China and the Left
Lachlan, Christina Veselovskiy, Barry York
Platypus Review 190 | October 2026
On September 25, 2025, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion at Australian National University with panelists Barry York (C21st Left blog),[1] Lachlan (Communist Party of Australia),[2] and Christina Veselovskiy (Revolutionary Communist Organization – Applicant Member).[3] Platypus member Conaugh Dwyer moderated the panel. An edited transcript follows.[4]
Introduction
What would it mean to call China communist? Is it? Is it appropriate to say that Maoism overcame Stalinism? Is China Maoist today? Did Deng Xiaoping betray the Chinese Revolution? If so, how? What lessons should we draw from the seventy-five-years' legacy of the Chinese Revolution, and from a century of Marxism in China? Why, if at all, are such lessons relevant for the Left today?
Opening Remarks
Barry York: I'd like to begin by sharing an anecdote from a trip to China. I was part of an Australian delegation of nineteen people in 1971. At the meeting with the party cadres, it was me who asked one of them. “Now, you say you're threatened by U.S. imperialism in the Pacific, and to the north by Soviet social imperialism. So why is it that China has no significant navy?” The cadre grinned broadly and he replied, “well, China is a socialist country, not an imperialist one. The imperialists require big navies. We don't. We rely on the people, the People's Liberation Army, for our national defense.”
China's navy at that time was what they call a brown water navy: coastal patrol vessels, frigates, diesel powered submarines, small torpedo boats. Today, under capitalism with Chinese characteristics, China has the world's largest blue water navy: aircraft carriers, advanced destroyers, nuclear subs. The regime patrols the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and it has an overseas base in East Africa and dual-purpose port facilities that can function as a base.
This is just one important example of how China has changed since the Maoist socialist period and it is indicative of China as an expansionist power, not a socialist one. I recommend to The History and Logic of Revolution and Restoration (2016-2019)[5] by Chinese Marxists. It's a great analysis on the processes through which capitalism was restored and imperialism emerged.
I was radicalized in the late 1960s. In the great year of the Left in 1968, I was seventeen. The Paris uprisings in May that year were inspirational, but we also knew about the Cultural Revolution in China. It was all meat on the same bone, to quote Chuck Berry. In Australia, the main issue was the American war against Vietnam and conscription for that war. Now the Prime Minister at the time, John Gorton,[6] he warned the protesters: we will tolerate dissent so long as it remains ineffective. He was just echoing the representatives of ruling classes through history with that statement. Rebellion has always been seen as intolerable unless it is inconsequential, with the exception of Chairman Mao. He was the only leader of world significance to overturn that and to declare to his own people "it is right to rebel.”[7] Now I ask you, how could a young migrant working-class boy from Brunswick who wanted to change the world not be inspired by that? That spirit was what led me in that direction of Maoism, which I later studied more seriously.
I really like the Platypus Society's motto, “The Left is dead, long live the Left.” The first part is manifestly correct. What passes for the Left today tends to be a dogmatic knee-jerk anti-Americanism that results in people who say they're Left-wing taking the sides of fascists, including Putin and Xi Jinping. This places the “Left” against the people in places like Russia, Ukraine, China, and Iran, who are heroically fighting neo-tsarism, social fascism, and clericalist dictators. To borrow from Mao, it's Left in form, Right in essence. So, there's a first lesson about the relevance of Maoism to today; in order to build a genuine Left, one that supports democratic movements, sides with the oppressed people, and supports material progress, we have to first identify and repudiate its opposite, the phony Left, the pseudo-Left.
Another lesson from the relevance of Maoism is its opposition to dogmatism. Mao constantly warned against formulaic thinking, taking ready-made conclusions and mechanically applying them without relating them to the real conditions. He contrasted it with the living dialectical approach where you start from investigation. You test ideas in practice and only then develop a line that is consistent with the real world. Today's formulaic thinking is based on the idea that U.S. imperialism is the number one enemy of the world. That was our slogan back in the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPAML)[8] in the 60s and 70s, “The Great Satan.” The various pseudo-Left sects have a position on everything instantaneously. You might have noticed that because they just have that formula, all they have to do is work out, “where does America stand?” The rest is automatic, but when this kind of anti-imperialism puts somebody on the side of fascist regimes and clericalist dictators, it's not worth having.
Mao recognized the need for continuing revolution after the people have taken power, because once the revolution happens and people take power, society is the same as it was the day before. You need a continuing struggle, especially against those who wanted to steer China towards capitalism, and they were the blue water naval communists. They were in the Communist Party. They won out as Mao warned that they could and in 1977 to 1980 there was a coup.[9] Hundreds were executed, thousands were jailed and disappeared. Real communists.
My analysis is that today China is really ruled by a nationalist regime, it ticks the boxes for the definition of fascism in many ways. Last year you might recall that Donald Trump called Xi Jinping brilliant. Why did he say that? He said, “President Xi is brilliant because he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.”[10] The evidence for Xi Jinping's iron fist is overwhelming, be it the regime's suppression of workers who go on strike or the great firewall of internet censorship, where two key terms that are censored and picked up are Tiananmen Square and the Cultural Revolution. There's also the Orwellian utilization of facial recognition technology to control the people, and in some parts of China they are still experimenting with social credit systems, how is that not fascism?
There's the suppression of cultural rights of minorities and the persecution of Maoists. In 1982 there were constitutional amendments by Deng Xiaoping and one of the things that happened there was that the constitutional reform overturned virtually all of the communist achievements that preceded it, including the right to strike as a constitutional guarantee. No surprise with that.
I could go on and talk about how we met Revolutionary Committee members and what the Revolutionary Committees were. They were part of what were called the “four big democracies” in the Cultural Revolution. These empowered people at the grassroots level and established the authority of the Communist Party bureaucrats and elites, the “little emperors” as Mao called them. They exercised political power, oversaw production, promoted debate, and exposed reactionaries. These were revolutionary committees in villages, in schools, in industry, and they were a foundation of the new democracy. In 1982, with the rise of Deng Xiaoping after the coup, they were abolished and a top-down institutional structure was imposed.
When we were in China, we saw big character posters. They were part of the four big democracies. These, in 1971, were like the internet or social media today for poor people — China was still pretty poor. Anyone could get a bit of paper, and write or draw on it, criticizing the authorities and the bureaucrats. We went to a school where teachers and students had these big character posters everywhere, and they were saying the headmaster wanted exams, and they said “no, we don't want those kinds of exams.” They were everywhere. It was fantastic, a real furthering of revolutionary spirit. Can you believe that in 1982, under the Deng Xiaoping constitutional changes, big character posters were outlawed? You weren’t allowed to do that anymore. Bear in mind that after, in 1982 and the later years, the global capitalist media regarded Deng Xiaoping as “the greatest little man in the world.” And you can see why.
Lachlan: To preface my statement, I will make clear the position of me and my party (Communist Party of Australia). One: China is a socialist democratic country guided by Marxism. Two: that Deng and the reforms associated with him were not unique to Marxism, they were not a break from Marxism, and they certainly were not a betrayal of the socialist project. Three: That China and the CPC (Communist Party of China) should be a source for inspiration and a subject of study for Leftists in Australia.
I'll begin with a quote from Karl Marx in his text The German Ideology (1845–46), “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence”.[11] Marxism is a science, not a program from which we establish our post-capitalist utopia. Reality cannot adjust itself to our ideals, however noble they may be. Rather, communism is the movement that aims to give the proletariat conscious and democratic control over the direction of society. How exactly a society will develop socialism is not something we can predict.
The proletariat, liberated and in control of the levers of power, will gradually shed the fetters to social progression. No party or individual can impose onto the proletariat what it must discard or what it must desire. In addition, the utopian abundance that many socialists wish to attain can only be delivered in proportion to the existing productive capability of that society.
During the Cultural Revolution in China, there was an illusion of accelerating economic development through the calls for mass mobilization and mass enthusiasm. This approach failed. It contrasted from the earlier practice of the CPC to allow different forms of ownership and the use of material incentives. In a 1957 speech by Mao, he addressed the policy of paying interest to the capitalists, saying, “at this small cost, we are buying over this class. By buying over this class, we have deprived them of their political capital and kept their mouths shut. Thus, political capital will not be in their hands, but in ours”.[12]
However, The Cultural Revolution put a temporary halt to this form of socialist development. It led to a premature sense of entitlement to welfare that Chinese society couldn't yet materially provide for itself. Workers came in hours late, were absent and lacked commitment. By this reduction in working hours and effort, the work required to reproduce society would be increasingly heaped onto a shrinking section of the working class who would have to work harder to provide for the welfare of the other section. It takes economic development to be able to provide real increases in quality of life. Until then, we can't expect one section of our class to work while the other takes it easy.
What it took to return China to a path of development was to introduce material incentives and develop the productive forces. With the condition, however, that the commanding heights of the economy remained publicly owned. Now, in 2025, China has developed an economy that is able to provide a moderately prosperous society that the CPC set as an aim in the National Congress in 2012.[13]
Now, to make sense of China's governance and foreign policy, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of the structure of world trade and finance. What must be understood is that the global economic system is not a neutral arena. The Western world and the institutions it created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 designed the world economy to benefit a few nations at the expense of many. The Global South manufactures the goods, mines the resources, and farms the food for the citizens of the Global North to consume, yet they are stuck in poverty while the West enjoys a quality of life that it simply couldn't support without the exploitation of poor nations. This is due to the use of the dollar as the world reserve currency and the hundreds of military bases littered around the world. Those two things are also dependent on each other. The world is required to use the U.S. dollar in international trade by the threat of military intervention, and the costs of this huge military presence is made possible by the high demand of U.S. dollars.
But why is this relevant to China? One: because part of the project of China's foreign policy has been to organize the Global South to escape this cycle of exploitation. Two, to establish a new standard for international diplomacy based on non-intervention. The CPC knows that exporting revolution is a failed policy. The result of making parties financially reliant on a foreign nation is that the revolutionary theory of said parties too often becomes an adoption of the theory from the sponsoring nation. This was common of communist parties supported by the Soviet Union and led to the failure and splitting of many parties.
As we can witness from many instances in history, if a country in Africa or South America develops the slightest hint of independence, it is promptly subject to a coup and sanctioned. For nascent socialist nations this means the loss of public confidence in the Marxist approach to providing a better life. The only way a poor nation can remain socialist or independent is typically to become hyper militarist to defend against Western attacks. Or the socialist nation could open its doors to capital and thus remove that main antagonism. For China, allowing Western capital into its country defanged the imperialist nations. They could lift the boot of imperialism off their neck ever so slightly as Jiang Zemin said, “they could hide their strength and bide time.”[14] With the new capital entering the country, China was able to, with their successive five-year plans, make slow but concrete gains and change their economy from one based on cheap manufacturing to one based on groundbreaking technology and automation, something Western economists didn't think was possible.
China, with its state-directed market economy, was able to break through the barriers created by the West that keep poor nations in perpetual servitude. With this success, the CPC began building the institutions and infrastructure that will allow exploited nations to also break these barriers. Through BRICS[15] and the SCO[16], exploited nations are able to reduce their reliance on the West and find much needed funding for vital infrastructure. It is this attack on imperialism that is causing a crisis in the West. The Empire, with the USA at its head, has overextended itself. Vassal states like Australia are being forced to pay levies in order to save the mothership. Or to put it another way, imperialism is coming home. It’s up to the working class of the West to decide whether it wishes to go down with the sinking ship or to build bridges with the Global South.
This is what we in the CPA are actively doing. Every year members of our party go to Cuba to learn, work, and have fun. Just last week, our President met with members of the Vietnamese Central Committee where it was agreed we would cooperate on information sharing, theoretical exchanges; and enhanced collaboration in communications, publishing, and public mobilization. Of course, we share consistent dialogue with our fraternal party, the CPC. To conclude, China is interested in helping countries develop and is committed to the communist movement. In its non-interventionist spirit, we cannot expect it to save us from our vicious capitalists. It is up to us to create the institutions that allow the working class here to be less reliant on the bourgeoisie.
Christina Veselovskiy: 15 minutes of speaking here tonight would hardly do justice to the task of understanding the most important political entity of the last 50 years, and indeed the next 100. I want to be upfront about what I believe, which is that I do not think the real existing ideology of the Communist Party of China offers any concrete lessons to our communist project in the 21st century. We can only discuss China in relation to its key role within the planetary form of capitalism that confronts us in the 21st century, and I thus want to structure my comments in two parts.
I'll first offer a concise history of where and when I believe the Chinese revolution made significant steps towards integration into the capitalist world system. I argue that this history was, if not inevitable, a primary outcome of the historically misguided fusion of party and state. Secondly, I would like to outline the planetary condition that we, as communists, are confronting. One which recognizes China as part of a planetary capitalist system. We can only overcome such a system by banning the 20th century dogmas of national liberation, merging party and state, and advocating for a socialist revolution in stages.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution, like all historic revolutions, was highly uneven and had to respond to a wide array of spontaneous desires, dreams, and visions across the population and indeed across the world. It is an oversimplification to say that the CCP was meant to emerge solely because of a crisis of national sovereignty and imperialist aggression. The actual phenomenon penetrated much deeper into Chinese society.
The decline of the Qing also meant the destruction of the imperial symbolic order, which, for all its restricted, aristocratic, and patriarchal nature, served as the common ground for nascent class struggle in the Chinese village. During the war, Mao Zedong thought, Mao Zedong Si Xiang (Maoism in Mandarin), emerged as the ultimate solution to fill this gap in China's agrarian north, where local resistance to state authority had a long tradition, unlike in the more consolidated and state-centric south.
Unsurprisingly, nothing went quite so perfectly as planned, since the fragmented structure inherited by the communists in 1949 was unsuitable for such a smooth transition. China lacked a unified economy. Its landscape featured tiny urban pockets amid vast rural areas. Urban institutions and the industrial environments were unfamiliar to the largely rural cadres who had spent so many years in hiding. The communists inherited a primary industrial sector from the Japanese colony state of Manchukuo; a territory designed around the violent processing and exploitation of Chinese laborers subject to conditions of bare life.
Using these technologies, the CCP began to shape its understanding of the universal and the particular through the lens of a state, positioning itself as the sole mediator between these two poles and as the sole driver of social and productive liberation. These visions greatly overlook the reliance of China's emerging industrial model on grain supplies from the countryside. When the Great Leap Forward started in 1957, decades of mass mobilization rhetoric couldn't prevent the collapse of this relationship. The post-Leap retrenchment marks the moment when the inequalities underpinning capitalist enclosure first took place, as legal and economic conditions began to solidify the infamous hukou system[17] into place. In addition, new social attitudes towards commodity production began to replace the older displays of Stalinist productive power.
The Mao books, Mao literature, Mao caps, and other such objects exported worldwide in 1968 should be seen for what they were, the first wave of Chinese commodities greeting the world of global communication and exchange. These emerging consumer objects, which Cultural Revolution propaganda called newborn socialist things, quickly became the site for reintroducing the commodity form into China during the reform years.
Comrades must discard the fetishistic trappings of the party state, and to understand that our present conditions all point to the fundamentally bourgeois, exclusionist, neocolonial, and patriarchal character of the system of nation-states both China and Australia inhabit.
The core idea of a lot of these Left sectarian views in the 21st century is to demand that comrades cease questioning history. The history they suggest, presents that at some stage all communists have faced a series of natural institutions that need to be accepted and worked around: the state, the family, the nation, and the market. They argue that rather than criticizing the bourgeois nature of this line of reasoning, we should instead revise Marx himself to suit the axiomatic logic of real existing socialism. When we stop asking questions, our comrades become little more than sports fans cheering on the Frankenstein-like collection of center-Right and Right-wing autocracies loosely gathered around China's arms-length diplomatic pacts, deluding ourselves that they ultimately aim to rival America as one united movement.
China itself is undergoing massive deindustrialization behind the shimmer of high-tech products. In 2025, what we once called the periphery of capitalist development is now its hinterland. Thanks to social media, nearly everyone in this room could probably also place the supposed neon utopias of Shanghai or Chongqing on a map. I'd hazard that very few here could locate cities like Shijiazhuang, Zhangzhou, or Anshan, where the belly of the carbon-intensive beast that is capital lies in the smog enveloping their populations. For all the tools that Marx gave us, we seldom see capital in such a visible form as in all this industrial smog. A Chinese labor organizer pointed out in 2014 that — if enclosure in England was a process whereby sheep devoured people as they were forced off the countryside and replaced by sheep enclosures — our modern-day counterpart in China's urban wastelands is a phenomenon where buildings devour people. Brutal land conflicts initiated by millions of precarious migrant laborers against party officials are part and parcel of the everyday running of the Chinese labor market.
Capitalism is not simply the force that undermines and subverts all the stable things that we hold dear. With its other hand, it fashions new social and geographic configurations that reinstate hierarchies, heighten inequalities, and further segment forms of human activity, all so that people must sell their labor to continue existing. Here, the distinction between public and private sectors is largely irrelevant when the lines between local, provincial, and party governments become blurred by the complex shareholding patterns of Chinese firms. We have in this system only one instance of the territorial structures that make capitalism possible on a global scale. The neocolonial condition is primarily a contradiction. We must simultaneously accept the never-ending desire to integrate ever more territory into a universal plane of exchange on the market, while keeping the subaltern other, the international proletariat, at a safe distance by erecting national and racial boundaries around their existence.
As a microcosmic example of resisting this neocolonial bind, the fall of apartheid in South Africa offers an important lesson. The end of white rule did not happen because the black population sought to establish independent socialist republics in the Bantustans. They only succeeded by seizing control of the colonial state itself. A dictatorship of the proletariat in Australia, folded under the Chinese model and subject to the same form of party-state mediation, would be as deleterious to the goal of global socialism as a Bantustan solution to the question of apartheid, or a socialist Gaza solution to the question of Palestinian liberation.
The state ideology of the PRC embodies a wholly non-revolutionary offspring, one shaped by decades of party-state fetishism. This view of continuity over change neither elevates nor vilifies Mao, Deng, or Xi Jinping. The historical record on these figures is increasingly distant from the current struggles before us.
Responses
BY: Today what we heard from Lachlan, we hear all the time in the mainstream media. There's nothing new about bagging the Cultural Revolution. That’s because it was an actual empowerment of people that at the grassroots level resulted, not only in empowerment but in improvements in infrastructure, irrigation, healthcare, literacy, and education.
When the commune system was replaced with the private ownership system, a lot of that was lost. With the healthcare system, the commune system funded the barefoot doctors. I met some in China in 1971. They were funded to go out to be trained. They were peasants and farmers trained in basic community health care, vaccinations, and midwifery. That was one of the reasons why the great achievement in life expectancy was achieved in that period. It just went through the roof under the Mao era. But when the communes were abolished and they could no longer fund the barefoot doctors, the life expectancy started to decline because of infant mortality rates, and maternal mortality rates skyrocketed.
The other aspect that I'd like to deal with is how China is engaging in economic imperialism from a Leninist point of view. It's so easy to establish. It's sort of funny to hear somebody talking in the language of imperialism, like the old British imperialists and the Americans, that we're here to help people, they want our help, our motives are fine. When in fact with China it's the same thing of a competition for spheres of influence.
This is established quite clearly by the domination, like in the Congo, of cobalt where they control 70% of that. The merging of industrial capital and finance capital through the banks and the state-owned enterprises in China that invest in Africa. $200 billion in investments. The use of debt for leverage and exploitation. The exploitation of labor.
L: The Cultural Revolution empowered people to a premature sense of what is possible in their society. The material basis of that society could not provide for the conscious development that had occurred. You needed to return to a materialist point of view and focus on the productive forces that needed to be developed to provide a nicer life for the Chinese people.
Some of my biggest disagreements with Christina are fundamentally on the state. We have a different theory of state, I don't see the state as something that exists outside of a class conflict. I see it as a tool used by one class to oppress the other. Therefore, in the early stages of workers taking power, you need to use the state as a tool to have control over the bourgeois class. That is the core of our main disagreement.
CV: As Comrade Lachlan has said, we confront a system where genuine improvements in the quality of life have been seen in a generation, which is something quite rare in the present day. I do believe that that is fundamentally true, but one must recognize the structural inequalities that drive that system founded upon unequal flows of migrant labor from rural to urban areas, propagated by almost direct policies of exclusion and legal denial of household status within urban environments. Many of these contribute to precarious social living standards and precarious labor conditions where people are fed into factory complexes with scant attention to their own health.
I would point that in historical perspective what this would amount to would be to say that the Communist Party of China has accomplished the job of the bourgeoisie in a periphery area of the world that it would have not done so otherwise, especially not on so short a timetable. That is something to be celebrated as an achievement for the genuine progress of world history. However, I would not say that this is the final word in the matter and that as socialists in the 21st century we should move towards accommodating further demands.
BY: There’s a funny thing called the Gini coefficient, the measure of inequality. In the Mao period, the estimated Gini was low. Like with Russia after the revolution when they set up the Soviets, the workers not only had control of production at the factory level, they could also vote out their managers. The one thing that happened was the wage differentials between technicians and managers and the workers were shrunk greatly. The same thing was happening in China during the Cultural Revolution and the Mao period. The inequality was extremely low.
Gradually, under Deng and Xi, now you have the billionaires, and of course they're good billionaires, they couldn't possibly have got to be billionaires by exploiting anyone else. Excuse me, sarcasm. The Gini coefficient in China today has doubled. It's up there with America, and even Australia is less unequal now than China. I find it surprising that there's acknowledgement that there are billionaires who have influence, there are actually 80 of them in the National People's Congress, or Assembly, and that's like, oh, that's no problem there, they're still a Communist Party.
L: As a Maoist, I'm sure you'll agree with Mao again when he said “at this small cost we are buying over this class. By buying over this class, we have deprived them of their political capital and kept their mouths shut. Thus, political capital will be not in their hands but in ours.” This goes to inequality as well. Inequality was a known effect when Deng and the CPC enacted reforms. They knew the results of what markets would bring. They knew the contradictions and the problems that were caused, but it was a necessary measure to make in their times.
You talked about how you believe there might have been a quicker abundance for all in China if they didn't adopt the market system. In the two socialist states that haven't adopted a market system, they are still further behind in quality of life than China, Vietnam and Laos. Cuba and North Korea, while they're great socialist projects and I support them as well, have not created the same increase in production and standard of living as China.
BY: You're supporting capitalism. That's right, that boils down to that. You are supporting a market economy run by a communist party that is no longer communist, and then it's pretty obvious what you're saying.
Q&A
China has lifted over 800 million people, so up to a billion people, out of poverty. How did this happen, this thing of almost a billion people lifted out of poverty? Do you think this would have been possible without the Communist Party of China?
CV: It is not taken for granted that one party and one centralized model of state relations, no matter how influenced they are by the intricacies of the capitalist market, constitute the one development path forward.
When you have only one representative system for the energies and the revolutionary passions of so many people across that country who have lifted out of poverty, we tend to put so much burden and so much stress on one system that can so easily collapse into further entrenching commodity society. Because commodities, as evil as they are, still constitute the fastest and easiest way to skip all of the problems engendered by the genuine recalcitrance of geographies, of classes, of populations to development, because they offer us so much in exchange for so little.
I would say that if we want to move towards a commodity-less society, and if we want to move towards the goal that Marx and other thinkers like him in the years since have wanted for us, we need to look beyond having a simple one state, one party solution to things. When we take into account rural development and urban development, there is genuine room for democratic emancipation on so many different levels. I don't just mean a liberal democratic sense of giving people property rights and therefore voting rights. I mean in the sense of what Lachlan has said as well, which is that communism is the movement towards giving people as much democratic control over the context they live in as possible. You can only do that when you start to implement genuine deliberative measures that bypass what you see in the villages now and as I saw in the village, which is that all centralized decision-making is done by the approval of the party First Secretary, which exists in those villages. That is a recent development.
When Lachlan mentions that communism is the real movement that aims to abolish the present state of things, we mustn't simply recognize the unequal position and the unequal status of China's development model as just a given, as a necessity, as something to be lauded upon here from the West while we have our own troubles. It should be something that we should look forward to and consider ways around.
L: I wanted to actually address something really quickly on what Christina said. I don't, and the party does not want to adopt exactly what China has done. That is not the position of our party. We look at all socialist experiments, successes, failures, whatever, and try to learn from them and apply them to our conditions here. The Australian revolution that will inevitably come, I believe, will have its own flavor. It will have its own revolutionary theory, its own leaders and so on. I don't think it'll be anything like the Chinese revolution because the conditions are totally different. What a Western revolution looks like we don't really know, so it's uncharted territory. China does not want to export revolution as I said, that is not their policy.
BY: China's the most industrialized place on the earth. I hear Australians and Americans saying, the world is de-industrializing. They only see it from their point of view. The world has never been so industrialized.
What comes with it under capitalism, like in China? Sure, everyone can buy a TV, but you still get not just alienation, because you're not empowered, but you have a hundred thousand or so acts of civil disobedience each year. What happened under Xi Jinping? He stopped releasing the data, the statistics, on workers rising up. This is very common. There's great dissent in China because of the capitalist system. There was a strike that Maoists were involved in, a technology company, JASSIC Technology. All those workers wanted was to set up an independent trade union. Because like Germany and Italy under Mussolini, you could be in a union, but it was a state-run union. You could not have independent unions. That erupted and Maoist students from the universities went to the JASSIC plant to unite with the workers. We did that too in Melbourne with the Workers Student Alliance and workers would go on strike and we would go to support them. China isn't just now a modern economy. Like any capitalist economy, you have a massive working class who are discontented, who are pissed off and want more. They don't have the institutional structure to do anything about it. It's suppressed.
What is the state and its role in revolution, if there is any?
CV: I do agree that yes, the state is a reflection of class power in society, but we can't organize it along sort of strict homogenous definitions like you say, because power is so diffuse. Especially in the 21st century, as power has been so broken up towards different financial cliques and industrial consortiums who organize along geographic as much as they do political lines. You have to stress the material essence of these vectors that constitute a state.
What I define as the state here is the site of contest, absolutely, but it is not a site of contest for which we have one homogenous outside attempting to conquer, one exploiting homogenous inside. It is a diverse array of different institutions where people can start to reformulate the ways they associate governance with the improvements of their own material lives and the ways they associate governance with their own rights and freedoms. I genuinely believe that in conflict with the state, especially in the way that it confronts us in vastly more complex and sublimely more perverse ways than it confronted the Bolsheviks or the Chinese communists in the 20th century, that we genuinely have to consider that so many fractions of capital which make up this state organize on transnational lines. This only further stresses the need that a revolution in this country cannot proceed without reference to a revolutionary upswing across the globe.
Should we conceptualize the reform and opening up period of China following the Sino-Soviet split as an ideological rejection of socialism or as kind of a forced retreat due to geopolitical conditions?
BY: China under Mao pushed ahead with seeking diplomatic relations and connections with the rest of the world. It wasn't only in this period of so-called openness. In 1972, Nixon went and recognized China as the one true China. Under Mao, they weren't isolationists in any way. They wanted good relations and trade and so on with the rest of the world. Regarding the capitalist roaders[18], they were ideologically motivated and as Mao said, dialectic boils down to one thing and that is that one divides into two and that in the party you had two different roads, and one won out and it hasn't been pretty. Do you know about China's support for the ethno-nationalist regime in Myanmar? Everyone know about that? That's socialist, apparently. They've developed generosity, imperial benevolence. They've helped the Myanmar junta develop a deep-sea port, which of course comes in handy for China. Chinese security firms support the junta forces, including drone operations. China is the main arms supplier to the junta. We're talking jets and drones. Socialists support the people struggling against the junta.
L: China also trades with the new Taliban government in Afghanistan. This is the policy of non-intervention, the policy of non-interference in other countries' affairs. You're adopting the American policy that the West can dictate what happens in another country. Whereas China is operating on the stance that the people of Myanmar, in their struggle, will take over their own country. China does not need to dictate the affairs of another country elsewhere.
BY: It's not trade, it's military aid. Jets and drones. Come on, that's not trade. What are you talking about?
Barry, how do you explain the history of regime change, such as the number of times the U.S. has aggressively overthrown governments, killed leaders of countries. Why would you downplay the violence of US imperialism? It's very suspicious to me that you want to downplay the role of US imperialism. It's very suspicious.
BY: Maybe I'm a CIA agent. Look, it isn't suspicious at all, because what I said was when people dogmatically oppose American imperialism automatically without the investigation, and when that leads them to a situation where they support fascist dictators and theocratic rulers. An old comrade of mine on Facebook put up a meme a few years back when the women of Iran rose up. You know, every so often there are these mass uprisings. What courage, what brave women. This is a regime that massacred the communists, by the way. The regime then needs to be overthrown, full stop.
So, U.S. imperialism should overthrow another regime? Sometimes U.S. imperialism is good?
BY: When Allende was overthrown, I was on all the demos. Vietnam — America was obviously wrong in Vietnam. Let us not end up in a situation where we end up on the side of people like Putin and the Ayatollah because they're anti-American. That's my point. You really misrepresented me badly.
I would like to ask the panelists what they think the role and the significance of revolutionary leadership is after Mao. What revolutionary leadership should we look to in China? If you would like, you can expand the role of the revolutionary leadership to China now and even Australia.
L: The way I see it is the danger with being an independent thinker on the Left is that you disconnect yourself from a collective decision-making process which is really strong in developing revolutionary theory. By being an independent thinker, you think that you are the thought of the Left. Being part of a party means you're never going to agree with everything the party decides or with everyone in the party, but it's about collectivizing our decision making. That's an important part. In that collectivization of that decision making, you create very strong leaders who are committed to the collective as they are bound by the directives of the collective.
BY: There are many communists still in China, the Mao period is still within living memory, and the young Marxists who took great risk in publishing The History and Logic of Revolution and Restoration, they are the future in China. As for party building, I mean I know it's a bit pretentious, independent thinker of the Left, but I just don't have a party. I have to be honest. I have comrades here in Melbourne who think like me or I think like them. We talk occasionally. I was in the Communist Party of Australia, Marxist-Leninist, the only true party for 10 years in the 70s.
Party building is bullshit, frankly, in Australia. We are nowhere near the conditions that make it sensible to try and build a communist party in this country. All we can do is start at the grassroots and call out the pseudo-Left and from that build a movement, a Left movement based on three components. Solidarity with oppressed people everywhere against the oppressors; support for struggles for democracy, bourgeois democracy if you will, because that's what the material conditions reveal; and also support for progress, which of course includes the notion that the communists borrowed from the suffragettes, which is abundance for all. That is a noble objective in my opinion. They're the three pillars of how the foundations for building a genuine Left movement. A party, it's crazy. You'll just end up with little sects who think they were just interested in each other and talk to each other.
CV: After 1969, when the Cultural Revolution's genuine revolutionary energies were clamped down upon by the alliance of the Party and the PLA, we entered a state in which so many of these leadership struggles come to us as kind of theatrical, and they don't actually represent genuine material conflicts within Chinese society. In many cases, the gap between Deng Xiaoping and his cronies and the Gang of Four[19] has been historically over-exaggerated — that these ideological conflicts reflect something far deeper within the structures of Chinese power. The Chinese state and the Communist Party is fundamentally organized along two key tracks: people who rose up through the revolutionary process and some genuine cadres who come from rural and provincial experiences, and then the overwhelming majority of them consist of what we would call princelings, sons of former revolutionaries who have been fed and clothed and bathed by subordinates for pretty much all of their lives. They can only draw upon the pedigree of their forefathers, an emphasis on their forefathers, for their track record and for any hope of advancing higher up in Chinese society. We need to understand material conditions that drive what we presently see, and we find in liberal democracy men of these same kinds of showmanship actions.
L: If the CPC is so corrupted, it is the most successful corrupt regime in the world in delivering for the people and what the people want. The infrastructure, the quality of life, etc. The party is made up of 100 million people. That's a lot of people that contribute and are required to contribute to the party and the party policy. I just simply disagree with that analysis. With accepting that, of course, there are some benefits and corruption that exists, of course, the party agrees that exists. That's why one of the major policies is anti-corruption, which we see day in, day out, someone being tried for corruption.
Would you admit China could be better if we have a so-called true Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in power?
BY: Well socialism is superior to capitalism, and we weren't able to see that play out because the people who wanted capitalism won out. They staged a coup, a vicious coup, in 1976 to 1980. Then in 1989 we know what happened there and of course I'm told — I hope Lachlan doesn't see it this way — foreign agents created the Tiananmen Square Uprising. The state had no choice but to massacre people, including those who were singing “The Internationale”, run the tanks over them. Who was in charge? Deng Xiaoping, in charge of the army that made the decision to go in hard. I'm still told to this day by old comrades who have lost the plot, in my opinion, “Oh, no, they had no choice. It was terrible, but America was behind it. There were foreign agitators.”
There weren’t enough material conditions to cause that in the form of corruption in the senior levels of the Communist Party. It was an anti-corruption, pro-democracy movement, essentially. The Left had to be on their side. Forget this stuff about U.S. imperialism was behind it. No. There was a legitimate cause for that uprising.
Barry, I appreciated and agreed with everything you said about the kind of relationship between China and these various, what are often accused of being CIA backed, color revolutions. But how do you square your opposition to this kind of campist “anti-imperalism” with your absolute support for Ukraine, in the context of, for example, Ukraine conscripting striking workers, banning strikes, selling off government assets to American investors, the Azov Battalion, etc.
BY: Well for one thing regarding the extreme right or fascist element in Ukraine in the last Ukrainian election, that the right sector was a coalition of all the far-right marginal extreme neo-fascist type people and the Svoboda party which is the other main right-wing party. They got 4% of the vote. The people aren't with those. It's a democratic struggle. It's not just a national struggle.
Might I remind everybody that in 1945 when the United Nations was set up, Stalin was head of the Soviet Union. He supported Ukraine having independent representation as a nation in the United Nations. Now we have somebody who ticks a lot of the boxes of a Nazi, including the ethno-nationalist thing, Putin. Putin's saying, “no, it's not even a war. How can it be a war when it's part of Russia?” I'm with the people who are fighting that. Since the Maidan uprising of 2014,[20] we've seen that this is a democratic struggle. It isn't just a nationalist one.
CV: Whether it was a color revolution or the spontaneous uproar of the masses, I would argue that it has a dual character, and that was that when it started as a student protest it was mainly because they believed in this high idealist notion that Chinese politics were this free and open contest and struggle between ideologically opposed camps. The students were protesting because they wanted Zhao Ziyang[21] to essentially be released from bondage within self-imposed exile in Beijing. They wanted him to restore all these great reforms, because it strengthened their class position as students, as bourgeois sons and daughters of China's most affluent.
It was only then when the workers of Beijing — who had suffered from the removal of their danhui systems, which were their work groups which provided them with housing and with food which had been destroyed during the reform and opening up era — finally started to mobilize in response to this, that was when essentially everything had already been concluded. The army was going to be sent in and the bulk of the casualties upon that uprising were of those workers who corresponded to a genuine class position in the same way the students did. But because the students had so much leeway in the way they live their lives, they could treat this as some idealist struggle for some higher cause. For workers in Beijing and workers across China, of which there are 240 million of them which live in a precarious legal situation which denies them full benefits of employment, this was one of the key drivers behind genuine unrest during that period.
It's a bit farcical to say that regardless of all these different splits within this movement, that it was all just one big homogenous block of misguided idealists or CIA-funded counter-revolutionaries. We have to understand that in the 21st century especially, and as much as it was then, that we confront revolution as a diverse arrangement of struggles from people with different material backgrounds who correspond to different ideological tendencies. The point is not to impose one form on them. It is to give them the freedom of expression to experiment with alternate methods of how we could govern our lives. It is not simply by imposing one form.
I have emphasized continuity between the Mao and Deng eras for a reason. It is to point out the fact that we get so caught up in trying to define terms so much and define eras and paint villains and heroes. We need to understand that this does not necessarily map on to our current struggle today. Our current struggle today is an international one and it is only through global revolution that we can establish the basic minimum of what we could call a communist society. Which is, to be very brief about it: a planetary form of government operating on principles of non-domination, mutual determination, and free association, which harnesses the technological productive and human factors towards not just furthering economic development, but also genuinely repairing our relationship to the ecology of the world.
L: It's very dangerous to think that U.S. imperialism is nuanced. U.S. imperialism is the dominating force across the world. U.S. imperialism has control of the world with its many different facets, whether it's the military, the media, or the U.S. dollar. This is the first form of exploitation that needs to break down.
Perhaps Barry could tell us what he thinks the position is of the people in the Donbas, that is to say the Donetsk People's Republic, who back in 2015 were actually restrained by Putin when they held a referendum to assert their independence. That led to an attack from Ukraine which led then to the Minsk Accords.[22] I'd like to hear what you would say about the genuineness of that popular movement. Also, do you think that the Right has colonized significant sectors of the state apparatus of Ukraine to the point that they could actually threaten Zelensky?
BY: People lived in peace and harmony in the Donbas and those areas for a long, long time. Russian ultra-nationalists and militia went in to stir trouble. The Ukrainian people voted overwhelmingly in the referendum that they wanted to be part of the EU.
They didn't actually vote.
BY: Well, OK, the majority voted and that became government policy and Putin cannot afford to have a bourgeois democracy next door to him because he knows that when it works the implications for him are that more and more Russian people will rise up against his own dictatorship or autocracy. You can call it nonsense, but they're laying down their lives, and up to a million Russians have been sacrificed for no good reason.
Those figures of Russian casualties are quite incorrect.
BY: Okay, 500,000.
Barry, I want to know how the many ideas of the Western revolution look at the absolutely brutal, exploitative, colonial past of many of these high-income countries. Do the ideas of the Western revolution look at what a revolution would look like within the bounds of a nation-state?
BY: I'm a bit old school. I mean, one of the reasons I was never attracted to Trotskyism back in the day was I found the notion that you can't have socialism in one country quite absurd. I couldn't see how you could have this coordinated uprising of the workers in all the countries roughly at the same time, adjust your watches for different time zones and all that. It was nonsense to me. So, I do believe that you can. Probability is that socialism will come about within the framework of a nation-state. I don't know if that answers your point. Am I missing some of the depth of what you were asking?
It partly does. My question alluded to the fact that the exploitation that happened in the colonial parts of many of these high-income countries, and the material conditions that they enjoy today are partly because of or because of the colonial past. So how does the Western revolution look towards any reparations towards it within the bounds of a nation-state?
BY: Yeah, I want to think about that one. I don't have the ready-made answer. I recall that Karl Marx, in his writings on India, he pointed to the exploitation and so on, but he also had a dialectical approach which saw that British imperialism was necessary for India to overcome a lot of the traditional past. It's in his 1853 essay on India.[23] This is something that a lot of academic types spend a lot of time trying to explain and excuse but it's entirely consistent with the Marxist idea that progress is universal and that a lot of the traditions just because they're happening in subjugated countries doesn't mean they're good for the people. So, there is that complexity to your question that, for example, India today without British imperialism, what would it be? What are the positives of the British legacy in India? Are there any? I would think there are. Economic development, overthrowing the rule of the elders, modern democracy, multi-party competitive votes, a free press, et cetera. It's almost like Monty Python. So, yeah, the colonial past is really in the past, by and large.
L: That's where I totally disagree.
Concluding Thoughts
CV: I don't think it's an idealist fallacy to say that we need to understand that no one form of pursuing revolution is the natural or the right way to do it, because when you confront the logic of a party state which says that everything the party must do in some ways it almost creates a kind of political surplus for itself from the desires of ordinary people for revolution and change in their life and I find that to be a fascinating thing because all of a sudden the state for itself, the party for itself, the nation for itself. You can very quickly see lines of continuity though not complete association with some of the same things that drifted Mussolini away from socialism and towards fascism.
I don't want to insinuate that we have a condition where China is a fascist state. That's not what I'm trying to argue. When I say that U.S. imperialism is nuanced, as someone would claim here, I do not mean that in the sense that we should take it as it comes. I want to outline the condition that regardless of what forms it takes, either hilarious or terrifying, the condition that confronts us now is hell. That only through hell can a revolution on a global scale, which is the ultimate goal of our movement, actually be waged.
L: Well, if you think it's hell now, then it's going to get a lot worse as the forms and the systems of exploitation that the West benefits from start to fall apart. We can see this in, for example, Britain. What does the British economy have to offer the world? It's based entirely off finance in London. How does it compare, for example, to the computers that are built in the Global South? When the playing field is made equal on the global stage, the West will fall into — I want to say it nicely — it will fall into similar levels of poverty, when it loses this privileged position. That's what's happening. Countries like China and like India and Brazil are organizing themselves to be able to rely on each other and not have to work through the Western systems that keep them in a subordinated state. Because it doesn't make any sense. How can Britain provide that quality of life without having a real economy? So yeah, that's my vision for the future. The West is going to have a reckoning, unfortunately. That is due to the work of China in organizing the exploited Global South nations to help each other out and evade sanctions, for example. The working class of the West is gonna have to wake up to this reality and start building a new future, a separate state apparatus, for the working class and start re-industrializing our countries: green re-industrialization.
BY: There's a Communist Party in the Philippines who have sustained the longest guerrilla and armed struggle, revolutionary struggle of any other country, any other party. They even have liberated areas in the south of the Philippines. Read from them about China, they know about China. They call China fascist and they call it social imperialist. Please, read the things that I've referred to if you want to get a different point of view because a lot of the things I've mentioned don't get into the mainstream media and I bet they're not on the reading guides at university. That says a lot. We're seeing competition for spheres of influence. When there's all this praise for China benevolently helping the South and so on, it really is just imperialist competition. As Lenin said, you don't side with or support the ascendant imperialism. That's something to think about. The characterization of American imperialism is, frankly, ridiculous. It's decrepit. It's on the way out. It's in crisis. It never recovered from its defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese people. You can point to these wars. The worst one was Iraq. 4,000 people died, American soldiers. They lost that in a month in Vietnam. America is in decline, and who represents that better than Donald Trump? His isolationist tendencies, America first, retreat. This competition, the spheres of influence between the two main imperialist powers, America and China, the Left should never side with the ascendant one, and that is China. That's my final word on this. |P
Transcribed by David D., Conaugh Dwyer, and Ali Ramezani
[2] The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1971 as the Socialist Party of Australia in a split from the original CPA. It changed its name to the Communist Party of Australia in 1996, after the original party dissolved in 1991.
[3] The Revolutionary Communist Organization is a Melbourne based communist group.
[4] Video of the panel is available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QKyb3OLjm8>.
[5] <https://bannedthought.net/China/Maoism/2022/ChinaRevolutionAndRestoration-English-2022.pdf>.
[6] Nineteenth Prime Minister of Australia from 1968–1971 (Liberal Party).
[7] First said in “Speech at a Meeting of All Circles in Yan'an to Commemorate Stalin's Sixtieth Birthday,” on December 21st, 1939.
[8] An Australian communist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party founded in 1964 by former members of the original Communist Party of Australia in response to disagreements over the Sino-Soviet split.
[9] After the death of Mao Zedong, there was a struggle for leadership within the Chinese Communist Party which eventually resulted in the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping to a de-facto leadership by 1980.
[10] Joshua Nelken-Zitser, “Trump Compliments ‘Fierce’ and ‘Smart’ Putin and Applauds Xi Jinping for Ruling China with an ‘Iron Fist,’” Business Insider, (September 4, 2022), <https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-calls-putin-smart-praises-xi-ruling-china-iron-fist-2022-9>, and Charles R. Davis, “Trump Calls Xi Jinping a ‘Brilliant Man’ with ‘the Look, the Brain, the Whole Thing,’” Business Insider, (April 12, 2023), <https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-calls-xi-jinping-brilliant-hollywood-good-looks-brains-2023-4>.
[11] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–46). First published in 1932 by the Marx-Engels Institute, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/>.
[12] Mao Zedong, “Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Committees,” January 1957, Marxists Internet Archive, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_57.htm>.
[13] At the 18th CPC National Congress. See <https://www.xinhuanet.com/english/special/18cpcnc/topnews.htm>.
[14] Jiang Zemin was Deng Xiaoping’s successor, becoming CPC general secretary and assuming the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission in 1989.
[15] An international organization comprising of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates
[16] Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a major Eurasian political, economic, and security alliance.
[17] A system of household registration in China which can affect a citizen's ability to move residence, as well as access to resources and jobs.
[18] Derogatory Maoist term for officials and groups alleged to be leading China down a “capitalist road.”
[19] Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife), Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, who accrued power during Mao’s tenure and oversaw much of the Cultural Revolution, and were arrested for treason and other various crimes after Mao’s death.
[20] A series of uprisings and protests in Ukraine over the President’s rejection of closer EU ties which led to the removal of the President and a return to Ukraine’s 2004 Constitution.
[21] He served as the premier of China from 1980–1987, as vice chairman of the CPC from 1981–1982, and the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1987–1989.
[22] The Minsk Accords were two separate agreements (I and II) in 2014 and 2015 which involved a ceasefire between Ukrainian and separatist forces and special self-governing statuses for Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region of Ukraine.
[23] Marx has two well-known letters dating from 1853 dealing with India. See Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” June 10, 1853, Marxists Internet Archive, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm>. And: Marx, Karl. “The Future Results of British Rule in India.” July 22, 1853, Marxists Internet Archive, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm>.
