Can China Rescue Global Capitalism? The Terminal Crisis Unfolds from Sri Lanka to South Africa and Beyond
Sri Lankans protesting in front of the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo on 13 April (Wikipedia, AntonO)
Intro
Bourgeois celebration of the arrogantly proclaimed “End of History” has been waning. The second “American century” has hit unplanned for and unexpected headwinds. The period of clear sailing, for unchallengeable and unassailable US/NATO military power and economic control of the semi-colonial world and the Global South has hit a wall. That wall was the slow and steady rise of the Russia/China imperialist bloc led by China’s mass of capital sent by “Belt and Road” looking outward for return on investment that the ‘turn to the interior’ could not provide. China’s economic engine (exploiting 6-700 million proletarians in China alone) is buttressed by Russia’s vast expanse, natural resources, nuclear arsenal and military prowess as integrated into the CSTO, BRICS and SCO projects.
Warned and informed by cold warriors like Kennan, Brzezinski and Kissinger, the western imperialists have only themselves to blame for their surprise. But what of the working masses, the proletarians upon whom the future of humanity depends? How has the international working class been prepared for the crossing of the rubicon from a mono-polar world to one of what promises to be decades long inter-imperialist conflict? The bi-polar world conflict presented, for the bourgois strategists, as a series of geo-strategic standoffs, including but not limited to Syria, Yemen and the Ukrainian steppes.
Hidden beneath the surface we see imperialism’s terminal death march to keep the masses in line. Countering the geo-pol strategists, Marxism warns the workers that these hotspots are counter-revolutionary wars against resurgent permanent revolution, objectively necessitated by the unfinished tasks of the national democratic revolutions in all the dependent nations. The workers movement suffers decades of a crisis of leadership. The counter-revolution and restoration of capitalism in Russia and China created an ideological tailspin giving rise to social imperialism, social chauvinism, right populism, fascism and social patriotism. It is the task of vanguard workers and revolutionary socialists to examine and expose this crisis of leadership to the masses who are daily being driven to the barricades and the front lines of the imperialist wars and class wars theoretically and organizationally unarmed while led by class traitors.
The degeneration of Trotsky’s Fourth International left the workers as unprepared victims of cross class popular fronts from Bolivia in 1952 to Sri-Lanka in 1964. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) entered the Bandaranaike government only for the party and vanguard workers to be slaughtered by the thousands. The Stalinists, Mensheviks, tankies, M-Ls and other revisionists never had a pretense to any kind of working class independence and have dragged the workers in and out of one failed popular front project after another. This deadened class consciousness to the point where half the international worker’s movement supports (backhandedly and with gobs of qualifiers) either Putin and Xi or Zelensky and NATO. Red flags have been folded up and put back in the closet, the international proletariat is mobilized under either the Blue and Yellow or the White Blue and Red.
This leaves the masses rising up against consequences of the exploding debt trap without class conscious leadership. We have trade union leaders enforcing their bloc’s with the bosses by means of bureaucratic centralism from South Africa (NUMSA-COSATU) to the AFL-CIO with its social patriotic agenda integrated with the CIA. Where is the democratic centralism of the revolutionary proletariat needed to break the logjam-where is the New International needed now more than ever?
Imperialist Debt Traps
Who laid the debt trap for the Sri Lanken masses? The west points at China while China’s apologists point back. One BBC reporter helps China make their case blaming the victim, in this case Sri Lanka. Is Sri-Lanka just the tip of the melting ice-berg? Are its particularities really that unique? Aren’t most loans (from both the east and west) knowingly extended and entrusted to mini-despots committed to ensuring repayment, exploitation of commodified labor power and resource extraction by means of repressive labor laws, austerities and militarization? Of course they knew. Didn’t all the creditors know sovereign bond markets could not sustain the hyped up interest burden once the coupons came due? Of course they knew the default risk!
The big creditors know how deeply they put semi-colonies in debt–yet they extend their exposure because the dynamics of capitalism leaves its administrators no other choice than to put the overproduced capitals back ‘to work’ exploiting opportunities internationally.
To counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the over accumulation of capital must find an outlet. The sovereign bond funds and loans for technology and military equipment that turn around and buy back from the lender. The zombie projects that wither and to lesser degrees the corruption which infuriates the masses all build up debt with compounded interest that must be paid regardless! The comprador capitalists and their corrupt politicians cut the deals, skim their cut and pass along the cost of debt in labor conditions, oppression and austerities the masses are made to bear–but only as long as the working masses willingly tolerate the arrangement.
The decade of ‘easy money’ flowing from quantitative easing in the west and the ‘Win-Win’ and Belt and Road projects emanating from Beijing peaked around 2016.
https://voxeu.org/article/china-s-overseas-lending-and-war-ukraine
China’s entry into the Great Game for an imperialist’s portion of the Global South came out of the same necessity of all imperialists: the need to keep the overaccumulation capital flowing. For the last to the game all the cycles of the world market of boom and bust are amplified. The Chinese central bank looks at its books today full of distressed debt.
The IMF is pressuring China to sit down at the table and take its lumps alongside the rest of the big boys again in Sri Lanka as it was forced to do in Zambia. What are the choices for the creditors? The indebted want moratoriums and cancellations but “nominal write-downs are rare”. China like the rest of the parasites prefers restructuring, interest and term readjustments, debt for equity swaps, long term leases –anything to assuage the bankers’ desire to keep the loan on the books as active receivables.
The big dogs at the IMF, World Bank, Asia Development Bank are caught in a monumental international ‘debt trap’ of their own making, and China is neck deep in it both abroad and at home. Clearly China did not plan for this eventuality, although they should have, having at their service the largest brain trust of experts formally trained in Marx’s crisis theory. To manage the debt impostions in the private sector Michael Roberts takes on the job of advisor to Xi and explains the CPC (Communist Party of China) only choice is to rein in the private capitalist sector using the state to float the boat. Ultimately that means the pain of the few will be shared by the many as the cost of the crisis lands on the masses, something socialism is supposed to prevent.
But Roberts’ reference to ‘state capitalism’ based on Lenin is wrong. Unlike Lenin’s time in Russia, there is no workers’ state in China capable of reining in the private sector. The state rules on behalf of the capitalist ruling class but has ‘special characteristics’ due to China’s history and recent restoration of capitalism after 1992. The central state ruled by the Maoist bureaucracy deliberately reintroduced the law of value to make the old state-owned sector competitive on the global capitalist market. The former CPC bureaucracy was transformed into a capitalist bureaucracy to manage capitalism, allowing it to rule on behalf of collective capital in the global economy characterized by monopoly capital.
While Western imperialist states were moving towards a state form that managed monopoly capitalism dominated by private monopoly banks and industries, China was able to use its central capitalist state to defend and extend its monopoly control of its own banks and industries against foreign capital. China’s rapid growth rate since 2000 therefore has to be credited to its state management of the law of value which it dresses up as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Of course this neo-Maoist ideology is magnified by its imperialist rivals as the new wave of “reds under the bed’’, and simultaneously lauded by the treacherous Stalinophile Menshevik left as ‘actually existing’ socialism and fed down the transmission ‘belt and road’ to the working masses for their consumption.
With mass upsurges in Sri-Lanka, the spread from Myanmar and Sudan across Panama and Argentina, all the imperialist creditors tremble at the specter of resurgent communism. They now know that declarations of the “End of History” were nothing but bluster! Today they balance the cost of largess, in terms of incremental caloric concessions to defuse the power keg against the cost of losing it all to successful revolutionary upsurges. Alongside these class enemies, the comprador authoritarian enforcers, the reformists, social democrats, trade union leaders, much of the self identified socialist and communist left work overtime to stop the workers from establishing leadership of the masses with a class independent party and program of action. Thus workers are now on their own to expropriate foreign and national capitals and thereby complete the tasks of national self-determination by permanent revolution that breaks down national borders to crush imperialism.
Without a revolutionary leadership, each upsurge is first met with the popular front to snow the workers with ‘democracy in action’ which without class political independence only prepares the workers for the inevitability of fascism. Promises of democracy to assuage world opinion are made and under new elections that at most deliver a ‘socialism’ of “bolsa de familia” to lift the enraged masses from misery to poverty but not beyond. Yet capital has no room and no means to offer the workers anything of value. In this crisis they can offer neither bread nor peace. If workers break with the popular front then capital abandons all vestiges of democracy and crushes the masses. Each downturn produces a ‘red tide’. In the west the red tide is more like a pink wave where social democrats, radical sociologists and other social-patriots rise to the task, but in the Global South as the red flags come out they must be tightly controlled.
So internationally the imperialist bosses are playing whack-a-mole. The west depends on authoritarians like Rajapaksa, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Duterte/Marcos and Bolsonaro hiding as best they can behind failing veneers of democracy. On the other side the Chinese apply the art of turning “useful idiots” to their ends. For China the task is to have a ‘radical left’ coterie of academics and activists ‘hold high’ the legacy of 1917 and 1949. This is morphed and wholesaled by the leadership from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping into ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, delivered as Marxism-Leninism’s Gospel truth to the enraged and awakening masses in the Global South who are told the debt collectors from China are their friends and leaders of an anti-imperialist bloc!
Capitalist Con Men of the ‘Left’: The petty bourgeois politics of the NGOs and the Stalinist Bureaucracy:
One such useful idiot rose from working class radicalism as a member of a Maoist caucus of radicalized black autoworkers in 1970’s Detroit to become something of a tech mogul. Thoughtworks’ profile page for founder Roy Neville Singham shows he has made bank directing multi million dollar projects for the likes of Caterpillar Financial Services with no regard for their armored bulldozers’ role in the death of Rachel Corrie and the IDF’s demolition of Palestinian homes in 2003. His company and activities became something of a pass-through to left outfits like Peoples Forum, Tri-Continental and CODE Pink in the US and to the 330,000 members strong NUMSA (National Union of Miners of South Africa) and its creation, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP).
In legal existence since 1987, NUMSA has organized the most militant sector of the South African Working class, standing up against the rightward trajectory of the Tripartite popular front of the ANC-SACP and COSATU which trapped the workers in perpetual subservience to imperialism, allowing a layer of Black capitalists to rise to the top climbing over the graves of the Marikana miners. The Marikana massacre exposed the ANC and now president Cyril Ramaphosa’s anti-working class commitments. At the time of the massacre, Ramaphosa, a former trade unionist and strike leader had become a board member of the Lonmin mine. When Ramaphosa showed up at the miners memorial vigil he was driven off by the workers who held him responsible. He would go on to serve on the executive board of the ANC. Since then he has acquired stakes in many industries; his personal wealth is reported as $450 million-quite a trajectory for a former trade unionist and strike leader!
Today he cynically preaches class peace as he vows to fight corruption as he campaigns for the “Framework for a Social Compact”, uniting COSATU and business owners to drive down wages and boost investment. With a third of the working class unemployed the ruling class opposes a ‘basic income grant’ and fears a new “Arab Spring”.
The fallout from the Marikana massacre split the working class internationally between supporters of the multi-class Tripartite popular front and the Justice for Marikana Miners movement. This split was apparent in Oakland, CA when we initiated street action in defense of the Marikana Miners, which led to forums and workshops. NUMSA sent its representatives to a Berkeley venue where the Transportation Workers Solidarity Committee, run by retired ILWU Local 10 militant Jack Heyman, hosted and toasted NUMSA as the emerging vanguard. Noticeably absent from this movement, in particular because they have been in lockstep with the Tripartite regime, were all the local Stalinist and M-L outfits like the Communist Party, Angela Davis’s Committees of Correspondence, the Becker brothers’ PSL and Workers World Party leader Clarence Thomas (ex-president of ILWU local 10 and leader in the Million Man March.)
After the 2012 Marikana massacre COSATU expelled NUMSA in 2013. The vanguard of the working class was looking for a new leadership to challenge the capitalist Tripartite regime, which despite its participation in BRICS, was clearly uninterested in shaking free from the imperialist world order, neither from the entrenched Anglo American nor from the new kids on the block, China. Gert Grobler reported in July 2021, “China has been South Africa’s largest trading partner for 12 years in a row. From January to May this year, bilateral trade between China and South Africa reached $20.52 bn, growing 65.6% year-on-year…”
NUMSA, it was hoped, by vanguard workers internationally, could fill the role providing a revolutionary socialist alternative.Its leader Irvin Jim led the 2019 formation of the SRWP which despite its proclaimed Marxism-Leninism was not able to win more than a small fraction of the NUMSA members to vote for it against the ANC. Only 24,439 voted for the SRWP in 2019 and in the municipal elections of 2021 it floundered again, garnering only 5,444 votes. Could it be the bureaucratic centralism of the leadership and its trajectory away from ‘Leninism toward Maoism’ and embrace of Xi’s China is no more inspiring to the working masses than the official SACP-ANC-COSATU?
Yet despite all the revolutionary bluster neither NUMSA and SRWP nor SAFTU and their respective leaders Irvin Jim and Zwelinzima Vavi have made a qualitative political break with the ANC, COSATU and SACP. For years they promised to return to the Freedom Charter and the national revolution and to get the revolution back on track. However, neither grouping were able to break from Stalinism’s Menshevik theory and stagist method that tasks the working masses with establishing a nationalist popular front and a rebuilt workers party as envisaged by Joe Slovo to revive the Freedom Charter. There is no fighting leadership that shows the masses the necessity of the permanent revolution, that only under the leadership of a politically independent black working class can the fight for workers power and socialism achieve the lofty yet limited national democratic tasks of the Freedom Charter. Tasks that can only be won by expropriation of foreign capitals and the native white big capitalists and emergent black capitalist class.
The Cape Town SRWP Shaun Magmoed Branch released a statement that argues that the bureaucratic centralism and adaptation of the Maoist method of allying with the entire petty bourgeoisie as opposed to the Leninist method of splitting the poorer/oppressed petty bourgeois from the upper well off petty bourgeois are being enforced, now in real time with the shuttering of New Frame magazine and the refusal to seat delegates critical of the leadership at the NUMSA convention. This is the culmination, they surmise, of the work of the Chinese Communist Party and its operative Roy Singham and the network of NGOs tying Chinese imperialism to NUMSA, Code Pink, Vijay Prassad at Tricontinental,the People’s Forum and Code Pink as?
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-big-business-of-uyghur-genocide-denial/
Workers around the world have to rally against this sellout of NUMSA to remove its Stalinist/Maoist bureaucratic leadership and put a fighting democratic leadership in place.
Under the bureaucratic rule of Irvin Jim’s Stalinist/Maoist leadership of NUMSA treats the SRWP as its political wing. Here we have the treacherous labor bureaucracy threatening to take control of the whole labor movement, collaborating with the China led BRICS – (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa soon to include Iran). The war in Ukraine has caused the West to close ranks temporarily, but far from weakening the Eurasian Block, sanctions have pushed the BRICS into a huddle – just take the fact that they now all buy Russian oil or gas. China and Russia are in a different league from the semi-colonial BRICS as rising imperialist powers.
Most of China’s economic growth flows from its ability to use its state capitalist regime to accumulate capital by outcompeting its imperialist rivals. It tries this on with the soft-power of ‘win-win’ deals that promise FDI on terms that pretend to be a peaceful extension of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ rather than the grubby Western abuse of the semi-colonial world.
But soft power is not credible without recruiting the labor bureaucracy in the semi-colonies to con workers into playing along with this lie. Workers do not buy the lie and know what super-exploitation is (take the case of the Rössing miners in Namibia whose union was busted by China.) But when they fight back against the popular front they meet a reactionary union leadership that drops its fake Marxism- Leninism and apes the Bonapartist bourgeois regimes of Xi, Putin, Modi, Bolsonaro, and Ramaphosa. They become mini Bonapartists spouting the Maoist Xi line of ‘win-win’ socialism to justify expulsions, thuggery, and fascism as the order of the day.
Terminal crisis offers no way out for capital. Forward on the road to socialism!
As the terminal crisis unfolds it can only lead to a dead end for capital. The counter-tendencies to the LTRPF come up against the reality that capital cannot create enough new value out of our labor to make a profit on the vast pile of accumulated dead capital. Ultimately all the counter-tendencies depend on increasing the rate of exploitation of labor to plunder nature to restore the rate of profit. But this depends upon the willingness of the workers and poor farmers to pay for the crisis with their lives and livelihoods. Neither the Western imperialists that drag workers into war against the “red menace”’, nor the Russian and Chinese imperialists who enlist the support of the petty bourgeois enemies of the workers to trap them in Stalinist/Maoist patriotic fronts to fight their wars, can restore falling profits. The mounting pile of debt in both the imperialist and semi-colonial world and the repression of the working masses worldwide will explode and bring capitalism face to face with the fearful ‘specter’ of communism. We face the rapidly approaching crossroads leading to socialist revolution or human extinction.
Socialist revolution will not happen without a mass working class conscious of the necessity for socialism. As we see in Sudan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, when workers rise up against the oppression of inflation, debt, hunger, war etc., the counter-revolution prevails unless the workers are organized and mobilized by an internationalist revolutionary party. Most urgently, workers around the world must rise up against the fifth-column labor collaborators that sell out the workers and poor farmers to endless wars and inevitable human extinction. They must be thrown out, and fighting, democratic unions built, backed by workers councils and self defense militias, capable of defeating the Bonapartist and fascist regimes, smashing the bourgeois states and imposing workers governments capable of ending capitalism and opening the road to socialism!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 08/02/2022
