PSLs book China: Revolution and Counter-Revolution includes a resolution that deals in part with the class character of the Chinese state. While rejecting the notion that Dengs capitalist road represented full-scale counter-revolution, it deals at length with how the working class character of the state has been compromised and in key respects no longer meets what have been the standard definitions for workers state. This is one of the relevant sections: *The Chinese state has assumed many of the tasks of a bourgeois state* 88) Both China and the former Soviet Union consisted of states and governments that were birthed by a workers and peasants revolution, with a proletarian (communist) party at the helm. Both used a similar economic model with the perspective of building socialism and not capitalism over the long term. Socialism was the perspective. 89) Since the economic reforms of 1978, China has incrementally and radically shifted its economic model away from socialist methods in order to integrate its national economy into the world capitalist economy. 90) These reforms have given rise to a new bourgeoisie inside China. The state, led by the Communist Party of China, has functioned as the protector of this bourgeoisie both in its relations with the Chinese working class and in its relations with the imperialist bourgeoisie. 91) To the extent that the Chinese state has promoted and enforced the rights, the interests and the needs of the Chinese bourgeoisie and the transnational corporations functioning within China, the state assumes the tasks of a bourgeois state. Since it is a state that originated from a working-class revolution and enjoyed an immense base of support from within the working class and peasantry, the Chinese state has only been able incrementally and over a time frame of several decades to diminish its historic obligations and defense of its original social base. 92) The Chinese state, including the Communist Party of China, has essential elements of what is known as Bonapartism, meaning the ruling party has to a degree straddled the class divide and has a foot in the camps of the bourgeoisie and the working class. The actual living experience of China in its evolution since 1949 is without precedent. Its differences with the Soviet Union’s evolution require us to acknowledge that it is not an exactly analogous social formation at this point. 93) The destruction and incremental dissolution of public ownership, centralized planning and the monopoly of foreign trade constitutes a historic setback for the Chinese working class. Its rights and interests have either been stripped or seriously eroded while the rights of capital, including foreign capital, have been elevated. 94) The advancement of the Chinese bourgeoisie has been at the expense of the political and social primacy of the working class. To the extent that a larger section of the Chinese population, including the working class, has additional access to goods, it comes as a form of personal or individual acquisition and cannot mask the fact that the status of the working class as a class has been seriously downgraded in terms of its social rights and political weight within the state and party.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 05:55:01 +0000
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