Ripe for a revolution

Objectively China is ripe for revolution. And like Russia in 1917 the coming Chinese political revolution has the potential to spill over into an economic revolution.

Three hundred million urban workers and 500 million rural workers cannot be kept in servitude for ever. But once the working class in the cities start to move, they will establish their own organs of democratic rule and push the revolution into a socialist one.

In 1989 the democracy movement arose out of the very success of the Communist Party's economic reforms. To paraphrase Marx, the Chinese Communist Party is creating its own gravedigger - the Chinese working class.

The changes to Chinese society have been monumental. When Mao won power in 1949, China was a peasant country. The working class was small, and played no part as a class in the Chinese Communist Party's victory. Indeed Mao ordered workers who occupied their factories shot.

The essence of Mao's economic policies was to replicate Stalin and use the state in an attempt to industrialise the country. Under this state capitalism the state is the collective embodiment of capital, extracting surplus from the working class, and dragging the country up by its bootlaces from a peasant economy to an industrialised one through the crude accumulation of capital.

State capitalism can be quite successful - for a while. Stalin's version turned peasant Russia into a military superpower. But state capitalism outgrows itself, and the ruling "communist" elite, recognising the economic stagnation their model eventually produces, begin to look for new ways of growing.

In the USSR and Eastern Europe the dictators were too late. Political revolutions there swept away the Aegean stables of Stalinism.

China took a different route. Under Deng Xiaoping the Chinese Government moved away from Mao's Stalinist state capitalism to a guided market economy.

For the last 25 years China's growth has averaged more than 10 per cent. In 2007 the rate was 11.4 per cent, while this year the impact of the US economic crisis is likely to see growth fall to a little less than 10 per cent.

The consequence has been a massive restructuring of Chinese society. There are 800 hundred million workers, with 300 million concentrated in the major cities.

While the US produces about 20 per cent of world GDP, China now contributes 10 per cent and some estimates are that in 20 years China will overtake the US. China has become the manufacturer of the world.

Part of the process of economic reform has involved a shift away from uneconomic state owned enterprises (SOEs). This has resulted in massive lay-offs. The Government acknowledges that between 1995 and 2003 27 million workers in SOEs lost their jobs. That figure is almost certainly a large underestimate. Another study puts the figure at 45 million.

Unemployment is officially low - a little over 4 per cent. However, because unemployed state enterprise workers are excluded from the figures, others put it at up to 10 per cent in the cities and higher in the countryside. Others go even further saying the number of unemployed is about 170 million in the cities alone.

With millions unemployed in the cities, with corruption endemic, with political repression and with the Chinese working class the mainspring of China's growth, the situation is more favourable objectively for the democracy movement now than in it was in 1989.

As the deposed Zhao Ziyang wrote ten years ago "The trend of democracy cannot be blocked".

Han Dongfang of the China Labour Bulletin argues that the most important component in the move towards democracy is the fight for the establishment of free trade unions.

Han says, "Independent trade unions are an indispensable part of this impetus to a new society as well as a strong and democratic mechanism for civil society. We might even say that independent trade unions are the key to building a democratic China."

Tiananmen Square in 1989 was a workers' movement as a well as a student movement. Workers were instrumental in holding up the Army’s first attempt to suppress the students. Their representatives involved themselves in debates with students. Some soldiers joined the rebels as a result of urging from bystanders. Five million people at one stage ran Beijing for two days. Everywhere people sang the Internationale, to highlight their commitment to a democratic and socialist future and to expose the fake socialism of the ruling elite.

While repression smashed the nascent uprising, it is clear it was a dress rehearsal for the future. The Chinese working class has a material interest in democracy. It has the industrial strength to overthrow the corrupt and bankrupt butchers in Beijing. Whether it has the political ability and leadership to ensure a successful revolution is the real question.

Certainly unrest is rife. Offical labour dispute figures have grown by around 20 per cent over the course of this century. The real number of strikes and demonstrations is difficult to know but most commentators see a further increase in social tension as the rich get richer.

One thing is certain. The (underground) leadership of the Chinese working class that currently exits and will evolve over time has no illusions about the Chinese Communist party. Nor do most workers. Only revolution can remove the present ruling class and usher in democracy.

Any Communist Party initiated democratic reforms will open the floodgates to revolution from below, in much the same way as Perestroika heralded the defeat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Revolution in China may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen. And it will not be and cannot just be a demand for political freedom - that demand will slide into calls for economic freedom. Socialism - the working class democratically running society - will be on the agenda. Then all the world will change.