the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 16, 2024
The following is a translation of a text of orientation submitted for discussion and voted on at the 54th Congress of Lutte Ouvriére. The text appeared in the December 2024 issue of Lutte de Classe, #244, the political journal of Lutte Ouvriére.
This has been a year of crisis, of wars, a year of sinking further into barbarism, and a repeat or, as they say for earthquakes, aftershocks from the preceding years. But it’s more than that. Things are getting worse, if only because of their duration.
Another year gone by—it shows that the bourgeoisie hasn’t done anything, hasn’t been able to do anything, to put an end to the crisis of its own economy.
A year of “high-intensity war” between Russia and Ukraine, as with those in the Middle East, has meant tens of thousands of deaths and colossal destruction. In addition to the number of casualties to date, there is growing certainty that the descent into barbarism will continue and that domination by the imperialist bourgeoisie over the planet has no other future to offer to humanity.
The current phase of the crisis, part of one that has lasted more than half a century, is situated in what bourgeois economists more and more frequently describe as a “secular crisis.” It started getting worse in the 1970s with the rapid succession of an international monetary crisis, the suspension of the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold, and a number of oil crises, succeeding each other.
This secular crisis definitively put an end to “The Glorious Thirty,” in reality, a brief period during which the capitalist economy restarted itself following WWII, its main driving force being the rebuilding of what had been destroyed by the war. Crises have been part and parcel of capitalism from the very beginning and, in fact, constituted one of its stages of development. But, contrary to the crises during the rise of capitalism, which were followed by a new period of growth, the crises that occur during the imperialist stage of senile capitalism tend to last longer or even to perpetuate themselves, hence the expression “secular crisis.”
The way in which the current phase of the crisis is evolving indicates that we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. Even the bourgeoisie and its more or less approved spokespersons admit it. The bourgeois press, particularly the economic press, seems to be haunted by the fear of a possible financial crisis in a highly financialized capitalist world that might well lead to an economic collapse comparable to that of 1929, or perhaps worse.
This has not yet happened in the current crisis. We might conclude that, so far, the world economy has escaped this fate but it might also mean, and this seems more plausible, that the worst is yet to come.
One of the most important indicators of the state of the capitalist world economy is the state of trade. For now, world trade has not collapsed, despite the protectionist measures taken by imperialist powers, particularly the U.S. which dominates production and world trade. But the spread of protectionist measures is starting to affect even this indicator. “World trade is losing energy” was a headline in Les Échos (France’s daily business paper) on August 26, 2024. The article went on to say, “The decrease is due mainly to a downturn in the export performance of European Union (E.U.) countries.”
The global statistics concerning all the imperialist powers mask a change in the balance of power between them.
Because the crisis has intensified rivalries and lasted for so long, it has already profoundly affected the world economic balance of power, particularly between Europe and the U.S. The same article in Les Échos points particularly to “developments in Germany where the export of chemical and other manufactured goods has decreased.”
A recent issue of Les Échos (September 12, 2024) comments on a long report by Mario Draghi compiled for Brussels that “sounds the alarm on a European economy in danger.” As if in panic mode, he talks in the report of the insufficient competitiveness of the European economy and warns that “either we do something or it will be a slow death.”
Choice words! And it’s not commentary from a journalist. Draghi, one of the most prominent figures in the bourgeois world, is saying that Europe is in its death throes. He’s not talking about the need to compete with Russia or even China. He’s talking about competing with the U.S. This man, responsible to the European bourgeoisie, fears that Europe is dying in the face of competition from the U.S. And he points out the cause: insufficiency of productive investment.
An amazing discovery! How many editorials have we devoted to the subject since the 1970s? The bourgeoisie is less and less inclined to invest in production and more and more inclined to invest in speculation, thus amplifying the crisis. In 1938, when Trotsky observed—in The Transitional Program—how lost, distraught and panicked the bourgeoisie was due to the upheavals in its own economy, he was describing a reality that is oh so close to today’s reality.
That is how things stand. The growing gap between the European and American economies is also an admission of failure for the European Union. The reasons for this failure stem from another observation: despite the long and laborious process of “building Europe,” Europe is not unified and the different states that form Europe are still in competition with one another. The European Union is in no way the unification of Europe, but an additional arena in which the capitalist countries of Europe continue to confront each other. Not only is the Union limited, but it is also reversible.
Free movement within the European Union was one of the few spin-offs of the Union that was favorable to the population as a whole. Do we need to be reminded that the so-called “free movement” of people has always been a sinister joke for anyone who is not a citizen of one of the countries in the Schengen zone? But Germany’s recent decision to reintroduce border controls is a reminder of how easily an E.U. country can scrap this emblematic measure in a flash.
This is only one aspect of the Union, and a minor one for the various national bourgeoisies. Europe has failed to overcome the fragmentation of its states in so many essential areas—armies, police forces, administrations, political institutions, taxation, social legislation, sets of laws, etc. In the rivalry between Europe and the United States, this is a crippling handicap.
At the worst of the 1929 crisis, either as a result of the crisis itself or due to protectionist economic measures, international trade literally collapsed. The monetary value of international trade was reduced by two thirds between 1929 and 1933. That is not at all the case today, whether for trade or production.
The major difference at the moment between the current crisis and the long depression that followed 1929 is that the big bourgeoisie is still making huge profits. It does so at the expense of the working class, wage earners and pensioners; and at the expense of everything in public services that is useful to the popular classes: health, education, public transport, etc. It makes its profits mainly through speculation and finance.
The financial operations that participate in the distribution of surplus value between capitalists turn themselves into amplifying factors in the crisis. Specialized financial publications reflect the deep concern of the big bourgeoisie about the threat of financial collapse. A financial collapse on a scale we have never seen before. We came close to it in 2008. But it was not on the same scale as in the years following 1929. Les Échos of September 17, 2024 nonetheless stated in a short article that “European states are rushing to settle the financial burden of the 2008 crisis,” and that “the Dutch state alone has spent €27 billion to save ABN AMRO (the Netherlands’ leading bank) from bankruptcy.” And that’s just one small imperialist state.
The specter of a major financial crisis haunts the big bourgeoisie.
The promises of increased productivity and the speculation on these promises are so intertwined that the thinking heads of the bourgeoisie are completely lost. The same applies to the latest buzzword among economists, journalists and, through them, the general public: artificial intelligence, or A.I. for short.
Scientific rigor is entangled with the most fanciful imagination and the wildest speculation, with a few detours into psychoanalysis.
Under the headline “Nvidia: A Boom Now Faced with the First Doubts about A.I.,” Le Monde of August 20 goes back over the speculative mechanism that is starting to flare up around this company. “The hero of this story, Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia [...] with Elon Musk […] is the most prominent figure in Silicon Valley. One of the richest, too. His company, in which he has a 3.5% stake, is no longer worth one trillion dollars on the stock market, as the nameplate indicates, but more than 2.5 trillion. On June 18, it even overtook Microsoft and Apple, reaching an incredible 3.3 trillion dollars, briefly becoming the most valuable firm in the world.
“Yet Nvidia doesn’t produce smartphones, computers or software, just electronic cards. But these are magic. They are the key to entering the worrying and fascinating world of artificial intelligence (A.I.). Their computing speed and flexibility of use mean that they are currently unrivaled on the market. As a result, when Microsoft, Google and Amazon decided in 2023 to invest tens of billions of dollars in data centers designed to train A.I. models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT conversational robot, they had no choice but to knock on Nvidia’s door. And their billions went straight into the San Jose company’s pocket.
“Over the 2023 financial year, its sales jumped by 126%, to 61 billion dollars, and its net profit came close to 30 billion. This is unheard of in the austere world of chip manufacturers, nor even in technology in general. Intel, in the glory days of its P.C. monopoly with Microsoft, never achieved such a performance. Nor did Apple at the height of the iPhone frenzy. So unheard of that analysts are perplexed by this craze: a flash in the pan, a bubble or a new era?” The question is out in the open. Depending on the answer, speculation begins.
“Mathematics to the Rescue in the A.I. Glitch,” was the headline in Le Monde on 27 August 2024:
“As research progresses, the need arises to go back to working in fundamental mathematics, where we can identify both invariants [...] and an infinite number of ways of implementing them.”
A study published at the end of June by one of the world’s most powerful banks, Goldman Sachs, provides an immediate direct answer: “Generative A.I.: Spending Too High, Profits Too Low?” (Le Monde, 20 August 2024).
For the head of a bank, every penny, or rather every billion, counts.
But that doesn’t stop successive waves of speculators from betting on the horse they hope will win, just as you would at the betting shop. And to spice up their bets, some are betting in crypto currencies.
A financial collapse mechanically implies monetary upheavals of varying degrees of severity, which can become vectors spreading the financial crisis.
For the moment, the dollar is the de facto pivot of the monetary system. For a multitude of reasons, including the fragmentation of Europe into states with different, even opposing interests, the euro has not come close to replacing the dollar. None of the existing major currencies—Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, British pound sterling—has succeeded either. Let alone the projects attributed to the BRICS (associating Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates) to create a currency capable of replacing the dollar, which are utterly fanciful. Competing with the dollar at one or another level—regional or geopolitical—may be possible, but replacing it is not.
The threat of a financial crisis is reinforced by that of currency crises. And the first harbinger of a currency crisis or of a future one is the current upsurge in the price of gold.
On the eve of the Second World War, no one could have foreseen the path by which the “separate clashes and bloody local disturbances would inevitably coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions” (quotation from Trotsky’s Transitional Program). Nor is there any reason why the current process should be a copy of the one that led to the First World War, nor the one that led to the Second. The only certainty is its inevitability.
In the bourgeoisie’s past, a number of different situations gave way to a multitude of processes that led to generalization of wars. They can be found even at the bourgeoisie’s beginnings, even when it wasn’t really aspiring to power and was still content with offering its contribution, notably financial, to wars waged by the leading feudal class that preceded it as the main exploiting class.
The long period which historians call the “Hundred Years’ War” was the last period of war of comparable length. To a large extent, it was a further succession of feudal wars. It lasted 116 years, 4 months and 15 days, from 1337 to 1453. And, despite its feudal dynastic character, the bourgeoisie, its interests and its money were beginning to play a major role.
The “Thirty Years’ War,” which began in 1618 and ended in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, saw frequent phases of warfare, interspersed with truces of varying lengths. In some regions of what was to become Germany, the loss of population reached between 66 and 70%. The main stated objectives of this war may have been religious, pitting Protestant princes against a Catholic emperor and Catholic princes, but in many ways, it shaped the map of Europe until the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
The senile imperialist bourgeoisie can find plenty of precedents. But today it has far more powerful material resources at its disposal. And the comparison is not merely anecdotal: if we consider that the war in the Middle East began with the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, it has already been going on for more than a hundred years. It was in Balfour that Great Britain, the future colonial power which wished to replace Turkish domination, declared itself in favor of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine: a land twice promised.
Although there has not yet been a financial crisis with effects comparable to those seen in the capitalist world after the crash of 1929, the big bourgeoisie keeps feeding the fears of its politicians and journalists. But, for itself, it has no need to worry so long as profits keep rolling in. No matter the real value of the currency in which profits are made, it gives them time to prepare for what’s to come, especially a worsening of the war situation.
While it is indisputable that the proletariat is totally unprepared for war, in many ways this is also true for the bourgeoisie. Just look at the backlog of arms deliveries, including to Ukraine, marking the incapacity of the major powers to deliver arms.
The Russo-Ukrainian war, like the war in the Middle East, is a good training ground for military staff. This is already the case in a number of areas: for example, the massive use of drones, their manufacturing, etc. As is, in a completely different vein, the underground warfare in which the Israeli army is acquiring unprecedented expertise against Hamas and, more recently, against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The same is certainly true of many other areas covered by military secrecy, which put the real threat of nuclear war into perspective. A possible nuclear war will not be fought with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, which are almost 80 years old.
Judging by the little information that leaks out of the military staff’s secrecy, their concern is more with adapting nuclear weapons, making them more manageable and therefore more usable in different circumstances.
Let’s not forget that during the Cold War between the Western world and the USSR, this confrontation, while fueling what was then called the “balance of terror,” did not ultimately lead to nuclear war.
There is no reason to believe that the rise of war will end, at some stage of its development, in a re-enactment of the First or Second World War. The process may simply go on, deepening and prolonging what is already happening now. Paradoxically, the rise of war in this period of bourgeois senility and capitalist crisis could just as well lead to wars resembling those waged with the collaboration of the nascent bourgeoisie, at a time when capitalism was only just emerging from its feudal matrix.
The ongoing effort to find allies is already an integral part of war. Past wars remind us that the search for new allies not only continues but intensifies during the wars themselves. At the same time, they show that sides can be changed many times, and that the configuration of alliances today does not necessarily correspond to what they will be in the long term.
The press increasingly mentions the case of Africa, where the ongoing decay of “Françafrique” is opening up new possibilities and reshuffling many of the cards from the Berlin Conference of November 15, 1884 to February 26, 1885—that conference, which drew borders in Africa that lasted for over a century, did not take into account the ethnicity of the populations. Although the two world wars changed the map of Africa, mainly to the detriment of German imperialism, they did so only marginally.
The uses to which capitalism could put the continent’s considerable mineral wealth are not the same today as they were in the 19th century when Africa was partitioned. Just think of the uranium in Burkina Faso, or the many rare metals in the Congo (ex-Zaire), which are indispensable for electric cars. The rivalry between the great powers to control them is likely to be fiercer than ever.
On August 22, 2024, Le Monde ran the headline: “One year after the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the paramilitary group Wagner: Africa, the new front line between the West and Russia.”
It’s hardly surprising that the collapse of Françafrique has whetted appetites for the African continent!
It has to be said, however, that Le Monde’s expression “Russia’s winning comeback in Africa” may be greatly exaggerated. Russia’s advantages in Africa still today derive, to a large extent, from the legacy of the former USSR and its policy of alliance with regimes that were described at the time as progressive, i.e., which in the context of hostility between the blocs, refused to align themselves systematically with Washington. So, these advantages came, indirectly, from the Russian revolution itself.
One of these distant legacies was the almost permanent invitation to intellectuals from African countries to study in Moscow during the Cold War. At the time, this created ties, including personal ones, between the African students and Soviet ones, for whom it opened up the possibility of leaving the USSR. The same generation was at the helm on both sides, African army officers and Russian officials.
The almost unanimous support of the imperialist powers for Ukraine in its war against Russia has understandably focused attention on the threat of a more direct confrontation between Russia and NATO, the military expression of the imperialist powers.
This may represent a warmongering phase in the increasing belligerence of a militarizing world. Putin’s Russia is already directly engaged in war, even if, for the moment, the imperialist powers are announcing multiple red lines to show that they are not yet in an unstoppable spiral.
Nonetheless, the attention of the political and military leaders of American imperialism is focused on China. China is engaged in an arms race with the United States, a race that is reflected in the statistics. The whole of East Asia, all the way to Australia, is involved in a feverish search for alliances.
The Taiwan Strait (or Formosa Strait), which separates mainland China from the island of Taiwan, is one of the hottest spots on the planet. The other one, in the same region, is the border separating North and South Korea. Seventy years after the Korean War, peace has still not been signed between the two parts of the same country, still separated by barbed wire and minefields.
What is self-evident in factual reality was clearly expressed in an article in the American magazine Foreign Affairs, published on October 1, 2024 and signed by Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State in Biden’s administration.
The article begins: “A fierce competition is underway to define a new age in international affairs. A small number of countries—principally Russia, with the partnership of Iran and North Korea, as well as China—are determined to alter the foundational principles of the international system.... They all seek to erode the foundations of the United States’ strength: its military and technological superiority, its dominant currency and its unmatched network of alliances and partnerships.”
Blinken goes on to label these states “revisionist powers,” adding a little later that, of all these states, “China is the only country with the intent and the means to reshape the international system ... its most consequential long-term strategic competitor.”
And yet, nowhere on the planet are China and the United States in direct military conflict, despite having their fingers on the trigger. But everyone fears that such a conflict could blow up as the result of some provocation, or even of an accident, given the number of warships and bombers passing each other in the China Sea.
In a preparatory text for our congress in December 1971, we summarized our position on the class nature of the Chinese State. Our position was diametrically opposed to that of the Trotskyist movement as a whole, especially to that of the main current claiming the label of the IVth International and presenting itself as Trotsky’s successor.
Under the heading “The case of underdeveloped countries in a political break with imperialism,” the text discusses China, along with Yugoslavia, Cuba, Albania and North Vietnam, in the following terms:
“Benefitting from exceptional historical circumstances, a few rare underdeveloped countries (…) were led to break politically and economically with imperialism and thus found themselves engaged in a whole series of economic and social reforms aimed at enabling them to survive if not develop.”
The text was written at a time when, in political circles, China was considered a communist country in the broad sense of the term. We wanted to make it clear, particularly to the rest of the Trotskyist movement, that not only was this not the case, but also that “these are in no way workers’ states but bourgeois states. They are, however, profoundly different from other states in underdeveloped countries.
“Different because radical political representatives of a national bourgeoisie—acting in the name of a vaguely humanist ideology, like Castro, or with a communist label, like Mao and Tito—managed to take over the leadership of peasant uprisings and, by that means, took power in the name of the national bourgeoisie that they represented.” We came to the conclusion that “the Chinese Communist Party … was originally a proletarian party, later cut off from the proletariat (i.e., in the crushing of the proletarian Chinese Revolution in 1927). In the end, the Party consciously turned its back on the proletariat by choosing the program of the national bourgeoisie—renouncing class struggle in the name of the four-class bloc, national anti-Japanese resistance, etc. It used the peasantry commanded by the intelligentsia as troops. Thus, despite their label, the role of communist parties was, to use Trotsky’s expression, to serve as a bridge between the peasant movement and the national bourgeoisie in the towns by offering the latter a political alternative when all other solutions failed.”
This position obviously put us radically at odds with the Maoist current which, at the time, dominated the French far left. But it also opposed us to the rest of the Trotskyist movement, for whom Mao’s China was a workers’ state, even if adjectives like “deformed” and “disfigured” accompanied the term.
The debate we introduced at the time in the Trotskyist movement was not just about an abstract theoretical question but about a more fundamental one: can a workers’ state arise without the active, conscious participation of the proletariat? In other words: can the proletariat be replaced by a peasant army led by a nationalist petty bourgeoisie as in China? Or by the Soviet bureaucratic army as in the Popular Democracies? Or by a military junta claiming to be revolutionary, or even socialist or communist, as in the regimes in a number of African countries?
Our conclusion to the text was as follows:
“Whatever its pace, the awareness of the working class of all these countries must take the shape of autonomous organizations and the development of revolutionary workers’ parties whose goal is for proletarian democracy to take power. Because the proletariat of these countries is an integral part of the world’s proletariat, the bearer of the socialist future, it is the only class that can offer these countries a prospect. Despite being weak within the national framework—faced with a massive peasant petty bourgeoisie—it has the strength of the world proletariat. But only an international revolutionary organization can embody that strength.”
We feel no need to change anything in this text that continues to convey our political position regarding the task of revolutionaries in China today.
China’s governments have been subjected to imperialist pressure ever since the peasant uprising that brought Mao Zedong to power. Pressure was openly military during Mao’s time (the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, followed by the more indirect pressure of the Vietnam War) but it continued in other forms even after Mao’s death and the advent of Deng Xiaoping, whose orientation was to reconnect with the imperialist-dominated world.
Since China did not accept the direct domination by imperialist powers, confrontations followed by periods of embargo prevented the country from benefitting from the international division of labor. The dictatorial nature of the regime under all its successive presidents, from Mao to Xi Jinping, stemmed from the need to achieve a kind of primitive accumulation.
The social base of Mao’s regime was the peasantry. But the peasantry was not in power. The essential objective of his regime was to achieve a form of primitive accumulation that would provide the state with the means to try to catch up economically—extracting it first from the peasantry and then from the peasants who had been pushed out of rural areas and proletarianized.
At the start, the Chinese government benefitted from trust by the rebellious peasants who brought it to power. It not only succeeded in building up a substantial industry but also achieved a level of development that no other underdeveloped country of comparable size, population or resources (India, Brazil, Indonesia…) had succeeded in creating. It managed to do all this by exploiting the peasants and workers, using methods that were as brutal as those used by earlier entrants into the pursuit of capitalist development.
Thanks to a high level of state control, China has succeeded in joining the ranks of capitalist nations. However, it continues to face pressure from the nations which, benefitting from earlier centuries of primitive accumulation, had secured a privileged position in the formation of the global market and its division of labor. Those nations led the move toward imperialism, which allowed them to participate in the plundering of the entire planet.
Imperialist pressure is more subtle than in the past. But, in essence, it’s with the same preoccupation that led Great Britain to launch the first Opium War in 1839.
As explained in the British newspaper The Financial Times, “Visiting Beijing late last year, the E.U.’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell complained that China’s trade surplus with Europe was soaring even as its market became tougher for European companies to enter.”
This was followed by a demand and warning from Borrell: “Either the Chinese economy opens up more, or you may face a reaction from us.”
The same newspaper later summed up the idea in this way: “Economists have been calling for years for China to do more to stimulate consumption to rebalance an economy overly dependent on debt-fueled investment.” Well, fancy that!
Nearly two centuries after the Opium Wars, today’s representative of the bourgeoisie uses the same warmongering tone to demand something very similar to the reason why the British Empire initiated those earlier wars. Of course, today it’s not the same product. Back in the day, China was unwilling to buy anything from Great Britain, so Britain forced it to purchase opium from India, the jewel of the British colonial empire!
The journalist from The Financial Times goes on to insist: “Economists argue that for consumers to feel comfortable to spend more, particularly after the real estate slump, China needs to step up its development of social welfare programmes and healthcare. While China has made strides in developing its public pension and healthcare systems, they are still lacking.” Isn’t it marvelous to hear representatives of imperialism calling for improved living conditions for Chinese workers? Maybe they should do as much in their own countries!
The living conditions of Chinese workers are clearly not what British or American leaders are concerned about (nor French leaders for that matter—the national newspapers Les Échos and Le Figaro are full of similar advice for the Chinese). But now that China has achieved a minimal form of primitive accumulation, they want to push the Chinese state not only to expand its domestic market but, above all, to allow imperialist bourgeoisies—in the first place, that of the United States—to make profit there.
Imperialist pressure is manifesting itself in a strange way: imperialist countries are demanding that China invest less in its industry and more in domestic consumption, particularly for the working class! Economists from imperialist countries are now pressuring the Chinese government not only to boost consumption by raising wages in various ways, but also to establish a form of social security so that peasants-turned-proletarians can at least have access to basic healthcare.
To use a common expression, “China has become the workshop of the world,” which, in other words, means it has become the imperialist powers’ subcontractor. As a result, on the economic level, there is both the obedience expected of a subcontractor toward its contractor—with all the disagreements and tension such a relationship entails—as well as a fundamental, though conflict-ridden, alignment of interests between them.
What’s happening in China is crucial for the future of humanity as a whole. This is true from the imperialist bourgeoisie’s point of view. The future course of events, which may lead to more or less serious armed conflict, depends on the coexistence and even collaboration between Western imperialism and China. But it is also crucial for the future of the proletariat.
State control has provided the Chinese bourgeoisie with all that has been mentioned above, but the development of the bourgeoisie along with industrialization has also strengthened the Chinese proletariat. Today, numerically speaking, the Chinese proletariat is one of the largest, if not the largest part of the worldwide working class. And it comes from a country with a long history of different experiences, including numerous and radical revolutions.
We don’t know to what extent this history has been passed on to the current generation. The dictatorship, first imposed on the peasants and then increasingly on the proletariat as it emerged with industrialization, is obviously a major obstacle to passing on such experience.
But revolutionary ideas have always found ways to overcome such obstacles. The dictatorship of a privileged class has never prevented revolutions from happening. It has never stopped a privileged class, when its time has passed, from being forced to make way for a rising class.
The absence of any kind of revolutionary International means that, despite all the advances in the technological means of communication, we know almost nothing about what is happening in China, particularly in the workplaces.
We can, however, assert that no matter where the revolution begins, in order for it to succeed on an international scale, it will need to shake the Chinese proletariat. And when we think about the difficulties the Russian Revolution of 1917 ran into—not only so that the proletariat could seize power but also consolidate it—the Chinese working class, with its population size and resources, has assets that the Russian proletariat of that time did not possess.
We are not able to know how the current younger Chinese generations interpret all of this. At first, they probably don’t interpret it in a communist way, given how thoroughly the Chinese regime has discredited the notion of communism, even though it still deceitfully makes reference to it. There must be some sort of reaction similar to what occurred in Eastern European countries or the USSR under Gorbachev or Yeltsin. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any groups, maybe the same size as ours, already organizing and advocating for communism. For a lot can be learned from history, after all!
It’s impossible to predict or guess—and it wouldn’t even make sense to try—how the necessary revival of the working class will come about. However, we can assert that a revolutionary intelligentsia will play a crucial role in the process. But in order to do so it must first exist and get to work!
At the fall of the USSR, the American economist Francis Fukuyama wrote a whole lot of nonsense in a book entitled The End of History. But history did not stop in 1992, the year his text was published.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” states the “Communist Manifesto,” written in 1848. The same will hold true in the future as long as our society remains divided into two fundamentally opposing classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The laws of historical development—that is, the lives and actions of approximately eight billion human beings populating the planet—are infinitely more powerful than the musings of an individual or even the efforts of all the world’s decision-makers combined.
The “Communist Manifesto” describes the class struggle in this way: “... an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Rosa Luxemburg directly summarized the same idea with “Socialism or Barbarism”—not as a commentator asking a question, but as a militant. To act for the revolutionary transformation of society is the only way to avoid barbarism.
No matter what upheavals humanity faces around the world or the turbulence of current events, and no matter how long it will take, historical necessity will ultimately impose its rule. It will do so in the only way possible—through the actions of people themselves. For the proletariat, this means that it is necessary to build working-class parties and, in our globalized society, a revolutionary Communist International. These parties and this International will both represent historical necessity and be the agents to accomplish it.