China Is Not in the Primary Stage of Socialism
By Huang Erwen. Utopia (Wuyou zhi Xiang), January 30, 2015. Translated by Vero Publishing.
An Analysis of the Social Process
The death of Zhou Xiuyun, beaten to death while demanding unpaid wages,[1] calls readily to mind two scenes. One is in Xia Yan's "Indentured Laborers," where the girl called "Reed Stalk" is beaten by the "Number One," the forewoman.[2] The other is in Fang Zhimin's Lovable China, where soldiers, workers and peasant women caught riding without tickets are whipped and humiliated by seven or eight thugs under the command of "a rather short man in a Western suit, very fat, with a bulging belly."[3] Such scenes bear the deep marks of their era. They are emblems of the humiliation of the old, semi-feudal and semi-colonial China.
The events Xia Yan and Fang Zhimin describe took place before 1949, in the semi-feudal, semi-colonial China of roughly the 1930s and 1940s. They reflect the savagery, ferocity and brutality of the feudal lords and colonizers of the last century toward their wage slaves.
In the thirty years from 1949 to 1979, no such brutal incidents occurred in China at all. During this period China carried out the socialist revolution, and especially in its last ten years China had fully built the first stage of communism, that is, socialist society. There was simply no economic or political basis for anything like a worker being beaten to death for demanding his wages.
But after the call for "reform and opening up" in the 1980s, as large numbers of state enterprise workers were laid off and foreign capital was brought in on a massive scale, disputes over pay began to appear. They grew steadily worse, until they became almost universal, an everyday sight in society. With Zhou Xiuyun beaten to death for demanding her wages, they reached a peak. In a country still flying the banner of socialism, there appeared a mark of shame that no country of public ownership would ever permit or could ever produce, a mark that characterized the semi-feudal, semi-colonial China of sixty or seventy years before. It reappeared after China had gone through more than half a century, and after more than thirty years of "reform and opening up," and it has once again become a major emblem of the character of the present era.
This emblem is typical and reflects a general reality. Zhou Xiuyun being beaten to death and Xia Junfeng being sentenced to death and executed by the police, procuratorate and courts[4] are in essence no different. Zhou Xiuyun was killed savagely, revealing the bloodiness and brutality of capitalism in its stage of primitive accumulation; Xia Junfeng was put to death in a civilized way, revealing the falseness and hypocrisy that appear as capitalism develops further. But neither escaped death. They, Zhou Xiuyun and Xia Junfeng, together with the hired workers who jumped from buildings,[5] and the wage slaves of capital of our time who are being slaughtered little by little, unable in the end to escape death, or whose lives are being shortened as they wait to die, were all killed by the defenders of private ownership in the present economic system. Their blood and sweat could flow into a river and their bones could be piled into a mountain. They have become an emblem of an era and will be recorded forever in history.
Private ownership is now very widespread in the present economic system. It has penetrated every corner of society and invaded and poisoned every person's soul. The existence of these emblems can therefore only mean that China's economic base no longer has a socialist character. In its economic system, China has basically completed privatization and is now in the primary stage of a capitalism bearing feudal traces and colonial coloring. In the works of all the classic Marxist writers there is no concept of a "primary stage of socialism" at all; all the propaganda about the "primary stage" of socialism is lies. This colossal lie was invented to deceive all the Chinese people who struggled for decades to build socialism in China, and to seize their wealth. That Communist Party members and police are involved in almost every such incident shows, moreover, that the economic base's departure from public ownership has seriously affected the character of the state superstructure, affecting the core of China's superstructure: the state machine and the Communist Party of China.
In the works of all the classic Marxist writers, we cannot find the concept of a "primary stage of socialism." It is nothing but the result of some people's "revision" of Marxism in the name of "keeping pace with the times" and "developing Marxism."
China has a history of war going back more than a thousand years. Who fought these wars? Peasants. Both sides in every war were peasants. The history of China is therefore a history of peasant wars. What is the greatest characteristic of the peasants? Their dual nature. They have a revolutionary side, and also a counter-revolutionary, backward and conservative side. Whoever grasps this characteristic of the peasants and wins their trust can win the war and shape the course of history.
When we say that so-and-so is a revisionist, we simply mean that he represents the negative, backward, conservative and reactionary consciousness of China's peasants, while avoiding implicating any particular peasant. But the death of Zhou Xiuyun reminds us that the time has come to deliver a sharp blow, a wake-up call, to peasants whose revolutionary spirit has long been suppressed and whose negative, conservative and reactionary consciousness holds sway. Until their revolutionary spirit is aroused, they cannot spontaneously give rise to socialism; they will only give rise to capitalism. They must be told plainly that they are wandering on a road to death, that they must wake up quickly and cast off the illusion of getting rich as individuals, and that returning to the collectivized socialist road is the only correct choice. Any argument that tries to hold on to them, make them hesitate or sway their decision, including cheap sympathy and condescending help, will hinder them from making the right choice and keep pushing them toward a dead end. China has reached a moment of great danger. Once a vicious economic crisis breaks out, and even the peasants have nothing to eat, history tells us that China's peasants will be the first to rise in revolt. Their backward, conservative and reactionary consciousness will instantly turn into a huge force, intense and blindly destructive, that no one can stop. At that point nothing anyone says will help, and the end result will inevitably be China torn apart.
In fact the Chinese government has long been drawing up measures to try to solve the problem of unpaid wages. But all these measures are in essence a bourgeois program, designed to ease the conflict between labor and capital and to intensify the exploitation and oppression of workers. They are not measures directed against privatization, nor measures to restrain or abolish private ownership. Carrying out this program will mark the further consolidation of private ownership in China and its arrival at the middle and higher stages of capitalism. That is not what China needs. China needs a society of equality without exploitation or oppression, a society in which polarization cannot arise. Such a society can only be a society of public ownership.
The Communist Party of China should abandon the notion of the "primary stage" as soon as possible and adjust its political line. It should openly acknowledge that the line of "one central task and two basic points" has led China's economic base to depart completely from the socialist direction and to retreat by great strides into the "primary stage" of capitalism. China must take the socialism expressed in its Constitution as its minimum program, return to socialism, and rebuild socialism.
Translator's Notes
1. Zhou Xiuyun (周秀云). A woman who died in Taiyuan, Shanxi, in December 2014 after a confrontation with police while she was trying to recover unpaid wages. Her death caused a public outcry, and several officers were later detained.
2. Xia Yan, "Indentured Laborers" (包身工, 1935). A classic work of reportage on girls working in Shanghai's Japanese-owned cotton mills. "Reed Stalk" (芦柴棒) is the nickname of an emaciated girl worker; "Number One" (拿摩温) is the pidgin term for the forewoman.
3. Fang Zhimin, Lovable China (可爱的中国, 1935). Written in prison by the Communist leader Fang Zhimin shortly before his execution by the Nationalists.
4. Xia Junfeng (夏俊峰). A street vendor in Shenyang who stabbed two urban management officers to death during a confrontation in 2009, claiming self-defense. He was executed in September 2013, a case that drew wide public sympathy.
5. "The hired workers who jumped from buildings." Most likely a reference to the wave of worker suicides at Foxconn factories in 2010.