21.11.2002

Capitalist characteristics

Step forward Mr Hu Jintao, newly 'elected' general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC). At the conclusion of the 16th Party Congress held in the Great Hall of the People, against a bizarre backdrop of painted mountain scenery, and surrounded by hundreds of pots of chrysanthemums, Hu and the eight other members of the expanded standing committee of the politburo emerged for the first time into the public gaze - in strict order of precedence. Dressed in identical dark suits and red ties, they appeared to be taking part in a grotesque beauty contest, bowing politely, smiling and applauding one another with restrained enthusiasm. But there was no doubt about the winner. Hu was the only one to utter a word. His lengthy encomium on the great achievements of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, were received in reverential silence, after which he himself received the stipulated prolonged applause. As Jiang had said earlier, this was "a congress of unity, a congress of victory and a congress of progress ... The party's central leadership has successfully realised the transformation from the old to the new." For the first time in his long career as an apparatchik (including, let us not forget, his stint as the butcher of Tibet) Hu was addressing the assembled foreign press, all 500 of them. No worries. The one journalist (from Hong Kong) who attempted to ask a question was hastily silenced. Moments before, all 2,114 delegates to congress had risen to their feet and unanimously acclaimed the new, fourth-generation team of the CPC's leadership. The orchestrated cries of "no dissent" were deafening. How to assess the significance of this change at the helm? Some bourgeois commentators have spoken in terms of a "purge" of the old guard, of Jiang being "ousted". That is far from the truth. At last July's celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of the CPC's foundation it was clear that Hu was the anointed successor. No lesser person than Deng Xiaoping had decreed it, against the wishes of Jiang, who had wanted a trusted member of his Shanghai mafia to get the job. But the emphasis, in reality, is on continuity, the continuity of China's path to full blown capitalism, albeit "with Chinese characteristics". For this, somewhat younger and more energetic blood was obviously needed. Hu is a sprightly 59 and the oldest member of the new standing committee is a mere 67. The average age of the central committee (comprising 194 men and just four women) has dropped to an amazing 55. Yet, far from having departed the political scene to cultivate his garden, Jiang is paramount leader and retains the position of chairman of the central military commission, a vital job in what is effectively a military-police dictatorship. His most trusted adviser, Zeng Qinghong, has the party's secretariat in his grasp and the majority of the new-hatched standing committee members owe everything to Jiang's patronage - most of all Jia Quinglin, the Beijing party boss, who, even in this most closed of closed societies is publicly and notoriously corrupt. Hu is clearly on probation and his task is to ensure China's successful journey along the path of "accelerated socialist modernisation": ie, capitalism. Regiments of Sinologists, like their now redundant Kremlinologist forebears, may continue to earn a good living by analysing the minutiae of Beijing politics - who's in and who's out - but what matters to us is trying to grasp the realities of the political and economic situation, the balance of class forces, in a state of which we perforce know very little. Although a majority of enterprises across most economic sectors remain for the time being under state ownership and control, around 50% of China's GDP is now accounted for by private sector firms employing wage labour. Foreign enterprises, like Unilever, to name but one, have not been slow to exploit the cheap labour and favourable tax climate afforded them by inward investment of capital. The chances are that your Walls Ice Cream Viennetta or Cornetto, purchased at the local supermarket, was produced in China, by workers earning pennies and often labouring 16 hours a day, seven days a week. The drive towards capitalist relations of production, whether under the aegis of foreign or domestic capital, has seen wide-scale social disruption: mass movement of labour from the countryside into the towns and cities, with a consequent gulf between rural and urban wages and living standards - many families in the countryside survive only on the strength of what their sons and daughters employed in the cities can send back. On top of that there is the growing urban unemployment and deprivation, as the labour market becomes saturated, which is made all the more acute given the effective collapse of the old social welfare system. Until last week, where the Chinese 'comrades' were concerned, there was no such thing as 'capitalism' in China. It was a case of Alice in wonderland: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." Hence, the extraction of surplus value from exploited workers in a proto-capitalist market economy was simply a matter of 'developing the productive forces'. Now we learn that capitalists are to be admitted into membership of the CPC. Much was made of this by the bourgeois press, as a step forward towards the 'normalisation' of Chinese society. On one level, of course, this is a significant development, in so far as it perfectly symbolises the contradictions that run from top to bottom in the ideology of the party and in the so-called People's Republic of China as a whole. Like Shen Wenrong, reputably the third richest entrepreneur in China, you can now be both a capitalist and a communist: "I don't care about being a millionaire; all I want is to do a good job for my country ... I will build the world's biggest steel mill for my country" (The Times November 12). So, without any sense of irony, this was the congress that formally embraced capitalism as the only way of saving communism in the most populous state on the planet. But on another level, it is, of course, true to say that the CPC had already objectively represented the interests of capital for some considerable time and already had capitalists in its ranks. After all, thanks to a pervasive culture of nepotism and guanxi ('relationships') in general, a large number of bosses of former state enterprises (now privatised) were long-standing party members, with corrupt tentacles reaching to the top of the CPC leadership. Having enriched themselves and their friends beyond the dreams of avarice, they can now come in from the cold and bask in their role as 'communists' and tribunes of the people. As yet, there are reportedly no 'official' capitalists on the central committee of the party, but that can only be a matter of time and is in a sense irrelevant. The logic of the process is inexorable. Scanning the pages of the left press, I looked for commentary on the 16th Congress but found very little. Even the Communist Party of Britain's Morning Star restricted itself to a few column inches of agency-style reporting. Perhaps the total capitulation of the CPC to capitalism finally stuck in their gullet? In truth, only the most dunderheaded geriatric Sinophile or political necrophiliac could find anything upon which to comment favourably. The surreal nature of the Beijing regime's claims to be pursuing 'socialism' rest on a consciously and transparently dishonest distortion of Marxism. The importance of sound theory as the basis of revolutionary political praxis could not be made more clear. What, for example, does the category 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' - the political, economic and social basis of the of the PRC as a state formation - actually mean? In his wisdom, paramount leader Jiang tells us that it rests on "Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory" - especially the latter, which constitutes "the best continuation and creative development of Mao Zedong Thought under the new historical conditions" (quotations from Jiang Zemin's speech at the 80th anniversary meeting - passim). Why is Deng's theory so important to the CPC? Because his "four modernisations" (in industry, agriculture, science/technology and defence), codified at the third plenum of the 11th central committee of the CPC in December 1978, represented a fundamental shift in the direction of 'socialist modernisation': ie, the introduction of 'market socialism', a process that continues to this day. From the 1950s onwards, when Deng joined forces with such 'pragmatists' as Liu Shaoqui, he consistently argued for the decentralisation of the economy and for state enterprises to be run with a free hand on the basis of cost-accounting by skilled technical and managerial elites. Deng's 'pragmatism' meant that he was purged from the top party leadership on several occasions, but, following Mao's death in 1976 and the subsequent rout of the Gang of Four, his position as paramount leader eventually gave him the power openly to extend the "four modernisations" in the direction of a mixed economy. The theoretical justification for Deng's revisionist Maoism and hence for "socialism with Chinese characteristics", reiterated in its latest version by Jiang, derives from a consciously distorted reading of the central tenets of Marx's historical materialism, specifically with regard to the dialectical interrelationship between productive forces and production relations and between base and superstructure. First let us look at the classic formulation in Marx's own writings: "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will: namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness ... At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution" (K Marx A contribution to the critique of political economy Moscow 1970, p20f). It should be clear to anyone that at the centre of Marx's conception there lies not primarily a technical-economic question, but a political one - the question of class struggle and revolution. The ever intensifying contradiction between dynamically developing productive forces and increasingly stultified production relations results in a situation where the ruling class is no longer able, and the oppressed classes are no longer willing, to be ruled in the old way. The inevitable outcome is a revolution and the supersession of the old ruling class. Specifically in terms of capitalism, it means that the socialisation of labour reaches a point where the proletariat, through its consciousness and self-activity, emancipates itself from oppression and alienation and, in liberating itself, liberates the whole of humanity. Historically the role of the Communist Party is to act as the vanguard of the advanced working class and its allies in bringing this situation about. Of course, neither Deng nor Jiang could deny this fundamental tenet of Marxism, nor the realities of the 1949 revolution. Jiang acknowledges that the victorious CPC "abrogated the privileges of imperialism in China, eliminated exploitation and oppression by the landlord class and the bureaucrat-capitalist class, changed the comprador feudal production relations and the rotten political superstructure rooted in such an economic base, and established a new political superstructure with the people's democratic dictatorship as the core". In the same breath, however, Jiang asserts - in a characteristic and constantly reiterated formulation - that "Productive forces are the most dynamic and the most revolutionary factor". The CPC in 1949 is depicted, bizarrely, not as the vanguard party of a revolutionary mass of proletarians and peasants, liberating themselves from the yoke of oppression and exploitation, but as "the representative of China's advanced productive forces at its very inception". Obviously there is a truth here. It was necessary for the CPC to carry out the "socialist transformation of agriculture, handicraft industry, capitalist industry and commerce in order to establish socialist relations of production, and, on that economic base, bring the socialist superstructure to perfection", as Jiang puts it. But in a way that imparts an entirely one-sided, static and undialectical character to the interrelationship, Jiang repeatedly emphasises that the primary purpose of the revolution, the overriding objective of the CPC then and now, was and is "to further release and develop productive forces". The political reason for this one-sidedness, and for the wooden, literal-minded application of the base-superstructure model becomes clear: "It is for the same purpose that we have since the third plenum of the 11th party central committee carried out reforms and opening up policies to adjust and reform the part of the socialist relations of production that is incompatible with the demand of the development of the productive forces and to adjust and reform the part of socialist superstructure that is incompatible with the economic base" (my emphasis). When translated into plain English, this core element in "Deng Xiaoping Theory" means the recognition in the late 1970s that the old bureaucratic, command-administrative methods of the centrally 'planned' economy were not working. Economic stagnation, with its consequent effects in terms of political and social instability, was (correctly) perceived as a threat to the hegemony of the CPC over the working class and the rest of the population. Hence, the need to "adjust and reform" the system by moving back to the market. Jiang's own contribution to the theory, known as "the three representations", was first published in 2000. It sets out the role of the CPC as advancing the productive forces, advancing Chinese culture (ie, "localising" Marxism by infusing it with "the splendid thought of the Chinese nation") and representing "the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people". On one level, the latter formula could simply be taken as affirming the CPC's role as representing the proletariat and peasantry, who do numerically constitute the overwhelming majority of the population. But, on another level, it resembles the claims first made by Nikita Khrushchev that the CPSU had become "the party of the entire people". In this sense, it is about giving the CPC a new identity and legitimating its hold on power. On the basis of "Deng Xiaoping Theory", can the CPC theoretically be described as a Communist Party in any meaningful sense? No, it cannot. Not unless your definition of a Communist Party sees one of the party's tasks as encouraging millions of workers and peasants to sell themselves to capitalists as wage slaves. Can the PRC theoretically be described as a socialist or workers' state? Only by those (mainly from the Trotskyite tradition) who make a fetish of property forms. In China, they will tell us, most of the productive forces remain in state ownership. But it is surely obvious that this apparent social ownership of the means of production is purely formal. Ownership of nationalised industry may have been formally vested in the hands of the proletariat, but, given the absence of even the most primitive forms of democracy, control over it is exercised exclusively by the party and the bureaucratic apparatus. That is precisely the point - democracy. Without democracy there can be no socialism, no working class power, and in China there is no democracy. Power is exercised neither by nor on behalf of the working class. The vapid banalities of "Deng Xiaoping Theory" and Jiang's "three representatives" constituted the theoretical cornerstone of Hu's claim to be leading the CPC into a 'socialist' future, but it is obvious that these sterile formulations can do nothing to resolve the massive contradictions that face the country, nor can they disguise the fact that the CPC itself has been the author of a counterrevolution over which, sooner or later it, seems doomed to lose control. Maurice Bernal