Those who doubt the malign influence of Stalinism should read Seamus Milne’s carefully worded eulogy of the Chinese ruling class in the Guardian on 1 July (here).
Milne describes the benefits of “China’s economic model”, slipping in a gratuitous reference to its constitution, which states China is a “socialist state led by the working class”.
Strikes are apparently normally “discouraged”, rather than the more accurate description - generally repressed. Milne states correctly that the recent strikes have been organised “outside of official union structures”, omitting that these “official unions” are state-run labour fronts with no independent role for representing workers.
For Milne, the response of the authorities to these strikes “has verged on the supportive”. Apparently the “Hu Jintao leadership” is determined to tackle inequality and increase consumption. Milne also falls back on his usual lesser evil argument, that China’s model is “a powerful challenge to the Washington consensus” – rather than in symbiosis with it.
But Milne goes much further than this. He suggests that there are “signs of a resumption of reform socialism”, and of the “restoration of the working class as the leading class”. This is pure fantasy. The idea that the Chinese rulers maintain a socialist essence should have been buried after their repression of workers and students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In fact, it should have been buried decades before, from the very start of China's Stalinist regime in 1949.
Milne states that the strikes have been against rampant exploitation, but fails to draw the necessary conclusions. If the strikes are about exploitation, this means one class is extracting surplus labour from another. Chinese capitalists, in cahoots with multinationals and backed by the Chinese state are exploiting Chinese workers. China is a class society – indeed a capitalist society, not a better or more progressive economic system.
The strikes represent a great hope – the emergence of a powerful Chinese working class. This movement will have to beware of fake lefts “friends” and apparent fellow travellers like Milne.
