When the China Air flight carrying some of the first Americans to escape the Tiananmen crackdown arrived at San Francisco International Airport, the news media was waiting to greet us in full force. A barrage of camera lights, reporters and microphones greeted me when I emerged from Customs. For the next several days, a group of Bay Area college students and I appeared on one TV talk show after another—WABC Eyewitness News, WCBS’s Bay Sunday talk show, and CNN’s “Live with Sonya.”
All the interviewers were interested in was if we had eyewitnessed any of the gore in Beijing. I did manage to slip into the conclusion of my interview with ABC News anchorperson Pete Wilson that the pro-democracy movement sought only to reform the Communist Party and make socialism work better, not to replace it with capitalism. With “Bay Sunday’s Barbara Rogers, I had to be a little more blunt.
Rogers: “Will you go back, Nivek?”
Me: “I think I’ll wait a little wh ile until things calm down a bit. I just want to say that I saw on the front page today that Deng Xiaoping accused the leaders of the pro-democracy movement of calling for the overthrow of communism, of the socialist system in China and for the establishment of a capitalist republic. That is an out and out lie; there’s not a shred of evidence of that anywhere. Student after student, worker after worker that I spoke to in the square and around the city, emphatically stressed that their goal was to radically reform the Communist Party, but not to overthrow socialism; that they wanted the Party to work better, make it more democratic, more responsive, and they were directing their fire against a bureaucatic clique of misleaders, who are a bunch of liars right now, because to say that just does not square with any of the facts that I saw.”
From there it was on to the radio airwaves and the Alex Bennett show, a popular morning talk program. I remembered Alex as a New York radio personality in the early ‘70s, a likeable chap who always reminded me a little of rock guitarist Frank Zappa. We had a thoroughly engaging, lively discussion, punctuated with the usual Bennett sardonic humor. But the best part for me was that I hadno trouble communicating the theme that socialism and democracy are not incompatible and that there was still strong support for socialism in China. Alex said it all for me, on his own.
But by far the most rewarding discussion on the Beijing events took place at the Clifford Elementary School in Redwood City, California. Lisa Erskine, who was a teacher there, asked me to speak to an assembly of 5th and 6th graders on what I saw. The children seemed fascinated by the Chinese students’ fight for democracy and were extremely knowledgeable on the latest news from Beijing, due in part to their teacher’s briefing. By now, the Clifford students along with the rest of the world had been mesmerized and inspired by the young man who had challenged a tank in the middle of the Avenue of Eternal Peace. The events in Beijing were so titanic and emotional that they overshadowed two other international news stories which by themselves would have commanded the world’s attention: the death and funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and the overwhelming electoral victory of Solidarity in Poland.
Those 5th and 6th graders asked more political, meaningful questions about China than all the journalists I’d spoken to that week.
“Why doesn’t the government allow the people freedom? Why did the army shoot the students?” It was at this point when I was struck by the tactical brilliance of the Chinese students when they articulated their demands in English and turned their struggle into a focus of the international media. They were able to talk directly with young people in Redwood City, California, who understood what they were saying a good deal more than those U.S. diplomats at the embassy briefing, not to mention most of the bourgeois journalists.
With such a large concentration of Chinese students in the Bay Area, it was no surprise to find many solidarity activities and protests against the Tiananmen massacre being organized on such campuses as Berkeley, San Francisco State and Stanford the week of June 5th. The actions culminated in a June 10th Memorial Vigil held in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, organized by a coalition of Bay Area Chinese student organizations. One of the vigil’s organizers, having seen my television appearances, invited me to speak on the program.
Over 5,000 showed up that night, filling the Civil Center Plaza located in front of San Francisco’s domed City Hall. The vast majority were young Chinese students, whose mood was understandably angry. When I arrived, the vigil organizer said that due to the last minute influx of politicians and celebrities itching to appear on the program, there was no room left for me on the agenda.
My reaction was less than passive. “What? Oh sure, keep the communist from speaking. Make room for all the politicians looking to gain political capital from the massacre. Were they in Tiananmen Square? I have a right to speak, and the students who came here have a right to hear what I have to say!”
They somehow managed to squeeze me in at the very end of the evening’s program, which turned out to be a string of dull speeches by opportunistic politicians like Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. Not a single speak had anything meaningful to say about what had occurred in Beijing; instead, the crowd was subjected to an endless succession of depressing handwringing that bemoaned the massacre, lacking any political perspective except for demagogic anticommunist propaganda which only distorted the meaning of the Beijing Spring. The only point on the program that excited the crowd was the appearance of two Chinese diplomats who announced their defections in response to the crackdown.
The audience seemed restless for someone to say something political about Tiananmen. It was up to the American worker in Tiananmen Square to do that. I began by saluting the courage of the Chinese people while extending solidarity to them and strong support for their fight for democratic rights while condemning the government’s brutal repression, to the cheers of the assembly. It was as if the audience was waiting for someone to take off the gloves and condemn the White House for its unusually lenient attitude toward “communist totalitarianism.” The response grew even more enthusiastic when I stated that the people I had spoken with said they were proud of socialism’s accomplishments and only wanted to reform the Communist Party, not overthrow it.
When I pointed out Washington’s hypocrisy in opposing sanctions against Beijing while imposing them on the Nicaraguan people, the students rose to their feet cheering. The ovation continued when I condemned the atrocious human rights record of the U.S. from Vietnam to El Salvador and confidently predicted the day when the international working class would join hands and forever end all forms of violence, tyranny and exploitation.
As I left the podium, a large Chinese man walked up to me and said threateningly, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Mao was a great man. You shouldn’t talk about what you know nothing about.” This individual was no doubt a hard core Maoist/Stalinist who was violently opposed to the pro-capitalist roader, Deng Xiaoping, but who was no friend of an antiStalinist, Trotskyist type.
A few days later I received a crank call from a decidedly anticommunist who also didn’t like what I said at the vigil.
The response of the largely student crowd was particularly intriguing in light of the hostile reaction to Senator Patrick Moynihan at a similar event in New York City just a few days earlier. Moynihan was roundly booed for supporting Bush’s hands-off policy on sanctions, while a socialist who also opposed sanctions (for they would only punish China’s working people; socialist support sanctions only when they are demanded by an oppressed people, such as South Africa’s Blacks or the Haitians) was cheered for condemning Washington’s hypocritical double standard in applying them.
Back in China, the physical crushing of the pro-democracy movement in Beijing broke the back of the campaign in the rest of the country. The dying embers of the movement flared for a last hurrah in Shanghai j ust days after the crackdown when the train ran over six demonstrators, but all intents and purposes, the struggle for democracy in 1989 was over.
The next few months saw the government conduct a mopping up operation consisting of show trials, massive roundups and arrests, and the 37 reported exectuions. Some student leaders managed to escape; others were arrested, some after being turned in by citizens. Wuer Xaxi fled the country; Wang Dan was not so lucky. Many workers lost their jobs for their involvement in the pro-democracy demonstrations.
An August 13th Reuters dispatch from Beijing reported that the peasant leader of a secret organization known as the Great East Asia Buddhist Society had been sentenced to death on August 4th for counterrevolutionary activities. It was not known if his activities were related to the Tiananmen protests. I wondered if this might have been the same Buddhist monk who gave such a spirited message of support in Tiananmen Square the Tuesday night I met Wang and Liu.
Fear and loathing permeated Beijing during the post-Tiananmen summer of 1989. The army’s continued occupation of Tiananmen Square and the rest of the city gave the people a clear message that martial law was still around. Yet there was another side of reality that reflected the complex relationship of forces in China—the absence of a large-scale purge in the Communist Party. One the one hand, Deng was blaming the entire economic mess and the Tiananmen demonstrations on party chief Zhao Zhang; on the other hand, the worst punishment Zhao received was his removal from all party positions. He didn’t lose his party membership—fairly lenient treatment for the person single-handedly reponsible for bringing China to the brink of ruin, not to mention the restoration of capitalism.
For the most part, the Zhao faction remained intact, albeit at a far less visible and active level. The Communist Party leadership went after the pro-democracy campaign’s leaders and activists hard, but there were no mass purges against the Zhao forces. Zhao’s reformist wing was forced to lay low and wait for Deng’s death before making another move.
Meanwhile, the hardliners were doing their best to shore up their position. Having crushed the pro-democracy movement and its nascent independent labor union, the Party stepped up its ideological campaign to root out all bourgeois influences to make damn sure Tiananmen Square would never happen again. All the problems had been caused by Zhao and his policies embracing private enterprise. Down with capitalism; up with socialism, which had been saved by the Communist Party. The government made it mandatory for all college students to attend reeducation camps in the outer provinces in order to be ideologically rerooted in Marxism and communism. And the incoming class at Beijing University was substantially reduced, a move universally seen as a punishment for the school’s active participation in the pro-democracy fight.
The Party couldn’t reverse the deteriorating economic situation; austerity was still the name of the game. Workers were hit with increased taxes; inflation was still high and living standards remained low. But the situation wasn’t a total disaster, and some layers of the peasantry were still doing fairly well. While the Party’s prestige and authority were severely tarnished in Beijing and Shanghai, the further out you went in rural China the more support Beijing enjoyed. Many peasants far removed from the urban centers of the pro-democracy campaign tended to believe the government’s version of the June 4th “disturbances.” Some peasants who hadn’t benefited much from Deng’s pro-capitalist tilt didn’t mind the government reversal at all. “We should go back to Mao,” said one peasant.
In the pro-democracy hotbeds of Beijing and Shanghai, the workers were laying low. The movement was definitively crushed; the people’s morale and confidence had been shattered by the sheer brutality of the crackdown. For the worker militants and the pro-democracy activists it was time to go undergound, since the relationship of forces would preclude any visible activity for some time to come. The students were largely quiet, with the exception of a small but courageous protest at Beijing University.
Reports began filtering out of China of an underground network of worker militants and democracy activists communicating by means of mimeographed bulletins. One group was called the Democratic Front for the Salvation of China, consisting of approximately 100 activists around thecountry who were targeting intellectuals and workers. The group’s goal was the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly of power and the establishment of a multiparty system.
But these fighters were not the only ones struggling tokeep the pro-democracy message alive. Over the summer, a small group of Chinese exiles organized the Front for Democratic China and went on a multination tour to drum up money and support. The front had some luminaries in its midst, including Wuer Xaxi, the charismatic, enigmatic student leader from Tiananmen Square; Yan Jiaqi, Communist Party member, intellectual and key aide to Zhao Zhang; and Wan Runnan, a 43-year-old businessman and head of the Stone Corporation, the computer company and think tank that had close ties to Zhao. They announced at the end of July that the official kickoff of the Front wold not be until September 23rd in Paris. But in the meantime, the three leaders were going on an international speaking tour to drum up support for their pro-democracy movement in exile.
In the first week of August the trio arrived with much fanfare in San Francisco. Wuer, truly the Boy Wonder of the Tiananmen student protests, came already embroiled in controversy. He was developing a reputation for being quite the ladies’ man as well as feigning illness at public engagements. Wan Runnan was an interesting character and a very profitable byproduct of Deng’s pro-capitalist turn. His Stone Corporation computer firm had made millions in profits, which Wan used quite freely to finance the Tiananmen campaign. He was soon to be accused of counterrevolutionary treason bythe government and sentenced to death. His unforgiveable crime was calling for an emergency session of the National People’s Congress to debate the government’s handling of the turmoil.
I went to the morning press conference at the Grand Hyatt Regency Hotel, attended by several dozen reporters, Chinese students, and members of the Bay Area China lobby. Wuer was fairly impressive at this conference. He presented himself as an intelligent, articulate young man, with no shortage of charisma. He certainly earned some respect for his role in the Tiananmen demonstrations, although questions had surfaced about him even then.
Wuer said that the reason why the students’ movement won so much international support was its nonviolent character. Someone asked him what advice hehad for the people of Beijing still living under fierce repression and martial law. Wuer replied he had no specific advice for the people, other than to stay in Beijing and wait for the day when the government ends martial law. The unsatisfied reporter repeated the question. Wuer skillfully evaded it again, saying it was important to look at the big picture instead of small incidents.
Wuer raised some eyebrows in the room when, in response to a question about human rights, he went out of his way to accuse President Bush of having double standards when it comes to human rights. Someone asked him what he thought of the planned Goddess of Democracy and Freedom to be erected in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Wuer thought it was a good idea. He said that the Goddess was the symbol of China’s pro-democracy aspirations, and that the goal of the Chinese people was to build it again someday in Tiananmen Square.
One reporter asked Wuer what people around the world could do for the Front for Democratic China. He responded by saying they could urge that sanctions be imposed on Beijing’s regime. It was then I stood up and addressed the group.
“It was my impression after spending the last 10 days in Beijing before June 4th that contrary to Deng’s assertion, most people were not calling for the overthrow of the Communist Party or even socialism; they merely wanted a dialogue and meaningful reform to make the system better.”
As my remarks were being translated to the podium, wuer’s face brightened as he nodded in agreement. Yan Jiaqi added that one-party rule in China could no longer work. He said the front’s purpose was to build an “independent political force outside the communist regime” that would achieve “peaceful, nonviolent, rational change. The purpose of the Front is to promote pluralism in China, not to overthrow the government or the Communist Party. We believe that the Communist Party and the KMT have a right to exist.”
Wan Runnan, however, seemed visibly uncomfortable with the theme of my comments. He said that the people wanted democracy and multiparties, but that the Communist Party was the source of all the troubles because it blocked meaningful economic reform and private enterprise.
It was a theme that Wan developed in greater detail during his speech at the Front’s big event at the Grand Hyatt that evening. The widely-publicized rally drew a large crowd of over 1,000, many of them Chinese students. There was a great deal of electricity in the Grand Ballroom over the appearance by the Front’s leaders, especially for Wuer, the star of Tiananmen Square. A six-foot replica of the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom served as a fitting backdrop for the Front’s public rally.
As Secretary General of the Front, Wan gave the major address of the evening. He wasted no time, and he minced no words. According to him, the key thing that stood in the way of all further reform in China was the question of private ownership of the means of production. The economic reforms of the past 10 years inevitably generated the desire for political reform, liberalization and pluralism. Capitalism brings democracy. What was missing in China was a large middle class. Only an expanding middle class could guarantee democracy in China. The more capitalism is brought to China, the more democracy its people will enjoy.
Wan freely admitted to donating a substantial amount of moneyto the pro-democracy movement, as well as agitating strongly for the emergency convocation of the National People’s Congress to force a showdown between Zhao and Deng. But to listen to him, you’d never know that over a million working people, including those in uniform fraternizing with the masses, had mobilized in the streets for democratic rights. According to Wan, the movement was all due to him and his money. It failed because the middle class wasn’t big enough, and there wasn’t enough free enterprise.
In the middle of Wan’s talk, Wuer Xaxi lived up fully to his reputation. He took sick and carried on, temporarily disrupting Wan’s presentation. After Wuer’s dramatic departure, Wan took the gloves off and got to the heart of the matter. Above everything else, the central obstacle to democracy and freedom in China was the nationalized property and the planned economy. In order for China to enjoy democracy, there must be private ownership of the means of production. Deng’s 10-year flirtation with the free market had wet the people’s appetite for democracy. According to Wan, his financial backing of the movement was the sole reason for its existence. The problem was there were not enough enterprising Wans to lead China down the road to freedom. There wasn’t enough capitalism; there wasn’t a large enough middle class. That’s why the movement fell short.
I could hear Deng Xiaoping howling with satisfaction back in Beijing when he heard about Wan Runnan’s remarks in San Francisco.
“You see,” he would tell the Party. “This proves we were right in crushing the disturbances. This man was the ringleader; the Mr. Moneybags financing the counterrevolutionary turmoil in Tiananmen Square. Now heis openly admitting his treason. He calls for the restoration of capitalism, for the private ownership of the means of production. Surely we were right; surely the people know that we were only defending socialism.”
But just as Deng and Li Peng were not defending socialism, Wan Runnan was not the great warrior for democracy he made himself out to be. As for his theory that the middle class is the major force behind the fight for democracy and freedom in the world, he’s only about 130 to 200 years behind the times. That period was the last time capitalism played a revolutionary, progressive, democratic role in history. The ascending “middle classes” waged struggles against the tyrannical feudal landlords, nobility and monarchs for greater freedoms and rights, in order for it to be easier to exploit “free” wage labor and make money the way capitalists do.
Marxists have never denied the historically progressive role the capitalists played in overturning feudalism, thereby paving the way for humanity to organize production on a higher plane as well as enabling the toilers to have more political space to fight for and defend their rights. But even then it was the more plebian layers who fought the hardest for extending democratic rights and civil liberties. And it was the propertied classes who resisted these struggles and sought to restrict any expansion of political rights and freedoms. In the years following the American Revolution,it was the militant struggles waged by the masses, by the workers and farmers, which pressured the new American government to add the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, a full ten years after the Revolution.
Capitalists played a progressive historical role when theywere a young, ascending, revolutionary class. But by the late 20th century, the epoch of capitalism in itsmost advanced stage—finance capitalism, that is, imperialism—capitalism has become increasingly incompatible with democracy. It is an empire in decline, in crisis, and historically spent, but still extremely dangerous. Capitalists all over the world engage in varying degress of repression to safeguard their profits and interests and are opposed to any extensions of democratic rights. Today, more than ever, it is the workingpeople who are in the forefront of the fight for democracy, from the United States to China.
All of which is not to say the financial contributions of Wan Runnan and others like him to the pro-democracy movement did not play an important role. But listening to Wan reminded me of those American diplomats at the embassy briefing. He too completely dismissed the central role played by working people in forging the mass movement that became known as the Beijing Spring. Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng feared China’s working class far more than ambitious enterpreneurs like Wan Runnan.
What really bothered Wan and other budding bourgeois elements in China was not the lack of democratic rights but the fact that the bureaucracy was not sharing enough of free enterprise’s spoils. With the rampant corruption and nepotism permeating China, the party chiefs were hogging the booty that was the fruit of Deng’s pro-capitalist turn. All the juicy contracts and deals were going to army officers and party bureaucrats and their children. Wan had concluded that the only way around this was to end the Communist Party monopoly and reprivatize the commanding heights of the economy.
Wan’s badly flawed, historically outdated theory about democracy and capitalism fared about as well as his Front for a Democratic China. This traveling sideshow of exiles made a big splash in San Francisco, Chicago and New York before returning to its “headquarters” in Paris. After that it prettymuch disintegrated, beset with internal conflicts, egoism, and disagreements over political perspective as well as the meaning of Tiananmen itself. Wan’s theory is about as politically relevant as the Front for a Democratic China, which has passed from the scene into the trashbin of history without anyone noticing.
This trio of dilettantes will have nothing to do with and very little to say about the future struggle in China for democratic rights. That historic development will be accomplished by the Chinese working class. These are the Chinese who will count in the future and lead the fight for socialist democracy in that country. It will be those who remain in China, far from the press conferences and glare from the cameras of the international media, who the world will hear from again; the layers of fighters who are drawing the central lesson from the Tiananmen movement—that the Communist Party does not belong to the workers but to the bureaucracy and cannot be reformed; that a new workers party will have to be built to lead China forward to socialist democracy.
But isn’t it true, one might argue, that given Wan Runnan’s candid admission that private property was the answer, and given further the crumbling of “communism” in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, that communists in the world should endorse the June 4th crackdown ordered by Deng? Wasn’t he forced to call on the army to save socialism in China? If Deng didn’t forcibly end the occupation in the square, wasn’t China on the road to what happened in Romania in December of that year? Remember the “Death to Deng” sign? Didn’t June 4 prevent what happened throughout most of the rest of the communist world, excepting Cuba, North Korea and to a lesser extent, Vietnam?
No. What the crackdown “saved” in China was Stalinism for a while longer, although it only postponed the inevitable. Eastern European and Soviet Stalinism fell sooner and at a more rapid pace than China because of certain historical reasons and a different relationship of forces. The crisis of the privileged caste in China was not as acute as it was in the Soviet bloc. But June 1989 showed a serious weakness in the Chinese Communist Party. It weathered the storm of the Beijing Spring, which was only the opening salvo in what will eventually become a political revolution, in the sense Leon Trotsky defined it in The Revolution Betrayed: where the working class overthrow the totalitarian rule of the bureaucracy and become masters of their own destiny.
But Trotsky predicted this in the 1930s, when a Marxist current still existed and communist continuity in the Soviet Union had not yet been broken. A communist-led political revolution was still foreseeable. But this was not, and could not be, on the historical agenda in 1989, and it won’t be in the near future in China, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, because there is no working class vanguard yet in any of those countries. New communist organizations will reemerge only through deepening class struggle experience and as part of a broader advance of the world revolution.
Given these conditions, it was inevitable that the Stalinist regimes would not be overthrown by a communist-led political revolution, as Trotsky had foreseen, but would instead be toppled by the masses in the midst of a deep crisis, as almost occurred in China in 1989 and did happen in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. What is on the agenda today with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes is not a political revolution, but the chance for workers to win political space and exercise those rights won by working people during bourgeois democratic revolutions.
The Stalinist-led Communist Parties of China, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have and had nothing to do with communism and revolutionary Marxism. The fact that parties may call themselves communist does not mean that they are. One must examine the programs, policies and actions of political parties to ascertain the class interests they represent. Communists represent the interests of the working class.
Stalinism has represented a privileged bureaucratic caste with interests separate and apart from the workers. But the Stalinists are not “capitalists” either; they’renot, as some have claimed, some new kind of bureaucratic capitalist class. They don’t own banks or industries, either as individuals or collectively. Instead, they are a petty bourgeois caste, a parasitic strata that has no independent role to play in the nation’s economy but feeds off the socialist property forms—the nationalization of the commanding heights of industry, a state monopoly of foreign trade, and an economy that operates according to an overall social plan. [Trotsky’s analogy: Stalinists are to workers states what trade union bureaucrats are to unions]
Trotsky explained that the origins of Stalinism began in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. Following the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolsheviks organized and mobilized the workers and peasants to expropriate and nationalize the capitalists and landlords that had ruled Russia. Capitalism was overturned; socialist property relations were established, and the Soviet Union had definitively broken from the capitalist orbit.
But tremendous pressures followed, and after the imperialist-led civil war and the failure of any extensions of socialist revolutions to the advanced capitalist countries, a privileged, bureaucratic caste emerged that reversed the domestic and international policies of the Lenin-led Communist International. This caste, led by Joseph Stalin, smashed workers democracy, dismantled the soviets (workers councils), liquidated the generation of Lenin’s collaborators, brutally collectivized agriculture, propped up the rich peasants,or kulaks, and ended Lenin’s communist course that guaranteed the right of national self-determination to the oppressed workers and peasants in the tsarist prisonhouse ofnations, the legacy of which history witnessed in 1991 with the accelerated disintegration of the Soviet Union and later in that same decade of Yugoslavia.
All of this amounted to a political counterrevolution, Trotsky explained. Replacing the internationalist, revolutionary perspective that fought to advance the class interests of the toilers—the urban workers and their allies in the countryside—the emerging bureaucracy was counterrevolutionary, retreating from Lenin’s internationalist policies to pursue a more conservative, nationalist road, designed to protect the privileges the bureaucrats were accruing.
This reactionary direction carried over into Stalin’s foreign policy, resulting in two disastrous outcomes: the disarming of communist forces in China and their butchering at the hands of Chang Kai shek’s Nationalist army; and the German Communist Party (under Stalin’s direction) refusing to support the German Social Democrats, thus allowing Hitler to waltz into power.
Stalin said the Soviet people would build “socialism in one country” under his leadership. Trotsky, as part of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and later from exile in Mexico, said that was impossible, especially in a backward, peasant country such as the Soviet Union. He pointed out that, as Lenin always said, there could not be socialism until the workers in the advanced capitalist nations made socialist revolutions.
What existed in the former Soviet Union was not socialism but a workers state—a transitional, contradictory society in transition from capitalism to socialism, as part of the world struggle against capitalist exploitation. A workers state can go forward to socialism, or backward toward capitalist restoration. The October Revolution had indeed overturned capitalism when it nationalized industries, established a planned economy and a state monopoly of foreign trade. All this laid the foundation for building socialism. When the internationalist socialist revolution did not occur and the Soviet Union remained impoverished and isolated, the Stalin-led bureaucracy ruthlessly carried out the political counterrevolution. But while the Stalinists weakened the workers state with their reactionary politics, they did not succeed in overturning the social conquests of the October Revolution.
It was a contradictory situation which Trotsky felt could not last very long. Either the imperialists would militarily overturn the workers state and restore capitalism, or a layer of the caste would try reinstitute capitalism. This could not happen, however, without taking on the Soviet workers and inflicting a crushing defeat on them in a civil war. Either way, Trotsky did not have much confidence in the Stalinists’ capacity to defend the workers state. It would be up to the Soviet working class to defend the state property relations. “The social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party,” he explained in 1936, “still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses” (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 255).
The Soviet Stalinists lasted a while longer than Trotsky thought they would, thanks in large part to the Soviet workers’ defeat of German imperialism in World War II. They were able to do this despite Stalin’s leadership, not because of it. The victory gave prestige to the Soviets throughout the semicolonial world. Capitalism, significantly weakened by the war, was overturned in Eastern Europe, but through predominantly administrative, bureaucratic and military means. This was less so in Yugoslavia, where there had been an active, militant, partisan guerrilla movement fighting the Nazis. The Communist parties became the instruments of the new castes’ political domination, and police state terror became the mechanism of their rule.
Trotsky, murdered by an agent of Stalin in Mexico in 1940, never lived to see these events. But the methodology of his analysis of the Soviet Union’s “revolution betrayed” could be applied to the overturning of capitalism in Eastern Europe. If the workers revoltuion in the Soviet Union had degenerated with the ascension to power of the bureaucrats, the workers states in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany, etc., were bureaucratically deformed from birth.
Nevertheless, capitalism had been toppled in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union emerged stronger from the war than the imperalists in Washingtonand elsewhere desired. The Cold War was imposed by the imperalists after World War II because of their inability to realize by means of a hot war, a shooting war, their goal of restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Bloc. This was partly due to the overt opposition by U.S. GIs to being used as cannon fodder in Eastern Europe or China.
Washington’s failure to achieve its aims in the Korean War was another indication of the limits of its military power. Instead of stopping the overturning of capitalism in Korea and China, the war intensified the deepening of the anticapitalist revolution in both nations. The communist parties in these countries, as well as in Vietnam shortly after, led socialist revolutions despite their Stalinist leaderships.
But these Stalinist parties were qualitatively different from the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Korea, Vietnam and China had revolutionary conditions ruthlessly imposed on them by imperialist interventions. The toilers in these countries fought tenaciously for their national sovereignties and independence from foreign domination. The fact that they were saddled with Stalinist leaderships did not stop them from defending their nations and overturning capitalism.
Mao Zedong was a revolutionary and an anti-imperalist, but he was schooled in the Stalinist perversion of communism. When he came to power in 1949, his Stalinist background came to the fore. Despite the sometimes vitriolic rhetoric against U.S. imperialism, Mao sought stable relations with Washington as much as Stalin did. And domestically, Mao’s leadership represented the interests of China’s counterrevolutionary caste which crystallized quickly when the officer corps of the People’s Liberation Army fused with the Party’s officialdom. Mao’s policies, from the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958-59 to the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, shared Stalinism’s most fundamental trait—a bureacratic approach that views working people as objects to be controlled, not as makers of their own history.
The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s frenzied, administrative attempt to transform China overnight from a peasant, agricultural society to a superindustrialized power. In the years preceding the Leap Forward, the Party imposed forced collectivization on the peasantry, reversing the Revolutions’ earlier policy of encouraging the formation of cooperatives. When the Great Leap Forward was leaping toward economic disaster, the government shifted gears again. Party leaders Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shao-chi urged greater reliance on private farming and increased emphasis on the use of material incentives such as bonuses to persuade workers to produce more, instead of frenetic administrative drives to squeeze more out of the workforce.
“The Great Proleterian Cultural Revolution” was essentially Mao’s unleashing a reactionary campaign of terror to remove Deng and Liu from power and establish himself as the sole, unchallenged arbiter of the ruling bureaucratic caste in China, as Stalin had done before him. The Chinese Communists have zigged and zagged all over the place, sometimes hellbent on forced collectivization, other times relying more on market mechanisms and material incentives, all behind the backs and over the working people.
The counterrevolutionary bureaucracies in China, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union cultivated stable relations with imperialism. They aided revolutionary struggles on to the extent necessary for their own defense and diplomatic leverage. They broke the revolutionary continuity of the workers movement in those nations, demobilized and demoralized the workers, turned them away from internationalism and isolated them from struggles by workers and peasants around the world.
Stalin sold out the Spanish and Greek revolutions in the 1930s and 1940s; Mao did the same to the Indonesians in 1965. Breshnev and Mao clinked glasses of champagne with Nixon while Washington rained terror and destruction on Vietnam. This was the Cold War—a standoff between the imperialists and the counterrevolutionary castes governing the workers states. The bureaucrats sought to collaborate and make deals with the imperalists, who in turn used the castes to get to the workers. It all worked fairly well for the imperalists, who reaped great benefits from the Stalinists’ blackening the name of socialism in the eyes of working peole with their totalitarian repression.
But continued instability in the bourgeois semicolonial world produced a socialist revolution right under the nose of U.S. imperialism—Cuba. The real bad news for Washington was that for the first time since October 1917, a nonStalinist leadership successfully ld the workers and peasants in an anticapitalist revolution. Here was a genuinely revolutionary leadership that couldn’t be bought off. The crazy, bearded Fidel could not be bribed into making deals at the expense of the workers.
It was a revolution that matured by deepening the revolution inside Cuba and not shirking from providing internationalist aid to anti-imperialist struggles around the world. Far from representing the interests of a bureaucratic caste, Fidel consciously fought bureaucratism and built a communist party that, unlike its counterparts in China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, was not an instrument for the distribution of privileges, but a communist vanguard of the working class, organizing and mobilizing them to run society in their interests, develop communist consciousness and build socialism. For this, Cuban earned Washington’s undying hatred and endured economic embargoes, assassination attempts, biological warfare, military invasions and unrelenting political pressure.
Like anyone else in this world, the Cuban Communists have flaws and made mistakes along the way. And there were undeniably some concessions made to the Kremlin, which were inevitable given Cuba’s heavy reliance on the strongest workers state. But all in all, the evolution of the Cuban Communist Party went a long way toward reknitting revolutionary continuity with the Bolsheviks and Lenin’s Communist International. And Washington knows it.
The years 1989-1990 marked a turning point in history, but not for the reasons intended by the imperialists. According to the pro-capitalist ideologues, they signaled the fatal weakening of communism. After all, didn’t communism completely collapse in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? And didn’t communism almost fall in China? Didn’t Deng Xiaoping come very close to the fate of Rumanian dictator Ceausescu?
It became the new national party line: Communism is dead. The entire world is rushing to free enterprise and “democracy.” The Cold War is over. America and democracy have won. Long live capitalism.
One aspect of this national party line is absolutely correct. The Cold War is indeed over. The only problem for the imperialists is—the United States lost. What we are witnessing is not a crisis of communism but the disintegration of Stalinist political rule, which is itself a reflection of the ongoing crisis of world capitalism, a system in the midst of a historical decline, a “death agony,” as Trotsky called it, which will unleash horrible bloodbaths like the U.S.-led war against Iraq; a system inexorably headed toward an international economic crisis that will generate gigantic social explosions and class battles.
Stalinism owes its very existence to the survival of world capitalism in the 1920s and beyond. It has served as a transmission belt for capitalist interests in the workers states, much as the trade union bureaucracies in capitalist countries serve as transmission belts for capitalism in unions. As imperialism undergoes a deepening structural crisis (overproduction, spiraling debt, falling rates of profit) the petty bourgeois castes, incapable of organizing the workers and peasants, increasingly relied on capitalist techniques and market mechanisms to squeeze more production of out of the workers.
Beginning in 1978, Deng Xiaoping went further down the free market road than any previous faction of the Chinese bureaucracy. The result was the creation of a layer of prosperous farmers and businesspeople, alongside increased inequalities and heightened disparities incomes and living standards. We saw vividly the fruits of these policies in 1989. Along with the desire for more democratic rights, it was thepopular revulsion against bureaucratic privilege and the inequalities generated by Deng’s market reforms that fueled the Beijing Spring.
Tiananmen Square shook China’s Stalinism to its core. The pro-democracy movement, despite its lack of a working class leadership, delivered a staggering blow to the counterrevolutionary caste in the People’s Republic. But, led by Deng andLi Peng, the bureacracy was able to weather the storm, regroup and score a bloody knockout over a leaderless mass movement.
In 1989-90, the Eastern European Stalinists did not fare as well. In those countries, the massive mobilizations of working people succeeded in sweeping the totalitarian regimes from power. And in August 1991, with a speed that left the world stunned, the Soviet Communist Party collapsed, after a coup by hardline Stalinists was foiled in the face of militant street protests by the toilers in Moscow and Leningrad. So why did the Chinese Communist Party escape this fate in 1989? What prevented Deng from going the way of Ceausescu in Romania?
China’s party was more durable because it is more closely connected to a people’s revolution, one that ripped one fourth of the world’s population out of the capitalist orbit. The workers states in the Eastern European nations, as has beenm entioned, were more the result of being imposed externally by the Soviet Union, whose long ago 1917 October Revolution had already degenerated.
Furthermore, the Chinese Communist Party, governing an overwhelmingly agricultural nation, as a far more genuine social base in the peasantry than did its counterparts in Eastern Europe. The further away from Beijing and Shanghai, the more the people believed the government’s version the events in Tiananmen Square. After all, the party had led the fight against the rapacious landlords and greatly improved the welfare of the peasants. The Eastern European Stalinists enjoyed no such prestige.
The deepening crisis that shattered the bureaucratic castes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is equally inevitable in China, but up until now is less aggravated. This is because the weight of agriculture in China means that the methods of industrialization to accelerate economic growth and raise labor productivity of the other deformed workers states have not yet been exhausted. That is, in China, unlike in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, three fourths of the people still live in the countryside, so it is still possible to drive workers off the land and into the cities on a large scale to work in mining, oil extraction, and other industries, raising productivity.
Washington breathed a huge sigh of relief when Deng crushed the pro-democracy movement on June 4th. The one thing U.S. imperialism desires most of all is stability with the Stalinists. A mass, militant movement for democratic rights by the workers, the logic of which points to democratic socialism, is the last thing Washington wants to see. It is quite pleased when the Stalinists smash mass movements and stabilize their rule. That’s why Bush was so understanding and restrained in his reaction to the Tiananmen massacre; why he foughtto maintain most favored nation status for China; and why Beijing was slapped on the wrist with relatively benign sanctions, mostly restrictions on arms sales.
The fact that thousands of Chinese lay dead in Beijing’s streets didn’t seem to bother George Bush all that much; what mattered was that Deng and the rest of the bureaucrats whom the U.S. had carefully cultivated relations with since 1971 had stablized their rule and would continue to serve strategic imperialist interests. Which they did, from continuing China’s reactionary support to the hated Khmer Rouge butchers in Cambodia, to not opposing Washington’s murderous aggression against the working people of Iraq.
Witness the contrast between Cuba’s position on the Gulf war as opposed to Moscow’s and Beijing’s. While Deng and Gorbachev jumped so far in bed with Washington that they gave a nod and a wink to its war with Iraq, Cuba consistently opposed the U.S. war drive, including the criminal starvation of the Iraqi people. Revolutionary Cuba fought for peace and spoke and acted in the interests of humanity.
Meanwhile, the disintegration of Stalinism in the Soviet Union showed that Gorvachev was not as human and progressive as he was made out to be a few years earlier. In fact, he was cut from the same cloth as Deng, unleashing murderous assaults, economic sabotage and blackmail against the oppressed nationalities of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Gorbachev and Deng outdid one another in jockeying for a better position to strike deals with Washington. The former met with Bush in December 1989 in the Mediterranean, weeks before the U.S. launched its terrorist military aggression against the people of Panama, killing thousands in a working class barrio under cover of the night. Bush lifted all sanctions against Beijing, and China answered by failing to veto Washington’s war resolution against Iraq.
The paybacks were real. Under cover of the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, Gorbachev violently attempted to crush the national aspirations of the Baltic peoples, with barely a peep out of Washington. While American jets pummeled the Iraqis, Beijing conducted the last of its Tiananmen trials, sentencing student leader Wang Dan and others to years in prison for “counterrevolutionary activities.”
To listen to the procapitalist propaganda so glibly peddled, communism is dead, while capitalism is this dynamic, vibrant, prospering system, destined to live forever under Pax Americana. But capitalism has clearly failed in the Third World and even in “industrializing” nations such as Brazil and Peru. Most working people in these countries face skyrocketing inflation, unemployment, disease, illiteracy, hunger, malnutrition and homelessness. They are suffering from an onerous, oppressive debt imposed on them by banks and governments from the capitalist world, not by workers states.
Capitalism’s proponents never ceased reminding us of the longest peacetime expansion since World War II, before the 1990-1991 recession hit. They neglected to add that this “boom” had been marked by increased poverty, homelessness, lower living standards and purchasing power for workers, massive cutbacks in social services, deteriorating health care and education, bank failures, bankruptcies, savings and loan scandals, two stock market crashes, and dangerous levels of consumer and corporate debt. All this occurred during an upturn. These are not the characteristics of a healthy, prospering system.
Far from heralding a “new world order,” U.S. imperialism continues to wage war to shore up the crumbling old world capitalist disorder. Far from a bright and stable future, capitalism faces intensified interimperialist conflicts and offers heightened aggression against the workers of the world [who will continue to rebel against capitalist exploitation ] from Iraq to Belgrade. Far from communism being irrelevant, it seems what Lenin told the Bolsheviks in 1917 still applies: “We must patiently explain. The masses will turn to us. They have no alternative.”
Contrary to the bourgeois dogma parroted by ruling class apologists, the spectre of communism is very much alive. As long as there’s an international working class, communism will haunt the bourgeoisie.
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Epilogue—1992-93
In the spring of 1992 I read a New York Times article entitled, “From Tiananmen Square to New York Sweatshops: One Woman’s Fight to Better the Lot of Workers Under Communism and Capitalism.” It told the story of Lu Jingua, a young woman from Beijing who had been an activist in the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation. Ms. Jingua fled China shortly after the June 4th massacre, emigrated to the United States, where she received political asylum, and became an ace organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
The Times article about this remarkable working class fighter inspired me to call the ILGWU’s Manhattan office and introduce myself to Ms. Jingua. Though her knowledge of English was limited, I managed to convey to Lu that I was an American unionist who had been in Beijing for the last days of the pro-democracy movement. Excited to hear from a fellow trade unionist who’d been inTiananmen Square, Ms. Jingua agreed to meet me for lunch at a restaurant near my apartment. When I showed her pictures of my Tiananmen friends, Liu shrieked in amazement.
“I know him!” she exclaimed, pointing to Liu, #008 commander of Tiananmen Square. Lu Jingua and Liu had been students together years ago.
Lu explained that while she missedher husband and children in Beijing, she was enjoying her experiences as a union organizer, and the opportunity to fight for workers rights here in the United States. Her ability to speak Cantonese was a huge plus in profoundly relating to Chinese immigrant workers so ruthlessly exploited in New York’s sweatshops.
I didn’t hear from Lu again until May 1993.
“Nivek, I have exciting news!” she told me. “You know your friend from Tiananmen Square, Wang? He is in New York. I’m friends with him now.”
Incredible as it sounded, Lu was now linked to two of the three Tiananmen activists I’d befriended in Beijing. She gave me Wang’s phone number, and the next day Wang and I experienced an emotional reunion over lu nch in Soho. He had been living and working in New York for two years while attending classes at Seton Hall University. Ironically, Wang was flying back to Beijing the very next day, but promised to return to New York in two months.
Wang said that he was out in the streets the night of June 4th, and confirmed that most of the casualties occurred in the side streets off Tiananmen Square. He also agreed that while there were divisions within the army over using force to end the protests, nothing close to a civil war existed, and the bureaucracy, while strained, was not yet ready to rupture, as its companion castes did in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in 1989-91.
Wang explained that shortly after June 4th, he was called in for questioning by the police. They wanted to know if Wang had been talking to an American journalist in Tiananmen Square throughout the week preceding the crackdown. In an impressive display of quick thinking and political sophistication, Wang replied that he had talked to an American, but this man was a Marxist who supported socialism and condemned capitalist exploitation around the world, and who disagreed with some of the Chinese about socialism. This response politically disarmed the stunned police, who could do nothing but release Wang.
We talked about the Chinese government’s release of student leader Wang Dan after he had served a two-year jail sentence. With his release, all students had been freed by the government. But Wang said that many workers were still imprisoned for their Tiananmen activities. As always, the harshest punishment was reserved for the workers, who constitute the greatest threat to the bureaucracy.
Wang told me that Liu was still running his shops in the free market district with his wife, and Yang was still a photojournalist. He would be seeing them when he returned to China, and he assured me that they would be thrilled to hear of our reunion.
Four years after the Beijing Spring, the deepening crisis afflicting the international capitalist system had resulted in heightened misery and exploitation, instability, and an accelerated disintegration of the old word capitalist disorder. From Bosnia, where rival wings of the bureacracy attempted to be become capitalists by competing in a mafia-style grab for power, its disintegration caused by another Stalinist misleadership that relied on capitalist market forces; to the People’s Republic of China, where the regime’s continued embrace of free enterprise resulted in an escalating toll of human suffering, graphically illuminated by the June 1993 shipwreck of the Golden Venture off a Queens, New York beach.
The desperate Chinese workers on that boat, literally constituting the slaves of this capitalist-generated slave trade, were more examples of the “ordinary people” who had been hurt by the “reforms” of Deng Xiaoping. They represented the other side of the “Chinese boom,” that is, China’s pro-market turn. These workers did what workers everywhere have been doing for the last few centuries of capitalism—emigrated to other lands when the glories of the free market become too much to bear at home.
They become victims of smugglers trafficking in this modern day slave trade, gangsters who force the immigrants into conditions of indentured servitude. But these smuggling operations that the capitalist policiticians and press hypocritically criticize are not an isolated aberration. They are nothing more than a capitalist enterprise that is totally enmeshed with, and helps supply, major businesses such as garment, construction, hotel, restaurant, agriculture and meatpacking. The capitalists who own these industries could not do without the superexploitation of immigrant labor and have no intention of stopping it.
There was much rhetoric from the Clinton administration about cracking down on the smugglers as part of real reforms in immigration policy. Rest assured that while these “reforms” resulted in immigrant workers having even fewer rights than they had before, the slave trade and the continued supplying of superexploited immigrant labor for U.S. capitalists have gone on unabated.
As did the inhuman nature of Washington’s immigration policies, so graphically exposed by the Golden Venture tragedy. Washington’s human rights crimes against Haitian refugees then dominated international headlines for years, particularly the case of the 100 HIV-positive Haitians who languished in concentration camp-like conditions at Guantanomo Naval Base, itself an ongoing violation of Cuba’s national sovereignty.
But there’s a side to all this movement of working people that’s in the interests of workers everywhere. It brings workers of all nations together; it helps to weaken the chauvinisms and racism that divide us; it breaks down the barriers and helps workers see that they are part of an international class; it helps us to defend ourselves for the gigantic class battles ahead. It strengthens the international working class for its historic task of preventing a third world war.
It brings outstanding working class fighters like Lu Jingua from the garment shops of Beijing to garment shops in New York City. Lu, fresh from her rich experience in the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation in 1989, strengthens the working class in the U.S. by her focused determination to fight to better the lot of working people, to fight for social and economic justice. There are more Lu Jinguas in China. And there will be more Malcom X's, Che Gueveras, and Joe Hills produced by the natural workings of capitalism. It’s what Marx meant when he said capitalism produces its own gravediggers. The Lu Jinguas of the world are nightmares to the garment bosses in New York City as well as the bureaucratic misleaders in Beijing.
The Stalinists in the Chinese Communist Party have a date with destiny. They are doomed to the same fate as their counterparts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Because of the lessons of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, China’s working people are in a stronger position to step forward and answer the question that was posed by the Beijing Spring: who should rule China?
The sharpening antagonisms and conflicts among the major imperialist powers will deepen inexorably toward another world war. But this is not inevitable. The working class will have a chance to prevent this catastrophe from happening. If Lu Jingua does not return to China to be part of the political revolution that will one day transpire there, she will be part of the working class struggle in the U.S. to stop World War III.
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Appendix
Speech to June 10, 1989, Memorial Vigil in San Francisco Civic Center:
“I want to express my admiration and respect for the brave and heroic Chinese people; I want to express my support for their struggle for democratic rights. And I wish to condemn the barbaric repression unleashed against them by those counterrevolutionary bureaucrats in the government who once again have blackened socialism in the eyes of working people all over the world.
“Deng Xiaoping is lying when he says the leaders of the pro-democracy movement were seeking to overthrow socialism in China and establish a capitalist republic. I was in Tiananmen Square from May 27th until June 5th, and talked to many dozens of students and workers, and not one of them talked about overthrowing the Party or restoring capitalism. Many were proud of socialism’s accomplishments and had many relatives in the Party. They did want to radically reform the Communist Party, to make it work better, and be more responsive to the people. The only counterrevolutionaries in Beijing are in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, who murdered their own workers and students in the streets in order to protect their privileges.
“I want so say something about President Bush’s reaction to the massacre in Beijing. He said he wanted to “wait and see if there’s an escalation of the violence,” before imposing any sanctions against China. ‘Wait and see?’ How many more thousands of people have to die for Bush? Apparently the sight of thousands of dead students and workers doesn’t really bother Bush that much, given his lukewarm response to the killings in Beijing. All he cares about is stability.
“Bush says he doesn’t like sanctions because of his concern for the Chinese people? Now I’m opposed to sanctions too; they would hurt the people of China. But I can’t help but notice that Bush is extremely selective about whom he’s concerned about. Where was Bush’s concern for the Nicaraguan people when he supported sanctions against them? You can say what they want about the Sandinistas, but they never butchered thousands of their citizens in the streets of Managua.
“And the U.S. government is in no position to lecture anyone about human rights, given its record from El Salvador to Nicaragua to Palestine to Vietnam to Korea! I told everyone I spoke to in Beijing that they have no friends in Washington because the American government doesn’t give a damn about them or their fight for democratic rights; that their real allies in the world are the working people and all the oppressed fighting against exploitation and injustice.
“We will hear from the Chinese working people again. I am convinced that there will come a day when the workers, farmers and students will organize and fight for genuine socialist democracy and kick out the counterrevolutionary fakers masquerading as communists. And I am convinced that one day the Chinese working class will join hands with the workes in the United States, Cuba, France, England and the rest of the world and fight to rid the earth of all forms of violence, tyranny, oppression and exploitation. Thank you.”
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