The ending of landlord and capitalist rule in China is one of the most important conquests of working people this century. This advance is described in a resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party in 1955, six years after the victory of the People's Liberation Army in the civil war.

"China was the chief prize for which the U.S. had fought the war in the Pacific...." explains the document. "Here was a matchless field for capital investments, a potential market for consumer goods, a rich reservoir of raw materials, an overflowing source of cheap labor. What the U.S. believed it had won in the war... the revolution took instead."

The peasants and workers "drove out the [pro-imperialist] Kuomintang regime, ended a century of imperialist freebooting in China. [They]... put an end to the country's dismemberment, uprooted the landlord and usurer domination of agriculture, destroyed the Asian relations in the family and swept away other feudalistic rubbish. The country has advanced materially and culturally."

And in spite of the express policy of the revolution's Stalinist leadership, the toilers pushed beyond those nation-building tasks. As the document explains, the revolution "abolished the capitalist state, instituted planning on the basis of government ownership of the key branches of industry, finance, credit, and introduced the monopoly of foreign trade." (See "The Third Chinese Revolution and its Aftermath," in Education for Socialists Bulletin The Chinese Revolution and its Development.)

China had become a workers state, a state in which the exploiters have been expropriated, capitalism has been abolished, and the industrial proletariat forms the ruling class.

The Chinese revolution changed the relationship of class forces worldwide. U.S. imperialism was weakened in Asia, where it was unable to conquer all of Korea, and Paris was soon kicked out of North Vietnam after its crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Washington's drive toward war with the Soviet Union was slowed as it had to confront the certainty of war with China if it proceeded. At the same time the Chinese revolution irrevocably weakened Moscow's political monopoly, beginning the breakup of the Stalinist monolith.

China's workers and peasants accomplished a great deal despite their rotten leadership. But the revolution was saddled with a bureaucratic leadership that had already been consolidated decades before the victory.

The Chinese communist movement had been formed by revolutionary-minded workers and peasants inspired by the Russian revolution. This Bolshevik-led socialist revolution inspired workers, farmers, and youth around the world.

Amid imperialist encirclement and pressure, and the delay in socialist revolution elsewhere, however, the revolutionary forces in the Soviet Union were supplanted by a bureaucratic layer personified and led by Joseph Stalin. Communist parties around the world, including in China, were forced to serve the interests of this counterrevolutionary bureaucracy, which continued to drape itself in the mantle of communism, and the Russian revolution. Mao Zedong, the most prominent leader of the Chinese Communist Party and government, was trained in the methods and policies of Stalinism.

The Maoist or Stalinist bureaucracy still dominates politics in China today. It rules with police-state methods, reflecting its fear of the potential power of working people, who created modern China.

What stance should communist workers take in conflicts between the imperialist powers and workers states like China? Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian revolution who opposed the Stalinist counterrevolution dealt with this issue in relation to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Some of his most important writings on the question are collected in In Defense of Marxism, published by Pathfinder.

In "Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR" Trotsky called for "unconditional defence" of the Soviet Union against the threat of attack by German imperialism. "What does [this] mean?" he asked. "It means... we do not lay any conditions upon the bureaucracy... independently of the motive and causes of the war we defend the social basis of the USSR, if it is menaced by danger on the part of imperialism....If the Red Army menaces workers' strikes or peasant protests against the bureaucracy in the USSR shall we support it or not?... We have never promised to support all the actions of the Red Army which is an instrument in the hands of the ...bureaucracy. We have promised to defend only the USSR as a workers' state and solely those things within it which belong to a workers' state."

Communists support workers and peasants protests and strikes against bureaucratic repression. Working people need to overthrow brutal rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and replace it with their own class institutions. Through these they can organize further advances in every field in collaboration with their sisters and brothers around the world. Trotsky used the term "political revolution" to describe this overthrow, emphasizing that such a movement would build on the progressive economic forms that lie at the heart of a workers state.

In his letter Matt Skiba recalls a "very interesting point" made by a volunteer staffing a Socialist Workers Party literature table in Seattle. "She gave a good comparison between the 'labor bosses' here and the Chinese 'Communist' bureaucracy that both essentially want to be capitalists, are capitalist minded, but have their base in the workers, and therefore have to talk (and make policies) out of both sides of their mouths. But does that mean that if [AFL-CIO president John] Sweeny and [Teamsters union president] James Hoffa held state power in the U.S. that this country would be a workers state?"

There are union-based parties that have administered capitalism, elected to office with the tacit support of big business or as a result of an accelerating class struggle. Such parties in fact occupy the government benches in the United Kingdom, France, and other imperialist countries today. But in every case these governments serve the ruling capitalist class in reining in workers and forcing through capitalist-imposed austerity. That's what a government of Sweeny and Hoffa would carry out. What differentiates a workers state from this is a revolution, like the one that transformed China.

Trotsky did draw an analogy between the workers state and a trade union. Both, he explained, are institutions of the working class. "In the final analysis a workers state is a trade union that has conquered power," wrote Trotsky in the article cited above. The analogy is useful because most workers grasp the fundamental need to defend the union against the bosses' attack, no matter the character of its leadership. The same class obligation is posed in the defense of a workers state.

This does not mean putting aside the reactionary policies of conservative trade union officials, or Stalinist governments. Trotsky uses a powerful example to explain this: "A trade union led by reactionary fakers organizes a strike against the admission of Negro workers into a certain branch of industry. Shall we support such a shameful strike? Of course not. But let us imagine that the bosses, utilizing the given strike, make an attempt to crush the trade union and to make impossible in general the organized self-defense of the workers. In this case we will defend the trade union as a matter of course in spite of its reactionary leadership. Why is not this same policy applicable to the USSR?"  
 
 
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