To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
December 12, 2021
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
China is the country with the second largest economy in the world; second largest number of billionaires, many of whom are in the ruling party; the second largest military establishment in the world; massive foreign investments around the world, with various countries in its debt; several foreign military bases; and ongoing territorial disputes with various of its neighbors, including over who will have access to the water in major Asian rivers such as the Mekong and Brahmaputra Rivers. It is not just an imperialist power, but one of the world's few great powers. Internally the supposed "Communist" Party of China runs an oppressive regime that clamps down on any independent voice or organization by the working class and suppresses critical thought. It might not burn books, but it will burn all those who read them, that is, jail them, and strip the books from bookstores, libraries, or the Internet. The CPC was once a revolutionary party that shook the world by standing at the head of the masses as they overthrew the old Chinese ruling classes, but it has been decades since it degenerated into the party of a new exploiting class that is as corrupt, decadent, and shameless as ruling classes anywhere else.
Nevertheless, there are many in the left who refuse to recognize China as imperialist. This is an ongoing debate in the American left, from journals like the Monthly Review to email lists such as Marxmail, and among ecosocialists as seen in the journal Climate & Capitalism and the group Science for the People. From the theoretical side, the denial that China could be imperialist is based on stale dogmatism, which denies that imperialism, while remaining vicious as ever, has changed many features since the days of the old colonial empires. From the dogmatic point of view, if China was semi-colonial at one time, it must still be an oppressed country today. So a major part of the left is unwilling to admit that a regime that calls itself communist can be a reactionary regime, whose actions are helping discredit everywhere the ideas of socialism, communism, and Marxism. This section of the left regards China as partially a workers' state, or as having a transitional economy, or as flawed but "non-capitalist", and sees it as only a little bit imperialist, if that.
Some of the apologists of the present Chinese regime say that criticizing it would mean backing US imperialism in its aggression against China. As the inter-imperialist rivalry between the American and Chinese bourgeoisies heats up, this argument is made more insistently. But the only way to really fight imperialism is to oppose all imperialisms, and back the democratic and anti-capitalist struggles of working people wherever they are. It is working-class internationalism, not apologizing for rival imperialisms, that is the path for real anti-imperialism. It is only a working class that has its own voice, not one that is bound and gagged, that can eventually become a consistent force, indeed the only consistent class force, against monopoly capitalism in all its forms.
This debate also raises the issue of Stalinism. Most everyone in the American left says they are against Stalinism, but large parts of the left regard that the Soviet bloc, under Stalin and his successors, consisted of non-capitalist regimes, or deformed or degenerated workers' regimes, and nostalgia for the days of these regimes is expressed in a number of ways. Within this part of the left, the criticism of Stalinism doesn't extend to the basic system it created but only to bureaucratic mistakes in what is regarded as a non-capitalist or post-capitalist system. This half-hearted stand is no more a serious critique of Stalinism than a criticism of the greed of individual capitalists is a struggle against capitalism as a system. It is connected to debates over whether to give critical support to various reactionary regimes around the world and shows that a good deal of the criticism of Stalinism, including that of most Trotskyists, is paper-thin.
We will carry material relevant to this debate in the coming issues of the D/SWV list, both material from our study groups and valuable material from other activists and groups. We will begin with notes on Richard Smith's book China's Engine of Environmental Destruction (2020). This might seem a strange place to start, as the book deals with the environment, rather than arguments over what should be called imperialism. But what's happening to the environment shows how the Chinese political and economic system works on a life-and-death issue today, and it is quite enlightening about who actually rules China and what type of economy exists there, and whether this economic reality lies behind China's actions towards the rest of the world.
We began coverage of Smith's book in August with Pete Brown's fine article "Review of reviews: China's race to be worst". (http://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-210814.html) Smith's book documents the astonishing and tragic story of rapid environmental degradation in China, and describes how it occurs throughout China even when there are national regulations against it. We don't agree with some of Smith's theoretical formulations, but we think the book gives a valuable snapshot of what economic life is like in China. In the past, we have also noted such works as the documentary film Under the Dome (2015) by Chai Jing, which describes the incredible air pollution in China, and it is clear that the situation hasn't improved since then. (http://www.communistvoice.org/DWV-160422.html)
We will then proceed to deal with how China and other newly-imperialist countries have been exploiting weaker countries and competing with the traditional imperialisms in this exploitation. In particular, we will deal with the anthology BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (2015), edited by Ana Garcia and Patrick Bond. This book shows how large-scale capital from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) spreads out aggressively to other countries. It refers to the BRICS as "subimperialist " countries, but whether one uses the term "subimperialist" or "imperialist" is a minor difference, since both terms refer to the BRICS's general imperialist character. Traditionally, however, the Leninist analysis of imperialism did not restrict the term just to the few great powers, which are only the largest or most powerful of the imperialist countries.
Then we will proceed to a discussion of how the imperialist system has changed overall over the last century. It is often thought that, to show that imperialism still exists and the basic Leninist critique remains valid, one has to minimize the major changes in the world situation such as the collapse of the old colonial empires, as if the changes were only cosmetic. We, on the contrary, show how the Leninist theory of imperialism, as based on monopoly capitalism, is verified by subsequent major economic and political changes, and by how the exploitative and aggressive nature of this world system has remained in the course of these changes.
This method of dealing with the debate on Chinese imperialism puts emphasis on looking at what is actually happening in China and the world, not on arcane statistics or theoretical quibbling. And it is what is happening today -- from the poisoning of the Chinese environment to the greedy outstretch of old and new imperialisms to weaker and subordinate countries, from the strengthened grip of finance capital around the world to the deadly inter-imperialist rivalries that grow more and more serious -- that reinforces the importance of the theory of imperialism. Looking at the concrete situation also helps point the way to how to fight imperialism--American, European, Chinese, or Russian, etc.--and to oppose its destruction of the environment. This fight has to be based on support for the working masses, not the conferences and symposiums and press releases organized by the CP of China and various reactionary regimes to prettify their growing repression as supposedly modern anti-imperialism or Leninism. <>
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