Mao pronounced the establishment of the People's Republic of China on October 1st. 1949. The name itself is significant, as a “People's Republic”, rather than “Workers' Republic”, or “Soviet Republic”. Lenin had pointed out as far back as the 1890's, in his polemics against the Narodniks, that the term “people” ceased to be useful, as soon as large-scale commodity production and exchange, results in the mass of the people being differentiated into bourgeois and proletarians. Not only do these two new distinct classes have different and antagonistic interests, but, they both have antagonistic interests to the remnants of the former popular mass, i.e. the peasants and petty-bourgeois, independent commodity producers. The term “people”, becomes, as Lenin sets out, a bourgeois deception, an abstract category that hides the concrete reality of a society comprised of hostile classes.
The term “People's Republic”, reflected the nature of the social transformation that had taken place in China, and the reality of the Chinese Communist Party, not as a Marxist Workers' Party, but as a Peasant Party, much like the Russian Narodniks, using the cloak of Marxist terminology, and its association with the Stalinist regime in the USSR, now, itself, being a Bonapartist regime that rested on the interests of a middle-class, bureaucratic caste, leaching off the surplus product of the workers', and itself utilising Marxist language to disguise its true nature. That Stalinist regime in the USSR, as a consequence of Stalin's theory of building Socialism In One Country, of attempting to provide itself with “breathing space”, to do so, by compromising with and appeasing imperialism, reflected in the policy of “peaceful coexistence”, was engaged in a global strategic dance with US imperialism.
It is why Stalin had urged Mao to form a coalition government with the KMT, continuing the Popular Front line that had led to disaster in the previous decades. In Eastern and Central Europe, Stalin also attempted to pursue that policy after the end of the war. The first governments in these countries were established, at least superficially, as coalitions, but as the Cold War intensified following the creation of NATO, as an overtly anti-communist military alliance, the USSR was led to respond.
That began in 1947, with the Anglo-French Dunkirk Agreement, expanding in 1948, and culminating in the NATO Treaty, in 1949. With the US signing a peace deal with Japan, and its role in China and Korea, including the US pressure on Japan to surrender Taiwan to Chiang Kai Shek, the divisions became hardened, particularly after the Korean War, and rejection, by the West, of Stalin's proposal, in 1952, to unify Germany, as a neutral state. The states of Eastern and Central Europe became Stalinised on the model of the USSR, and joined together in a defensive military bloc to counter NATO, in 1955 – The Warsaw Pact.
The Chinese “Revolution” of 1949, never was, then, a proletarian, i.e. communist revolution, but from the start, simply a Peasant War, supported by external powers, and ultimately by the Stalinist regime in Moscow, much as with the occupation of Poland in 1939, by the Red Army, and of Eastern and Central Europe after 1945. Where, in Russia, in 1917, there had been an actual revolution, led by the industrial proletariat, in the main urban areas, and drawing behind it the peasantry, no such proletarian revolution occurred in China, or in Central and Eastern Europe, or in Korea, despite the fact that these transformations are described as communist revolutions. In fact, in Korea, it was in the South where an actual popular revolt occurred, against the US Military Government, in 1946.
But, as set out earlier, the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie cannot form the ruling class. There can be no mode of production, in the era of imperialism, based upon peasant or small-scale, independent commodity production. Any such venture results either in economic and social collapse, a failed state, or else, results in an overthrow of the regime, and the installation of a new Bonapartist/military regime, as seen frequently in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia, and the Middle-East. Bonapartist regimes can only move forward, by themselves acting as the agent of industrialisation of the economy, and that can only be done by either serving the interests of capital, or of labour.
In China, the Bonapartist regime of Mao, which headed a Peasant Party, and came to power on the back of a Peasant War, was also constrained in that manner. Given its association with the Stalinist regime in the USSR, the path of its initial industrial development was set. As with the transformations in Eastern Europe, the landlord class was uprooted, as was the bourgeoisie, leaving the small but rapidly growing proletariat as the ruling-class, by default, but, as in the USSR and Eastern Europe, a ruling class that, as with the English bourgeoisie under Cromwell, could not exercise political power, directly, in its own name. I set this out, in 2010, in a series of posts.
Its within this context that the bourgeois national revolutions in the post-war period have to be viewed. That is of the global strategic competition between the USSR and primarily US imperialism, which dominates the NATO military alliance.
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