Vol. 71/No. 22      June 4, 2007

He refers to “Reply to a reader” columns in the December 18 and December 25 issues that describe why China and the former Soviet republics are workers states. Preciado agrees with the explanation that China is not a capitalist state. He is also correct in saying that the government in Beijing resorts to brutal repression against working people as in the suppression of the youth rebellion in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or the assault on Uighur Muslims in Gulja in 1997.

The December 18 column noted that the foundations of a workers state are state property, a monopoly on foreign trade, and economic planning, established through the expropriation of the capitalist class by workers and farmers. It is not simply a category of “nationalized property” but a set of social relations conquered by the working class in its struggle for power.

The state is not the same as the government. States are rooted in the rule of one historic class or another—in the modern epoch, either the bourgeoisie or the working class. Governments can take different forms. For example, a capitalist state can have a bourgeois democratic government or a military dictatorship. A workers state can have a revolutionary government—like the Soviet Union in Lenin’s time, or Cuba today—or a bureaucratic regime, like the Soviet Union after the late 1920s or China today. A good explanation of the nature of a workers state—including a bureaucratically deformed one like that in China—can be found in Leon Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism.

In that book, in the article “On the nature of the Soviet Union,” Trotsky makes an analogy between a workers state and a trade union. A trade union is a workers’ organization despite the class-collaborationist course of the bureaucratic misleadership, which weakens the organization. Workers defend their union against attacks by the bosses and scabs. Under pressure from the ranks, the union tops are compelled to take some progressive steps. Likewise, China is a workers state despite the reactionary policies of the ruling bureaucratic caste—which saps the working class—and working people should defend China against imperialist attack.

The Chinese government is not revolutionary. Its leadership has been Stalinist from the beginning. But the privileged caste that dominates the government and Communist Party is not an exploiting class like the bourgeoisie that was overthrown in the 1949 revolution. It is a parasitic middle-class layer that siphons off resources and clamps down on working people in order to protect its privileged position.

Because of the historic strength and expectations of Chinese workers and peasants—a result of the revolution there—the government in Beijing is compelled to defend the basic nationalized property relations. It would take a bloody counterrevolution to overthrow the workers state, and the bureaucracy is too weak to do this. That is why the imperialist powers are hostile to China—not to the bureaucracy, but to the workers and peasants, who remain the main obstacle to reimposing capitalism there.

Describing China accurately, as a deformed workers state further degenerating today under the misleadership of a bureaucratic regime, is not about semantics. It has to do with a working-class approach, in practice, toward China, its government, and Beijing’s conflict with Washington and other imperialist powers.
 
 
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