THE Chinese working class is definitely on the march.
It has already compelled the Stalinist bureaucracy to start bringing in legislation forcing the western capitalist monopolies to accept trade unions into their factories in the New Economic Zones.
The foreign capitalists are angry and threatening to withdraw their capital, and they are also warning the bureaucracy that it is making a big mistake, and opening up the door to working class action independent of the Chinese Communist Party.
However, the bureaucracy has no alternative. It must either give way on trade unions in the New Economic Zones or face a workers’ uprising.
Chinese workers are angry at the way that the bureaucracy has invited the world’s capitalists into the economic zones to super-exploit them. They are also angry at the massive corruption at the top of the Communist Party and the Chinese workers’ state.
Many leading officials have been enriching themselves with bribes from the world’s bosses, while their sons and daughters have attempted to turn themselves into capitalists, so that they too can exploit the Chinese workers.
Now the anger of the working class is forcing the bureaucracy to purge its most corrupt elements.
The Chinese media has reported that more than 50 bourgeois and bureaucrats have been detained in Shanghai because of a pension fund scandal.
Several senior Shanghai Communist Party officials and businessmen have already been implicated in the alleged misuse of the multi-million dollar fund.
The first high-profile head to roll in the pensions scandal was Chen Liangyu, who was dismissed from his post as chief of the Communist Party in Shanghai last month.
More than 100 central government investigators have been sent to Shanghai to investigate money that has disappeared from the city’s 10 billion yuan ($1.25 billion) social security fund. The funds were allegedly used to make illegal loans and investments in real estate and other infrastructure deals.
On Sunday, the Chinese President Hu Jintao said that the Communist Party was determined to root out corruption. He also appealed for party unity at a joint public appearance with Jiang Zemin.
However, there are at least half a dozen different parties contained within the Chinese Communist Party, ranging from millionaire bourgeois trends to workers and peasants, and they are now being violently pulled different ways by the class forces that they represent.
The bourgeois trends want to put an end to the Peoples Republic and the dictatorship of the proletariat and go completely over to capitalism.
The party’s left wing, influenced by the anger of hundreds of millions of workers and peasants, wants the undermining of the workers’ state ended and the capitalist roaders and their bourgeois friends thrown out of the party.
Outside the party there are the masses, many millions of workers and students who want to see the rights of the workers and peasants that the bureaucracy has been chipping away at, completely restored.
Many workers are calling for the expropriation of the foreign capitalists and the dumping of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s theoretical estimation of modern China as ‘one society with two social systems’.
One state, a workers state with two social systems – nationalised property relations and a new bourgeoisie with private ownership – is a transitory state, reflecting the struggle between the working class and the bureaucracy-led bourgeoisie. One or the other class, and one or the other system, must triumph.
Either a new revolution of the workers and peasants, a political revolution, will overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and bring in rule through workers’ and peasants’ soviets as part of the world socialist revolution, or the bureaucracy, allied to the Chinese new bourgeoisie and the foreign capitalists, will restore capitalism by overthrowing the workers’ state.
What the Chinese working class needs now, is a new revolutionary leadership, that is a section of the Fourth International to lead the political revolution that is rapidly developing to its victory. It is this leadership that must be built in China.
