political crisis has broken out in China. For 10 years the Chinese Communist Party leadership pursued a policy of opening up the Chinese economy to market forces. In December 1986 tens thousands of students demonstrated in China demanding that the political processes accompanying these changes go further. This week, following a clamp down on the demonstrations, the Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang was dismissed. parallel process in the USSR series of economic and political reforms have been introduced under Gorbachev. These again involve greater weight for market mechanisms degree political liberalisation' which was well publicised in the release of Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. JAMES BAILEY looks at the background to the unfolding events in the USSR and China.
The best theoretical guide to understanding the events unfolding in China and the USSR still remains Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's writings in the 1920s and 1930s analysing the development of the Soviet Union have never been equalled. theoretical framework he outlined at that time applies equally well to China - although the Chinese revolution which triumphed in 1949 was victorious in a country at a far lower level of economic development than Russia in 1917.
Trotsky pointed out that the USSR took the road of socialist revolution not because it was the most developed country in Europe, on the contrary it was the most backward, but because that was the only way the country could be saved from ruin. As he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed: 'Russia took the road of proletarian revolution, because her economy was the first to become ripe for socialist change, but because she could not develop further on a capitalist basis. Socialisation of the means of production had become a necessary condition for bringing the country out of barbarism.
It was the fact that only the overthrow of capitalism had saved Russia from ruin which was both one of the reasons it was vital to defend the USSR and also created tremendous pressures against the restoration of capitalism even under a regime as barbaric as Stalin's: *The lall the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would ... mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry culture. When catastroohe and an attemot to restore capitalism did arrive, in the form of the Nazi armies, it was crushed by Soviet working class in the the greatest war in history.
But despite the objective pressures which defended the planned Soviet economy from capitalist restoration, tremendous pressures from the international capitalist economy continuously operate on it. As Trotsky put it in The Third International After Lenin: 'The seizure of power by the proletariat has not at all excluded the Soviet republic from the system of the international division created capitalism.' Lenin in his report to the eleventh congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1921 equally spoke of:
'the international market to which we are subordinated, with which we are connected, and from which we cannot isolate ourselves.' The economy of the Soviet Union, or any country which has overthrown capitalism is constantly subject ot the remorseless economic pressure of the imperialist states. As Trotsky wrote in The Third International After Lenin in 1928: 'it is not so much military inthe intervention cheaper commodities that constitutes perhaps the greatest menace to the Soviet economy. And a Ford tractor is just as dangerous as a Creusot gun, with the sole difference that while the gun can function only trom time to time, the tractor brings its pressure to bear upon us constantly. Besides the tractor knows that a gun stands behind it as a last resort.' The tremendous of not pressure on the Soviet economy reform under Gorbachev, to meet the US lead in electronics, high technology, and military advances shows just how constantly the weight of the capitalist world economy bears down on the USSR.
In order to understand the link between this external economic pressure and the internal situation in the USSR or China it is necessary to grasp the nature of these economies after they had overthrown capitalism. Both China and Russia were economically backward countries - China qualitatively more underdeveloped even than Russia in 1917. A relatively small capitalist industrial sector coexisted with a mass of the population in an agriculture where pre-capitalist relations of production still existed.
In fact the revolution had a dual economic character. The working class the took state power and in industry expropriated capitalism. agriculture the working class opened up the way to unfettered commodity relations of production for the first time by destroying remnants of serfdom, landlordism, the system of lending. and all remnants ol pre-capitalist systems of production. If the revolution industry socialist revolution then, economic point of view, the revolution in the countryside was a thorough goby ing capitalist revolution.
Lenin pointed out that the proletarian state which came to power in Russia in November 1917 carried out the thoroughgoing revolution in history on the iand. The proletarian state power created socialised post-capitalist relations in industry and relations of petty-commodity production on the land — the revolutions in both Russia and China saw a tremendous 'levelling" process peasantry with landless peasants gaining land and small capitalists losing land.
But these two systems of producof tion have completely dynamics. The increasingly planned economic system operating in industy leads to greater and greater socialisation of production. But the commodity relations existing In would, if left to themselves, produce capitalism — with the process of social differentiation, employment of labour by others, individualisation of production, unemployment, and all the other features which accompany capitalism.
Allowing the development of market forces necessarily creates on the one other sector, for e exactly the same types of effects. class in such a situation are evident. It is impossible to jump over' the stage of the development of tions in agriculture. Forced collectivisa tion, the peasant 'communes' in China and all similar attempts to jump over the development of petty-commodity roduction in agriculture inevitably en in disaster capitalist countries which have attemp ted it such as agriculture has still not recovered 50 years later from Stalin's forced collectivisation of the peasants in 1928-33.
SHET 1 ne peasant communes muroaucca li power China by Mao-Tse Tung led to a 20 year near stagnation in Chinese agriculture.
In contrast the restoration of market mechanisms in China after 1976, agricultural production in five years.
was an not attempt to check the development of commodity market production then the consequences are inevitable Social system of industry cannot be separated capitalist from that of the countryside - as each provides the inputs and outputs for the tions of agriculture, system of agriculture spreads into industry — and as the market spreads inamong to industry it produces unemployment, tion of the working class.
system of the country cannot be comdifferent foreign La minimum. agriculture USSR or China inevitably attempts to link up with the international market of capitalism.
Purely internally, there is no way to fully overcome these Gorbachev Deng ically capitalism has been The dilemmas that face the working commodity rela revolution.
deed they also do i Mozambique. Sovie introduced by Deng Xiaoping, led to over the capitalist more than a 50 per cent increase in However, if the working class does employed in wages, differentiation and unemployment in- budget, evitably follow. Furthermore these inevitably spread out of agriculture as the organisations), other. Either, the planned economy of industry is widened into successive sec..
For the market social differentiation, and the atomisaFurthermore the internal economic pletely separated from the international - although a monopoly oi gives powerful mechanism to reduce the interaction to that socialism The market sector in the precisely break the in one country, grip contradictions — although a series of policies can be adopted to lessen them. solute It is only on the international terrain through the increase in the number of countries, and in particular economadvanced countries in which verthrown tha these economic contradictions can b overcome. As Trotsky put it: 'The way out of those contradictions which wil befall the proletarian dictatorship will be found on the arena of world This is not the lunatic, and ultraleft, view that nothing can be done in a single country until capitalism is over thown internationally, but it provides the framework in whic economic olicy must be approached. Above a be directed at improving and strengthen ing the position of the working class. As the Platform of the Left Opposition written by Trotsky put it in 1927: "The decisive factor in appraising the move ment of our country forward along the road of socialist construction, must be the growth of our productive forces and the dominance of the socialist elements - together with the sheer improvement of all the conditions of existence of the working class. This improvement ought to be evident in the material sphere (numbers of workers industry, level of real character the workers' housing conditions, medical aid etc) in the political sphere (party, trade unions, soviets, communist youth finally sphere (schools, books, newspapers, theatres).' Strengthening the position of the working class internally, placing this in the framework of extending the revolutionary development internationally, is the basis of policy when the working Since 1924, however, a diametrically opposite policy has been applied by first the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin and then by the Chinese Communist Party. This is the policy of 'socialism in one country' - the utopian and reactionary theory can be constructed within the boundaries of a single state, whether it be the USSR or China.
The consequence of that policy is to only way out whereby the internal economic contradictions of a country such as the sought to block socialist revolution in Western Europe before and after World War II. Then the Chinese Communist Party, in particular during the latter part of Mao Tse-Tung's life and under Deng Xiaoping, turned to coexistence both with the United States and the surrounding Asian capitalist states The inevitable consequence of this is a bureaucratic oscillation of the Soviet and Chinese leaderships between two courses. The first policy is to attempt to maintain their bureaucratic by voluntaristic hyper centralisation of the economy. This both atomises the working class and suppresses the peasantry. It was the policy developed by Stalin from 1928 onwards and pursued by Mao, under both the 'Great Leap Forward' of 1958 and from the mid-1960s to the end of the 'Great Cultural Revolution'. The result is stagnation in agriculture, where free commodity production is suppress. ed, and low quality of production in the voluntaristically expanded industry.
The other • course is precisely to adapt to the market commodity mechanisms in agriculture — the policy theoretically advocated in the 1920s in ussia by Bukharin and applied pra ically in China since 1976 by Der Xiaoping. This, logically and necessarily, is accompanied by moving closer to the market, capitalist, system interna. tionally — which also means to greater coexistence with international capital. A more 'Bukharinite' shift towards market mechanisms internally, closer 'coexistence' with capital interna. tionally, is the rationale behind th policies pursued by both Deng and Gorbachev.
The contradictions of this course are also clear. In the USSR, which is now a country dominated by large scale industry, the effect of market mechanisms will be to introduce in. creasing wage differentials, social differentiation, and the beginnings of unemployment. However given the ab dominance of the Soviet economy by the tremendous weight of the working class these shifts are likely to be limited in their effects. In China however, with a far smaller working class surrounded by a vastly larger peasantry, the consequences can be economic chaos. These policies also tend to atomise and break up the working class.
In fact the consequences of Deng's policies already began to be felt at the end of last year. Planned price increases of consumer goods for the workin lass had to be postponed due 1 widespread protests. Attempts to introduce laws allowing bankruptcy of firms, therefore sacking workers, have been resisted. Extension of the plans to spread the changes carried out in agriculture into industr have been shelved in a number of cases But in reality both theses policies -that of hyper centralisation and that of adapting to the market mechanisms -a blind alley. Both reduce the political weight and homogeneity of the working class — the first through through the atomisation produced by repression the second market pressures.
The only way out is the one that Trotsky outlined 60 years ago — to find the solution to these contradictions in expansion 0I the revolution and, internally, directing 1 economic policy increasing weight and cohesion of the working class in society. That policy was de nounced at the time as 'unrealistic History is now judging whether it was Trotsky or Stalin and Mao's policy of 'socialism in one country' which was realistic.
Trotsky noted the theory of socialism in one country was the only view which to its foundations was op posed at every point to his own theory of permanent revolution. As he wrote "The question of the programme is ir turn inseperable from the question of two mutually exclusive teories theory of permanent revolution and the theory of socialism in one country.' All theories apart from these two are simp ly forms of eclecticism. That was true 60 years ago when Trotsky wrote those words. It remains so today.
Those who fail to understand why should look at what is unfolding in China and the USSR
Socialist Action 23 Jan 1987