The policy of Party and union leaders clashes headlong with the growing mood of anger and frustration that is building up in the factories, steel plants, construction industry, mines and elsewhere. However, the growing crisis of overproduction on a world scale means there is little or no hope in conciliation between the new bourgeoisie, whose interests demand driving down living standards and, ultimately, the destruction of any free trade unions with the right to strike.

What are the tasks of Marxists and revolutionaries in this situation? Obviously, the immediate one is to analyse what is happening, to present an explanation that corresponds to the real situation in order to enter into a meaningful dialogue with workers, students, and honest CCP members. Thus, it is necessary to study the Chinese economy, society, and politics. It would be a serious error to try to deal with a complex, contradictory and historically unprecedented process on the basis of ready-made formulae which do not correspond to what the Chinese people are living through.

The CCP being both the party of government and state apparatus will be subject to all the centrifugal forces that in Western democracies are represented by a whole range of parties and other organisations. Depending on the relative strengths of those forces there could be serious divisions between the tops in the bureaucracy who are already billionaires and an integral part of big business, and those in the front line (usually men) who have to face a roomful of angry strikers (often women) and explain why nothing can be done.

It would be expected that those Party members who are union officials and thus closest to the workers’ struggles, many of whom will have benefitted least from the transition to capitalism, will see their material interests best served by taking the leadership of those struggles. There will also be rank and file elements within the CCP who look with horror on the transition to capitalism in China and the inequalities it has brought. Both currents are confirmed by letters and articles that have appeared in the Chinese press. Many hark back to Maoist China. But in the present context those who seek a way out through a ‘return to Mao’ would find themselves forced to confront the question of workers’ power and soviet democracy. The closer to the rank and file these people are the more readily they will accept such ideas. Chinese workers will not willingly accept a move back to Stalinism; they want to move forward to real workers’ power, towards genuine socialism.

At the moment we are seeing a growing strike movement which, so far, in its actions has pushed the official unions to one side. If the ACFTU is to take the lead it must utilise its remaining strengths. The first is that the unions have played a significant role in the field of health, social security and the like, and so have a basis of support amongst less militant workers. Secondly, the most militant groups of workers are migrant women and due to the contract system many are transients moving from one factory to another, even from one city to another, but the local union offices and staff remain in place and, with the new regulations, a few officials are changing their strategy from outright opposition to any actions against employers, to one of listening to workers with grievances and, in rare cases, supporting them.

The official unions have the enormous advantage that when the working class begins to move, it invariably expresses itself through its traditional mass organisations, although these can be in surprising and unanticipated ways. Even today the first step taken by many workers who, for the first time, find themselves in conflict with management, is to visit the local union branch office to get advice and support. It is absolutely necessary for genuine Marxists to find a way to the rank and file of the Chinese trade union movement.

As Russia returned to capitalism the Communist Party fractured, but that has not happened in China, instead the CCP has remained in control and successfully transformed itself into a mass bourgeois party. We can correctly observe that the CCP has many millions of members and that as the class war in China heats up it will be reflected in the Party. To what degree and to what extent cannot be predicted. However, in the event of an open struggle between a wing of the CCP and the new bourgeoisie, Marxists would fight for the defeat of the main enemy, the bourgeoisie, while patiently explaining that only the transfer of power to the working class can solve the problems facing China.

The aim would be to mobilise the masses but not to defend the privileged positions of bureaucrats. While supporting opposition within the CCP (or any break away section) to the new bourgeois, Marxists would explain to the workers the need to take the power into their hands through, for example, workers’ councils or factory committees, initially as organs of struggle and then as Soviet organs of workers’ power. It should never be forgotten that Soviets were not an invention of the Bolsheviks or any other party, but rather the spontaneous invention of the working class. Chinese workers will want to move forward to real workers’ power, towards genuine socialism.

An important consideration is that in China there has never been any Bolshevik tradition. For decades, the dominant ideology was authoritarian – Stalinist; whatever Mao said must be correct, and whatever Mao proposed must be adopted. However, since 1980, Mao’s ideas have been thrown overboard. Indeed, it was no mere oversight that the Mao era was omitted from the historical review presented at the Beijing Olympic ceremony. No reminder was permitted of a non-capitalist alternative. However, Maoism is not the only tradition. There is also the important tradition of Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), and it is positive that in the recent period students and others have established Chen Duxiu societies and Marxist circles specifically to study his works. This is symptomatic of a real desire amongst many activists to discover the true ideas of Marxism.

Young workers, particularly migrant women workers, peasants, and students now have experience of the new Chinese capitalist state and growing numbers are turning against it. The great weakness of these Chinese leftists is that their struggles tend to be isolated, but this is gradually being overcome as they link-up using the internet, risking severe penalties.

A revolutionary or even workers’ party is lacking but it was Chen Duxiu who first recognised the necessity of founding a revolutionary party to transform China into a workers’ state. It is as true now as it was then, that Marxists and revolutionaries must take the first steps in the building of a democratic centralist Party which strives for Soviet power.

Nevertheless, proletarian consciousness is rising, and there is a sense amongst many that the left is on the verge of a leap forward. But this will only occur if workers, peasants and intellectuals find issues that unite the forces of opposition. Socialists will, of course, fight for immediate demands but pose them in a way that links day-to-day problems to the socialist transformation of society. Such demands, transitional demands as Trotsky referred to them, act as a bridge between actions taken in the struggle for bettering the condition of the masses and the idea of the socialist revolution.

The ‘partial’, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses must be supported, as every successful struggle raises the combativity of the workers involved. It might be necessary to start with small demands that are relatively easy to win in order to build up a dynamic, the speed of progress is not critical, but when workers are in struggle events tend to unfold fast. As the international capitalist system becomes ever more degrading and decadent the most advanced workers should advance a platform of transitional demands, the essence of which is that they are directed against the very foundations of the bourgeois regime. In their totality, the transitional demands seek to systematically mobilise the masses for the proletarian revolution.[29]

The socialist revolution would be unthinkable without the day-to-day struggle for advances under capitalism. Only in, and through, such struggles can the working class acquire the necessary experience and organization to challenge the capitalist system. However, any protesters must prepare to face a state apparatus which is the fusion of a monstrous Stalinist regime with the most repulsive features of capitalism.

A campaign for transitional/democratic demands could provide the basis for a powerful mobilisation of workers and peasants. In the context of a rigid, bureaucratic regime such demands would be based on a class struggle policy based on the workers’ rights to act in their own interests, and almost certainly include:

  • the right to make one’s voice heard through public demonstrations, leaflets, newspapers and websites;
  • freedom of association whether a trade union or political party;
  • freedom to bargain collectively and to take industrial action on such issues as unemployment, low pay, health and safety;
  • freedom to form picket lines and self-defence squads to protect them;
  • a return to a national health service and free schooling;
  • greater equality for all forms of labour, against social inequality, disclosure of the assets of the Party tops.

The precise demands, the way they are posed and the means by which they realised are extremely important so they have to be determined by those directly involved. Clearly, a governmental slogan will be required to bind these demands into a coherent programme. In Russia this was given substance in “All Power to the Soviets”, and this may be one path for the Chinese revolution. Such a slogan would have to be built on freedom to form action committees in every factory, workplace, college, street, army barracks, and village, and for aggregates of such committees to form the cores of a new generation of democratic Soviets.

The workers would demand the renationalisation of all the main sectors of the economy and could immediately begin to take over the administration of industry, society and the state and move in the direction of socialism in the real sense of the word, not the bureaucratic caricature of Stalinism. Such a programme of popular democratic and transitional demands would be the antithesis of Stalinism. Under such conditions it would be impossible to re-impose a Stalinist totalitarian regime.

In their struggles, the workers need mass organizations and these will be, in the early stages, trade unions. It is necessary for revolutionaries in China to be active in the ACFTU, because in the structure of the CPC state, it is there that class relations are expressed most directly and immediately. Every attempt to subordinate the union to the capitalist enterprise must be opposed: instead workers must demand it supports their claims.

In China, at least initially, it will not be possible to replace the leadership of the ACFTU at the top, regional or even local level because these leaders are not elected. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of branch officers are senior managers in the enterprise which may give demands for representation on the branch committee a particularly sharp form. However, it is quite possible to militate in the factories and local union branches for the election of shop stewards and factory committees to represent the workers, and to argue that the “good practice” of co-opting strike leaders onto local branch committees is made universal.

The factory committee gives the demands of the workers an organised expression. Elected by all the factory employees, the factory committee immediately creates a counterweight to the administration. The prime significance of the factory committee lies in the fact that it becomes a kind of military HQ for layers of the working class. When, as often happens in China, there is a temporary seizure of the factory or part of it that raises in a practical manner the question of who is boss of the factory – the capitalist or the workers – and at such times the factory committee takes on special significance.

  1. CLB 29 September 2015, clb.org.hk.

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