From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949-

Markin comment (repost from 2012):

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
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Workers Vanguard No. 966	8 October 2010

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Fight Against Capitalist Repression

(Quote of the Week)

In the name of the “war on terror,” the government has massively reinforced its arsenal of police surveillance and terror in a wholesale assault on democratic rights. More than 80 years ago, Victor Serge, an anarcho-syndicalist who was won to communism under the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, showed how the bourgeois legal system serves to protect capitalist rule against the workers and the oppressed. As Serge stressed, the proletariat must see the fight against the bourgeois rulers? attacks on democratic rights and other gains as a necessary part of its struggle against the capitalist order.

In every country, the workers’ movement has had to win, in over half a century of struggle, the right to associate and the right to strike. Even in France this right is still not conceded to state employed workers nor those in industries considered to be of public utility (as if all industries aren’t), such as the railways.

In the conflicts between capital and labor, the army has often intervened against labor—never against capital.

In court the defense of the poor is nothing short of impossible, because of the cost of any judicial action; in effect, a worker can neither bring a case nor defend one.

The overwhelming majority of crimes are directly caused by poverty and come into the category of attacks on property. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates are from the poor....

To respect legality such as this is to be fooled by it. Nonetheless, it would be equally disastrous to ignore it. The advantages for the workers? movement are the greater the less one is fooled. The right to exist and to act legally is, for the organizations of the proletariat, something which must constantly be re-won and extended....

We believe that in countries where the reaction has not yet triumphed, destroying the previous democratic constitution, the workers will have to fight to defend every inch of their legal position, and in other countries fight to regain it.

—Victor Serge, What Every Revolutionary Should Know About State Repression (1926)