Nick G.
(Above, painting of Mao Zedong proclaiming the creation of the Peoples Republic of China from the Tiananmen rostrum on October 1, 1949)
October 1, 2012 is the 63rd anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This was an event of earth-shaking significance following fast on the heels of the victory of the war against fascism and the post-war advances of socialism worldwide. It brought dismay and anger to the imperialists and jubilation and hope to the people.
The new People’s Republic of China was created by the Chinese workers and peasants under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. Accordingly, the Chinese Party and its leaders came to be revered internationally by communists and progressive people struggling for a better world. They were deserving of reverence, but that reverence was tainted with subjectivism, with historical idealism.
It remains hard, even today, for some to accept the logic of the laws of uneven development and to accept that in less than half a century there could be two major setbacks, two disastrous events to temper the blind confidence in a future free of capitalism and imperialism.
Firstly, the leadership of the mighty USSR, the country that had turned the tide of war against Hitler and Co., lost confidence in their people’s ability to stand up to the threats of a nuclear armed US imperialism. The latter had emerged relatively unscathed from WW2; the former suffered 20,000,000 casualties and immense economic losses.
Following Stalin’s death, the Khrushchev gang promoted revisionism and accommodation to capitalism and imperialism. Many good comrades were unable to see this at first, although the smashing of the last vestiges of state ownership in 1991 sealed the matter. What had failed and collapsed was not socialism, but revisionism.
Secondly, there was the change of direction in China following the death of Mao Zedong. The PRC blazed a trail for feudal and semi-colonial nations to achieve independence and develop socialism. It created a model for the revolution in undeveloped, semi-rural countries.
For at least three decades, the PRC practised proletarian internationalism, coming to the assistance of the Korean and Vietnamese peoples in their wars against US imperialism, maintaining ties with and supporting the Marxist-Leninist parties of peoples wanting revolution, providing practical and political assistance to nations seeking liberation from colonial and neo-colonial enslavement, and supporting countries pursuing independence from being enmeshed in the economic, diplomatic, military and cultural web of imperialism.
Under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese people were encouraged to learn from the triumph of revisionism and the subsequent restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. Various attempts were made to conduct socialist education and to combat the powerful vestiges of feudal and capitalist ideas, bureaucracy and corruption, culminating in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
In the history of socialist countries, this was a bold, innovative and unprecedented attempt to train successors to the revolutionary older generation, and to engender mass ideological understanding of the differences between socialism and capitalism, and between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism.
Following the death of Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution was denounced and a series of economic measures enacted which weakened the all-round exercise of power by the Chinese proletariat and emboldened those wanting to embrace the capitalist road. In the circumstances where the Communist Party of China remains the leading party in China, and where there remains the profession of Marxism as a guiding ideology, there is still struggle to determine which will finally prove victorious, namely, the socialist road led by workers and peasants, or the capitalist road led by the new bourgeoisie. It has to be said that to outside observers like ourselves, it would appear that the capitalist roaders have the ascendancy.
The new bourgeois elements that emerged in the course of China’s “reform and opening up” included corrupt elements within the Communist Party of China, up to and including its Central Committee, as well as local and regional upstarts who exploited their fellows no less savagely than had the hated Kuomintang (KMT) bosses of an earlier period. There was also a comprador element that serviced the needs of imperialist capital in China.
Today, the core of the new privileged elite in China is encouraging the deployment of Chinese capital in overseas foreign direct investment. There is a growing merger of the interests of Chinese private capital and Chinese state-owned capital to secure foreign sources of raw material, markets for Chinese goods, and opportunities for profit generating overseas investments.
In our region, there is a growing rivalry between the US imperialists and China. In the struggle between the two, the US imperialists are forced through economic weakness to fall back on military containment and threat. China, in a situation of continuing economic growth and expansion (although not without some speculative bubbles in real estate and sporadic incidents of over-production of commodities), is playing a much more sophisticated game of manoeuvring the US aside in regional and global economic forums and institutions, and in promoting the Yuan in opposition to the US Dollar.
In the current circumstances of China’s importance within a globalised capitalist economy, and of the playing out of fundamental contradictions within that economy, China should be supported where its interests come into conflict with and weaken the major imperialist bloc headed by US imperialism, so long as those interests do not in their own turn violate the interests of the world proletariat.
In any case, at a people-to-people level, it is appropriate to promote friendship and understanding between the Australian and Chinese peoples and respect for the achievements of the great socialist era of China’s emergence from semi-feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. It is only through the great foundations of a socialist economy that the present strength of the Chinese economy could have developed.
As with all our other international solidarity with the people of the world the CPA (M-L) supports the Australian people’s understanding of issues related to China’s national sovereignty, territorial integrity and multicultural unity. Our Party opposes attempts to blacken the reputation of Mao Zedong and other leaders of the Chinese revolution; and promotes the Chinese Communist Party’s history of revolutionary struggle to end feudalism, imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism and to lift these burdens from the backs of the Chinese people. We promote understanding of the great contributions of the Chinese revolution and of those who led it. The same approach should be adapted to the great pioneers of socialism in the USSR.
Asian Australians have been a primary target of attack by those who seek to divide the community, and in particular, to weaken the unity of the Australian working class. We should assist in vigorously fighting all manifestations of racism within the ranks of the people.
The oppressed peoples and nations of the world, together with the working classes of the advanced industrial nations, have placed their faith in socialism. Setbacks have occurred. This is only natural, and accords with the laws of historical and dialectical materialism. New attempts to build socialism are inevitable and will be made. Material conditions for socialism are advancing and maturing. New setbacks will occur and need not be feared. Each new attempt will be enriched by the lessons of earlier attempts, and new setbacks will be more consciously anticipated and better resisted. It is like a game of snakes and ladders in which we will get better the longer we play.
In celebrating the 63rd anniversary of the People’s Republic of China we redouble our efforts to develop the revolutionary movement in our own country and among our own people. This is our main task and our contribution to the international revolutionary working class movement.
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