The restoration of capitalism in the former deformed and degenerated workers’ states (DWS) poses critical questions for revolutionary Marxists. The biggest possible pitfall is to reduce the method practiced by the masters of the dialectic to a set of rote formulas; abandonment of method is the grossest form of revisionism. The events following 1989, though clearly not the “end of history,” have turned out to be a challenge to Marxists, who, if they are to be effective, must clearly see and state what is.
In the workers’ movement, the most pressing current question is China’s emergence as an imperialist power. China has begun to challenge the dominant western imperialist powers for control of markets and resources, and for a chance to spread vast amounts of outgoing Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) alongside of and in competition to the other leading parasitic imperialist players. The embrace of China as a “friendly” developing nation, as promoted by the ANC, Hugo Chavez, and Chavez’s Menshevik World Social Forum (WSF) and Fifth International, deceives the workers into welcoming this new exploitative imperialist power as if it were a friend. But while renegade Trotskyists roll out the red carpet and kowtow to Morales and Chavez, in reality their Chinese “friend” is helping the Castro brothers usher capitalism back into Cuba.
All the groups that came together in July 2009 to unite in forging the FLTI were in agreement that capitalism has been restored in China, although not in 100% agreement about all the processes of the restoration. At the July 2009 Congress, the FLTI agreed to disagree on the categorization of China, based on the agreement of the minority (consisting of HWRS and the CWG-NZ) to abide by discipline in the event that the theoretical debate became superceded by programmatic consequences. In addition, the Congress passed a resolution agreeing to hold a public debate on the question before the international proletariat. (Selected documents from this debate can be found on the CWG-NZ’s Redrave blog.)
Both the majority and minority tendencies in the FLTI agree that the current character of China has significant programmatic ramifications for the world revolution. The differences have since led to the declaration of a public faction on the issue of China in particular, and on all issues which are directly and indirectly connected. What follows is an introduction to the crisis in our international current; as honest militants in search of the best program for the working class to seize power, we invite revolutionary workers to participate in this debate. This introduction does not purport to exhaust the scope of the debate. The documents and source references are extensive, exhaustive, and accumulating, as developments in the real world are revealed daily. Our purpose here is to excite the reader to go to the original documents of the debate, as well as the source material, and weigh in themselves on this crucial issue.
For readers who are aghast at the presumption that capitalism is restored in China, we have dedicated a section of the document “The Truth is Concrete” to an explanation of the restoration of the law of value in China. But that is not our main concern in this introduction. The crisis in the FLTI revolves around the current role of China in the global economy, and its implications for the preparation of the working class in its struggle against the power of finance capital, regardless of its nation of origin.
For the majority of the FLTI, the current inter-imperialist rivalry poses the question which of the major imperialist powers (the USA, Germany, or Japan) will control the prize of Russia and China? Primarily, the majority sees China as a giant maquiladora and a pawn of western finance capital, which takes its marching orders from the likes of J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, and the like, who have assigned it to the lowly task of scouring the globe to pick up the dregs of business opportunities which, the majority argues, are not profitable enough to justify western capital in wasting or risking its own FDI. But contrary to the majority’s assertion, those dregs are essential for the “giant maquiladora” to continue functioning as a source of profit. We could ask: why would Wall Street risk its profit stream by directing its “Chinese pawns” to dive head first into minimally profitable and potentially disastrous ventures, if they are in reality, as the majority claims, fronting for western finance capital?
For the majority, western imperialism is behind all the Chinese maneuvers around the globe. This theory ultimately presents a contradictory world view, with China being driven by its puppet masters on Wall Street to embrace Chavez and Morales’s “21st century socialism,” while at the same time Chinese capital helps the Castro brothers restore capitalism in Cuba, and props up the US war machine by holding trillions in treasury bills. In the meantime, while the US does the actual fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, China walks away with oil deals, copper deals, and new pipelines, and is building itself a new navy and securing ports in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden.
In the majority’s twisted view of reality, the minority is said to have revised Marxism, in particular because Lenin’s Imperialism explained that the forces of production stagnate and that capitalism is no longer progressive. Therefore, the majority argues, the emergence of a new imperialist power almost 100 years later, as asserted by the minority, means that the productive forces are still advancing. This, the majority contends, contradicts Lenin’s theory of imperialism and 150 years of Marxist theory. With this “insight,” the majority has removed the spring from the clock; it has dug itself a trench and climbed in, and the walls are quickly collapsing. In contrast, what the minority has demonstrated is that the conditions of China’s transition from a DWS to capitalism were unique; the transformation proceeded along the slow road (see Dialectics and Revolution), through a state capitalist stage interpenetrated with semi-colonial relations, to imperialism. This unprecedented process of capitalist restoration allowed the formation of a new Chinese national bourgeoisie, and permitted it to accumulate capital. Basically, the emergent bourgeoisie, nursed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), allowed Wall Street (western FDI) to rape and plunder the country, and Wall Street allowed the emergent bourgeoisie to gather its strength. Due to the anarchy of the market, Wall Street was too short sighted to see that the accumulating national capital in the hands of the Red Mandarin and the emergent capitalist class would come back to challenge the world order of imperialist powers.
This theory, the majority insists, implies that capitalism has regained its progressive nature, and ipso facto, Marxism is being killed by the minority! For the majority, neither China nor Russia, nor any other nation, can become an imperialist power today. For that to happen, the very foundations of Marxism must be collapsed – and we can’t have that! The majority asks: if capitalism is no longer a fetter on the advance of the forces of production, what becomes of the historic role of the working class, and what happens to the materialist perspective? The materialist contradiction between private accumulation and social production, which Marxism has proven to stall the advance of the forces of production, has been resolved! And there stands the minority eagerly collapsing Marxism and ultimately disarming the working class! Thus, the minority, we are told, are the revisionists who have swallowed the bourgeois analysis, and are implicitly promoting the anti-Chinese chauvinism now peddled by the likes of the leaderships of the United Steel Workers and the United Auto Workers – disarming the working class.
So says the majority. But don’t take our word for it, as we (HWRS) represent the minority. We have presented our findings to the world proletariat. The majority’s response reached us only recently (February 20, 2010), and we have not yet had a chance to digest it fully. Thus, we have constructed the foregoing summary of the majority’s position. For verification, we direct the reader to the majority’s position papers, which were printed in International Workers Organizer #1 and International Workers Organizer #1 Part 2, and the majority’s recent response, which has been posted on the CWG-NZ’s Redrave blog.
Regardless of how heated the discussion gets, keep in mind, dear reader, that honest revolutionaries seeking the best program for the working class will need to stand firm and defend their convictions until there is “light, light and more light,” as the good comrades of the majority never cease to remind us. But comrades, the stakes are high, and the web of the dialectic has shown us that the China question is connected directly and indirectly to many of the major questions facing revolutionary workers and vanguard militants today. We know that unless these questions are resolved, the working class will not be armed to face the current period of rising inter-imperialist rivalry, of wars of conquest and proxy wars, of revolutions and counter-revolutions. Principled and methodological differences lead to programmatic differences. And the minority has concluded that those programmatic differences are no longer in the theoretical realm, and concretely impact the international’s current programmatic approach in regional, local and international politics, as well as its hypothetical program in the event politics lead to military conflict.
In the event of direct or indirect military conflict between the USA and China, or in the event that a proxy war or direct conflict over zones of influence breaks out, the majority will call for the military defense of China, and the minority will call for revolutionary defeatism on both sides. This raises the question of the role of the international proletariat in the face of war, and it is a primary question for both the Chinese and North American revolutions. The majority disarms the Chinese workers by telling them that their primary enemy is US imperialism, when today the road to the conquest of the Chinese democratic workers’ state is primarily over the corpse of the Red Mandarins.
In contrast, the message of the minority to the Chinese workers in an inter-imperialist war between USA and China is this: “Only a democratic workers’ state can unleash the productive power needed to destroy capitalism and prevent subjugation by imperialist powers. Therefore, we must turn this imperialist war into a civil war against our own capitalist class. As Chinese workers, we must reach across the Pacific to the American workers and tell them to do the same! Jointly, the workers of China and America can destroy world capitalism, and if we all work together, it won’t take long!” By the same token, the minority tells the American workers this: “The Chinese workers are not your enemy. Wall Street has undermined your national economy and sent all your productive capacity abroad in search of cheap labor – and in so doing they helped the Chinese ruling class emerge and acquire great wealth, based on their joint effort to starve and enslave our brother and sister workers of China! The only way for American workers to regain their former productive/economic strength is to join with the Chinese workers and once and for all throw off all the imperialists – of Wall Street, Europe, and Asia alike – and take the economy into our own hands. Through our actions to stop the war by expropriating our ruling class, we will inspire the Chinese workers to do the same. Once we overthrow Wall Street, the workers of North America will put the productive resources back to work, and aid workers internationally in building socialism.”
The minority has shown, through extensive documentation (see “The Truth is Concrete”), that contrary to the majority’s assertion, China is a still emergent, yet already powerful imperialist player, and that through China’s gaining of military backing from Russia, a Russia-China bloc is emerging. Thus, the West’s nightmare of 1950 has come full circle – but this time the threat is not of expanding “communism,” but of a formidable imperialist opponent. Added to this bloc’s current strength is the Chinese navy, now in production, which will soon sail the high seas of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The minority has shown that China is on the ascendant, and that while the USA is still the big boy on the block, it is declining in power. These relative positions of the USA and China can be tracked in the trajectory of outgoing FDI. Contrary to the majority’s view, we have shown that western finance capital is not the major supplier of Chinese outgoing FDI. We have shown that Chinese capital accumulation has reached a point where it must go outside its borders to stay fully invested.
The minority has also shown that in the process of capital accumulation, the CCP used the slow road to restoration. In other words, they used the state to slowly birth a new capitalist class, which engorged itself by sharing with western finance capital in the parasitic bloodletting of the 150 million strong Chinese proletariat. The minority has shown how this process has developed finance and fixed capital resources in abundance, in the hands of Chinese capitalist in Chinese banks not controlled by JP Morgan or any other organ of western finance capital. We have shown that Chinese capital has emerged in the last twenty years from out of the cocoon in which Wall Street thought it had securely wrapped the Chinese economy. The minority has shown that far from discarding Lenin’s theory of imperialism, we have advanced his theory, as well as Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, by showing that the unique characteristics of the DWS allowed Chinese state capitalism, acting through the CCP and the plunder of their own people, to propel the growth of a new bourgeoisie. Through the super-profits earned from its own workers, the new Chinese bourgeoisie developed plenty of surplus capital to invest abroad, thus becoming an imperialist power. This new power uses the oppressed nationalities in China as its own internal colonies for super-exploitation, and its new bourgeoisie is buffered by an upper managerial professional class (a mass consumer layer similar to the upper managerial layers in the advanced imperialist countries) that itself numbers over 150 million.
The majority claims China cannot be imperialist because it imports the machines that make the machines from Japan. Right now, comrades, Japan is happy to have any customers at all, despite being a major imperialist player itself. Indeed, Japan is playing with the idea of moving into the Russia-China bloc rather than remaining under US “protection”; in other words, the Japanese are clearly seeing the handwriting on the wall. And it is not news to observers of the world economy that other imperialist countries besides China have sometimes had to import the machines that make machines. Meanwhile, just looking at the papers each day, one can read of the technological advances being made by Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs, who are as smart and cunning as any others and are quickly closing the gaps. Now Chinese capital owns Hummer and Volvo, and their reverse engineering and outright buying of technology compensate a hundred times over for the portions that they are missing out of the first world’s fully bloomed industrial economy. The Chinese are now planning to build a 31-mile bridge in six years. Compared that to the new eastern span of the SF Bay Bridge, which is 3 miles long. It will end up having taken over 10 years to construct, and has been delayed because it is waiting for the necessary steel – which comes from, you guessed it, China! When China is building a navy while the USA has to wait for bridge parts, it’s time to wake up and smell the steel mill.
The minority has also shown how Chavez and the Bolivarians promote the false dream of so-called “21st century socialism” (or, to call it by its real name, semi-colonial capitalism with Bonapartist demagoguery covering for the preservation of capital), standing hand in hand with their friendly Red Mandarins who willingly embrace the left rhetoric (at least for the photo op), then sign for the oil and are on their way. The Bolivarians and the ANC are actively spreading the illusion of a friendly socialist China that is helping to develop Africa and Latin America. The FLTI majority disarms the working class of Africa, Latin America and Asia by not warning them to drive out US, EU and Chinese imperialism! Chinese capital is not there to help the masses; it is there to help itself.
Take, for example, the issue of Cuba. It is still under embargo by the USA, but even so, Cuba is not isolated from imperialist investment and trade. Canada and China are vying for first place in front of Spain as trading partners. Is China there to prop up the DWS in Cuba? No! They are there to rape it, as the Castro brothers prepare to transform the property of the DWS into the property of the new capitalists and their imperialist “helpers.” Capitalism will be restored without a shot being fired, and China will be there, right alongside Canada and Spain, to reap the rewards. Hell, they may even do it without returning the property to the gusanos. The only thing that can stop the restoration of capitalism in Cuba at this point is the fight for the proletarian political revolution! Revolutionary workers must replace the Castroite bureaucracy in the fight for the expropriation of foreign capital, the restoration of the monopoly of foreign trade, and the development of a planned economy directed by armed, democratically organized councils of workers, farmers, and soldiers.
Today, the Chinese proletariat and working masses are the most militant in the world. The rise of capitalist imperialism in China is based on the theft of the workers’ state. The iron rice bowl has rusted through, but as Chinese capital devours its own working class, they fight back in the millions. Tens of thousands of strike actions a year occur in China, but the power of the state keeps them separated, and they have yet to generalize their action and create organs of workers’ democracy and dual power. Yet for the majority, today China is in a pre-revolutionary period.
We all agree that a revolutionary party is needed to bring unity of action, theory, and strategy to the workers, and the FLTI correctly looks to the East in this regard. We all agree that unleashing the mighty Chinese proletariat will have profound effect on the world revolution. Despite the 30,000 strong strike at Tonghua in July 2009, in which a manager was thoroughly dispatched (see this article), at most China is in a preparatory period, not a pre-revolutionary period as the majority claims. Moreover, the majority’s strategy to “arrive” in China under the pacifist umbrella of the JRCL-RMF is opportunistic and flawed. How would one explain to the Chinese workers that their would-be comrades in Japan disarmed the workers in the Japanese imperialist homeland by preventing them from carrying out their proletarian duty to defend the Chinese DWS militarily? How will the FLTI explain to the Chinese workers why, when they had the opportunity to correct the JRCL at the Anti-War conference, they acted like some sad second international social pacifists, who bluster boldly in the smoky back rooms but allow social-pacifism to pose as Marxism without a serious public criticism at the world pacifist conference. We ask the majority and the SCI: When you greet the Chinese workers, will you explain: “We had to capitulate opportunistically to the social pacifists so that we could get here to help you; aren’t you lucky. We’re from the International Secretariat, and we’re here to help!”
The implications of the debate within the FLTI have spilled over to Japan, Latin America, Cuba, and Africa, and even to the streets of San Francisco. In the process, the minority has found that pulling at the loose thread of the majority’s dogmatic theoretical model has unraveled the majority’s cloak of ultra-left proclamations and pompous sectarian abstentionism, and exposed underneath it a series of opportunistic and subjectivist methodologies. The resulting exchange of correspondence has left the FLTI majority, and its International Secretariat (SCI) in particular, standing half naked in a cross class alliance with the Lambertist class traitor Alan Benjamin, the USEC-Socialist Action sellout Jeff Mackler, the leader of the San Francisco Labor council Tim Paulson, and Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, all in an effort to hide an opportunistic obsequiousness toward the JRCL-RMF that one SZ (a perennial labor activist on the centrist left) threatened to reveal by asking one question too many.
At the anti-war demonstration in San Francisco on October 17, 2009, SZ asked HWRS if we, and the FLTI, knew that the JRCL-RMF accuses him of being a CIA agent, and also asked questions about the role of the JRCL-RMF in the post-1985 railway privatization struggle in Japan. The HWRS had no information to give in response to these questions, and sent an inquiry to the International Secretariat. The SCI, in turn, went ballistic (see Let’s shed Light, light and more light). To the SCI, just by asking these questions (actually, passing them on) the HWRS had crossed a moral barrier, because we were associating and “playing lawyer” for SZ, whom they characterize as a bourgeois politician because he is on the central committee of the Peace and Freedom Party, which the SCI considers “bourgeois imperialist.” This entire episode became a red herring that allowed the majority to delay answering the minority on China for many months. It also opened up, for the minority, a host of questions about the centrist and reformist groupings with which the FLTI intersects.
It appears that the SCI’s method, when their opportunism is exposed, is to retreat into a bogus and subjective morality which insists that moral and political questions are separate, and precludes discussion of both at the same time – an artificial separation that every student of dialectics knows is impossible. The debate on China was thus diverted into a discussion about how a small Leninist nucleus in Oakland relates to the PFP, and to one activist (SZ) in particular. It is amazing how quickly phenomona travel from the general to the particular. The JRCL-RMF has confirmed to HWRS that the JRCL-RMF warns vanguard workers that it considers SZ to be a CIA agent. The JRCL-RMF offered no evidence, however, other than SZ’s vast collection of videotapes documenting international workers’ struggles. The FLTI majority, on the other hand, considers SZ, by virtue of his position in the PFP, to be a leader of a bourgeois imperialist party that poses as socialist, and thus washes their hands of of him. In truth, as everyone in the Bay Area workers’ movement knows, SZ is a ubiquitous and perennial participant in every workers’ movement event on the calendar. His tenacity is a testament to his dedication, regardless of his “questionable” class allegiance. For those who engage in coalition work involving SZ, we have no choice but to take him at his word about what he stands for.
In our documents on the subjectivist and centrist method of the majority, we showed that the majority is absolutely incapable of objective dialogue. (See A Critique of the SCI’s Method.) Every discussion degenerates quickly into extreme subjectivity and infantile name calling. For example, along with this introduction and other documents from the FLTI debate, we are publishing a metal worker’s response (Letter from a Metal Worker) to questions posed by one of our comrades (USA Being Replaced by China: Just the Facts) about the majority’s complaint that the minority uses data from the bourgeois press in its analysis of China. This Argentinian comrade treats our comrade CR like an enemy, rather than as a comrade with political differences; he calls him “Mr.” and characterizes him as a servant of American imperialism. This is nothing new. The majority’s documents are filled with slanders, because they cannot answer seriously a single question that the minority has posed.
The majority asked us to publish the letter by the metal worker to CR. So we are doing so, along with the minority’s response (Response to Letter from a Metal Worker). His letter also accuses the minority of capitulating to US imperialism when it sent its Marines to Haiti. So we are also publishing our answers to all the accusations of the majority against the minority in regard to Haiti (see In Defense of the Minority on Haiti and Letter to the National Committee of LO(CI)). Finally, to illustrate the level of degeneration of the FLTI’s leadership, we are publishing a letter from the SCI (Let’s shed Light, light and more light) in which its subjective method borders on complete delusions in regard to reality in general. Our response to this delusional letter, also published here (The SCI’s Rejection of Dialectics Is Taking the FLTI into the Centrist Swamp), is Dave Winter’s document about the petty bourgeois character of the SCI, in which he warns that if the SCI’s current trajectory continues, the FLTI will slide into the centrist swamp.