Following are remarks from a speech by Sam Marcy, chairperson of Workers World Party, to a public forum on the crisis in China held June 10, 1989 at the Newspaper Guild in New York City. The capacity audience also heard from Workers World Party National Committee members Monica Moorehead and Lydia Bayoneta, who reviewed the long history of U.S. imperialist intervention in Asia and Workers World's support of the Chinese Revolution.
For those of us who lived through the forties and fifties and survived, there are one or two outstanding domestic developments in the United States. One of them is the rise of McCarthyism. Most people, even at that time, assumed that its origin was of a domestic character. They never explained why a neofascist movement, at a time when there was relative capitalist prosperity, would gain big support in the ruling circles.
The answer, which we gave at the time, is that it wasn't a domestic question which propelled McCarthyism. It was the Chinese revolution that scared the U.S. ruling class.
The McCarthyites, a good section of the military, and some politicians raised the biggest hue and cry. Who lost China? they asked, as though they had owned it and must find the people responsible for losing China. It wasn't that the workers and peasants won the revolution. According to the McCarthyites, groups of spies in the State Department who were in conspiracy with the Soviet Union caused the fall of Shanghai and the ouster of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Hundreds were framed up on that basis and thousands lost their jobs, all due to the arrogance of U.S. imperialism.
The Chinese Red Army was marching and winning because it had the support of the workers and peasants after some 20-odd years of struggle. But this was not convincing. No, it was communists in the State Department, communists in the army command of the U.S. They even began to speak of 21 years of treason, which included the Truman administration.
Debacle in Korea
But finally the debacle of the U.S. armies in Korea forced a reconsideration of that thesis. What's important is that this unusual chapter in the domestic history of the United States was almost exclusively the result of a foreign affairs issue. The liberals who now write about McCarthyism and the persecution don't touch the fundamental question: that it was an attempt by sections of the ruling class and some of the army to launch a war against China in order to retake it for U.S. imperialist purposes. The Korean war looked like the beginning, but it got stalled by the heroic defense of the Korean people, the supplementary assistance of the Chinese Red Army, which intervened after MacArthur threatened to cross the Yalu River, and the Soviet Union's help with military equipment.
They couldn't believe it was a revolution. They had to say, who lost it? They never could admit that the great Russian Revolution was a reality either. It was only temporary. The Bolsheviks would be overthrown. And the same with the Chinese Communist Party.
To develop an overall strategic approach to what's happening today you've got to take a look at the orientation of U.S. monopoly capitalism and its political leaders. What are they doing? If they had a hands-off policy toward China and the rest of the world, that would be one thing. But they are for intervention everywhere.
That chapter in the history of this country did a lot of damage to the progressive movement and eventually destroyed the most militant sections of the labor movement, especially those who espoused Marxism and Leninism. But the roots of McCarthyism were deep in the heart of China, which the monopoly capitalists looked upon as a fabulous market with endless possibilities.
It took the military might of the Korean people and the PLA and the support of other socialist countries to finally bring about the truce. To this day the U.S. hangs on with 40,000 troops and god knows how many atomic bombs aimed at China, Korea and the USSR.
Then came another chapter in U.S. history so far as China was concerned. Having lost this violent attempt to regain China, after bulldozing all of Asia and mesmerizing the population in this country on the basis of lies and slanders and red-baiting, they tried another tactic. It was the same strategic orientation, but tactically it was different.
If you watched TV, as I've been forced to do this week, with the commentators and think-tankers and so on, there was one face missing and that was Richard Nixon's. I haven't seen him. Kissinger was on once. I haven't seen Eagleburger, either, who's glad that he's in Latin America somewhere. The youngest practitioner from this group of imperialist geopolitical strategists, Winston Lord, had to take the brunt of it all.
The Nixon maneuver
Now, who are these people? Late in the sixties they decided that the best way to win China back to the U.S. was to carry out a complex maneuver to finally recognize China, but to do it in such a way as to hurt the Soviet Union. By the way, almost two-thirds of the UN had voted for admitting China but several of the imperialist countries really controlled the UN and they had said no.
So the U.S. tried the Nixon maneuver (really the Rockefeller maneuver). Its chief practitioner was Henry Kissinger. It was the soft cop approach, which may sound crude but it's approximately correct. They would slowly and gradually penetrate the Chinese economy, make all sorts of deals, grant some technology, win them on the basis of the soft sell. Some concessions were good for China, some deals were helpful. China broke out of isolation. But overall, the fundamental strategy was to obtain the same objective that the McCarthyites and the military had tried to win by forceful means.
Walter Lippmann's prescription for China
Walter Lippmann was at that time considered the dean of the syndicated columnists and a foreign policy specialist. He had the ear of the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon. To see how he was regarded, in 1961 he was on a plane to Moscow to obtain an interview with Khrushchev. Suddenly the Soviet ambassador handed him a note saying that Khrushchev wanted the interview postponed for a week. Lippmann wrote back, "It's impossible for me to do that." And Khrushchev changed his mind. This was because Walter Lippmann represented the U.S. government. That's how significant his writings were in that period.
Lippmann gave an interview to the New York Times on Sept. 4, 1969, in which he was asked about China. He said, "I think China is obviously too big to be governed as one central state." You could say, well, that's an opinion and who cares what he said? But that's the opinion of a good part of the government, of the think tanks and the military. China is too big. They want to divide it up. It is a brutally frank statement of the orientation of U.S. imperialism.
The view that the U.S. is a peace-loving nation merely attempting to find good customers here and there, letting the capitalist market work, is a false conception. They put the military and economic strangulation to work. This explains the rage that the U.S. capitalist press is now in.
The Nixon-Kissinger maneuver, which has lasted for 17 years, is now in question in the minds of the bourgeoisie. They are saying, look, this great strategy is not working. Nixon, Kissinger, Eagleburger and some of the others are not around at this particular moment or are keeping a low profile because they know that.
On the other hand, the media are giving a high profile to the supreme racist and arch-warmonger Jesse Helms. And he is in the company of a fraudulent liberal from the Brooklyn area, Stephen Solarz. Brooklyn, which he misrepresents as a constituency, is supposed to have been the heart of liberalism. It indicates to us that there's a united front in the ruling class against the Chinese Revolution.
But we must also look at the internal situation in China, for after all it is the internal situation that in the long run will matter.
For a long time, Marxism had seemed to be situated in the West, and partly in Russia, although few recognized that as a great center of Marxism. But after the Russian Revolution, another center of Marxism grew up. It is thought that the Chinese leadership merely followed the Soviet Union, but over the many years when the Red Army fought the pro-imperialist forces of Chiang Kai-shek and Japan, it also built up cadres eager in the study of Marxism.
I think it was Trotsky who once said that in the East they lacked in development of technology and sciences, but were ahead of the West in the science of Marxism. That was a very important observation. They eagerly grappled with Marxism as a science and developed it for the purposes of the socialist revolution. The revolution was a very profound one, with great experiences in the class struggle. There were defeats and victories. They trained a generation of revolutionary thinkers who could grapple with the most fundamental questions.
And the revolution did succeed. All attempts to overturn it, as the McCarthyites wanted, failed. Having been victorious, the Chinese Revolution then had to go much further. It had to go towards reconstruction, building socialism in this vast undeveloped country. That's the question of questions, and it is still urgent today. How do we bring about socialism?
Two views of how to build socialism
Two tendencies developed in the struggle. One group thought China, considering its undeveloped industry and technology, had to go through a period of capitalist development. Concessions had to be made to the bourgeoisie which still existed. And others thought that the road to socialism lay in the continuation of the struggle against the remnants of the landlords and the bourgeoisie. It was Mao Zedong who led the latter tendency. It was Liu Shao-chi and Deng Xiaoping who led the first tendency.
This struggle between the so-called pragmatists and the hardliners is not new. It began in the Soviet Union in the early twenties over what to do in an undeveloped country that needs equipment and know-how from the West. Lenin himself inaugurated the New Economic Policy. Was it like the one that Deng and the others were pursuing? Perhaps, but in Lenin's writing he said, we are making a temporary retreat of a strategic character to see if we can win something from the bourgeois elements in order to fortify and strengthen the revolutionary aspirations of the working class and the poor peasantry.
It was clear that the New Economic Policy could not continue very long. The bourgeoisie was ready and willing to take all the concessions but not at all willing to accommodate itself to the socialist objectives of the proletarian dictatorship. Now, you can blame everything on Stalin and say that Stalin ruthlessly collectivized agriculture and therefore set everything back, as he did, but that's only half the story. The other half is that the bourgeoisie did not want to go along with the New Economic Policy. They wanted it for their purposes, for capitalism, not socialism. Lenin kept saying over and over again, in this struggle, who will conquer who?
Lenin did one thing not done by the current leaders in China. He called things by their right name. He said, we are beating a retreat and reintroducing forms of capitalism that will help us. But they did not help for long.
If the New Economic Policy that Lenin introduced had worked splendidly for socialism, Stalin and Bukharin and Trotsky and the others would not have been dissatisfied with it. The entire leadership was dissatisfied with what was happening in the country as the result of the prolongation of the New Economic Policy, that is, of concessions to the bourgeoisie.
This happened decades ago, back in '21 and '22, but it's a live issue in the entire socialist movement. It's a live issue in the Soviet Union, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, wherever a working class government takes over from a not fully developed capitalist society.
What is the basic issue in China? Here we have fought, the workers can say, to build socialism. We have tried both ways. We have tried an extreme, radical program and it got overthrown by the rightists. At the beginning after the People's Republic was formed, we tried a moderate course.
We can't deal with all the lies of the capitalist press, but when the People's Republic was established, they had a moderate program of buying out some of the capitalists, making it easier for them to accommodate themselves to socialism. There was a period when most liberals in this country supported the Chinese People's Republic because they said it was going easy on the population. They began to contrast China to Stalin's regime, as they called it, of horror and so on. That they were more humane.
But the revolution is as humane as it possibly can be in all these countries. It was the Chinese bourgeois elements who didn't want to cooperate. They were the ones who disrupted socialist projects. The first thing to recognize is that if you give the bourgeoisie freedom of speech, you think they'll be satisfied? And that's all? That is not true. You have to have an irreversible socialist foundation and political structure for that.
The same fundamental question that the USSR faced in the twenties and the thirties, how to deal with the leftover bourgeoisie in both agriculture and in industry, was faced in China under more difficult conditions. They started off on a moderate course, but it didn't work. The world bourgeoisie was not impressed. They said, You do more for us, open up the ports, open up for investments.
Essence of right-left struggle
This question of how to deal with alien class elements is the quintessence of the struggle between right and left. I think the term hardliner is wrong from a Marxist point of view. It's a struggle between left and right tendencies. Occasionally, there are ultra-left tendencies, and there are ultra-right tendencies, but in general there are two fundamental lines of development for China on how to proceed.
Some innovations tried by the government did not succeed, like having open-hearth furnaces in the backyard. Had it succeeded, it would have been a world-shaking development. It would have meant a whole new steel industry in a short time made by the workers themselves virtually in their backyards. But it didn't work out. It was not a costly maneuver, but it could be taken advantage of by the rightwing to show that these innovations of the leftwing were not successful and they needed to go back to the period of capitalist development.
All the struggles in China turned around the issue of how to deal with the peasantry, whether to communize it or whether to bring back private property. The communes were successful. Remember, China was able to hold out and grow stronger in the period when the government was stable. They were able to rally the support of the oppressed masses worldwide and even sections of the Western working class.
We are faced not with some sort of incidental or accidental division in the Party between old and young. It's true that the present group are mostly the older people and that they have a record of revolutionary struggle dating back over many years. But it is also true that precisely because they are older people, they may not last long, and that will open up a new road.
Is it possible for a developing country to adopt a constitutional form of struggle in which two divergent tendencies, both of which have deep roots in the country, alternate in the government according to democratic measures? No, it is not possible if the class struggle is still alive and strong and a vibrant force. Serious struggle comes because of a divergence of material and economic interests between social groupings and classes. The existence of serious struggle, of bloody struggle, over a period of time signifies that there is a class basis for it.
When there is not enough, when the economic foundation is not yet sufficiently built up to supply the needs of the masses, it is not probable that there will be agreement without a bitter struggle in which one of the factions gets booted out and another faction comes in.
The imperialist bourgeoisie had a 200-year economic and technological lead over the East--Poland, China, Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America. To overcome that lead is not possible by mere constitutional means.
The secret of bourgeois democracy
I mentioned Britain earlier. Britain, one of the oldest capitalist countries, has a solid class structure of exploitation--the police, the military, all of its institutions are bourgeois. The Parliament and the monarchy are bourgeois. They have two parties, the Conservatives and the Labor Party, but the Labor Party is a bourgeois party. It is not a revolutionary threat to the state, that is, to the class structure. It is a governing opponent of the Conservative Party. When the Conservatives go out, the Labor Party comes in. But the Labor Party does not bring about socialism, it does not even seriously try. It is understood by both parties that the class structure remains as is. The secret of their democracy is the super-exploitation of the colonies, which nurtured an aristocracy of labor and opportunism at home.
It's different in a revolutionary socialist republic where the question of the class structure has not been finally resolved. The old bourgeoisie is gone, the landlords, the old feudal institutions, but it takes much more time and economic wealth to build up the foundations on which the common ownership of the means of production rests. So solid must it be that the political leaders can say to themselves that whoever gets in, the rightwing or the leftwing, the socialist foundations remain. There will only be tactical changes, only reforms of a socialist character. If the left gets in, they will make certain socialist reforms, if the right gets in they will push it back a little, but the foundation as a socialist state is not in question, not in danger. At that time there can be two different parties in open, democratic discussion to see which one gets elected.
But that cannot be done in this period when the socialist foundations are not secure enough, as witness the hundreds of minor rebellions and eruptions which have a class character. Suppose that two socialist parties are in opposition to each other to win a parliamentary election, let us say in China. If it is a serious struggle, the imperialist bourgeoisie moves in, supporting one group wholly and entirely, even financing it. How can there be democracy of a socialist character under these circumstances? It cannot be done.
Capitalist democracy is a fraud. They only practice it as long as the capitalist foundations are secure. If there is a real threat of socialism, they call out not only the police and the militia but the army. In 1926 there was a threat to the social foundations of the rotting imperialist system in Britain, a general strike, and what happened? Churchill called out the army and crushed it. He didn't say, well, you're entitled to your democratic rights and therefore we'll allow the general strike to continue although it's a revolutionary threat to the capitalist system.
The best that we can hope for under the present circumstances is that the leftwing will win out. That is very important for the struggle. Once it has reached the military stage, you must admit, it is a serious bourgeois opposition and the U.S. government will support it hook, line and sinker. So will Britain, France and Japan.
But after 17 years in which the Nixon administration, along with Kissinger and all the others, have attempted to build a bridge to China for imperialist penetration, it seems for the moment to have collapsed. And this is good for China and for the working class of the world.
Time to reconsider strategy
We are not against having peaceful economic relations with the Western imperialists. We are not for the self-isolation of China. What is necessary is to slowly reconsider the strategy that has been pursued since 1978. It is very necessary to go over the list and say: "We have dealt with imperialism for so many years now; let's add it all up and see where it has brought us. We have allowed the native bourgeois elements to thrive and grow strong, to become impudent and insolent and to challenge us for power. We have allowed them all that and weakened our position. This not only infects the intellectual community, it will spread out to the workers--and to some extent has done so. Before long it will have some effect on the peasantry. It's time to rethink the strategy."
Now, we want to support the People's Republic of China in its struggle against the counterrevolution. But we will do them a disservice if we do not at the same time speak out and say what was wrong. But in a responsible way, in such a way as not to give aid and comfort to the counterrevolution or the imperialist bourgeoisie and the hangers-on, including the radicals who have become silenced, cowed down, fearful even of a fraudulent pro-democracy press campaign. What will happen when there's not just a press campaign but a military campaign? You can imagine.
It's the leaders' policies that have brought inflation, that have created the whole yuppie generation, who are mostly the sons and daughters of the bureaucrats. So under these very difficult conditions, they must solve the problem of what to do next. Anybody who criticizes must have a program. What good is it to say you're against repression but fail to ask what is the class character of the student movement? Is it bourgeois, is it pro-imperialist or is it a socialist movement? It is a pro-imperialist bourgeois movement and a very serious threat, and the question for the government is how to repair the situation.
It may be necessary for the government at the present time to say they will continue the reforms and strengthen them. You can't just stop all of a sudden and turn it all around. As an example, China has contracts to purchase wheat in the U.S. It so happens that the U.S. is very anxious to sell because if they don't, China will buy it from Argentina, Australia and Canada, even Europe. The U.S. learned that, when the grain embargo was imposed by the Carter administration against the Soviet Union, it didn't work; it did more harm to the farmers here.
China also floated certain bonds on the bond market in Europe. They start to fall. Interest payments become due on certain bonds. You can't stop the joint ventures all of a sudden. There are contracts involved, there's money invested by China. You can't just turn it all back. It has to be done carefully.
There are innumerable problems arising at the present time. The counterrevolutionary forces have destroyed a good part of the transportation system in Beijing, Shanghai, Canton and other areas. Disruption for several days is one thing; this has been going on for weeks, and the struggle has been building up for months.
The problem too is how to win back a good many of the students and the intellectuals. There are a host of problems, but the worst problem would be if the bourgeois elements won out. That would be the biggest bloodbath in history. It would put to shame the bloodbath in Indonesia in 1965-66.
Class character of the opposition
The imperialist media has misled the public on the nature of this bourgeois opposition, as though they are a few innocent young students. It's not true. They are serious elements. You know that in a socialist country like China, if the revolution had at its disposal all the means to educate the masses, the student body would be composed overwhelmingly of peasants and workers. But precisely because the rightwing got the upper hand, the student body is composed more of the privileged groupings in China and very much less of the peasants and workers.
When you send students into a foreign country, they become contacts of the foreign country. They are sending them to the richest country in the world, and they're coming from one of the poorest ones. It is very likely they'll have to be more select on who they send over here.
Contact with the students is only one thing. Take contact with the military. One of the first things that happened under the Bush administration was to strengthen contacts between the military of the U.S. and the military of China. It's all a question of how to get around the Chinese people so that the U.S. military can ingratiate itself with the PLA. It's a struggle, see. It's a way of winning over the military. They fought China for 20 years. Now they want to win them over on the basis of little maneuvers, being nice to the officers, showing them a new type of plane or taking them on an aircraft carrier.
There's a general retreat in most of the socialist countries, with the exception of Cuba, Korea and the German Democratic Republic (I really don't want to hazard an opinion on where each will stand on China). It's important to realize that it's a retreat and not to call it something else, not to call it a revolutionary restructuring of society that will bring socialism. It's a retreat to capitalist methods, to private enterprise, and it is also conciliatory to imperialism on an international scale.
Now, all this could be a maneuver, and it would be very fortunate for humanity if it were a maneuver, you know, a tactic agreed upon by the leadership that could change the next day. That was possible during the Stalin period but is not possible at the present time. The ones who took over in the Soviet Union are committed to the reforms on the basis of conviction. Their convictions will be proven to be based on erroneous conceptions.
This retreat did not come about yesterday. And while the capitalist press here are still praising it, they are getting the message that the workers in Hungary, Poland and above all the USSR are going to see the reforms for what they are, capitalist tactics that are used not to bring about a better, more fruitful economic wellbeing, raising the social standards of the masses. No, it is a backward step.
A world historic development
I believe that the China development is of world historic significance because it is bound to make the leaders in the Soviet Union think again, it will make them think in Hungary, Poland and everywhere.
So what we are looking forward to, which we might not have been able to say three or four months ago, is a revolutionary renaissance in the world socialist community. This retreat is going to end. It is becoming discredited.
A revolutionary policy is bound to emerge in China, but it won't come quickly. We first will have to see how far the counterrevolution got. And, if it is done legally, there will have to be a Party congress where this is discussed. If they are in a position to, I think the congress should be opened up and the discussion should be not merely about what happened in Tiananmen Square and the repression, but the basic issues that are involved. After all, two general secretaries of the party supported, in one way or another, the student movement which turned into a counterrevolutionary movement. It's not because of lack of personal characteristics alone, it's because of objective conditions.
These are the result of the penetration of capital in the port cities, the joint ventures, private enterprise, desettlement in the rural areas. All this has to be reviewed in the light of planning for the future without depending once again on the capitalist sector. Inflation grew, corruption and unemployment grew even at a time of a worldwide capitalist boom.
This is bound to end. A new collapse of the capitalist system will vitally affect all of the world's oppressed. It will give renewed confidence to all who are fighting. The entire national liberation movement everywhere has viewed the reforms as something not in the interest of the world struggle against imperialism. It's a negative factor.
A return to revolutionary Marxism, a return to a thoroughgoing anti-imperialist policy, to join the forces of the socialist world into a commonwealth and tighten the reins of friendship, that is what is needed. This policy that everybody is independent, meaning that everybody in the socialist countries should collaborate with the West, deprives them of autonomy to deal on a coordinated socialist basis. If all the socialist countries are united, not necessarily in an ironclad way but on the basis of economic need in relation to imperialism, they have sufficient forces to rally the masses to build socialism with greater enthusiasm than what is being done in the port city of Shanghai as a result of the invasion of foreign capital.
Let us make this very clear. We are not calling for the scuttling of all that China has entered into. That would be injurious. But to slowly phase it out, as did the Soviet Union during the NEP period. The so-called prosperous sections have been only in a very narrow area of China compared to its huge population. A common effort to reignite revolutionary enthusiasm will do more than anything else to shake up the world as China did once before.
In his book China Shakes the World, Jack Belden showed what the masses were doing in China. This is another opportunity. China will shake it up again, but in a thoroughgoing revolutionary way in the interests not only of the Chinese Revolution but in the interests of the world revolution.