy of ISI in pursuit of subsistence, but due to bad experiences with inflation on the mainland a more aggressive growth policy was not adopted until the USA threatened to reduce aid in the 1950s.[32] Only then did Jiang and the GMD begin to industrialise along the lines we saw in Korea.

Before this period the primary sector (mainly agriculture and fishery) accounted for nearly a third of GDP before rapidly dropping to just 7% in the industrial explosion, and food processing (the dominant industry on GMD occupation) fell from 47% of manufactory output in the 1950s to just 31% in the industrialised 60s, finally dropping to 12% in the early 1980s (the end of the heavy industry era).[33] Interestingly after the initial boom of light industry (particularly textiles) we would expect to see from from Korea’s experience, light industry remained statistically significant all the way into the 1980s.[34]

Heavy industry was quickly established, in particular steel, electronics and petrochemical, as soon as the state ascertained that domestic and international demand was sufficient.[35] While other state firms were privatised during the development process to encourage foreign investment and expertise, these industries were always seen as essential to reconquest of the mainland and so remained firmly nationalised.[36]

While Yongping Wu points out that small- to mid-sized firms had an important role to play during this phase of development,[37] the state never lost its firm grip over the direction of the economy. A key measure here was control of foreign exchange, limiting the access of private firms to imported materials and serving both to keep up domestic demand for processed raw materials (which was done in state firms and onsold to selected firms) and to reduce capital risk.[38]

Vincent Chang describes the final phase in economic development, to fully-fledged technological state. Once the competitive advantage in labour-intensive products seemed to be slipping (both as a result of a more educated workforce and the rising competition from China in the late 1970s) the state essentially decided to jump before they were pushed: “the export-oriented economic structure… must be upgraded to become more technology- and skill-intensive.”[39] The state’s role in “the inception of pivotal technologies and in the export vigour of Taiwan’s information industry,” as well as in key large-scale industries like semiconductor production was immense,[40] and as in Korea led to the development of a substantive skilled-labour population who with their increased disposable incomes stimulated both domestic consumption and the service industry.

Taiwan followed a similar trajectory to Korea in its progression through four distinct stages of development, though with two exceptions of note: first that light industry played a key role in the economy all the way into the 1980s, and second that leadership did not seek to move beyond the first phase until threatened with aid reductions by the US. The unexpected lack of decline in light industry once heavier industries were developed could perhaps be attributable to the role of small- and mid-sized industries as discussed by Chang – with most heavy industries nationalised but small-scale entrepreneurship tolerated, this is a logical industry to gravitate towards. The second point is by far more significant, and may contain a clue as to the underlying reason that the Asian Tigers successfully developed through state-led, rather than market-led or interventionalist, methods.

The City-States: Singapore and Hong Kong

Singapore was perhaps the most “democratic” of the Tigers in its early life, if in name only: so charismatic was the leadership of Li Guangyao that in the words of a British diplomat “politics disappeared” leaving only an “administrative state.”[41] After reluctantly accepting Singapore’s independence from Malaysia in 1965, Li took control of Singaporean politics in “soft authoritarianism” until his retirement in 2011 and much of Singapore’s success is directly attributed to his personal vision and ability.[42]

Singapore’s development follows a now-familiar path. While not facing the challenges of rebuilding after a war, Singapore stood alone as a modern city-state with too little land to effectively feed its citizens. Food and water had to be provided for by imports, necessitating a quick push towards export-oriented light industries to balance trade.[43] Interestingly Singapore sought to supplement the local lack of technical and managerial knowledge by attracting international firms, albeit in a limited fashion, using their capital and resources to kick-start the light industry that would provide the backbone of Singapore’s economy for the next few decades.[44]

The 1970s saw a dramatic change in the structure of Singapore’s economy, with manufacturing and heavy industry becoming increasingly more of a priority throughout the 1970s and 80s.[45] This was largely in response to the challenge that China’s burgeoning light industry under Deng posed to Singapore’s output, and was pushed forward by the central government through a combination of reinvestment of wages in industry, infrastructure, housing and communications through the Central Provident Fund and an increase in minimum wage, forcing employers to seek more efficient modes of production.[46]

Unlike Taiwan and South Korea, Singapore’s move to the final phase of development was not marked by the establishment of the high-tech industry but rather by fulfillment of Stamford Raffles’ original vision for Singapore as the trading and financial hub of Southeast Asia.[47] Trade, import refinement and finance all require skilled labour, much like high tech industry, and Singapore’s unique geographic position and recent market liberalisation allow this to serve as the high-level industry that cements its position as a fully developed nation, just as high tech industries do for South Korea and Taiwan.

Given today’s liberal markets, and the nominal democracy of Singapore’s modern history, it is tempting to think of Singapore as an example of liberal market-led development in action. However the importance of the Central Providence Fund in establishing the infrastructure needed for heavy industry and the dominant role of Li in both politics and economic direction both suggest that the state was the principal mover in the development of Singapore’s economy, with liberal elements only being introduced in the late phases of development to pave the way to a financial and trade hub.

Hong Kong is similar in many ways to Singapore, although it is notable for being the most consistently laissez-faire (and therefore market-led) of the Tigers. As in Singapore the pressing need to balance trade deficits due to poor agricultural potential led to a rapid development of light industry, but then advocates of market-led development would argue that the next steps through to trade and financial services would have been a logical step for market actors to take, given the proximity to China and the historical nature of Hong Kong as a trade port.[48]

[49] The state may have left market actors to find their own way, but they were not subtle about putting a map in their hands.

Hong Kong, like Singapore, ended up as a financial centre for its region as well as a major industrial producer – not bad for a former entrepot.[50] It is unusual among the Tigers for having a fairly consistent laissez-faire approach to the market, and is by far the closest to a market-led model of development. However this is not to say that the state had no hand in pushing development forward when the market might have been content to stay in one phase.

When taken into consideration with the other Tigers, we have a clear idea of how their economies developed. In all cases barring to an extent Hong Kong, a strong central state created a long-term plan for development that saw it through from the early days of ISI all the way to the establishment of advanced technological or financial industries. The state was able to implement these plans through a range of policy tools, without considerable domestic challenges and with the ability to adapt the details of the plans to the challenges they encountered along the way. Rather than dwell in any particular phases of development, the Tigers pushed forward, aggressively reinvesting in the infrastructure needed to establish the next phase and protect it from the advantages of the international market until it was ready to shoulder the burden of economic growth. This saw them through, with some variation, from backwards islands, peninsulas, and losers in war, to four of the most powerful economies in East Asia. But can this success be replicated elsewhere?

The Missing Link: Leadership and Legitimacy

We may now have a model for economic development, but this does not not mean that we can easily transplant it to other parts of the world. Other countries, notably the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea, have attempted to lead development from the state with little success. Why was state-led development successful in the Tigers, but not elsewhere? And can we replicate this in other parts of the world?

Advocates of market-led or interventionalist growth would say that we could not. According to them the development of the Tigers, while ultimately successful, was highly idiosyncratic to the East Asian region and cannot be exported elsewhere, the universal alternative obviously being the liberalisation of markets (to the varying degrees required of their models). The most common explanation of the Tiger’s success is that it was in some way due to their shared Confucian culture.[51] Confucianism’s emphasis on social hierarchy and the nation-family, they would say, provides East Asians with the unique outlook required to tolerate the submission of personal economic interest to the state’s long-term goals. Other parts of the world, lacking such an ingrained cultural disposition, would not accept the state’s mandate and frustrate progress.

Beyond the obvious objection that there are still a number of Confucian states in the early stages of development, Chang has considerable disdain for this argument. He describes culture as having a “Jekyll and Hyde” nature, the positives and negatives being called on as needed to justify an argument.[52] The first example he gives here is an account of an Australian businessman touring a Japanese factory in 1915 and concluding that the reason for Japan’s then-backwardsness was due to the inherent cultural laziness of the Japanese people. How times (and cultural stereotypes) have changed. Indeed, when East Asia was still in the early stages of development the blame was placed as firmly on Confucianism as its current success is today. Chang’s response to the culturalist argument is essentially that within any culture or religion an observer can find sufficient characteristics to justify just about any argument that they wish to make, which somewhat undermines the claim that state-led development can only be successful in countries with a certain culture. “No culture,” he concludes, “is either unequivocally good or bad for economic development. Everything depends on what people do with the raw material of their culture.”[53]

If the success of state-led development in East Asia cannot be attributed to their shared culture, then what? I would suggest the missing link here is the legitimacy of these countries’ leaders. All four Tigers had a strong central leadership able to effectively steer the direction of the economy without significant internal challenges, an indication that all enjoyed considerable legitimacy. Most governments today derive their legitimacy from democratic elections – when the Obama administration makes a decision, the decision is made by the people and for the people. Older forms of government have derived their legitimacy from the Divine Right of kings or from Hobbes’s Leviathan, to name a few examples. But from where did the leaders of the Tigers derive their legitimacy?

In all four cases, to varying degrees, the legitimacy (and continued survival) of the leadership rested in some way on the continual economic success that they were able to provide to the people. This meant that the leaders of all four of these countries had considerable motivation to aggressively seek sustainable development, and the fact that legitimacy was based on neither democracy (which can lead to instability and a lack of long-term planning) or ideology (as in the Communist states, binding development to a prescribed course with no room for adaption) allowed them to pursue this sustained development with stability and flexibility, explaining their particular success.

The unity and legitimacy of Korean leadership was based on “forced unity” against the ideological foe of the North.[54] The division was based on ideological grounds, with leaders of both North and South claiming to represent the ideology that was in the people’s best interests, and so the success of either leadership could best be gauged by their subjects by how much better off they appeared to be when compared to their neighbours. Park knew that he was relatively safe from uprising (though apparently not from assassination) because the USA would not tolerate the fall of an anti-Communist regime, meaning that he had considerable stability and the ability to make long-term plans, but he also knew that the best means to maintain legitimacy was by proving ideological superiority over the North by achieving greater economic gains.[55]

Even today, much of Taiwan’s identity is based around its relationship with mainland China, and a recent study concluded that while public identification with the mainland is less clamourous than it was a decade ago, continuous GMD leadership until the 2000 elections meant that the leadership was always committed to their One China policy.[56] This rivalry with the Mainland, shared by both leadership and wider society, provided the legitimisation for continuous GMD rule[57] and again gave a strong economic focus to the regime: they needed a strong economy both to prove superiority over the PRC but more importantly to support the military forces that they needed to pose a challenge to the mainland. This manifested most obviously in the continued nationalisation of the steel, petrochemical, electronics and vehicle manufacturing industries, as all have an obvious military application. Taiwanese leadership needed these industries in particular to have a strong foundation in order to support their claims, both necessitating development and removing the potential obstacles of democractic instability and ideological inflexibility.

The relationship between the economic development of Singapore and Hong Kong and the interests of their respective leaderships is an even more pressing issue of survival: given their tiny size, they simply didn’t have the agricultural basis to survive as independent countries. If they had not industrialised and maintained a position of economic necessity within the region (as trading ports and later as financial centres) then they would not have been able to feed their population. The legitimacy of the leadership here is based simply on continued economic survival of the state, partly mitigated in Hong Kong’s case by its colony status. The legitimacy of its leadership was also tied to its status as a Crown property and it might ultimately have relied on Britain to support it should it have failed to develop successfully – this would account for it being the most laissez-faire of the Tigers. Singapore, sandwiched between its economic rivals of Malaysia and China, had no such fallback and the leadership’s continued rule rested solely on their ability to deliver the economic goods.

In the cases of all four Tigers we see a clear trend in the leadership and the location of its legitimacy – to varying degrees the position of the leadership is sustained and justified by the economic development that they were able to deliver. Because they did not rest their legitimacy upon democracy or ideology, leadership not only had the motivation to aggressively pursue development, it had the ability to do so with stability of government and flexibility of approach. The Tiger approach to development is perhaps best characterised then as “success due to coherent and flexible policies, effective implementation by the state… and political capacity to insulate economic planning from competing interests.”[58]

Putting It Together: Replicating the Tigers’ Success

So how could we replicate the success of the Tigers in other developing states? The crucial element is the leadership. If a state’s has a leadership that in some way derives its legitimacy from economic success, rather than democratic elections or ideological correctness, this will provide it both the motivation and the ability to effectively pursue the long-term and aggressive development progression we saw in the Tigers, with clear transitions through ISI, light industry, heavy industry, and finally into a fourth stage of high tech industry, skilled labour and increased domestic consumption.

The biggest issue facing developing states is that in too many cases the leadership rests its legitimacy not on the economic benefits that it can bring to its subjects but rather on the military forces that it commands and with which it can suppress any dissent.[59] A good number of these states (and too many more besides) likely face a not-unrelated issue that with their position secured by some form of legitimacy leadership is more concerned with the benefits that its position can provide for itself than to the country at large – they might be stable government not bound to inflexible ideologies, but without the motivation of legitimisation they are happy to focus their attention on patronage rather than enacting development policies.

In order to rectify this situation, and to encourage development in states sorely in need of it, some drastic measures must be taken. Statebuilders need to generate in state leaders a pressing urgency to pursue sustained economic development that will make the government stable (non-democratic) flexible (not bound to ideology) and motivated to actively pursue sustainable development progression. Alternate sources of legitimisation, such as military strength, need to be stripped by some means from leaders who show no signs of interest in the long-term economic interests of their state in order to refocus their attentions, while short-term revenue streams that will eventually dwindle need to be limited – extractive industries for instance should have their exports limited to fight the “resource curse” and force consideration of alternate industries.[60]

Here overzealous democratisation poses its own danger, quite apart from any criticism of market liberalisation in developing states. Democracy at best provides a degree of instability in leadership – it is hard to make effective Five Year Plans (as in South Korea) when the government could be radically different as little as three years into the future, let alone long-term plans for development of key strategic industries as in Taiwan. At its worst, democracy provides yet another legitimisation for leaderships primarily concerned with its own benefit and not sufficiently motivated to aggressively push through development plans.[61] Democracy is certainly a good thing and should be a goal of statebuilding, but it is not the only good thing, and it may even provide an obstacle to development – better perhaps to wait until the government is more institutionalised and society is more stable overall than to introduce it too soon.

Ultimately the pattern of economic development achieved by the Asian Tigers is replicable elsewhere in the world, if the key issue of legitimisation and the role of the leadership in development is addressed. However it may require some rethinking of the priorities of statebuilding exercises, and other goals like the establishment of democracy may need to be pushed back in order to maintain the stable, flexible, and economically-motivated leadership that seems to be required for effective state-led development.

Conclusions

Of the three models of development we can identify in literature, it is the state-led model that was successfully employed in the “Asian Miracle” of the Tigers. In contrast to the Neoliberal approach of market liberalisation and faith in the rationality of individual actors, this model describes a strong central state utilising a range of policy tools to aggressively pursue development even against the wishes of market actors. This sees development follow a clear progression through ISI, light industry, heavy and chemical industries, and then finally technological industry, with the export revenue of each stage being used to fund the next and heavy protection from the international market until industries have been sufficiently established.

Rather than being a product of particular cultural values, the success of this model in East Asia can be attributed to the unique pressures placed on the leadership of these states to pursue economic development lest stagnancy threaten their legitimacy. The reliance on economic development for legitimacy rather than democratic elections or ideological justification allowed the East Asian states to have both stability and flexibility in their planning, effectively enacting long-term plans for reinvestment and development while still adapting to the situation of the international economy and any new challenges that might arise (such as China’s development of light industry in competition to Singapore’s). A state-led economy has every chance of failing if they are not sufficiently stable, flexible and motivated to pursue development, as other cases might suggest.

The Asian Tigers provide us with an interesting alternative to the developmental strategies most commonly seen in statebuilding exercises, with their emphasis on liberal values like democracy and market-led growth. Replication of their successes may well be possible, though it will require a dramatic rethinking of our approaches to development economics and our conception of the relationship between a regime’s legitimacy and security.

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SHIN, Dongmyeon. Social and Economic Policies in Korea: Ideas, Networks and Linkages. London, UK: Routledge Cuzon. 2003.

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[1]   Charles Harvey and Hyunhoon Lee, “New Regionalism in East Asia: How Does It Relate To The East Asian Development Model?” ASEAN Economic Bulletin 19:2 (2002), 126

The Nexus of Economics, Security and International Relations in East Asia, eds. A. Goldstein and E. Mansfield (California, USA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 41

[3]   Harry Truman, Inaugural Address (1949), http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres53.html (accessed 19th May 2014)

[4]   Devesh Kapur, “The IMF: a Cure or a Curse?” Foreign Policy 111 (1998), 115

[5]   Paul Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (London, UK: Vintage Books, 2010), 15

[6]   cf. Marglin’s neoclassical, neo-Keynesian and neo-Marxist strands of economic thought analysed in Tariq Banuri, “Sustainable Development is the New Economic Paradigm,” Development 56:2 (2013), 209

Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series Paper 461 (1989), 23 for an elegant summary of the rational actor concept.

[8]   Aditya Bhattacharjea, “Krugman’s Economics: An Introduction,” Economic and Political Weekly 43:49 (2008), 27

[9]   Illustrated by Colin Danby, “A Two-Factor World: The Heckscher-Ochlin-Samuelson Model” (1998), http://faculty.washington.edu/danby/bls324/trade/hos.html (accessed 19th May 2014)

[10] C.P. Chandrasekhar, “Investment Behaviour, Economies of Scale and Efficiency in an Import-Substituting Regime: A Study of Two Industries,” Economic and Political Weekly 22:19/21 (1987), 62

[11] A withering critique is found in K.S. Jomo and Rudiger von Arnim, “Trade Theory Status Quo Despite Krugman,” Economic and Political Weekly 43:19 (2008), 30

[12] Summarised in Johan Deprez, “Open-Economy Expectations, Decisions and Equilibria: Applying Keynes’ Aggregate Supply and Demand Model,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 19:4 (1997), 600

[13] Chen Sun, “The Role of Medium-Term Plans in Development,” in Liberalisation in the Process of Economic Development, eds. L. Krause and K Kihwan (California, USA: University of California Press, 1991), 146

[14] Anand Chandavarkar, “Was Keynes a Development Economist?” Economic and Political Weekly 21:7 (1986), 305

Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)

[17] Chang and Grabel, Reclaiming Development, 38

[18] Chungil Kim, The History of Korea (Conneticut, USA: Greenwood, 2005), 144

[19] Dongmyeon Shin, Social and Economic Policies in Korea: Ideas, Networks and Linkages (London, UK: Routledge Cuzon, 2003), 47

[20] Ibid

[21] Ibid, 48

[22] Ibid, 50

[23] Ibid, 51

[24] Ibid, 55

[25] Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (London, UK: Random House, 2007), 14-15

[26] Shin, Social and Economic Policies, 56-7

[27] Ibid, 57-8

[28] Susan Collins, “Lessons from Korean Economic Growth,” The American Economic Review




Report on Political Parties Liaison Committee by WRP Namibia

WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (WRP)

TO REBUILD THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

A party duly registered in terms of the Electoral laws of the Republic of Namibia

Fax: 088641065 Tel: 061-260647 4479 Dodge Avenue Khomasdal jacobusjosob@gmail.com / ericabeukes@yahoo.co.uk

10 November 2021.

REPORT ON PLC MEETING AT THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION

On 9 November, yesterday, the Political Parties Liaison Committee (PLC) met at the Electoral Commission of Namibia to discuss amongst others, “the way forward”.

The act provides for sanctions to be implemented by the Electoral Commission in the event the parties do not comply with the act in respect of finances.

As the custodian of the Act, the Electoral Commission has a legal obligation to ensure that these measures and requirements are implemented.” The Electoral Commission has not enacted these sanctions and appeal to parties to comply.

The WRP represented by SG Jacobus Josob and Political Secretary Hewat Beukes responded as follows: “It is unacceptable that the legislator may be the first violator of the law. This implies that the laws passed by Parliament are done so with mal-intent. It is equally unacceptable that the Electoral Commission confesses and admits to non-compliance with the electoral act of 2014. The sanctions provided therein are not discretionary. They are peremptory(compulsory) upon the Electoral Commission.

If parties did not submit proper annual reports they shall not receive further funds and the sanctions contained not only in the Electoral Act, but in the general law, shall be enforced.

A further issue is that the ECN does not report on the fact that the WRP had not received a single cent of its parliamentary funds. It was denied these funds on the insistence of the USA and the EU and the actions of the Namibian regime. It could not submit audited reports.

This situation has been seized upon and WRP allocations had been stolen from the Treasury. Peter Katjavivi, the Speaker stole N$5 million. The Labour Commissioner and the Labour Court were abused to issue warrants of execution against the WRP for fraudulent claims of more than N$3 million.

On each of these atrocities the WRP objected in writing to the ECN, the National Assembly and to Petrus Damaseb the Judge-President. None replied.

The WRP issue is one issue. The ECN, the courts and the National Assembly work together to create a situation in which the Treasury is being raided at will in general. This lawless situation at the ECN regarding finances of political parties is the ultimate instance of Treasury looting.

A foundational principle of a democracy is freedom of association. Political parties are voluntary associations that register with the ECN by payment and registering their constitutions, their office-bearers and authorised representative. The ECN, the Parliament and the courts ignore the rights of parties and cause confusion, chaos and disruption by ignoring authorised representation and use their own agents to deal with party business, with the object of disabling opposition.

This is a failed State in which the law is alien. No-one denied the WRP’s factual submissions.

The WRP resolved to make a full statement to all parties and the working people on the abuse of law and the looting of Public money from the Treasury.”

Hewat Beukes and Jacobus Josob.




Financial appeal from our Namibian comrades

For many years now, the Namibian Workers Advice Centre has been run from the Windhoek home of Erica and Hewat Beukes.
They have been forced to fight a legal battle over many years to defend the premises against legal and financial chicanery. Many homeowners in Namibia have suffered from this evil, but in the case of Erica and Hewat Beukes a further element has been state and political attempts to silence and paralyse their campaigning work.
In the course of the struggle, for example, their access to electricity and water has been illegally cut off.
Now they are involved in a legal appeal which could secure their title to the premises. They need to raise money to finance the technical costs of the court case.
Their detailed request for support is below. Please help with as much as you can.

•••

WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (WRP) TO REBUILD THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
A party duly registered in terms of the Electoral laws of the Republic of Namibia
Fax: 088641065 Tel: 061-260647 4479 Dodge Avenue Khomasdal
jacobusjosob@gmail.com / ericabeukes@yahoo.co.uk

Appeal
Erica is the leader joint committee for truth and justice by the committee of parents former PLAN Fighters.
The committee is fighting for an international enquiry into mass murder of Namibians in Exile.
She is also the director of the workers advice centre which was established in 1991.
The workers advice centre fight against the onslaught on workers rights all levels including the derogation of legal rights in labour legislation by corporate lawyers.
Hewat is the leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party which fights to arm the working class through organisation and building their own political party.
Both have been involved leaders in the struggle for independence and self-determination.
In 1974 they established a clandestine socialist youth organisation.
Erica and Hewat have faced continual persecution by the Namibian State over the past 31 years.
The target was their livelihood.
In 2005 the organised criminal First National Bank illegally sold their residence in the name of the South West Africa Building Society (SWABOU) with which they held the bond.
This was part of the scams conducted by the FNB through the courts of Namibia in which they stole the R3,7 billion homeloan book of the SWABOU, deregistered the building society without the knowledge of the members and the bondholders.
Court cases proliferated as corrupt judges through corrupt judgments protected the bank.
The State and the bank used the municipality and the courts to cut all services to Erica and Hewat. In 2005 they cut water and in 2017 the Chief Justice gave a judgment which he concocted from smear campaigns and pure fabrications to find that Erica and Hewat had no right to water and electricity. The pre-paid electricity had been cut too.
On 25 March 2021, a judge gave the final judgment on the house dispute rejecting the application of Erica and Hewat .The judgment did not make sense, but they were forced to lodge an appeal after they came to hear of the judgment on 21 May 2021.
We ask that socialists and working class fighters respond to our financial appeal. We need N$56,000 for the appeal record of which we need 30% deposit urgently. Comrade Hewat will defend the case in person in the Supreme Court. Thus, costs for legal representation will not be required.
We may need a further N$25,000 for legal costs for legal expertise. This will be pressing very shortly
The residence over time has become a centre for working class struggles around the country. In 1986 the house was bombed. In post-colonial Namibia it has become a target for harassment, intimidation and ejectment.
Its very defence is part of the struggle of the working class in this country.

Jacobus Josob
Secretary General




ADDENDUM TO 10 JUNE 2021 STATEMENT RE: MAGISTRATE UNCHEN KONJORE’s INTIMIDATION, THREATS AND COERCION BY THE JUDICIARY AND THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY

WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (WRP)

TO REBUILD THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

A party duly registered in terms of the Electoral laws of the Republic of Namibia

Fax: 088641065 Tel: 061-260647 4479 Dodge Avenue Khomasdal jacobusjosob@gmail.com / ericabeukes@yahoo.co.uk

12 JUNE 2021

ADDENDUM TO 10 JUNE 2021 STATEMENT RE: MAGISTRATE UNCHEN KONJORE’s INTIMIDATION, THREATS AND COERCION BY THE JUDICIARY AND THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY

Some definitions: “An “affidavit” is a written statement that is considered made under oath. It is only valid when made voluntarily and without coercion.”written statement of facts voluntarily made by an affiant under an oath or affirmation administered by a person authorized to do so by law.

TRUTH has its own ways. In April/May 1989, three Lubango dungeon prisoners were confronted with two choices to make. One, to repeat lies in front of a video camera and return to Namibia. Two, to refuse repeating lies in front of a video camera and be killed. They chose the latter. They are Tshuutheni Tshithigona, Gerhard Tjozongoro and Kleopas Namushinga. “ Samson Ndeikwila.

In April 2021, Magistrate Unchen Konjore supervised the swearing-in of the Karas Regional Management Committee.

On 3 June 2021, the chief magistrate and the government attorney sent her an affidavit which they had written. They instructed her to sign it and have it commissioned by a commissioner of oaths.

They instructed her to take her decisions to swear in the management committee review in the High Court.

The purpose was to concoct a rerun of elections or regional counsellors in Karas.

But, they also planned to force the magistrate to implicate herself as being politically biased and incompetent. Once this was achieved they would remove her. She would not be able to defend herself, because by own admission she would have disqualified herself.

Adv. Matti Asino, the head of the government attorney, personally threatened her and tried to force her to carry out their instructions of self-incrimination.

The High Court to which they take these reviews entertains these absurd nullities. It gives Court orders to create the impression that this state is operating in terms of some law.

The parties who approach the court have no legal interest. An aggrieved person may approach a competent Court of law in terms of Namibian constitutional law. The person going for reviews are officials who seek to corrupt political bodies and organs around this country in favour of the SWAPO regime. They have no legal standing and no legal interest.

The High Court has no jurisdiction to hear the reviews and is not competent.

The officials do not take the reviews to the Electoral Court, which would make it too obvious that the persons who bring the reviews have no interest in the elections.

We now have it on good authority that the chief magistrate was instructed by the government attorney to bring the review, because of the widespread public opposition to the thug methods to force Magistrate Konjore to bring the review.

The chief magistrate has been trained in South Africa. She would be fully abreast that she cannot legally bring review. It is crystal clear that she has been forced, or through opportunism, to submit to the legally incompetent government attorney. It is public knowledge that the government attorney employs persons with no workable knowledge of law.

The United Front of political parties, churches, civic organisations, and workers’ and working peoples’ organisations combine to reject these underground terror methods of the SWAPO regime through the organs such as the Government Attorney and the judiciary.

We call on all to fight alongside us to expose and work to stop the violation of our Nation.

Let us work to protect professional officials and jurists such as Magistrate Unchen Konjore.

JACOBUS JOSOB

Secretary General




Open Statement by the WRP(Namibia)

WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (WRP)TO REBUILD THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

A party duly registered in terms of the Electoral laws of the Republic of Namibia

Fax: 088641065 Tel: 061-260647 4479 Dodge Avenue Khomasdal jacobusjosob@gmail.com / ericabeukes@yahoo.co.uk

 OPEN STATEMENT   10 JUNE 2021  

AND TO: THE MAGISTRATES COMMISSION

THE CHIEF JUSTICE

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY

THE CHIEF MAGISTRATE

In April 2021 magistrate Unchen Konjory swore in a management committee for the Karas Region. SWAPO counsellors had abdicated their statutory duty to facilitate the election of the said committee.

The judiciary and the government attorney then combined to reverse the process. They attempted to bully the magistrate into submission to reverse the process as an admission of her incompetence.

The magistrate refused.

The full savage legacy of the SWAPO Lubango regime then kicked in.

They tried to force her to lodge a review application against her swearing-in of the said committee. This would be a confession of total incompetence and incapacity. The black comedy who would shoulder costs when the application was granted passed them by.

The extracts from the correspondences below will show that they threatened the magistrate to sign an affidavit drawn up by them and to take her own decision on review. The government attorney which is from the executive and purportedly operating on the principle of The Separation of powers did not spare the rod of power on the magistrate.

The daunting heading of the various correspondences says it all: FIRST AND FINAL WRITTEN INSTRUCTION TO COMPLY WITH LAWFUL ORDER: PROCEDURAL ERROR: //KHARAS REGIONAL COUNCIL ELECTIONS.

No amount of protest from the magistrate that she could not take her own decision on review in terms of the law would suffice.

They were relentless, savage and organising for a full-scale assault on the person, a character, her individuality and the right to decide.

This mockery has become part of the fabric of the Namibian legal system.

The magistrate is self-evidently a competent jurist.

This in itself requires in the Lubango tradition that she be removed.

On 4 June 2021, Chief Magistrate, Philanda Christiaan, wrote to Magistrate Konjore, “I confirm receipt of the affidavit, but that was not what is requested, the request is for you to avail yourself for consultation with the GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY, since you were an integral part of the proceedings and will shed light.  You will however be the one that must depose of a founding affidavit with the guidance of GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY, and not on your own volition.”

Government Attorney, Monique Meyer on 8 June 2021, wrote to her, ”I wish to place on record that you were not threatened at any point during the conversation. The phone was on loudspeaker as it was yesterday and I have been present for all your conversations with the Government Attorney.
The Government Attorney spent hours yesterday evening and spent a great deal of time this morning trying to convince you that you are the appropriate person to bring this review because of YOUR PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE of what transpired during the elections for the management committee. He repeatedly told you that this is not an attack on you personally and that we serve at the pleasure of the Government as a whole, to cure the irregularities we are now faced with.
He further attempted to convince you that our office is mandated to represent all Government officials, which we do without fear or favour, and the course of action our office mapped out is the best route to cure the irregularities in the High Court.

When we spoke to you telephonically yesterday, you refused to depose to the affidavit because you do not agree with “anything” in the affidavit. Thereafter, we spent hours on the phone going through every paragraph and editing it to your satisfaction. We removed every single statement you were not happy with. After that intensive and time-consuming exercise, you indicated around the end of the call that you do not wish to be the First Applicant. This was around 18h00.
This morning, when you still refused our advice as your legal practitioners, he ADVISED you to seek legal counsel from an alternative lawyer, who may perhaps clarify the law in a way that is understandable to you, and for you to see that we are not trying to trick you by bringing this application as a self-review. He even went as far as to state that we will pause everything pending your consultation with your lawyer and that you revert to us by 12h00. Even this attempt to meet you halfway was refused by you.
The accusation of alleged threats is therefore a complete falsity and an afterthought to cure the fact that our office spent valuable time appeasing you by editing the affidavit to your liking. I further place on record that great deference was shown to you by the Government Attorney throughout your exchanges.”

It is unclear how much incompetence is embedded in the depravity and malice. It is certain that it is a lot.

Nevertheless, we declare our unequivocal stand beside Magistrate Unchen Konjore for her refusal to abandon her knowledge and principles under the savagery of a depraved State and Judiciary.

We call on all parties which have not yet lost their souls to opportunism and hopelessness to defend Magistrate Unchen Konjore in her admirable stand to defend her profession and her duty to the Namibian working people.

JACOBUS JOSOB

Secretary General




International support for Rössing Union leaders

Rehire Namibia Mineworker Union Rossing Leaders President Xi-Jinping! Rally At SF Chinese Consulate

https://youtu.be/kjLdDEnONqo

Trade unionists and workers spoke out at the San Francisco Chinese Consulate on February 12, 2021 to demand that the Chinese government rehired the fired Namibia Mineworker Union Rossing branch. The Chinese National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) which is controlled by the government has illegally fired the NMU Rossing union executive committee in September. They also recently fired a newly elected chairperson in an effort to completely destroy the union. Speakers also opposed the US imperialist encirclement of China but said that internationalists must back the struggle of not only the Namibian workers but all workers around the world whether they work for Chinese companies or other US and European capitalists companies. The rally took place before the labor arbitration hearing that is being held in Namibia on February 15, 2021 to decide on their discharges.

Additional media: Namibia Mine Workers Union Rossing Leaders Report On CNNC & Letter To Chinese President Xi-Jinping https://youtu.be/oNoaMxLiC9U

The Mineworkers Union of Namibia (MUN) Rossing Branch & The Struggle of The Namibian Working Class https://youtu.be/1LCD5ZuAgvc

Namibian Rössing Mine Workers Face Covid-19 & Attacks From State Owned China National Uranium Corporation Limited (CNUC) https://youtu.be/pHsDDqy_WPU

Namibia Rössing, union in wage deadlock https://www.namibian.com.na/198882/archive-read/Rössing-union-in-wage-deadlock

China and Namibia Rössing Workers on Collision Course https://www.facebook.com/informantenam/posts/3090166147716991/

Namibia MUN claims China National Nuclear Corporation is falling short of its Rossing promises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLuFIxwcIM&feature=emb_logo https://www.nbc.na/news/mun-claims-china-national-nuclear-corporation-falling-short-its-rossing-promises.29304

Namibia Rössing uranium mine union members face dismissal by Chinese owners https://www.namibian.com.na/203896/archive-read/Rössing-union-members-face-dismissal

Swapo, what is ‘Socialism with a Namibian Character’? https://www.namibian.com.na/183845/archive-read/Letter-of-the-Week–Swapo-what-is-Socialism-with-a-Namibian-Character

Namibia says China can buy Rio’s uranium stake if it respects laws https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rio-tinto-namibia-china/namibia-says-china-can-buy-rios-uranium-stake-if-it-respects-laws-idUSKCN1SZ0UR

Anatomy of a Bribe & Fish Rot Files https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FJ1TB0nwHs

Production of Labor Video Project www.laborvideo.org