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

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

The crisis in Numsa: The lessons and the way forward

The crisis in Numsa:

The lessons and the way forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine is a warning to workers everywhere

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

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

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

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

Continue reading

China and the crisis of imperialism

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

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

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

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

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. Continue reading

International support for Rössing Union leaders

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

https://youtu.be/kjLdDEnONqo

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

India: A discussion on “What does Modi’s victory mean?”

[threecolumns]

By Roger Silverman, June 2014
(Cde. Silverman is one of the founders of Workers International Network. The original article, which was specially commissioned for Workers International Journal, has also been posted on https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/socialistdiscussion. WIN also has a Facebook Group: https:// www.facebook.com/ WorkersIntlNetwork)

The article I wrote recently on the Indian election results initiated a correspondence with the son of a British friend who is currently working in Banglaore, India. He has illusions in Modi, and we have had a fairly spirited exchange of ideas. I have copied here my latest reply to him…

Thanks for your reply. For me, too, it is stimulating to have my ideas challenged (even when they are right!). I haven’t got time for a thorough reply now, but here are a few interim points to keep the discussion going:
You keep quoting the wishes of the USA (in this case, once again in relation to their collusion with India in unilaterally violating the nuclear non-proliferation pact), as if that were a decisive factor in determining the future course of world history. If anything, this policy had far more to do with US determination to tie the hands of Pakistan, with its ambivalent attitude to Islamic fundamentalism, than with India’s rivalry with China; it is after all towards Pakistan that the Indian H-bombs are facing. Continue reading

Cracks recently appeared in the edifice of world capitalism

By Balazs Nagy
First published in Lutte des Classes No. 11, September 2013.[threecolumns]We really ought to draw our readers’ attention to two major current events which ̶ each in its own political and economic way ̶ testify to a considerable deterioration in the painful death-agony of capitalism-imperialism. On the one hand, there is the current stage reached in the breakdown of its arrangements in the Middle East with the in itself unusual and surprising but real political blockage affecting this system in relation to the civil war in Syria; on the other, the fresh upsurge of world crisis in the ̶ for many ̶ unexpected shape of a general fall in the rate of growth in production among more or less all the so-called “emerging” countries: India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, etc., including China. This fall is expressed and accompanied by a real upheaval in their financial system through a brutal fall in the values of their currencies, excepting China. As luck would have it, all of these serious problems of imperialism have matured and are concentrated at the Moscow meeting of the 20 countries which are considered to be the most important, the famous G20 on 7 and 8 September 2013. Continue reading

INDIA: WHAT DOES MODI’S VICTORY MEAN?

[threecolumns]

By Roger Silverman, June 2014

(Cde. Silverman is one of the founders of Workers International Network. This article, which was specially commissioned for Workers International Journal, has also been posted on https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/socialistdiscussion. WIN also has a Facebook Group: https:// www.facebook.com/ WorkersIntlNetwork)

 

The sweeping electoral victory of the BJP under the leadership of Narendra Modi has been greeted worldwide with a mixture of euphoria and alarm.

For big business, the justification for the euphoria lies in Modi’s record as chief minister of the state of Gujarat between 2002 and 2010, when he presided over an average growth rate of 16.6% a year. However, Gujarat’s rapid growth actually pre-dates Modi by a whole decade: it had already been the fastest-growing of India’s fourteen major states between 1991 and 1998. Moreover, even during Modi’s tenure of office, Gujarat was not in fact India’s fastest-growing state: its record was exceeded by Uttarkhand and Sikkim. Continue reading