“Success” for China. And for China's workers?

Click on to the website of the Socialist Action group and the banner at the top of the Home page tells you what to expect. There is no place here for Marx, Trotsky, or Lenin. But enough space for pictures of Malcolm X, Chavez, Castro and Guevara.

That certainly sets the scene nicely.

Socialist Action was one of the splinters that emerged in the mid-1980s from the break-up of International Marxist Group (from 1982 renamed Socialist League). Inside the IMG the faction that eventually became the current Socialist Action group had traditionally been led by John Ross.

Socialist Action was launched as the Socialist League’s newspaper when the organisation entered the Labour Party in the early 1980s. Later, after the Socialist League had split apart, SA was published as the magazine of the Ross group. Now, although the group still exists, all that is publicly visible is their website.

Buried, secretively, in the Labour Party and various campaigns, by the late 80s SA had become a small, ultra-factional sect which attempted to hitch itself to prominent leftists and soft-leftists in the UK labour movement. They gave praise and support to Stalinist and “anti-imperialist” movements and states in the wider world.

Ken Livingstone

Although still nominally Trotskyists, SA became well-known backroom workers for the fake-left Ken Livingstone. SA’s day-to-day labour movement practice would not distinguish them from most run-of-the-mill Labour MPs.

In the 1990s Ross lived in Russia, semi-detached from SA, and for the past decade or more he has been confusing himself in China.

When the Berlin Wall came down at the end of 1989 and popular bourgeois democratic revolutions swept the Stalinists from power across Eastern Europe we helped the anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist left, and celebrated. SA, however, editorialised (issue 7): “The destruction of at least some of the workers’ states in Eastern Europe, and the imperialist reunification of Germany are both the greatest defeats suffered by the working class since World War 2.”

So, East Germany, where one in seven people were caught up as part of the Stasi’s secret police network, and Stalinist Hungary, where a workers’ revolution was crushed in 1956, were workers’ states, and without any qualification.

And this was not just any defeat, you understand, but bigger even than the imposition of apartheid in South Africa, the fascistic Chilean coup of 1973, and the coming to power of Khomeini in Iran. That comment placed SA on the far, uncritical end of the very broadly-defined socialist left; they were less critical of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe than most Communist Parties.

When the end came in the Soviet Union, with a feeble, rump Stalinist coup attempt in August 1991, SA’s cover (issue 12-13) had the headline: “1917, 1941, 1991 - the Russian Revolution fights for its life.” SA sided with those attempting the coup and attempting to preserve “nationalised property relations.”

Yes, in 1991 the Russian revolution still lived, apparently. Despite Stalin’s purges, the Ukrainian famine, Gulag prison camps, the creation of a totalitarian state within which the working class had no power, the emergence of the Soviet Union as a colonial-imperialist boss state — despite all this, the Russian workers’ revolution was still alive. And the Bolsheviks’ representatives on Earth were now a group of rusty old generals attempting a coup to save the Revolution!

Academic

Now Ross is an academic at a Chinese university, writing in enthusiastic praise (bit.ly/ross-c) of the glorious achievements of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Ross continues the SA tradition of sycophancy to those whose bandwagon they intend to hitch themselves. He certainly knows whose arse he needs to press his face into if he wants to keep his job at a Chinese university.

He states his “deepest appreciation” for “the leadership of the CPC.”

Ross’s English language blog is called Learning from China. And what exactly has Mr Ross learnt from China? (Apart from that being Beijing’s useful idiot pays well.) Ross’s thesis is this: if the USSR’s leadership had followed the Chinese route the USSR would not have fallen. Instead, using the genius-strategy of Mao and Deng, the USSR would have been able to build a powerful socialism, just as the Chinese are now doing.

Ross’s 7,000-word article is also full of praise for himself. You must understand, you see, that John Ross is an important Marxist theoretician. Why? Because he tells us so. Over and over again.

What you won’t find in all that text is any of these words: worker, working class, trade union, class struggle. Because for Ross socialism is something that does not depend on workers, or workers’ freedom and conscious, organised power. For Ross these little people can be ignored, concerned as he is with the battle between the Western free market capitalist system and the anti-imperialists led by China under the Communist Party.

Other words you will not find are: Uyghurs, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, democracy movement, threats against Taiwan, military build-up in South China Sea. Ross ignores these issues which speak of a side of China that apparently does not concern him: the virulent Han-chauvinist, repressive, would-be-totalitarian, imperialist Chinese Communist Party.

Patriotism

Except that is not quite true. Occasionally Ross praises Chinese patriotism. That should not come as any surprise to those Ross-watchers who noticed, in the 1990s, Ross advocating a red-brown alliance (Stalinist Communists allying with far right nationalists) in Russia. In this article he again praises Russian patriots.

It is not necessary for Ross to advocate a red-brown alliance in China now, of course, because the CPC already exists as a unified “red-brown” party.

Ross’s long-winded, tiresome article amounts to this:

The “overall balance sheet of the USSR… is overwhelmingly positive.” Why? Because the USSR “defeated German Nazism saving Europe from fascism [and] its impact was decisive in the destruction of the colonial Empires.”

The USSR’s “disintegration” was a “geopolitical disaster”. Capitalist restoration led to misery in Russia. The Chinese avoided this disaster due to the magnificence of their CPC leadership. Why did China succeed when the USSR failed? In China not everything is nationalised; after 1978 they developed a “socialist market economy” and China is open to the world market. “China after 1978 achieved literally unprecedented economic success.”

How was this possible? “Mao Zedong, with Lenin, [is] the greatest political thinker of the 20th century and “Mao Zedong Thought”, as it is known in China, [is] a fundamental contribution to Marxism.” And, as a consequence, “Deng Xiaoping … who achieved this [economic miracle] … saved world socialism.”

Ross argues that a fully nationalised, “collectivised” economy in Russia in the 1930s was a good thing because it allowed the USSR to beat the Nazis. Back in his Trotskyist past the fully nationalised Soviet economy of the 1930s was what had allowed him to call the USSR a “workers’ state”.

OK, but without a fully nationalised economy, why is China socialist? It is not clear from what Ross writes, but he seems to suggest that the Chinese Maoist revolution of 1949 would not have happened without the Russian Revolution. And since the USSR was socialist, ergo, so is China. Fill in the logical gaps yourself.

Besides, it says it is socialist and has a red flag — so, there you go.

Nationalisation

Ross manages to consider the creation of the nationalised economy in the USSR without mentioning how that economy was created: the abolition of trade unions, workers’ control and Party democracy, police state terror and the murder of Trotsky and the socialist opposition.

And, indeed, the USSR defeated the German Nazis, yes, but then imposed its own totalitarian rule in the areas it overran, presiding over its own colonial empire in Eastern Europe. The USSR sent troops into Czechoslovakia to crush a dissident Stalinist movement and fought a long and bloody colonial war in Afghanistan. The USSR was in opposition to US imperialism not because it was a socialist, internationalist state, but because it was an alternative, competing imperialism.

Of course the reintroduction of capitalism in the former USSR was a nightmare for many workers. Ross is right about that. Where he’s wrong is here: supporting democratic and workers’ rights in the USSR does not imply we favour the wild gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years. Or any type of capitalism.

Ross suggests Chinese workers avoided suffering, because, apparently, they avoided capitalism. In the early 1960s, 30 million people died of starvation during the deranged Great Leap Forward campaign. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, hundreds of thousands more died as the Maoists struggled to keep power. 3,000 were killed in the Tiananmen protests of June 1989.

These were spectacular high points of very visible horror, coercion and terror. But day-to-day life is regimented and organised from above.

The CPC has caused enormous suffering, regulating in its own interests the press, the internet, the writing of the current news and past history and the curricula of educational institutions. Religious worship, national minorities are monitored and policed. Families are told how many children they can have and where they can and cannot live. People are ruined, sacked, disappeared or jailed for stepping out of line. Unions are banned and strikes are repressed. Towns, suburbs and villages can be destroyed without consultation to make way for roads, new factories or vanity projects.

Everywhere there is bureaucratic abuse and corruption. And Chinese workers have certainly not avoided capitalist exploitation. The CPC has allowed vast capitalist expansion, while maintaining a strict monopoly of political power and an enormous, efficient, brutal surveillance-state which allows the CPC to corral, arrest, intimidate and even expropriate members of the private capitalist class.

China now is now aggressively constructing a network across the world, drawing in neighbouring states through Belt and Road. It is rapidly building up sophisticated modern armed forces.

Behind all this guff from John Ross is the question: how do we measure progress and socialism? Economic “success” achieved at the expense of the working class is not socialist success. Chinese state power used to repress the working class and protect the elite’s privilege is not socialist power. The metric of socialism is workers’ democracy and liberty. By that measure China fails.

Ross manages to write his nonsense without managing to understand he is doing some damage to his humanity. Presumably, somewhere, in the back of his head, he can remember becoming a Trotskyist. Maybe he can even recall why he did so: because the world urgently needs solidarity and working class struggle in the fight against repression and exploitation.

And now what is he? What have SA become? Boosters and mercenaries for Xi and the CPC.