Crux
2nd November 2010, 22:47
The Great Crisis and the Great Resistance: Labour movements one tide after another, struggles emerging all around us
Tuesday, 2 November 2010.
To fight for the establishment of independent grassroots trade unions
Chen Mo, Chinaworker.info
What workers should do are those things that they can achieve through their own power!
—— F. Engels, The Conditions of Working Class in England
According to the reports of the Japanese newspaper "Asahi" on 30 July, from mid-May to late-July this year, there were at least 43 strikes in China, 70% of which (32 strikes) occurred in Japanese enterprises. This figure doesn't include the "chain strikes" that involved more than 20 enterprises in the industrial zone of Dalian that continued for more than a month, including much of July. This recent wave of strikes is the most significant and influential one in China ever since the big wave of privatisation of state-owned enterprises and the massive lay-off of workers that happened in 2002. Therefore, some leftists in China have called May this year "Red May", and different political tendencies have engaged in various analyses and debates around this strike wave both within and outside of China.
On 17 May, more than 1000 workers at the Honda plant in Foshan engaged in strike action, and raised the demands of "increasing wages and restructuring the trade unions". After a period of strikes that stretched for over half a month, it only ended just before the ultra-sensitive date of June the 4th and the anniversary for the Tiananmen incident. Through resisting against the local government, the capitalists and the government-run trade union and their actions of harassment and suppression, this strike action achieved certain positive results in a limited sense. The workers acquired a 24% - 32% increase in wages (around 500 RMB). After this, from Guangdong to North China, from the coastal regions to the great interior, from foreign-capital companies to state-owned enterprises, strike waves have spread around the entire country like wild fire.
Strikes have occurred in at least 9 Honda plants around China, as well as in Toyota and Nissan plants. For instance, on 17 June, a strike action occurred at the Xingguang rubber and plastics company in Tianjin that is owned by Toyota; on 18 June, strikes occurred at a Toyota synthesis plant in the same city. At the same time, a strike happened at the Gaowei metallugy factory in Wuhan that services Honda plants, as well as a factory that produces componenets for Nissan cars located in Zhongshan of Guangdong province. In mid-June at a subsidary IPO enterprise of Foxconn located in the Pudong district of Shanghai, there emerged a "quasi-general strike" against the plan to relocate the factory. Several hundred workers in the rubber industry working for KOK International in Kunshan of Jiangsu province engaged in a strike on Friday 4 June. In Shaanxi province, 900 workers at the Japanese-owned Brothers company that produces industrial sewing machines engaged in a street demonstration that lasted from 3 June to 10 June. At the moment, strikes have not just happened in foreign-owned multi-nationals, but also in state-owned enterprises such as the Qianjiang gear transmission factory in Chongqing, at which a strike action occurred at around the same time as the strikes in Foshan.
Since the end of June, "chain strikes" that have lasted for several months and involved tens of thousands of workers have occurred at more than 20 enterprises in the special economic zone in Dalian. This is the biggest wave of strikes ever since the "chain strikes" that happened at the same location in September 2005. The strikes in 2005 happened due to the lack of wage increases for over a decade at the numerous Japanese-owned factories and enterprises within the Dalian special economic zone, which led to massive anger among the working class there. The strike at the time also touched on many basic issues of workers' basic political and economic rights, such as the mechanism for changing wages, collective contracts and the rights of trade union representatives etc. None of these had been successfully solved at the time. According to online reports and relevant statistical figures, ever since June this year, most of the strike waves in Dalian involved world-famous Japanese enterprises, such as Mabuchi Motors, Yiguang Towels, Nidec Machinery, Mattel, Star Micronics, Roybi, Cnailisi, Toshiba, Toto, Canon, YKK, Float Glass, Yas-Yamatake, Fuji Plastics, Asahi Keiki, Mitsukoshi, Hayakawa, Nakamura-Tome Precision Industry, Tostem Construction and Takachiho.
In fact, this new round of strikes did not just occur in China. As "Voice of America" reported, this summer low-wage slaves across many south-east Asian countries engaged in struggles to fight for basic economic rights. The minimum wage has not been increased in Bangladesh for the last 4 years and the working conditions there are extremely harsh. The massive inflation that occured in 2006 meant an actual reduction in real income for most workers. In July this year, massive strike waves by workers that demanded wage rises turned into mass riots. In addition, multiple instances of workers' strike actions occurred in India, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, which forced their respective governments to raise the minimum wage levels. During the periods of rapid economic progress in these regions, capitalists and governments have acquired massive profits, but workers have yet to see any real benefits from it. On the other hand inflation and the current economic crisis have caused direct problems for the lower layers of workers, especially in areas such as food and housing which are the most basic necessities of life.
In China itself, due to extreme neo-liberal capitalist economic policies, workers' wages as a proportion of GDP have decreased continuously for 22 years, from 67% in 1983 to 37% in 2005. These figures show which class has really paid for these "capitalist reforms". According to the figures released by China's own government-controlled trade unions, nearly a quarter of Chinese workers have received absolutely no increase in their wage levels over the last 5 years. In fact, labour costs are only a very small amount of the overall costs of multi-national companies based in China.
In 2008 the economic crisis began, and in order to reduce the risk to capital, the CCP regime and the capitalist class freezed the minimum wage, reduced overall wage levels and began to lay-off workers. This meant that Chinese workers who have already been massively exploited faced the brunt of the crisis. As the first stage of the economic crisis drew to a close, due to the fact that it became very difficult to find high-profit sectors for investment and the expansion of production, capital due to its intrinsic nature of forever chasing after profits must begin to invest in relatively low-risk sectors, therefore the property market as well as the daily circulation of ordinary consumer goods became venues for opportunistic investment by capitalists, and as a result this has caused significant levels of inflation.
Although the official CPI index published by the National Statistics Bureau in July 2010 is only 3.3%, but according to the views of Finance professor Michael Pettis at Beijing University, during the first half of this year the actual rate of inflation in China is as high as 6% or more. Committee member Yu Yongding at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has also commented that the official CPI figure does not really reflect the actual inflation of goods prices in China. Therefore, people in China have commented about how due to opportunistic investment, the prices of very basic goods like garlic, green peas and black beans can increase by several times on the Chinese market, and the prices of many fruits and meat products have raised by 20%. Since the start of this year, costs of medical products and housing rents have also increased significantly.
Under this kind of situation, struggles for basic rights can only occur within the workplaces, and therefore strike action has become the primary vehicle for struggle. Due to differences in education levels, social views and economic prosperity, we can see from the latest wave of strikes the vibrant new spirits of the new generation of workers who were born in the 1980s and 1990s in China. The internet, computers and mobile phones are an integral part of the communication tools used by the new generation of youths, and various internet chat rooms and forums have become a basic platform for new workers to interact with one another. At present there are over 200 million users of the chat program QQ, and most of these are from the ordinary and young wage-earning classes. Mobile QQ and text messaging have become important tools for workers to exchange information and to communicate. Through talking with some workers who have participated in the strikes, one can discover that they have some knowledge of the relevant labour laws as well, and have a clear consciousness to seek out the opinions of the media and specialists. Some workers also have some understanding of the importance of trade unions and the need for independent unions in China. For example, during the strikes by Honda workers at Hainan, many workers have repeatedly raised the slogans of "restructuring the trade unions" and "elect trade union representatives". Although the majority of workers have not really accepted socialism in general, there is already a class-wide consciousness based on united struggle.
An employee at the Taiwanese-owned KOK enterprise in Kunshan of Jiangsu province clearly wrote in his "The heart-felt opinions of an employee": "Solidarity equals strength, and only through struggle is there hope. At far we have the "end of year" prizes, nearer there are the examples of Honda and Foxconn. These all serve as our exemplars and symbols of strength for us." From this one can clearly see the spirit of class solidarity and struggle, and the clear consciousness workers possess of the importance of fighting for basic rights. If leftists cannot recognise these clear signs of consciousness, then it would be a mistaken understanding of the Chinese workers' movement in general.
According to the views of orthodox Maoists in China, these economic struggles by the "new workers" of China do not challenge the basic ownership rights of capital, and they are at most a kind of "trade unionist" consciousness, a manifestation of "proto-revolutionary awareness". Also these young workers are generally "individualistic, short-sighted, slothful, selfish and disorganised". They are different from the "old workers" who have experienced the Maoist period, who are much more "class-conscious" and "politically aware". But aren't this kind of discriminatory views towards the "new workers" of China similar to how the capitalists view workers? The negative views some new workers in China have towards "the old stagnant Maoist socialist flag" indeed reflect Maoism's own problems.
In addition, the "revolutionary old workers" promoted by Maoists are getting old both individually and as a class, and are weakening politically, and will eventually exit the arena of history. Capitalists with the aid of time is silently destroying them, they are the remanent memories of the last instance of deformed revolution and the swan songs of the last defeat of class warfare. Even if one day in the future, genuine socialism where workers democratically control all enterprises is truly established, these enterprises would still be very different from the "state-owned enterprises" of the Maoist era. But now we wish to give our utmost respect to the "old workers" of China who are "roaring their last" and continuing the struggles against capitalism. Their determined struggles during this most difficult period have demonstrated the fighting spirit of the Chinese working class which possesses a glorious revolutionary tradition.
Of course, the "new workers" have yet to develop a fully mature class consciousness, but at the same time they have not been influenced by the old bureaucratised workers' movements and Maoism. As the primary force of the Chinese working class in general both today and in the future, they shall become the main fighting force of the Chinese worker's movement. As Lenin pointed out: "We are a party of the future, and the future belongs to the youths. We are a party of those who establish new things, and the youths always like to follow those who establish new things. We are a party that fights against the old corrupt things of the world tirelessly, and the youths are those who are most prone to tireless struggles."
As the "Socialist" magazine already pointed out in related articles published in 2009, the class structure of Chinese society has undergone the most fundamental changes as the largest capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation in all of human history is occurring in China as we speak. Although the hukou system that segregates urban and rural populations which was created to better control the flow of labour still exists, and in theory rural populations still consist of 60% of the Chinese population, but the actual percentage of rural populations in China is only around 30%, and agriculture only consists of 5% of the overall GDP. Around 300-400 million people with rural hukou are already increasingly separate from rural production and living styles in the concrete sense, this is especially true for the tens of millions of "new workers" (the second or third generation of rural migrant labourers born in the 1980s and 1990s). These youths around 20 years of age have had a medium level of education, and although their hukou is still officially rurual, many of these people have never really experienced what it is like to live in the villages. More importantly, subjectively they will never define themselves as "genuinely rural". Indeed, due to discrimination they would usually not identify themselves as "urban dwellers", but this does not affect their self-identification as "workers". According to a report published in 2009 in Guangdong province, around 81% of all "new workers" identify as workers.
As Engels described to his letter addressed to Sorge, "China remains to be conquered by capitalist production. But when it finally conquers China, it will find that it can no longer exist in its own country. In China millions of people will be forced to live their home. They will migrate to Europe, and in great amounts. And as competition among the Chinese increases in scale, it will rapidly radicalise the situation where you are and where I am. This way, as capitalism conquers China it will also cause the collapse of capitalism in Europe and the Americas."
Engels' prediction is largely correct. In the neo-colonial world led by China, including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in Asia as well as Africa and Latin America, and parts of Eastern Europe, one could indeed see that hundreds of millions of people have left their original homes to be concentrated at the production bases in coastal industrial regions where global capital is at its greatest focus. But relatively speaking only a small minority of labourers have actually been exported both legally and illegally to developed industrial nations. Due to the "low labour cost enslavement" placed upon them by capital and the "race to the bottom" effects that is evident on the international level, radicalisation has been initiated in the advanced Western nations, as well as massive scale de-industrialisation, but so far none of these are sufficient for the economic collapse of capitalism in advanced Western nations.
Capital, as the primary force for the entire capitalist market, can indeed flow everywhere, but it is not omnipotent. Capital has as its primary goal the maximisation of profits, and centred around this key principle it would seek to manage the various other major productive elements, but at the same time it is inevitably limited by the boundaries of the nation-state as well as by geographical conditions, technological development levels and resource availability. Due to the division of the world into various capitalist nation-states and the competition between the capitalist classes of different nations, labour power cannot truly flow freely on an international basis. This means although capital can flow freely in the world, labour cannot, but rather they are all concentrated in certain newly emerging coastal industrial areas that have both cheap labour costs and efficient transportation systems. In order to cut down labour costs as much as possible to extract as much surplus value as it is possible to do so, in the millions of "sweat-and-blood" factories in these areas, it is almost as if we have returned to the industrial age of more than 100 years ago. Extremely low wages, difficult to maintain the production cycle beyond the most basic of living costs; extremely bad working conditions and simple repetitive labour tasks, more than a dozen hours everyday, without a single day off for many weeks; dozens of people squeezed together in cheap dormitories, with bad quality food; no proper employment contracts; no proper health and safety measures, so that if accidents do happen, in most cases one can only admit that he/she is just "unfortunate". This kind of conditions is indeed possible to make people mad or even drive them to suicide, as demonstrated by the chain of suicides by workers at Foxconn.
As the "communist" bureaucratic Chinese government lost economic vitality due to the deformation produced by the Maoist planned economy, in order to find a way forward the bureaucratic bloc in the government has embarked on a path of complete capitalist restoration as it allied itself to global capital. In order to guarantee both its political reign and the process of capitalist restoration, the one-party dictatorship of the Chinese state has banned all possibilities of any organisations challenging its rule or its policies. It is especially aware of the potential power and energy of the organised working class. This is why as the 1989 Tiananmen democratic movement developed to the stage of workers going onto the streets, the Chinese government decided to suppress it bloodily using military force.
Therefore, in order to further develop the capitalist economy and to guarantee the interests of the bureaucratic ruling bloc, the regime is using suppression to limit any kind of fight-back by the working class. Not just strikes and demonstrations, but even demands for wages, going to court and suicides would be deemed as "evil" and be brutally suppressed. The capitalist rulers of various other nations have also used their co-operation with the Chinese dictatorial bureacuratic government to maximise their own profits and interests. Today, the People's Republic of China that still flies a "socialist banner" is the largest modern "sweat-and-blood factory" in human history, and hundreds of millions of workers have been enslaved, oppressed and exploited. The capitalist economic development of China has also become the main experimental arena for global neo-liberal capitalist policies as well as the main driving force behind capitalist globalisation in general.
Before the current historical economic crisis, the bureaucratic regime of China and the various capitalist nation-states of the world believed that they can continue to exploit and oppress the working class without any need to pay anything back, and the restoration of capitalism in China will continue to deepen. The "Socialist" magazine and the Committee For a Workers' International (CWI) have always recognised that the current economic crisis is of the highest historical importance. It would continue in the long-term and will probably also experience several dips and repeated economic shocks. Just like the global economic crisis in 1929 that continued for over a decade, and due to the defeat of the global proletarian revolution at the time, in the end the capitalist system used the most barbaric mechanism of a world war to get itself out of the economic crisis. What severe consequences today's economic crisis can cause would to a large extent depend on the balance of power between the struggling classes on a global scale.
Workers who have continuously been heavily oppressed and exploited will certainly not be satisfied to forever remain in these conditions. Labour power comes from workers with subjective self-awareness, not just machines that can be manipulated at will by capitalists. Faced with their inevitable role as "wage slaves", it is natural that the working class will continue to fight back. In today's environment of capitalist globalisation, faced with the global economic crisis and the attempts by capitalists to make workers pay for it, the working class of the neo-colonial countries of Asia have produced a clear signal through their collective struggles: workers do not wish to become the sacrificial victims of rapid economic development, they shall work together in solidarity and fight against the capitalists who are trying to make workers bear the burden of the current economic crisis.
Socialists should follow what Trotsky has always stressed in his "Transitional Programme": "As the capitalist system is facing collapse, the masses are continuingly living under the conditions of oppressive poverty, and now more than ever face the prospects of the depths of extreme poverty. The masses must fight to protect their every mouthful of bread, even if they cannot at present increase its amount or improve its quality. In the struggles to fight for partial and transitional demands, workers need mass organisations more than ever, mostly trade unions. Every Bolshevik-Leninist should stand on the frontlines of stuggle, even if these struggles only touch on the most basic material interests or democratic rights of the working class. They should actively participate in the trade unions of the masses, to strengthen them, and to increase their fighting spirits. They will completely and uncompromisingly oppose any attempt to subject the unions to the capitalist nation-state and any attempt to forcefully limit the power of the proletariat, as well as any kind of attempt at police supervision, whether fascistic or "democratic" in nature."
Yes, brutal exploitation and bloody suppression will continue, and there will be temporary set-backs, but none of these would in the end stop the progress of society, and obstruct the awakening of the proletariat and their fight-back. We of course cannot expect the final class war to be decided overnight in a single battle, but to hold out like forest trees the hundreds of millions of fists of labour to declare the awakening of this giant, the new generation of workers in China will fulfill their historical destiny through incomparable courage and wisdom, and through their struggles for their own rights and the solidarity of the proletarian class as a whole.
Tuesday, 2 November 2010.
To fight for the establishment of independent grassroots trade unions
Chen Mo, Chinaworker.info
What workers should do are those things that they can achieve through their own power!
—— F. Engels, The Conditions of Working Class in England
According to the reports of the Japanese newspaper "Asahi" on 30 July, from mid-May to late-July this year, there were at least 43 strikes in China, 70% of which (32 strikes) occurred in Japanese enterprises. This figure doesn't include the "chain strikes" that involved more than 20 enterprises in the industrial zone of Dalian that continued for more than a month, including much of July. This recent wave of strikes is the most significant and influential one in China ever since the big wave of privatisation of state-owned enterprises and the massive lay-off of workers that happened in 2002. Therefore, some leftists in China have called May this year "Red May", and different political tendencies have engaged in various analyses and debates around this strike wave both within and outside of China.
On 17 May, more than 1000 workers at the Honda plant in Foshan engaged in strike action, and raised the demands of "increasing wages and restructuring the trade unions". After a period of strikes that stretched for over half a month, it only ended just before the ultra-sensitive date of June the 4th and the anniversary for the Tiananmen incident. Through resisting against the local government, the capitalists and the government-run trade union and their actions of harassment and suppression, this strike action achieved certain positive results in a limited sense. The workers acquired a 24% - 32% increase in wages (around 500 RMB). After this, from Guangdong to North China, from the coastal regions to the great interior, from foreign-capital companies to state-owned enterprises, strike waves have spread around the entire country like wild fire.
Strikes have occurred in at least 9 Honda plants around China, as well as in Toyota and Nissan plants. For instance, on 17 June, a strike action occurred at the Xingguang rubber and plastics company in Tianjin that is owned by Toyota; on 18 June, strikes occurred at a Toyota synthesis plant in the same city. At the same time, a strike happened at the Gaowei metallugy factory in Wuhan that services Honda plants, as well as a factory that produces componenets for Nissan cars located in Zhongshan of Guangdong province. In mid-June at a subsidary IPO enterprise of Foxconn located in the Pudong district of Shanghai, there emerged a "quasi-general strike" against the plan to relocate the factory. Several hundred workers in the rubber industry working for KOK International in Kunshan of Jiangsu province engaged in a strike on Friday 4 June. In Shaanxi province, 900 workers at the Japanese-owned Brothers company that produces industrial sewing machines engaged in a street demonstration that lasted from 3 June to 10 June. At the moment, strikes have not just happened in foreign-owned multi-nationals, but also in state-owned enterprises such as the Qianjiang gear transmission factory in Chongqing, at which a strike action occurred at around the same time as the strikes in Foshan.
Since the end of June, "chain strikes" that have lasted for several months and involved tens of thousands of workers have occurred at more than 20 enterprises in the special economic zone in Dalian. This is the biggest wave of strikes ever since the "chain strikes" that happened at the same location in September 2005. The strikes in 2005 happened due to the lack of wage increases for over a decade at the numerous Japanese-owned factories and enterprises within the Dalian special economic zone, which led to massive anger among the working class there. The strike at the time also touched on many basic issues of workers' basic political and economic rights, such as the mechanism for changing wages, collective contracts and the rights of trade union representatives etc. None of these had been successfully solved at the time. According to online reports and relevant statistical figures, ever since June this year, most of the strike waves in Dalian involved world-famous Japanese enterprises, such as Mabuchi Motors, Yiguang Towels, Nidec Machinery, Mattel, Star Micronics, Roybi, Cnailisi, Toshiba, Toto, Canon, YKK, Float Glass, Yas-Yamatake, Fuji Plastics, Asahi Keiki, Mitsukoshi, Hayakawa, Nakamura-Tome Precision Industry, Tostem Construction and Takachiho.
In fact, this new round of strikes did not just occur in China. As "Voice of America" reported, this summer low-wage slaves across many south-east Asian countries engaged in struggles to fight for basic economic rights. The minimum wage has not been increased in Bangladesh for the last 4 years and the working conditions there are extremely harsh. The massive inflation that occured in 2006 meant an actual reduction in real income for most workers. In July this year, massive strike waves by workers that demanded wage rises turned into mass riots. In addition, multiple instances of workers' strike actions occurred in India, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, which forced their respective governments to raise the minimum wage levels. During the periods of rapid economic progress in these regions, capitalists and governments have acquired massive profits, but workers have yet to see any real benefits from it. On the other hand inflation and the current economic crisis have caused direct problems for the lower layers of workers, especially in areas such as food and housing which are the most basic necessities of life.
In China itself, due to extreme neo-liberal capitalist economic policies, workers' wages as a proportion of GDP have decreased continuously for 22 years, from 67% in 1983 to 37% in 2005. These figures show which class has really paid for these "capitalist reforms". According to the figures released by China's own government-controlled trade unions, nearly a quarter of Chinese workers have received absolutely no increase in their wage levels over the last 5 years. In fact, labour costs are only a very small amount of the overall costs of multi-national companies based in China.
In 2008 the economic crisis began, and in order to reduce the risk to capital, the CCP regime and the capitalist class freezed the minimum wage, reduced overall wage levels and began to lay-off workers. This meant that Chinese workers who have already been massively exploited faced the brunt of the crisis. As the first stage of the economic crisis drew to a close, due to the fact that it became very difficult to find high-profit sectors for investment and the expansion of production, capital due to its intrinsic nature of forever chasing after profits must begin to invest in relatively low-risk sectors, therefore the property market as well as the daily circulation of ordinary consumer goods became venues for opportunistic investment by capitalists, and as a result this has caused significant levels of inflation.
Although the official CPI index published by the National Statistics Bureau in July 2010 is only 3.3%, but according to the views of Finance professor Michael Pettis at Beijing University, during the first half of this year the actual rate of inflation in China is as high as 6% or more. Committee member Yu Yongding at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has also commented that the official CPI figure does not really reflect the actual inflation of goods prices in China. Therefore, people in China have commented about how due to opportunistic investment, the prices of very basic goods like garlic, green peas and black beans can increase by several times on the Chinese market, and the prices of many fruits and meat products have raised by 20%. Since the start of this year, costs of medical products and housing rents have also increased significantly.
Under this kind of situation, struggles for basic rights can only occur within the workplaces, and therefore strike action has become the primary vehicle for struggle. Due to differences in education levels, social views and economic prosperity, we can see from the latest wave of strikes the vibrant new spirits of the new generation of workers who were born in the 1980s and 1990s in China. The internet, computers and mobile phones are an integral part of the communication tools used by the new generation of youths, and various internet chat rooms and forums have become a basic platform for new workers to interact with one another. At present there are over 200 million users of the chat program QQ, and most of these are from the ordinary and young wage-earning classes. Mobile QQ and text messaging have become important tools for workers to exchange information and to communicate. Through talking with some workers who have participated in the strikes, one can discover that they have some knowledge of the relevant labour laws as well, and have a clear consciousness to seek out the opinions of the media and specialists. Some workers also have some understanding of the importance of trade unions and the need for independent unions in China. For example, during the strikes by Honda workers at Hainan, many workers have repeatedly raised the slogans of "restructuring the trade unions" and "elect trade union representatives". Although the majority of workers have not really accepted socialism in general, there is already a class-wide consciousness based on united struggle.
An employee at the Taiwanese-owned KOK enterprise in Kunshan of Jiangsu province clearly wrote in his "The heart-felt opinions of an employee": "Solidarity equals strength, and only through struggle is there hope. At far we have the "end of year" prizes, nearer there are the examples of Honda and Foxconn. These all serve as our exemplars and symbols of strength for us." From this one can clearly see the spirit of class solidarity and struggle, and the clear consciousness workers possess of the importance of fighting for basic rights. If leftists cannot recognise these clear signs of consciousness, then it would be a mistaken understanding of the Chinese workers' movement in general.
According to the views of orthodox Maoists in China, these economic struggles by the "new workers" of China do not challenge the basic ownership rights of capital, and they are at most a kind of "trade unionist" consciousness, a manifestation of "proto-revolutionary awareness". Also these young workers are generally "individualistic, short-sighted, slothful, selfish and disorganised". They are different from the "old workers" who have experienced the Maoist period, who are much more "class-conscious" and "politically aware". But aren't this kind of discriminatory views towards the "new workers" of China similar to how the capitalists view workers? The negative views some new workers in China have towards "the old stagnant Maoist socialist flag" indeed reflect Maoism's own problems.
In addition, the "revolutionary old workers" promoted by Maoists are getting old both individually and as a class, and are weakening politically, and will eventually exit the arena of history. Capitalists with the aid of time is silently destroying them, they are the remanent memories of the last instance of deformed revolution and the swan songs of the last defeat of class warfare. Even if one day in the future, genuine socialism where workers democratically control all enterprises is truly established, these enterprises would still be very different from the "state-owned enterprises" of the Maoist era. But now we wish to give our utmost respect to the "old workers" of China who are "roaring their last" and continuing the struggles against capitalism. Their determined struggles during this most difficult period have demonstrated the fighting spirit of the Chinese working class which possesses a glorious revolutionary tradition.
Of course, the "new workers" have yet to develop a fully mature class consciousness, but at the same time they have not been influenced by the old bureaucratised workers' movements and Maoism. As the primary force of the Chinese working class in general both today and in the future, they shall become the main fighting force of the Chinese worker's movement. As Lenin pointed out: "We are a party of the future, and the future belongs to the youths. We are a party of those who establish new things, and the youths always like to follow those who establish new things. We are a party that fights against the old corrupt things of the world tirelessly, and the youths are those who are most prone to tireless struggles."
As the "Socialist" magazine already pointed out in related articles published in 2009, the class structure of Chinese society has undergone the most fundamental changes as the largest capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation in all of human history is occurring in China as we speak. Although the hukou system that segregates urban and rural populations which was created to better control the flow of labour still exists, and in theory rural populations still consist of 60% of the Chinese population, but the actual percentage of rural populations in China is only around 30%, and agriculture only consists of 5% of the overall GDP. Around 300-400 million people with rural hukou are already increasingly separate from rural production and living styles in the concrete sense, this is especially true for the tens of millions of "new workers" (the second or third generation of rural migrant labourers born in the 1980s and 1990s). These youths around 20 years of age have had a medium level of education, and although their hukou is still officially rurual, many of these people have never really experienced what it is like to live in the villages. More importantly, subjectively they will never define themselves as "genuinely rural". Indeed, due to discrimination they would usually not identify themselves as "urban dwellers", but this does not affect their self-identification as "workers". According to a report published in 2009 in Guangdong province, around 81% of all "new workers" identify as workers.
As Engels described to his letter addressed to Sorge, "China remains to be conquered by capitalist production. But when it finally conquers China, it will find that it can no longer exist in its own country. In China millions of people will be forced to live their home. They will migrate to Europe, and in great amounts. And as competition among the Chinese increases in scale, it will rapidly radicalise the situation where you are and where I am. This way, as capitalism conquers China it will also cause the collapse of capitalism in Europe and the Americas."
Engels' prediction is largely correct. In the neo-colonial world led by China, including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in Asia as well as Africa and Latin America, and parts of Eastern Europe, one could indeed see that hundreds of millions of people have left their original homes to be concentrated at the production bases in coastal industrial regions where global capital is at its greatest focus. But relatively speaking only a small minority of labourers have actually been exported both legally and illegally to developed industrial nations. Due to the "low labour cost enslavement" placed upon them by capital and the "race to the bottom" effects that is evident on the international level, radicalisation has been initiated in the advanced Western nations, as well as massive scale de-industrialisation, but so far none of these are sufficient for the economic collapse of capitalism in advanced Western nations.
Capital, as the primary force for the entire capitalist market, can indeed flow everywhere, but it is not omnipotent. Capital has as its primary goal the maximisation of profits, and centred around this key principle it would seek to manage the various other major productive elements, but at the same time it is inevitably limited by the boundaries of the nation-state as well as by geographical conditions, technological development levels and resource availability. Due to the division of the world into various capitalist nation-states and the competition between the capitalist classes of different nations, labour power cannot truly flow freely on an international basis. This means although capital can flow freely in the world, labour cannot, but rather they are all concentrated in certain newly emerging coastal industrial areas that have both cheap labour costs and efficient transportation systems. In order to cut down labour costs as much as possible to extract as much surplus value as it is possible to do so, in the millions of "sweat-and-blood" factories in these areas, it is almost as if we have returned to the industrial age of more than 100 years ago. Extremely low wages, difficult to maintain the production cycle beyond the most basic of living costs; extremely bad working conditions and simple repetitive labour tasks, more than a dozen hours everyday, without a single day off for many weeks; dozens of people squeezed together in cheap dormitories, with bad quality food; no proper employment contracts; no proper health and safety measures, so that if accidents do happen, in most cases one can only admit that he/she is just "unfortunate". This kind of conditions is indeed possible to make people mad or even drive them to suicide, as demonstrated by the chain of suicides by workers at Foxconn.
As the "communist" bureaucratic Chinese government lost economic vitality due to the deformation produced by the Maoist planned economy, in order to find a way forward the bureaucratic bloc in the government has embarked on a path of complete capitalist restoration as it allied itself to global capital. In order to guarantee both its political reign and the process of capitalist restoration, the one-party dictatorship of the Chinese state has banned all possibilities of any organisations challenging its rule or its policies. It is especially aware of the potential power and energy of the organised working class. This is why as the 1989 Tiananmen democratic movement developed to the stage of workers going onto the streets, the Chinese government decided to suppress it bloodily using military force.
Therefore, in order to further develop the capitalist economy and to guarantee the interests of the bureaucratic ruling bloc, the regime is using suppression to limit any kind of fight-back by the working class. Not just strikes and demonstrations, but even demands for wages, going to court and suicides would be deemed as "evil" and be brutally suppressed. The capitalist rulers of various other nations have also used their co-operation with the Chinese dictatorial bureacuratic government to maximise their own profits and interests. Today, the People's Republic of China that still flies a "socialist banner" is the largest modern "sweat-and-blood factory" in human history, and hundreds of millions of workers have been enslaved, oppressed and exploited. The capitalist economic development of China has also become the main experimental arena for global neo-liberal capitalist policies as well as the main driving force behind capitalist globalisation in general.
Before the current historical economic crisis, the bureaucratic regime of China and the various capitalist nation-states of the world believed that they can continue to exploit and oppress the working class without any need to pay anything back, and the restoration of capitalism in China will continue to deepen. The "Socialist" magazine and the Committee For a Workers' International (CWI) have always recognised that the current economic crisis is of the highest historical importance. It would continue in the long-term and will probably also experience several dips and repeated economic shocks. Just like the global economic crisis in 1929 that continued for over a decade, and due to the defeat of the global proletarian revolution at the time, in the end the capitalist system used the most barbaric mechanism of a world war to get itself out of the economic crisis. What severe consequences today's economic crisis can cause would to a large extent depend on the balance of power between the struggling classes on a global scale.
Workers who have continuously been heavily oppressed and exploited will certainly not be satisfied to forever remain in these conditions. Labour power comes from workers with subjective self-awareness, not just machines that can be manipulated at will by capitalists. Faced with their inevitable role as "wage slaves", it is natural that the working class will continue to fight back. In today's environment of capitalist globalisation, faced with the global economic crisis and the attempts by capitalists to make workers pay for it, the working class of the neo-colonial countries of Asia have produced a clear signal through their collective struggles: workers do not wish to become the sacrificial victims of rapid economic development, they shall work together in solidarity and fight against the capitalists who are trying to make workers bear the burden of the current economic crisis.
Socialists should follow what Trotsky has always stressed in his "Transitional Programme": "As the capitalist system is facing collapse, the masses are continuingly living under the conditions of oppressive poverty, and now more than ever face the prospects of the depths of extreme poverty. The masses must fight to protect their every mouthful of bread, even if they cannot at present increase its amount or improve its quality. In the struggles to fight for partial and transitional demands, workers need mass organisations more than ever, mostly trade unions. Every Bolshevik-Leninist should stand on the frontlines of stuggle, even if these struggles only touch on the most basic material interests or democratic rights of the working class. They should actively participate in the trade unions of the masses, to strengthen them, and to increase their fighting spirits. They will completely and uncompromisingly oppose any attempt to subject the unions to the capitalist nation-state and any attempt to forcefully limit the power of the proletariat, as well as any kind of attempt at police supervision, whether fascistic or "democratic" in nature."
Yes, brutal exploitation and bloody suppression will continue, and there will be temporary set-backs, but none of these would in the end stop the progress of society, and obstruct the awakening of the proletariat and their fight-back. We of course cannot expect the final class war to be decided overnight in a single battle, but to hold out like forest trees the hundreds of millions of fists of labour to declare the awakening of this giant, the new generation of workers in China will fulfill their historical destiny through incomparable courage and wisdom, and through their struggles for their own rights and the solidarity of the proletarian class as a whole.