Page 2 of 3 CHINA'S REVOLUTION, Part 3 Lessons of the Soviet experience
By Henry C K Liu
Foreign capital has been the new opium of a new Western neo-liberal opium war
in the 21st century. Fortunately, China's addiction to export has been forced
to go through cold turkey detoxification since July 2007 with the abrupt
collapse of global financial markets. Hopefully, this financial crisis will
save China from the danger of voluntarily falling back into the
semi-colonialism from which it took 120 years of protracted socialist
revolution to extract itself.
In 1978, at the initial formation of the open-and-reform policy, Chinese
policymakers were acutely aware of the danger of
allowing foreign capital into the country. Thus the policy compromise on the
revolutionary path in order to kick start the economy was at first limited to a
term of less than a decade, as reflected by the fact that the new 1979 Joint
Venture Law governing foreign capital has a sunset clause limiting all foreign
joint venture agreements to a maximum life of nine years, after which joint
venture assets had to revert to full Chinese ownership.
Unfortunately, the 1989 June Fourth Incident at Tiananmen Square, in which
initial students protests against the adverse effects of market-oriented
economic reform and the resultant corruption were distorted by
counterrevolutionary elements, encouraged by the US media allowed in to cover
the state visit of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, to look like a popular
movement in demand of bourgeois democracy.
This distortion led eventually to, among other regressive political
developments, the removal of the nine-year sunset limitation clause. In
contrast to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which turned China toward a
socialist path by rejecting Western imperialist machination, the June Fourth
Incident of 1989 turned China away from its socialist path by appeasing US
neo-liberal geopolitical pressure.
By the mid-2000s, the CPC leadership was forced to accept that the long-term
ideological penalty and economic costs of its open-and-reform" policy were
beginning to outweigh the short-term economic benefits, leaving the party with
serious internal ideological division and the nation with an economy infested
with compradorism and excessively dependent on export, with unsustainable
long-term environmental degradation, structural destabilizing wealth and income
disparity and uneven regional development.
Yet, despite clear evidence of leadership awareness of the serious problem, the
open-and-reform policy had difficulty in regaining its original revolutionary
socialist purpose because the economy had become too addicted to petty
bourgeois seduction all through the early 2000s, until the necessity of review
was imposed on it by the global collapse of free market financial capitalism in
mid-2007.
Marx's law of social motion declares that society progresses from feudalism to
capitalism at the point when feudalism ceases to support the forces of
production. In turn, capitalism will give way to socialism once capitalism's
productive potential has been fully exhausted, rendering its continued
existence obsolete. This will happen when the need for further capital
formation is neutralized structurally by the involuntary excess saving imposed
on workers through low wages, which then reduces demand needed to justify more
capital. The so-called savings were in reality excess profits on the part of
foreign capital.
Yet this dialectic process of self-terminating capitalism can be and has been
prolonged by imperialism in the 19th century and neo-imperialism in the 21st
century. Under neo-imperialism, currency hegemony in a global financial
architecture is the device to force low-wage workers in labor-intensive
exporting economies to finance the consumption of the higher-wage workers in
financially advanced importing economies in a process of the poor lending to
the rich.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is the revolutionary device to accelerate
the dialectics and to combat the antirevolutionary effectiveness of imperialism
and neo-imperialism. Today, in both exporting and importing economies, the
revolutionary struggle is to raise wage levels to deny further incentives for
multinational corporations to profit from inter-economy wage arbitrage.
But in the 20th century, Russia went straight from feudalism to socialism in
1917, as did China in 1949, and Vietnam in 1975. Unlike Russia, both China and
Vietnam were saddled by the curse of Western imperialism. These revolutionary
states ended up shadow-boxing non-existent capitalism in their effort to
achieve accelerated socialism.
For China and Vietnam, as with all other developing economies, the obvious
enemy was imperialism, which Lenin, drawing on Hobson, declared to be the final
stage of capitalism. For countries that are or have been victims of
imperialism, capital is essentially a foreign enemy if their economies are open
without restriction to outside investment. Under such circumstances, domestic
capital is often merely comprador capital controlled by foreign capital. The
struggle against imperialism cannot be won without economic nationalism.
In the second edition of Problems of Leninism, published in August 1924,
seven months after Lenin's death, the very foundation of international
communism was reordered to reflect the objective reality that, for the then
foreseeable future, the USSR was going to remain the sole communist state in a
world dominated by long-lasting if not permanent capitalist wonders. Russian
communists erred in their underestimation of Chinese communism led by Mao
Zedong. As it turns out, history granted China the role of the sole remaining
major communist state after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
The Soviet Revolution needed to be protected first and foremost from effective,
coordinated hostile reaction to revolution in the advanced countries giddy with
temporary prosperity fueled by imperialism. These advanced industrial states,
natural cradles of inevitable evolution from capitalism toward socialism,
turned out to be powerful and unrelenting counterrevolution headquarters all
through the 20th century.
The role of the Comintern was accordingly reduced to opposing foreign
counterrevolutionary intervention against the new USSR to keep the lone
socialist lamp burning in the world, rather than either engaging with
unacceptably high-cost but futile sacrifice in struggles that could not
possibly be won in the prosperous capitalist countries or fostering prematurely
untimely socialist revolution in pre-industrialized colonies that had no
proletariat class.
The socialist revolution in Russia, instead of building on the high prosperity
of the advanced stage of capitalism, was saddled with all the decrepit problems
of feudal decay. The path to socialism, instead of being another step towards
the final stage of human development, was mired in object poverty left over
from the collapse of feudalism without the necessary wealth-creating
institutions offered by capitalism.
Socialist revolution against feudalism cast a poverty shadow everywhere outside
the advance capitalist economies, exacerbated by organized anti-socialist
hostility from the moneyed class. In the Third World, imperialism gained new
life and respectability by assuming an anticommunist mask in defense of
capitalism.
Under such circumstances, the Comintern needed instead to act as an instrument
of Soviet state foreign policy in a world order full of hostile anti-communism
states that were materially more prosperous. This meant that the non-ruling
communist parties in all countries had to seek cooperative arrangements with
whatever influential sections of society they could, in the interests of
promoting "state-to-state friendship with the Soviet Union", temporarily
sublimating the revolutionary advancement of the class interests of workers.
This change in the Comintern line was demonstrated in two events in the
mid-1920s - the British General Strike in 1926 and the defeat of the upsurge of
workers in Shanghai in 1926-7. The betrayal of the General Strike in Britain
fractured the British communists and gave birth to the anti-communist,
anti-Soviet British left. At the CPSU Party Congress in Moscow in 1927, the
Central Committee under Stalin defeated Trotsky's "left deviationism" by a
plurality of 854,000 to 4,000 votes. In exile, Trotsky, instead of abandoning
his fanciful dream of world revolution, stigmatized Soviet policy in this
period as "Stalinist".
Luther a Marxist-Stalinist
Protestantism, as espoused by Martin Luther (1483-1546), was revolutionary
because its doctrines held not merely that abuses in the church must be
reformed but that the Roman Catholic Church itself, even if perfect by its own
ideals, was wrong in principle. Protestants aimed not to restore the medieval
church from Renaissance abuses, but to overthrow it and replace it with a
church founded on principles drawn from a contemporary reading of the Bible.
Such principles should not be decreed by the church but by the individual
believer's conscience.
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