Letter: Calling the Pot black (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Calling the Pot black

Dear Editors,

John Bissett's article in the August Socialist Standard was excellent. There was a curious parallel between the Ceausescu and the Pol Pot dictatorships at the time they were being given Western aid and tacit approval. Not only did the Queen dub the Rumanian ruler, Sir Nicolai but the British press was encouraged to spell his country as Romania so as to emphasise its historic link with Rome. Similarly newspapers began to spell Cambodia as Kampuchea as a sop to Pol Pot. This policy was quietly dropped when the scale of the Khmer Rouge massacres became more widely known. However, the public abhorrence of the Pol Pot regime has been insidiously used by defenders of the oppressive system operating in Vietnam founded by Ho Chi Minh. These people are loud in their condemnation of the Khmer Rouge but have maintained a fifty-year long silence with regard to Ho’s initial task on behalf of his masters in the Kremlin. That was to murder the entire leadership of Indo-China's substantial Trotskyist movement in the interregnum between the collapse of the WWII Japanese occupation and the re-establishment of French colonial rule.

Later, when the French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietcong began their slow but sure mastery over the independent states that came into being in the wake of France losing her South-East Asian territories. American intervention in the Indo-Chinese civil war certainly introduced a massive increase in the technology of destruction but there was little they could teach the Vietcong by way of the cruel and treacherous methods of guerrilla warfare in which they eventually proved victorious.

Rivalry between Vietnamese and Cambodian nationalism goes back a long way. But a bone of contention which has been little commented upon by Western specialists on Asian affairs is the way Pol Pot claimed that his savage treatment of the population under his control was laying down the pre-conditions for a moneyless Communist society with no private property whatsoever. In my opinion these claims must have been a major irritant in Leninist circles where to be reminded of what their original aim was supposed to be was very uncomfortable indeed. Stalin sent people to Siberia for less!

Eddie Grant, 

London NW4

Letter: Sri Lanka (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sri Lanka

Dear Editors,

I would like to draw your attention to a mistake in the article on Sri Lanka in the August issue of the Socialist Standard. The article states that the Tamils were brought to the island, then known as Ceylon, from India during British rule to work as cheap labour on the tea plantations. In fact, this group of "Indian" Tamils account for only about 1.2 million of the total Tamil population on the island. They lived until recently mainly on the plantations in central Sri Lanka.

The remaining 1.4 million Tamils live largely in the North and East of the island. They trace their history in Sri Lanka all the way back to the fifth or sixth century BC. when it is believed the Sinhalese began to settle on the island. By the time the Portuguese colonialists arrived in the 16th century AD. two separate kingdoms — Tamil in the North and Sinhalese in the South were well established. During the British colonial period these two kingdoms were brought under a single administration for the first time. At the time of Independence the idea of a separate Tamil state was regarded as rather extreme by most Tamils. Nevertheless the Tamils were concerned about their future status in an independent Sri Lanka, as they were considerably outnumbered by the Sinhalese.

The case of the Indian Tamils is quite different. They have had no share in the ancient history of either the Ceylon Tamils or the Sinhalese on the island. When they arrived in Sri Lanka they were scarcely better off than slaves. They were resented by the Sinhalese as they were settled on estates in the heart of the Sinhalese area. As the plantation economy boomed they found themselves marginally better off than the Sinhalese peasants in the area. The estates often provided them with some medical care, education and housing. They were disliked also by the Ceylon Tamils as they were mostly low caste Hindus living in abject poverty and dependent on the estates.

However, by the time of Independence they just outnumbered the Ceylon Tamils. They held considerable electoral sway in the central area of Sri Lanka, as they outnumbered the Sinhalese in these areas. Their vote ensured that eight Indian Tamil MPs went to parliament in 1947. In 1948 the Indian Tamils were disenfranchised and deprived of Sri Lankan citizenship. The Indian Tamil MPs were replaced by Sinhalese MPs This action gained the approval of the Ceylon Tamil leaders as well as the Sinhalese.

Since then there have been several agreements with India to repatriate several hundred thousand Indian Tamils and readmit the rest to Sri Lankan citizenship. These measures have been slow, largely unsuccessful, and have only added to the sufferings of the Indian Tamils. Conditions on the estates have deteriorated and the Indian Tamils live under conditions of considerable hardship.

However, it was not until 1977 that the two separate Tamil groups started to join forces. In that year violent anti-Tamil activity was directed at the Indian Tamil estate workers for the first time. This drove many of them out of the central area of Sri Lanka to the North, where they sought refuge with the Ceylon Tamils whose leaders by now were agitating for a separate state. Here they continue to be harassed by the state forces seeking out terrorist suspects.

KM

London

Correspondence. (1956)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow, C.2, 22/8/56.

Sir.

In the Socialist Standard for August your contributor F. Offord, says “At the conclusion of the Second World War when the Japanese capitulated to Russia their arms and ammunition and their control of Manchuria were handed over by Stalin, not to the Communists who had borne the brunt of the Chinese war against the Japanese, but to their mortal enemies the Nationalists.”

These statements are not merely incorrect—they are the very reverse of the truth. When withdrawing from Manchuria, the Russians, instead of handing over Manchuria to Chiang Kai-shek, whose authority they had by treaty recognised, gave advance notice to the Communist forces who were able to take up positions before the Nationalists arrived. The Russians surrendered immense quantities of captured Japanese arms to the Chinese Communists and this was one of the principal factors in ensuring Mao Tse-tung’s success.

Neither is it true, but the very opposite of the truth, to say that the Chinese Communists bore the brunt of the fighting against Japan. The Communists reserved as much of their strength as possible for the coming struggle for China while the Nationalist forces were exhausted by their long and terrible campaign against the Japanese. Lin Yutang did not exaggerate when he said, in 1945: “For every Japanese the Communists claim to have killed they have killed at least five Chinese; for every town they have captured from the Japanese, they have captured fifty towns from the Chinese.”

The Communists directed their struggle mainly against their own countrymen and the immense aid which Russia gave them was a direct breach of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship of August 1945 in which Stalin recognised the National Government as the central Government of China.

Yours faithfully.

H. W. Henderson.

Reply to Mr. Henderson.

On Mr. Henderson's first main point that Russia surrendered to the Chinese Communists the arms and ammunition left by the Japanese in Manchuria and also assisted, with advice, he does not give proof of his assertion. As for the statements in the article, they are fully supported by the following quotations from the generally-recognised historian on China, Professor C. P. Fitzgerald, and quoted from his work “Revolution in China.” “Late in the war, in 1945, Stalin could say to Harry Hopkins that he did not regard the Chinese Communists as a serious factor, and recognised only Chiang’s Government as that of China. ... It was this regime [that of Chiang Kai-shek] that the victorious powers recognised as the legitimate Government of China. The Communists were treated as dissident forces who should properly submit to the authority of Chiang Kai-shek. Their claim to share in the surrender of the Japanese, or to administer the provinces in which they had maintained resistance for eight years, was not accepted ” (page 83). On page 86 is a description of how Chiang Kai-shek (the leader of the Nationalist Kuomintang Party) obtained “the surrender of the Japanese to the forces of the Kuomintang, not to those of the Communists.”

As to which side bore the brunt of the fighting against Japan—on page 64 “Chiang devoted his time and his German-trained armies to fruitless campaigns against the Communist rebels in South China. Huge sums of money were wasted on these vain attacks, heavy losses of material, many casualties among the best trained troops. None of these troops were ever permitted to fight the Japanese. . . .” On page 77, “. . . the Communists, who had ten years of experience of guerrilla warfare behind them, could be sure of being able to keep the field, for years if need be, till they, and they alone, represented Chinese resistance.” Again, on page 80, “.The Nationalist Government, from the end of 1939, never made any further military effort to recover lost territory . .  It did not engage to any serious extent in guerrilla warfare behind the Japanese lines. This task was left to the Communists. . . ." Incidentally it was the constant fight against the Japanese which the Communists maintained that was such an important factor in rallying the patriotic Chinese behind the Communist Party, and that, in turn, really was a factor which enabled the Communists eventually to conquer China.

F. Offord.

British capital in Malaysia - Part 1 (1966)

From the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Up till a few months ago British and Indonesian soldiers were butchering each other in the jungles of North Borneo. With the ending of “confrontation” Tunku Abdul Rahman, Prime Minister of Malaysia, said that it was a “victory of the forces of good against the forces of evil”. But, when it is known that this relatively small area provides over one-third of the world’s natural rubber, is a leading producer of tin— and that nearby Brunei has the largest oilfield in the Commonwealth, it becomes clear that the war in Malaysia had very little to do with a struggle between “good” and “evil”. The prizes at stake were large enough for the British government, representing the general interest of British capital, to consider it worth spending £255 millions each year to maintain its armed forces in the country. 

The original cause of British intervention in Malaya was trade. For this reason the island of Penang was rented on perpetual lease in 1786, the island of Singapore was bought in 1819 and the decayed port of Malacca was obtained from the Dutch in 1824. From these bases British “protection” was extended—so that between 1874 and 1909 the nine Malay states were brought under control. The sultan of each state signed a treaty by which he agreed to accept a resident adviser and to follow the “advice” in all matters except those that concerned the Moslem religion and Malay custom.. This arrangement still persists in the oil state of Brunei; the Sultan remains the nominal ruler but it is the British government, through its High Commissioner, which is responsible for all external affairs and defence.

Malaya in the 1880's has been described as a museum piece of Asian feudalism, roughly similar to 12th century France or Germany. But with the rapid development of the tin and rubber industries this feudal backwater found itself hurled into the modern, capitalist world. The state of the country was suddenly determined by the prices of these two commodities and no longer by civil wars between rival claimants to the throne. By 1914 the value of foreign, chiefly British; capital in Malaya had already reached $.US 194,000,000. When the Second World War broke out this figure had been dwarfed and there was something like $.US 260,000,000 of British capital alone invested in the tin mines, rubber plantations, etc. In addition there was a further $.US 82,500,000 invested in government loans, which were often floated in London. French, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and American capitalists had all staked their claims in the rush to exploit Malayan workers, but it was British imperialism which held the whip hand. In recent years there has been some reticence about revealing the total amount of British capital invested in Malaya but some idea of its enormity can be gauged from the fact that in 1961 remitted profits on direct, foreign investment from the Malayan Federation were $.M 321,000,000. In the same year a further $.M 137,000,000 flowed into the country as private, direct, long-term investment. It would be inaccurate to picture this as a one-way process. For example, the native capitalist class in Malaya—through its government—declared its official overseas assets to be $.M 825 millions at the end of 1960. These consisted mainly of British government securities, including local authority mortgages. A clear example that the exploitation of the world’s workers by the international capitalist class is a process that cuts across all national boundaries.

Although Malaya yields approximately one-third of the total world output of tin, it is interesting to note that only some two per cent of it is now produced by the traditional dulong washers. These are individual collectors who concentrate the ore by hand, using a pan in the beds of streams. There are upwards of a hundred mines owned by British capitalists and this represents about three-fifths of the total industry. Its contribution to the profits remitted out of Malaya, taking good years with bad, is a reasonably close rival to that of rubber.

The history of the tin industry is one of desperately trying to impose some sort of order on to the chaos of capitalist production. During the inter-war period an International Tin Committee was formed whose object was “the adjustment of production to consumption and the reduction of surplus stocks by the restriction of output”. This was set up largely as a result of the slump of 1930 when tin prices fell disastrously. The verdict of economists on this attempt at enforcing price stability is that “it was unable to prevent violent short-term fluctuations in the world price”. (L. A. Mills—University of Minnesota). After the Second World War it was confidently suggested that these “short-term fluctuations” could be ironed out by means of a world buffer stock of tin. This was the method adopted when international control of production was again established in the nineteen-fifties. Just how successful this has been is demonstrated by the table below.

As can be seen, after 1958 there was a run-away increase in prices and once again the professional economists were forced to admit that capitalism reduces the most carefully-laid plans to a shambles. Thus, the Economist ruefully made the point:

The tin agreement, which is based on the manipulation of a buffer stock, and was intended to cope mainly with price declines, has been faced with unmanageable rises. The buffer stock manager has had no tin to sell since October, 1963. But, despite the long list of unsuccessful agreements, primary producers go on trying to find the ideal formula. What else can they do?  (10th July, 1965)

Any socialist could supply the answer: nothing at all, within the framework of capitalism. Only the ordered production of a socialist society provides a solution. The economists, yearning for an “ideal formula”, resemble nothing so much as the alchemists who searched in vain for the Philosopher’s Stone. (Incidentally, it has since proved just as hopeless to deal with price declines. Since January of this year, tin has fallen nearly £180 a ton on the London Metal Exchange).

John Crump

(To be concluded)

The Yellow Revolt. (1914)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

“China and the Social Revolution,” by Kiang Kang Hu.

This little pamphlet is an all too brief sketch of the revolutionary movement in China during the recent upheaval. It is exceedingly interesting reading, and would be a startling eye-opener to the brand of anti-Socialist whose only excuse for opposing Socialism is that England must wait for Socialism until the “uncivilised” and the heathen are converted to our cause.

Here we have the “heathen Chinee” applying Marxian remedies to working class evils, and showing a knowledge of capitalist conditions that would put to shame many a “civilised” Christian “labour leader.”

The great revolution in China in which the working class, as is customary in all such revolutions, was used to free the land from Manchu rule, leaves the Chinese worker groaning under still worse conditions, conditions common to the early development of capitalist production. And, as a result, to use the author’s words ;

“The faith of the people is gone in Republicanism. The belief that it was the Manchu’s only who were oppressive is shattered. There remains but one thing, THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. That and that only can bring relief to the toiling millions of China. Their only hope lies in this : the taking over of the entire mechanism of production and operation of it by the workers, for the workers—the Socialist or Industrial Republic.”

The growth of The Socialist Party of China was evidently too swift for the powers that were, for in 1913 martial law was declared in Peking, the headquarters raided, the Secretary, Chen Ye Long, was beheaded and the S. P. of China dissolved. It is however but for a time.

“China cannot remain long in the grip of the re-action. Yuan Shi Kai can overrun the country with his troops. He can zealously stamp out, every spark of revolt. And yet, even as he does that, the tremendous forces are gathering, forces to which his army is but a toy, which will hurl aside Yuan Shi Kai and the re-action as though they were nothing. The name of those forces is industrialism. Steadily in ever increasing speed, the great economic change to machine production continues in China. This means that China must be, will be modernised.

“And the Socialist Movement in China will reassemble its forces, fall in step with the great Red International and march with it to victory.”

The author puts things very straight, and a passage dealing with the missionary, the capitalist, and the invasion of China by the Allied Powers is thus neatly and forcibly summarised: “China can now come into contact with the holy trinity of capitalism, the Cross, the Dollar Mark, and the Bayonet.”

Much other useful information is given in this brochure, which is well worth perusal.

Twel.

What future for the Beautiful Island? (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

A look at the 'other China'

Start with Hong Kong. A bouquet of modern capitalism. Concrete, glass, steel. Banks, hotels, skyscrapers. Streets bedecked with anti-pollution face masks. And residents who advise visitors come to marvel not to drink the water. Then escape to a leaf-shaped island of some 24 million population which became known to untroubled, disinterested people outside only because it was the country of origin of much of the cheap electrical equipment they bought from their local branch of Currys or Comet. Once reliant on the export of cheap textiles or consumer goods the island rose to be among the world’s leading manufacturers of computer software and hardware. Not to overlook bicycle parts, some of which are used at a London East End branch of the not-for-profit Social Enterprise to help train locals who are homeless, isolated or unemployed (or perhaps all three) to make a kind of living as bicycle mechanics.

Within the island’s demographic stew there are some half a million descendants of about a dozen aboriginal tribes, settled with others who came over from mainland China. Together they can claim to be now one of the most peaceful societies in Asia. So – welcome to the island of Taiwan, to Ilha Formosa (beautiful island), to the Republic of China – a misleadingly splendid name for a state which is no longer a member of the United Nations and is recognised by only the likes of Belize, Malawi, the Vatican… Welcome to the beautiful scenery, the mountains, the golden beaches. To the flyovers whisking you above the factories and past the driven schools. To the nation state which exists by, through and in with, one tough work-ethic.

Martial Law

Of the competing mercantile powers it was the Portugese who, about 1590, “discovered” Taiwan – and gave it the name Ilha Formosa. A long period of war, rebellion and murderous poverty while Taiwan was a “province” of China ended in 1895 when the Japanese occupied the island. This was supposedly “in perpetuity” but it came to an end in 1945, after a half century of martial law. Japanese rule was harsh – an estimated ten thousand people were killed – but not corrupt and it developed an educational system as well as roads, railways and industry. In 1943, as the Allied leaders were carving up the Far East in expectation of Japan’s defeat in World War Two, a “peace” conference in Cairo decided that, as a spoil of war, Taiwan would be “returned” to China under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). United States Vice President Truman’s response described the island as “America’s unsinkable battleship”.

Towards the end of the war there was a subtle change in the vocabulary of the Allied powers’ intentions; Taiwan was to be “temporarily occupied” on their behalf by the KMT. But this was soon undermined when civil war broke out on mainland China between the KMT and Mao Tse Tung’s “communist” forces. Preoccupied by those more pressing events, Chiang left the running of Taiwan to his deputy Chen Yi, whose regime was barbaric enough to provoke many “liberated” Taiwanese to regret the end of Japanese rule. In 1947 a minor incident connected to the state monopoly of the tobacco trade inflamed a series of widespread protests which were crushed with mass arrests, torture and execution of up to 30,000 people. (The day when it started – 28 February – is now a national holiday in Taiwan and New Park in the capital city Taipei was re-named 2-28 Peace park). That horror was a foretaste of things to come

White Terror 

By 1949, as the KMT on the mainland were facing defeat Chiang Kai-shek took refuge in Taiwan, where he continued to insist that one day he would prevail. Meanwhile martial law returned under The White Terror, with mass arrests of those alleged to be “attempting to overthrow the government”. Over 90,000 were taken in this way and at least half of them were executed. The scene of much of this was Green Island Lodge – a prison on a volcanic island separated from Taiwan by a few miles of nausea-inducing Pacific Ocean. Here there is lush scenery, one of the world’s three seawater hot springs, golden beaches, pristine coral reefs and dazzling tropical fish. This is where many Taiwanese come to enjoy a short break – if they can ignore that close by are a museum and a human rights memorial in place of the notorious prison where so many victims of The White Terror suffered and perished.

Apart from his willingness to commit atrocities, the defeated Chiang Kai-shek became something of an embarrassment to the Americans. In 1971 President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger offered an “opening” – a carefully chosen word of flexible interpretation – to China and, as if that was not enough, Taiwan lost its membership of the United Nations to China. During the following year the US and China met and agreed on a “communiqué” which, while not actually saying that Mao had won the civil war, “acknowledged” (more of those careful words) that the new China was a unified country of which Taiwan was a part. This betrayal of what was supposed to have been an unshakeable commitment was settled after the negotiators had been pleasured by an especially sumptuous meal, encouraging Nixon’s odious chief arm-twister, replete, to assure his hosts “After a dinner of moatal and Peking Duck I’ll sign anything”. Well, he was Henry Kissinger wasn’t he…

Elections

Chiang Kai-shek died in 1978 and his son Chiang Ching-kuo took over with an easier, less repressive hand. While martial law was still in operation it was possible in 1986 for the first official opposition – the Democratic Progressive Party – to be formed and to win a significant number of seats in the next election. In process with these changes in 1987 martial law was brought to an end; free elections are now an established part of political life on the island and the election of 2000 brought an end to KMT rule. It should be said that it is not unknown for elected members to try to sort out their differences through a punch-up in the Chamber and for political business to be obstructed through allegations of corruption. In 1991 the KMT claim to link Taiwan and the Chinese mainland was formally abandoned. Symbolic of the clearing away of a lot of the obstructive anachronisms imposed on the Taiwan of the 1940s, many of the statues of Chiang Kai-shek were vengefully torn down. It was symbolic too of Taiwan feeling its way into place as an independent competitor in global capitalism.

Part of this process is Taiwan’s promotion of itself as a tourist attraction to rival the best offered by the likes of Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia. “Where else” bellows a full page ad in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement “would you find time-honoured traditions that thrive in perfect harmony with the chic and the avant-garde”’. Apart from its “breathtaking scenery” the island’s vibrant ambition is testified to by “the city’s skyscrapers” – among them Taipei 101, the world’s second highest building, with the fastest elevator to whisk you from ground level to the top viewing spot in a matter of seconds so smoothly that you are unaware of moving. All of which demands that the Taiwanese people live by a patriotism manufactured as surely as those computer parts. And it all soaks down to the children, who devotedly learn the officially sanctioned Mandarin language – often along with English and Japanese – during an average 12 hour day in the classroom with extra tuition in Maths and Science at private cram schools on a Saturday.

Unemployment 

But hard work, to whatever degree, has not been able to insulate Taiwan from capitalism’s chaos. The present world recession has cruelly broken the dream of ever-flowing Taiwanese prosperity. Unemployment is an encroaching problem no longer confined to the poorer, under-educated families but now also affecting graduates. A government subsidy intended to persuade companies to take on graduates has had the effect of worsening poverty at large by forcing applicants to accept lower starting wages – at about half the national average. Many employers – as in England – have pressed their workers to take temporary unpaid leave, or have stopped taking on new staff altogether. And there remains a serious problem of youth unemployment, with the rate for 15-24 year olds about twice that for the workforce as a whole and looming over it all is the real prospect of them being sucked into the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

After a history of savage repression, Taiwan is struggling now for a place among the trend-setters of Twenty-First Century global capitalism. For example they are trying for admission to bodies such as the United Nations and there are missions working for unity with China. As one guide (Robert Kelly and Joshua Brown, Lonely Planet ) put it: “So is Taiwan at a crossroads, or a precipice?” And it may also be asked – what will this do to a beautiful island which has already suffered so grievously? Will it turn out to be a modern capitalist power as frantic, as restless and as abrasive as Hong Kong?

Ivan

China: the Puzzle of the Past (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is the Marxist view of China’s history? Prior to modern developments and the establishment of the Communist régime, the scene was of vast tracts where millions of peasants eked out existence on strips of land, under the thumbs of landowners and at the mercy of warlords; manufacture and trade belonged to only three or four well-populated areas. The ready conclusion is of a feudalism going back to the earliest kings. In China's Three Thousand Years (1973) C.P. Fitzgerald writes:

The Chou kingdom [1025 BC] was designed on what is familiar to the western world as the feudal system: the country was divided into fiefs whose rulers, more or less closely related to the monarch, had the duty of raising forces to fight for him and were also required to pay ceremonial visits to court.

In a later chapter Brian Hook refers to the view “employed by Chinese Marxist historians” that China “passed through primitive, slave and feudal societies, the impact of the West occurring, however, before the onset of the capitalist stage of society” This is taken directly from Mao Tse-tung’s statements in the official edition of his Selected Works:

[Up to now] approximately 5,000 years have passed since the collapse of the primitive communist society, and the transition to class society, first slave society, and then feudalism.

It sounds too probable to question. Yet preceding it was a doctrinal change-over in Russia, in which Stalin altered Marx and eventually his officials announced that a part of Marx’s historical theory had been disposed-of completely. The Chinese Communists adopted Moscow’s teaching to help build their own régime. And the question remains: what is the Marxist view of China’s history?

The Meaning of History

The basic statement of Marxism is the materialist conception of history. The way in which men stand to one another in the production and distribution on which they must depend is the foundation of all social organization. Marx put it thus in the Preface to The Critique of Political Economy :

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

Since the passing of primitive society, the relations have been those of owning and non-owning classes. Class interests have centred on the ownership of the productive resources, and the changes from one historical epoch to another have been the triumphs of new owning classes. Marx’s economic theory is not distinct from but part of this understanding of history: the labour theory of value is the detailed working-out of the class struggle in present-day society.

In the same passage in The Critique of Political Economy, Marx states the forms society has taken:

In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society.

“Ancient” is the slave societies of the Mediterranean and the near-East, from whose break-up feudalism emerged. Marx identified “Asiatic” society principally with India and China. In Volume I of Capital (pages 350-352, Allen & Unwin edn.) he described the self-sufficiency of Indian villages, linked with a communal system of land tenure, as “the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies”; and the handicraft paper-making of India and China as “two distinct antique Asiatic forms of the same industry” (p.377).

That Marx saw Asiatic production as a separate type of economic organization is made plainest in the Grundrisse. In the latter part of Notebook IV references to it occur repeatedly. For example:

In Asiatic societies, where the monarch appears as the exclusive proprietor of the agricultural surplus product, whole cities arise, which are at bottom nothing more than wandering encampments, from the exchange of his revenue with the ‘free hands’, as Steuart calls them. There is nothing of wage labour in this relation, but it can stand in opposition to slavery and serfdom though need not do so . . .

(p.467)

In the Asiatic form (at least, predominantly), the individual has no property but only possession; the real proprietor, proper, is the commune — hence property only as communal property in land.

(p.484)

Hydraulics and Hierarchy

The requirement on which Asiatic society was founded was that of large-scale irrigation. In Capital Volume I (p.523) Marx wrote:

It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economising, of appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the works of man’s hand, that first plays the decisive rôle in the history of industry.

He went on to name examples, all of irrigation works, in Egypt, Lombardy, Holland, India, Persia, Spain and Sicily. In some of these, of course, the economy was simply a farming one involving some irrigation. The social and political consequences when all depended on major irrigation were shown in two footnotes on the same page:

1. The necessity for predicting the rise and fall of the Nile created Egyptian astronomy, and with it the dominion of the priests, as directors of agriculture.
2. One of the material bases of the power of the state over the small disconnected producing organisms in India, was the regulation of the water supply

Because of its importance the management of water could not be left to diverse hands. The characteristic of Asiatic “hydraulic society” was large scale government-managed works of irrigation and flood control.

The amounts of private property varied in Asiatic societies, but had to be subject to the hydraulic regime. In Volume 3 of Capital Marx said that in the Asiatic system there existed “no private land- ownership, but both private and communal possession of the soil”; i.e. there was no universal system of land tenure as in feudalism. The rulers, priests and supervising bureaucrats had the surplus and the pickings from supreme autocratic leadership. Engels summarized Asiatic society thus in Anti-Duhring:

However great the number of despotic governments which rose and fell in India and Persia, each was fully aware that its first duty was the general maintenance of irrigation throughout the valleys, without which no agriculture was possible . . . The ancient communes, where they continued to exist, have for thousands of years formed the basis of the most barbarous forms of state, oriental despotism, from India to Russia.

(pp. 202-3, Lawrence & Wishart edn.)

In the hydraulic works continually in hand, the bulk of labourers remained peasant's without differentiation or division of labour. There had to be reservoirs, sluices, dykes, aqueducts, drainage and navigation canals. The armies of labour were transferable to non-hydraulic projects: huge defence structures, roads, capital cities — and tombs and temples for the rulers. The first Chinese emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, is said to have had 700,000 employed on building his palace and his tomb.

The Case is Altered

The question of Asiatic society as an inconvenience to the official doctrine-makers of Soviet Russia first came to the fore between 1925 and 1930. Ryazanov, the director of the Marx-Engels Institute, and the economist Varga published articles on the Asiatic mode of production depending on government-controlled water works, and declaring China to be a society of the Asiatic type. In 1926 Stalin began designating China as “feudal”, and the 1928 Programme of the Communist International spoke of “feudal mediaeval relationships". The assertion was that if Asiatic society was to be recognized it was only as an Oriental variant of feudalism.

Karl Wittfogel in his Oriental Despotism argues that the matter goes back to the original break between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1906. Lenin in his early days not only accepted Marx’s and Engel’s theory of Asiatic society but applied it strongly to Tsarist Russia. Planning land nationalization to win the support of the peasant masses for the seizure of power, he was — says Wittfogel — hoist with his own petard: the proposal closely resembled what he had condemned as Aziatchina. Thus, from 1906 he gradually dropped speaking of Asiatic society substituting “mediaeval”, “pre-capitalist”, and “feudal”.

The debate was sealed in 1938 with the publication of Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. In it (pp.43-44, L. & W. edn.) he quoted Marx’s Preface to The Critique of Political Economy — short of the sentence referring to the Asiatic mode of production. Only three forms of class society were named: slavery, feudalism and capitalism. But in particular, Stalin laid down that geographical environment could not be a “determining cause” in social development: “for that which remains almost unchanged in the course of tens of thousands of years cannot be the chief cause of development of that which undergoes fundamental changes in the course of a few hundred years” (p.24).

Engels dealt with this question in 1894 when replying to H. Starkenburg about the materialist conception of history. He wrote differently:

Under economic conditions are further included the geographical basis on which they operate and those remnants of earlier stages of economic development which have actually been transmitted and have survived — often only through tradition or the force of inertia; also of course the external milieu which surrounds this form of society.

(Selected Correspondence, p.516)

Truth is a Class Affair

Because this adoption of a different view of history is recent, it is still possible to read books published before the “revision” that describe the Asiatic hydraulic societies. There are V. Gordon Childe’s Man Makes Himself and What Happened in History — and, as a curiosity, the British Communist Party’s Handbook of Marxism. In general, however, the 1939-45 war intervened conveniently to avoid critical arguments; western Communists were able to resume believing, or saying, history had always been so. The final act was an official Russian report in 1950 which announced the consummation of Soviet Oriental studies: “the rout of the notorious theory of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’.”

Wittfogel’s book has established itself as the standard detailed work on Asiatic society, and in 1962 he published two articles in The China Quarterly (nos. 11 and 12) on “The Marxist View of China”. Much more research needs to be done before reaching conclusions, of course. For instance, Wittfogel apparently did not have access to the Grundrisse, and in some observations about the “political myth” of the government’s rôle in various societies he is a long way from understanding either Marx or western history.

Nevertheless, here it is. Marx postulated an Asiatic form of society to which China almost certainly belonged. The Russian state, for its own ideological purpose, set out to erase that it had existed; and the theorists of the new Chinese state, following similar purposes, adopted the re-fashioned analysis of its history. Before crying out at such cynicism, it is as well to remember that every nation has misrepresented its own — and other countries’ — history. The point of the proper Marxist view of history is to see the class interests at work. Lying about the past is a necessary part of lying about the present.

Robert Barltrop

Indonesia: all change for no change (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chain of over 13,000 islands stretching 3,600 miles from Malaya to Northern Australia have a long and chequered history. Evidence suggests humans resided on some of these islands over 50,000 years ago. From 3000 BC to 500 BC immigrants from South China mixed with, or displaced, the original Melanesians. Indian influence from AD 700 created a Buddhist and two Hindu empires co-existing among those islands. The introduction of Islam by Arab traders in the 13th century eventually destroyed these empires. Brunei became a powerful Islamic Sultanate, dominating the whole of Borneo and parts of the Philippines. The whole chain of islands were divided into many kingdoms but Arabs came to dominate trade and religion throughout.

The first Europeans to open a sea-route to Asia were the Catholic Christians of Portugal. Their ruthless hatred of Islam was welcomed by the island kingdoms who assisted in breaking the trade monopoly of the Arabs. The first half of the 16th century saw the demise of Arab trading as the Portuguese built fortified trading posts, not only among these islands but, throughout the whole of Asia in an attempt to monopolise commerce in that part of the world.

In the latter part of the 16th century serious European rivals appeared on the scene. The Protestant Christians from Holland hated the Catholic Portuguese and they proceeded to evict them entirely from the island chain. The Dutch set up their trading centre at Batavia on the island Java and they would eventually colonise the entire archipelago under the name of Dutch East Indies. In the meantime the British were eliminating Portugal from India and Malaya. It was the lust for the lucrative trade in eastern silks, porcelain, precious stones, perfumes, spices etc that drove these commercial ventures and caused so much bloodshed.

France squabbled with the British over India but later settled for claiming Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam). Borneo was partitioned and claimed by the Dutch and Britain while the Philippines were claimed by Spain. Way down in the south, Australia would become British and the large island to the north, New Guinea, would be partitioned and claimed by the Dutch (west), Germany (north-east) and Britain (south-east). After losing World War I, Germany would lose this colony to Britain and the whole eastern half of this island would be handed to Australia to look after. The sole remnant of Portuguese activity was the eastern portion of Timor, the Dutch claiming the western half.

The Japanese overran all these colonies, except India, during World War II and this prompted European colonies throughout the world to seek independence after Japan was defeated. The armed conflicts between foreign ruling classes and local ruling classes have done nothing to improve the lives of workers in any of these countries. 1945 saw the end of World War II, and Holland challenge the claim for independence by their East India colonies. The military expeditions and attrition of guerrilla warfare became economically unsustainable and independence was granted in 1949 when the Republic of Indonesia was formed. Centralised rule from Java was been opposed by several other islands and the Republic quickly became a seething mass of discontent. Ongoing revolts and dissent in Sumatra and in the original “Spice Islands” (the Moluccas) and other territories have been met with by excessive military brutality.

This authoritarian dictatorship embarked upon policies of expansion to extract wealth from surrounding resources, enabling the ruling elite to live on obscene opulence amongst the grinding poverty of the masses. West New Guinea (Irian Jaya) was invaded and forcibly annexed in 1963, adding another festering sore of discontent to the Indonesian collection.

In this same year, 1963, an aggressive Indonesia was lured by the lucrative oil in Northern Borneo. A secret war was fought when British and Australian interests in oil-soaked Brunei insisted that this area of land be incorporated into Malaysia. SAS units from Britain and Australia, and the 3rd Australian Regiment, made damaging and deadly incursions into Indonesian territory (Kalimantan) during this undeclared and clandestine war. Plans were made in 1964 to bomb Jakarta. This information was made available only recently, under the 30-year secret-file rule.

This conflict ended abruptly about 1965, as though an undercover political deal had been struck between the parties involved. Indonesian army officers were suddenly being trained in Australia for jungle warfare, and in the same year up to 700,000 Indonesians were massacred by their army for dissent. It was alter revealed that US Intelligence was also implicated in this slaughter.

The solitary Portuguese colony of East Timor, surrounded by a sea containing suspected riches in oil and natural gas, waited apprehensively for the outcome of independence wars being fought by Portugal against their African colonies of Angola and Mozambique. Indonesia also waited.

When both Portuguese colonies eventually won their independence in 1975, East Timor also announced their own freedom., they were immediately invaded by Indonesia and officially annexed in 1976. No action was taken by the UN against this act of blatant aggression or against the human violations in which tens of thousands of Timorese civilians died. In indecent haste, with Portugal now out of the way, Australia officially recognised the annexation and struck a 50/50 deal with Indonesia for the riches of the Timor sea. It seemed as though this had all been pre-planned, a political “pay-off” to Indonesia for backing down in Borneo perhaps?

Exploration since the late 1970s has revealed increasing riches of oil and gas in the Timor sea—a bonanza. Is it pure coincidence that the UN has shown increased interest, during the 1990s, in Timorese “Human Rights” in direct proportion to the increasing wealth reported lying beneath the sea “owned” by this island territory? Increasing pressure has been put upon Indonesia, by the UN, to introduce democratic elections, and in 1999 East Timor successfully voted for Independence.

An ever-opportunistic Australia, always a UN agent for Western capitalism, provided Timor with protection and peace-keeping troops on “humanitarian grounds”, after 24 years of inactivity and indifference to their plight.

A new agreement has been drawn up whereby Australia will now “manage” all the resources in the Timor Gap, worth billions of US dollars, without the need to pay any “aid”. Royalties from profits will be sufficient payment for East Timor with some left over for Australia to pocket. Indonesia will miss out completely.

All the usual major Western capitalist companies have moved into the area, among them the US giant, Phillips Petroleum and Australia’s Woodside Petroleum, etc, and—oh yes—the Dutch are back again with their Royal Shell Group.

Ron Stone

50 Years Ago: A Denunciation of Nationalism (2002)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Indian, M. N. Roy, who was at one time prominent in the Communist International, but later broke away and took a line of his own, recently wrote for the Manchester Guardian (21/6/52) an article “Asian Nationalism. Its Roots in Race Hatred.”

In it he puts the case that the Asiatic nationalist movements are not just movements to secure independence from the foreign governments that kept them in colonial subjection, for even after achieving independence they continue to preach the same anti-foreign doctrines as before. He quotes Mr. Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and advocate of Indian nationalism, as having admitted that he does not know what nationalism is:

“What exactly is nationalism? I do not know, and it is extremely difficult to define. In the case of a country under foreign domination it is easy to define what nationalism is. It is anti-foreign power. But in a free country it is something positive. Even so, I think that a large element of it is negative or anti-, and so sometimes we find that nationalism, which is a healthy force, becomes—maybe after liberation—unhealthy, retrogressive, reactionary, or expansive.”

Yet though Mr. Nehru could not define nationalism he went on to declare that it “warms the heart of every Asian” and that “any other force that may seek to function must define itself in terms of this nationalism.”

Mr. Roy says this is nonsense and that what Mr. Nehru’s explanation really means is that nationalism is “race hatred kept alive artificially.”

“Asian nationalism is an unmixed evil. It has not got the saving grace of a cultural and idealist origin as in the case of earlier European nationalism.”

Although Mr. Roy notices that between the wars European nationalism developed into fascism, and quotes the statement of the late Lord Acton that nationality sacrifices everything “to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State,” he does not appreciate the simple fact that nationalism has been and is everywhere the form in which each capitalist group tries to carve out a place for itself in the world of warring capitalist states. If he did he would not be at all surprised that the politicians who have used nationalism to gain independence from a colonial power need it just as much afterwards in order to persuade the workers to go on fighting capitalism’s battles.

If it is an illusion to think that nations can be friendly in a capitalist world provided that they are all “independent” it is equally an illusion on the part of Mr. Roy to think that the Powers, great and small, could dispense with nationalism.

At least one thing Mr. Roy has correctly summed up. Discussing the disappointing results of national independence from the worker’s point of view, he says that when India and other countries achieved independence, “absolutely nothing changed except the personnel of the State machinery.”

(From an article by “H”, Socialist Standard, August 1952)

The making of global poverty (2005)

From the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why is the Third World always third? Why are ‘developing countries’ still not developed, when the West is doing so well? Why are so many of them poor, and have they always been that way? Is it just their fault? A look at history reveals a different story, and one which explains the real origins of western prosperity.

It is sometimes called the Third World, though now expressions such as ‘the South’ or ‘the Majority World’ are felt to be more acceptable. Equally, ‘developing countries’ is seen as more accurate than ‘underdeveloped’. Yet whatever label is used, it cannot be denied that much of the Earth’s population endure lives of poverty and squalor, of undernourishment that often crosses into famine, of insecurity and lack of opportunity. Their lives are often brutally short, with life expectancy far below that in wealthier countries (just 37 years in Sierra Leone, for instance, against a global average of 67 years). Each year around 14 million children die in the Third World, mostly from entirely preventable diseases. But such conditions have not always existed, nor has there always been such a chasm between rich and poor parts of the world. For capitalism created, or at least exacerbated, these inequalities, by the way in which it exploited pre-capitalist societies as it was expanding across the globe in search of markets, raw materials and labour.

The slave trade, for instance, was perhaps the worst example — it can only euphemistically be called a ‘trade’. Labour supplies were needed in the new colonies, especially in the Caribbean, but the native inhabitants were not strong or healthy enough to provide this. The solution was to ship labour power from Africa, not as ‘voluntary’ immigrants but as slaves, captured in battle or purchased from local rulers, transported in appalling conditions and forced to work on plantations. British capitalism in particular benefited from the slave trade: its products and profits helped towns like Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol to develop industries such as shipbuilding, cotton processing and sugar refining, for colonies were forced to send their produce to England and forbidden to manufacture anything locally. Banks such as Barclays and Barings were set up with profits from slavery. ‘The West Indian islands’, says Eric Williams, writing of the late eighteenth century in Capitalism and Slavery, ‘became the hub of the British Empire, of immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of England.’ And at the same time Africa was impoverished, as it was usually the youngest and fittest who were abducted, thus depopulating the land and leaving the old or infirm, who could not cultivate the farms adequately. Africa’s population scarcely grew between 1650 and 1900, while Europe’s increased fourfold.

In addition, the Third World was a source of raw materials which fed the ever-growing demands of European capitalism. Africa, for instance, supplied groundnuts, cotton and rubber (nowadays it’s diamonds, timber, oil and rare metals). Profits from all this were repatriated, leading to further development in Europe rather than in Africa. Cotton goods and soft furnishings manufactured in India were enormously popular in seventeenth-century Europe. But the cloth industries in India, Africa and elsewhere were deliberately destroyed, primarily by British capitalism, both to do away with potential rivals and to open up new markets. In one area of the Philippines, for instance, the British vice-consul deliberately forced the replacement of locally-produced textiles with machine-made British ones, and encouraged production of sugar for export. All in all, Third World industry was undermined or at least kept on a low level while western capitalism forged ahead, partly on the basis of its colonial profits. In 1830, China was responsible for 30 percent of world manufacturing output, and India for 17 percent; by 1900, these shares were down to 6 percent and under 2 percent, respectively, while over the same period Europe’s share rose from 34 percent to 63 percent.

The end of the nineteenth century saw widespread droughts and famines, the Late Victorian Holocausts of Mike Davis’ book. Though figures can only be estimates, perhaps fifty million died in China, India and Brazil alone, as food was exported to the West, and local agriculture was disrupted by a mixture of ignorance and intent. In North Africa in the 1870s, peasants were forced to sell their livestock cheap to French dealers in order to stave off starvation in the short term. In other cases new taxes that had to be paid in money were introduced, forcing peasants to become wage-labourers. While the British rulers of India were lavishly celebrating Victoria’s sixty years as queen in 1897, wheat was being exported to Britain or left to rot in railway sidings, and poorhouses were being set up to further punish the destitute. (The Socialist Party’s predecessor organisation, the Social Democratic Federation, was the only grouping that consistently protested against the suffering being inflicted on India’s peasants.)

One of the most notorious events of the Western creation of the Third World was the Scramble for Africa (which can be roughly dated 1876-1912). This took place partly for strategic reasons: Britain needed to control both the Cape of Good Hope and the Suez Canal in order to ensure access to its Indian Empire. In addition, tropical produce was being exported to Europe, and there were many raw materials available cheaply — Germany needed access to cotton, oil, cocoa and rubber, for instance. Revenue could be boosted by taking over the tax and rental income of local ‘chiefs’, and forced labour could only increase profits. King Leopold of Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo, supposedly carried out to do away with the remnants of slavery, was the most extreme example. Edmund Morel, the journalist who exposed the extent of Leopold’s scheming, described what was happening as ‘a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman’. African rulers often gave their lands away in return for old rifles and strings of beads, or unknowingly signed a treaty in English or French that contained different provisions from that in the local language. Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister during much of the Scramble, prided himself that Africa had been carved up with no European power firing a shot against another (and African troops employed by Europeans did much of the actual fighting against other Africans). Salisbury’s policies served the British ruling class well:

  ‘He had certainly made sure that the lion’s share of new colonies and protectorates — fifteen out of thirty — went to Britain. If his preoccupation had always been to give Britain the strategic advantage, it was fortunate for Britain that he also gave it most of Africa’s most profitable territory: the gold-mines of the Transvaal, the teeming markets of the Niger, the tea and coffee of Uganda, the cotton of Egypt and the Sudan.’ (Thomas Pakenham: The Scramble for Africa)

Thus British capitalism benefited at the same time as Africa was impoverished. All in all, it cannot be argued that underdevelopment is due to Third World countries not (yet) enjoying the benefits of capitalism, that they have missed out on development by missing out on capitalism. The truth is that their current condition is a result of the role they played in the development of capitalism. Africa and many parts of Asia and South America, were colonised, formally or informally, for the sake of the European powers, whose ruling classes grew rich on the profits of this exploitation, in addition to the surplus value they extracted from workers ‘at home’.

Paul Bennett

The Four Tigers (1988)

From the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

  A weary Asia out of sight  

Is tugging gently at the night  

Uncovering a restless race; 

Clocks shoo the childhood from its face.

W.H. Auden

A trade union demonstration in Singapore is a rare sight; one protesting a decision of the United States Congress is unheard of. That it was permitted is a measure of the government's concern at Singapore's inclusion with South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong as one of the Four Tigers allegedly threatening the economic life of the US. and therefore scheduled to have its GSP privileges withdrawn on 1 January, 1989. The Generalised System of Preferences allows free or low-tariff imports of certain goods into the US; Japan and the EEC have similar schemes. Its purpose is. ostensibly, to encourage the trade and economic development of Low-Developing Countries. But trade is at least a two-way business, and developed countries are involved as much for the purpose of their economic health.

Growing up in capitalism is a painful affair, as any worker knows. Having successfully responded to the urging of their US mentors to modernise and achieve newly industrialised country status, these LDCs are reaching out for some of Uncle Sam's bourbon and cigars and have been told that they will be "graduated" from their trade privileges as a consequence.

The present trade deficit of the US. and its changed role from creditor to the world's heaviest debtor nation, is something that capitalism's supporters would have found difficulty envisaging ten years ago. Some blame Reaganomics, but this cannot explain how the exceptional economic superiority of the US after the Second World War appears to be progressively deferring to the rapid growth of Europe and Japan. Although persistent trade imbalances can be reversed and do not indicate the permanent demise of a country's economic strength, it does seem that the automatic assumption of US economic hegemony is being challenged by the development of capitalism itself in the shape, in this instance, of the Newly Industrialised Countries.

Asian NICs
These countries have all experienced colonial status and their development in the last decade has been outstanding. The UN Economic and Social Commissioner for Asia and the Pacific states that the Four Tigers achieved a remarkable 11.7 per cent growth in real GDP in 1987. Even the growth at 5.7 per cent of another Asian ex-colonial LDC, the Philippines, exceeded that of the most developed countries. And despite the continued general slowdown in world economic growth projected by the IMF at 2.9 per cent this year, the Tigers' expansion rate, in keeping with ESCAP's regional projection of 5.6 per cent, is expected to continue well above those of developed countries.

The scheduled withdrawal of GSP privileges is an example of increasing US protectionism which highlights the international nature both of markets and investment capital. The Singapore American Business Council's call on its government in Washington to reconsider withdrawal, argued that cheap imports of Singapore products into the US — in particular from their own factories in Singapore — help lower costs in US-finished products, increasing US competitiveness. In a demonstration of their capitalist maturity, the NICs took immediate steps after the announcement to support their separate economies. Trade delegations between the Tigers followed, as well as between them and areas such as India, Pakistan and East and West Europe. And Taiwan and South Korea, with a competitive eye on China's cheap and abundant raw materials, agreed to reverse their previous trade policy with her and to open their markets.

The role of the Tigers' exports in the US trade deficit is an indication that capitalism can still develop increasing productivity and output, and that industrialisation still results from investment in low-wage areas. US, Japanese and EEC capital have played the major part in this.

But the Four Tigers represent only part of the picture of Third World development in East Asia. Thailand, better known for export of rice and rubber, now exports Japanese cars, its manufactured products swelling from two per cent to 60 per cent of exports in 25 years. With the highest growth rate in the ASEAN group of six countries, and an IMF forecast of a seven per cent annual growth until 1991, she is expected to become the next NIC. Like the Tigers two decades earlier, Thailand has a flourishing labour-intensive textile industry with low wages — about US$3 daily. The increasing use of machine-intensive industry, staffed round the clock by an adaptable, young labour force, could well follow their pattern by keeping labour costs low and the economy competitive. At one-third of the cost, industrial productivity almost equals that of South Korea. Already a magnet for US and Japanese capital, investments now flood in from the economies of the Tigers and the EEC. to share in the fruits of exploitation.

Malaysia, another ex-colony attracting foreign investment, has urged Singapore and Taiwan, already the second and third largest investors in the country behind Japan, to avoid GSP restrictions by relocating their industries there, stating its aim as wanting to form an "economic power to replace the weakening US and EC markets". Its manufacturing sector's growth of 12 per cent, and its 69 per cent growth in trade surplus in 1987, reflect the surprising fact that Malaysia is now a significant producer of electronic and electrical goods, and that machinery and transport equipment head both its import and export lists.

Keeping a watchful and wary eye on these developments — and on her trade surplus with the NICs — Japan is in the forefront of OECD moves to include them in a new Pacific OECD. However, they already account for 25 per cent of the US deficit, and as they turn to the EEC to avoid US protectionism, the European trade situation could worsen. Expected by OECD to surge past Japan's surplus, and to double that of the EC and EFTA combined in 1989, it is not surprising that their inclusion in economic dialogue is seen by Japan and the other major powers as essential.

When Auden wrote the lines at the head of this article, much of Asia and the Pacific rim were colonies. Fifty years and decolonisation have passed, and many countries seem ready to move into what is referred to in Singapore as the "chopsticks century", as fully-fledged capitalist powers experiencing the same competitive pressures. As exploitation in South Korea intensified. leading to a series of strikes and a 20 per cent pay increase last year, suicides among housewives increased sharply. And in a rare demonstration of strength and solidarity, Thai workers in reorganised unions are demanding a social security system from birth to death.

Increasing US protectionism, and the anticipated strengthening of EC external tariffs with the community's impending economic unification, have led to calls for an Asian Common Market. We are not in the business of making predictions, and treat economists" forecasts with a caution derived from our knowledge of capitalisms' economic anarchy. Whichever scenario obtains — free trade or protectionism — Asian workers will indeed have lost their childhood.

Bill Robertson

The King of Nepal (1960)

From the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Several weeks ago the King and Queen of Nepal paid a state visit to London. You may recall the event, particularly if you were a Londoner caught up in the traffic chaos that day and were not mollified by the background of pageantry.

The City of London, however, showed pleasure unalloyed. The Crown Prince Birinda of Nepal watched the Guildhall luncheon in honour of his father, King Mahendra. Four hundred guests tackled lobster soup; sole and pheasant.

The king wore the same gorgeous uniform. as he did for his reception by the Royal Family on his arrival, with the addition of the baton of a British field-marshal, newly presented to him by the Queen. In his speech he said:—

  London is especially attractive to us because here was begun the battle of liberty and freedom, centuries ago, and here it was won during the latest—and let us hope, the last—challenge in war.
  The task is now to press on with the Battle of Peace—and we in Nepal unshakeably believe that London is going to be our greatest friend in this struggle, too.

Why do the Nepalese King and Queen hob-nob with “our” Queen, and what is the significance of Nepal to the British ruling class? What meaning lay behind the King's speech at the Guildhall? Such suspicious questions seem to come naturally to Socialists, for we have learned by experience in capitalism not to take too much notice of the description on the label.

May we now proceed to attempt to unravel the little mystery of the royal visit even though it may rather take some of the glitter off the tinsel.

Nepal is a border state between India and Tibet. It is 525 miles long and up to 140 miles wide, with a population of 5½ million. The family of the present ruler has been in power for decades and the history of Nepal is a long story of royal ruthlessness, trickery and bloody outrages.

Nepal invaded Tibet in 1855 and received annual tribute until 1952, when Tibet was colonised by “Socialist” China. Since then China has reversed the process and has become in turn the aggressor. The Chinese last June invaded Nepal's border, killed a Nepalese army officer and took prisoners back. It naturally gave a severe jolt to relations between them and makes it understandable that the Nepalese ruling-class should now wish to lean on the U.K. And with India on its other border Nepal is between two dangerous giants.

But the so-called Socialist Government of Nepal is good at playing one off against the other and in the process doing well for the ruling-class. To date the economic and technical aid from India amounts to about 100 million rupees (£8 million). Besides, India has been helping Nepal build up her vital lines of transportation and supply. A 972 mile highway linking Katmandu, the capital, with the Indian border was constructed by Indian engineers. In 1958 an agreement with India was signed for the laying of nearly 900 miles of roads. India has also agreed to contribute R's 500,000 for irrigation and waterworks.

From China, too, Nepal has received R'S 10 million in economic aid as part of a R's 60 million aid programme. Russia, too, has agreed to set up a hydro-electric power plant, a sugar factory with a diesel power plant, and to prepare a road survey costing three million roubles.

Whilst Nepalese capitalism is expanding, the Nepalese working-class is suffering heavy unemployment and is embarrassing the so-called Socialist government of the country. They, however, hold out hope in the start of the second five-year Plan now beginning, which has made provision to absorb about half a million working people during the Plan period. Social services cannot do much to tackle this thorny problem and the population is growing at the rate of 1.5 per cent. per year.

Amongst the Nepalese underprivileged, so great is the struggle for existence that normally children over 10 work and some even below that age. But unemployment means cheap labour, and cheap labour can give rise to good profits. No wonder the City of London are interested. The dinner at the Guildhall was bread cast upon the water, to be returned with interest.

The recently elected “Socialist” government of Nepal serves to mark that country's entry into the world of capitalism. The Sino-Indian dispute and its repercussions loom large on the Nepalese political horizon, but as a way out the Nepalese ruling class is developing a world consciousness.

When the King of Nepal referred to liberty and freedom, he was no doubt referring to the liberty and freedom for the ruling class to make money with as little in the way of restrictions and hindrances as possible. Those who remember the journeys and activities of the Duke of Windsor when he was Prince of Wales will realise that the King of Nepal is not the first royal commercial traveller.

Frank Offord

Vietnam: A Tragedy? (1967)

From the April 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The word tragedy is firmly linked to the name of Vietnam, so that it is almost impossible to hear one without the other. Everyone seems agreed that the war there is regrettable and unnecessary but nobody seems able to stop it.

Harold Wilson mournfully tells us that the only thing needed for the success of his recent joint peace move with Kosygin was a gesture of trust from one side or the other. U Thant, when he was talking last year about resigning the Secretaryship of UNO, bemoaned ". . . the tragic error of relying on force and military means in a deceptive pursuit of peace,” and the United States Ambassador to UNO, Arthur Goldberg, readily agreed — “We . . . do not believe that force and military means are good arbiters of international dispute.” Which was all very well, were it not for the fact that the USA was busily using just those means at the time.

The anti-war lobby in the United States take heart from the many prominent politicians who are critics of America's policy, and especially from Senator Robert Kennedy, who keeps popping up with schemes to end the bombing of the North and to start peace talks with Hanoi. Some American observers think this is all part of a Kennedy campaign for the Presidency in 1972 and perhaps they are right; way back when he was Attorney General in the government which was running the Vietnam war he took a different attitude: “We are going to win in Vietnam. We will remain until we do.”

Vietnam has been suffering for a long time. An article in the Manchester Guardian (20.4.54) opened with the words, “The prolonged tragedy now being played out in lndo-China is neither simple nor morally clear cut.” At that time, of course, it was the French who were fighting to keep their hold on the place, with the same sense of hopelessness as the Americans now experience. In the introduction to Jules Roy’s The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Neil Sheehan compares the two situations:

  Nine years alter the disaster at Dienbienphu had ended more than eighty years of French rule in lndo-China. much remained unchanged. The French generals and diplomats had departed . . . But they had been followed by American generals and diplomats who suffered, or were about to suffer, the same fate for similar reasons.

Vietnam is not unique in being regaided as an accident, a tragic mistake. But if it is, why is this apparent only to journalists, to protesters and to ambitious, out of office politicians? Why is it that the men in government, whoever they are, make so many such mistakes, so consistently? Why is the world apparently so accident-prone? To answer, these questions we can do worse than consider Vietnam, and why it has added its name to capitalism's long list of “tragedies”.

The French first appeared in any force on the lndo-China scene in 1771, when their soldiers helped Gia Long, heir to the King of Cochin China, put down the Tay Son Rebellion. This was followed in 1787 by a treaty between Gia Long and Louis XVI, the negotiations for which were helped along by the Almighty in the person of the Bishop of Adran, Pigneau de Behaine.

Cochin China was taken into French protectorate in 1867 and Tonking and Annam (the coastal province) in 1884. The Annamese gave the French a certain amount of trouble. In 1873 Paris had to send a military force when the merchant Jean Dupuis ran into opposition to his efforts to open the Red River to commerce and in 1882 another expedition, and later a war, was employed to break Annam's political links with China.

By the twentieth century the dust had settled and lndo-China was firmly under French control. The French military and civil authorities ran the same sort of paternal repression which later came under the spotlight in Algeria. lndo-China was an outlet for investment; trade and commerce was mainly in the hands of the Europeans — especially, of course, the French — and the Chinese. In 1922, between 250* and 300* million francs were invested in private French industries there. The French parliament granted the privilege of issuing currency notes to the Bank of lndo-China, which was itself a profitable source of investment for French capital.

lndo-China had some valuable raw materials. About a million tons of anthracite came each year from the mines at Hongay and Dongtrien, supplying the industry which was developing in the Red River delta. There were about 62,500 acres of rubber plantations, as well as some zinc and phosphates.

The colony was also a market for French industry. There was a reciprocal duty-free arrangement with France but this worked to the advantage of the French. Indo-China’s main export was rice, whereas France sent it manufactured goods. In 1925, for example, 53 per cent of lndo-China's imports came from France; in money terms this came to 760* million francs, while trade in the opposite direction amounted to 612 million francs. (*All currency amounts in these two paragraphs are at 1925 values.)

lndo-China, then, made a cosy picture of colonialism, typical of its time. But inevitably there grew up a nationalist movement, preaching that there was little hope of the country shaking off its agricultural economy and developing its industries under French rule, and arguing that the resources and the workers of lndo-China should be exploited by a native ruling class.

This propaganda had its appeal; while the French soldiers and merchants and their ladies were lording it and trying to forget their workaday worries in the cabarets and bars in Saigon and Hanoi, the nationalist movement was gathering strength. In particular a strange, slight man with a ragged goatee beard was travelling and talking. He visited many European countries, including Moscow and London, where he is said to have been a kitchen boy at the Carlton Hotel. He was, of course, at some time in prison. His name was Ho Chi Minh.

The Second World War gave the nationalists their chance. The Japanese, in their lunge down to Singapore, occupied lndo-China and ran the country with the help of the Vichy French authorities under the Emperor Bao Dai. The nationalists carried on an underground struggle and in 1941, at a congress in China convened by Ho Chi Minh, the organisation known as the Vietminh was formed. At the time this was purely an independence movement, although the Communists were prominent in it. Its name is an abbreviation of the Vietnamese for League for the Independence of Vietnam. But the fact that the Vietminh was fighting the Japanese meant that the Allies gave it their support — with the result later recorded in the appropriate volume of the Official History of the Second World War.

   . . . there were few countries in which the British and their Allies did not also seek to raise the forces of nationalism against the Japanese . . .
  In fact all parties, friend and foe alike, were vigorously engaged in whipping up nationalist enthusiasm.
   It was hardly a matter for surprise, therefore, that when the Allies re-entered Burma, Indonesia and Indo-China, they found a nationalism that was a very different force from that which they had known before the war. (British Military Administration in the Far East, 1943-46).

In March 1945 the Japanese interned the French authorities in Indo-China. In August the Vietminh took over and declared the country an independent republic; Bao Dai became Ho Chi Minh’s political adviser. The Vietnamese nationalists suffered the usual dissensions and into this confused situation, in September, the first British occupation troops arrived at Saigon. With some help from the Japanese army they carried out their mission to “restore order” and shortly afterwards a French force finished the job in a short, brutal action.

The Vietminh, however, was not beaten. There followed a number of complicated conferences, at one of which the French actually agreed to recognise “the Democratic Republic of Vietnam” as a “Free state within the Indo-Chinese Federation” which sounded like surrender, except that nobody was sure exactly what it meant and Paris was not going to help make it any clearer. On both sides, there were those who would now be known as hawks; French admiral D’Argenlieu impatiently wondered why “. . . when France has such a fine expeditionary force in Indo-China her leaders should prefer to negotiate.”

He need not have worried. In a few months matters were brought to a head by a dispute over Customs control. A French cruiser bombarded Haiphong, killing about six thousand Vietnamese. In December 1946 the Vietminh in turn attacked, massacring French civilians in Hanoi, Vietnam’s first peace time war had started.

For eight long years this dragged on, with the French steadily losing and finally suffering a decisive defeat at Dun Bien Phu. This was part of the painful recognition forced upon the French ruling class after the war, that they were no longer a world power of any consequence. France had not been able to fight the war against the once despised Vietminh alone; in 1950 they asked for American aid and from then on the United States bore the war's financial burden, contributing to France an annual average of $500 million. But even this could not prevent Dien Bien Phu and the French went to Geneva in 1954 virtually suing for peace.

In July 1954 the Geneva Agreement, which was going to bring peace to Vietnam, (Anthony Eden, as he then was, got a knighthood for his part in it) was signed. In reality, it was just another of capitalism’s sour jokes, designed to redraw the battle lines and to give each side a breather before the next round.

The Agreement divided Vietnam roughly at the Seventeenth Parallel. North of this line went to the Vietminh; south of it to the nationalists who had fought for the French in the war and who proceeded to set up a series of American supported puppet governments. The Agreement laid it down that elections were to be held in Vietnam in July 1956 — “In order to ensure that sufficient progress in the restoration of peace has been made . . .” The elections did not, of course, happen.

The Agreement prohibited the introduction into Vietnam of “. . . troop reinforcements . . . additional military personnel . . . new military bases . . . reinforcements in the form of all types of arms, munitions, and other war material . . .” But in November that year the American General (he was officially “Ambassador”) Collins arrived at Saigon declaring “I have come to Vietnam to bring every possible aid to the government of Diem and to his government only.” Collins also announced that a United States Military Mission (officially “advisers”) would instruct the Vietnamese army.

This signalled the fact that the Americans had openly taken over from the French. This time it was against the guerillas — the Vietcong — who were continuing the war by gnawing away at South Vietnam and who by 1961 held about a quarter of the countryside. There is no reason to doubt the American conviction that the guerillas were receiving aid from North Vietnam. Just like their French predecessors, the Americans found the enemy tough, well trained and armed. But this time there would be no surrender and so began the process known under the typically ugly name of escalation.

Almost desperately, the Americans have tried to stem the flood with more and more troops and with increasingly ferocious bombardment; from the air with high explosive, rockets and napalm and now from the sea with shellfire. They have pushed the bombing line further and further north until Hanoi itself is under fire. Each step has been excused with the argument that earlier, less ruthless measures have failed. But the Vietcong are still gnawing.

The United States, then, are in the same sort of trap as the French. Washington is pumping tens of millions of dollars into Vietnam, as well as their men. There are now 415,000 American troops there, compared with 215,000 a year ago. The Pentagon recently estimated that 100,000 of these may well be killed during this year.

This massive effort has not had the results expected of it. In May 1962, US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara said “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.” But in January this year he testified to a Senate committee that “The bombing of North Vietnam has not reduced and will not significantly reduce the level of infiltration to the South.” (Guardian 21/2/67).

So what can Washington do? Present policy seems to be based on the reasoning that to admit defeat will also surrender Cambodia, Laos and Thailand to a hostile power. It would open the gateway into Malaya and thence into the very heart of America’s sphere of control in South East Asia. For Johnson, Vietnam is just as much a sticking point in a long process of retreat as Suez was for Eden in 1956.

This interpretation need not be correct. China is an old enemy of Vietnam and, to get its valuable resources — its anthracite, phosphates, chromite — would doubtless be prepared to repeat the invasions of the fifteenth century. Perhaps the Vietnamese will end up fighting them once more; not the only irony of the situation is that peace with America might make Ho Chi Minh one of Washington’s staunchest allies.

And if there is not peace? U Thant has forecast a “prolonged and bloody conflict” and this seems to be the likeliest outcome of the immediate future. The Americans will step up their effort, the fighting and the bombardment will become more intense. Perhaps it will go a stage higher in escalation, and bring in nuclear weapons. The official propagandists, will tell us that this is all being done to save humanity — an assurance which will not be readily accepted by the people who suffer under the bullets and the blasts and the unimaginable horrors of napalm.

Vietnam is not a tragedy. Nor is it a mistake, those who say that it is, whether they protest or not, are trying to excuse the inexcusable. They are trying to prove that capitalism’s wars need not happen — that they are the result of wrong judgments or moral lapses. The whole point of this pretence is that, if we accept it, we also accept that wars can be prevented simply by finding cleverer, or more morally sensitive, leaders. There is then no need to get rid of capitalism.

The melancholy history of capitalism, of its World Wars and of its smaller conflicts like Korea, Algeria and Vietnam, provides the evidence which exposes this pretence. There is small hope for the world, while society regards its problems as tragedies. Capitalism is full of international conflicts. When has it made a comedy of them?

Ivan