Whither China

The worker of East Asia can see their peasant past, their proletarian present and their bleak future through the same eyes

If you are a Maoist or a Trotskyist or a Left Communist or an anarchist in the English-speaking world you probably think that, by this late date, the Chinese Revolution of 1949 has been grossly betrayed. The socialist developmental state under Mao has given way to the state capitalist model inaugurated by Deng. The Chinese masses who shook the world through social revolution in the 20th century have exited the stage of history, to be replaced by a party technocracy pursuing national renewal through a private-public partnership with international capital. 

It is widely considered naïve to believe that the process of social change inaugurated in 1949 is unfinished and that the masses might have a revolutionary part still to play in China. For the Western supporters of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics the idea is downright criminal! With life expectancy, literacy, and income on the rise, hasn’t the Reform and Opening policy been vindicated? Why upset the apple cart when a multipolar world of harmonious development beckons? Why even mention the Chinese proletariat when the party state seems to have overcome the social antagonisms of capital accumulation; when it works for the Chinese working classes, in their interests? Why even try to return to shopworn phrases about proletarian internationalism, the abolition of the wage system, and all that claptrap when the real movement that abolishes the present state of things is the peaceful construction of socialism in one country and its midwifery of a new multipolar world? 

I would argue that naivety lies not with those who think the revolution is unfinished, but with those who think the state or the party, any state or party, can overcome the contradictions unleashed in the course of capitalist development. The accumulation of capital is always, whether in private enterprise or state-owned enterprise, the production of its negation – the proletariat – at the same time. While the economic gains made over the last several decades have led to incredible economic growth, they have also brought hundreds of millions of Chinese workers into the labor market where their freedom from peasant life has been won, but their freedom from the imperatives of capital has been lost. If the current world system, most notable in the great power rivalry between the US and Chinese states, is left to its own devices it will bring more war, more exploitation, more pandemics and more misery unto us all. Only the global proletariat can put a stop to this and the road towards reaching that old goal might just begin again in China. Paradoxically, ‘the great betrayal’ of the capitalist reforms may have opened just this path. 

Regardless, to sit thousands of miles away and judge China’s recent by some abstract moral-ethical-political standard is lazy and, quite frankly, conceited. I write this essay because I’m pretty disappointed in how the Anglo left has confronted recent defeats, most notably the demise of neo-social democracy under Bernie and Corbyn, by making endless debates about China a means of deferring the important process of constructing a form of politics adequate to fighting for socialism in the present moment. It is possible to do two things at once: to appreciate the great gains made over the last several decades in China, but also to point to the necessity of overcoming capitalism with Chinese characteristics.  

Deng’s Great Betrayal?

To see why the old mole might be digging itself away, we need to interrogate how we view China and its recent history. We should bear in mind that the impetus for social, political and economic change in China has always been a dialectic between the masses and the Communist Party of China within the changing context of global affairs and economic terrain. That so many on the Western left view the problem of socialism in technocratic, national terms is an understandable error born of the defeat of the last cycle of global working class struggle from the 1960s-1970s and the long economic malaise since that time.  But the error still has to be corrected sometime.

The truth is that the socialist developmental state in China had reached its limits by the 1970s. The mismatch between agricultural and industrial production that was meant to be solved, as in the USSR, with increasing the productivity of the latter to spur the productivity of the former had clearly failed. Agriculture, despite the inspirational collectivization/communization campaigns of the Chinese peasantry starting in the 1930s-40s, remained largely unmechanized which meant an absolute limit to social surplus in food and labor available for state-driven industrialization. The loss of technical expertise and access to means of production in the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s only compounded these limitations. Mass drives for production (the disastrous Great Leap Forward), popular political campaigns to root out capitalist roaders (the chaotic Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) and the like were insufficient to remedy this. A glimmer of an alternative perhaps existed in 1960s workers' self-activity like the (second) Shanghai Soviet, but by the 1970s what remained of the communist rank-and-file at the point of production and within the party was exhausted and demoralized. These are the facts of the situation; the sober context in which the Great Betrayal of Deng and his neoliberal wreckers occurred.

If the Dengist retreat was overdetermined by economics, politics and geopolitics, then what do we make of the last five decades of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics? More and more, and especially since the abortion of the democratic socialist renewal in the US and UK, leftist commentators have made a political virtue out of what party leaders in period of Neoliberal ascendance took as a necessity. Nowadays, everyone who claims radical politics  is forced to either defend the state capitalist program or denounce it. What is at stake is unclear since the left has no power to do anything about it at the moment except judge from afar. (And post spicy takes on social media.) Are we forced to judge China as a capitalist state like all others or can we analyze what’s been accomplished, what’s been created, on its own terms? What if China is a capitalist state similar to all others, but it is exactly what's been accomplished by the working class in the last few decades that points towards potentially revolutionary conclusions?

What is China: A Brief Historiography

So, what has China become? Is it on the path to socialism still under the guidance of the party? Is it a lost cause, the veneer of Marxist ideology used to justify the aggrandizement of a party elite? Was there something historically necessary about the phase Chinese society is going through, or has the revolution been betrayed? The truth is that there’s two distinct ways to look at the recent history of China. It can be viewed from the standpoint of historical materialism, on the one hand, and the position of general historical development, on the other. As we will see, both offer plausible explanations for what’s happening in China, but the economic engine that drives all sorts of liberal optimism about the telos of history is running pretty low on oil.

But what do I mean by general historical development? This consists of the patterns of the expansion of human potential – or dare call it freedom, if you will – measured in material prosperity and social complexity unfolding through time and across space. This is the positive side of development, that which makes capitalism a historically progressive force, casting off the fetters of feudal relations and the backward isolation of petty production.

Now, liberal and conservative historians working in the whiggish vein (historiography that presents world history as the unfolding towards the telos of liberal, democratic freedoms) will condemn what they consider the ideological excesses of the revolutionary period – the famines, the political violence, etc. They will piss and moan about state subsidy for enterprises, public ownership of business, currency and capital controls, etc. But even the most anti-communist among them are forced to admit that the eighty-year process of development (at first with few private markets, then later on with many private markets) has returned China to a place of parity with the West that is more in keeping with long-term comparative development.

We may not see the end point of history as the liberal democratic state, as the whigs do, but we should look upon this remarkable revival of Chinese civilization with humility. The potential for broad-based, if unequal, material prosperity has arrived on this historical scene with the advent of capitalist social relations, yet again. On a certain level it seems as though the official doctrine of Marxism-Leninism, through the cunning of reason, has risen to become not a universal ideology of world revolution, but a replacement ideology for a particular type of economic and political renew of an ancient nation, a policy framework for balanced capitalist development.

The Great Divergence between East and West has been obliterated with just a few hundred years of disorder in between. Seven hundred million people have been raised out of poverty. We’ve seen epochal increases to life expectancy, literacy and life-chances. From the point of view of general historical development this is a remarkable achievement and a positive development. Apparently, the ruthless accumulation and exploitation machine known as capital still had some historical work to do. There are many on the left today, some of whom call themselves communists, who point to these achievements as though they are victories for socialism as opposed to the results of the law-driven logic of capital doing what it does in concert with a strong developmentalist state. There are plenty of Whig communists out there, it seems, for whom Olof Plame, prime minister of Sweden in the post-war period, has as great a claim to the mantle of socialism as Deng Xioaping.  

This whiggish history is all well and good, but what of historical materialism? (This is, after all, the preferred mode of analysis in Chinese universities today, so we should take it seriously.) If the return to the allocation of social surplus, goods and labor power by markets was a retreat, no matter how necessary, do we give up on China as a socialist project? In a nation where the ruling party claims its interests are identical with the class, does the proletariat as an active historical force still matter? Now that China has pulled back from even the rhetoric of internationalism, does the working class have any role left to play? Does the Chinese state capitulation to capital mean an end to the communist dream of a free association of producers, in the withering away of the state, et al? 

Wherein the whiggish view of history sees the accumulation of capital and state capacity as the unproblematic unfolding of human freedom, the communist position acknowledges this positive side of historical development while at the same time pointing to its limits. After all, what is the expansion of capital except the simultaneous production of its contradiction – the proletariat? And what is the expansion of the role of the state in regulating capital’s contradictions except humanity’s  grudging self-realization that the real material limits of producing the necessities of life cannot be overcome through the blind workings of the law of value but can only be overcome politically. Global trends in governance over the last fifty years have shown markedly that the bourgeoisie would rather blast and ruin this world before investing in capital goods at scale sufficient to feed, cloth and shelter humanity.

Opening the floodgates of capital accumulation, whether private or state-centric, brings in its wake a torrent of social conflicts and contradictions that can be held at bay only temporarily and with great effort. State functionaries or regulators might, as in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, be able to inflate a massive housing bubble with $600 billion in investment and then, fifteen years later, use their power over markets and local governments to slowly deflate the same bubble without blowing up the financial infrastructure. These same forces may be able to use the hukou system–the internal passport regime that locks rural and urban workers in place–as a stopgap welfare system and partial fetter on social mobility to foster proletarianization of hundreds of millions of peasants. The party apparatus may proceed in shutting down whole swaths of legacy state-run industrial production in what is now the Iron Rust Bowl to make way for special economic zones of private accumulation in the Pearl River Delta and later elsewhere. The same powers may be able to capture the fruits of surplus borne by foreign capital made domestic, and direct it towards mass campaigns of health, education and other social goods. They may even take a bunch of this surplus and lend it out for development projects across Africa and Asia. The governing class may do all these things when the dynamism of capital accumulation plants the seeds for the expanded development of social production and civil society.

But, as we’ve seen time and time again, the brooms always come for the sorcerer’s apprentice. The accumulation of capital always, always, presupposes the accumulation of misery for the direct producers–the only collective social agent with the power to make this world and remake it. It likewise presupposes the forceful dislocation of millions and a mass rupture with old ways of living and being. And here is where the historical materialist must part ways with the productivist market-socialism-in-one-country enjoyers and the whiggish upholders of the global capitalist order. The same processes that bear progress within the capitalist order likewise give birth to the potential agent of its destruction. 

China’s Working Class

China is a special case, if only because of the unique role history has assigned its working class. One of the notable aspects of capital’s self-development over the last several hundred years is how its cycles of investment-maturation-disinvestment or - that is to say, proletarianization-socialization-immiseration – have grown (necessarily) larger, with greater surplus value needed to sustain profitability while the temporal waves of the cycle have become (necessarily) shorter. Uneven and combined development means that whole peripheral regions of the world like East Asia can leapfrog over the core. A process of accumulation that once took generations now barely exceeds a fixed capital cycle of twenty to thirty years. The ‘maturation’ of economies (which is another way to say the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as whole nations industrialize) has happened quicker and more spectacularly in China, South Korea and Vietnam over the last generation or two than the slower cycles of accumulation of the UK in the 1820s-1914 or the US from 1914-1968. The velocity of change has increased abruptly. Sweeping across the globe from rural Lancaster of the nineteenth century to Guangdong today, capital has progressively and ruthlessly annihilated space through time.

In historical terms this means that the high point of accumulation, in which the working class comes into its own (as a class-in-itself), and its low point of deindustrialization, was separated by several generations in the West. The English working class that built the labor movement in its period of industrial expansion and the one that fought a desperate rearguard struggle against Thatcherite deindustrialization were separated by over a hundred years. But, in China and East Asia, the self-expanding, compounding logic of capital has compressed this dynamic into just a few decades. The worker of East Asia can see their peasant past, their proletarian present and their bleak future through the same eyes.

Only those on the left who see a one-to-one identity between the class and the party, or the class and the state, can be optimistic about the possibility for a smooth transition to socialism through the CCP apparatus. If there can be any hope for an overcoming of capitalist social relations, in China or elsewhere, it’s absolutely not in technocratic measures to be employed by the policy-makers in the Party, the potential for the CCP to hit the Communism Button sometime in the 2050s, nor that the already-faltering Belt and Road Initiative might lead to harmonious capitalist development around the pole of Chinese capitalism. As in 1871, 1917 or in 1968 it will be the self-organization and self-activity of the class that moves history.

This does not mean there cannot be a role for the Party in this process. As recent history has shown, despite the real or perceived ‘authoritarian’ tendencies of the CCP and the lack of formal democracy, the Party is often attuned to the mood of the Chinese working class more than other political formations, certainly Western liberal ones. This could be seen both in the immediate response to COVID-19 and in the lifting of Zero-COVID policies last year in the face of mass working class protest. While the governing class, riven by the same internal factional interests of any governing class, dithered as COVID first spread in 2019, the organic initiative of workers, in this case to self-organize the voluntary distribution of goods for the community, proved powerful and effective. Then the party, fearing independent initiative, cut out the organic working class leadership and scaled-up operations under its own auspices. Fast forward to 2022, when the burden of COVID Zero had become too much to bear for the working class, the working class takes to the streets in mass protest and within a week the party concedes to a chaotic unwinding of its formerly ironclad health policies.

There exists the potential for some sort of dialectical process between the class and the Party (or elements of the Party) in the face of the coming global crisis of capital. The Chinese working class remains the most militant in the world. Their mass strikes of the 2000s-10s, what can be seen as the moment of peak proletarianization, when the rural reserve army of labor was finally exhausted, upending the entire cheap labor developmental model of Chinese industrialization. This is all in recent memory. How will the promises of inclusive private development and technocratic state capitalism fare when the accumulation engine, the wellspring of all social dynamism in the bourgeois system, grinds to a halt in the face of the impending debt and profit crisis? The legitimacy of the whole Dengist model predicated on the influx of foreign capital to fund social development will be up in the air.

Will the Chinese working class take mass unemployment and spiraling debts lying down or will the mismatch between the promises of development versus the reality of dispossession lead them to storm heaven yet again? Is the ancient train of popular upheavals in China6 over now that the masses are urban workers and not communal peasants tied to the land? Will Xi and the rest of the leadership remain committed to markets or will popular action force their hand? Or even their overthrow?

These are big question that hangs over the near future in China, but they hang over our heads as well. What is China but the workshop of the world, the horse that leads the cart of global production? What is the Chinese working class but an image of ours own past and present mirrored back upon us? What are the attempts of the Chinese governing class to contain the wild contradictions of capital within the iron cage of the state but the selfsame rearguard actions of our own ruling class in the face of the long crisis since the 1970s?

This is where general historical development and historical materialism meet. Through the soft teleology of capital’s self-propelling dynamic, through the process of accumulation/proletarianization, the Chinese working class has joined the rest of us, the workers of the world, in one collective mass united by the sinews of global production. They also join us in a worldwide crisis of the economy, of society, of politics, and of the future itself. If there is any place on earth where labor’s self-propelling dynamic towards mass revolutionary struggle might take hold it is China.

The Stakes

Look across the landscape of despair in the West: the wars, declining living standards, and corrupt ineptitude of the ruling classes. China is the only place on Earth where the dreams of a better future still seem to resonate, where optimism still has a material basis in recent economic dynamism. It is one of the few places where a residue still exists–in state/party institutional form–of the 20th century’s titanic struggle over which class will rule. The question for all of us, then, is not whether the Chinese state can or will or even has the intention to guide the peaceful development of global socialism, but whether the faltering system of nation states and national markets could even contain the surging waves of inchoate struggle that have racked the world since 2008 were the Chinese proletariat to enter history once again.

If there is no fightback against the regime of state capitalist accumulation, and this is a real possibility of course, then China will likely face the fate that the rest of the core has suffered over the last 50 years: decline of manufacturing, rise of the tertiary sector, disaggregation of individual workers and the dislocation of working class communities–a true Neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, as David Harvey called it. There certainly are worse fates than this (as we well know when we view the poverty and underdevelopment of much of the global periphery.) But we’re beginning to see– in the US, UK, Japan, Germany and France–where the road of 21st century capitalist development leads. It is its own kind of trap: Rising anomie, screen addiction, deaths of despair, and the demise of any future orientation which isn’t individual and consumptive.

I actually do believe that it is possible for a counter-systemic movement to come out of the conditions we face in the post-neoliberal Western capitalist core. I’m just not sure how liberatory it might be where the recent political direction has been towards the populist defense of small property and/or radical nationalism. Perhaps counter-systemic struggles in this period have already appeared in the movement of the squares, or the movement of non-movements, or workers identity becoming a barrier to itself, or something we haven’t even recognized yet. Time will tell.

But does China have to go through the same process of ‘maturation’ that the rest of the developed world did from the 70s-00s? Is it even possible to recreate that process on a scale sufficient to post-industrialize the Chinese economy? Where could the new global epicenter of production even move for the mass of Chinese surplus capital to be invested profitably overseas? Will Cold War 2.0 and disglobalization make this question moot? Time will also tell.

It feels like a profound political act to shout ‘Betrayal!’ from the sidelines, on the one hand, or cheer on China’s state-capitalism from the West, on the other. It feels comforting to reenact the great ideological struggles of past centuries from the comfort of the internet. It feels good to feel as though we might be on the winning side of history against a violent and deranged American-led capitalist death machine. But without an organizational capacity of our own, whether in a party or an autonomous workers movement, we really don’t have much say at all about what happens within China, let alone across town. No matter what orientation we as individuals or orgs have, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, by its very stated nature, is not a political model suitable for import. Help will not be coming from Beijing any time soon.

Conclusion

So we are left with a hope that comes from understanding that the contradictory workings of the capitalist system always engender crisis and revolt. We’re left with a faith that capital always produces its antithesis in the working class. We’re left within a global proletariat with more latent power than at any time in human history due to imperialism's tendency to unite production and potential practice across borders. A rebirth and renewal of proletarian internationalism–the kind that might unite the Chinese working class in common struggle with workers up and down supply chains–will not happen automatically. That kind of unity will have to be built out of great and dangerous struggle under very difficult conditions. But if there’s any place for communist politics in the 21st century, if we’ve learned anything from the failures of actually existing socialism, then it will come bearing those old watchwords, ‘the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself.’

The Marxist-Leninists can have their dreams of technocracy overcoming capital’s contradictions; of state capitalism leading to socialism in one country. Of a multipolar world bringing us closer to world revolution. I doubt it, but maybe they are right. They certainly are willing to put a lot of trust in this thesis to the detriment of building the sort of capacity to meet the real challenges we face as the international working class. In the meanwhile militants should look towards, and if the time comes be prepared to ally with the militant social cohort that Chinese economic policy has fostered. The one that might be its own undoing, the lodestar which the rest of the class might be compelled to follow.