China has returned to capitalism. The three key indicators of this – the monopoly of foreign trade, a planned economy, and nationalisation of key industries have been reversed and replaced by a market economy with each enterprise striving to maximise its profits. The transition was initiated and overseen by a Stalinist bureaucracy greedy to retain its privileges and which saw capitalism as a safer bet than a worker’s democracy.
In assessing the role of the CCP and its leaders, we must consider how well they have achieved their goals. Whatever their roots, this group has dismantled the planned economy and privatised state assets, and in so doing they have, almost without exception, acquired vast private fortunes which are invested not only in China but around the world. Their greed knows no bounds, while still raking off enormous salaries and perks as Party tops they have their villas in the south of France, their apartments in Beverley Hills and their houses in London. Their children go to the world’s top private schools and, under current laws, will inherit their parent’s huge fortunes. Re-reading Lenin on the British Labour Party:
… whether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics. Only this latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat. Regarded from this, the only correct point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie[64]
It is unambiguously clear that the CCP is a bourgeois party.
Social inequality is growing fast, class differentiation is a fact; despite the state retaining a significant degree of control over industry and over such factors as exchange rates, an economic downturn was clearly seen in 2008. Today state control is much less and the threat of a world crisis of overproduction is growing fast. China produces as much steel as the rest of the world combined and overproduction has meant the price of steel in China is now less per tonne than cabbage.
Monopoly capital, of which Foxconn is an extreme example, is creating gigantic global-scale factories that dominate the lives of Chinese workers. Foxconn and its fellows have been enabled by an economic transformation at a national level in which the leadership of the CCP has chosen to ally itself with and become part of big business in the belief that this will allow it to continue running China. What Foxconn provides is living proof of Trotsky’s analysis made near the end of his life that modern monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private initiative but on centralised command. There is an identity of outlook and interests between capitalist cliques at the head of these giant companies, banking consortia, etc., and those holding state power. They collaborate at every step and neither can allow free trade unions.[65] This has been taken to extremes in China where the same group (CCP members) are in control of government, trade unions, and many of the most important industrial enterprises and banks.
The alliance extends from local governments reducing relocation costs, maintaining minimum wages at artificially low levels, acting as the recruiting sergeants for incoming factories, to labour laws which effectively outlaw strikes. We have seen that to maximise profit from these factories the bourgeoisie has restructured the form of the relationship between bourgeois and proletarian. These forms, including residence permits and dormitory-labour schemes, are subjecting workers to more intense exploitation and great hardship and suffering. Contradictions between capital and labour are accumulating at the point of production and, notwithstanding an alliance of state, unions and employers, are resulting in increasing levels of struggle by the Chinese proletariat.