August 10, 2023
By Stephen Gowans
The integration of China into the economies of the G7 lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty at the expense of middle-to-lower income workers in G7 countries. These proletarians, displaced by competition from lower-wage Chinese labor, have gravitated toward the far-Right, which demagogically offers relief from their precarious economic condition. The fractured, feckless, disoriented and China-addled Left, in contrast, doesn’t even offer the sop of false promises.
While it has traditionally been the professed champion of the proletarian, the Left—from liberals who sing paeans to globalization and defenders of “socialist” China who rhapsodize about globalization raising hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty—has abandoned the world proletariat and the campaign for socialism, for the Third World proletariat and its integration into a capitalist world economy under the guidance of political parties who claim to be on a journey to a socialism which exists, perhaps, in some crepuscular future. Liberals see in the massive Third World work force the bourgeois attraction of access to cheap labor while defenders of “socialist” China have found their golden calf in the Communist Party of China.
The left has failed to mobilize the despair of displaced workers in the countries of the G7 and channel it into the project of socialist transformation, in part because it is transfixed by China and Beijing’s opposition to the United States, and by what it sees as the achievement of the country’s Communist party in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. But China’s uplift is Janus-faced. What the Chinese have gained—their transformation from a nation of mainly poor farmers producing food for local consumption into a nation of mainly poor factory workers producing gadgets for Western consumers—has undermined the achievements of the labor movement elsewhere in the world and weakened the working-class struggle globally.
China’s opening to the West meant that the pool of labor available for exploitation by capitalists of the G7 expanded significantly. A G7 labor market in which the proletariat had achieved some degree of protection by way of unionization and the concession of social reforms extracted from business-dominated and -oriented governments, was suddenly flooded by a cataract of low-wage labor with few social welfare protections. On top of this blow, came another: The Communist Party of China, keen to ensure that its workers prevailed in the competition for jobs, offered the world’s largest enterprises the sweeteners of tax breaks, subsidies, and party-controlled pseudo-unions, to relocate factories to China. G7 governments that had relied on businesses to defray part of the expense of funding social supports for workers, now found that the social supports were no longer affordable in what was described as “an increasingly competitive global environment.”
The court philosophers of the bourgeoisie offered soothing words. More competition was a good thing, so long as the G7 took steps to remain competitive. Remaining competitive meant: lower wages; no unions; bare-bones social security. That is, becoming like China.
This isn’t the view of the apostles of “socialist” China. While they rhapsodize about the hundreds of millions of Chinese lifted out of poverty, they attribute this development, not to the displacement of high-wage unionized workers in the West by low-wage (effectively) non-unionized workers in the East, but to “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. As such, they match G7 economists in producing a consoling illusion. If defenders of “socialist” China attribute the uplifting of hundreds of millions of Chinese to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (and not to the competition for jobs being won by Beijing offering to indulge the G7 bourgeoisie with low-wages, ductile labor, tax concessions and subsidies—essentially scabbing) then G7 economists attribute it to something called “globalization.”
“Globalization”, we’re to understand, is a good thing because it has uplifted hundreds of millions of Chinese and delivered goods to Western consumers at very low prices. But what of the other side of the coin? Low prices come from workers toiling gruelingly long hours in sweatshops for subsistence-level wages. Also left unsaid is that these workers have displaced their class cohorts who once commanded higher wages, worked fewer hours, and enjoyed better benefits. In other words, “globalization” has been good indeed for the bourgeoisie but a net loss for the proletariat, whose conditions, on a world-scale, have worsened.
We’re also told by the apostles of “socialist” China that the Communist Party of China is a good thing for the same reason G7 economists say globalization is a good thing: because it has uplifted hundreds of millions of people. But the Communist Party of China and globalization, are, in this context, the same thing. The Communist Party of China lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty because it cooperated with the G7 bourgeoisie in the project of globalization—that is, in scabbing on a world scale.
To be sure, a net proletarian loss globally is of little moment to a Left which seems incapable of seeing the world as an integrated whole, preferring, instead, to confine itself to matters of parochial significance. Chinese workers were uplifted, but what happened elsewhere? Did Chinese uplift happen in a Panglossian world of win-win? The problem with a national perspective is that what happens in one’s own little corner of the world is affected by, and affects, other corners of the world. No man is an island, and neither is a country. Some Communists believe, contra Marx and Lenin, that the Left ought to concern itself with what happens within their own country’s borders, and let people in other countries worry about their own affairs. That might be sage advice, if the world’s over 195 countries were not interconnected in multifarious ways into a global whole. If the Chinese Communist Party has organized a giant campaign of scabbing, there are profound implications for the socialist project and for the working class in toto, touching workers in every country. One might subscribe to the theory that Chinese Communists should look after the Chinese, while Canadian, US, and British communists champion Canadian, US, and British workers. Sauve qui peut. The trouble is, even if that is what one thought the Left should do, and it isn’t what the Left should do, it is not what the Left is actually doing. For all the talk of addressing local issues, the Left is hardly addressing the “local” issue of the plight of workers who have been displaced by competition from low-wage Chinese labor. That has fallen, by default, to the far-Right.
It should be plain to Marxists that it is not the job of communists to advance the interests of one part of the world’s proletariat against another, not the Chinese part against the G7 part, and not the G7 part against the Chinese part. “Workers of the world unite!” while inscribed on the banner of many communist parties, is a slogan, it seems, that carries little weight these days in discussions in some communist circles. “Sure, it’s all fine in theory,” one can hear some communists harrumph, “but this is the real world!” When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they did so as part of a project of world revolution, not to present Russia as the low-wage factory floor to which the European bourgeoisie could shift production in search of higher margins.
There’s an assumption that needs to be addressed that lurks in the idea, or, to put it more aptly, in the unexamined doctrine, that “globalization” or “the Communist Party of China” lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. The assumption is that the gain in China’s GDP could not have happened without China’s embracing capitalism under the direction of the Communist party. I have no doubt that the outcome of China’s integration into global capitalism would have been less favorable for China had the Communist party not taken a strong guiding hand. But the assumption that it is only by embracing capitalism that the Communist party could have directed China to its present level of development is debatable. To Marx, it was not private ownership of the means of social production that produced a society of plenty, but what had developed with it: social production, the division of labor, and the extension of human productivity by machinery. It was possible for China to take advantage of these benefits without promoting a private sector.
The USSR had, from its first five-year plan until Gorbachev began dismantling the socialist economy, grown at an often strong pace, and always unremittingly, without the high degree of income inequality, unemployment, and brutally long working hours that have stained China’s journey along the capitalist road. Moreover, Soviet economic development did not come at the expense of the proletariat in the West. On the contrary, the USSR provided a counter-narrative to capitalism that spurred Western governments to make concessions to their workers as a prophylaxis against a possible revolution inspired by the example of what Soviet workers had achieved—full employment, virtually free housing and public transportation, free education and healthcare, unmatched advances in the status of women, racial equality, and so on. In contrast, China inspires no proletarian movement anywhere. China’s effect on the lives of workers in the Western world has been the exact opposite—to worsen their conditions, rather than improve them. Whereas the Western bourgeoisie found in the Soviet Union a competitor with which it had to vie for the allegiance of the world’s proletariat, in the Communist Party of China, the bourgeoisie of the G7 has found a partner with which it can divide the workers of the world.
China-enthusiasts have crowed about how the Communist Party of China, unlike its Soviet counterpart, cracked the code of rapid economic development. But their analysis is flawed. First, it understates the robustness of Soviet economic growth. Second, it fails to take account of the reality that the Soviet Union, in remaining faithful until Gorbachev to its Marxist-Leninist origins, had to row against the strong current of US opposition—an opposition which never rested for a moment in its efforts to contain Soviet economic development. Deng Xiaoping set China on a course of side-stepping this problem by undertaking two transitions: from socialism to capitalism and from competing with the US capitalist class to cooperating with it. Once China offered itself as America’s low-wage factory floor, Washington did all it could to accelerate China’s growth. China’s economic development had more to do with Washington than Beijing, just as impediments to Soviet growth had much to do with US policy.
Times have changed. Fired by dreams, not of world revolution, but of remaking China as a great civilization, Chinese Communists have decided to embark on yet another transition—this time, from corporate America’s supervisor on the Chinese factory floor, to world leader of the industries of the future. But there’s a hitch. Corporate America won’t yield its spot at the pinnacle of the global bourgeois order without a fight. And so it is that the growth in China that G7 economists hailed as the blessing of capitalism and China’s claque of sycophants in the West celebrated as the product of the Communist Party’s brilliance, withers under the assault of a concerted campaign of US economic warfare. Where is the vaunted Chinese growth model now? Whereas Washington once worked unremittingly to sabotage Soviet economic growth because Soviet socialism threatened US capitalism, the US government now works ceaselessly to kneecap the Chinese economy because Chinese capitalism threatens US capitalism.
Chinese officials cry foul. “No fair,” they grouse. The scabs are learning what capitalism is really all about. In the meantime, the victims of globalization—the low-and-middle-income proletariat of the G7 – drift toward the pseudo-solutions of the far-Right, because the Left – which no longer believes in Marxism, socialism, the doctrine that workers have no country, or the necessity of uniting the world’s workers—has nothing to offer globalization’s losers except celebration of the scabs who took their jobs.
What's Left 