The PRC’s onward march, its remarkable successes, and in particular, its widening and deepening advances on the technological frontier, underline that capitalism, which briefly thrived in the decades after the Second World War only thanks to socialistic Keynesian welfare state reforms in its homelands , and has since sunk into a neoliberal funk of low growth, low investment, technological failure, financialized speculation and predation and militarism, can no longer advance humanity on any front and cannot even develop the forces of production.
Text
I would like to thank the organisers for honouring me with their invitation to be part of this world historic celebration.
On the historic occasion of the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China there is so much to celebrate, one is spoiled for choice: China’s economic, social, technological, cultural and foreign policy achievements are just too numerous. However, one major lacuna in our appreciation of them is how it fits into Marxism: after all, the proliferation of revolutions in the developing world is often held to be a negation of what Marxist theory allegedly predicted. So, in my brief remarks I suggest that it only appears so because Western Marxism has lost any connection to Marx’s original analysis, which we can recover.
- Not only did the PRC represent the arrival of socialism in the world’s biggest country;
- Not only did it endure, against great odds, which included not being recognised by the world’s most powerful imperialist country for some three decades after the revolution, wars being conducted on its borders, sanctions and the tragic split with its previously most powerful supporter;
- Not only has it completed 75 years, something which that most powerful supporter, the Soviet Union, failed to do;
- Not only has it done so with no sign or exhaustion but, rather, with the vigour of a society which, rather than resting on its laurels has set itself new goals worthy of a socialist society;
China’s socialist successes underline the historical necessity of socialism for humanity, just as Marx and Engels had predicted, and accelerate it.
This becomes clear if, unlike so much Western Marxism, which compromised with neoclassical economics and became blind to capitalism’s contradictions and thus also to its imperialism, we view the Chinese revolution and its achievements in the geopolitical economy of capitalism. It is the historical materialist understanding of the international relations of the capitalist world, ‘the relations of producing nations’ as Marx put it, that emerges from Marx’s understanding of capitalism as contradictory value production. In it, imperialism and resistance against it are as important as class struggle in driving history forward, or, as Mao put it, national struggle is a distinct version of class struggle. In this analysis, Third World socialist revolutions were definitely among the possible openings to socialism.
It was no coincidence that the socialist aperture opened with the Thirty Years’ Crisis of capitalism and imperialism from 1914 to 1945, with the two most important socialist revolutions to date bookending it in 1917 and 1949. In Marx’s analysis capitalism had by then already reached the point – the monopoly phase – when it had exhausted its historically progressive potential and become ripe for socialism, a point underlined by Lenin’s view that capitalism had reached its ‘highest stage’.
Not only did capitalism require the imperialist subordination and underdevelopment of much of the world to get to that point, from here on, the only way any sustained and lasting development could be had was through socialist means. Capitalism was not going to prove capable of absorbing any new entrants in its charmed circle. And it has not. A simple map of the countries sanctioning Russia over the Ukraine conflict makes clear that the imperialist world has not expanded, other than acquiring some minor hangers on, since 1914. That was not all: the most successful periods of development that Third World countries have known have been the ones of state-led socialist or socialist oriented development and definitely not the ones implementing the neoliberal policies imposed by the West. This is also why the socialist urge has been so irrepressible, despite the most strenuous efforts of the imperialist world.
Looked at this way, what becomes clear is that humanity embarked on the road to socialism in 1917 with the Russian Revolution enduring the suppression of the wave of revolutions that broke out around the same time. Of course, the path to socialism, once taken, was never going to be without its difficulties and mistakes. This was clear not only in the developmental difficulties endured by the Soviet Union but also from the mistakes made by its leadership in its support for other revolutions, not least the Chinese, and from the fact that the pioneering revolution did not, in the end, make it. However, 1989 and 1991 was not the end of socialism, as so many in the West seemed to believe, nor the beginning of its end, but, as Carlos Martinez has so insightfully put it, only the ‘end of the beginning’ of socialism.
The PRC’s onward march, its remarkable successes, and in particular, its widening and deepening advances on the technological frontier, underline that capitalism, which briefly thrived in the decades after the Second World War only thanks to socialistic Keynesian welfare state reforms in its homelands , and has since sunk into a neoliberal funk of low growth, low investment, technological failure, financialized speculation and predation and militarism, can no longer advance humanity on any front and cannot even develop the forces of production.
The great achievement of the PRC, perhaps an instance of the success of the second comer, is that it can now lead humanity towards the socialism that Marx and Engels long ago identified as humanity’s destiny.
