The publication of a serious and in-depth study of contemporary China is always a welcome event. Understanding the transformations of the Asian giant over the past few decades, and their impact on international relations as a whole is essential for questioning where the global system is headed. This year, Iskra Books published André Barbieri’s China: Where Extremes Meet. Trotsky, Permanent Revolution and a Critique of Capital’s Multilateralism in the Xi Jinping Era, which fully meets these requirements of seriousness and depth.
The book is organized into three parts. The first discusses the role China can play in an increasingly disordered world order. To do so, it investigates the profound transformations that Chinese society has undergone in recent decades. The second part reviews the strategies implemented in China since the first revolutionary uprisings of the 20th century, highlighting the consequences of the Maoist leadership’s seizure of power, which, from the formation of the People’s Republic, blocked any socialist transition. Finally, the third part describes the processes of struggle that have been developing throughout China, the regime’s responses to them, and the enormous revolutionary possibilities that could arise if revolutionary parties capable of harnessing those phenomena were to develop.
The Development of Capitalism in China
Barbieri has drawn upon a comprehensive study of sources that have allowed him, and also allows those of us who read his book, to gain insight into the complexity of China’s socio-economic configuration. He offers good grounds for why we should understand China as a capitalist social formation, despite all the hybrid aspects — the “characteristics” of so-called “Chinese socialism,” as it were — that mark its socio-economic system.
A very valuable aspect of this study is the broad range of authors with whom Barbieri polemicizes with. We find some classic discussions, in the field of the Marxist Left and related fields, such as Perry Anderson’s article “Two Revolutions” and Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing. But he also engages with some of the most recent discussions of China, such as Isabella Weber’s study on how China escaped the shock therapy applied in Russia and Eastern Europe. Domenico Losurdo, Michael Roberts, and Elias Jabour are some of the other authors with whom Barbieri also develops counterpoints. The critique that Barbieri offers of these thinkers is very productive, as it reveals the weaknesses of perspectives that seek to question or relativize China’s capitalist transformation.
Advancing through these controversies, the book offers ample empirical evidence of the problems of those arguments that seek to deny China’s capitalist character. This book solidly shows how the reforms introduced by Deng initiated a process that created the conditions for the development of exploitative relations based on wage labor, a fundamental measure if we wish to discuss the extent to which a society is capitalist or not. The center of gravity of the capitalist social order, its basic existential fulcrum, lies in the possibility of finding an available wage labor force from which to extract surplus value. Of course, historically, there were formations integrated into global capitalism where surplus value extraction was not based on wage relations, such as those based on slave labor — such was the case of the American cotton plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries. But if we want to assess whether China more closely conforms to what the CCP bureaucracy claims — a “socialism with Chinese characteristics” — or whether it is truly a capitalist society, we must evaluate the extent to which production relations have transformed in a capitalist way. André shows how the characteristic dispossession of wage labor, on which capitalism is based, has advanced in China. He studies how labor precarity has developed, taking on a structural character, organized by the government itself, within the limits of social stability. The migrant workforce, which today constitutes the majority of the country’s working class, sees its rights curtailed when it leaves rural areas to settle without permits in cities or manufacturing areas. This allowed China to have a labor force with very low wages and subject to temporary contracts to secure its growth model and offer it to large transnational capital for decades.
This does not mean that there is a univocal measure that allows us to determine when an economic and social formation with contradictory features definitively becomes capitalist. While there are numerous manifestations that allow us to speak of capitalism in China, there are others that seem to relativize or deny it. Among them, none other than the control of the state apparatus by a party that defines itself as Communist. And, if we look at economic policy, we find a series of interventionist or planning policies that go beyond what we traditionally see in capitalist states, although they have been restricted over the last several decades. It is therefore necessary to proceed carefully to unravel, through these contradictory manifestations, where the reality of China lies. Barbieri successfully proceeds with these operations and provides a panorama of contemporary China that allows us to understand the profound scope of this gravitational pull of capital. In the book, we see how, although China does not exhibit the “normal” functioning of the law of value according to Western parameters, due to the very particular reconstruction of capitalist primacy within its territory, this does not lead us to deny its presence. As he also convincingly argues: pointing to a supposed incompatibility between the Communist Party’s control of the state apparatus and the primacy of capitalist relations of production in the economy became a very common way of reducing the complexity of the sui generis character of Chinese capitalism in order to conduct a favorable exegesis of its policies. This ignores the fact that the state in China, as in all countries where there is social domination by an exploiting class based on the extraction of surplus value, is also an organ of class domination of the bourgeoisie over workers and peasants.
An important theoretical challenge posed by the Chinese process is to identify how, within the framework of the political continuity of the State, without an open rupture, this social counterrevolution took place. I believe this provides an important definition of what China has been since the 1949 revolution: a transitional economy, lacking a strictly defined social identity to the extent that the hallmarks of the old system of capitalist production and social reproduction survived as subordinate remnants through the expropriation of the propertied class within the newly emerging society. The decisive factor in understanding where a formation with these contradictory features was headed lay in the forms of the State, that is, whether there could truly be leadership from the working class itself or whether a bureaucracy would seize power, expropriating it from the masses. This is a question that affects the social base on which it is grounded, but also the political regime. Socialism, as Barbieri rightly points out, can only be a conscious construction; it does not develop “automatically” as occurs with capitalism. It depends on the instruments of self-organization and conscious self-determination of the masses, Soviet-type councils (with all the rich particularity that each country confers on these institutions of coordination and self-activity) to evolve. A transitional economy, if it moves from capitalism to socialism, needs these founding bodies of a new type of state (of the type of the Commune of 1871, perfected by the Russian Soviets of 1917) to advance. The People’s Republic never had any such state since 1949. The bureaucratically deformed workers’ state that emerged from the October Revolution of 1949 — which at that stage had freed China from the imperialist yoke more than it had expropriated the bourgeoisie (which would more properly occur in 1956) — contained elements of a transitional economy to the extent that it had deprived the bourgeoisie of power. However, the absence of a strategy linked to the international expansion of the revolution, something that Maoism shared with Stalinism based in the USSR, led first to stagnation and then to the regression of the transitional direction of the economy within China. Instead of advancing toward socialism, it deteriorated the elements of the bureaucratically planned economy and strengthened the conditions that allowed for the resurgence of capitalist tendencies. These tendencies were fueled by the entire course of Deng Xiaoping’s opening reforms and Jiang Zemin’s liberalizing offensive. During the 1990s, the latter completed the restoration of capitalism through the drastic reconfiguration of state-owned enterprises.
This characterization of the form of transition as one in flux, where either progress is made toward socialism or a reversion is made to capitalist dominance, and the importance of the forms of the state, such as Soviet democracy, is key. This allows us to dismantle those formalisms, which even authors as subtle and scrupulous as Perry Anderson, who once asserted the continuity of some form of socialism in China, fall into, based on the continued existence of the Communist Party regime in power. The second part of the book, which explores how the bureaucratization of the People’s Republic and the blockage of the transition are rooted in Mao’s strategies for seizing power, is another highly relevant and important aspect of Barbieri’s work.
Benign Multipolarity?
The discussion about the social foundations of the People’s Republic is important in itself, but it is also intertwined with another equally important issue: the question of the extent to which China can play a role in a multipolar system organized more favorably for oppressed peoples than the US-dominated imperialist order, based on the plundering of the planet and reactionary capitalist social domination across the globe. Denying China’s capitalist aspects allows us to question the idea that, with its rise, it will repeat the mechanisms of plunder and oppression characteristic of capitalist powers. What Barbieri argues instead is that we should consider China as a capitalist state “rapidly rising, with imperialist features.” My opinion is that China’s current situation warrants stating this more clearly. I would say it is an imperialism in the process of construction, or consolidation, because if we compare China’s international power projection, it already surpasses that of many countries we would not hesitate to call imperialist, including Great Britain, Germany, or Japan. Of course, we must avoid seeing this as a completed process. This is a warning Barbieri makes, with which I can only agree. But beyond this nuanced discussion of how to define China’s current moment, we share the view that its status and behavior in the international arena do not warrant supporting the idea that China can be the guarantor of a benevolent or peaceful multipolarity.
In the book, we can see how China’s ongoing deployment has already led it to adopt policies that contradict the idea of a benevolent counterweight to Western imperialism. In Africa, for instance, where it has had the greatest advantage over other powers, we see that the pressures derived from indebtedness and the deepening of extractivism accompany China’s expansion. The Chinese state has strengthened its political and military position in African countries through economic mechanisms, ensuring the supply of raw materials in exchange for infrastructure investments or cash contributions to leverage the continental ruling classes willing to collaborate with Beijing on geopolitical terms. It pursues a policy of permanent influence over national security, which plunges these countries into tight networks of dependency. The notion of non-intervention in the internal affairs of countries increasingly diminishes what China does within them. In Latin America and other latitudes, this is not currently the case, and this may create the illusion that it can establish itself as a power that does not reproduce imperialist patterns, but this gives a distorted view of the effects of China’s expansion.
Uneven and Combined Development in China
Finally, another merit of the book is its use of the category of uneven and combined development to theorize China’s trajectory. The idea of extremes meeting, which appears in the title, is closely linked to this theoretical approach. Uneven and combined development was originally theorized by Trotsky to refer to Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. In that context it was used to describes the emergence of small islands of great capitalist development that concentrated a few thousand industrial workers in factories with the most advanced technology — often set up by foreign industrialists or subsidized by the state itself — existed alongside a society that remained largely dominated by the servile relations of production (where peasants were bound to the land) on which the Tsar’s regime was based. For Trotsky, the law of uneven and combined development could be understood as the result of three intertwined mechanisms. The first, he summarized as the “whip of backwardness”: capitalist states that were lagging behind in development — with significant consequences, for example, for armies — were pressured to seek modernization, that is, in this case, the introduction of capitalist techniques. Second, we have “the advantage of backwardness”: for those who lagged behind, more advanced techniques were available, because they had been created in other countries, and they did not need to be developed from scratch. This made it possible to compress historical time. But, as Trotsky explained in his third point, the possibility of incorporating these new techniques and transforming the economic structure with them was limited by the conditions of the society in which they were introduced. In Tsarist Russia, the introduction of large factories did not in the least mean a modernization of the economy and social relations as a whole. On the contrary, Tsarism sought modernization to perpetuate its power, based on the nobility and its control over the land. To advance its projects, it increased the pressure on the rest of society, multiplying tensions and provoking powerful social upheavals that led to the first attempt at revolution in 1905. With this theory of uneven and combined development, Trotsky showed how national processes could not be analyzed outside of what was happening on the planet as a whole, given the formation of a deeply interdependent capitalist world economy.
In this book, Barbieri uses this method to trace the contours of China’s uneven and combined development. Xi’s China is analyzed in connection with the reconfiguration that global capitalism has undergone in recent decades. The rise of the Asian giant must be understood not only by observing the social, political, and economic changes generated by the restoration of capitalism within China, but also by understanding that it is a very important chapter in these processes of change in the entire global system. This understanding, which runs throughout the book, allows us to avoid the temptations of methodological nationalism, which plague much research on China, with its focus almost exclusively on what happened within China and on state policies, with the international context barely appearing as a context.
China, more than four decades after Deng’s first reforms, had become the most dynamic hub of global capital accumulation and the manufacturing workshop of the planet. But such an accelerated transformation had enormous unbalancing consequences. Not all sectors in China benefited equally from the fruits of economic growth. The locomotive of growth, where it did arrive, forced accelerated adaptations to the labor regimes demanded by the unbridled machinery of accumulation: grueling workdays and the confinement of dormitory factories became the norms to which new generations of China’s working class had to adapt. These norms, moreover, were carried out in the name of a curious “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that offered an army of cheap labor to multinational corporations that located part of their production lines in the country.
Today, many different “Chinas” coexist within the country, each one highly diverse in terms of its material capabilities: from the highly advanced technological environment of Shenzhen and other Southeast Asian cities where the world’s most productive and cost-effective factories are located, to other geographies where the conditions of traditional rural life remain little changed. Between one extreme and the other, we find multiple variations, subject to successive transformations driven by the regime to sustain the growth required to ensure social order.
Multipolarity or Permanent Revolution?
Given the frenetic pace of China’s transformations, it is not surprising that explosive tensions have developed between social classes, and that the CCP regime has, since Xi took office, become increasingly Bonapartist. This shift is explained by the need to balance these tensions and confront exacerbated international rivalry. Both aspects are addressed in the book’s analysis. Another of the major contributions we find in Barbieri’s work is an in-depth analysis of the situation of the working class and some of the main processes of struggle it has undergone, from the restoration of capitalism to the present day. As part of this, André describes the richly heterogeneous nature of the urban working class, which has absorbed the migrant rural proletariat within its fold.
China’s rapid development, with its contradictions and conflicting extremes, raises the prospect of its becoming one of the main revolutionary powder kegs in the turbulent contemporary world. Based on the study of social classes and their fractions, the various discontents that have accumulated during the bourgeois restoration, and the growing Bonapartization of the Chinese regime, Barbieri concludes with a crucial question: will China sustain a benevolent multilateralism of the world capitalist order, or will it be the stage where the current state of permanent revolution will once again be at stake? It should come as no surprise that this country — where very important revolutionary achievements by workers and peasants took place in the 20th century, where decades before expelling imperialism and unifying the country in 1949, they demonstrated their willingness to fight, and where today in the 21st century the workforce that manufactures goods sold around the world is concentrated — is where some of the most powerful revolutionary skirmishes to come are taking place. This book concludes with this emphasis, for which strategic work is fundamental. Therefore, the book’s final overview of strategic debates and the call to bring into play the best weapons of the revolutionary Marxist tradition to forge the parties that can lead the working class to victory, are important. This is the challenge posed in China and around the world, and it is inseparable from the reconstruction of an international revolutionary organization of the Fourth International.
Originally published in Spanish in La Izquierda Diario on May 18.
Translated by James Dennis Hoff