THE Chinese Stalinists are now paying an enormous price for linking their fate with that of US capitalism.
First of all they declared parts of their Pacific coast to be Special Economic Zones, so that US imperialism in particular could exploit the Chinese working class producing cheap commodities for the US market.
The slump in the US home market has seen large numbers of these factories shutting down, transforming millions of Chinese workers into a very angry army of unemployed overnight.
Then the Chinese Stalinists guaranteed the financial security of the United States, keeping bankruptcy at bay at a time when the dollar is collapsing, by buying US debt to the tune of some $650bn.
Now the US is hustling China to revalue its currency upwards, and to make money available to the IMF, as well as buying up yet more US debt.
This has reduced Chinese Premier Wen to raising the issue publicly for the first time ever, at the end of the Chinese People’s Congress, at a press conference, last Friday.
Wen said then, that pressure from other countries would not force China to change its exchange rate policy.
He added: ‘We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States. . . Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am a little bit worried. I request the US to take measures to maintain its good credit, to honour its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.’
He said that ‘Increasing IMF’s funds is not a matter for one country,’ adding ‘No other country can put pressure on our country to depreciate or appreciate the renminbi.’
The Chinese Stalinists are however on course to buy another huge chunk of US debt.
They are increasingly terrified that under the pressure of the deepening crisis, the US ruling class will default on its debts and that they will have to bear the brunt of the desperate situation that will follow.
However, there is now a firm belief setting in that the position of the Chinese Stalinists is worse than it appears, and that, so infatuated had they become with the appearance of get rich capitalism, that they have been gambling with shares.
The Financial Times claimed yesterday that China has lost up to $80bn after the state gambled in the share market with up to 15 per cent of its nearly $2 trillion of currency reserves.
Those other infatuees of capitalism, the Russian Stalinists, have also been hit hard by the crisis.
The billionaire oligarchs have taken losses of billions of dollars.
Instead if expropriating the oligarchs who came into existence by stealing state property from the USSR, Medvedev and Putin are concentrating on rescuing them with ‘recapitalisation programmes’.
The Russian government is planning to increase spending on anti-crisis measures by R1,740bn, said Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Zhukov yesterday.
The Stalinist bureaucracy has gone from building socialism and communism in a single country to placing all of its trust in capitalism, right at the time when the capitalist system is heading into its greatest ever economic and political crisis.
Meanwhile, the Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian workers are shocked and angry at the way the Stalinists have allowed the capitalist crisis to threaten their jobs and their lives, and the gains of their revolutions.
In Russia and the Ukraine there have been large numbers of rallies and meetings demanding the reconstitution of the USSR, while Chinese workers will shortly be taking action against the capitalist roaders and the betrayers of the Chinese revolution.
They are demanding forward to socialism not backwards to capitalism with its slumps and wars. They are very much part of the world socialist revolution that is rapidly emerging.
