Re: [Marxism] Class consciousness of Chinese Students and intellectuals

[Josh Saxe <joshsaxe@xxxxxxxxx>]

" The students were demanding more of the policies of
Xiaoping, and were thus demanding more impoverishment for the Chinese
workers, and later peasants. That the workers were able to come out in
solidarity with for such undeserving specimens shows the exemplary
solidarity of Chinese workers. It moreover shows that Marxists have to
target for engagement exclusively the workers and peasants, and should not
waste their limited resources and energy on Chinese students and
intellectuals, as almost any efforts would prove completely futile and
would be lost on these wannabe capitalists."

I think the Chinese question is going to be a big stumbling block for
the 21st century left.  I think this comrade's analysis demonstrates
that.  I have very limited knowledge of the Chinese left and recent
Chinese history but my perception hasn't been that the Chinese workers
came out to support the students simply because of a grudging sense of
"solidarity" - they too supported the sentiment towards democratic
reforms, as they should have!  In some ways I imagine the situation in
China will be similar to that of Russia in the late 19th century up to
1917, in which the demands of a movement for bourgeois-democracy get
tangled up with much more radical aspirations of the
left-intelligentsia and the lower rungs of the society.  You could
have made all the same complaints against Russian or Eastern European
students before World War I that you do against the Chinese students. 
That didn't mean a wing of them didn't have a central role to play in
making socialist revolutions in Hungary, Russia, the Ukraine, etc.

About the Chinese professors who teach other philosophies instead of
Marxism, and students who hate studying the official "Marxism" - there
is a sense in which we should say more power to them, for rebelling
against the official ideology.  I can only imagine the Chinese
movement might go through a period in which many of its militants
reject Marxism, but we have to understand how that is rooted in the
history of the country.  Also we may see a left develop in religious
sects, in non state affiliated liberal trade unions, whatever else,
which we should be sensitive to.  It may be that the next big upsurge
or working class offensive in former "communist" countries will come
under a leadership that is anti-Marxist, "Marxism" being the official
bland Soviet Marxist dogma.

I wonder how applicable the concept of permanent revolution is to
contemporary China.  I don't agree with the idea that China was ever a
"workers state".  I think that's a ridiculous category to apply to
China 1949-present.  I think the country has been under the rule of a
kind of modernizing nationalist bureaucracy that used communism as its
legimating ideology but essentially saw its goal as being able to
compete effectively in the bourgeois international states system. The
state elite balanced between the Chinese intelligentsia (which it
largely created out of the peasant class), workers and peasants, and
the _international system of bourgeois states_, which forced upon it
the main imperatives of social development.

If the Chinese bureaucracy succeeds in dragging its society into the
core of the world economy it will seek to hold on to its power and
privileges - it will also have generated a gigantic proletariat, a
proletarianized peasantry, a mass of information workers and low level
students, etc, all of which will rightly want to see bourgeois
democracy - this might be the key demand of a revolutionary movement
in China.  It might initially come under the leadership of bourgeois
sectors like students, information workers, intellectuals,
businesspeople, but be supported by the mass of working people - as
was the case in many late bourgeois revolutionary movements, and as
was the case in Tianamen square.  A wing of this movement in China
might be won to the "permanent revolution" position.  If this is the
trajectory it would be quite counterproductive to write off students
who put themselves at the mercy of tanks and machine-guns as "wannabe
capitalists."  Even if we write off the "two stage" theory there is a
natural impulse towards the two stage concept under states that are
considered "anti democracies" by their populations (occupied
Palestine, the old South Africa, Somoza's Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc,
etc) - recognizing that would make us more sensitive to the democratic
student movement in places like Iran and China.
Josh

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