Sunday 12 May 2024

Lessons Of The Chinese Revolution, What Is Happening In China - Part 1 of 4

What Is Happening In China?


The betrayal of the Chinese workers, by Stalinism, was manifest in its subordination of them to the KMT, in the same way that, today, the pro-NATO “Left” has subordinated the Ukrainian working-class to Zelensky's, corrupt, capitalist regime, and the workers of its own countries to NATO, and its global strategic ambitions, as it marches towards a new imperialist world war. It is epitomised in the grotesque claim that imperialism, and the capitalist state, defends the interests of workers. The same pro-imperialism, also makes the grotesque claim that the Zionist imperialist state has a “right to self-defence” (i.e. the social patriotic cry during WWI, of “defence of the fatherland”) even as it was actively engaged in genocidal attacks on Palestinians!

The reality that the capitalist state does not defend the interests of workers, even when engaged in a war of national independence, as in China, in 1925-7, if ever it needed demonstrating to Marxists, was seen in the coup, organised by the KMT, against those workers, in April 1927, when it slaughtered thousands of them, in Shanghai. The actions of NATO, globally, from its inception to today, show that, contrary to the claims of the social-imperialists of the AWL/USC, it is no friend of workers, but, rather, as with the capitalist states affiliated with it, their most immediate and deadly enemy. As Trotsky, Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht recognised, “The Main Enemy Is At Home”.

Zelensky's regime openly attacks Ukrainian workers and their organisations, and feels confident to do so, even as it appeals to them for support against Putin, precisely because of the craven subordination to it of the interests of Ukrainian workers by their social-patriotic leaders, because it sees them as not vital, given its reliance on its professional armed forces, and the massive backing of NATO imperialism, an imperialism that the social-imperialists, in the West, have also subordinated themselves to. The capitalist states affiliated to NATO have been busy channelling billions of Dollars, into Ukraine, to finance its war against Russia, even as the infrastructure of those countries has been crumbling, their health, social care, education and other welfare services collapse, due to more than a decade of austerity, itself designed to slow economic growth, so as to restrain wages and interest rates, and inflate asset prices.

Those states continue to claim there is no money available to meet the needs of workers in their own countries, as those workers, also, have faced a cost of living squeeze, as prolonged liquidity injections to prop up asset prices, then to finance the idiocy of lockdowns, brought a return of inflation, now, also exacerbated, by a growing global trade war, as the precursor to a shooting war, and by NATO/EU/G7's, boycott and sanctions against Russian energy and food supplies. Those same states have used their muscle, as employers, to make public sector workers bear the brunt of those real wage cuts, as they have held down wage increases, whilst, labour shortages and the drive of private sector companies to employ more workers has pushed up private sector wages.

Is it any wonder that workers, seeing this “Left” back the attacks on them, by imperialism and the capitalist state, desert it, even, sometimes, wrongly throwing their weight behind right-wing populists, who pretend to be defenders of their immediate interests? The workers themselves can see that imperialism and the capitalist state is not their defender, but their enemy, even if the social-imperialists cannot!

Trotsky, describes, in his writings on fascism and imperialism, how the same policies led to the rise of Hitler in Germany, for example. Then too, as Trotsky also, described, the Stalinists and social-imperialists, had used all the same arguments they use today, to dress up defence of the fatherland, in the clothes of national self-determination. The same was seen in 1925-7, in China, following the similar betrayals by Stalinism. It increased the social weight of the peasantry, and petty-bourgeois, in the CP, and, absent the support of the industrial proletariat, to carry through the struggle, it led to a turn to putschism, and guerrilla war, waged by peasants in rural areas.



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