By VALERIO ARCARY*

If the best of the new global left embraces a new camp, now of unconditional alignment with the Chinese state, the consequences will be terrible.

1.

Fernand Braudel argues, in Material civilization, economy and capitalism, that a comparison between China and Europe in the 13th or 14th centuries would hardly have allowed one to predict a superiority of the West over the East.[I] Perhaps even the opposite, since the invariably unfavorable flows of precious metals from the West to the East, for centuries, would be one of the evidences of its greater development, as well as the astonishing difference in demographic expansion.

The conquest of the oceans and, as a result of this dominance, the hegemonic role of the European powers in the world market would have decided in their favor the growing inequality and, ultimately, the subsequent colonization of the East. Why would China have abandoned the trade routes it explored from Malacca, India to Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, guaranteeing intense commercial traffic for its junks? Why would it have renounced the promising commercial prospects with Islam and India?

According to Fernand Braudel, China's isolation in the following centuries was explained by the priority need to defend its northern borders. The waves of invasions from the steppes, a thousand-year-old scourge that oppressed the Middle Kingdom without interruption, led to the construction of the greatest defensive work in pre-capitalist history, the Great Wall.

The Empire's defensive priority and the preservation of territorial unity would have inhibited the commercial trends that were expanding with the prosperity of trade routes with Islam and India, and blocked a distinct evolutionary possibility. The focus on security would have internalized the Empire and guaranteed the political unity of the state, unlike Europe, which was fragmented into numerous states, and would have been a factor blocking the development of commercial expansion and the dispute over control of the oceans.

Controversial but very suggestive, this hypothesis allows us to analyze the inequality of development between the West and the East over the last five hundred years, up until the Second World War and the victory of the revolution in China.

2.

Fernand Braudel's main conclusion, of a political nature, was that the persistence of the political unity of the state in China, which had been destroyed in Europe with the collapse of the Roman Empire, would have been an obstacle to a dynamic of commercial expansion across the Indian Ocean that would have allowed a dispute for hegemony over the emerging world market. The political phase we are experiencing is characterized by the inversion of this historical hegemony.

China is threatening the supremacy of the US-led Triad. It is already the largest trading power. The US still maintains financial and military supremacy. Beijing is embracing a strategy of concertation and betting on negotiation because it prefers to buy time. This is not Washington’s strategy under Trump. There has never been a peaceful transition of leadership in the state system.

In the 17th century, Amsterdam and London faced off in three wars.[ii] In the 18th century, France and England faced off in four wars, and British superiority was only consolidated with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.[iii] In the 20th century, Germany challenged for supremacy in two world wars. Could there be a peaceful transition through successive rapprochements? No one knows.

The hopes that all socialist or revolutionary currents (not all socialists were revolutionaries, and not all revolutionaries were socialists) of the 19th century placed in the proletariat as a social subject contrast with the scepticism of the early 21st century. However, it seems unreasonable to rule out the possibility of major revolutionary crises in the most urbanized countries.

One of the serious reasons for this change in attitude refers to the issue of social substitutionism, which operated on an unprecedented scale, in what we could call the third wave of the post-war world revolution, with the shift of the axis of the class struggle to Asia, Latin America and Africa.

After all, the victory of the Chinese revolution, the greatest peasant revolution of the 1927th century, a socialist revolution in which the urban proletariat played essentially no role, prostrated by the crushing defeat of XNUMX, more than a sui generis process, established a reference, for a quarter of a century, for the passage from the democratic-national phase of anti-imperialist revolutions to the anti-capitalist phase.

Social substitutionism has occurred on an astonishing scale and scale, surpassing (and surprising) anything that classical Marxism could have imagined in terms of the radicalization of the peasant masses. Vladimir Lenin referred countless times to the “two souls” of the ruined peasant, one hungry for land and property, the other nostalgic for equality, dreaming of a communal past in which the village owned and cultivated the land in common.

The recent history of Latin America and beyond has also offered us examples of new “Münzers” and their modern “Anabaptists”. In Marx’s famous correspondence with the narodniks In the 1870s and 80s, a revolutionary organization that sought the agrarian revolution as the driving force behind the Russian revolution, the issue of social substitutionism had already been raised, without Marx ruling out the possibility a priori. Even so, the process of the post-war world revolution went beyond anything that could have been predicted. In China, a workers' and peasants' republic emerged, a state led by a revolutionary party-army that broke with capitalism.

It is impossible to understand the current context without starting from a fundamental reference that is at the root of the first “Chinese exceptionality”: the largest peasant revolution in history took place in China. But it was a socialist revolution “without a proletariat.”

Isaac Deutscher gives an interesting explanation of the role of Mao Zedong’s leadership, presented more as a peasant army than as a workers’ party, breaking with the “four-class bloc” under pressure from American imperialism: “In carrying the revolution beyond the bourgeois phase, Maoism was driven not only by ideological commitments but by a vital national interest. It was determined to transform China into a modern, integrated nation. The entire experience of the Kuomintang was there to prove that this could not be achieved on the basis of a backward and largely imported capitalism superimposed on the patriarchal landowning class. National ownership of industry, transport and banking, and a planned economy were the essential preconditions for any rational, even incomplete, development of China’s resources and for any social advancement. Securing these preconditions meant initiating a socialist revolution. Mao did just that. This is not to say that he transformed China into a socialist society, but he used every ounce of the nation's energy to erect the socio-economic structure indispensable to socialism and to bring into existence, develop and educate the working class, which alone could make socialism an ultimate reality.”[iv]

3.

Political destiny is often unforgiving in the face of theoretical errors. Those on the global left who underestimated the capacity of the Chinese leadership to make and defend the revolution were wrong. But in the current situation, the opposite danger: an exalted defense of China that concludes that it is a country in transition to socialism is also wrong. What seems to be underway is a slow shift in the political balance of forces in the state system in favor of the East, a spectacular historical feat.

China has not been pursuing a transition to socialism over the past forty years, as it did between 1949 and 78, but to capitalism. This is the second Chinese exceptionality: it is the most dynamic capitalist economy in the world. This is, in fact, the official formulation of the Chinese leadership: the need for a long-term NEP, or transition to capitalism, in order to make a new historical turn and restart the transition to socialism within two or more generations.

But this is not a political strategy. A political strategy is a bet on a project guided by the time of individuals who are alive. In fifty years, most of us, and the Chinese population, will be dead. Believing in an ideological discourse of this nature is equivalent to betting on life after death. No one can seriously predict what will happen in the world or in China in even the next ten years.

An economic model that deepens social inequality for an indefinite period cannot be considered socialist. The Chinese state leadership itself theorized the need for capitalist methods to ensure the most exuberant economic growth of the last thirty years. In perspective, the process of capitalist restoration would have begun first in China, where the transition was made from above and, only later, inspired by the “pioneering” of Deng Xiao Ping, would Gorbachev have made the same strategic choice.

The “campist” currents dedicated themselves tirelessly, for decades, to the unconditional defense of the “achievements” of the construction of socialism in the USSR, even though the socioeconomic evidence, among others, contradicted, in an increasingly undisguised way, that Brezhnev’s bureaucratic regime could be anything (hence an endless controversy about its class and historical nature), except a regime in transition to socialism.

If anything seems “granite-like” in the lessons of the historic defeat in the USSR, it is that a bureaucratic caste, the nomenklatura, consolidated its power for three generations and developed its own interests. Faced with the crisis, it split and pushed to the point of civil war. The restorationist faction won. It is impossible to analyze the Chinese experience of the 21st century without considering that Deng Xiaoping’s leadership studied and learned lessons from Gorbachev’s process, and has managed to avoid the same mistakes so far. This is the third Chinese exceptionality: the restoration generated a hybrid of, perhaps, state capitalism, but the leadership of the communist party remains in power.

The Chinese state was a worker-peasant republic with grotesque bureaucratic deformations that began a transition to socialism, but encountered colossal objective obstacles: the dramatic historical backwardness inherited from imperialist colonization lasting more than a hundred years. Forty years after the beginning of a controlled capitalist restoration, what is the social nature of this state today?

The fact that there is a hybrid of capitalist and post-capitalist social relations does not authorize the conclusion that the Chinese state is already capitalist. If the bourgeoisie is not in power, it cannot be concluded that the state is capitalist. The exercise of abstraction would require concluding that the bureaucratic apparatus of the party-army rises above the social classes and replaces the bourgeoisie in the service of the bourgeoisie. An outlandish hypothesis.

Symbols are nothing more than ideological props, but no bourgeoisie would accept having the red flag as the national flag of its state, nor would it accept naming its party the communist party. But the absence of the internal bourgeoisie in control of the state does not legitimize the state's continued existence as a workers' state, if the government's program has, for forty years, favored the unlimited accumulation of private capital, strengthened the bourgeoisie, and increased social inequality.

Forty years is a longer period than the interval of a generation. We are therefore faced with a theoretical dilemma. The best hypothesis, the method teaches, is the simplest. If those who have controlled the State for almost half a century are a bureaucratic caste consolidated on the throne of a restoration project, then perhaps the best characterization is that the State is bureaucratic.

4.

This is the fourth Chinese exceptionality: the social nature of the State has changed, but the political regime has not. In Marxist terms, there would have been a social counterrevolution without a democratic political revolution. The definition that the State would still be a workers' republic seems unsustainable after forty years of capitalist restoration. If this hypothesis is consistent, the theoretical challenge is to understand when a change in the State occurred. More importantly, why?

Historically, everything suggests that it was from the “replacement” of the leadership nucleus that was formed under the direction of Mao Zedong during the cultural revolution, between 1966/76, known as the “gang of four”: Jiang qing (Mao's wife), Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen e Yao Wenyuan associated with General Lin Biao. The factional struggle was brutal and merciless. A month after Mao's death they were deposed and arrested in a palace coup led by Hua Guofeng.[v]

Deng Xiaoping, one of the main historical leaders of the party, from the Long March to the revolution, arrested, tortured and exiled during the cultural revolution, was rehabilitated and assumed power in 1978, and remained at the head of the party, army and state until the XNUMXs.

The question is how it was possible to change the social nature of the State without changing the regime. A bureaucratic State is a new historical phenomenon. The fact that it has not happened before does not justify the conclusion that it is not possible. In contemporary society, there are not only social classes determined by the place they occupy in the production process, broadly speaking, capitalists, workers and the middle class.

There are other phenomena such as the lumpen, which breaks away from the proletariat, or organized crime, a petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois fraction, when it becomes gigantic in illegality, or special more homogeneous social groups, such as professional intellectuals, religious people and police officers.

But the most important phenomenon is the high state bureaucracy. The post-revolutionary historical experience in the Soviet Union saw the pioneering formation of a caste of specialists in the management of the party, army, police and state. It would be obtuse to ignore that the working class also creates its own bureaucracy in its organizations, even before it gains power.

 A privileged caste is not the same as a class of property owners. They enjoy privileges, advantages, benefits and immunities, but they do not have the right to inheritance, the guarantee of the shielded transmission of wealth. The historical tragedy of the capitalist restoration in the former USSR and Eastern Europe confirmed that the political and social project of every bureaucracy is the bourgeoisification. Individually, there will be exceptions, of course. But a Marxist judgment cannot rest on exceptions. The promiscuous relationships between families at the top of the Communist Party and the internal bourgeoisie are public. Some examples were so scandalous that they were punished by the regime itself.

State and political regime are not the same thing. The same State can have different political regimes. A political regime is the institutional form that the State takes on, the architecture of the exercise of power. In China, the regime is a dictatorship of a party-army that maintains monolithic control of power. But one should not conclude that there is no political struggle.

Even in single-party regimes there are factions, currents of opinion and also cliques, more or less formal or concealed, and rules for the dispute over positions, projects and posts, which are based on greater or lesser internal support, expressing different social pressures. The regime is a dictatorship, but it is not totalitarian. A Chinese peculiarity has been the cult of personality of leaders and the maximum concentration of personal power.

The immense authority of Deng Xiaoping, the last leader of the pre-revolutionary generation, favored some decentralization after the “Asian” excesses of the Mao Zedong period. But Xi Jinping has reversed this trend since 2012. It is not only for external defensive reasons that the political regime has remained so closed and authoritarian.

It would be reckless to ignore the significance of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In Tiananmen Square, the repression of the youth who were still singing the Internationale was a crime and a historic trauma. It was not a “Kronstadt moment,” by analogy with the Russian revolution. The scale was different. But, in historical perspective, the repression of the Soviet about anarchist influence was a mistake.

Forgetting that the camp was an ideological deformation with irreversible consequences. The destruction of internationalism with the separation of the struggles in the West and the East, and the association of socialism with bureaucratic tyranny in the USSR are among the most profound defeats of Marxism, as a political movement and of the workers' movement in general.

The campist strategy has inescapable responsibilities. The existence of countries where private property of the great means of production was expropriated, even though their political regimes had aberrant bureaucratic deformations, a historical hybrid, necessarily transitory, placed the world left in a paradoxical and disconcerting situation.

It should defend the social nature of States in the face of imperialist pressure for capitalist restoration, and at the same time support the mobilizations of workers and youth for democratic freedoms, against political regimes of oppression. In other words, a defense conditioned on the class sign of the conflict. Something much more complex than an unconditional defense or an unconditional opposition.

The pendulum's swing has always been very complex, giving rise to imbalances: Stalinophilia or Stalinophobia. The same political problem arises today, albeit in a different dimension, in the face of Iran or North Korea. The defense of independent countries in the face of imperialist aggression does not exempt criticism and delimitation in the face of dictatorial regimes. In short, campism simplifies what is not reducible to unilateral formulas.

If the best of the new global left embraces a new camp, now of unconditional alignment with the Chinese state, the consequences will be terrible. The dilemmas of internationalism are not simple.

There is no way to escape this theoretical crossroads. The answer to this question will determine much of the divisions and unifications of the left in the coming decades. But we cannot ask the youth who are joining the socialist cause to defend a tarnished flag.

* Valerio Arcary is a retired professor of history at the IFSP. Author, among other books, of No one said it would be Easy (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3OWSRAc]

Notes

[I] BRAUDEL, Fernand. Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life, Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1997, p.21/34/36

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo%E2%80%93Dutch_wars

[iii] https://www.thefrenchhistorypodcast.com/how-many-wars-have-france-and-england-fought-against-each-other/

[iv]DEUTSCHER, Isaac. Ironies of History, essays on contemporary communism, Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Civilization, 1968, p.133

[v] The trial of the members of the Gang of Four took place in 1980. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were sentenced to death (sentences commuted to life imprisonment), while Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen were sentenced to twenty years in prison. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camarilha_dos_Quatro

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