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

China in the 19th Century (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

In communist theory the feudal era in China ended with the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 — preceded by a period of embryonic capitalism, and followed by the capitalist era. In reality, though this marked the end of Imperial and dynastic China, its economic effects were minimal. But for the 1914-18 war, it is quite probable that Yuan Shih-Kai’s bid to inaugurate a new dynasty with himself as emperor would have been successful; from the founding of the republic, he had the support of the western powers against the revolutionary Sun Yat sen.

The preoccupation with the war in Europe deprived Yuan of foreign support when he claimed imperial legitimacy, and also let in the Japanese as a new predator. After the war the western powers, expecting to return to the status quo, imagined they could buy off Japan by admitting her to the wolf-pack and allowing her to have the former German interests in Shantung province. This was China’s ultimate disillusionment with the west; it sparked off the May the Fourth movement from which Chinese Communism was to spring, nationalism and all. Confident that Japan had been appeased, the western powers went about their business of exploiting China. This was the period of warlordism, which was only a reflection of other rivalries. And when Japan wanted more, the western powers sank their differences and jointly supported Chiang Kai-shek as the best bet for defence against Japan.

During this period, though capitalism waxed fat in China, it was practically entirely western capitalism. Very little indigenous industrial enterprise started up. What did arise was a flourishing finance capitalism. Bankers, direct heirs of the usurious pawnshops of traditional China, were able to negotiate foreign loans and act as agents for raising Chinese capital to go into foreign enterprises. But agriculture continued to account for 90 per cent. of the population, and the torments of the peasants intensified as it was upon their backs that the burden of others’ money-making rested. To speak of this as China’s capitalist era is a delusion.

Before the 1911 pseudo-revolution China is supposed to have been undergoing the pangs of nascent capitalism. It is convenient to start the story of what was happening with the First Opium War of 1840, although it really opens with the Lord Macartney mission in 1793. The western mercantile nations were affronted and indignant at China’s refusal to enter into trading relations with them. China deliberately saw no benefit in foreign trade; to the rapacious young capitalist class this was an incomprehensible denial of the laws of political economy and of God. By 1840, they were prepared to force China at gun-point to accept their trade.

China’s subjugation followed as a matter of course, helped by the degeneracy of the ruling dynasty and civil strife. By 1860, after the sack of Pekin by the Anglo-French Expedition, both the Dragon Throne and the bureaucracy were in despair. The traditionalists interpreted these troubles as the consequence of the Emperor’s departure from Confucian virtue; but there was a more realistic school of thought which held that western force could only be met by Chinese force. They were agreed on the need to maintain traditional Chinese society, but advocated the introduction of western technology so that China could build the only weapons — both military and economic — which the intruders understood. They became known as the Self Strengthening Movement. Their practical problem was the declining revenue into the Treasury.

After the 1860 war the Maritime Customs was set up; it was for a long time administered wholly by western nations, mainly British, with Sir Robert Hart at the head. Its object was to collect payment of the various indemnities charged against China, and to fix low tariffs so that western goods could compete against Chinese products. Western goods were also exempt from internal taxation, so that the revenue crisis was very serious.

At the same time the Taiping Rebellion was raging. The first massive successes of the Taipings were due largely to the incompetence of the Manchu bannermen, who had become effete in a century of peace. The Taipings were eventually defeated with some help from the western nations, and this gave ground for military reorganization. The Manchu generals were replaced by Chinese commanders, some of whom introduced new tactics and were rewarded for their success with provincial governorships. A number of them were sympathetic to the Self Strengthening Movement.

The movement’s first obstacle was the raising of capital to set up modern industries. Generally, liquid capital was in the hands of merchants who were uninterested in the risks of industry; their favourite investment was in land as the means to entering the gentry class. A second obstacle was that no enterprise of any size could be set up without official approval. However, the Court’s own difficulties gave it no alternative but reluctantly to approve of some of the proposals of the Self Strengthened. The Maritime Customs returns seldom covered the indemnities, which increased with every minor incident of a European affronted by a Chinese, and there was the Court’s own extravagance. Something had to be done: industry of a sort came to China.

Despite the merchants’ general reluctance to invest in industry, a few with comprador experience saw that fortunes might be made. Sheng Hsuan-huai was at one time reputed to be the richest man in all China, and his rise to wealth is typical of the small number of merchants who turned to industry. Sheng came from a powerful merchant class with wide comprador associations, and his own family had taken the first step into the gentry class by becoming landowners. He had passed the local examinations for the civil service but failed in the provincial ones; when he became a rich man, he purchased several official positions.

China at an early stage began appointing to office by merit. This was Confucian doctrine, and even in Han times examinations were held; by the Tang dynasty they were firmly established. They produced the scholar élite , bringing a professionalism into the government service that assured continuity in the administration in whatever crisis. In the 15th century, during the Ming dynasty, office purchase was introduced. This was a device to dilute the bureaucracy so that it would not become too powerful, though it was justified on the score of introducing experience in practical affairs. When the Manchu dynasty was in full vigour office purchase fell into disuse, but was revived again during its degeneracy as a source of revenue. Eventually the purchase system so degraded office-holding that the abolition of the examinations, and the abrupt demise of the scholar class, passed by almost unnoticed.

Until Sheng was wealthy enough to purchase office he could claim only a lowly “official gentry” status. He saw the possibilities of enrichment through industry, and during his life controlled at one time and another steamships, posts and telegraphs, railways, ironworks, iron and coal mines, and interests in shipbuilding and cotton-mills. He began with steamships. After the Taiping Rebellion parts of the Grand Canal from Shanghai to Pekin were in disrepair, and there was a serious problem in transporting tribute rice from the south to feed Pekin and the north. Another route had to found. Some of the rice began to be carried by foreign steamships, and Sheng was unable to persuade members of his clan of the possibilities in buying steamships.

Success was assured when the approval of the clan head was given — this made investment by other clan members an obligation. Nobody expected a capitalist’s return on his investment. In fact none of Sheng’s companies ever paid much in the way of dividends, nor was there ever a policy of accumulation and growth (although quite large amounts of capital were required initially, except for posts and railways where the government invested for its own needs). But the investors, by applying traditional Chinese nepotism, could pack the higher offices with clan members and operating the peculation which also was taken for granted, cream off rich personal rewards — to be invested in even more lucrative pawnshops or in land to achieve status.

Sheng was eventually able to ingratiate himself with a provincial governor who was a Self Strengthener. Li Hungchang had been one of the successful generals in the Taiping defeat, and his reward was the metropolitan province of Chihili. He was also Controller of the Northern Ports; he and Sheng were made for each other. They were not unique. Other governors and high officials also tried to build up partnerships with merchants, and the struggles between factions were quite unscrupulous. Li’s patronage was Sheng's good fortune, enabling him to obtain a monopoly of the tribute rice shipments.

In fact in all Sheng’s undertakings the essential ingredient was an official monopoly. He had to reward his patrons lavishly, and the Throne also demanded recompense in “return for Imperial grace”. By employing Europeans almost exclusively as technicians, he showed no vision of a capitalist China. After the Boxer Rebellion, when the dying dynasty traded nominal survival for subservience to the west, he became little more than a super - comprador, though this still enabled him to increase his riches: he became probably the most hated man in China. His son’s biography of him says his aim was to amass a sufficient fortune to ensure the wellbeing of his family for many subsequent generations; this is a worthy Confucian aim but not a capitalist one.

*

The social status of the Chinese merchant was like that of the mediaeval Jew; he was despised as a usurer, yet tolerated because no-one could see how the services he performed could be dispensed with. Their wealth, like Jewish wealth in Europe, could always be sequestered. At the same time, the Chinese merchant had greater mobility for escape from his calling. If wealthy enough, he could become a landowner and his heirs qualify for entry into the scholar-gentry class. There was therefore no strong urge for a separate merchant class to struggle for political recognition.

As important as the combination of social mobility with rigid social stratification was the absence of truly free labour as it arose in the west. Although China’s expanding population in the 19th century brought great pressure on the land, there was relatively little urban drift. The family persisted with remarkable stability; every member from the toddler to the aged grandmother had their allotted tasks, with a total interdependence. In the cities handicrafts manufactures were carried on under a family basis. There were also small factories employing families from the same clan operating a joint enterprise.

To be a totally alienated individual was the most terrifying prospect facing any Chinese. It was common for the new arrival in the city, especially when he was alone, to carry an introduction to a secret society. These go back into ancient Chinese history, and some have histories which span centuries as friendly societies, dissident groups, political opposition and resistance bodies, bandits — in fact any cause either to affirm or to deny conformity. The large factory in the Chinese city recruited its labour from the labour boss of the appropriate secret society. The labour bosses had their own territories; in return for the wages he paid over to the society boss the labourer received enough rice just to keep alive, adulterated opium to make his misery just tolerable, and a minimum of rites for the comfort of his spirit when he died.

Inescapable despotism, abysmal living conditions and low capital investment made a strong propulsion for Chinese people to get out of China if they could. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was a capital offence for a Chinese to leave his homeland; many, nevertheless, took their heads in their hands and went to the Philippines. As early as 1855 Australia restricted Chinese immigration. Subsequently New Zealand and South Africa legislated for their exclusion, and the first restrictive immigration laws in the USA concerned them. Canada did the same. Chinese went to the East Indies, Malay, Burma and anywhere open to them. The greatest wave, however, was in this century, started about 1900 by the construction of the Russian railway across Manchuria and the large expenditure of the Russian army of occupation. When the Japanese took Manchuria in 1932 emigration was re-stimulated by Japanese recruitment and apparent “opportunities”; altogether, from 1900 to 1945 the Chinese population of Manchuria grew from 10 million to 40 million. It hardly needs saying that wherever they have gone the Chinese have found only what capitalism offers to the rest of the world’s population. Peasants went to the cities and became indentured coolies, and left — to become cheap labour all over the world.

Mary B.

The Mandarin (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The papers have had rather a lot to tell us about the wonderful welcome given by Maoist China to that well-known communist and faithful servant of the workers of the world, Comrade Ted Heath. One wonders what on earth the many thousands of workers who call themselves Marxists and Maoists can really think of the antics of the Chinese red-fascists who go out of their way to fête such an obvious and clumsy anti-worker as Heath. The same people who shouted “Heath Out” and “Long live Chairman Mao” can somehow bring themselves to swallow the spectacle of tens of thousands of workers being dragooned into turning out to stand by the wayside to cheer and march and dance in order to impress this capitalist buffoon.

What would the same people say if the workers here were called out to march like cheering automata to celebrate the arrival of “Former Prime Minister Heath”? It was hilarious, as well as tragic, that this was the only title they could greet him with because his present rôle, as distinct from his former one, is of course Leader of the Opposition. Somehow, it was regarded as unsuitable to use such a title in Maoist China. The workers may not have quite understood what a leader of the opposition could be in a land where there is no opposition, except in the cemetery. Or maybe it was feared that they would have understood too well; so even Heath’s title has to be twisted.

Of course, Heath was immensely bucked by this splendid reception which made him feel so much more important than he would be in England where he would be more likely to be greeted with a chorus of raspberries if he were to flaunt himself before the proletariat. And it goes without saying that when he returned he was full of praise for the rulers of China whose system he is supposed to hate. And did he say how abhorrent it was for workers to be drilled into clapping and waving flags and the rest of the disgusting charade? You must be joking. He enjoyed every minute of it. He and Mao are brothers under their skins. Like a couple of Orwell’s pigs.

L. E. Weidberg

Letters: Women's Lib (1974)

Letters to the Editors from the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Women's Lib

At your 70th Annual Conference a resolution was passed that membership of the Women’s Liberation movement is incompatible with membership of the Socialist Party. Is this due to the fact that Women’s Lib. strives for equality within the capitalist society, or is there more?

Catherine Spence, 

Cramlington, Northumberland.

Reply:

The SPGB has as its sole objective the establishment of Socialism.

Membership of the SPGB is dependent on the acceptance of and compliance with our Declaration of Principles which declares:

That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interests of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.

In pursuit of their objectives Women’s Liberation must put pressure on or come to some agreement with capitalist political parties. Reforms of capitalism rarely if ever benefit the working class and the outcome of workers struggles in this direction are not worth the time and effort spent on them. They leave the workers in precisely the same position as before — the dispossessed class in society.

The Socialist Party must therefore be hostile to all reformist political parties and pressure groups and membership of any of them (e.g. Women’s Liberation movement) must be incompatible with membership of the Socialist Party.

If all the reforms demanded by Women’s Liberation were implemented the vast majority of women would still be members of the propertyless class having to sell their ability to work to the capitalist class for a wage or a salary.

The political history of capitalism is littered with the remains of those reform movements which attempted the impossible task of establishing “equality within the capitalist society.” Having failed many reformists dropped their illusions and went on to administer capitalism in the only way it can be administered — in the interest of the capitalists.

Social equality is only possible in a classless society. Women’s Liberation by accepting the class basis of society. (whatever some of them may claim) help to confuse workers and thereby help to perpetuate capitalism with its mass of economic and social discriminations. Have you read Women’s Lib has got it Wrong in the July Socialist Standard ?

Workers and wages

"We . . .  do not . . . exhort workers to try to attain 4y wages where before they only had 3y wages. An above average wage in one industry necessarily implies a below-average wage in another”.

This seems to suggest that the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not urge workers to struggle for higher wages on the grounds that a wage increase for one group of workers necessarily involves a wage decrease for another.

The Socialist Party has always urged workers to try to get the highest possible price for the sale of their labour-power. And Marx long ago exposed, in Value Price and Profit, the "wages fund” theory accepted by the Owenite Weston that, as the amount that could be paid out in wages was limited, one group of workers could only obtain a wage increase at the expense of the rest of the working class, and that therefore trade union action was to be opposed. As Marx showed, it was sometimes possible for workers to take advantage of favourable labour market conditions to obtain a real wage increase, even if only a temporary one, at the expense of the profits of the capitalists and without harming other workers. For Marx Socialists had not to oppose the struggle for higher wages, but rather to point out its severe limitations and to urge the adoption of the revolutionary, socialist slogan “Abolish the wages system”. Marx also made the point that workers have to struggle for higher wages, even if they don’t obtain them, just in order to realise the value of their labour-power. Workers should struggle to get 4y wages in place of 3y because if they don’t they won’t even get paid 3y.

A. Buick

Brussels

Reply:

The interpretation placed on this extract by A. Buick appears to have been an over-reaction to what was stated. The term “above average wages” derives from the IPC statement itself and it should be remembered that this is a statistical concept. It should also be remembered that the statement relates to a specific company and those workers within it. This is not meant to imply that because it is a specific company, that we take no interest in the workers concerned, but more to mean that we do not approach these workers and their part both in the class struggle, and in their understanding of Socialism, exclusive of all others.

As was pointed out in the article, Mr. Roberts (the Managing Director of IPC Newspapers Ltd.) refers his employees to their high standing in the “Pay relativities League Table.” The graph (re-printed from the Financial Times) represents the average rates of pay throughout many industries, and Roberts is telling IPC employees: Look how much higher up this scale are your wages compared to those of other workers. This is a blatant appeal to his men to be thankful, for what are in the end, extremely small mercies. It is relevant however, to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that if Roberts pays his workers wages which are above a norm, then those of other workers must be below it. Clearly not all workers can obtain “above average wages,” for an average is necessarily the mean between high and low.

This reference was made to point out the limitations of Robert’s own emphasis on above-average wages as an indication of “success” and to remind IPC workers that they should not consider being “above-average” as a satisfactory position. In short, “above average” as a class view. It was certainly not intended to endorse the theory that there is a given pool from which wages are drawn, and consequently one man’s wage increase, is another’s decrease. The clause A. Buick has omitted from the extract quoted in fact points to the source from which an increase in wages would come i.e. the capitalist’s profit.

As A. Buick says, it is quite possible for a group of workers to achieve a wage increase without affecting the amount of wages received by other workers Their relative positions on a statistical graph will of course change, but as was pointed out, these relative differences will not change the basic class position of workers, or their problems. It is worth bearing in mind that there have been a considerable number of strikes in post-war years over wage relativities. As such we cannot be expected to approve a claim by any group of workers that at all times they must have more than some other group of workers.

A. Buick’s letter states “For Marx Socialists had not to oppose the struggle for higher wages . . ." and so on. However it seems a somewhat large (and inaccurate) mental leap to conclude from the passage quoted, or the article as a whole, that we were advocating opposition to workers struggling for higher wages. The class struggle between worker and employer results from the capitalist system, and wage claims are manifestations of this struggle. It would indeed be contradictory to claim that the SPGB represents the political interests of the working class on one hand, while actually advocating opposition to intelligent efforts aimed at improving or maintaining standards under Capitalism by struggles in the industrial field. The article did not put forward this point of view, and Marx explains fully why this would be a contradictory position:

(Writing about the tendency for the average standard of wages to fall)

. . . is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation . . .  they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiation of any larger movement.

(Wages, Price & Profit. Chapter 14).

In practise, where gains are made by workers in industries, generally it is due to these “occasional chances” and not to the number of strikes they engage in.

Regarding A. Buick’s opinion of how our case should be expressed in relation to the struggle for higher wages, it would not be true to claim that the SPGB is better placed than the workers, or Trade Unions involved, to identify such "occasional chances” for improvement, or to usurp their particular functions in this respect. It would be a considerable and alien extension of our own function to assume that we should act either as some form of Advice Bureau, or Clearing House for various wage claims. Such a conclusion would be hard to avoid were we to blandly assert that all those IPC workers receiving (in the article’s terms) 3y wages, should be taking action to attain 4y wages.

Apart from elementary considerations such as the likelihood of such a claim being met or not, or to what extent and duration of industrial action can be taken, it should be remembered that workers (not the SPGB) advance wage claims in terms of £’s and pence. Apart from these other considerations it would be unrealistic to prescribe the numerical formula put forward by A. Buick to the IPC workers, and even more so, to all workers at all times. The extract complained about was expressly inserted to make clear to the reader that we are not able to give specific advice on the formation of particular wage claims. We certainly do not exhort workers to act in such a way, we exhort workers to achieve Socialism.

Although Mr. Roberts might view such a formula as an attempt to be “realistic”, if a little immoderately, the SPGB would take a view which he, and millions of workers at present regard as “un-realistic,” namely, if we are to talk in terms of figures, why just struggle for 4y, why not 5 or 6 or 10y ?

It is possible that A. Buick means his formula to be interpreted in a more general way to read that workers should continue to struggle for higher wages. If this is so, he is acknowledging what is occurring daily under capitalism. The SPGB has frequently put forward the view that workers generally (not just Trade Unions) should recognise the need to achieve not only the best wages, but also the best conditions that they can, although we have not always seen as beneficial some of the methods employed in this respect: For example, the use of industrial action to preserve the “Closed-shop,” inter-unions disputes, or racially motivated strikes etc., because their result has been to further divide and embitter sections of the working class. If A. Buick is concerned lest the IPC workers, or other workers, become unaware of increasing costs of daily necessaries, or of greater exploitation by the capitalist class, his reminder is timely.

While recognising that the capitalist class will constantly seek to lower wages to the minimum level required to ensure the maintenance and reproduction of a work force, and pointing out to the working class that this is a most undesirable tendency, which, if not resisted, will result in a fall of their standards, the SPGB’s task is to urge workers (employed or not) to recognise their class position, and, as Marx points out in his following paragraph from Wages, Price & Profit (Chap. 14).

not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the cause of those effects.

Our exhortation must be therefore for workers to adopt a class view and establish a system of society in which high, low or average wages will only be sought and found in history books.

Could do better?

There are some cases where workers have got out of the position of being workers and made a bit of a fortune by some means or the other — hook or by crook — and Socialists are the first to oppose them doing this! Namely because Socialists give no incentive to workers in getting out of the position of being workers.

What comments have you to make on this ? Don’t be aloof and good. What are your comments, in detail ?

F. S. Steele 

London N.4.

Reply:

Have you confused us with someone else ? If we should hear of any working men or women making “a bit of a fortune” and escaping from wage-slavery, we don’t oppose it: we (individually) wish them luck

However, the belief that anyone can do it or have it happen to him is part of the mythology which sustains capitalism. Anyone cannot; very few can. If you were thinking of football pools the chances of a quarter - million - pound win are statistically about the same as those of being struck by lightning. If you were thinking of famous men who have “advanced by their own efforts”, such stories have practically never been true.

Our case is simply that workers who think on these lines are like the beast of burden following a carrot on a stick in front of it. Escaping from wage-slavery is a most desirable aim, and the only way for the great majority — with exceptions so rare that they don’t matter — to achieve it is by abolishing the wages system, i.e. establishing Socialism.

For the present

Until socialism is established, we have to live under the present capitalist system.

Features of this system are institutions such as Building Societies, Insurance Companies and banks, all of which many workers invest money into and unwittingly aid capitalism.

Seemingly they do not have a choice. There is not enough rented property in the private or public sector to meet the demand, despite years of government by the Labour Party. The Building Societies do offer a way out at a price

Insurance schemes are contributed to, understandably, by many workers who want to provide safeguards for their families should misfortune occur.

The banks use people’s money to finance their existence and keep the system rolling, for that, they provide the service of looking after our money.

All three institutions under the present system exist because of human needs. How do people at present obtain the necessities of life without contributing to a system that exploits them? The obvious need is for Socialism; until it arrives where does the Socialist Party stand on this problem ?

Kevin Parkin

London S.E. 1

Reply:

Banks, Building Societies, and Insurance Companies do not exist to satisfy human need. They are features of capitalism — a system of commodity production based on the class ownership of the means of life. As such they only exist to make a profit and only too often stand between human beings and their means of subsistence. They are “necessary” only in a money-dominated society which has profit as the motive for production.

While capitalism lasts the working class will need to sell themselves on the labour market, use banks and take out mortgages and insurance. Because they own no property they must work for wages and in so doing they will be contributing to the profits of the capitalists. Socialists realise this only too well, that under these circumstances workers have no option but to be involved in the whole sordid business simply in order to live — after all, we are in the same position ourselves. It is Utopian to believe that workers can isolate themselves from or opt out of these and other oppressive features of capitalism.

What the Socialist Party continually points out, and urges working people to act on, is that the society we live in can be done away with. When the majority of the working class realise this they will need to take upon themselves the task of abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism through democratic political action. This is the only real choice facing the working class. Why not join with us and help to bring the establishment of Socialism that much closer?

Religion & railings

A reading of your interesting 70th Anniversary issue has left me with the impression that the SPGB has no satisfactory explanation for the failure to get through to the working class. I ask you to consider the following hypothesis.

A more propitious ethos must be generated by capitalism, which has already demonstrated its ability to induce a more rational view of the social scene. Remember the blow it has dealt religion. Masses of workers who have never heard of the SPGB or read a secularist tract have involuntarily succumbed to a more materialist view of the world about them. This dynamic power, identified as the ethos, could ultimately produce the untutored, the spontaneous Socialist. The existence of the SPGB is evidence enough that some workers have understood the Socialist case. My belief is that these workers are of a special “type”.

An example of a social trend I see currently unfolding: Many of the restricting inner railings in a large park near here have been removed. The perimeter fence remains — soon this barrier will be seen as an affront. Down it will come (where traffic and safety hazards allow) permitting at last, free and unrestricted access. This changing attitude will widen and deepen until it embraces the whole economy. Workers will then be more readily aware of the restraints on their lives. I visualize conditions in which workers will leave your meetings convinced at a first hearing of the need for Socialism.

To summarize, I am saying the SPGB can’t achieve its aim without a riper ethos, itself a product of evolving capitalism. In the spin-off of an ever-accelerating technology I see many signs which encourage me in the belief that, although at the rather advanced age of 61, I shall yet witness the triumph of Socialism.

F. C. West, 

London E.2.

Reply:

Your letter has had to be shortened for space reasons, but its chief point is that we have to wait upon capitalism itself creating certain trends.

Unfortunately, your examples do not lead us anywhere. In the absence of Socialist understanding people who give up religious beliefs have, generally, only exchanged them for other fruitless ones. You are right in suggesting that capitalism needs religion less now; but it is not short of opiates. And if railings being taken down creates ideas of freedom, that is depressing news because of the number of railings being put up now in the streets and therefore (on that argument) conditioning people to more restraint.

There are simpler, more prosaic reasons why we can “get through to the working class” to only a small extent. In the forthcoming General Election Wilson, Heath, Thorpe and their party programmes will fill the television screens and the newspapers all day every day for three weeks non-stop; our “coverage” will be a flash on TV, if we are lucky, and a sentence or two in the papers.

But do you mean that at 61 (not an advanced age at all) you are waiting to see Socialism brought about? We have active members old enough to be your parents; we are not waiting for Socialism, but working for it. Why don’t you ?

50 Years Ago: The Futile League of Nations (1974)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Garvin’s own summary may do him less than justice, but apparently there are but two things to be done to avert the threatened holocaust. First revise the Peace Treaties by peaceful means, and next enlarge the League of Nations by the inclusion of Germany and Russia, followed later by America. Is it possible that a man of education, and some width of outlook can fob his readers off with that stuff? Does he really believe it himself? Unfortunately there is no reason for doubting it. Mr. Garvin and those of his school look upon the present system of society as final, and for all useful purposes, eternal. Modification there may be, but fundamental change—no. Just as slavery was justified and defended in former times, even by men of culture and feeling, so wage-slavery under capitalism is justified and apologised for by those who profit by it. This attitude may result from a lack of imagination, but more probably from a comfortable feeling that the working class is a special dispensation of Providence, designed to do the necessary work of the world, in order that a smaller aristocratic class may cultivate the finer side of life.

With this view of human society it is not to be wondered at that the re-drawing of frontiers appears to them as epochal; that the stage-play of international leagues assumes a solemn profundity. When the working class realises its true position, it will view an arbitrary line drawn across a country as of equal validity with a chalk mark across the Atlantic. If Alsace were restored to Germany tomorrow, the Alsatian would still remain a peasant or a worker. If the Germans, Austrians, Poles, Rumanians, Czechs, Tyrolese, etc., were all re-shuffled tomorrow, the workers of those areas would still remain workers. Differences of comfort or amenity, custom and language there might be, but working men would remain working men, and that is the essence of the matter. The Irish workers are finding out that a difference in political bosses is not such a vital matter as they once thought. Where capitalism is, there is wage-slavery, and the colour of the flag that floats over the factory makes no real difference to the worker. The great nations of the world are capitalist nations. The League of Nations can be nought else but a league of capitalists. 

(From an article "The Great War and the Greater Wars that are Coming", by W. T. Hopley, in the Socialist Standard October 1924.)

Correction (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the article Inflation in our September issue it was stated (p. 149, col. 1) that "the idea that increased spending increased production [is shown] to be true. if at all, only for a short period". In case this was taken as a complete generalization, which it is not, it refers in fact to the idea of increased spending resulting from inflation. Please note.

Confucius, Lin Piao and the CCP (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lin Piao is dead and in disgrace. Confucius who died a couple of thousand years earlier is getting the treatment reserved for high-ranking renegades — scapegoats of the Chinese “Communist” Party. In recent months such publications as Peking Review and China Reconstructs have devoted much space to debunking these former “great men”. It seems that Confucius was in his day a spokesman for the rulers of a chattel-slave society, that is, he was a reactionary. The accusation against Lin Piao is that he tried to restore capitalism. Therefore in the context of present-day “Socialist” China he was (when alive) a reactionary.

All good stuff no doubt for those people who accept that “Socialism” exists, that there is a “Communist” party in control, that renegades have wormed their way into positions of power and only the vigilance of Mao and the followers of his thought are rendering them harmless. However, the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not accept these claims. The outpourings of denunciations and supposed analysis serve more to confuse than to explain. Nevertheless, enough is let out of the bag to expose this so-called Communist Party and the society it administers.

Confucius (551 - 479B.C.) could not prevent social change taking place. What the supporters of the government of China must explain is: why an attack on a philosophy that was reactionary 2,400 years ago was only launched after more than twenty years of “Communist” party government. One attempt at justification occurred in an article in Peking Review 26th July 1974 describing how some workers had studied the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels again since the campaign to criticise Confucius and Lin Piao started. They quote the Manifesto as follows:

  “The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas” 

and go on to say

  “They [the workers] discussed this in terms of China’s reality. They said that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution . . . is a great political revolution carried out by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes under conditions of socialism. . . . It is also a deep-going criticism of the doctrines of Confucius . .”

China’s reality does indeed have exploitation, and therefore cannot be Socialist. What we are not told is how the worker students of Marx squared their conclusions with the following passage which comes a few lines before.

  “When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.”

In the reality of China there developed in the period leading up to 1949 a nationalistic, anti-imperialist anti-landlord ideology that subsequently served the “communists” in implementing their land reforms and state control of industry to carry out the capitalist revolution. There was and still is a vast amount of catching up (with other countries) to do so that the pace of development has been hectic. To quote the Communist Manifesto :

  “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”

Although dealing with the capitalism Marx and Engels knew in their youth it can serve as a fine summary of events in China over recent years.

Much of this propaganda has been aimed at working people with reminders of the horrors of life before “liberation”. Peking Review 19 July 1974 has articles on the subject with special reference to Tibet. One writer, a former serf, described how the serf-owners had the power to inflict such punishment as the cutting-off of ears, tongues and hands. Another article describes how, “tens of thousands of former serfs and slaves are now the region’s first generation of industrial workers operating industrial machines.”

In the May issue of China Reconstructs there is a picture, illustrating an article on “Wuhan Steel Works”, of a crowd watching a veteran worker “showing where a landlords dog bit him when he was begging for food in the old society and furiously denounces the attempt of the Lin-Piao anti-Party clique to restore capitalism”. The articles described how the histories of 144 labouring families were collected and entered into two account books. “One listed the stories of blood and tears under the oppression and exploitation of the old society. The other recorded examples of their happiness in the new society.” The first was to warn against Lin Piao’s reactionary' policy and the second in praise of Mao’s line. It would seem that this contrasting the unhappy past with the present could mean that workers need reminding that things could be worse and there can be no let-up in the drive to modernize industry and increase production. In the above case it was reported that production had increased. So that this was maybe no more than a stratagem of the Chinese equivalent of the industrial relations expert trying to motivate workers to greater efforts. The above excerpts show that what they fear seems more like a return to feudalism rather than capitalism which has not yet been overthrown.

The Chinese “Communist” Party set out to develop and control capitalism, and now claim to have set up a Socialist society. Socialism will come sure enough, but in spite of them. What any student of Marxian economics would recognise as an emerging capitalist state was described as “People’s Democratic Dictatorship” and when the state had gained control of the greater part of industry and agriculture it was supposed to have carried out the transition to Socialism. A state of affairs where, on their own admission, classes and the class struggle still exist.

This is not a harmless deception as capitalist society can only work against the interests of the working class and any government trying to run it must come into conflict with the workers. Part of any government’s armoury of weapons in this conflict are arguments designed to get workers to make sacrifices for the mythical nation and warn them of the dangers to the workers of wanting more of the wealth which they produce. Although there may be power struggles taking place in the top ranks of the government, the Lin Piao-Confucius campaign is also a weapon in the class war against the workers. Once workers become aware of their class status they will see through the deceits and come to understand that a class-less society cannot be brought to them from above. They will then form their own Socialist party in opposition to those who at present administer their exploitation.

The Socialist Party has consistently argued, that the party aiming at the emancipation of the working class can play no part in the government of Capitalism; they must continue building up support for Socialism. How little the claim that the “people are in power”, means can be judged by the remarks made by Mao Tse-tung to Edgar Snow in 1960. He said that China was being run by 800 Party members who had joined at or before the time of the 1927 massacres of the “Communists” (biographical notes p.512 of 1973 Pelican edition of Red Star Over China). Here was the élite of élites with decades of devotion to the cause behind them, yet the renegades were still in their midst. Lin Piao is but one of them. He went over to the Communists in 1927 at the age of 19 from the Nationalist Army in which he was a Colonel. He rose high in the ranks of the army and the party. He was credited with the compiling of the little red book of quotations from Chairman Mao for use in the army which became a world wide best seller. The 1969 new party constitution named him “Mao’s close comrade in arms and successor”. Yet Chou En-lai in his Report to the Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (August 1973) claimed :- “Lin Piao, this Bourgeois careerist, conspirator and double-dealer engaged in machinations within our Party not for one decade but for several decades” (p. 13 Documents of 10th Congress, Foreign Languages Press, Peking).

It is a strange sort of party that puts up with such behaviour for so long. On p.16 we are told: “socialist society covers a considerably long historical period . . . there are classes, class contradictions and class struggle . . . Lin Piaos will appear again.” Not only have they put up with it, they expect more of it. If what was said about Lin Piao is any guide, members who are now considered beyond reproach are hard at their double-dealing machinations.

The Chinese “Communist” Party having pursued the national liberation of China are, despite their protestations to the contrary, nothing but a party of capitalism. They have taken the terminology of Socialism and used it to disguise the State capitalism they administer. The “Thoughts of Mao” may serve them now, but such is the dynamic of capitalism that they will “become antiquated before they can ossify” and become redundant like "the ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions” of Confucius.

Joe Carter

Socialist Candidate's Address (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of you will be asking why The Socialist Party of Great Britain is standing in this constituency in this election — why we should be intruding in the battle between the big political parties and complicating what seems a simple choice between Labour and Conservative, or perhaps Liberal.

You will be going to vote in the belief that your cross on the ballot paper will have some influence in improving our lives, or at least in protecting our living standards. This is understandable — but on what do you base your belief ?

The other parties are bidding for your vote with programmes which may seem to offer some hope of easing, or even abolishing, many of the problems of this country and of the world. Millions of people find these programmes attractive enough to vote for one or other of them. The Socialist Party of Great Britain argues that none of them stands up to examination.

For example, recent elections have been dominated by promises to deal with economic crises — balance of payment problems, inflation, unemployment and so on. Yet these crises keep bursting upon the scene and as fast as the promises are made they are discredited by events.

Yet again; every government comes into power pledged to abolish slums and to eliminate the housing problem. They seem to have it all worked out, with their declarations of intent and their statistics. The result, according to Shelter, is that “today’s housing crisis is a disgrace to any civilised society.”

All the other parties offer plans designed to make war a thing of the past. They ring the changes on appeasement, resistance, diplomatic initiatives. In spite of all these plans the world scrapes through a succession of wars — Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, the Middle East, Cyprus — with the threat of nuclear conflagration hanging over our heads.

It is true that at times some problems are alleviated or even suppressed, but this is only for others to take their place. For example; we are told that our lives have been improved by the development of productive techniques, but we are also faced with the fact that these very developments pollute our environment to such an extent that they may present a threat almost as great as a nuclear war.

Why do other political parties fail ? Why are their promises so ineffective? What causes the problems of the world? The Socialist Party of Great Britain urge you to examine the social system we live under — capitalism.

This is a society based on the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. Private ownership at once divides society into two classes — the owning, or capitalist class and the deprived, or working class. It is the working class who suffer poverty and all it means in terms of bad housing, inadequate medical services, sub-standard food and so on. Capitalism is a society of competition which splits the world into rival nations and power blocs and is the direct cause of modern war.

What Must Be Done?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain puts forward the alternative society. Socialism will be a society in which the whole of humanity, without distinction of race or sex, will own in common all we use to make and distribute wealth. Common ownership means a society without classes, without privileges, without different standards of consumption. In Socialist society everyone will have free access to the world’s wealth and will stand equally in that respect.

Socialism will produce its wealth for human use instead of for sale. This will make it a society of cooperation instead of competition. There will be no frontiers to divide the world’s people. Socialism will be one world, with one people working together for the common wealth.

Socialism will be an efficient world, in contrast to capitalism, where waste and shoddiness are profitable. For the first time, men and women in Socialism will realise their capabilities to the full. Socialism will produce an abundance and at only one standard — the best we are capable of.

Is It All A Dream? How Do We Get Socialism?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is not another collection of leaders telling you to trust us and promising you almost anything for the sake of winning your vote. No leader can give you Socialism, no clever politician can pull you by the nose into the new society. Neither will it happen by accident.

Socialism must be your work; it needs a conscious political act by the mass of the people, opting for the new society in full knowledge of what it is. It comes to this — only if you understand Socialism and want it, vote for the Socialist candidate.

And that is why The Socialist Party of Great Britain are here in Hampstead at this election We are a political party, hostile to all others, including those phoney revolutionaries of the Left — the Communist Party, International Marxist Group, International Socialists, Workers Revolutionary Party, etc. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is different — we are the political instrument to be used by the working class to transform the world from a chaos of deprivation and strife into an order of abundance and harmony. Your vote is important, to you and to society, because it expresses your choice between the two.

The Pilgrims to Peking (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the nastiest aspects of the fake-socialist revolution perpetrated against the Russian workers and peasants was the slimy stream of western intellectuals who, in the '20s and ’30s, made their pilgrimages to Russia (almost always paid for, on VIP level of course, by the Bolshevik government out of the surplus-value wrung from the Russian masses who were literally starving in those days.) The pilgrims returned to the west to tell (and sell) their stories of Russian “socialism” from the comfort of their western-capitalist armchairs. Such execrable names as the Webbs (who wrote a great monstrous book in praise of Stalinism), Shaw and Kingsley Martin spring to mind, but there were innumerable others. They could have known all about the anti-Socialist tyranny of Lenin and Stalin (and Trotsky, of course, despite the latter-day idiots who call themselves Trotskyists) without leaving these shores. It was all in the Socialist Standard of those days (and quite often in the newspapers too).

The miracle did happen at least once, oddly enough, The French writer André Gide went to Moscow as a propagandist for their cause (he would not have been invited otherwise) and the eyes which he had kept closed in France refused to stay closed when he saw Stalinism at close quarters so he spilled the beans when he got back. The CP’s answer was to revile him as a homosexual. (Oddly enough, Hitler did the same trick when he murdered his henchmen Roehm, Heines and company. He said they were homosexuals — as though unaware of this when they were his faithful lieutenants. Just another instance of the close relationship between red-fascism and the other kind.)

In recent years, specially since the Khrushchev “secret speech” in ’56, the new generation of intellectuals have been busy writing books like Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror which have exposed the turpitude of the western fellow-travellers of those days. But does that mean that the present lot of academics and other politicians and scribblers have learnt the lesson of history? You must be joking Having learnt only that Moscow is no longer the Mecca for leftist hypocrites to visit, they have looked around to find “a substitute for a prostitute” as an old joke has it. There is the pudgy face of Mao Tse-tung beckoning benignly to them just as Uncle Joe did in days of yore. The East is Red, so is the carpet; the grub is better than the Chinese Take-away and you can come back from your free holiday and make your fame and fortune scribbling and gibbering about your first-hand knowledge of the Utopia which has replaced Russia. (Up to a decade ago, the word was “supplemented,” not “replaced”. But now the two “socialist” giants are calling each other fascists as loud as they can. And how right both are!)

If it were not that so many students and workers in the west fall for the lies about Socialism in China (as their fathers did about Russia), “hilarious” would really be the word for it. An article in the June Socialist Standard referred to the leftist intellectuals like Professor John Galbraith and Baroness Barbara Wootton, both of whom returned from VIP trips to China to sell confusion to the western press. The former said “it works for the Chinese”, thus using practically the same words as a previous generation Yankee intellectual, Lincoln Steffens, who came back from Moscow to pronounce: “I have seen the future and it works”. Presumably even Galbraith wouldn’t dare to say that it would work for the west where only a handful of half-baked students seem to respond to the call.

It is also worth noting that neither Galbraith nor Steffens before him ever dreamt of living in the paradises they described, but put 10,000 miles between themselves and Utopia. (Which recalls the case of that other modern scribbler Graham Greene who said he would rather live in Russia than America. And merrily carried on living in his fabulous villa. On the French Riviera!)

It was more than interesting to learn from that same Standard (our 70th Anniversary number) that this same Baroness Wootton, who says she agrees with Mao for not allowing trade unionism among his 700 million blue ants, debated against the SPGB. She was then a youngish economist and Labourite. Now she is an old Baroness and clearly more pseudo than ever. How sad that the comparatively free workers of the west should then and now permit this monstrous nonsense to be talked at them.

As the latest prime example of the genre a Labour MP, Joel Barnett (a year or so ago when he was in opposition; now he is in Wilson’s government) had the luck to get on one of the jaunts (which must be worth a few thousand quid in any language — quite apart from the fact that you can’t get into China without being approved by the red-fascists who rule the roost, the fact that there are about 700 million who can’t get out). Joel made sure that he copped for a spot of extra publicity which would be read by his friends and relations and constituents, not to speak of us. When the time came for him to be red-carpeted around the Great Wall of China, which is one of the highlights of all these picnics, Joel told them he insisted on seeing some genuine Chinese workers instead. This may not have been reported in the Peking Daily Liar but imagine what a sensational scoop it would make for the local rag in Rochdale or whenever. Our Labourite friend not only wanted to see real workers — he actually insisted on talking to them. What did he want to say? Nothing less than the 64-dollar question: “What do you really think about Mao Tse-tung?” Well, that’s what I read in the Guardian. But, I fancy, not quite. Because our Joel doesn’t speak much Chinese (seeing that most MP’s don’t speak English very well, this must not be regarded as surprising).

So what happened was that Joel popped it to the interpreter, who, as in Russia, is just another minion. Whether the minion really asked Joel’s question I can’t really say. Neither, of course, can Barnett. For all either of us knows, he may have merely mouthed the ancient Confucian proverb (before Confucius was arrested as an ally of Lin Piao): Ooh flung dung? Equally, we don’t know what the wage-slave replied. All we know is that the minion told our visitor that the reply was in the affirmative. Of course, Barnett was quite aware of the charade he was acting — at the expense of the Chinese working class and of the British working class too. What did he expect the worker to say under the noses of Mao’s very own thugs? And what could this poor devil have thought Barnett was? To a Chinese slave, a bespectacled accountant from Manchester would appear to be a different species. He might have been a Dalek from Outer Space. No matter, the purpose was served.

The Chinese workers are there for the purpose of producing all the wealth of the state-capitalist system so that the rulers can live high off the hog, as they do in Russia. And to provide good propaganda for the privileged trippers who are allowed to make the pilgrimage. The odd thing is that (as the writer happens to know), Barnett is by no means the most obnoxious type of politician. He may even think himself to be honest. But it comes to the same thing in the end. As long as the workers in England, China, Russia and the rest of the capitalist world, fail to grasp the true meaning of their class subjection and to realise that only a revolutionary change to Socialism (as distinct from the monstrosity that exists in China and Russia) will free them for a life worth living, then they will continue to be battened on by the jackals of capitalism.

L. E. Weidberg

Workers' Councils: Solution or Delusion? (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been argued, in opposition to the case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, that an analysis of working-class struggles shows that the setting up of Workers’ Councils is the way to success in the struggle for Socialism. The “evidence” cited in support of this idea is:

1. The unsatisfactory nature of all political parties (including the SPGB), and
2. The “success” of workers’ councils.

It is urged that revolutionary political parties merely re-iterate a series of abstractions and wait for the workers to eventually accept them, whereas taking part in workers’ struggles, for which Workers’ Councils are formed, educates workers through “day-to-day” experience. The notion is by no means a new one. It goes back to the formation of the Communist Party, the Communist International and the Russian Revolution in 1917.

As a result of the effect of the Russian eruption a “Conference of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils” was held in 1918 at which people like Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden had proclaimed their support of workers’ councils. On July 31st 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed, based on the following resolution:

  For the Soviet (or Workers’ Council) system as a means whereby the working class shall achieve power . . . they declare the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a necessary means of combating counter-revolution. (Report, Foundation Conference, CPGB 1920).

In the same year the Second Congress of the Comintern had concerned itself with the German question, and the problems of getting Continental “Left-Wing” Social Democrats to form Communist Parties. But the main discussion, led by Zinovieff (in his capacity as President of the Comintern) was to convince and overwhelm the British delegates (Gallacher, Murphy, Ramsay, Jack Tanner, Dick Beech) of the necessity for a political party. For several weeks, one after another, from Lenin downwards (and Lenin had written about it in Left-Wing Communism) the Russians pounded and pummelled the poor British delegates with argument after argument, fact upon fact, to prove the indispensability of organizing a political party.

Those Comrades who take a stand against the necessity of a party sometimes consider themselves a Left opposition. It is not Left, but just the other way. The propaganda against a workers’ party is a capitalist trick. Don’t all good capitalists support their parties as soon as they grow up ?

squeaked Zinovieff at them. The Soviets (Workers’ Councils), he said, do not take the place of the party; they presuppose it.

I tell you the party has been our guiding star . . . the advanced Russian worker cherishes the party as something sacred. (Report of the Second Congress of the Communist International 1920).

Highly interesting was the comment of Jack Tanner, chairman of the Shop Stewards’ movement and later president of the Engineering Union:

  The main point of Zinovieff’s argument was the absolute necessity for a strong disciplined Communist Party and also that the Dictatorship of the Proletariate is synonymous with the dictatorship of the Party. He has not clearly proved his argument. What has taken place in Russia must not be set up as a model for all other countries. In England, we are sure, things will be quite different. (Report of the Second Congress, Comintern).

As editor of the Trade Union opposition paper Solidarity he was evidently well aware of the articles on Russia in the Socialist Standard. What Lenin and Zinovieff were arguing, therefore, was the imperative necessity of a political party to take political power.

What we have now however is the claim that “times have changed”, that a large number of workers are “white collar” hands, and that the numerous cases where Workers’ Councils have emerged in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland etc. show the necessity for enlarging these councils to include “everybody” on any and every qualification or pretext — Old Age Pensioners, Tenants, School-kids, Squatters. Once this happens of course it is no longer a Workers’ Council in the old sense of the Russian Soviet which claimed to be Proletarian Democracy by excluding “parasites”, the sole qualification for representation being what International Socialists still called “workplace delegation”. This could only be a loosely federated political party calling itself “Workers’ Council”, somewhat like the Labour Party with its nebulous “affiliated” membership (half of which is moonshine) advocating contradictory reforms, and a constant hotbed of internecine struggles between opposing sections or factions.

One delusion concerning political power had its origin in the abortive Spartacus “putsch” in Germany in 1918, and the curious myth that the German ruling class suspended or rebelled against Parliament by organizing the so-called “Freikorps.” Nothing is farther from the truth. The Spartacus episode was the Comintern’s most disastrous and irresponsible stunt — so bad that on learning the sorry facts the ECCI sent telegrams calling the revolt off, after a few hundred German workers had gone to their doom.

In fact the Freikorps was recruited, paid and ordered by the German Social-Democratic Government. Their political commander was Gustav Noske (Ebert’s “bloodhound”), and the first thing Ebert did was get the support of the Army Supreme Command. This was decisive; Ebert promised the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils elections for a Constituent Assembly (which never materialized). On January 11th Noske’s volunteers crushed the Spartacus putsch in the name of Parliament, the Constituent Assembly. The Weimar Republic was proclaimed. And what had this to do with Socialism? Nothing. The German workers were Social-Democrat-Liberals with a few Marxian phrases: reformists.

The criticism of parliamentary activity — that it discourages activity by delegating power and therefore encourages passivity — can apply equally to unions or Workers’ Councils. Without the consciousness of Socialist workers they are just as reactionary, leader-dominated, and ineffectual without political power. But above all, support for Workers’ Councils against Parliament means the dissolution of the Socialist Party, and in fact, the demise of Socialism. Its one-time members would be swimming aimlessly in a flood of Squatters, Claimants’ and Pensioners’ “demands" not knowing which to support first or most.

Why is the only form of organization which can take political power a political party ? Because only a party based on individual conscious voluntary membership, where every member knows the aim and understands it, can operate unitedly for it. The actual work of Parliamentary activity will build a Socialist membership in the localities which will dispel confusion by debating the mistaken views of reformers. This is no set of permanent abstractions The abstractions are applied to life by party activity. The establishment of Socialism is the work of the working class as social man, irrespective of trade or profession.

In every instance where neo-Communists have tried sporadic revolts for limited objectives with workers’ councils, it has ended in disaster. Socialism is the political interest of the whole working class, and only represented by a political party.

Horatio.

China Since 1949: A Survey (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Chinese People's Republic was inaugurated in 1949, Mao Tse-tung was careful to point out that the new society would not be Socialist. His inaugural speech said:

To counter imperialist oppression and raise her backward economy to a higher level, China must utilize all the factors of urban and rural capitalism that are beneficial and not harmful to the national economy and people’s livelihood . . . Our present policy is to regulate capitalism, not to destroy it.

The teaching of 1949 was that the workers and peasants of China still had to endure the development of capitalism — “several decades of hardship” (Mao, 21st September 1949) — before the change to “socialism” could be achieved. In the sophistries of the time China was “semi-feudal”; there were “semi-proletarians”, and the peasants were divided neatly into rich, middle and poor. There was also a “national bourgeoisie”, who were considered revolutionary allies, and a petty bourgeoisie who could be conveniently used as either comrades-in-arms or whipping-boys. The bogeys were the big landowners and the Kuomintang bourgeoisie.

Under “the people’s democratic dictatorship” the Chinese capitalists would develop the means of production together with a widening State sector and eventually the whole would fall into the laps of the workers. In the meantime the “democratic” structure would ensure that though a large section of the economy would remain capitalist, the capitalists would never exercise political power. Because the political institutions were democratically elected it followed naturally that the Chinese Communist Party, representing by definition the great majority of the population, would always be m power. It was similar, in fact, to the Chinese Imperial doctrine of “merchant operation, official supervision”.

The Capitalists

Of course it didn’t work. The idea of regulating capitalism had to be abandoned, largely because of the weakness of Chinese capitalists; the foreign capitalists who mattered — Mattheson & Lang, Butterfield, Russel & Co. — pulled out to Hong Kong after a very short time, leaving a gap which the Chinese had a hard struggle to fill. It was from this time, in the mid-fifties, that Mao and the CCP began to claim that China was socialist (the prefix “semi-” in front of "feudal” and “proletarian” was dropped at the same time). Chinese capitalists were bought out on terms described by Yuan-li Wu in The Economy of Communist China (1965) as follows:

A nominal ‘‘fixed interest” or “dividend” of 1-6 per cent a year, payable quarterly, regardless of the profit or loss of the enterprises in question, was promised to private stockholders for a period of six years. The amount was subsequently revised to a uniform 5 per cent per annum.

These compensation agreements were in fact extended for further periods, and as far as can be ascertained dividends are still being paid. Many capitalists were also offered State agencies on relatively generous terms. However, the smallness of the area in which these owners operated must be borne in mind. It was the confiscation of banking and manufacturing interests of owners identified with the Kuomintang that gave the Communists, at the beginning of their rule, a nucleus of important financial and manufacturing enterprises in addition to already-State-owncd enterprises.

By 1956 it was claimed that the proportion of the “capitalist enterprises” in the gross value of output of industry had declined to 0.1 per cent. However, as with so much else in China, hard facts are not so easily come by. As in Russia, illegal manufacture and trading have been widespread and persistent. Wu says:

In fact, among the “crimes” the Communist authorities have tried to stamp out are the matter of unauthorized invoices and purchase orders, purchase and sale of raw materials on the black market, and production in “underground factories”. These “deviations" became especially prominent in the spring of 1963 and required the institution of official drives to eliminate them along with the “rectification" of various "individualistic trends" contrary to the spirit of planning. The 1963 drives were reminiscent of similar campaigns in 1952. The Soviet tolkachi (pushers) most definitely have their Chinese counterparts.

It is often assumed that Soviet aid was, before the breach between the two countries, highly important to China. Certainly it was the major source of foreign capital, but its volume was quite negligible. In The Journal of Asian Studies, XXI, 1961, F. H. Mah estimated that only 727 million yuan out of 3 billion yuan loaned by Russia to Communist China during the First Five-Year Plan consisted of economic loans — about 1.5 per cent, of the state capital investment; the remainder was military loans and transfers of assets already in China. Wu estimates the total of Soviet loans between 1950 and 1957 at 5.2 billion yuan. (Exchange rate between yuan and $: 1 yuan = $2.5.) Thus, the principal source of capital investment was domestic capital formation.

Party and Bureaucracy

In an article “China’s ‘New Economic Policy’ ” in China Under Mao (1973) Franz Schurmann says: “The bitterness against the Soviet Union runs very deep in China.” Mao Tse-tung and Hoxha of Albania are the only political leaders in the world today still singing the praises of Stalin, yet Mao can have nothing for which to thank Stalin. When after 1917 the European revolution did not materialise for them the Bolsheviks turned their interest to China. From the time when the Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921, until 1940, it was under the domination of the CPSU. (The name adopted was the Chinese CP, and not the CP of China: this is a unique distinction among national Communist parties, implying a subordinate status.)

In the ’twenties and ’thirties the advice from Russia to the Chinese Communists in their struggle against Chiang Kai-shek was continually disastrous. When the struggle resumed after the war Stalin gave little encouragement, and at the point of the Communists’ victory in 1949 urged a compromise settlement: a divided China was a better prospect for Russia than a united one. John Gittings says in The History of the Twentieth Century (Vol. 6, p. 2483): “the Chinese knew that Stalin’s foreign policy was dictated by national interest rather than by ‘proletarian internationalism’.” After a few years of alliance marked by well-founded mistrust, the rift came over nuclear weapons. The line taken in China, however, was that Stalin’s successors had departed from the principles of Lenin. An Editorial commemorating the 50th anniversary of the CCP in June 1971 said:

Khrushchev, Brezhnev and company are renegades from the proletarian revolution, and present-day social-imperialists and world storm-troopers opposing China, opposing Communism and opposing the people. It is our Patty’s bounden internationalist duty to continue the exposure and criticism of modem revisionism with Soviet revisionism at the centre and carry the struggle through to the end.

(Translated Peking Review, 2nd July 1971)

The historical oppressors of the Chinese people are the Imperial Despot and the bureaucracy which administered the despot’s will; and, by implication, the Confucian philosophy which sanctioned them. Mao’s declared aim is the abolition of bureaucracy. The ideological quarrel with the Soviet Union is that, according to Mao, it is the interests of the bureaucracy which govern the politics of Russia: the Party must be a wholly separate institution if it is to identify with the interests of the people. Yet all Mao’s attempts to curb the bureaucracy have failed. From the Great Leap Forward, through various rectification and education campaigns, to the Cultural Revolution and the anti-Confucius campaign, immediately the pressure has been eased the bureaucracy has re-established itself. The reasons are only too obvious, given the industrial and commercial structure China is building. Schurmann describes it:

Factory administration has been recentralised, with major decisions once again being made at the executive level, rather than on the production floor. Money is stressed over production . . . much of the talk about economising could come from the mouths of good Republicans in the United States. Concern over money also implies an orientation to some kind of professional or technical élite (bankers, executives, etc.) and so it is not surprising that the present turn toward accumulation has gone hand in hand with a return of authority to the country’s professional intellectuals.

The ideal of every regime is to see ideology and organization go hand in hand. When they fail to do so, scapegoats are usually sought; and since the advent of “socialism” in China Mao’s speeches and writings have been about little else than the dangers of subversion from “capitalist-roaders”.

Workers and Peasants

The living conditions of the Chinese peasant and worker are hard by any western standard. By their own standards, it can be said that things have never been otherwise and would be no different under any other government in China. It can be said, further that millions do not now die every year from starvation. Yet, since China has adopted the devices and modes of organization necessary to being a major power in the capitalist world, it is the standards of that world that must be applied.

The primary task for the Communist régime was the accumulation of capital. In Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries (1964) Ragnar Nurkse writes:

External resources, even if they come in the most desirable forms, are not enough. They cannot automatically provide a solution to the problem of capital accumulation in backward areas . . . Greater efficiency in food production is the basic way of releasing human energy for capital construction. The domestic saving potential consists here in an increment of real income, and the task of mobilizing it is to withhold the highest possible proportion of this increment for investment purposes. (Our italics.)

Thus, along with the establishment of “mutual-aid teams” — predecessors of the agricultural communes — in the early years political means were used to curtail consumption. As well as heavy taxation, compulsory saving, and rationing of necessities, "conspicuous consumption” was made a crime. According to Choh-ming Li’s article “Economic Development” in China Under Mao, per capita consumption of food, cloth and housing services declined from 1952 to 1957 and in the following two years “took a deep dive. The severe shortage of staple (rice and wheat) and subsidiary food was nation-wide.” In the rural areas, where 50-70 per cent, of total output was required to be set aside as accumulation, there was considerable discontent. Yuan-li Wu in his book says:

In the course of the programme to establish control over resources for accumulation, a principle of low wages and low farm income was evolved. The system of low wages, according to Communist Chinese authors, is one under which all workers would have enough to eat while improvements in the standard of living would be gradual and would be granted only on the basis of further development in production.

Industrial wage differentials on an eight-point scale were introduced in 1956. It was estimated in 1964 (Charles Hoffman: Work Incentives in Communist China) that the wage rates of the highest grades in Manchurian industry were 2.5 to 3.2 times those of the lowest grades; and in the ’sixties other material incentives — rewards and bonuses — were extended. A social welfare system has been steadily expanded with the familiar range of insurance benefits and including subsidized housing. The role of trade unions is similar to that of other Communist countries: enforcing labour discipline, performing welfare functions, and acting as a department of the government rather than as guardians of the workers’ interests.

All Toe the Line

What is considered one of Mao’s most important theoretical statements is his 1957 speech On the Correct Resolution of Contradictions among the People. It is part of life in China that absolute conformity is demanded; while speaking of the dignity of “socialist” man, Mao encourages every deception for degrading opponents and non-conformists. Though the CCP has not reproduced the slaughtering political purges which took place in Russia in the nineteen-thirties, in another sense a purge goes on all the time in the form of the continual “rectification” campaigns.

The Party in China has probably played a more crucial role than its counterpart did in the early Soviet Union. It aims to be in command in every department of social endeavour. Its legitimacy is its interpretation of Marxist-Leninism, conveyed through “the mass line”. By definition, the correct policy of the CCP must be one which will be acclaimed by its own model worker (assumed to be the overwhelming majority); the mass line is Mao’s attempts to give practical demonstration of this.

The CCP has built an elaborate system of communication. A decision made at the centre is carefully graded as information, directive or instruction; it is elaborated in the newspapers, and suitable correspondents procured to identify the CCP with the mass line. A meeting — the vital part of the system — follows. Pretending the possibility of CCP fallibility, the meetings are market-research exercises at which some notice may be taken of views from the floor. Though local party fractions are allowed latitude in the means they adopt, each exercise is stage-managed to give no choice as to the decision over the mass line. Preparatory open and secret sessions are held, the speakers selected, questions planted and bogeys exploited. In the end, the CCP’s correctness is demonstrated, and opposition becomes the evil intent of recalcitrant workers influenced by bad elements (“poisonous weeds”).

On the other hand, the Chinese rulers have discovered what western ones learned: that they can go too far. During the Great Leap Forward workers toiled to the point of exhaustion and produced shoddy goods in the factories, while the bumper crop of 1958 suffered heavy losses from the tiredness, hunger and resentment of the peasants. The disaffection was not confined to economic factors: it concerned corruption, maltreatment by the militia, the threat of labour camps, and the enforced disintegration of family life in the communes. The mass line has had to be accompanied by reforms.

Socialism or Sam's Image ?

What kind of social system exists and is being developed in China ? They claim it to be Socialism:

Article I. The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state of proletarian dictatorship led by the working class (through the Chinese Communist Party) and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.

(Draft Constitution, 1970-71)

The economic, political and social resemblances to Russia of, say, forty years ago are striking — even to the humourless ponderosity of speeches and writings and the endless sloganizing, and their repetition by parrot-brained supporters abroad.

Not one of the economic characteristics of Socialism is to be seen existing in China. The wages system is not abolished but flourishes. Production in its entirety takes place not for use but for accumulation and profit. So far from withering away or becoming an “administration of things” the State has consolidated itself and taken pride in being a dictatorship — of “the proletariat”, which would not exist if there were Socialism.

However, it is not even a question of theoretical shortcomings. The idea of Socialism is founded on the desire for equality, freedom of choice, and the population to be able to claim the fruits of its labour. Because it is opposed to capitalism, there is an over-riding implication that the consequences and concomitants of capitalism — war, economic crises, the shyster dealing between nations — would be absent. And if by some word-magic the theoretical rules for Socialism could be shown to be complied with but the latter conditions were not fulfilled, all Socialists would say that Socialism wasn’t worth having. What they have in China is not Socialist life.

One argument is that though the Chinese system is admittedly not Socialism, it is not capitalism either, because investment is in the hands of the State and a capitalist class in the traditional sense cannot be seen. The obvious point to be made is that, as in Russia, this makes no difference whatever to the social relationships of production; with the State behaving as the capitalist, the working class is exploited to produce interest and profit just the same. Given favourable historical circumstances, some nations can do all the time what others can do only part of the time. Ragnar Nurkse makes plain that this has nothing to do with “socialist” as against capitalist economies:

The country that affords the most notable instance of forced collective saving is Soviet Russia under the five-year plans since 1928. In this case private investment activity was entirely suppressed . . .   I mention it along with the others only in order to bring out the point that in countries with widely different political ideologies the system of collective saving appears to have arisen from basic economic needs which those countries had in common. It worked of course imperfectly, being man-made; but it worked nevertheless. It became very prominent in the post-war reconstruction effort of Western Europe in the 1940’s, but that is an example that does not come from an underdeveloped area.

Moreover, the State can respond to economic needs by admitting outside investment and private enterprise at times. After 1961 (see China Under Mao, pp 222-228) the right of enterprise management to make autonomous use of the capital furnished by the State, so long as quotas and targets were met, was emphasized. The purpose was to overcome defects in the planning system; it was accompanied by permitting open markets to develop, and one immediate consequence was the growth of advertising. Obviously the State at another time will seek to repress what it has licensed and encouraged — leaving the position that sometimes individual profit-makers can be discerned and sometimes not.

The centralized Soviet-type economy is sometimes thought to have greater stability than “free enterprise” and “mixed” economies. This is not true (the difference is the difficulty of obtaining information). It is now generally accepted that the failure of the Great Leap Forward was “a depression, such as in the capitalist world: overproduction, underconsumption, drying up of savings, unemployment, decline in business morale, disruption of the market, etc.” (Schurmann, ibid.) Nor has the Chinese régime escaped the problem of rising prices, or abstained from inflationary “deficit financing” (increasing the note circulation).

What has been set on its feet in China therefore is capitalism: where the privileged smirk and philosophize, and the peasant and the worker bear the burden. The announcement of the American President's visit there in 1971 said :

The meeting between the leaders of China and the United States is to seek the normalization of relations between the two countries and also to exchange views on questions of concern to the two sides.

It might have been more simply put: Uncle Sam recognizes his own image.

Robert Barltrop