Chinese Revolutionary Socialists (Trotskyists)
We publish the following statement in solidarity with its authors and as a contribution to the development of revolutionary groups in China
As 2023 draws to a close, the world is facing a crisis potentially deeper than the financial turmoil of 2008. The Russo-Ukrainian War is still ongoing. The living standards of the working class in European and American countries are hit by the severest inflation in decades. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict threatens to drag the entire Middle East into war while the already fragile economies of most third world countries are on the verge of bankruptcy under the dual blow of pandemics and geopolitical rivalry.
In China, the economic situation is deteriorating, and the party-state system is steadily heading towards instability. The inevitably uneven development of capital within China, combined with the distortions of bureaucratic control, have resulted in not only declining growth rates but also divisions within the ruling bureaucratic caste. At such a historic juncture, Chinese Trotskyists believe that it is time to make public their views, principles and positions on the Chinese revolution, to distinguish themselves from the programmes of the Maoists (Mao-Leftists) and the liberals, and to clarify the strategy and tactics for the forthcoming mass movement.
As bona fide Marxist-Leninists, we hold this truth to be self-evident, that successive modes of production have raised human productivity to the point where their own social structures made further development impossible, for production to achieve a higher level those social structures had to be overthrown in a social revolution; capitalism, having developed the productive forces to the point of a global system of economic production, has now reached the point where its social structure presents society with the alternative of socialism or barbarism. The pursuit of socialism is Liberty, Equality and the sustainable development of Humanity, and to serve that end, the working class, itself the product of modern capitalism, shall smash the bourgeois state machine and replace it with a workers’ state, to overthrow the capitalist system for making profit and replace it with a planned economy for meeting needs, paving the way to a stateless and classless communist society.
The rule of democratically accountable workers’ councils is the defining feature of a workers’ state that can open the way to socialism and communism. This fundamental axiom of Marxism was first formulated from the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and developed by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was proven from the negative side by the experience of the Soviet Union, China and the other degenerate workers’ states established after the Second World War, none of which was able to develop its economy to a higher level than the advanced imperialist states.
The Communist Party of China (CCP hereafter) was a genuine revolutionary workers’ party at its founding in 1921. Nevertheless, as the result of erroneous leadership under the Stalinist Third International and the historic defeat of the Chinese proletariat in 1927, CCP faced immensely harsh conditions when every urban working-class organisation and the vanguards were annihilated. Far from maintaining its working-class social base, the CCP was forced to survive in a conservative and backward countryside and recruited soldiers from the revolutionary peasantry. The class character of the party gradually underwent a qualitative change. By the time when Mao Zedong and the Red Army arrived in Yan’an in 1936, CCP had already become a counter-revolutionary party of a military-bureaucratic caste that was willing to defend its power at any cost. Here, Maoism, the “Stalinism with Chinese characteristics” emerged .
In 1949, the CCP came to power at the head of a Popular Front whose initial programme was for an extended period of capitalist development. When that proved impossible, the CCP, rooted in the state bureaucracy, overturned capitalist property relations creating a degenerate workers’ state. Although capitalist property relations were overthrown by bureaucratic measures, their progress towards qualitatively higher levels of production and social equality was prevented by the rule of a bureaucratic caste. Thus, the progression to socialism required the overthrow of the CCP by political revolution.
Today, 30 years after the CCP’s decision to restore capitalism in 1992, the class character of China has evolved from a capitalist country to an imperialist capitalist country with global ambitions. The task of the Chinese proletariat is therefore no longer political revolution, but social revolution – in other words, proletarian revolution would have to put an end to both the one-party dictatorship and the capitalist property relations defended and promoted by the party-state.
In the epoch of imperialism – the highest and latest stage of capitalism, the objective pre-conditions for a proletarian revolution are ripe all over the world. However, history repeatedly shows that subjective conditions of a revolution are as essential as objective conditions. Therefore, we, Chinese Trotskyists, based on the principles and experience of the Communist League, the First International, the Left Wing of the Second International, the Third International in Lenin’s era and the Fourth International in Trotsky’s era, now proclaim to the citizens in China and the world the following 10 points as our stance:
1. Down with the bureaucratic dictatorship! Abolish the “leading role” of the CCP!
China is a capitalist country, we demand the immediate recognition of all democratic demands compatible with capitalism such as freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, the right to form independent trades unions and parties. Public administration is necessary but bureaucratic rule is not, disband all CCP party committees and posts in every sector of life, economic, political and social. Bureaucratic rule has obscured the fundamental division within society between workers and the capitalist class, which supports bureaucratic rule as long as it guarantees capital accumulation; no reliance on capitalists and their allies in the struggle for workers’ rights.
2. For the election of workplace committees which will then form the basis of workers’ councils composed of recallable delegates. Due to the nature of the Stalinist regime, any independent mobilisation of the working class would immediately come into conflict with the state apparatus, whatever problem might prompt their mobilisation. In all enterprises and factories, the democratically elected workplace committees of all workers shall be the supreme authority. The deputies sitting in the workers’ council shall be recallable anytime by a general assembly. Abolish business secrecy, open all management information systems and books and accounts to be supervised by workers’ deputies. Factory committees shall enforce workers’ control in all aspects of production, including guaranteeing the right to strike and veto the management’s decision – whether it concerns wages, working conditions, or redundancy decisions. Oppose the privatisation of banking and state monopoly industries; for workers’ control over the People’s Bank of China, the expropriation of all commercial banks and their amalgamation into a single State Bank, an essential step towards the introduction of democratic planning, overseen by a state planning council, as proposed by both Lenin and the Soviet Left Opposition in the early 1920s; for workers’ control over state-owned industries including but not limited to energy, water, electricity, telecommunications, railway, aviation and mineral industries.
3. Outside the workplace, the proletariat must have independent trade unions as a central element of its class organisation. Either through the overhaul of existing “state” trade unions, or through the creation of new trade unions in the democratic movement, independent trade unions must be accountable to and controlled by their members. Trade union officials must be directly elected and recallable by union members; the “leading role of the party” shall be abolished; union officials will receive the average salary of their members.
4. Against the censorship laws of the CCP bureaucracy, workers should decide for themselves what to publish. Support the free circulation of any literary and artistic works. Open access to the press, newspapers, radio and television to any workers’ organisation or independent trade union. Remove social media censorship and abolish the Great Firewall. Workers shall have the right to discuss any piece of legislation without state intervention. Election of judges and trial by jury in workers’ courts.
5. The freedom of all working classes to form political parties, the right of any group of workers and small peasants to put forward their own candidates in any election; all citizens have the right to form political parties that respect democratic rights (thereby excluding the fascists). For transparent election of village officials, recallable anytime; open the book and accounts of every village. Full reparation to the victims of land seizures and illegal land sales. Election of rural soviets guarded by peasants’ militia which will make their decisions on the use of collectively-owned land resources, transportation, operation of public facilities and environmental protection. Oppose land privatisation in cities and countryside. Demand free credit to farmers to buy machinery and fertiliser, as well as incentives to encourage individual farmers to join cooperatives and supply and marketing cooperatives. For workers’ control of large, capitalised firms developed since the privatisation of collective farms and production cooperatives in Deng Xiaoping’s Reform; construct large-scale modern state farms as a model for voluntary transformation of individual/family farming. Massive investment to increase free health care, transportation and cultural services in rural areas. Provide free public housing for landless people. Gradual elimination of rural-urban divide through the “combination of work on land and in industry”. Abolish the “land financing” system and nationalise the property sector without compensation; provide decent and free public housing for low-income families.
6. In the course of revolution, the police, armed police and national security agency will be broken up, to be replaced by a Public Safety Committee modelled on the Cheka in the early Soviet era. As the experience of the Arab Spring shows, revolutions in authoritarian countries will begin with democratic demands but could only ensure their success by going beyond the democratic stage, breaking the soldiers from their high command and winning sections of them to the revolution. The Tiananmen massacre has also shown that even if there is a split within the bureaucracy, if the dominant faction still controls the armed forces, it will be used to defend against popular uprisings. In this respect, the core of the revolutionary programme, therefore, is to support soldiers’ freedom of assembly, organisation and expression, and elect their own commanders to soldiers’ committees, which then becomes the Soldiers’ Council.
All workers shall receive military training, arm and organise themselves into workplace-based militias, as the guardian of Workers’ Councils. Repeal the National Security Law in Hong Kong; immediately implement universal suffrage; convene constituent assemblies at both provincial and national level; the provisions of the Basic Law concerning the relationship between the Region of Hong Kong and the Central Authorities shall be submitted to the National Constituent Assembly for review or amendment. Abolish the death penalty. For unconditional release of all political prisoners.
7. For Soviet democracy. To overthrow the bureaucratic dictatorship, the working class must establish its own means of exercising state power. The independent organisations that emerge in the struggle against the bureaucracy, the factory committees, need to be combined into Workers’ Councils (Soviets). The Soviets will organise the working class and its allies of the rural poor to carry out a mass uprising against the bourgeois state. The workers’ council has both executive and legislative functions. Combine the workers’ council and the soldiers’ council to establish the Soviet government (workers’ and peasants’ government), as the form of a proletarian dictatorship. The Soviet government shall set up a price-watch committee to supervise the quality and prices of consumer goods and ensure the sliding scale of wages. Creation of a national unemployment union to provide jobless people with vocational training and distribute the existing jobs over the whole labour force on a pro rata basis.
8. Down with all kinds of social oppression. A typical feature of the Stalinist regimes is that the feminist movement and the gay liberation movement are suppressed and even persecuted by the bureaucracy every day. In the Soviet Union, the political counter-revolution of the 1920s marked not only the establishment of a bureaucratic dictatorship over the economy and politics, but also the reversal of reforms introduced after 1917 to combat social oppression. The huge contribution made by the October Revolution in homosexuals’ and women’s liberation has long since been completely crushed. Reactionary legislation and morality were reintroduced. Everywhere in China, the Stalinist bureaucracy reinforced the bourgeois family concept and continued to dictate the size of the family according to immediate economic needs. The restoration of capitalism and the privatisation of public services since the 1990s have greatly exacerbated the oppression of women, and Chinese women have been forced to bear the triple burden of employment, housework, and raising children. At the same time, the youth are indoctrinated in schools and classrooms with “socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era of Xi Jinping”, and they are not only fooled by reactionary patriotic morality, but also deprived of their right to free expression. In this regard, we should put forward the following demands:
• Socialisation of domestic work and the construction of 24-hour crèche facilities, the prohibition of gender discrimination in recruitment and admissions, the struggle for an independent Women’s League based on women workers, large-scale investment and expansion of women’s shelters, orphans’ shelters, public canteens, public laundries, free clinics, etc.;
• Cancel any imposed family plans. Abolish the “cooling-off period for divorce” and completely free divorce rights. Impose heavier penalties for child lewdness, trafficking of women and children and rape;
• LGBTQ equality; against harassment and violence based on gender or sexual orientation;
• Support democratic control of schools and education systems by students, parents, teachers and psychologists. Increase investment in education by waiving all tuition, fees, and room and board fees from primary school to university, regardless of nationality. Youth associations are not regulated by any political party and exercise control over their own cultural, publishing and dissemination bodies;
• Abolish censorship that prohibits youth from accessing the world’s existing cultural inheritance. This will only weaken their intellect and fighting spirit, making them fall prey to reactionary ideas;
• Abolition of discrimination against young people in work and society; equal pay for equal work among apprentices, temporary and regular workers.
9. The right of oppressed nations to self-determination is an absolute and unconditional democratic right, but the Stalin-Maoists constantly denied it. Despite the federal character of Soviet Russia since its foundation, Stalinism, like other aspects of the political practice of the Bolshevik Party, retained the form and stripped it of its revolutionary content. In the Soviet Union and in all the degenerate workers’ states that followed, neither the federal character (the USSR and Yugoslavia) nor the single state (China) under the guise of “autonomous regions”, it was not a voluntary federation of peoples, but a common prison for all peoples.
Marxism holds that the nation is a modern political concept, which originates from the formation of a common market in the process of capitalist development under a series of factors such as geography, language, religious beliefs, etc., and thus the territory of China during the dynastic period, regardless of its boundary disputes and historical changes, is not a source of legitimacy for the claim of “sovereign integrity”. In the 19th and 20th centuries, at this critical stage of national formation in capitalist development, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan either declared their independence or seceded from China for a long time and should enjoy the right to self-determination under the conditions of national formation.
After the CCP came to power in 1949, the People’s Liberation Army invaded Xinjiang and Tibet, depriving the two ethnic groups of the right to self-determination. From the 1990s onwards, because of the social counter-revolution caused by the restoration of capitalism, ethnic minority areas witnessed the rise of religious power and nationalism. Like the social counter revolutions that took place in other aspects of national life, the restoration of capitalism created separatist sentiments on the one hand, and escalating conflicts between Han, supported by the CCP, and the ethnic minorities on the other. In recent years, Xinjiang has become the most typical case.
The proletarian revolution must first recognize the right of self-determination by the indigenous in Xinjiang and Tibet, which includes the right to secede through a referendum. Above all, what form of self-determination that might take place and whether they want to exercise this right is up to the will of indigenous people. This is not only correct in principle, but also the only way in practice to ease the tension between Han and ethnic minorities due to state oppression. Therefore, national self-determination is the only way to win the support of the proletariat of the minority nationalities to the Chinese revolution.
Meanwhile, every socialist, be they Han Chinese or ethnic minority, must call for the formation of a socialist federation of Asia that member states could voluntarily join and withdraw, and that Han Chinese who had settled in Xinjiang and Tibet under the state colonial programme would have the right to choose to stay and develop together with the ethnic minorities, or return to their hometown in mainland China regardless of the future of Xinjiang and Tibet.
The demands of socialists shall be:
Disband the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps;
Withdraw the troops stationed in Tibet;
Release all Uyghurs and abolish the “re-education camps”;
For religious freedom, freedom of indigenous languages and culture
For the right of national self-determination;
Long live a Federation of Asian Workers’ States!
10. A return to the proletarian internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky. Western socialists have called for the dissolution of NATO, the World Bank and the IMF, while Chinese socialists shall demand the dissolution of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the cancellation of all debts of developing countries, the abolition of the Belt and Road Initiative, and the free donation of infrastructure projects in Africa and Southeast Asia to local residents. In countries that have become semi-colonies of Chinese imperialism (e.g. Pakistan), withdraw all the troops from oversea military bases, remove all unequal privileges, and announce a plan to compensate for the environmental pollution caused by the transfer of production capacity. For recognition of the sovereignty of a workers’ state in determining the control and development of oversea Chinese enterprises. Abolish secret diplomacy; disclose all secret treaties signed with foreign countries. Condemn the war waged by Russian imperialism in Ukraine. Hands off Taiwan; cancel all the sanctions or counter-sanctions. Oppose all military spending by the party-state. Condemn Israel’s settler colonialism and support a single, secular and socialist state in Palestine. Stop official xenophobia propaganda and military build-up in nuclear or conventional weapons. Full and equal rights for foreign residents. Issue the revolutionary statement to all foreign countries’ governments and call for world revolution.
***************************************************
On the eve of the American Revolution in 1776, Thomas Paine wrote, “The cause of America is in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their affections are interested.” Today, the cause of the Chinese proletariat is also the cause of all mankind, first and foremost, because the international character of a proletarian revolution naturally transcends the limitations of the bourgeois nation-state, and the Chinese revolution will be a link in the world revolution and in the transition to a world socialist federation. Although at present, the Chinese bourgeoisie has its own reason to oppose the party-state and may use the Republic of China as a banner for “democratic revolution”, the Chinese revolution can be a true revolution when and only when it ends in a power seizure by the proletariat.
Trotsky, in expounding the philosophical thought of Marx and Engels, once pointed out: “Mankind has driven out the dark spontaneous forces from the sphere of production and ideology, and replaced the barbaric conventions with science and technology. The replacement of religion with science, which led to the Renaissance and Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was the pursuit of intellectual rationality; and then mankind drove out the unconscious from politics and overthrew the monarchy and hierarchy with a democratic, purely rationalist parliamentary system, and then a completely transparent Soviet system. It was the pursuit of political rationality that began with the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries and culminated in the October Revolution; and finally the blind spontaneous forces took the deepest root in economic relations – but there humanity would expel the spontaneous forces with socialist economic organisation, all of which made it possible to achieve economic rationality.”
What makes China special is that it is a country where none of the three rationalities – ideological, political, economic – has been realised, and therefore the mission of proletarian revolution shall be the combination of all three.
Consequently, all revolutionaries who endorse the above mentioned demands must firstly be organised into a single party. A revolutionary labour party shall practise democratic centralism – “one member one vote” for its members and full freedom in discussion with the minority obeying the majority, democracy in decision-making and absolute discipline in action-taking. As Lenin pointed out, as the vanguard section of working class, a revolutionary labour party has to raise the level of organisation, morale and consciousness of the proletariat via each and every struggle, until it will be able to lead the whole class in overthrowing the bourgeois state through insurrection and establish a workers’ and peasants’ government. Any worker’s party, therefore, shall form its government only through winning the majority of seats in the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council and never treat the party apparatus itself as the regime power. Lastly, in order to promote, coordinate and unite the revolutionary movements beyond the border, we call for a new Revolutionary International based on democratic centralism, as a world party for socialist revolution.
Although for the time being, we are a tiny minority among the Chinese proletariat totalling 400 million, although we face the enmity of the second biggest imperialist power and an utterly totalitarian CCP-state, we believe the Chinese proletariat in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory. On the eve of the New Year 2024, we request the militant workers at home and across the globe to listen to our demands and follow our actions.
- Workers and the oppressed of all countries, unite!
- Long live the Chinese revolution!
- Long live world revolution!