This is a special double issue of Communist Fight. We won’t be doing this often, but the reason for this is that this issue contains a major document on China, which elaborates why our international tendency, the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, have changed our position on the class nature of China. Notwithstanding its large capitalist sector, which is subordinate to the central state power, we consider that China remains a deformed workers state. In that sense, we see it as fundamentally different from Russia, where capitalist restoration took place after the catastrophic collapse of proletarian state power after August 1991, which was followed by the even more catastrophic neoliberal economic shock imposed by Yeltsin with his Western advisers.
In our most recent statements since the beginning of Russia’s 2022 defensive Special Military Operation in Ukraine, we noted that capitalism in Russia is fundamentally weak, not so much vis-a-vis imperialism, but in the face of the legacy of three quarters of a century of post-capitalist economic development under the USSR, which was destroyed by counterrevolution in 1991. Yeltsin’s eclipse and the rise of Putin represented elements of the shattered state apparatus partly reconstituting and asserting power over the new capitalism. The form of capitalism that emerged in Russia after 1991 was unable to escape massive deformations that derived from its main productive forces and material assets being created under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the harbinger of a higher mode of production.
However, in China, the main state apparatus was never shattered, nor did anything like the Yeltsin shock happen. The Chinese bureaucracy’s alliance with US imperialism against the USSR led to China not being particularly targeted for the kind of military pressure and economic warfare that caused the USSR to implode. Rather, as imperialist capitalism went into its phase of neoliberal globalisation, the large-scale outsourcing of industry from the imperialist countries to lower wage countries became a major phenomenon. Ironically, this benefitted China enormously, and because the central state was still intact, it was able to take advantage of this phenomenon, with its large-scale capitalist investment, leading to a massive rise in China’s productive capacity. This phenomenon did not just assist a nascent capitalist class in China, it also strengthened the material power of the workers state itself. Without a conscious revolutionary purpose – far from it! – the effect was to fuse the higher elements of imperialist technological advance with a state that still embodies nascent elements of a higher mode of production.
The Bolsheviks under Lenin attempted something analogous with the 1921 NEP, acknowledging that the backwardness of Russia put the proletarian dictatorship in acute danger, and seeking through allowing a significant controlled capitalist element to operate within the workers’ state, to bring about an expansion of the productive forces. For them this was linked to a programme of world revolution. The Chinese Communist Party has no such programme – very far from it. But the impact of this was to lead to a major growth of the productive forces in a deformed workers state that was still basically intact at the same time as imperialist capitalist powers were divesting themselves of much of their domestic industrial power in search of greater profits, reacting to the continuation into the late 20th and then 21st centuries of the tendency Marx noted of the falling rate of profit under capitalism.
This has created another paradoxical situation where world imperialism has become to a degree dependent on a powerful economy which, even though it has a powerful capitalist sector, is basically post-capitalist in its central core. There are huge contradictions within the Chinese deformed workers state, but there are also huge problems for imperialism in this, and both the phenomenon of Trumpism, with its renewed Cold War hysteria against China, and its evident inability to handle China, with the tariff wars, demonstrate imperialism’s own problems. The article concludes by pointing out the complete lack of proletarian internationalism of the CCP leadership, and the need for a rebirth of Bolshevism in a new, and very different world context.
The lead article in this issue chronicles the reactionary viciousness of Starmer’s regime here – its attacks on the most vulnerable sections of the working class, including the disabled and the retired, literally taking from these to finance genocidal imperialist atrocities in Palestine and Ukraine. It chronicles the government’s flagrant attacks on democratic rights, particularly of those protesting the holocaust in Palestine, and the rapid collapse of its political authority, quicker than that of any government in living memory. It noted how discontent is being misdirected though support to the right-wing populist Reform party, but we went to press before Starmer made his ‘island of strangers’ speech echoing Enoch Powell to pander to Reform supporters with anti-migrant bigotry.
We also have an account of some recent problems and conflicts within the Socialist Labour Network, which we are heavily involved in, and the emergence of differences centring on Zionism, culminating in a strange All Members Meeting in April, in which an attempt by our comrades to initiate a campaign against the IHRA pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism was met with a determined, and initially successful, manoeuvre to overrule and dilute the critique we proposed, by one individual, amid spurious allegations of anti-Semitism against ourselves from that individual. This proved to be a pyrrhic victory however, and the individual who insisted on these changes walked away from the SLN when he realised that he had not really won the argument and that we intended to continue to argue for a correct position. During these discussions, the comrade concerned launched an attack on David Miller, the left-wing academic unlawfully sacked by Bristol University, which evidently had the two-fold purpose of reviving the public witchhunt against David Miller for supposed anti-Semitism, thus playing into Zionist hands, and using this as a factional weapon within the SLN. We initiated a statement defending David Miller against this new witchhunting attack, which gathered some prominent endorsements – this is reproduced in this issue also.
We reproduce in this issue the May Day statement signed by the LCFI and ClassConscious this year, which also contains analysis of the international situation as well as brief analyses of the domestic conjunctures in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain and the US. And a short article by a CD comrade examining the role of the US military (Military-Industrial Complex) in enmeshing much of humanity in debt and endless imperialist wars.
