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

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:

“… the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself” until “the knell of capitalist private property sounds, the expropriators are expropriated”.

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 19^thcentury, 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.

The Chinese government is fostering relationships with some of the most corrupt regimes in Africa, such as Namibia, where the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) in cahoots with the Swapo government has unlawfully sacked the committee members of the Mineworkers’ Union of Namibia at the Rössing uranium mine. Trade unions were organised in the mine in the days of apartheid in the face of the most evil forms of oppression and exploitation. Most of the labour force was made up of contract labourers provided and disciplined by tribal leaders. Workers endured appalling living and working conditions, but in the end – and with international working-class support – they achieved recognition for their trade union and much improved wages and conditions.

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-20^thcentury.

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

“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.

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

Meanwhile, the devastation of whole regions of Europe, and their working-class populations, continued apace. Northern England, the midlands and working-class London; the Scottish midlands; the north of Ireland; the German Ruhrgebiet and the north of France, the US rust belt and the former industrial parts of Chicago, New York, Boston, Baltimore, and many others have been laid waste. Entire industries such as shipbuilding, steelmaking, coal mining, engineering, machine-tool making, bulk chemical production, textile spinning and weaving, have virtually disappeared in these areas. Nothing that governments or employers have done in the last five decades has helped to put the situation right. Is it any wonder that workers in these areas (or rather, very often, the children and grandchildren of actual workers) have in recent years have been misled into voting for (demagogic) politicians who have promised to reverse, the effects of globalisation, “stand up to China” and “Make (X) Great Again! (insert America/Britain/Germany/France etc. in the space provided). These devastating longer-term effects of China’s alliance with the USA (and the character of that alliance) are terrible indeed – and they were completely foreseeable!

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 19^thcentury, 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 

This content was originally written for an undergraduate or Master’s program. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.

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.

In Korea’s economic history we can identify four discrete phases of development: a period of Import Substitution Industrialisation; the development of light industry and export-led growth while reinvesting in and protecting heavy industry; the development of heavy industry, increases in labour quality through education and permissal of limited degrees of foreign capital; and finally the development of the high-tech industry, the skilled labour required for which stimulating domestic consumption. The second through fourth phase show remarkably steady GDP growth in all but three years: the year of Park’s assassination and the 1997 and 2003 crises.

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]

The importance of market actors in the development of Hong Kong cannot be denied, but there are some features of development (glossed over in Neoliberal accounts) that suggest that the state had a not-insignificant role in guiding the economy. In particular Vogel points to the allocation of public funds, with the vast majority diverted to developing the infrastructure that would be required by heavier industries – roads, universities, and most interestingly land development specifically for the use of factories; and all this a good decade before there was any significant market-led demand for these public goods.[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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[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

[2]   See Robert Garran, Tigers Tamed: The End of the Asian Miracle (Hawaii, USA: University of Hawaii Press, 1998) for a prime example; also Benjamin Cohen, “Finance and Security in East Asia,” in 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 19^th 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

[7]   See Gustav Rainis, “Towards a Model of Development,” in Liberalisation in the Process of Economic Development, eds. L. Krause and K Kihwan (California, USA: University of California Press, 1991),78 for analysis of the positive correlation of market liberalisation and good economic performance; Robert Ellickson, “Bringing Culture and Human Frailty to Rational Actors,” 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 19^th 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

[15] Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel, Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual (New York, USA: Zed Books, 2004), 38; cf. Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1924-1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)

[16] Ibid at 66; 78-9; 90; 101; 114; and 120 respectively

[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

Comments have been requested on a number of texts (see below Ed.) which have arisen in left-wing, socialist and Marxist circles in response to the Coronavirus crisis and the background of chronic economic and environmental crisis. 

Both Cde Shaheen Khan in South Africa and the “Public Reading Rooms” comrades in the UK make a number of serious analytical points in describing the current situation. Shaheen (1) writes: The capitalist system is in deep crisis and the rule of the capitalist class on a global scale is in jeopardy”.  No Going Back describes the coronavirus crisis and the feeble economic recovery from the 2008 banking crisis as arising from “the structural limits of the entire system of social reproduction”. (This latter document also adds that “The wanton destruction of nature by capital creates the perfect conditions for the emergence and spread of pandemics”). All three documents present proposals for a fresh impulse from the socialist movement and the working class to respond to these accumulating crises.

Both Shaheen and No Going Back emphasise the international and systemic character of the crisis. “As the pandemic spreads across the globe, the global health emergency is rapidly evolving into a crisis of the entire existing world social order”, says Shaheen (1). “The pandemic is global; it cannot be stopped in one country” says No Going Back. 

This is why Shaheen (1) says: “The task in the days, weeks and months ahead is to build a conscious socialist leadership throughout the world”. (This assertion is missing for some reason in Shaheen [2]). No Going Back calls for “The convocation of a Zimmerwald conference – which united the anti-war left in 1915 – for our times, to unify all those prepared to fight for a fundamental change in society; who understand the necessity of renewing the left’s strategic and theoretical framework as well as going beyond its existing organisational forms.”

All three documents lay great stress upon the activity and consciousness of the working class. In “Our Perspectives and Tasks” Shaheen Khan states “The working class is not taking this lying down … these are the molecular processes where the class is gradually beginning to comprehend the problems arising from the social crisis. Consciousness is determined by conditions”. He then takes the thought further: “A revolutionary party bases its tactics on a calculation of the changes of mass consciousness. While the party must impress through its propaganda and agitation … the dangers of the epidemic and the need for physical distancing we must begin to take leadership of the mass protest movement that is gaining momentum. The working class on its own is fighting and breaking down the parameters of the bourgeois lockdown and we need to direct this anger in the right direction and in the right quarters”. Both of Comrade Shaheen’s documents contain sets of proposals for a programme of action to bring this about.

The No Going Back theses state:

“The most important factor in world politics is the struggle of working people, the poor and dispossessed to remake the world; most immediately it is to defend themselves against both the pandemic and the poverty of their everyday lives …” And a bit later on, emphatically: “The pandemic indicates the possibility of ending the permanent subordination of labour to capital”.

Both Shaheen and No Going Back reject reformist policies and solutions. Shaheen (2) explains:

“These are difficult times, not only for the bourgeois but also for the leadership of the working class. Many bourgeois economists and NGOs have been making recommendations to the government to adopt a Keynesian economic approach rather than the neoliberal path they have been following. This is a nationalist capitalist trajectory which does not in any way serve the interests of the working class”. Although Shaheen addresses his proposals to the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party, he is critical of the leadership of the National Union of Metalworkers’ (NUMSA) who established that party. “The NUMSA open letter to the President is different” (from the Keynesian economic approach). “However we think it fails to address the question from a class struggle perspective and remains an economistic approach to the question”.

No Going Back is even harder on reformism: “There can be no support for those in the labour movement who present the struggle against the virus as a national crisis in which class-struggle is suspended”. Quite right: the way the COVID-19 crisis is dealt with strikingly reveals aspects of class struggle which are even accentuated in this context. They go on: “Leaders of the movement who fight for the interests of their members must be given every backing”. And so they should; but who determines which leaders are fighting “for the interests of their members”? Like Shaheen Khan, the “Public Reading Rooms” implicitly set themselves up as the judges of that. They go on: “But we cannot support those who seek to corral the working class into subordination to the existing system. The institutions of social democracy have failed to adequately challenge capitalism, and have even failed to defend their own achievements”. As the argument goes on, all “social democrats” are (wrongly) identified as “embracing of neo-liberalism in the 1990s” which “made them complicit in the savaging of the welfare state.” So No Going Back throws into one pot all the groups in, for example, the UK Labour Party, when that includes in its ranks both unreformed Blairites (who were rather more than just “complicit” in the attacks on the welfare state between 1997 and 2010) and the supporters of former party leader Jeremy Corbyn who have spent a great deal of time elaborating precisely a “Keynesian economic approach”, but did that mainly in order to defend the democratic, economic and social rights of the masses (“the many”) including the working class. No Going Back concludes this paragraph with a resounding phrase: “The pandemic exposes the illusory nature of systemic transformation through incremental social change”. In plain English they are saying: We think the Corbyn initiative in the Labour Party has fallen flat on its face and we would like to make recruits among its remnants”.

What is clear in all three documents is that none of the discussion and the shaping of policies and programme demands arise in close connection with or on the same wavelength as the main groups of workers in struggle. All the authors’ remarks arise from contemplating the various media reports of the current situation, refracted through the discussion in a milieu of educated people for whom ideas matter as ideas. There is of course nothing wrong with that: we all have to orientate ourselves daily, hourly, minute by minute as the crisis unfolds at various levels, reflected in the media.

But it is not enough to proceed directly from the impressions in one’s own head, having seen a news item and tossed it around in social media, to formulating proposals for action to place in front of workers.

Or to put it differently: if you are in an ongoing involvement in workers’ attempts to deal with the class struggle and the issues that arise within it, then you will be very clearly (often painfully!) aware of the contradictions and moments within workers’ consciousness and the preoccupations they bring to the struggle, what their priorities are. Your thoughts, when fresh and probably contradictory impressions flood in, will in that case be how concretely particular workers and groups of workers can be persuaded to react, how they themselves will take proposals on, reshape them and fashion them into real weapons of struggle. 

This is a long way away from “A revolutionary party bases its tactics on a calculation of the changes of mass consciousness” based on a few impressions. “Mass consciousness” has a past and a future and its present is anyway contradictory. Slogans and programmes which are slightly (but not too far) ahead of the working class are powerful levers to action. Those that are too far ahead risk falling flat on their faces. Doing this involves a really demanding, actually scientific, “calculation of the changes of mass consciousness”. 

It is one thing to pontificate about the working class as an abstraction; it is quite another to work in sensuous involvement in class struggle, engagement within the forms of organisation which exist in the working class in every country.

To identify one’s own reactions to the news with the reaction aroused in the working class is in itself a grave mistake. To proceed from these subjective impressions and use them to decide for ourselves what practices workers should adopt is to succumb to pure contemplation – a form of idealism, if that is where you leave it.

It is even worse if – like Shaheen (2) – you add: “we must begin to take leadership of the mass protest movement that is gaining momentum”. Being guided by the fruits of one’s own untested thoughts is one thing: informing workers that these thoughts are the only correct ones and that they need to follow them is another, and it has nothing to do with providing leadership!

These approaches add up to the petit-bourgeois “left-wing communism” which Lenin excoriated in his 1920 pamphlet of the same name. Lenin asks: “How is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact and – if you wish – to merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people – primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct … without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement”. 

The only organisation with the potential “to link up, maintain the closest contact and – if you wish – to merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people” in South Africa is the Socialist  Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP), set up as a result of the struggle of the National Union of Metalworkers’ of South Africa (NUMSA) and their break with the African National Congress -South African Communist Party alliance.

Fortuitously, the Socialist Workers Revolutionary Party has just used social media to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. Virtually alone in the world among mass workers’ organisations, NUMSA boldly (and rightly) brandishes the banner of Lenin.

Their FaceBook remarks on this auspicious occasion steer carefully clear of laying out and specifying Lenin’s actual contributions to our movement. The same is true of a half-hour radio broadcast by Dr Vashna Jagarnath, Deputy General Secretary of the SRWP (Radio 702, 10.30am 21 April 2020). Dr Jagarnath made some interesting observations about Russian history, Lenin’s biography and family background, his early studies of capitalism in Russia and his influence in former colonial territories. She avoided any mention of Lenin’s theoretical contribution or his role in the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, later its Bolshevik faction, later still the Communist Party Communist movement and in establishing the Communist International.

What emerged from this interview was that Marx was a “theoretician” and Lenin “put his ideas into practice”, but there was not really a lot about what these ideas actually were, except that they might have special application in the “global south”.

All this makes the SRWP leadership look like a party which has broken with Stalinism (in the acute form of the ANC-SACP), but only incompletely. The decisive tragedy of Stalinism is that it was a political force which first falsified and then obliterated Marxism and Leninism in the movement it dominated. Many former “hardliners” have recoiled from the direst expressions of Stalinism, but their break took them in the direction of liberal bourgeois politics. Even the best ones hesitate to name significant insights that marked the work of Lenin: that revolution (in whatever part of the world) needs to uproot and destroy bourgeois social relations, production for private profit, and that this requires an international leadership. 

In that same Left-Wing Communism Lenin wrote (in 1920):

“At the present moment in history, however, it is the Russian model that reveals to all countries something – and something highly significant – of their near and inevitable future. Advanced workers in all lands have long realised this; more often than not they have grasped it with their revolutionary class instinct rather than realised it. Herein lies the international ‘significance’ (in the narrow sense of the word) of Soviet power and the fundamentals of Bolshevik theory and tactics” (my emphasis – BA). 

We are no longer in that “present moment” (of 1920), and only middle-class radicals masquerading as Bolsheviks can pretend that we are. However, we hope that the leadership and membership of the SRWP will reach for Lenin’s writings – all the major ones at least, and find their current relevance. A good look at the booklet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” would be a useful start and would aid an understanding of an aspect of the current crisis. 

These are the horns of the dilemma on which the SRWP is caught, striving to break from Stalinism but still under the influence of Stalinist evasion and mangling of theoretical questions. But that fact itself can and must be taken together with the position of the working class and the masses in the last five decades. In considering how to encourage a genuine move towards Marxism in the SRWP, we need to devote some thought to those decades.

The context

Outstanding characteristics of economic and social life over the last fifty years have included 

•break-neck, revolutionary, increase in the rate of technical development and its social impact

•dismantling of barriers to the reach of trade around the world 

•a parallel huge growth in banking and finance 

•massive shift in industrial production from its former heartlands to “emerging markets”.

•In the course of the above, workers in the formerly under-developed world were manoeuvred into competing with workers in the old industrial centres, brutally breaking a tradition of solidarity internationally between workers’ movements. This has led to further contradictions in working class consciousness in those centres as jobs and industries disappeared and blind resentment grew. It appeared as if workers could only defend their existence by opposing and doing down workers elsewhere.  

•a massively-focussed assault on all socialist ideas as the guiding principles of workers’ movements and organisations, not to mention states. This contributed to the discrediting and collapse of the bureaucratic state in the Soviet Union and its allied states.

All these drives interact with and feed each other. All have had powerful impacts on the way people live and the choices facing them. 

They all arise from deliberate decisions adopted by the capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – in order to confront the systemic social and economic crisis which surfaced in the 1970s (about the time the US was being driven out of Vietnam).

The results have been profound. The “advanced” nations of Europe and North America have been more and more stripped of traditional industries and trading patterns, with hugely damaging social consequences. Meanwhile, a country like China, which 40 years ago stood almost completely outside of world markets and whose citizens were mainly employed in agriculture, is now the industrial workshop of the world and a powerful leader in technical development. China has also become a major political power and challenges the hegemony of the United States. 

Bangladesh, which has existed as a country for barely 50 years, has today cornered a huge wedge of the textile and clothing industry which two hundred years ago made Manchester great, although the social, legal and civil rights of the textile workforces there are in some ways worse than the mill workers of Lancashire knew. 

But both of these (and many other) economies still rely on selling their products to customers in the wealthy countries of the world. They are thoroughly enmeshed in a variety of ways in “global chains” of supply, production and value.

While huge numbers of people have experienced a significant increase in their living standards from these changes, many have also experienced extremes of exploitation, while others have been expelled from world markets and marginalised from society. But above all huge profits have been made by a comparatively small group of the population. The results of this development of imperialism has been an increase in every dimension of inequality.

This kind of “globalisation” may have helped raise populations out of extreme poverty, but it has also blocked countries’ incipient development and triggered severe social crises. 

Banking and finance have assumed enormous importance in daily life. They have been released from traditional controls and have been significant in enabling the “delocalising” of industries. Debt and the trade in debt have become major instruments of economic disruption and restructuring. The “casino” economy ensures that all businesses and industries face a standing holy inquisition based on the “bottom line”: if their business functioning does not yield the absolutely maximum profit, they are closed down, the “assets” realised and the workforce told to go away and die.  Many an attempt by a militant working class to win back a little more of the surplus value they create at work has been undermined by the nimbleness of hyper-mobile capital. 

Capitalist relations of production

Inspired by the idea expressed by Adam Smith that each individual ensures the benefit of all by pursuing selfishly their own interest, the lords of finance feel exonerated from contemplating the effects of their activities on the masses, or of even wondering how those masses protect themselves from famine, plague or poverty. This foundational conception for capitalism is most seriously brought into question by the coronavirus pandemic.

The damage inflicted on the workers’ socialist movement over the last fifty years has been profound. None of the great political organisations of the working class have emerged unscathed from these years and many, in adapting to the onslaught, have become ever-less ambitious in setting goals and establishing political programmes. This is understandable: the arrangements of capitalist economic globalisation have severely weakened working-class organisation in the workplace and in society. While the trade unions have continued in many places to be a potential bastion of class defiance, the best among them have been fully aware of fighting on the back foot. The old equation of working-class industrial militancy and confidence with political class consciousness, which kept many a Marxist grouping together in the post-World War II period, is worn painfully thin, and mainly lives on among middle-class activists.

(No Going Back quite rightly refers to aspects of imperialist policy in the past period, but this is not related to a half-century of class relations and how they have worked out. For them, working-class consciousness is not the outcome of material social processes, it is an abstraction).

The best trades union and socialist political leaders are well aware of this context however, because they deal with it every day. They are very aware that for many workers their confidence in socialism is severely sapped. The collapse of the Soviet Union and of mass Communist Parties, as well as the vile work of the capitalist media contribute to this lack of confidence, just as the versions of global supply, production and value chains imposed by imperialism since 1970 turn worker against worker and have fostered a nationalist back-lash.

It is unions like Unite the Union in the UK and NUMSA in South Africa which deal with these and other problems on a daily basis. And at the moment that is where the main struggle for the consciousness of the working class is focussed.

And in the absence of real confidence in a socialist future, apparently “reformist” policies demanding government action to secure welfare, protect businesses from bankruptcy and defend workers’ living standards can play a role, if they rally a body of the more conscious workers to take their own fate in their hands as a working class leadership. 

At a global level, the climate crisis and now the coronavirus pandemic cast a glaring light on the world that imperialism has fashioned. The productive forces of society (industrial capacity, technique, science and above all human labour) are constrained by the social relations of production (capitalism, business, the role of money, the hegemony of the bourgeoisie). So long as the profit motive – that major element in the social relations of production – continues to dominate over the needs of the producers (and of the potential producers currently excluded), the more human society undermines the very conditions for its own continued existence on Earth.

This is the issue posed now. Our job is to assist recognition of this in the working class and in a mutual relationship of struggle. We do need to forge a new relationship between socialist intellectual and worker-activists. At the moment, certainly in the richer established capitalist nations, there are divisions between the better educated, socially-empowered and liberal-minded section of the labour-force which has generally done rather better out of “global” economy (which is where many of the socialist groups draw their membership) and those employed in less secure and rewarding jobs, who in the best cases are members of “blue-collar” trades unions. This division is one of the big obstacles to overcome. 

But our movement has a rich history of resources which can help us to overcome the problems of working-class consciousness which mirrors this division.

A vital text to study

A text which is worth looking at carefully in connection with the current crisis (arising out of the dead-end and serious turning point in “globalisation” is a fragment by Friedrich Engels, part of a planned work (to be called Forms of Bondage) which was never completed. At the time Engels was writing, by the way, it was quite normal to refer to “man” as the representative of all human beings. This is not acceptable today, but we should be patient with the text on that account. There are some other aspects of Engels’ ideas in this text which reflect the limitations of the scientific notions of the day.

Because the fragment starts with considerations of The Part Played by Labour in the Transformation from Ape to Man, that is the title under which it was ultimately published. The text is available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm.

Engels’ topic in these few pages is how human beings are (like all life) part of nature. But they are a part of nature which has also evolved the ability to both envisage and execute changes in nature in order to achieved a desired goal. He explains: “The animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence: man by his changes makes it serves his ends, masters it.”

But then Engels – this was in the early 1880s – issues a stark warning:

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature.  For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us”.

There follow a number of examples of historical human-generated environmental disasters. Engels points out about each “victory” that:

“in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first”. 

He continues: “Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and all that our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”

Explaining that “with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws,” he goes on: “we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, even the most remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses, the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body”.

(For Engels, the need for a materialist method of thought and opposition to idealist methods was a permanently important matter, and his advice must be taken seriously by all socialists. This is a point which will be expanded later.)

He concludes that “the social science of the bourgeoisie … examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange that are actually intended … As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account.” (my emphasis).

“In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different.”

Engels explains very simply and lucidly the content of the struggle and the aims which the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party has adopted: “… by concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessing the huge majority, this instrument” (he meant modern industry) “was destined at first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class antagonisms (my emphasis – B.A.). But in this sphere too, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our production activity, and so are afforded an opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well”.

Sadly, at the moment there are few established workers’ organisations around the world in which these issues are seriously discussed, or can even be raised. The SRWP must be one of the ones where this is possible! Naturally, workers will look for a discussion of aims which look achievable within the current framework of social relations. This is entirely understandable, and gains made within this framework can be very valuable, as workers in the UK and US know. 

But the current coming together of a major economic crisis, a major health crisis and a chronic environmental crisis does mean that a body of SRWP members needs to be conscious of the way Engels presented this problem of humanity and nature. 

Selecting and putting forward proposals for action

Besides making available some of the best teachings of past socialist leaders, the best way to educate a movement of workers and temper the political consciousness of its members is to develop a systematic programme of demands which enables members to take action over burning everyday issues but in doing so opens the way for a discussion of the wider aims.

In the two recent documents submitted by Comrade Shaheen Khan (The Coronavirus, Capitalism and the Response of the Working Class and Our Perspectives and Our Tasks), various proposals are made which he probably believed would appeal to workers as solutions to the immediate problems associated with the COVId-19 pandemic and lockdown, but also strengthen their awareness of their own power, which is a necessary preparation for looking for ways to make that power prevail.

The problem is that such demands cannot be successful if they are dreamed up in the heads of one or more intellectuals on the basis of their own plans and aspirations. They have to be anchored also in the minds of, in the first place, those special workers who are going to persuade and lead many others, arguing on the basis of their daily experience, building up their confidence and their communal action with other workers. Sadly, it looks as if Comrade Shaheen Khan has chosen a set of proposals based on a the thoughts in his own head and now casts his bread upon the waters in the hope that it will be returned a hundredfold, whereas it is more likely it will fall on stony ground.

My first reaction (from thousands of miles away in London) was that it is not clear which audience among workers Comrade Shaheen Khan thinks he is addressing. He has a clear conception of the problems they face, and a fairly detailed set of proposals for dealing with them. But there is no sign of how these proposals could be discussed with the SRWP leadership and membership. Comparing the second document with the first, one can see that some proposals in the first document have been dropped, but there is no account given about why this is so. That leads me to suspect that the proposals don’t really find much traction among workers, because if there was, they would start to change and take on a concrete form as they developed from the “abstract idea” (in Comrade Shaheen Khan’s head) towards the “practical idea” (as concrete plans in the hands of workers).

The contemporary significance of Engels’ concept

Dealing with a deep crisis in “the fields of production and exchange” in the 1970s, world capitalism, led by its American arm, chose the deliberate course outlined nearer the beginning of this text. People know it variously as “The Washington Consensus”, “supply-side economics”, the “Chicago School” and of course “globalisation”. While revolutionary socialist movements around the world were being side-lined, defeated, undermined and corrupted, conditions were created for massive but one-sided “development” in the “third” world and China. 

Maybe Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger spared a though for the “remote effects” of their drive to “globalisation” forty years ago. Maybe not. They probably consoled themselves with J M Keynes’ dictum that “in the long run we are all dead”. Certainly, they are not alive to see the actual results of their actions.

A form of globalisation which thoroughly and properly and thoughtfully shares with the rest of the world the advances which have marked European and North American societies would have been and will be a good thing, because it will eradicate poverty, ignorance and inequality. But it must be done for the benefit of all future human beings and in consciousness of the “remote effects” of all the actions involved, applying science and human measures to the process. Uncontrolled globalisation in the interests of capital has involved a huge anarchic expansion of “smoke-stack” industries and reliance on oil and coal power, which now destabilises the entire climate of the world. Only now – very late in the game – has capital turned to new forms of energy, and only when it can turn a profit from them.

Capitalist – anarchic – deregulation of global trade and movement of people means a giant city the size of Wuhan has a population which a generation ago mainly lived in the countryside. Adaptation to urban living and the needs of urban hygiene have always been problematic under such circumstances, and it is not clear that the entrepreneurs who have turned Wuhan into a world city prioritise the fostering of urban hygiene and modern culture of life among the whole population. Many workers do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship, and live on the margins. The experience of the European industrial revolution could have been extremely instructive in this regard, but it is not clear how far lessons have been learned from this. Meanwhile around the whole world, developed and “developing”, layer after layer of regulation has been stripped away. Bodies with responsibility for public heath have been deprived of experienced personnel and re-purposed or simply abandoned. 

Wuhan is so integrated into the world that a local incident where (so far as we can tell) a virus formerly limited to other animals which has adapted to infecting human beings has been carried by infected humans virtually uncontrollably right across the world. Globalisation of trade and general intercourse, without applying the long and painful lessons of modern public health, has exploded beyond any chance of catching and suppressing such an outbreak early on. But it doesn’t need to be like this.

The need for socialist globalisation, alert to the “remote consequences” of actions taken, was never greater. But recognition of this fact is only significant if it is embedded in the consciousness of the working class. And we now need to look at some of the factors which affect that consciousness.

The working-class response to the coronavirus crisis

Right across the world, the working-class response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been extraordinary. 

When the 2008-2010 “sub-prime” banking collapse hit society with shattering effect, the most painful thing for conscious socialists was to see the bemused and confused response throughout the social layers affected most sharply, evicted home-owners, small businesspeople and laid-off workers. People reacted to their situation by camping in town squares as “indignados”, in the “Occupy” movement, engaging in frantic but eventually fruitless debates about what had gone wrong and how to go forward in a different way. The organised working class and its trades unions were put on the back foot. Even talk about the working class – as opposed to undifferentiated “citizens”, was denounced as outdated dogmatic nonsense.

Many Marxists will remember the difficult discussions with individuals and groups blown into the air by the effects of the finance crisis who didn’t want to be lectured about how the system works by people they suspected of being sectarian word-jugglers.

This may seem ironic to formal thinkers, but right across the US and Europe the last thing many of these people wanted was a Marxist explanation of how the crisis had come about!

(The “Arab Spring” also came as a reaction to the – global – banking crisis and its effects, but although this series of uprisings shared many traits with the “indignados” this movement really did seriously shake governments across the Middle East and North Africa.)

The most exceptional development anywhere in the world after 2008-10 was the magnificent class movement of South African workers unleashed by the massacre of the Marikana miners. This also led to the exceptional decision by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) to break the trade union movement’s alliance with the ANC and SACP and set out to establish a working-class party based on revolutionary Marxism. This was the only development internationally that adequately reflected the depth of the finance crisis and identified its significance for the working class, but even then NUMSA has had to work hard to get the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party off the ground, and to find a way back to genuine Bolshevism.

In this 2020 crisis the working-class emerges directly as the heroes of the whole of society. 

And it is not just the working class as an undifferentiated mass of the population, but the working class in its trades unions which has taken the crisis in hand and made its presence known. This is, in any case, the experience in the UK.

Postal workers here have kept up deliveries right through the lockdown (although they are now instructed to deliver only genuine mail, not the advertising junk-mail they have more recently been obliged to deliver). They emerge as the genuine face of the community where families and pensioners and the chronically ill are penned into their homes. Their union – Union of Communication Workers (UCW) – is engaged in a long-drawn out struggle to defend members’ rights and resist the impact of privatisation on Royal Mail.

Unite the Union represents many groups of workers, including bus drivers, who have heroically continued to work so that other “key” workers can get to the hospitals treating virus victims and manufacturing and logistics workers can get to work producing and distributing medicines and equipment.

Employers like Transport for London (TfL) needed to be pushed hard to make sure that drivers are protected from infection and that buses, trains and underground trains are regularly deep cleaned and disinfected. Anger exploded among union members as the death-toll of drivers mounted. The union has won and imposed certain measures of protection for these heroes.

Other Unite members working in sanitation (dust-bin collection) have had to fight for proper Personal Protection Equipment (PPE). From government ministers downwards to local managers, the initial response is always a bare-faced lie, i.e. that the employees have been issued with adequate equipment as laid down in the guidelines and have nothing to complain about. If the equipment wasn’t where it was needed, it was on its way. It would arrive tomorrow or the next day. The workers have had to explain each time that COVID-10 isn’t “normal” and unless workers have the appropriate emergency PPE when they need it, many of them will get infected and possibly die and another vital service will just collapse. 

Workers are starting to stand up and fight this through their unions and they are taking that fight right through the community. And they are often winning because the community is recognising their worth and importance, which has been concealed by decades of deliberate slander, disrespect and being discounted as insignificant (since the Thatcher government smashed the miners’ union in 1984-1985 and brought in class-based laws to take away trade union rights).

Lowly-paid supermarket staff have done amazing work keeping stores open and safe and supervising “social distancing” among customers. 

And none are more aware of the lie about PPE than National Health Service (NHS) hospital staff. From senior doctors to nurses and on to catering staff, porters and cleaners, they are in minute-by-minute contact with highly infectious coronavirus patients. So, too, are workers in the care sector who either care for elderly and vulnerable people in care homes or visit such people in their own homes. This group is an undervalued, underpaid and exploited section of the workforce.

They have had to fight tooth and nail to get adequate supplies of PPE, and they have had to face government ministers and hospital managers telling them that it is safe to work with inadequate protection, that they must work with inadequate protection, that fresh PPE is on its way, that the army is rushing PPE to them as we speak and so on and so forth. Many of these key workers have become infected and died. (A recent example of this came in the Guardian newspaper, 17 April 2020: “NHS staff told ‘wear aprons’ as protective gowns run out. Exclusive: U-turn on original guidelines of full-length waterproof gear for high-risk procedures”.)

Resistance to COVID-19 has galvanised the mass of society, and “key” workers (and it turns out that large numbers of “mere” workers are “key” to society in one way or another – go figure!) are at the heart of the community response.

Indeed, the right-wing Conservative and Thatcherite Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, on his way to a hospital intensive care bed with the virus, came on air to assert that “there definitely is such a thing as society”. (The Iron Lady herself is said to have asserted the exact opposite view! How things change!). More about thatcher and Thatcherism later.

Naturally, social conditions in the “rich” (I.e. imperialist) nations involve certain working-class gains won over centuries of struggle. In the USA and the UK, the various “lockdown” measures mean millions of workers in “non-essential” trades have been thrown out of work and various types of welfare arrangement have been put in place to keep them fed and supplied with necessities during the “lockdown”. We can expect some quite sharp struggles over how this works out; for example, the government promised there would be no evictions as tenants on “lockdown” ran out of cash for the rent. But, actually, there have been many evictions and some vulnerable people have died. Undocumented refugees are particularly vulnerable in all aspects of their lives. By-and-large, however, most people are unlikely to starve, or at least have the conception that society will not let them starve. 

But in many parts of the world workers have not been able to win the right to even a bare existence. A report has been published by the “Haiti Support Group” (here in the UK) under the headline: “Garment factories Re-open in Haiti Despite COVID-19 Fears”. The report, which might have come from any number of countries in Latin America, Africa or Asia, explains: “Garment workers at Haiti’s Caracol industrial park are expected to return to work on 20 April, following an announcement by Prime Minister Joseph Jouthe.”

The report continues: “Many have been left with no pay due to cancelled orders and factory shutdowns, or forced to work in high-risk conditions as factories reopen before the crisis has passed.

“When asked about the reopening of textile factories across Haiti, Georges Sassine, factory owner and president of L’Association des Industries d’Haiti (ADIH), the main organisation of Haiti’s manufacturing sector, has said: ‘the question was whether to die of hunger or coronavirus’.” 

It is further stated: “In a letter addressed to workers on 3 April, S & H Global informed them that the 50% of their salary promised by the Haitian government had not yet arrived and would only constitute 50% or the already meagre 500 gourdes minimum wage, 5 US Dollars per 8 hour working day (already four times lower than the average cost of living in Haiti).” 

“Prioritising profits over the wellbeing of workers” (my emphasis), the Korean textile supplier tenants at the (Caracol) park had originally issued the letter to announce that factory production would recommence on 13 April. While the company stated that government-advised health and safety measures would be implemented (the wearing of masks and hand-washing), local unions and international garment sector NGOs remain unconvinced …”

The rest of this highly-informative report is available on https://haitisupportgroup.org/garment-factories-reopen-haiti-covid19/ .

In this, one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean, class struggle is waged and the working class come to the fore as a major social factor.

As we shall see later, “prioritising profits over the wellbeing of workers”, and the rejection of this attitude, is a serious matter which engages opposition from workers (and wider society). There can be no doubt at all that a profound shift is underway in the relations between the class of factory-owners and bankers and the working class at the heart of the world’s masses.

The coronavirus pandemic is certainly unprecedented in its severity. Its ultimate impact on world economy is difficult to assess at the moment but it will eventually be hugely destructive: things will never look quite the same again.  It is the current social and economic conditions prevailing around the world which have turned this new biological hazard (novel Corvid-19) into a massive crisis for every dimension of human life. The origins of the outbreak thus certainly do lie in the character of modern capitalism-imperialism. 

By and large the pandemic has revealed that the real “heroes” are the doctors, nurses, hospital technicians, scientific researchers, paramedics, aides, cleaners, transport, sanitation and logistics workers and the many volunteers who have stepped in during “lockdown” to feed, help and support the vulnerable. 

This has produced in the UK at least a different general outlook from the one associated with “globalisation”, the pure capitalist Adam Smith view that my individual commercial success is all that is required for happiness in society. “Neo” liberals like Margaret Thatcher are said to have taken this further, proclaiming that “there is no such thing as society”. The UK has seen a decidedly Thatcherite Prime Minister – Boris Johnson – assert that there certainly is such a thing as society. He had just been successfully treated by the UK National Health Service for coronavirus, and (he was still a bit woozy from the disease) poured fulsome praise upon his foreign-born nurses. 

This may only be a passing effect in Mr. Johnson’s case, but it reflects a swing in the general social attitude to workers, and this swing cannot fail to have its effect among workers. The responses of bus and other “key” workers show that it is having an effect. But that effect needs space to develop. It will not be strengthened by calls for “a new Zimmerwald”, but it might be expressed first by an improvement in the general activity and level of involvement of trades union branches and regional and national committees and associated bodies. 

It could be reflected in workers getting involved in the Corbyn movement in the Labour Party, if the discussion there can concentrate on issues affecting workers.

Marxist and socialist intellectuals can encourage a discussion of principles by encouraging the development of trade union activity after decades of a down-turn in that sphere.

A real development of mass consciousness needs to happen in that context. Attempts to force the issue by promulgating noisy statements will end up in “phrase-mongering and clowning”. But it doesn’t need to be like that. There is a genuine job of work to do. But it can only be done if the working class is a material part of our work, not something separate and abstract.

Bob Archer, April 2020

Shaheen Khan (in South Africa): (1) “The Coronavirus, Capitalism and the Working class” and (2) “Our Perspectives and Tasks”.  (See below)

Public Reading Rooms (UK): “No Going Back – The COVID-19 Pandemic: Theses”. 

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The Coronavirus, Capitalism and the response of the working class by Shaheen Khan, 21/03/2020

The spread of the coronavirus to all countries of the world in the past week has laid to rest any sceptic view that this is but a normal flu and does not require special attention from socialists and the working class.  As the pandemic spreads across the globe, the global health emergency is rapidly evolving into a crisis of the entire existing world social order. As the death toll rises, major cities are in lockdown, and hundreds of millions of people are faced with the loss of their jobs and incomes;  the social, economic, political and moral bankruptcy of the capitalist system is being utterly exposed.  Capitalism not only creates the conditions for the existence of viruses and pandemics but the failure of the major capitalist governments to prepare for a pandemic is resulting in thousands, and potentially millions, of deaths, “The number of cases is already approaching 300,000 and it is rising rapidly. The number of deaths has  passed 11,000 and is increasing exponentially.  A pandemic of this character was both foreseeable and foreseen. However, the most basic requirements to secure the health and safety of the population were ignored”.

The capitalist system is in deep crisis and the rule of the capitalist class on a global scale is in jeopardy.  For the second time in little over a decade, the world economy is in a state of breakdown, this time on a far greater scale than 2008. In 2008, the downturn in real estate—by way of subprime to funding markets and from there to the balance sheets of major banks—threatened an economic  collapse. In the winter of 2008-2009, more than 750,000 job losses were recorded every month—a total of 8.7 million over the course of the recession. Major industrial companies like GM and Chrysler stumbled toward bankruptcy, and “for the global economy, it unleashed the largest contraction in international trade ever seen”.   

It is too early to confidently predict the course of the economic downturn facing the world economy now due to the coronavirus. But a recession is inevitable. The global manufacturing industry was already shaken in 2019. All the elements of a new financial crisis have been in place for several years and the coronavirus is the spark or trigger of the stock market crisis, not the cause.   . The stock market bubble is bursting before our very eyes and the Financial Times provides an estimate for the three largest investment funds, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, whose market value of assets is estimated to have fallen by $2.8 trillion in just under a month. 

With the coronavirus spreading exponentially across the globe, the world’s major economies will be shut down for at least several months. Factories are closing, shops, gyms, bars, schools, colleges, and restaurants shutting. Early  HYPERLINK “https://www.epi.org/blog/coronavirus-shock-will-likely-claim-3-million-jobs-by-summer/” indicators suggest job losses in the United States could top 1 million per month between now and June. That would be a sharper downturn than in 2008-2009. For sectors like the airline industry, the impact will be far worse. In the oil industry, the prospect of market contraction has unleashed a ruthless price war among OPEC, Russia, and shale producers. This will stress the heavily indebted energy sector. If price wars spread, we could face a ruinous cycle of debt-deflation that will jeopardize the world’s huge pile of  HYPERLINK “https://www.ft.com/content/27cf0690-5c9d-11ea-b0ab-339c2307bcd4” corporate debt, which is twice as large as it was in 2008. International trade will sharply contract. Investment bank Goldman Sachs announced on Friday that it expects the US economy to contract by an unprecedented 24 percent in the second quarter of the year (April-June), as production and service industries grind to a halt. This would be the largest quarterly contraction in US history, far surpassing even what took place during the Great Depression. The International Labour Organization reports that up to 25 million workers worldwide could lose their jobs over the next several months, but this is a vast underestimation. In the United States alone, 14 million jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector will be affected by mandatory shutdowns. Moody’s Analytics reports that nearly 80 million jobs, or half of the US economy, are at risk.

While the pandemic has triggered the crisis, the causes of the economic breakdown lie far deeper. The process of financialization—the systemic and unrestrained separation of the accumulation of staggering levels of wealth from real productive activity—created a massively unstable global economy, based on the unlimited transfusion of liquidity by the central banks (i.e. quantitative easing) to drive up the equity markets to ever more unrealistic and unsustainable levels.  The capitalist system is being exposed as a society that subordinates everything to the obscene greed and corruption of the oligarchy. An indescribable level of selfishness, egotism, and indifference to human life pervades the ruling class, which treats the lives of workers as dispensable. 

Social opposition is growing internationally.  Wildcat strikes and walkouts in Michigan and Ohio forced a temporary shutdown of the North American auto industry, as workers refused to let the auto companies “kill them on the line” for the sake of profit. There is seething anger amongst the working class and soon we will see mass explosions in different parts of the world. The capitalist crisis and the pandemic will not silence the class but stir its basic instinct to struggle and in the process develop the necessary revolutionary consciousness to deal decisively with the capitalist system. 

Capitalist Crisis, the Austerity Budget and the State of Disaster address

In South Africa the Apartheid-Capitalist system is crashing right in front of our eyes.  Mining is in shambles, finance under massive attack from digital money and a very weak manufacturing base.  The energy sector is barely limping along and the ‘negotiated settlement’ has lost its legitimacy and has expired. 

The State of Disaster address by President Cyril Ramaphosa on the evening of the 15^th March 2020 was the first serious attempt by the South African state to respond to the Coronavirus which had already infected more than 150 000 people internationally at that time,  including South African citizens who were stranded in China for almost three months.  Nothing much was said about the virus by the President at his State of the Nation (SONA) address on the 13^th February 2020 nor by the Minister of Finance, Tito Mboweni at his budget speech on the 26^th February 2020. In fact the budget speech massively cut costs on basic social services in general and health in particular.  They did this knowing full well that the Coronavirus would soon be upon us with a public health system that was in a total state of decay. 

The budget speech of the Minister of Finance came straight out of the Treasuries ‘ Economic Strategy Document’  which is a rightwing, neoliberal, austerity  budget geared to slashing the public  wage bill and  cutting costs on basic social services in general and the public health services in particular.  This was a mean budget directed against the working class and poor!  Health services have been hammered by neoliberal austerity measures for a quarter of a century where the South African working class has carried  the burden of a range of disease areas like malnutrition, child mortality, Tuberculosis, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity.  Above this can we forget the devastation wrecked on the population of over 350 000 deaths from HIV and Aids under the Mbeki regime?

This budget which continues to be implemented exposes the hypocrisy of the President’s appeal that the coronavirus “will unite us and bring us closer”.  Behind this appeal for national unity and a common approach to the problems we face as a society lies the greed of the ruling class which is seen in the kind of decisions they have made to address the virus. These decisions threaten the safety of the working class and poor of our society. Cyril Ramaphosa, Tito Mboweni and the entire leadership of the ANC government are responsible for any death of any worker from the Coronavirus!   

The Context of our struggle

 COVID-19 arrives in South Africa against a public health system that is in deep and structural crisis.

South Africa has a split health system, one for the rich and one for the poor.  Even those working class people who have managed to buy themselves out of the public health system find that the supply of health services is precarious as they run out of benefits on a regular basis, falling back into the collapsing public health system. 

The health system of the rich, a private health system has all the facilities needed to respond to COVID-19 – testing facilities for the virus, laboratories that can generate results quickly and efficiently, clean hospitals, access to water, a stable supply of electricity.  On the other side we have hospitals of the working class – water that runs on and off, unstable electricity supply, a demoralised and apathetic staff (who themselves do not use these hospital facilities as they have state medical aid), hospitals and clinics with little or no medication, chaotic administration and laboratories that are ill-equipped to deliver reliable services.

The reason for the high burden of disease in South Africa is because we are the most unequal and one of the poorest countries in the world. The South African working class is a poverty stricken class where the burden of non-communicable diseases (NCD’s) is three times higher than in countries of similar levels of development. The South African working class had higher levels of precariousness and systemic exposure to poverty than their poorer counterparts in other parts of the world.

South Africa is also a country trapped in deep, systemic and structural violence.  This plays out in our townships where gangsters rule and violence is directed not only at communities but more especially on women and girls.  Women and girls while in the frontline of these attacks are not the only ones.  The ‘foreigner’ is often used as a cover to face assault for the austerity measures of the ruling class.

The epidemic of unemployment faces large sections of the working class, where 40% of the population and 50% of the youth are unemployed. This unemployment level is a catastrophe.

The class divisions in our society, in every aspect of life is a result not of any misunderstanding nor of a ‘lack of will’.  It is a product of the rule of a comprador bourgeois who protect and advance the interests of a white monopoly capitalist ruling class.  This comprador bourgeois carried out the massacre at Marikana and is conducting a vicious battle to privatise the SOE’s, Eskom, SAA, the railways while at the same time cutting the wages of public sector workers.

It is time for revolutionary politics and a new strategy to meet the social and political needs of the masses.  It is time to unite the working class, the employed and unemployed behind the revolutionary party, the SRWP which must be ready to take on capitalism and defeat it.

Our Strategic Perspective

There are times in history when sudden events — natural disasters, economic collapses, pandemics, wars, famines — change everything. They change politics, they change economics and they change public opinion in drastic ways. Socialists regard these as “trigger events.” During a trigger event, things that were previously unimaginable quickly become reality, as the social and political map is remade. On the one hand, major triggers are rare; but on the other, we have seen them regularly in recent decades. Events such as 9/11, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial crash of 2008 have all had major repercussions on national life, leading to political changes that would have been difficult to predict beforehand.  COVID-19, the coronavirus pandemic, is by far the biggest trigger event of our generation. It is a combination of natural epidemic and economic collapse happening at the same time. 

The task in the days, weeks and months ahead is to build a conscious socialist leadership in the working class throughout the world.

Every event of the past week has demonstrated the necessity of putting an end to capitalism and fighting for socialism. The pandemic exposes in concrete form the inability of a society based on private profit, on the endless accumulation of wealth, and on the antagonisms of nation-states, to address any of the problems of mass society. 

We must appreciate that the Coronavirus is not a medical crisis but it is primarily a social and political crisis!  While big pharma rush to find a vaccine, which will take a year and a half to test for its safety and veracity in human beings, the working class, particularly its leadership,  has to organise society so as to slow down and finally reverse transmission of the virus.  Even after a vaccine has passed clinical trials we will have to contend with global monopoly capital and its desire to make billions out of it.

The immediate question is raising the consciousness of the working class and poor and developing a sense of social solidarity.  This is done through elementary interventions like pamphlets,  posters, television, community  radio stations,  loud hailing etc.  This must take place at every level of the party and must take place not only at the homes/living quarters of workers but also at schools, churches, taxi ranks etc.

This approach on organisation has to take account of the danger of spreading the virus and must consist of localised organising in small groups and meetings of small groups that can address issues. As our influence in the communities grows and more people join up the small groups themselves will grow both broader and deeper into the class.

The aim is to form Solidarity Action Committees (SAC’s)  which are local neighbourhood structures.  These structures once formed must conduct only small localised meetings in communities so as to protect communities from spreading  the virus. The success of our endeavour to build such structures depend on how widespread our organising is and how deep we can reach into the communities in the first place.

The immediate aim of these SAC is to create health structures for anti-coronavirus defence in the working class.  We must create social and physical infrastructure that the working class can access in the struggle against the virus.  These structures are those we demand from the state and those we set up on our own through our organised communities.

The working class demands:

Immediate and full access to water and sanitation –  a major defence against the virus is washing hands with soap on a regular basis. We must demand that the state set up thousands if not millions of temporary hand washing facilities across South Africa.  This must start with the immediate provision of water to informal settlements, taxi ranks, train stations, shopping malls, clinics, schools, libraries, community halls etc.  All places of employment must be compelled to install water/soap points or sanitisers. Our trade unions must monitor this.  The armed forces must be organised to deliver water to all areas where there is no water available.

That all hospitals to be nationalised and private healthcare facilities to be abolished. – away with the two-tier health system!

A  coronavirus testing  system that is free – we reject the payment of a fee for testing for the virus and it must be free to all people at all facilities, whether they be private or public hospitals and clinics.  The immediate roll out of testing stations to all areas of need,  where people can access them within walking distance.

The state must immediately take command of all laboratories – this will allow a more efficient and well run system of testing where results will be released timeously.

Production and free distribution of appropriate masks – every person in the country must have an appropriate mask to protect themselves against the virus.  The state must set up mass production facilities for the production of masks immediately.

The production of essential medical equipment – essential medical equipment like drips, protective clothing etc needs to be produced on a large scale immediately. These will be critical for establishing temporary quarantine facilities.  This will only be able to be done on the basis that such factories be expropriated as is taking place in many countries of the world to deal with the virus. 

Feeding schemes in townships to meet the needs of children who are not any longer at school as well as hungry and malnourished members of the community. Set up key feeding points at churches, community halls and other spaces.  

Food parcels for all those people who are ill and in isolation or quarantine.

A basic income grant for the unemployed –  the working class and their children suffer high levels of malnutrition and are food insecure.  In order to fight the virus the immune system must be boosted by nourishing food which the unemployed and poor do not have access to.

The closure of all non-essential production, with full income to those affected (initially for one month, but longer if necessary); safe working conditions in industries essential to the functioning of society.

No dismissal or retrenchment of workers who are ill.  Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who are ill or for firms that have stopped operating or are on short time. This must not impact the leave due to workers nor the UIF payments .  Companies must make extra-ordinary arrangements to ensure that they carry these workers till they can return to work.

The State implement strict adherence to WHO rules governing cleanliness and safety in the workplace.

The state make working class transport safer – the working class travel in taxis and trains that are overcrowded.  While laws governing this has been promulgated communities structures together with taxi associations must monitor this to ensure it is implemented. 

Cut interest rates to zero for the duration of the epidemic and cancel all home loan and debt repayments for the next three months or until things get back to normal.

We must defend the working class! The building of Solidarity Action Committees must proceed immediately.  We must explain the middle class programme of ‘self-isolation’ does not defend the working class against infection from the virus. This approach must be replaced by a more holistic approach that  focuses on preparing infrastructure that will be needed to deal with thousands of cases that need isolation.  With our communities we must identify facilities that can be converted into holding spaces for community members that need to be isolated or quarantined. These facilities include churches, community halls, universities, colleges etc.  Some of these like universities already have basic infrastructure like running water, canteens for cooking, electricity etc.

We will work carefully and ensure we do not contribute to spreading the virus.  This means we will take special care in the way we organise in small groups, using electronic and social media methods where possible to reduce direct contact. While we will take extreme care and consider every organisational move we make, we will not be paralysed by fear of the virus nor infection!

We will move from the defence to the offensive in time!  The building of SAC’s is in line with the SRWP Central Committee resolution to lead the struggles of the working class and build party branches in the cauldron of battle. The coronavirus comes at a time when the capitalist system is in such deep crisis that it is possible to prepare to rid society of it and build a socialist humanitarian society. 

Shaheen Khan 

21/03/2020

 World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) “The Spread of the pandemic and the lessons of the past week”, 21/03/2020

 (Financial Times, “World’s three biggest fund houses shed $2.8tn of assets”  HYPERLINK “https://www.ft.com/content/438854a8-63b0-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68” https://www.ft.com/content/438854a8-63b0-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68 published on 15 March 2020).

 A. Tooze, “Is the Coronavirus Crash Worse than the 2008 Financial Crisis?”, 18/03/2020

 WSWS, “The Spread of the pandemic and the lessons of the past week”, 21/03/2020

 Banda Aswell, whatsapp message  11/03/2020

 Khanya College, “In the Eye of the Storm”,  15/03/2020

 E. Toussaint, “The Capitalist pandemic, Coronavirus and the Economic Crisis”, 19/03/2020

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Our Perspectives and Our Tasks by Shaheen Khan 17/04/2020

“Theory, my friend,  is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life” (Goethe)

This was one of the favourite quotes of Lenin who combined the science of Marxism with the art of struggle, how to act. Such a moment lies before us today and what we need to do is not to repeat ‘formulas’ but deal with the concrete economic and political conditions of the particular period  of the historical process.  In line with this we must not forget that Marx and Engels famously reiterated ad naseum that “Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action”.  

The Capitalist System is in deep crisis

We are not going to deal with an in-depth analysis of the capitalist crisis, its economic, social and political character as this has been done by many analysts and political groups.  We wish only to outline some elements which we believe are of decisive importance:

The capitalist system is in its deepest crisis ever and the rule of the capitalist class on a global scale is in jeopardy.  What is increasingly becoming clear is that this crisis is more than a mere recession but a deep depression, as even the bourgeois IMFBlog outlines in its April World Economic Outlook “we project global growth in 2020 to fall -3 percent. This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, a major revision over a very short period.  This makes the Great Lockdown the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis.” 

The capitalist class will of course blame the pandemic for the crisis of the system.  This is not true as the the pandemic emerged at a crucial turning point in world politics. In  2019 two key developments of historic proportions took place. First, the most severe slump of the capitalist world economy began. And, secondly, a global wave of class struggles and popular uprisings were taking place in many countries simultaneously and it covered nearly all continents.  

The bourgeois are panicking as the world has changed dramatically in three months and “The magnitude and speed of collapse in activity that has followed is unlike anything experienced in our lifetime”. 

In South Africa the Apartheid-Capitalist system is crashing right in front of our eyes.  Mining is in shambles, finance under massive attack from digital money and virtual banking and this on top of a very weak manufacturing base.  The energy sector is barely limping along and the ‘negotiated settlement’ has lost its legitimacy and has expired.  

COVID-19 arrives in South Africa against a public health system that is in deep and structural crisis. South Africa has a split health system, one for the rich and one for the poor.  Even those members of the working class who have managed to buy themselves out of the public health system find that the supply of health services is precarious as they run out of benefits on a regular basis, falling back into the collapsed  public health system.  Unemployment has reached epidemic proportions, where 40% of the population and 50% of the youth are unemployed. This is a catastrophe.

The class divisions in our society is a result not of any misunderstanding nor of a ‘lack of will’.  It is a product of the rule of a comprador bourgeois who protect and advance the interests of a white monopoly capitalist ruling class.  This comprador bourgeois carried out the massacre at Marikana and is conducting an austerity programme as seen in the vicious battle to privatise the SOE’s, Eskom, SAA, the railways while at the same time cutting the wages of public sector workers. 

The Scientific Model is a bourgeois model

The capitalist government of Cyril Ramaphosa has taken the nation into its confidence and placed before the nation the medical/scientific basis for the lockdown. While this makes perfect sense from a scientific point of view it does not address the social character of the problem.  Bourgeois science divides life into separate categories and the outline of the medical team in its analysis fails to address the question in a way that provides social solutions.  In fact the epidemiologist concludes that since we are to return to normal conditions of economic and social activity the pandemic is inevitably going to kill thousands of people, particularly the elderly but also those that are immuno-compromised. What he is not saying is that those who are going to die are the black working class who are most vulnerable to the spread of the epidemic.  

The lockdown in bourgeois hands is a hydra-headed monster.  On the one hand it is necessary to ensure the safety of the population through ‘flattening the curve’.  On the other hand, because of the capitalist system, the working class and poor have been reduced to high levels of hunger and suffering.  The condition of the employed working class is subject to claims and processes from the UIF which has placed the class in a very precarious position. The unemployed who eked out a living through precarious and part-time work have been thrown into abject poverty. The lockdown in its current form is untenable and represents a hell-hole for the working class and poor.  The class is beginning to respond to this in the form of food protests and fighting the police who are part of a high-handed repressive bourgeois approach to the lockdown.

The bourgeois is in a tizz, caught between the competing interests of its different fractions. While initially frightened by the prospect of mass deaths of its labour force (and that is the reason why the lockdown took place in the first instance), it has already started  non-essential productive activities like opening the mining industry .  It plans a phased return to work and releasing the lockdown, even before it is safe to do so, which may cause the rampant spread of the epidemic and the death of millions of black workers. The cynicism of this is mind boggling – they place profits ahead of people!

A revolutionary and socialist approach to the pandemic

Lenin as well as Trotsky liked to quote Napoleon who said “On s’engage et puis … on voit.” (“First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens.”) Our task is not to wait until things unfold before us  but  to analyse, understand  and intervene to change things  in such a way that it serves the interests of the working class and oppressed.

These are difficult times, not only for the bourgeois but also for the leadership of the working class.  Many bourgeois economists and NGO’s have been making recommendations to the government to adopt a Keynesian economic approach rather than the neoliberal path they have been following.  This is a nationalist capitalist trajectory which does not in any way serve the interests of the working class. The NUMSA open letter to the President is different as it has as its main consideration the effects of the lockdown on the jobs bloodbath that will flow from it. However we think that it fails to address the question from a class struggle perspective and remains an economistic approach to the question. We think it is not the approach to follow.

The salient issues we must consider are:

While there may be questions related to the medical/scientific outline presented by Professor Salim Abdool Karim his presentation confirms that the lockdown has been successful in keeping down infections and the spreading of the virus. More so the study  indicates that if the lockdown is lifted too soon there will be an exponential increase in the number of infections and consequential death of thousands of people. These thousands of people will be black working class people living in townships and urban settlements. The danger of the NUMSA open letter is that it may expose the workers in the manufacturing sector to this danger. Already businesses that have been operating are reporting COVID-19 infections, so too prisons, police stations, the SANDF and private hospitals. The big bourgeoisie are very unhappy with the lockdown as seen in the responses of Trump, Bolsanaro and our own Democratic Alliance. They  want to return as soon as possible to business as usual through a phased approach.  Their concern is the profitability of their system, not the lives of people, particularly the working class and poor.

As socialists we cannot agree with the lockdown in its current form; ours.   While we recognise the essential need for physical distancing we also understand the absence of ‘social needs’  that is causing the working class to experience great difficulty and suffer under conditions of the lockdown.  While there are a myriad of social issues to be addressed the immediate needs are that of  food, a basic income, healthcare and the question of retrenchments and job losses.  

The working class is not taking this lying down.  Hunger and the insecurity of life is leading to conditions of revolt brewing in the class.  These are the molecular processes where the class is gradually beginning to comprehend the problems arising from the social crisis. Consciousness is determined by conditions.

 A revolutionary party basis its tactics on a calculation of the changes of mass consciousness. While the party must impress through its propaganda and agitation (media/newspaper/pamphlets) the dangers of the epidemic and the need for physical distancing we must begin to take leadership of the mass protest movement that is gaining momentum. The working class on its own is fighting and breaking down the parameters of the bourgeois lockdown and we need to direct this anger in the right direction and to the right quarters.

The mass anger must be directed at the ruling class, the ANC government and the provincial authorities to demand a right to a decent life under the current conditions. This must include the following:

‘Food for All’ – we demand a mass government funded food distribution programme. This must take place on a weekly basis  with food parcels allocated and distributed to all people living in working class communities. This must also include all those people who are ill and in isolation or quarantine.  We also demand immediate feeding schemes in townships to meet the needs of children who are not any longer at school as well as hungry and malnourished members of the community. Set up key feeding points at churches, community halls and other spaces.  

A ‘Basic Income Grant’  for the working class employed and unemployed, for the middle classes including small business people who are facing the brunt of the lockdown. The funding for this must come from the reserves held by the Reserve Bank and the super-profits from the Mining, Industrial and Banking sector.

The ‘Nationalisation of all Hospitals’ –all  private healthcare facilities to be abolished, away with the two-tier health system! A  coronavirus testing  system that is free – we reject the payment of a fee for testing for the virus and demand a humanitarian programme of mass testing  which must be free to all people at all facilities, whether they be private or public hospitals and clinics.  The immediate roll out of testing stations to all areas of need,  where people can access them within walking distance.  The state must immediately take command of all laboratories – this will allow a more efficient and well run system of testing where results will be released timeously. The production of essential medical equipment – essential medical equipment like drips, protective clothing etc needs to be produced on a large scale immediately. This will only be able to be done on the basis that such factories be expropriated as is taking place in many countries of the world to deal with the virus.  The immediate  establishment of temporary quarantine facilities. 

‘Full Pay for all Workers! No Retrenchments and No loss of Jobs’  –   we insist that only the most essential of services focussed on food production, health equipment production and those workers involved in any other essential activity be allowed to work under safe and hygienic conditions (monitored by labour and  health inspectors and the trade unions).  The pandemic is caused by capitalism and the capitalist class must bear responsibility for it.  Workers must be paid their full salary and responsibility for claiming wages from the special UIF fund must fall on the bosses.  This must not impact the leave due to workers nor the UIF payments .  We will not accept any retrenchments and all work on hand must be divided between all the workers without loss in wages. Those enterprises that close down must be Nationalised under Workers Control.  This must become the clarion call of the trade union movement!  Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who are ill.  

‘Social Responsibility Programme’ –  there must be immediate and full access to water and sanitation –  a major defence against the virus is washing hands with soap on a regular basis.  We demand the immediate provision of water to informal settlements, taxi ranks, train stations, shopping malls, clinics, schools, libraries, community halls etc. While the state has started such a programme we must insist it be rolled out to every area in the country. The production and free distribution of appropriate masks and sanitising material–the state must set up mass production facilities for the production of masks and sanitising material immediately. The state make working class transport safer – the working class travel in taxis and trains that are overcrowded.  While laws governing this has been promulgated communities structures together with taxi associations must monitor this to ensure it is implemented.  Cut interest rates to zero for the duration of the epidemic and cancel all home loan and debt repayments for the next three months or until things get back to normal.  Stop all evictions and rent payments for the duration of the lockdown.  Immediately reduce the cost of airtime and data by 50% across all networks – this must be done immediately to facilitate access to online learning for all children.  Stop the brutal repressive tactics of the police and army! These people must perform useful tasks and not carry out the repressive agenda of the ruling class and the madman placed in charge of them. They can be useful in the distribution of food and water and other essential tasks.

Our Tasks!

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”  K. Marx,  HYPERLINK “https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm” Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

What is very clear is that Capitalism is a system in extreme decay;  climate change and the destruction of nature is the source of the epidemic  and this on top of the biggest depression in the history of capitalism.  The capitalist class is in a state of utter confusion and desperation as to how to address this triple crisis, but what comes naturally to it is to shift the burden onto the backs of the working class and poor.  Already mass retrenchments, growing levels of unemployment, deepening inequality, impoverishment  and veritable hunger of the working class and poor pock-mark our society.  The working class and its organisations,  primarily the SRWP,  must  make a choice – either the class is totally decimated and disorganised by these conditions or we fight back and begin a serious and organised defence of the class!  The very conditions of existence of the working class is at stake and so too the future generations.

We must immediately organise the following Campaigns:

A ‘Food for All’ campaign – is a call for a  mass government funded food distribution programme. The working class and poor are already running out of food and soon their hunger will be criminalized.  We must anticipate mass food riots and looting which will be harshly dealt with by the state through a declaration of a state of emergency and or the imposition of martial law.

A ‘Basic Income Grant’ campaign – the unemployed have no source of income and the salaries of the working class have been cut. 

A ‘Single National Health System’ campaign – a fight for the nationalisation of private health care facilities so that a national health response to the epidemic can be rolled out.

A ‘No Retrenchments, No Job Losses, Full Wages’ campaign – the working class is under severe attack and the bosses are effecting  restructuring  of their enterprises through retrenchments and cutting of salaries of workers. The very integrity of the working class as a social entity depends on our ability to win this fight.

A ‘Social Responsibility Campaign’ – full access to water and sanitation, production and distribution of masks on a mass scale, stop evictions and rent payments, zero interest rates,  redcue the cost of airtime and data, an end to repressive tactics of the police and army, use the resources of the Reserve bank and the super-profits of the big Monopolies tied up in the banks for a social responsibility programme.

Our Organisational Tasks:

We must defend the working class! 

We must call on the working class to form Workers Committees in work places and Solidarity Action Committees (SAC’s) in every township and village.  We must explain our programme of demands and get these committees to lead the fight for such a programme. As far as the virus is concerned we must explain  that the middle class programme of ‘self-isolation’ does not work for the working class and poor.  We call for physical distancing and social solidarity!   With our communities we must identify facilities that can be converted into holding spaces for community members that need to be isolated or quarantined. These facilities include churches, community halls, universities, colleges etc.  Some of these like universities already have basic infrastructure like running water, canteens for cooking, electricity etc.

We must lead the struggles that are currently unfolding in the townships!

The working class and poor are starving under conditions of the lockdown.  While a lockdown is beneficial as far as the spreading of the virus is concerned, it cannot be that people must go hungry and literally starve to death.  We must get involved directly in these struggles waged by communities and pose the questions as outlined in our programme.  We must also be sensitive to local issues that may arise.

From defence to offense!  The coronavirus comes at a time when the capitalist system is in such deep crisis that mass scale struggles of the class may erupt soon. These are the important moments in history when revolutionary parties are tested.  The building of SAC’s are embryonic forms of Soviets, ‘Worker Councils’,  that spring up as the organised expression of the working class in struggle. While we may be far off from this becoming generalised,  we must lay the foundations for democratic working class organisations where our party cadre are leading the fight.  This will also allow us to build party branches in the cauldron of battle.

Forward to the defence of the working class!

Forward to the Socialism!

Aluta Continua!

Shaheen Khan 17/04/2020

 T. Cliff ‘Building the Party’.

 IMFBlog “The Great Lockdown: Worst Economic Downturn Since the Great Depression.

 RCIT :  The COVID-19 Global Counterrevolution: What It Is and How to Fight It,  A Marxist analysis and strategy for the revolutionary struggle

 ibid

 Banda Aswell, whatsapp message  11/03/2020

 RCIT:  The COVID-19 Global Counterrevolution: What It Is and How to Fight It  A Marxist analysis and strategy for the revolutionary struggle