“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”.
Imperialism (capitalism at its highest stage of development) was in an intractable crisis in the 1970s. Throughout North America and Western Europe, a well-organised and confident working class was asserting itself in the workplace and exerting pressure on bourgeois political systems. On the one hand, Soviet troops were stationed in the heart of Europe to the east of the river Elbe, a reminder that the legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917 still lived, even under a degenerate and corrupt leadership; on the other hand, a post-war generation of workers in the west had grown up under bourgeois governments committed (despite themselves) to full employment and increasing social expenditure on welfare, health, working-class housing, access to justice and educational provision.
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. Continue reading
