90 years of delusion

With more than 80 million members, the Chinese Communist Party is the world’s largest political organisation. It is perhaps better described as the world’s largest chamber of commerce. The ability to reinvent itself and adapt to changing times has ensured the party’s survival.

Fewer than 9 per cent of its members are classified as “workers” while more than 70 per cent are recruited from the ranks of government officials, businessmen, professionals, college graduates and the military. In China, the Communist party maintains a monopoly of power and controls much of the economic activity. Corruption thrives in areas under state control, such as land sales and infrastructure. In Richard McGregor’s account of China’s political rulers, The Party, public officials are described as constituting a “new black-collar class”, who abuse their positions to accumulate vast fortunes. The richest 20 per cent of the population enjoys three-quarters of this hidden income, according to Professor Wang Xiaolu for Credit Suisse. Professor Victor Shih of North Western University estimates that the top 1 per cent of households own some 30-50 per cent of bank deposits

“The fact is that many people today foster hatred for government officials and hatred for the rich.” says Yang Jisheng, a former government journalist and author of Tombstone, an investigation into the Great Leap Forward of 1958 in which as many as 45 million people died of starvation.

90 years ago this month 13 members of the CCP held its first national congress. Five quit the party within a year or two later, four had been killed or died within a decade or so and one expelled for being a Trotskyist. Only Mao and one other attendee were still alive at the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Looking at China today is very much like looking back in time. The capitalism currently flourishing there is pretty much indistinguishable from the capitalism of Victorian England that Marx and Engels spent so much of their lives analysing. China’s period of state-led primitive accumulation and capitalist industrial development began under Mao. However, like all capitalist development, sooner or later it ran into barriers to its further expansion. It needed, in particular, to increase labour productivity, reform and improve the productivity of agriculture, and attract foreign capital thus economic reform under Deng Xiaoping in the 80s. This created a free labour force – free in the double sense of free to choose an employer, and free from any entitlements to the means of production, free to starve or live in grinding poverty. Further reforms in the 90s sought to integrate Chinese capitalism into the world market, opening China, and particularly its vast reserves of cheap labour-power, to exploitation by foreign capital.

Strikes are illegal. But, as we know, they, as well as riots and even mass revolts, have occurred. The class struggle is alive and well! But meanwhile, the rich capitalists and factory managers of whom many are or were Communist Party functionaries prevail.

Much taken from here