Where is China going?

Western reporting of the recent Chinese Communist Party Congress, at least in anglophone countries, has been dismally poor with very few exceptions. The highest point reached in the limited material available in Britain have been articles (see Financial Times and the Guardian 17 October) which stressed the tremendous significance of Xi Jinping's main speech 'for us all'. There followed little in the way of serious examination of the speech, or its surrounding measures. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics', as the speech was titled, ultimately boiled down to Xi Jimping's consolidation of power and the vague threat of future Chinese 'world dominance' as far as most Western media were concerned.

But the 19th CCP Congress was a remarkable event. A great change in the Chinese leadership's future orientation was presented to the world. 

Starting from some of the measures confirmed by the Congress; there were, for example, profound changes to the Peoples Liberation Army's places in the hierarchy. China's military elite were cut away from their previously dominating position in the CCP. Only 17% of the previous military delegates to the Chinese CP Central Committee were returned to their positions. The anti-corruption campaign accounted for 38 members of the Central Committee losing their places. 53% of the standing CC 'retired.' Overall there was a 70% turn over in the membership of the Party's Central Committee. Only the Party changes in the 9th Congress in 1969, the period of Mao's Cultural Revolution, had the same spread and depth.   

The speech styled China as a 'moderately prosperous society' and outlined a 15-year plan to commence in 2020 'to see that socialist modernisation is basically realised.' Next will come a further 15-year plan to 'develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.' Some sort of democracy by 2050. It was the sole mention of the word. Meanwhile developmental gains are still being made.

In the past five years, China's GDP rose from £7 trillion to £10 trillion, contributing more than 30% of global economic growth.

Over the same period it was claimed that more than 60 million more people had been lifted out of poverty. Over 1,500 reform measures had been launched, establishing general frameworks for reform in major fields and lending greater impetus for growth.

But China, it was stated, was still facing severe challenges and would long remain in 'the primary stage of socialism.' Its international status as the world's largest developing country had not changed.

'Some acute problems caused by unbalanced and inadequate development await solutions; and the quality and effect of development are not what they should be,' Xi said.

'China's ability to innovate needs to be stronger'...  'the real economy awaits improvement, and the country has a long way to go in protecting the environment.'

The answer to China's problems was also made clear. In essence the Chinese CP, with 89.5 million members, will take a much stronger grip on Chinese society. This decision has various aspects. First is the centralisation of power around Xi and his immediate supporters - as the Western media duly noted. More profoundly however, the party's centralisation echoes the strong message from the Congress on the need for the centralisation, the homogenisation, of China itself, due, among other things, to 'unbalanced and inadequate development' mentioned in the above quote from the speech. But that in turn is only a part of an even greater mosaic. For example the current campaign against corruption is also to deepen. Already 1000s of local and regional party officials have been expelled from the party and jailed. Congress delegates were housed in basic accommodation and offered simple food. Further measures are promised and corruption is certainly under scrutiny and attack - and, at the same time, the campaign is used as a key weapon to eliminate any inner party criticism of the new direction.

Related to the impact of what Xi called 'unbalanced and inadequate development'  a major political decision has also been taken, or solidified, regarding the scope of China's 'great reform.'  When Deng Xiaoping opened the road to the market in the 1980s and 90s many debates arose inside China in general and the CCP in particular about the possibility of accompanying economic reform with political reform. This reached its terrible apogee with the counter-revolutionary events during the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989. But political reform has remained a topic of debate in the margins - which has also been stimulated by the (rare) comments of Deng himself when he addressed the issue in the 1980s and 90s.

Deng argued that the Soviet example proved that economic development should be won and then consolidated (at the level of what was known then as 'First World' conditions) before a political culture could be built that would allow increasing democracy. Because Perestroika and Glasnost had been implemented before any economic effort to reach 'First World' conditions in Russia, the Soviet Union had been destroyed. Deng never defended any sort of Western model of democracy, but seemed to accept the idea that greater participation by the Chinese people in political life would ultimately be a positive aim - once economic development had reached a reasonable peak.

The 19th Congress has rejected all that. The experience of Hong Kong's mass demonstrations, the Tibet undercurrent of independence, the upsurges in Xinjiang - with its significant Uyghur Muslim population - and other regional and national strains; the emphasis that Trump gave to Taiwan's role and, the under the surface struggle over islands in the China sea, all mean that consolidation of China is now the watchword. Deng's flirtation with democracy with Chinese characteristics is dead. China needs to be concentrated and centralised in every sense and at every level in order, it seems, to deal with the 'unbalanced and inadequate development.' The CCP is the key instrument for that purpose. Its independent bureaucratic power is to be mobilised defining China's needs with its own defence.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. What is the relationship between CCP State power and the actual engine of growth and development - the 'free market'?

China's 'free market' is a matter of considerable controversy and there are no definitive measures of its weight in the overall Chinese domestic economy let alone its part in China's international trade and foreign investment. However, while industry, especially industry oriented to exports, in China is predominately private, China’s largest companies are state owned. Given China’s state monopolies in oil and electricity, it is not surprising that the country’s three largest companies are two giant oil conglomerates and the national electricity grid. The combined revenue of these three giants in 2013 was US$1.3 trillion, which is the same figure as the GDP of Mexico.

Central State companies also dominate telecommunications and transport. The government also owns China’s main banking and finance companies, the tobacco industry, major media and the post office. Altogether these central state companies, often large business conglomerates with hundreds of subsidiaries, took in half of the US$9.2 trillion in revenue earned by China’s top 500 companies in 2013. Beneath the central government, Chinese provinces own more than 100,000 state firms, many of which have joint ventures with private capital.

The Chinese state therefore appears to remain dominant in the domestic economy not least through its key role in finance and banks, and its control of infrastructure.

Two general consequences of China's progress in its relations with capitalism are worth noting before focussing on current political conditions in China. First is the success in Chinese development produced by the opening up of a significant 'free' market within a state system of control. In 1921 Lenin introduced the 'New Economic Policy' (NEP). NEP marked the end of starvation in the USSR's cities and therefore aided the final defeat of the counter revolution. Lenin described the move as state capitalism. China's experience would also seem to show that the capitalist market, albeit controlled by the state, can still function as an instrument of rapid growth in the context of under-development.

Second, there has not been the slightest inkling of any interest in 'democratising' China from the private sector. The attempt in the 1980s and 1990s to weld democratic politics to the 'free market' was always spurious. The Silicon Valley billionaire 'anarchists' were the first to drop their fancies about the new freedom of the world-wide-web in China and the whole free market = democracy show has now been unceremoniously dumped by the 'free world's' main leader.

However, economic corruption, uneven development and social upheaval (China has the largest level of social disturbance in the world according to UN statistics) are never simply causes of problems. They are symptoms. But of what?

Whatever characterisation is applied to the Chinese regime, outside any notion that they are simply capitalist, the contradictions between different types of property, of that owned by the State and that owned by private owners, invariably and increasingly opens cracks and friction in society. Such frictions opened up even in the much smaller NEP experiment in Soviet Russia. They were containable, but not in any longer term and especially not in the context of a global system of capitalism.

There are 594 billionaires in China, ahead of 535 billionaires in the US. A huge and widening gap has opened between the mass of the Chinese population, that has only recently moved from poverty and starvation, and the new rich. There has always been a layer of corrupt officials in the CCP but now corruption is a mechanism used to facilitate the development of this region, to guarantee that planning permit and allow another population movement. It is indispensable to deal with the strained relationship between state monopolies and finance and the need to find large, new chunks of local labour and fast means of exporting fashionable goods. 'Unbalanced and inadequate development' or, more historically put, uneven and combined development, is an absolute necessity of the capitalist system when it encounters under-development. Investment moves to areas with the lowest price of labour - both between countries and within them.

The centralisation of Xi's leadership, the CCP and even the whole of China will not resolve these contradictions. They are unreachable by such measures. Stalin 'resolved' NEP in Russia in 1928 with a ruthless industrialisation, a terrible famine and a mass political purge. The alternative then, outlined by Stalin's critics in the New Course, included the demand for the wholesale democratisation of Communist Party and Russian society as well as a careful and planned industrialisation. The crystallising Communist Party bureaucracy was identified as a major part of the USSR's crisis. The opposition were all murdered for their thoughts. 50 years later, after massive sacrifices and effort by millions, the so called Soviet Union died.

Today, in China, the need to open out an increasingly democratic debate is becoming indispensable in 'solving' the current (and mounting) difficulties. The enormous and genuine 'leap forward' of the mass of Chinese people is the platform for a new accountability of the CCP and the role of capitalist accumulation in Chinese society. Uneven development between the regions and nations in China can be faced and reformed best by decisions made by the very people who live with those difficulties. To open the state to the democracy of China's workers and farmers will certainly 'turn the world upside down'. But it is the real road, the only road that defends the gains that the Chinese people have made and strengthens their future in a way that the Chinese people can decide and embrace and, if necessary, defend.  

Can Corbyn change Britain?

The reason Teresa May, Britain's Prime Minister, survives in office, is nothing to do with her abilities. The Tory Party and Britain's movers and shakers are scared of a Corbyn led Labour government, or rather what a Corbyn government might unleash, so May stays on. But Britain's politics are now more fragile that at any time since the rise of a mass Labour Party at the turn of the 20th Century. Unexpected eruptions in the once impermeable Tory Party (viz an arrogant Foreign Secretary or the exposure of another Cabinet sex-pest) become more and more possible.

The class discipline of the Tory Party in government is as shaky as at any time in its modern history. And a Corbyn led Labour government is the practical alternative. But even a Corbyn led Labour Party - as it stands - cannot become the solution.

It is overwhelmingly obvious that the interest of Britain's working class, inclusive of virtually all who must work to have an income, is to get this wretched Tory government out. But then the question arises; how can the Corbyn Labour Party succeed? How can it stand against a ferocious Capital strike; alienation from all other Western leaders and most of the rest of the planet's rulers; let alone the sabotage plotted by its own bulk of MPs?

The answer, in general, is of course that the success of Corbyn's leadership will depend on the mobilisation and organisation of British people - essentially the British working class people. That is the source of any substantial change for the better in Britain. But expressed just as that, such a magnificent truth, left alone without a context, turns into an achingly empty abstraction. A mass movement for a new government is critical. No progress will be made without it. But we leave the political struggle inside the Labour Party at our peril. The movement both outside and at the base of Labour requires sharp political thinking and action to break through the barriers.

There are many hurdles ahead for a left government but there are basic steps that the Corbyn leadership must take in order to give realistic support to a movement of working class people for decisive change. A mass movement against all forms of austerity may be the key condition for initial success against the Tory government but that is only the beginning. Certain critical political steps are required from the Corbyn leadership to fuse the new government to the mass movement to nourish both and to help build the self-organisation of a new class trying to break from what they experience daily as a failing system.

On November 4 Corbyn wrote out to all Labour members and supporters. His first words were;
'When I ran to be Labour leader, I said I wanted to transform our party into a movement.' He went on to praise the sharp increases in Labour support seen at the last General election.

Momentum, Labour's pro Corbyn left wing, sent out a rejoinder.
'Today, the Labour Party launched the Democracy Review. The review represents the most significant opportunity to radically transform the structures, culture, and balance of power of the party in modern history, and we want as many of you to feed into it as possible.'

These are fine, organisational aims. But they express a political absence - even weakness that must be addressed, whether through regional conferences, open public discussions and debates or a vast, emergency gathering across Britain of any and all who want to see the Tories out and radical change as an alternative.

Examining some of the political steps urgently needed must start with Labour, Corbyn's Labour, and Scotland. Winning a Labour government majority could become difficult, depending on the Scottish vote in a snap General election. Along with the continuing disastrous Labour policy supporting Britain's nuclear weapon, Trident, the British Labour party still has the most juvenile policy on the Scot's right to independence. The current weakness of Scottish Labour is entirely caused by Labour's decades of Tory policies but also by the failure of the party to support the Scots' right to self determination. Corbyn has stated recently that he supports such a right. But that is barely at the beginning of the need for a (rapid) process to revolutionise Labour's approach to Scotland. Labour must offer a solution to this question. Currently it is dividing working class opinion in Scotland, a working class that had made a great leap forward in the Independence debate regarding the sort of country that should be built, into those who feel the issue is over, and those who distrust Corbyn as 'nothing new.'

Corbyn and Kezia Dugdale, Scotland's Labour leader up to August this year, talked about promoting a federal solution across Britain. But this was dropped as a result of the siren calls of key British union leaders, who sincerely believe that Labour, offering a more radical social and economic program than the SNP, would shake mass working class voting in Scotland back into its traditional shape thereby solving the problem by denying it exists.

This will not do. Scottish labour (small l) is, as a result of a two year national debate about their country - amongst other reasons - at the very pinnacle of popular political understanding in Britain. They have studied the direction of their country and society. They are aware of the great levers of power and influence. The British Labour Party must learn from this experience, whether or not people voted for or against independence. Historically, in its formation years, Labour supported self-determination for the Scots. That is the starting point for a renaissance for Scottish Labour today. Such a position implies that it is the Scots and the Scots alone who determine if, when and how any referenda on sovereignty are called. Tying that clear call to a genuine and radical anti-austerity program (putting the SNP leadership to shame) would regroup Scottish politics.

Second, how to raise working class benefits, wages and incomes? Here the Labour leadership have (rightly) offered a vast, new program of public investment which will stop Britain's Capital investment strike and rebuild productivity. Wage caps will be gone. Public service workers will be allowed to seek increases. The top 5% will be properly taxed. The minimum wage will rise and the removal of the most recent Tory measures taken against the unions will be annulled.

All this is a big shift. But it does not address the kernel of the problem of working class income.

Working class incomes are, fundamentally the product of a contest. Trade unions in Britain did not wither away because modern techniques changed work. They were smashed to pieces and chained up. That meant they could not contest for the collective support of the new labour and new industries - where the payment of labour was systematically reduced over decades in relation to profits, managerial incomes and shareholders.

Collective organisation, unions, are the self organised measure that working class people take to resist the tremendous and endless efforts of owners and their wealthy hangers on to extract more production, more profit, with less labour costs. There is no denying that, like the post war Labour Party itself, great unions built even greater towers of internal privilege and self-interest, where self preservation of privileges and perks often rolled over the needs of the union's ranks. But there were many dramatic exceptions, when unions like the Miners NUM took action to defend the income of nurses. And on the 'shop floor' the daily defence of union members saved millions from poverty and worse.

Today, all the anti-union legislation of the past must be rescinded. To succeed in the fight to increase working class incomes, unions must be released from tyrannical laws. A new union movement can be built, by those who fight for each others decent existence. Like a new successful, radical Labour Party, the unions need a total democratic overhaul to win the new millions who labour. But unions are in the end, in this society, the primary self-organised route to the increase of working class incomes and Corbyn's Labour must set them free. That is the real and decisive step for Labour to 'transform itself into a movement.'

Finally the vile, sexist, chauvinism of Britain's main political institutions are available for all to see on any TV at any Prime Minister's question time in Parliament, as red faced buffoons bellow and honk - particularly at women MPs. The mass media have tried to capture the battle by women against their treatment from (male) power in politics but have not succeeded. The point that is emerging from this latest wave of struggle against Britain's woefully backward institutions - is how far they are effectively obstacles to modern social progress!

Labour's creditable efforts to reform itself under Corbyn will mean relatively little if they are not a part of a program to reform Britain's political institutions, most urgently its Parliament. How can Parliament lead society against oppression when its leaders and its organisation effectively promotes sexism and institutional racism; generally blocks working class people from representation, continues to fertilise a vast swamp of Lords; all in the context of a tsunami of austerity for the rest? All this needs root and branch reconstruction.

In this field too, Corbyn's Labour Party must take the issue to the people and their movements. Every vote should count. Until the political culture changes then we need quotas to ensure that women, that people of colour, that working class people represent our society in our political life. Corbyn's Labour has to play a key role in all this. But it will be the movements underway, the defenders of the NHS, the fighters for decent wages, the voices raised against racism that will re-inspire Britain's political institutions. 'None so fit to break the chains as those who wear them.' (Connelly.)

Priti Patel, another small piece in the Alt Right's jigsaw.

The Alt Right does not have a coherent global strategy. But it does aim at power through dominance.

Trump's siren songs in China - including his insistence that it is the previous US leadership's failure that is 'to blame' for Chinese success in the balance of trade between the two countries rather than the craft of the Chinese Communist Party - is actually designed to build US dominance over China. The US already has the largest and most offensive 'cordon sanitaire' around China that the world has ever seen in any previous military disposition. At the same time Trump wants to oil his way into the Chinese market and train the Chinese CP to concern themselves with a 'deranged' North Korea. The Chinese know all this of course, but currently depend disproportionately on financing US debt in government bonds and have a significant holdings in their inflating stock exchange.  Thus the new, epic, silk road to Europe and the vast Chinese investment in Africa.

And Priti Patel in all this? Small beer, but nevertheless part of a gathering international momentum emanating from the US in its own post-glory days. Every nation that sees itself as an 'international player' has its own 'alt right' version of external dominance and the divisive domestic politics required to animate a section of the alienated population and suppress the rest.

Priti Patel's political physiognomy stems from Thatcherite parents (her father was in UKIP.) She denounced foreign aid and called in 2013 for the Department for International Development that she was eventually to lead up to November 8, to be closed. She also opposed gay marriage, wanted the death penalty brought back and even when she had to change some of her more extreme views as a rising star of the Tory Party, she campaigned as a radical right-wing supporter of Brexit.

At first glance her 'secret' meetings with Israeli leaders while on a family holiday seems a simple political disaster for Ms Patel. The decline and fall of an ambitious politician whose hubris overcame their common sense is the flavour of the British media reports. But the traditional British media, with a very few honourable exceptions, is the least analytic in the Western world these days. In reality Priti Patel has already started on a road that has opened up with Trump's victory and the continuing threat from the new right in Austria and now Germany. The fact she is a Tory politician simply reflects the anachronistic political system and the party structure in Britain. In reality, like her fellow Cabinet member Dr Fox, she is carving out a new right wing political project for Britain.

There are some obvious indications of Ms Patel's intended trajectory. Being slung out of PM Teresa May's Cabinet is a bit like being ordered to leave the Titanic. Association with a crumbling, factional, ravaged set of failed has-beens is not the most obvious platform to start your heave towards the top. On the contrary, Ms Patel's 'independence of mind' and her 'willingness' to face May's rejection will (she hopes) soon become valuable currency in the messy struggle to come when this despised  government collapses. She has decided that a General election is coming sooner rather than later and that Corbyn's Labour Party will probably win. Given her politics she expects Labour will fail under the weight of a massive Capital strike and she will be set fair for a run at the new Tory leadership, designed to 'save' the country.

It is also obvious that Ms Patel had no interest in the Department she led and saw it as a means to this particular end.

Most significant of all however is what Ms Patel actually did on her Israeli holiday.

The alt right aim to break down the remnants of the post WW2 consensus (led by the old 'Western world') on all remaining fronts. The United Nations is now (in the absence of the US government / state and the weakness of May, Macron and now Merkel) the leading institution in the world trying to uphold that fragmenting orthodoxy. One of the longest term assumptions bolstered by the UN is the (utterly failed) nominal support for both halves of the original Balfour declaration - which called for a Jewish state in Palestine but also argues that Arab political rights should be upheld. Finally interpreting this idea into the 'two state solution', for decades most Western nations have stuck to this gigantic failure of a policy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump met at the Trump Tower in New York, September 25, 2016. The PM held up Trump as a true friend of Israel. Trump wanted to move the US embassy to divided Jerusalem. The alt right were breaking away from the failed UN cliches - but to the right! They supported Israeli settlements, their control of the Golam Heights and their proposed military hostility to Iran. Even the minimal 'concessions' of the Balfour declaration in respect of Arab rights were to be blown away.

The destruction of the West's traditional political 'common sense' - on the Middle East question, the traditional alliances (including the EU), the forty year effort to get a grip on climate change, on 'global development' and soon to come, on the ban on first-use nuclear weapons - are under assault, from the new right. Ms Patel on her holidays was adding her own shoulder to the new alt right dispensation and signalling to whomever might be watching. It is a part of her new trajectory; not to join an international conspiracy of the far right, but to become a leader of a British type model of politics that lives with the multi-nationals but carves out forms of national dominance over others, both inside the peoples of the country and in relation to other nations.