by Heiko Khoo

China’s rise in the world economy was produced by changes in work and the working class. New workplaces and work practices diversified the composition of the working class. Nowadays there are two main categories of urban workers. The traditional working class predominantly employed in state owned units, and migrant workers generally employed by the private sector or in enterprises of hybrid ownership.

I shall focus on the new migrant workers and look at how their protests and demands relate to those of the traditional working class. For the Communist Party of China the trade unions are central to the maintenance of legitimacy, therefore I shall assess how the Chinese trade unions act and react to workers demands and look at ways that workers express their demands and organise to attain them. (more…)

“At what point can one say that a qualitative transformation [to capitalism] has occurred? If the majority of the economy, including all the decisive sectors, were firmly in the hands of private owners, this would represent a fundamental change. The law of motion of a planned economy would be replaced by those of the market.”

Ted Grant: Russia: From Revolution to Counter-revolution, 1997

“The Marxist thesis relating to the catastrophic character of the transfer of power from the hands of one class into the hands of another applies not only to revolutionary periods, when history sweeps madly ahead, but also to the periods of counterrevolution, when society rolls backwards. He who asserts that the Soviet government has been gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is only, so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism.”

Leon Trotsky: The Class Nature of the Soviet State, 1933

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In 1949, China underwent a social revolution during which capitalism and feudalism were abolished. It was not possible to solve even partially the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in any other way. These tasks were the creation of a nation state, the separation of church and state, the overthrow of autocracy and the crushing of feudalism in the countryside. Only Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, enriched by Ted Grant, could fully explain this process.

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The China debate within the International Marxist Tendency raises a range of fundamental theoretical, historical and empirical questions which are fundamental to understanding the how the world will develop in the 21st century. This is the first in a series of posts which we hope will encourage readers to get to the grips with this difficult subject.

Here is a link to a document adopted by the IMT as their official position. Heiko Khoo’s reply is published in full below.

http://www.marxist.com/china-long-march-capitalism021006.htm

The Class Nature of the Chinese State

A critique of “China’s Long March to Capitalism”

By Heiko Khoo August 2008

In 1949 the Chinese revolution led to the formation of a workers state, which abolished landlordism and capitalism and established a planned economy that transformed the living conditions of the masses. Since 1978 the Chinese Communist Party adopted economic methods not used on a large scale since Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union. This policy fostered exploitation, created inequality and class polarization, but also led to the development of the productive forces and the working class.

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