On September 25, 2025, the Platypus Affiliated Society chapter at the Australian National University hosted a public forum on China and The Left. The speakers were Barry York (C21st Left[1]), Christina Veselovskiy (Communist Unity[2]), and Lachlan (Communist Party of Australia). Platypus member Conaugh Dwyer moderated the panel. An edited transcript follows.[3]
Opening Remarks
Barry York: I’d like to begin by sharing an anecdote from a trip to China. I was part of an Australian delegation of 19 people.[4] We were there for a month, 54 years ago in 1971. Among many activities we met with party cadres, and I remember as well sitting at a long wooden table, pots of tea were copious as were containers of cigarettes that everyone smoked in China. We found the cadres to be very enthusiastic, as were people we met in the streets and railway stations and shops. But at the meeting with the cadres, it was me who asked one of them, ”Now, you say you’re threatened by US imperialism in the Pacific, and to the north by Soviet social imperialism. So why is it that China has no significant navy in the military force sense?” The cadre grinned broadly and he replied, ”Well, China is a socialist country, not an imperialist one. The imperialists require big navies. We don’t. We rely on the people, the People’s Liberation Army, for our national defence”.
China’s navy at that time was what they call a brown water navy, coastal patrol vessels, frigates, diesel powered submarines, small torpedo boats. Today, under what I regard as ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’, China has the world’s largest blue water navy, aircraft carriers, advanced destroyers and nuclear subs. The regime patrols the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and it has an overseas base in East Africa and dual-purpose port facilities that can function as a base.
This is just one important example of how China has changed since the Maoist socialist period and it is indicative of China as an imperialist power, not a socialist one. I recommend to you a 350-paged work by Chinese Marxists. It’s been translated into English now. It’s called ‘The History and Logic of Revolution and Restoration’.[5] They had to compile it in secret. It took many years. But it’s a great analysis on the processes through which capitalism was restored and imperialism has emerged. It’s online for free, just Google ‘History Logic Revolution Restoration’.
I was radicalised in the late 1960s, in the great year of the left in 1968, I was 17. The Paris uprisings in May that year were inspirational, but we also knew about the Cultural Revolution in China. It was ‘all meat on the same bone’ to quote Chuck Berry, one of his lyrics. In Australia, the main issue was the American war against Vietnam and conscription for that war. I wish I had a dollar for every street march and rally that I attended in solidarity with the Vietnamese. The police could be very brutal as they are today, batons, fists, and boots. Now the Prime Minister at the time, John Gorton, warned the protesters, we will tolerate dissent so long as it remains ineffective. He was just echoing the representatives of ruling classes through history with that statement. Rebellion has always been seen as intolerable unless it is inconsequential, but except for Chairman Mao. He was the only leader of world significance to overturn that and to declare to his own people “It is right to rebel”. Now I ask you, how could a young migrant working class boy from Brunswick who wanted to change the world not be inspired by that? That spirit was what led me in that direction of Maoism, which I later studied more seriously.
I really like the Platypus Society’s motto, “The Left is dead, long live the Left”. The first part is manifestly correct. What passes for the left today tends to be a dogmatic knee-jerk anti-Americanism that results in people who say they’re left-wing taking the sides of fascists, including Putin and Xi Jinping. This places the left, in inverted commas, against the people in places like Russia, Ukraine, China, and Iran, who are heroically fighting neo-tzarism, social fascism and clericalist dictators. To borrow from Mao, it’s left in form, right in essence. So, there’s a first lesson about the relevance of Maoism to today; in order to build a genuine left, one that supports democratic movements, sides with the oppressed people, and supports material progress, we have to first identify and repudiate its opposite, the phony left, the pseudo left.
Another lesson from the relevance of Maoism, is its opposition to dogmatism. Mao constantly warned against formula thinking. He described it as taking ready-made conclusions and mechanically applying them without relating them to the real conditions. He contrasted it, formula thinking, with the living dialectical approach where you start from investigation. You don’t know what the answer is going to be. You start with an investigation of reality. You test ideas in practice and only then develop a line that is consistent with the real world. Today’s formula thinking is based on the idea that US imperialism is the number one enemy of the world. That was our slogan back in the CPA-ML[6] in the 60s and 70s, ‘The Great Satan’. The various pseudo-left sects have a position on everything instantaneously. You might have noticed that because they just have that formula, all they have to do to work out is, ‘where does America stand?’ The rest is automatic, but when this kind of anti-imperialism puts somebody on the side of fascist regimes and clericalist dictators, it’s not worth having.
We’re living at a time when things in the world are changing very rapidly and the need for a left that is founded on solidarity with the oppressed against their oppressors and a commitment to modern democracy and progress is very urgent. Mao recognised the need for continuing revolution after the people had taken power. The need, because once the revolution happens and people take power, society is the same as it was the day before. You need a continuing struggle, especially against those who wanted to steer China towards capitalism, and they were the faux communists. They were in the Communist Party. They won out as Mao warned that they could and in 1977 to 1980 there was a coup. Hundreds were executed, thousands were jailed and disappeared. Real communists.
My analysis is that today China is really ruled by a nationalist regime, it ticks the boxes for the definition of fascism in many ways. It’s a dictatorship of the billionaires, not of the proletariat and peasantry. It has a clear economic imperialist or neo-imperialist agenda. Last year you might recall that Donald Trump called Xi Jinping brilliant. Why did he say that? He was asked, why do you say that? He said, “President Xi is brilliant because he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist”. Trump’s problem with Xi is trade competition rather than leadership methods, as we see. The evidence for Xi Jinping’s iron fist is overwhelming, be it the regime’s suppression of workers who go on strike, the great firewall of internet censorship, where two key terms that are censored and picked up are Tiananmen Square and the Cultural Revolution. If you mention those, you get hit by the firewall of censorship. There’s also the Orwellian utilisation of facial recognition technology to control the people and in some parts of China they are still experimenting with social credit systems, how is that not fascism?
There’s the suppression of cultural rights of minorities and the persecution of Maoists. In 1982 there were constitutional amendments by Deng Xiaoping and one of the things that happened there was that the constitutional reform overturned virtually all of the communist achievements that preceded it, including one which is the right to strike as a constitutional guarantee. No surprise with that.
The most urgent issue in the world today is obviously Palestine. I’m using the word fascist a lot, but it’s accurate. In Israel, there is a fascist regime backed by America, and it’s ethnically cleansing Gaza and engaging in terrible war crimes. The Xi regime in China, for all its pro-Palestine words, supplied Israel with about $18 billion worth of goods and products last year, including products with dual use potential such as electronics, semiconductors and sensors that can be used in drones, missiles and radars. They also provided precision tools and robotics that can be used for aerospace components and also optics which can be used for night vision, targeting and lasers. They also provided aluminium alloys that can be used for missile and drone production. These are dual use in the sense they can be used ostensibly for civil use, but they have a military application as well.
Palestine is obviously the most urgent issue, but in my view the most important issue in terms of international consequences is Russia’s imperialist aggression against Ukraine. China is officially neutral, but has become one of Russia’s most important trading partners since the war began. China’s trade is helping Russia to cushion the impact of sanctions. As with Israel, China exports large amounts of dual-use goods to Russia. Machinery, microelectronics and machine tools. Were the Chinese Communist Party a Communist Party, China would be supporting Ukraine in its resistance to Putin, who wants to be ‘Tsar of All the Russias’. As Lenin said in 1916, “Socialists who fail to demand freedom of succession for Ukraine are behaving like lackeys of the blood and mud-stained imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie”.[7] That was at a time when revolution was happening, and Putin obviously is no socialist revolutionary.
I could go on and talk about how we met Revolutionary Committee members, what the Revolutionary Committees were. They were part of the four big democracies they were called in the Cultural Revolution. These empowered people at the grassroots level and they challenged the authority of the Communist Party bureaucrats and elites, the little emperors as Mao called them. They exercised political power, oversaw production and promoted debate and exposed reactionaries. There were revolutionary committees in villages, in schools, in industry, and they were a foundation of the new democracy. Following 1982 and the rise of Deng Xiaoping after the coup, they were abolished and a top-down institutional structure was imposed.
When we were in China, we saw big character posters. They were part of the four big democracies. These, in 1971, were like the internet or social media today for poor people, while China was still pretty poor. These big character posters, anyone could get a bit of paper, and write or draw on it, criticising the authorities and the bureaucrats. We went to a school where teachers and students had these big character posters everywhere, and they were saying, the headmaster wanted exams, and they were saying, ”No, we don’t want those kinds of exams!”. They were everywhere. It was fantastic, a real furthering of revolutionary spirit. Can you believe that in 1982, under the Deng Xiaoping’s constitutional changes, big character posters were outlawed? You were not allowed to do that anymore.
Bear in mind that after, in 1982 and the later years, the global capitalist media regarded Deng Xiaoping as, quote, ‘the greatest little man in the world’. And you can see why.
Lachlan: To preface my statement, I will make clear the position of me and my party (the Communist Party of Australia). That is that:
1. China is a socialist democratic country guided by Marxism,
2. That Deng and the reforms associated with him were not unique to Marxism, they were not a break from Marxism, and they certainly were not a betrayal of the socialist project,
3. That China and the CPC should be a source for inspiration and a subject of study for leftists in Australia.
To make sense of the way China acts and behaves requires a close study of Marxism and the material conditions which China finds itself in. In this statement I want to provide a brief outline of why the CPA holds this position. We do not come to a position on such a divisive topic lightly. Our policy is determined by study and debate. So, I’ll begin with a quote from Karl Marx in his text The German Ideology, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence”.[8] Marxism is a science, not a program from which we establish our post-capitalist utopia. Reality cannot adjust itself to our ideals, however noble they may be. Rather, communism is the movement that aims to give the proletariat conscious and democratic control over the direction of society. How exactly a society will develop socialism is not something we can predict.
The proletariat, liberated and in control of the levers of power, will gradually shed the fetters to social progression. No party or individual can impose onto the proletariat what it must discard or what it must desire. In addition, the utopian abundance that many socialists wish to attain can only be delivered in proportion to the existing productive capability of that society.
During the Cultural Revolution in China, there was an illusion of accelerating economic development through the calls for mass mobilisation and mass enthusiasm. This approach failed. It contrasted from the earlier practice of the CPC to allow different forms of ownership and the use of material incentives. In a 1957 speech by Mao, he addressed the policy of paying interest to the capitalists, saying, “at this small cost, we are buying over this class. By buying over this class, we have deprived them of their political capital and kept their mouths shut. Thus, political capital will not be in their hands, but in ours”.[9]
However, The Cultural Revolution put a temporary halt to this form of socialist development. It led to a premature sense of entitlement to welfare that Chinese society couldn’t yet materially provide for itself. Workers came in hours late, were absent and lacked commitment. By this reduction in working hours and effort, the work required to reproduce society would be increasingly heaped onto a shrinking section of the working class who have to work harder to provide for the welfare of the other section. It takes economic development to be able to provide real increases in quality of life. Until then, we can’t expect one section of our class to work while the other takes it easy.
What it took to return China to a path of development was to introduce material incentives and develop the productive forces. With the condition, however, that the commanding heights of the economy remained publicly owned. Now, in 2025, China has developed an economy that is able to provide a moderately prosperous society that CPC set as an aim in the National Congress in 2012.
Now, to make sense of China’s governance and foreign policy, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of the structure of world trade and finance. What must be understood is that the global economic system is not a neutral arena. The Western world and the institutions it created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944[10] designed the world economy to benefit a few nations at the expense of many. The global south manufactures the goods, mines the resources and farms the food for the citizens of the global north to consume, yet they are stuck in poverty while the west enjoys a quality of life that it simply couldn’t support without the exploitation of poor nations. This is due to the use of the dollar as the world reserve currency and the hundreds of military bases littered around the world. Those two things are also dependent on each other. The world is required to use the US dollar in international trade by the threat of military intervention, and the costs of this huge military presence is made possible by the high demand of US dollars.
But why is this relevant to China?
One, because part of the project of China’s foreign policy has been to organise the global south to escape this cycle of exploitation. Two, to establish a new standard for international diplomacy, one based on non-intervention.
The CPC knows that the exporting of revolution is a failed policy. The result of making parties financially reliant on a foreign nation is that the revolutionary theory of said parties too often becomes an adoption of the theory from the sponsoring nation. This was common of Communist parties supported by the Soviet Union and led to the failure and splitting of many parties. Non-intervention as an international standard would disarm the West from forcing the subordination of nations. As we can witness from many instances in history, if a country in Africa or South America develops the slightest hint of independence, it is promptly couped and sanctioned. For nascent socialist nations this means the loss of public confidence in the Marxist approach to providing a better life. The only way a poor nation can remain socialist or independent is typically to become hyper militarist to defend against Western attacks. Or the socialist nation could open its doors to capital and thus remove that main antagonism. A nation with a population unexploited with its markets closed is a source of aggressive, insatiable desire for the capitalist. All efforts will be made to expand into that territory by whatever means necessary.
For China, allowing Western capital into its country defanged the imperialist nations. They could lift the boot of imperialism off their neck ever so slightly as Jiang Zemin[11] said, they could “hide their strength and bide time”. With the new capital entering the country, China was able to, with their successive five-year plans, make slow but concrete gains and change their economy from one based on cheap manufacturing to one based on groundbreaking technology and automation. Something Western economists didn’t think was possible.
China, with its state-directed market economy, was able to break through the barriers created by the West that keep poor nations in perpetual servitude. With this success, the CPC began building the institutions and infrastructure that will allow exploited nations to also break these barriers. Through BRICS[12] and the SCO[13], exploited nations are able to reduce their reliance on the West and find much needed funding for vital infrastructure. It is this attack on imperialism that is causing a crisis in the West.
The Empire, with the USA at its head, has overextended itself. Vassal states like Australia are being forced to pay levies in order to save the mothership. Or to put it another way, imperialism is coming home. It’s up to the working class of the West to decide whether it wishes to go down with the sinking ship or to build bridges with the Global South.
This is what we in the CPA are actively doing. Every year members of our party go to Cuba to learn, work and have fun. Just last week, our President met with members of the Vietnamese Central Committee where it was agreed we would cooperate on information sharing, theoretical exchanges and enhanced collaboration in communications, publishing and public mobilisation. Of course, we share consistent dialogue with our fraternal party, the CPC. To conclude, China is interested in helping countries develop and is committed to the communist movement. In its non-interventionist spirit, we cannot expect it to save us from our vicious capitalists. It is up to us to create the institutions that allow the working class here to be less reliant on the bourgeoisie.
Christina Veselovskiy: 15 minutes of speaking here tonight would hardly do justice to the task of understanding the most important political entity of the last 50 years, and indeed the next 100. I want to be upfront about what I believe, which is that I do not think the real existing ideology of the Communist Party of China offers any concrete lessons to our communist project in the 21st century. We can only discuss China in relation to its key role within the planetary form of capitalism that confronts us in the 21st century, and I thus want to structure my comments in two parts.
I’ll first offer a concise history of where and when I believe the Chinese revolution made significant steps towards integration into the capitalist world system. I argue that this history was, if not entirely inevitable, a primary outcome of the historically misguided fusion of party and state.
Secondly, and lastly, I would like to outline the planetary condition that we, as communists, are confronting. One which recognizes China as part of a planetary capitalist system. We can only overcome such a system by banning the 20th century dogmas of national liberation, merging party and state, and advocating for a socialist revolution in stages.
First, I would like to provide a history of the People’s Republic of China that does not assume fixed, abstract definitions of socialism, communism, or capitalism; concepts that exist at one point in history but not at another. The Chinese revolution, like all historic revolutions, was highly uneven and had to respond to a wide array of spontaneous desires, dreams, and visions across the population and indeed across the world. It is an oversimplification to say that the CCP’s were meant to emerge solely because of a crisis of national sovereignty and imperialist aggression. The actual phenomenon penetrated much deeper into Chinese society.
The decline of the Qing also meant the destruction of the imperial symbolic order, which, for all its restricted, aristocratic and patriarchal nature, served as the common ground for nascent class struggle in the Chinese village. During the war, Mao Zedong Thought, Mao Zedong Si Xiang (in Mandarin), emerged as the ultimate solution to fill this gap in China’s agrarian north, where local resistance to state authority had a long tradition, unlike in the more consolidated and state-centric south.
I do not want to deny the significance of the Yan’an period, and the revolutionary semiotics that emerged there, nor the powerful aftershocks that we saw in May of 68. Mao Zedong thought it was a genuine harnessing of the libidinal energy of the masses, who were finally capable of engaging in class struggle within their local contacts. However, the contradiction that would surface after 1949 was already evident, balancing various struggles while synthesizing them into a unified national effort against the Japanese and the Guomindang, followed by the need to build a sovereign socialist economy. This was a tall order, regardless of how one sliced it. If the Communist Party were to resolve this contradiction on its own, it would need to deliver a flawless performance.
Unsurprisingly, nothing went quite so perfectly as planned, since the fragmented structure inherited by the communists in 1949 was unsuitable for such a smooth transition. China lacked a unified economy. Its landscape featured tiny urban pockets amid vast rural areas. Urban institutions and the industrial environments were unfamiliar to the largely rural cadres who had spent so many years in hiding. The communists inherited a primary industrial sector from the Japanese colony state of Manchukuo; a territory designed around the violent processing and exploitation of Chinese labourers subject to conditions of bare life.
Using these technologies, the CCP began to shape its understanding of the universal and the particular through the lens of a state. Positioning itself as the sole mediator between these two poles and as the sole driver of social and productive liberation. These visions greatly overlook the reliance of China’s emerging industrial model on grain supplies from the countryside. When the Great Leap Forward[14] started in 1957, decades of mass mobilization rhetoric couldn’t prevent the collapse of this relationship.
The post-Leap retrenchment marks the moment when the inequalities underpinning capitalist enclosure first took place, as legal and economic conditions began to solidify the infamous Hukou system into place. In addition, new social attitudes towards commodity production began to replace the older displays of Stalinist productive power.
The Mao books, Mao literature, Mao caps and other such objects exported worldwide in 1968 should be seen for what they were, the first wave of Chinese commodities greeting the world of global communication and exchange. With genuine moments of mid-1960s class struggle foreclosed upon by 1969, the subsequent years of the Cultural Revolution leading up to Mao’s death were a procession of Rashomon-style theatrics intended to conceal the robust alliance of the Party and the PLA, keeping the decaying edifice in place. Even in the often-fetishized Shanghai Commune, voting was literally split down these lines in favour of a two-thirds majority of Party cadres and the Chinese military.
All the conditions were right for the Party to relinquish sole responsibility for its Sisyphean task of mediating the universal and the particular of the masses and the state. It is no surprise then that these emerging consumer objects, which Cultural Revolution propaganda called newborn socialist things, quickly became the site for reintroducing the commodity form into China during the reform years.
I would like to delay further discussion of China’s post-1978 history until later this evening, as the focus should now shift to understanding our current task through the lens of China and its role in the global capitalist system. I believe that if we are to succeed, comrades must discard the fetishistic trappings of the party state, and to understand that our present conditions all point to the fundamentally bourgeois, exclusionist, neocolonial, and patriarchal character of the system of nation-states both China and Australia inhabit.
The core idea of a lot of these left sectarian views in the 21st century is to demand that comrades cease questioning history. The history they suggest presents that at some stage all communists have faced a series of natural institutions that need to be accepted and worked around: the state, the family, the nation, and the market. They argue that rather than criticizing the bourgeois nature of this line of reasoning, we should instead revise Marx himself to suit the axiomatic logic of real existing socialism. When we stop asking questions, our comrades become little more than sports fans cheering on the Frankenstein-like collection of centre-right and right-wing autocracies loosely gathered around China’s arms-length diplomatic pacts, deluding ourselves that they ultimately aim to rival America as one united movement.
I am highly sceptical of the dual-stage model of revolution that some comrades put forward, as the historical record shows a tendency to focus solely on the first stage while rarely discussing the second. For the sake of argument, let’s analyse the program of theirs to understand the misguided and out of touch program for achieving socialism after the state might be conquered.
In the mid-1960s, it would have been ridiculous for us to do what Stalin did and argue in favour of building our own Magnitogorsk out in the Pilbara Ranges. Today, it would be similarly fantastical to imagine a world where Australia, like China, could compete at the forefront of manufacturing without the industrial expertise, with a domestic population barely 2% of China’s, and to do all of this while refusing to make any concessions to the living standards of ordinary Australians, of the kind necessary to replicate the massive wealth transfers China’s government affects away from households and towards export industries. We will be chasing a promised return to Fordist society and living conditions that for structural reasons can never return. This isn’t because Chinese labourers work for cheaper and that we’d have to adapt to this challenge. China itself is undergoing massive deindustrialization behind the shimmer of high-tech products.
The task at hand involves understanding finance and manufacturing as interconnected industries, each supporting the uneven development patterns now mirrored globally. By 2025, what we once called the periphery of capitalist development is now its hinterland. The fundamental truth is imprinted on our very bodies here in this room. Chances are that your skin is more familiar with the commodities finished in the scorching heat of the Pearl River Delta than with the caresses of those you care about most.
Thanks to social media, nearly everyone in this room could probably also place the supposed neon utopias of Shanghai or Chongqing on a map. I’d hazard that very few here could locate cities like Shijiazhuang, Zhangzhou, or Anshan, where the belly of the carbon-intensive beast that is capital lies in the smog enveloping their populations. For all the tools that Marx gave us, we seldom see capital in such a visible form as in all this industrial smog. The one thing Marx would point out is that beneath this smog lies the territorial and social origins of this eldritch beast.
A Chinese labour organizer pointed out in 2014 that enclosure in England was a process whereby sheep devoured people as they were forced off the countryside and they were replaced by sheep enclosures. Our modern-day counterpart in China’s urban wastelands is a phenomenon where buildings devour people. Brutal land conflicts initiated by millions of precarious migrant labourers against party officials are part and parcel of the everyday running of the Chinese labour market.
Capitalism is not simply the force that undermines and subverts all the stable things that we hold dear. With its other hand, it fashions new social and geographic configurations that reinstate hierarchies, heighten inequalities, and further segment forms of human activity, all so that people must sell their labour to continue existing. Here, the distinction between public and private sectors is largely irrelevant when the lines between local, provincial, and party governments become blurred by the complex shareholding patterns of Chinese firms. We have in this system only one instance of the territorial structures that make capitalism possible on a global scale.
The neocolonial condition is primarily a contradiction. We must simultaneously accept the never-ending desire to integrate ever more territory into a universal plane of exchange on the market, while keeping the subaltern other, the international proletariat, at a safe distance by erecting national and racial boundaries around their existence.
As a microcosmic example of resisting this neocolonial bind, the fall of apartheid in South Africa offers an important lesson. The end of white rule did not happen because the black population sought to establish independent socialist republics in the Bantustans. They only succeeded by seizing control of the colonial state itself. A dictatorship of the proletariat in this country, folded under the Chinese model and subject to the same form of party-state mediation, would be as deleterious to the goal of global socialism, as a Bantustan solution to the question of apartheid, or a socialist Gaza solution to the question of Palestinian liberation.
If you were to ask what leaves me optimistic about China’s present condition, one prominent point, would be that China’s willingness to integrate into the capitalist system is perhaps the most significant structural cause behind the climate crisis, the greatest crisis capitalism will probably ever face, and possibly the one thing that could lead to capitalism’s demise in the coming decades. The only conclusion I can come to is that a war against the planetary capitalist system, especially in the metropoles, can only be fought in hell.
I’ll sum up what’s been said by briefly answering tonight’s questions in a fire round. To call China communist would be an oxymoron, as communists seek the end of the nation and state. Maoism surpassed Stalinism in a discursive sense, when Mao’s signification of Marxism-Leninism paved the way for an indigenous application of nationwide political and armed struggle. In many ways the Mao years mirrored the height of Stalinism in its uneven focus on production above all else. This fetishism foreshadowed the reintroduction of the commodity form and China’s integration to the capitalist world order. I believe that there are multiple Maoisms each with their unique discursive affective and strategic aspects each with their own energy and corresponding material conditions. However, the state ideology of the PRC embodies a wholly non-revolutionary offspring, one shaped by decades of party-state fetishism. This view of continuity over change neither elevates nor vilifies Mao, Deng, or Xi Jinping. The historical record on these figures is increasingly distant from the current struggles before us.
The lessons I take are that our discussion tonight touches on a key dividing line. That’s separating communists from those who fear, dismiss, or see as immature, the spontaneous living moments of revolutionary violence needed to overthrow the system. Those who prefer Australia’s orderly and peaceful drift into China’s developmental path under the sterile militant discipline of a singular party. It’s as if revolutions were a clean televised military operation, much like those that often see on the overhead screens of subway cars in Shanghai or Chengdu, rather than the messy nauseating task of systematically tearing away the necrotic flesh of the global capitalist beast. That is our goal.
Responses
BY: When Lachlan was speaking it was clear how his party views echoes that of the Chinese Communist Party. There are many points of view, many scholarly political analyses available for a very different assessment of the Cultural Revolution. I mentioned at the start, ‘The History and Logic of Revolution and Restoration’, compiled under great risk by young Marxists over several years in China. There’s real risk for them to promote a critical view.
But there are many books that repudiate the idea that the Cultural Revolution was a failure. One of them is Mobo Gao, professor at Adelaide University, ‘The Battle for China’s Past’[15]. Because as we know, the way history is interpreted by the powers that be, by those in control, is usually designed to promote their own continuing rule. Mobo Gao shows how the attack on the Cultural Revolution by the, I call it fascist regime, is designed to say it doesn’t work. “Look at us, 450 billionaires. To get rich is glorious. 80 billionaires in the National Assembly!”.
Another one worth looking at is Han Dongping[16]. I’m very interested in oral history. I’ve done heaps for 40 years now, mainly with immigrants. Oral history is very valuable because it gets you to the people. Han Dongping grew up in a village during the Cultural Revolution. Later he went to America to study. Then in the 1990s he thought, “What’s happening in China? It’s changing fundamentally from a socialist to an obvious state capitalist system”. He went back and he decided to go back to his village and do something that I wish the people who were so uncritical would consider doing: ask the people. He’s Chinese. He had credibility among his village cohort. He interviewed 200 people. Overwhelmingly they felt things had worsened under the capitalist system since the abolition of the communes. Which incidentally had a terrible impact on women. But Han Dongping, he also went to the village municipality, the schools, the industries, and did archival primary source research. His book is called ‘The Unknown Cultural Revolution’[17], because today what we heard from Lachlan, we hear all the time in the mainstream media. There’s nothing new about bagging the Cultural Revolution. That’s because it was an actual empowerment of people that resulted at the grassroots level, not only in empowerment but in improvements in infrastructure, in irrigation, in healthcare, in literacy, in education.
When the commune system was replaced with the private ownership system, a lot of that was lost. With the healthcare system, the commune system funded the barefoot doctors, you’ve all heard of the barefoot doctors? I met some in China in 1971. They were funded to go out to be trained. They were peasants and farmers trained in basic community health care, vaccinations, and midwifery. That was one of the reasons why the great achievement in life expectancy was achieved in that period. It just went through the roof under the Mao era. But when the communes were abolished and they could no longer fund the barefoot doctors, what happened? The life expectancy started to decline because of infant mortality rates, and maternal mortality rates skyrocketed.
The other aspect that I’d like to deal with is on how China is engaging in economic imperialism from a Leninist point of view. It’s so easy to establish. It’s sort of funny to hear somebody talking in the language of imperialism, like the old British imperialists and the Americans, that we’re here to help people, they want our help, our motives are fine. When in fact with China it’s the same thing of a competition for spheres of influence.
This is established quite clearly by the domination, like in the Congo, of cobalt where they control 70% of that. The merging of industrial capital and finance capital through the banks and the state-owned enterprises in China that invest in Africa. $200 billion in investments. The use of debt for leverage and exploitation. The exploitation of labour. The workers are complaining. Listen to them.
If this is going to be sort of published in a newsletter or something, I’d like an opportunity to type up my notes, especially on this aspect of how China is engaged in economic imperialism that has created a billionaire class. But of course, that’s great because that’s apparently increased its standard of living. Haven’t we heard that before? Haven’t we heard that from the coalition and conservatives everywhere? You know, that if the rich are doing well, you’re doing well.
L: At the core of my support for China is the increase in the quality of life. It is the increase in the standards of living for the people of China. That also goes to Vietnam and Laos. Yes, there were improvements in the Cultural Revolution, and I find the Cultural Revolution a very interesting time and some of my favourite revolutionary songs come from the Cultural Revolution. I’ll go back to my point, it empowered people to a premature sense of what is possible in their society. The material basis of that society could not provide for the conscious development that had occurred. You needed to return to a materialist point of view and focus on the productive forces that needed to be developed to provide a nicer life for the Chinese people.
Some of my biggest disagreements with Christina are fundamentally on the state. We have a different theory of state, one that I don’t see as anything that exists outside of a class conflict. I see it as a tool used by one class to oppress the other. Therefore, in the early stages of workers taking power, you need to use the state as a tool to have control over the bourgeois class. That is the core of our main disagreement.
CV: To point out, as Comrade Lachlan has said, that we confront a system where genuine improvements in the quality of life have been seen in a generation, which is something quite rare in the present day. I do believe that that is fundamentally true, but one must recognise the structural inequalities that drive that system founded upon unequal flows of migrant labour from rural to urban areas, propagated by almost direct policies of exclusion and legal denial of household status within urban environments. Many of these contribute to precarious social living standards and precarious labour conditions where people are fed into factory complexes with scant attention to their own health.
I would point that in historical perspective what this would amount to would be to say that the Communist Party of China has accomplished the job of the bourgeoisie in a periphery area of the world that it would have not done otherwise and especially on a not so short timetable. That in and of itself is something to be celebrated as an achievement for the genuine progress of world history. However, I would not say that this is the final word in the matter and that as socialists in the 21st century we should move towards accommodating further demands.
BY: You mentioned inequality, China under socialism would have, abundance for all would have been achieved much quicker than under the capitalist exploitative social relations of production. There’s a funny thing called the Gini coefficient[18]. Everyone knows what that is, the measure of inequality. Under Mao, in the Mao period, the estimated Gini was low inequality. For one thing, like with Russia after the revolution when they set up the soviets, the workers not only had control of production at the factory level, they could also vote out their managers. The one thing that happened was the wage differentials between technicians and managers and the workers were shrunk greatly. There was still a difference but they shrunk. The same thing was happening in China during the Cultural Revolution and Mao period. The inequality was extremely low. Gradually, under Deng and Xi, now you have the billionaires, and of course they’re ‘good billionaires’, they couldn’t possibly have got to be billionaires by exploiting anyone else. Excuse my sarcasm. The Gini coefficient in China today has doubled. It’s up there with America, and even Australia is less unequal now than China.
I find it surprising that there’s acknowledgement that there are billionaires who have influence, there are actually 80 of them in the National People’s Congress, or Assembly, and that’s like, oh, that’s no problem there, they’re still a Communist Party.
L: As a Maoist, I’m sure you’ll agree with Mao again when he said at this small cost we are buying over this class. By buying over this class, we have deprived them of their political capital and kept their mouths shut. Thus, political capital will be not in their hands but in ours. This goes to inequality as well. Inequality was a known effect when Deng and the CPC enacted reforms. They knew the results of what markets would bring. They knew the contradictions and the problems that were caused for the country, but rather it was a necessary measure to make in their times.
You talked about how you believe there might have been a quicker abundance for all in China if they didn’t adopt the market system. In the two socialist states that we have that haven’t adopted a market system, they are still far behind in quality of life than China, Vietnam and Laos. Cuba and North Korea, while they’re great socialist projects and I support them as well, they have not created the same increase in production and standard of living as China.
BY: You’re supporting capitalism. That’s right, it boils down to that. You are supporting a market economy run by a communist party that is no longer communist, and then it’s pretty obvious what you’re saying.
Q&A
[To Barry and Christina] You admit that there’s been millions and millions released from poverty, but it just shouldn’t have been the party state, and it shouldn’t have been one party. Isn’t that idealistic? Doesn’t that lack a material basis? Because whoever it was, and it was the party that produced this phenomenon, isn’t that where we should begin, rather than the other way around?
L: I wanted to actually address something really quickly on what Christina said. I don’t, and the party does not want to adopt exactly what China has done. That is not the position of our party. We look at all socialist experiments, successful, failures, whatever, and try to learn from them and apply them to our conditions here. The Australian socialist, the Australian communist revolution that will inevitably come, I believe, will have its own flavour. It will have its own revolutionary theory, its own leaders and so on. I don’t think it’ll be anything like the Chinese revolution because the conditions are totally different. What a Western Revolution looks like is well, we don’t really know, so it’s uncharted territory. That’s my response if there’s any feeling that we simply want to do what China did here. China does not want to export revolution as I said, that is not their policy.
Moderator: How do you see the task of socialism in relation to welfare inequality?
L: At the end of the day, the task of socialism and communists is to improve the world and the world that we live in, at the core of it, and to resolve contradictions. It is one of the most fundamental parts of our project, and the practice that we can do in the CPA is to improve people’s lives now. Some of the things that we and other leftist organisations around Australia do is to improve lives for people now and to show that if we work together, the working class can support itself without the institutions of the bourgeoisie. I do think it’s a fundamental part of our work.
BY: First of all, Lenin’s new economic policies occurred under the power of the dictatorship of the proletariat or people’s power. In the Baku oil fields[19], for example, in order to develop the oil fields, he soon realized that he had to invite foreign oil companies. He offered them concessions. It was like a product-share arrangement, as we would call it today. It wasn’t the restoration of a capitalist system, a market economy. It was a short-term aim towards an end. Now, with China, there has been a previous period in history where there’s been rapid economic growth, and that was the Industrial Revolution in England. I see a comparison there with China today. China’s the most industrialised place on the earth. I hear Australians and Americans saying the world is de-industrialising. They only see it from their point of view. The world has never been so industrialised.
What comes with it under capitalism, like in China? Sure, everyone can buy a TV, but you still get not just alienation, because you’re not empowered, but you have a hundred thousand or so acts of civil disobedience each year. What happened under Xi Jinping? He stopped releasing the data, the statistics, on workers rising up. This is very common. There’s great dissent in China because of the capitalist system. Sure, you can look at many different capitalist countries. People own homes now. Well, you used to own, you know, Baby Boomers. People generally are better off through modern capitalist economic development. In China, the other side to that coin is the great discontent of people. They’re not happy. They don’t have an outlet for that.
There was a strike that Maoists were involved in, a technology company, JASIC Technology[20]. All those workers wanted was to set up an independent trade union. Because like Germany and Italy under Mussolini, you could be in a union, but it was a state run union. An official union, you could not have independent unions. That erupted and Maoist students from the universities went to the JASIC plant to unite with the workers. We did that too in Melbourne with the Workers Student Alliance when workers would go on strike and that we would go to support them.
China isn’t just now a modern economy. Like any capitalist economy, you have a massive working class who are discontent, who are pissed off and want more. They don’t have the institutional structure to do anything about it. It’s suppressed. The data isn’t released anymore. Up to 2006 it was released and it didn’t look good. There were 100,000, they call it ‘civil unrest’ or something, it’s a bureaucratic term.
Lachlan, I’d like to ask, do you consider it necessary for socialism in China that the wives of PLA soldiers cannot divorce their husbands without state permission?
L: I don’t think it’s necessary to do anything that China does in socialism. It is a proletarian state. What happens in China and what they decide is up to them. Whether I agree with it or not is irrelevant to them. In fact, there’s many things that I disagree with, with what China does. Many, and with what Vietnam does, Laos. At the end of the day, I believe that it is one of the first socialist countries to emerge, just like the early market republics, capitalist republics that popped up in Italy and so on, the start of capitalism. These are the first countries that are developing socialism. It’s completely uncharted territory. They will get things wrong. They’ll get things right. What you think about their policy is irrelevant to them. They will decide, and at the end of the day, they are on a more progressive development than the West, which is increasingly turning towards hate and fascism.
BY: As an independent leftist influenced by Maoism, let me say it’s outrageous and it points to the fact that China, I mean, they teach Confucianism. No longer Mao Zedong Thought and “It is right to rebel”. They teach Confucianism in all the schools, there’s been a big push for years under Xi Jinping, a patriarchal feudal outlook based on what? Obedience to authority. Of course, this sort of thing is going to happen where women have to get permission from there. I mean there’s so much evidence that China is not socialist, let alone communist. I’m surprised we even would be… well I know that people have different views.
L: Very quickly, we need to remind ourselves as Marxists that consciousness follows material development. We have the luxury in the West with hundreds of years of material development that our standards on ethics and so on may be very developed and that’s a good thing. In countries where violence, for example, at the start of the 20th century where the majority of China lived in a peasant economy where violence and exploitation were a daily presence. Our aversion to violence and so on is because of our material conditions. What I want to say is that China, while it is now, I would say on par with Western countries in development, it is still a developing country, and its consciousness develops as that happens.
If the idea is that women whose husbands are in the army can’t get a divorce is because the material conditions aren’t there in China to enable such a thing, then surely if that’s the case, then when during a cultural revolution there was a massive upswing in revolutionary feminism, would that then imply that the material conditions in China for socialism have gone backwards if we accept both of those ideas?
L: What I would say is that yes, conscious development is possible, like it was in the Cultural Revolution, but it cannot last, and it didn’t. The material conditions need to follow, and so the Cultural Revolution was a failure in the end in providing the wishes and the dreams of the Chinese people, and there had to be a change of path.
BY: During when China had socialist leadership and was on the socialist path,there were propaganda magazines. I used to go with my dad on the tram into the international bookshop and we’d look at these China Pictorials, and my dad was a factory worker by the way, and he was always impressed with the industrial and scientific and technological advances that were happening in China during the Mao period. But women were portrayed because the idea was women hold up half the sky. First of all, wage differentials were reduced. That changed. Somebody should do a thesis on this. Look through the China Pictorial magazines, how women are portrayed over time. Back then, they’re in the army. They’re on the machines in the factory. They’re in the farms working and they’re there with their babies as mothers. Fast forward to the material conditions, to today. They have beauty contests. They had Miss Universe in China. I saw one of those Chinese magazines, the front picture had a woman all in pink and a Dolly Bird type look. That says so much about the position of women in China, under the new regime of capitalism.
L: Yes, I agree there’s these things that I also detest, much like they exist in the Western world with our fully developed markets. The difference is that I believe China will be able to rid their society of such things when they become so antagonistic to their people. Because their discontent can be concentrated in their state, whereas ours cannot. If the working class’s discontent in the Western world conflicts with the interests of business, it is irrelevant. Whereas if the discontent of the working class in China conflicts with the interests of business, it is still listened to. We see this time and time again. China is one of the only countries that actively execute billionaires. Name one country controlled by capitalists that executes its own class.
BY: They’ve got enough billionaires to knock off one.
L: Still, name another capitalist country.
BY: And where do they come from? Who do they exploit to become billionaires?
This is about revolutionary leadership, and I just want to read a sentence from Cliff Slaughter[21]. “For this organization of a more advanced character and therefore theory of a much wider and deeper character is required. This means a political party which subordinates all partial struggle to the construction of the leadership firmly welded to the working class and completely devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.”[22] I would like to ask the panellists what they think the role and the significance of revolutionary leadership is after Mao. What revolutionary leadership should we look to in China? If you would like, you can expand the role of the revolutionary leadership to China now and even Australia.
L: I liked the part where this person said the connection between leadership and the party. The way I see it is the danger with being an independent thinker on the left is that you disconnect yourself from a collective decision-making process which is really strong in developing revolutionary theory. By being an independent thinker, you think that you are the thought of the left. Being part of a party means you’re never going to agree with everything the party decides or with everyone in the party, but it’s about collectivising our decision making. That’s an important part. In that collectivisation of that decision making, you create very strong leaders who are committed to the collective as they are bound by the directives of the collective.
BY: There are many communists still in China and the Mao period is still within living memory… the young Marxists took great risk in publishing ‘The History and Logic of Revolution and Restoration’ which is free online, please Google it, read the whole book. They are the future in China. As for party building, I mean I know it’s a bit pretentious, “independent thinker of the left”, but I just don’t have a party. I have to be honest. I don’t have a party. I have comrades here in Melbourne who think like me or I think like them. We talk occasionally, but at the moment in Australia, and because I was in the Communist Party of Australia, Marxist-Leninist, the “only true party” (sarcasm) for 10 years in the 1970s. I mean it was quasi-religious and I hear that here too, a quasi-religious type formula about what will happen, what should happen.
Party building is bullshit, frankly, in Australia. We are nowhere near the conditions that make it sensible to try and build a communist party in this country. All we can do is start at the grassroots and call out the pseudo-left and from that build a movement, a left movement based on three components. Solidarity with oppressed people everywhere against the oppressors; support for struggles for democracy, modern democracy, bourgeois democracy if you will, because that’s what the material conditions reveal, and also support for progress, which of course includes the slogan that the communists borrowed from the Suffragettes, which is ‘Abundance for all’. That is a noble objective in my opinion. They’re the three pillars of the foundations for building a genuine left movement. A party, it’s crazy. You’ll just end up with little sects who are just interested in each other and talk to each other.
CV: With this notion of leadership, if we draw our eyes to the post-Mao years, I would note that when I mentioned in my opening statement that after 1969, when the Cultural Revolution’s genuine revolutionary energies are clamped down upon by the alliance of the party and the PLA, that we entered a state in which so many of these leadership struggles come to us as kind of theatrical, and they don’t actually represent genuine material conflicts within Chinese society. In fact, in many cases, it has historically been overstated that the gap between Deng Xiaoping and his cronies and the Gang of Four[23] has been historically over-exaggerated and that these ideological conflicts reflect something far deeper within the structures of Chinese power. The Chinese state and the Communist Party is fundamentally organized along two key tracks: people who rose up through the revolutionary process and some genuine cadres who come from rural and provincial experiences, and then the overwhelming majority of them consist of what we would call princelings, sons of former revolutionaries who have been fed and clothed and bathed by subordinates for pretty much all of their lives. They can only draw upon the pedigree of their forefathers, an emphasis on their forefathers, for their track record and for any hope of advancing higher up in Chinese society.
We have this phenomenon known as the red telephone. The red telephone in Zhongnanhai is only available to people who are in the in-group within the Communist Party. This corresponds almost overwhelmingly to people who make up the princeling faction. Even when we talk about Bo Xilai, the great mayor of Chongqing who tried to emulate aspects of Mao I would argue that many of these were seemingly just display shows underlying the fact that he was also a princeling because when we talk about all these great titanic sectarian ideological struggles at the top at the great halls of power within China I’m not going to argue for a second that they genuinely reflect aspects of Chinese society I’m not going to call for the great coming of someone like Wang Yang or Hu Chunhua who Western analysts would love to have because they say that he would restore the reform and opening up years when things were so grey but now everything that Xi Jinping touches turns to crap. That is not fundamentally reckoning what Chinese society is actually structured by and it is only paying attention to the surface of conflict. We need to understand material conditions that drive what we presently see, and we find in liberal democracy many of these same kinds of showmanship actions.
L: If the CPC is so corrupted, it is the most successful corrupt regime in the world in delivering for the people and what the people want. The infrastructure, the quality of life, etc. The party is made up of 100 million people. That’s a lot of people that contribute and are required to contribute to the party and the party policy. I just simply disagree with that analysis. With accepting that, of course, there are some benefits and corruption that exists, of course, the party agrees that exists. That’s why one of the major policies is anti-corruption, which we see day in, day out, someone being tried for corruption.
Barry, I appreciated and agreed with everything you said about the kind of relationship between China and these various sorts of what are often accused of CIA backed colour revolutions. I don’t want you to take my question as a gotcha, because it’s unattended as one. But I would be curious, in this context, how do you square that with your kind of absolute support for Ukraine, in the context of, for example, Ukraine conscripts striking workers? Going on strike being totally banned? More than 80% of what were government assets at the beginning of the conflict have now been sold off to American investors. I’m not being conspiracist about this. I’m aware of at least one fascist that is in the upper echelons of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry and obviously the Azov battalion itself receives lots of support. I’m curious how you oppose this kind of campus quote-unquote anti-imperialism but that you’re also so strong in support of Ukraine.
BY: Well for one thing regarding the extreme right or fascist element in Ukraine, in the last Ukrainian election you’d know that the Right Sector that was a coalition of all the far-right marginal extreme neo-fascist type people and the Svoboda party which is the other main right-wing party. They got 4% of the vote. The people aren’t with those. It’s a democratic struggle. It’s not just a national struggle. Might I remind everybody that in 1945 when the United Nations was set up, Stalin was head of the Soviet Union. He supported Ukraine having independent representation as a nation in the United Nations. Now we have somebody, and I’ll call him out, he ticks a lot of the boxes of a Nazi, including the ethno-nationalist thing, Putin. Putin’s saying, no, it’s not even a war. How can it be a war when it’s part of Russia? I’m with the people who are fighting that. Since the Maidan uprising of 2014[24], we’ve seen that this is a democratic struggle. It isn’t just a nationalist one. If you want to associate neo-fascist groups with Ukraine, also look at their publications and what they say about Putin and Russia. There’s far more sympathy for Putin. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, see him as a saviour of white nationalism and Christian values. Whereas Ukraine, they’re fighting against occupation of their land and the reason, the examples you gave are happening because they’re under martial law. I mean, martial law is pretty serious business.
CV: Just on this subject of the colour revolutions especially, it’s absolutely crucial to understand that we do deal with a genuinely horrific system of US imperialism which does overthrow governments and has historically done so. I would add that this is not one kind of homogenous process. It goes in waves and it definitely has differences in how it goes about things. For example, in Georgia, or it might have been Moldova, when there was a genuine overthrowing of their governments, the amount of funds that were actually granted by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the great Reaganite front for regime change as it’s put forward, which I don’t deny does do significant acts of destabilizing various regimes, it allocated roughly $100,000. That gets you about an office and two salaries. It’s really hard to square sometimes the idea that this could overthrow one single regime.
To even talk about this as like this great like instance of either colour revolution or the spontaneous uproar of the masses I would argue that it has a dual character and that was that when it started as a student protest it was mainly because they believed in this high idealist notion that Chinese politics were this free and open contest and struggle between ideologically opposed camps. The students were protesting because they wanted Zhang Zhengchao to essentially be released from bondage within self-imposed exile in Beijing. They wanted him to restore all these great reforms that they had gotten under reform and opening up, because it strengthened their class position as students, as bourgeois sons and daughters of China’s most affluent.
It was only then when the workers of Beijing, who had suffered from the removal of their Danhui systems, which are their work groups which provided them with housing and with food. This had been destroyed during the reform and opening up era. When they finally started to mobilize in response to this, that was when essentially everything had already been concluded. The army was going to be sent in and the bulk of the casualties upon that uprising were of those workers who corresponded to a genuine class position in the same way the students did. But because the students had so much leeway in the way they live their lives, they could treat this as some idealist struggle for some higher cause. For workers in Beijing and workers across China, of which there are 240 million of them which live in a precarious legal situation which denies them full benefits of employment, this was one of the key drivers behind genuine unrest during that period.
It’s a bit farcical to say that regardless of all these different splits within this movement, that it was all just one big homogenous block of misguided idealists or CIA-funded counter-revolutionaries. We have to understand that in the 21st century especially, and as much as it was then, that we confront revolution as a diverse arrangement of struggles from people with different material backgrounds who correspond to different ideological tendencies. The point is not to impose one form on them. It is to give them the freedom of expression to experiment with alternate methods of how we could govern our lives. It is not simply by imposing one form.
I have emphasized continuity between the Mao and Deng eras for a reason. It is to point out the fact that we get so caught up in trying to define terms so much and define eras and paint villains and heroes. We need to understand that this does not necessarily map on to our current struggle today and our current struggle today is an international one and it is only through global revolution that we can establish the basic minimum of what we could call a communist society which is to be very brief about it: a planetary form of government operating on principles of non-domination, mutual determination, and free association, which harnesses the technological productive and human factors towards not just furthering economic development, but also of genuinely repairing our relationship to the ecology of the world.
L: It’s very dangerous to think that US imperialism is nuanced. US imperialism is the dominating force across the world. US imperialism has control of the world with its many different facets, whether it’s the military, the media, or the US dollar. This is the first form of exploitation that needs to break down.
I found Christina’s points really incredible. I wanted to ask Barry because he touched upon what the Western Revolution would look like given the material conditions are different here. I want to know how the many ideas of the Western Revolution look at the absolutely brutal, exploitative, colonial past of many of these high-income countries. Do the ideas of the Western Revolution look at what a revolution would look like within the bounds of a nation-state?
BY: I’m a bit old school in that I can’t see… I mean, one of the reasons I was never attracted to Trotskyism back in the day was I found the notion that you can’t have socialism in one country, I found it quite absurd. I couldn’t see how you could have this coordinated uprising of the workers in all the countries roughly at the same time, adjust your watches for different time zones and all that. It was nonsense to me. So, I do believe that you can. Probability is that socialism will come about within the framework of a nation state. I don’t know if that answers your point. Am I missing some of the depth of what you were asking?
It partly does. My question alluded to the fact that the exploitation that happened in the colonial parts of many of these high-income countries, and the material conditions that they enjoy today are partly because of or because of the colonial past. So how does the Western Revolution look towards any reparations towards it within the bounds of a nation state?
BY: Yeah, I want to think about that one. I don’t have the ready-made answer. I recall that Karl Marx, in his writings on India, he pointed to the exploitation and so on, but he also had a dialectical approach which saw that British imperialism was necessary for India to overcome a lot of the traditional past. It’s in his 1847 essay on India[25]. This is something that a lot of academic types spend a lot of time trying to explain and excuse but it’s entirely consistent with the Marxist idea that progress is universal and that a lot of the traditions just because they’re happening in subjugated countries doesn’t mean they’re good for the people. So, there is that complexity to your question that for example with India, India today without British imperialism, what would it be? What are the positives of the British legacy in India? Are there any? I would think there are. Economic development, overthrowing the rule of the elders, modern democracy, multi-party competitive votes, a free press, et cetera. It’s almost like Monty Python. So, yeah, the colonial past is really in the past, by and large.
L: That’s where I totally disagree.
Concluding Thoughts
CV: It’s very important to understand, like, what would this look like in the West? Because we talk here, China, China, China, and for some reason Ukraine and India. To understand this process can’t be solved in one night, obviously. I don’t think it’s an idealist fallacy to say that we need to understand that no one form of pursuing revolution is the natural or the right way to do it, because when you confront the logic of a party state which says that everything the party must do in some ways it almost creates a kind of political surplus for itself from the desires of ordinary people for revolution and change in their life and I find that to be a fascinating thing because all of a sudden the state for itself, the party for itself, the nation for itself. You can very quickly see lines of continuity though not complete association with some of the same things that drifted Mussolini away from socialism and towards fascism. I don’t want to insinuate that we have a condition where China is a fascist state. That’s not what I’m trying to argue. When I say that US imperialism is nuanced, as someone would claim here, I do not mean that in the sense that we should take it as it comes. I want to outline the condition that regardless of what forms it takes, either hilarious or terrifying, the condition that confronts us now is hell. That only through hell can a revolution on a global scale, which is the ultimate goal of our movement, actually be waged.
L: Well, if you think it’s hell now, then it’s going to get a lot worse as the forms and the systems of exploitation that the West benefits from start to fall apart. We can see this in, for example, Britain. What does the British economy have to offer the world? It’s based entirely on finance in London. What does it have to do, how does it compare, for example, to the computers that are built in the global south? When the playing field is made equal on the global stage, the West will fall into it. I want to say it nicely, it will fall into similar levels of poverty, when it loses this privileged position. That’s what’s happening. Countries like China and like India and Brazil are organizing themselves to be able to rely on each other and not have to work through the Western systems that keep them in a subordinated state. Because it doesn’t make any sense. How can Britain provide that quality of life without having a real economy? So yeah, that’s my vision for the future. The West is going to have a reckoning, unfortunately. That is due to the work of China in organizing the exploited global south nations to help each other out and evade sanctions for example. The working class of the West is gonna have to wake up to this reality and start building a new future, a separate state apparatus for the working class and start re-industrializing our country’s green re-industrialization.
BY: There’s a Communist Party in the Philippines who has sustained the longest guerrilla and armed struggle, revolutionary struggle of any other country, any other party. They even have liberated areas in the south of the Philippines. Read them on China, they know about China. They call China fascist and they call it social imperialism. Please, read the things that I’ve referred to if you want to get a different point of view because a lot of the things I’ve mentioned don’t get into the mainstream media and I bet they’re not on the reading guides at universities. That says a lot. We’re seeing competition for spheres of influence. When there’s all this praise for China benevolently helping the South and so on, it really is just imperialist competition. As Lenin said, you don’t side with or support the ascendant imperialism. That’s something to think about. The characterisation of American imperialism is, frankly, ridiculous. It’s decrepit. It’s on the way out. It’s in crisis. It never recovered from its defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese people. You can point to these wars. The worst one was Iraq. 4,000 people died, American soldiers. They lost that in a month in Vietnam. America is in decline, and who represents that better than Donald Trump? His isolationist tendencies, ‘America First’ retreat. This competition, the spheres of influence between the two main imperialist powers, America and China, the left should never side with the ascendant one, and that is China. That’s my final word on this.
Transcribed by Conaugh Dwyer, Ali Ramezani and Jake.
[2] Communist Unity was formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist Organisation, which was founded in 2024.
[3] Video of the panel is available at <https://youtu.be/jrjEe9W8cMA>.
[4] See “Reflections on my trip to China in 1971, and the eventual victory of the ‘capitalist roaders’” <https://c21stleft.com/2020/08/19/reflections-on-my-trip-to-china-in-1971-and-the-eventual-victory-of-the-capitalist-roaders/>
[5] Can be found at <https://bannedthought.net/China/Maoism/2022/ChinaRevolutionAndRestoration-English-2022.pdf>
[6] The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist–Leninist) split from the Communist Party of Australia in 1964 in support of China in the Sino-Soviet Split.
[7] See “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm>
[8] “The German Ideology” <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm>
[9] See “Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Comittees” <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_57.htm>
[10] The Bretton Woods Conference was a gathering of delegates from 44 nations that met from July 1 to 22, 1944 to agree upon a series of new rules for the post-WWII international monetary system. The two major accomplishments of the conference were the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).
[11] Jiang Zemin served as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1989 to 2002, as the chairman of the Central Military Commission from 1989 to 2004, and as the president of China from 1993 to 2003.
[12] BRICS is an intergovernmental organization. Current members are Brazil, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.
[13] The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a political, economic and international security organisation comprising most continental Eurasian states.
[14] The Great Leap Forward was an industrialization campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chairman Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party.
[15] Can be purchased at
https://www.plutobooks.com/product/the-battle-for-chinas-past
[16] Dongping Han teaches history and political science at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and comes from a rural background in China.
[17] Can be purchased at
[18] The Gini coefficient is a standard statistical measure used by economists to quantify the degree of inequality in a population’s income or wealth distribution.
[19] Baku oil fields were vital to the survival of the Soviet state. Facing economic ruin, Vladimir Lenin mandated the Red Army’s invasion of Azerbaijan in 1920. Later he granted concessions in certain Baku and Grozny oil districts to attract foreign capital and technology to get the wells pumping again.
[20] JASIC was a welding equipment manufacturer in Shenzhen, China. Workers attempting to establish an independent trade union were fired and beaten by management.
[21] Cliff Slaughter (18 September 1928 – 3 May 2021) was a prominent British socialist activist, sociologist, and author who dedicated his life to Marxist theory and working-class internationalism.
[22] Can be found at
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1960/10/leadership.html
[23] The Gang of Four was a powerful political faction within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that led the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) led by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing, Zhang Chinqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen.
[24] The Maidan uprising of 2014, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, culminated in February 2014 when mass civil unrest and protests in Kyiv’s Independence Square overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.
[25] Referring to Marx’s 1853 essay, ‘The British Rule in India’ found here
C21st Left 