China and Orthodox Trotskyism
Totally nuts
As you can see from my recent little platform piece I consider the Beijing regime to be state capitalist, and profoundly reactionary and fascist to boot. Much of the pseudo left does not share this view although difference takes various forms. For now I just want to look at the orthodox Trotskyist position.
According to this view, China is a deformed workers' state and still has a socialist economic base that needs to be defended. They are referring here to the fact that the state still owns the "commanding heights" of the economy and all the land is either state or “collectively” owned. To remove the remaining deformities there needs to be a "political revolution" that replaces the "bureaucracy" with genuine working class rule.
There are a number of points to make here. Firstly, the extent of existing state ownership is not going to be a major issue when a revolutionary government comes to power. It can nationalize whatever it likes by decree. Secondly, the existing management associated with state owned industry will be no less problematic than that of private business. Thirdly, much of the Chinese economy is not in state hands anyway, and agriculture is virtually all private despite it being on "collective" land.
We already know that state ownership is not socialist if only from the fact that it used to be quite extensive in many advanced capitalist countries prior to the wave of privatization of the 1990s. Power generation, telephones, rail and ports, for example, were often in government hands. Although, this did not stop the pseudo left from pulling their hair out over the whole business, and they haven't stopped ranting about "neoliberalism" ever since.
The big political take-home message of the orthodox Trotskyist position on China is that the regime has to be protected from its own people. We don't want "reactionary" umbrella revolutions or Tiananmen Square incidents upsetting things. The only force worthy of overthrowing the present regime is some pristine proletarian revolutionary movement. You can't support people who just want a bit of democracy and an end to sham socialism.
So a revolutionary movement is supposed to emerge in China that is separate from and opposed to the main, and far larger, source of opposition to the regime. That is nuttiness of the highest order. Genuine revolutionaries would be working with and supporting anyone who is resisting or being suppressed by the tyrannical regime, and would recognize that democratic space is critical for the development of a revolutionary movement worthy of the name.
In his Notes to 'Anti-Duhring' (1877), Engels says: "...since Bismarck went in for state-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the state the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, [116] the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions".