Crux
1st June 2012, 11:19
China: Chongqing model – a capitalist model under a ‘red’cover
Tuesday, 29 May 2012.
The working class can only rely on its own forces to change the current unjust system
Zhang Shujie, chinaworker.info
[This article is translated from the May issue of Socialist, the Chinese language magazine of the CWI. After the spectacular fall of Bo Xilai, the former ‘communist’ party boss of Chongqing – a ‘special municipality’ with a population roughly as big as Canada’s – there has been much debate in China about the ‘Chongqing model’ promoted by Bo as an alternative to the more neo-liberal pro-business agenda favoured by the central government and especially the ‘liberal reform’ wing around Premier Wen Jiabao.The author Zhang Shujie is a CWI supporter from Chongqing, who was persecuted by state security police and forced to flee China last year.
The Bo Xilai affair, which began when his former police chief Wang Lijun fled to the US consulate in Chengdu, signals the most serious top-level power struggle in China for two decades. While the regime’s propaganda presents this as ‘just’ a criminal case, it is also clearly a political struggle, with Beijing incensed by Bo’s refusal to meekly follow its policies, an increasing threat given the central government’s often-precarious grip on the provinces. The Bo Xilai affair is being compared by many commentators to Shakespeare’s dark play Macbeth, with Bo’s wife Gu Kailai the prime suspect in a murder case, and the family’s secretly amassed fortune subject to media scrutiny at home and abroad. Bo and his wife are both ‘princelings’ – the children of former party leaders who enjoy great power and influence in government and the economy.
Bo became a hero among sections of the neo-Maoist ‘new left’ and the ‘Chongqing model’ was promoted as offering greater social justice and help for the poor alongside increased state economic control, while also reviving some ‘cultural’ features of the Mao era such as singing ‘red songs’. Under conditions of one-party dictatorship, with a total absence of independent workers’ organisations and the free and open political debate they encourage, it is not surprising that significant layers repelled by the current government’s policies should see Bo and Chongqing as a possible alternative. But as this article shows, Bo’s policies did not represent an alternative to capitalism, and in fact won praise and – more to the point – sizeable investments from overseas capitalists. For more background in English on the Bo Xilai affair read The fall of Bo Xilai (http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/5648)]
The attempted defection of Wang Lijun at the US consulate in Chengdu on 6 February, and subsequent arrest of Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai, in connection with the murder investigation of British businessmen Neil Heywood, has revealed to the public the biggest power struggle within the ruling elites of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the 1989 democracy movement. Since the news of Wang’s visit to the US consulate broke, it has been keenly “followed” by more than 100 million people. Many netizens have commented that the story is more fascinating than a “thriller” film.
People are very aware of the Wang Lijun and the Bo Xilai affairs. This is not for entertainment’s sake as far as the masses are concerned, but shows there is deep dissatisfaction with the state of society and yearning for real change.
Following the Wang Lijun affair, the Chongqing model, Bo Xilai and Wang have become the focus of public debate. The Chongqing model [the term used to describe Bo’s policies in the special municipality from 2007 until his ouster] is not as some Maoists claim, a “renaissance of socialism”, nor is it as many liberals have claimed, the “restoration of Cultural Revolution”. By any standards, Bo Xilai’s rule in Chongqing can only be considered as a limited form of reformism [in the social democratic sense], while increasing the power of the state and developing capitalism under the leadership of the government.
Public rental apartments
The public rental apartments project in Chongqing is an example of this. The Chongqing government claims 40 million square meters of public rental apartments will be built in three years, enough to meet the housing needs of one to two million people. This has been applauded by many reformists. Professor Larry Hsien Ping Lang from Chinese University of Hong Kong even claimed “only the Chongqing Model can save China’s real estate market”. Many lower class people and youth also hope that the public rental apartments can solve their housing problems.
Yet, amidst a chorus of praise, there are also criticisms concerning the apartments being too small, or too far from the city centre [where most people work]. Some of the public rental apartments in Chongqing have been turned into workers’ dormitories built cost-free for capitalist factory owners. According to the Chongqing Daily News, the public rental apartments in Xiyong Duty Free Zone are designed as “structured dormitories”: “The public rental apartments in Xiyong Duty Free Zone are divided into four phases, each phase containing ten blocks of buildings, able to provide 3,123 apartments. Assuming each apartment can hold 6-12 workers, the whole project will be able to accommodate around 18,348 people. The supporting facilities also include dormitories for white-collar employees, dining halls for workers, services such as shopping streets, etc.”
Chongqing’s mayor and economic czar, Huang Qifan, spoke to the publication China Reform: “Due to the separation of the government and business, the government and society took responsibility for the livelihood of the workers; business now only builds factories, and without the need to build dormitories its investment requirements are decreased, therefore this promotes foreign investment.”
Li Yongyan from the Chongqing Academy of Social Science states that when Foxconn [the contract electronics maker] also dropped plans to build a housing complex for its Chongqing plant, it was closely related to the two main reforms of the Chongqing government – the public rental apartments and reform of the hukou system – and that these would increase the city’s competitiveness.
Reform of the hukou system
The aim of the so-called hukou [household registration system] reform as stated in the Chongqing government’s policy paper “The 10 points of people’s livelihood” is to convert the village hukou of the peasants into urban hukou.
The separation into two hukou systems has limited the free flow of labour. Bourgeois liberals have increasingly called for the abolition of the hukou system in order to realize the free flow of labour and build a fully competitive labour market. The bureaucratic authoritarian government of Chongqing decided to “gradually and in a planned way” turn peasants into non-peasants (village hukou into non-village hukou), and at the same time achieve the free sale and exchange of rural land. The bureaucrats hope that this will realize the marketization of the two main means of production – labour and land – to develop capitalism.
Common Prosperity – privatisation of rural areas
The rural policies of the Chongqing government have nothing to do with ‘socialism’; instead the policies are of privatisation. For instance, in the third point of the Chongqing government’s policy paper ‘12 points of common prosperity’, it states it will “develop 2,000 new rural shareholding co-operatives and open the way for mortgage financing of the ‘three rights’ of rural villages up to the level of 100 billion yuan.” (The ‘three rights’ refer to peasants’ usage rights over forests, land and buildings. Under the Chongqing policy the peasants can get money from mortgaging land.)
The so-called new shareholding co-operatives are not producer organisations of the peasants that pool the means of production; instead they are capitalist agricultural companies. Those that own the shares are mostly members of the village committee, or CCP party branches, or wealthy peasants. The co-operatives not only share the peasants’ own land, but also rent land from other peasants; some ‘co-operatives’ also hire other peasants as seasonal farmhands. Apart from professional co-operatives, there are also rich families that rent and hire other peasants’ land and labour, and enjoy government subsidies through selling agricultural products.
The fourth point of the statement ‘12 points of shared wealth’ deals with the plan “to build 2,500 new rural villages, by means of trading in ‘land tickets’ (dipiao) to increase the wealth of peasants.” These ‘new rural villages’ and ‘land tickets’ are closely inter-linked. Through building new villages for peasants to live in a more concentrated area, the government obtains large amounts of land from the original homes of the peasants that can be turned into ‘land tickets’, and thus transferred at a profit to property developers and new industrial investors.
Since 4 December 2008, with the opening of the Chongqing Land Trading Centre, and China’s first exchange of ‘land tickets’ on that day, the cumulative value of these deals has reached more than 10 billion yuan.
Attracting investment (from overseas business)
At the same time, the Chongqing government is still pushing for more policies to “attract foreign business”. In January to February this year, Chongqing city obtained foreign investment of US$1.05 billion, an increase of 52 percent compared to the same period last year. Foreign trade has also risen to US$5.36 billion in the same period, an increase of ten percent on the same period last year, the second highest rate in China.
The Chongqing government official paper ‘Ten points of people’s livelihood’ launched the goal “to set up 60,000 new small enterprises. City government will spend 300 million yuan each year, subsidizing 30-50 percent of the registered enterprises’ capital. And the government supports new businesses through tax rebates, financial guarantees and exemption of duties/taxation.”
“Hitting the black” – campaign against gangs
The government’s campaign against organised crime has indeed improved public safety in Chongqing, and therefore is supported by the people. But at the same time, left activists have been repressed by the police in Chongqing. In 2009, a Maoist underground organization, the Chinese Maoist Communist Party was ambushed by the police while holding a national congress in Chongqing’s Wansheng district. All the participants were arrested and five of them were sentenced to a combined 35 years of imprisonment. [There are many Maoist currents in China today including reformist-Maoists who seek change within the CCP and current system, and self-styled ‘Red Maoists’ or ‘revolutionary Maoists’ who call for its overthrow – this layer includes those arrested in Chongqing in 2009].
In addition, Zhang Shujie [the author of this article], a Trotskyist and supporter of the chinaworker.info website, was also persecuted by the state security police and forced into exile.
“Singing red songs”
The liberals often portray the Chongqing model, especially the “sing red songs” campaign, as a revival of the Cultural Revolution. Even some reformist-Maoists regard Chongqing as the “new Yan’an” [the capital of liberated region under Mao’s control during the 1930s to 1940s]. But to “sing red songs” does not mean the Chongqing government is leaning towards socialism. As Professor He Bing of China University of Political Science and Law commented, “[They] encourage you to sing revolutionary songs, but they do not encourage you to wage a revolution; they encourage you to watch [the film] ‘The Great Achievement of Founding the Party’, but they do not encourage you to establish a party.” Moreover, the so-called red songs are mostly songs that praise the CCP such as ‘Without the CCP, there would be no new China’, and not songs like ‘The Internationale’.
New “Down to the Countryside Movement”
As part of its propaganda the Chongqing government promotes the “Three enters and three together”, telling government officials to “enter the poor layer, enter the villages, enter the farmer’s home, and eat together, live together, labour together with the peasants”. Both liberals and some Maoists see this as a new version of the “Down to the Countryside Movement” of Mao Zedong. However, according to a village official in Chongqing who spoke to chinaworker.info, “In fact, most officials do not really live and eat together with the peasants, sometimes they simply write up a report and that is it. And the so-called living with peasants, in reality it is living in a room prepared by the village government. Even fresh graduate ‘village officials’ do not live in the village, to say nothing of senior government officials. The living standards of most peasants lag behind the city-dwellers by decades, for instance there are no flush toilets or they are very backward. On the other hand for security reasons, low-level governments do not want government officials, especially female officials, to live at peasant homes. The leaders at county-level just go to visit a village, while the village government has to spend large sums on banquets and hospitality to welcome these officials. This has turned into a common formality.”
Reformist-Maoists
Some reformist-Maoists, such as Zhang Hongliang from Minzu University of China, see the Chongqing model as the last hope to “save the party and rescue the country”. They even state that “the Republic lives if the Chongqing model lives; the Republic falls if the Chongqing model falls.”
The leaders of these reformist-Maoists are mainly retired officials of the CCP or university professors. On one hand, they do not believe in the power of working class, and see it as a “vulnerable social group”. Thus for them the only way out is to reform the party from the top to the bottom, or they hope for a new Mao to lead the workers and peasants to socialism. Zhang Hongliang even states, “To rely on the people to start their own revolution is a dead end. Only through merging the people with the party can the CCP and the masses both become strong and become a united force.”
On the other hand, the class position of this layer of Maoists separates them completely from the working class. Some of them even belong to the ‘vested interest groups’ of the bureaucratic system and capitalist economy. Therefore they support ‘order and stability’ and fear any movement or attempt by the masses to overthrow the current system. They would even maliciously describe the ‘revolutionary Maoists’ (those Maoists and other left forces that insist on overthrowing the current regime through revolution) as a “Left Traitor Party”. Zhang Hongliang claims that, “how to solve the problem of the Left Traitor Party, will be a big challenge for the future left movement in China, it will also be a huge challenge for the Chinese nation.”
The Bo Xilai affair has led to disillusionment in the Chongqing model among some Maoists, and some of the reformist-Maoists and youth, who had illusions in reforms before, have been radicalised.
The need for a mass struggle
Socialists clearly understand that the working class is not what some of reformist-Maoists portray as a “vulnerable social group ”. A general strike by the working class is capable of bringing the whole economy to a halt, and this is due to the fact that working class is the driving force of the economy.
The working class and working masses can only rely on our own power to change the current unjust system. Demands for reforms – which we fight for – such as free healthcare and education, are not as the bourgeois liberals claim, things that will come automatically when ‘bourgeois democracy’ is realised. Neither are these things, as the Maoists believe, given by a ‘great leader’. Even demands for economic reforms can only be won by radical mass struggle, especially by an organised workers’ movement.
Real socialists do not stop at this. Under the capitalist system, such reforms are only temporary and inevitably come under attack as shown by the neo-liberal counter-reforms in the Nordic states and throughout Europe. Only through public ownership and control of the economy and natural resources, and a socialist planned economy controlled by elected committees of the workers and masses, to democratically plan, manage and produce, can ensure that social production meets the needs of all.
This is why the Committee for a Workers International stands for immediate democracy, an end to one party-rule, free elections to a revolutionary constituent assembly, the building of a workers’ and poor peasants’ government, massive increases in the basic wage and a maximum 8-hour working day, free public healthcare and education, nationalization of big corporations and banks under public democratic ownership.
Tuesday, 29 May 2012.
The working class can only rely on its own forces to change the current unjust system
Zhang Shujie, chinaworker.info
[This article is translated from the May issue of Socialist, the Chinese language magazine of the CWI. After the spectacular fall of Bo Xilai, the former ‘communist’ party boss of Chongqing – a ‘special municipality’ with a population roughly as big as Canada’s – there has been much debate in China about the ‘Chongqing model’ promoted by Bo as an alternative to the more neo-liberal pro-business agenda favoured by the central government and especially the ‘liberal reform’ wing around Premier Wen Jiabao.The author Zhang Shujie is a CWI supporter from Chongqing, who was persecuted by state security police and forced to flee China last year.
The Bo Xilai affair, which began when his former police chief Wang Lijun fled to the US consulate in Chengdu, signals the most serious top-level power struggle in China for two decades. While the regime’s propaganda presents this as ‘just’ a criminal case, it is also clearly a political struggle, with Beijing incensed by Bo’s refusal to meekly follow its policies, an increasing threat given the central government’s often-precarious grip on the provinces. The Bo Xilai affair is being compared by many commentators to Shakespeare’s dark play Macbeth, with Bo’s wife Gu Kailai the prime suspect in a murder case, and the family’s secretly amassed fortune subject to media scrutiny at home and abroad. Bo and his wife are both ‘princelings’ – the children of former party leaders who enjoy great power and influence in government and the economy.
Bo became a hero among sections of the neo-Maoist ‘new left’ and the ‘Chongqing model’ was promoted as offering greater social justice and help for the poor alongside increased state economic control, while also reviving some ‘cultural’ features of the Mao era such as singing ‘red songs’. Under conditions of one-party dictatorship, with a total absence of independent workers’ organisations and the free and open political debate they encourage, it is not surprising that significant layers repelled by the current government’s policies should see Bo and Chongqing as a possible alternative. But as this article shows, Bo’s policies did not represent an alternative to capitalism, and in fact won praise and – more to the point – sizeable investments from overseas capitalists. For more background in English on the Bo Xilai affair read The fall of Bo Xilai (http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/5648)]
The attempted defection of Wang Lijun at the US consulate in Chengdu on 6 February, and subsequent arrest of Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai, in connection with the murder investigation of British businessmen Neil Heywood, has revealed to the public the biggest power struggle within the ruling elites of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the 1989 democracy movement. Since the news of Wang’s visit to the US consulate broke, it has been keenly “followed” by more than 100 million people. Many netizens have commented that the story is more fascinating than a “thriller” film.
People are very aware of the Wang Lijun and the Bo Xilai affairs. This is not for entertainment’s sake as far as the masses are concerned, but shows there is deep dissatisfaction with the state of society and yearning for real change.
Following the Wang Lijun affair, the Chongqing model, Bo Xilai and Wang have become the focus of public debate. The Chongqing model [the term used to describe Bo’s policies in the special municipality from 2007 until his ouster] is not as some Maoists claim, a “renaissance of socialism”, nor is it as many liberals have claimed, the “restoration of Cultural Revolution”. By any standards, Bo Xilai’s rule in Chongqing can only be considered as a limited form of reformism [in the social democratic sense], while increasing the power of the state and developing capitalism under the leadership of the government.
Public rental apartments
The public rental apartments project in Chongqing is an example of this. The Chongqing government claims 40 million square meters of public rental apartments will be built in three years, enough to meet the housing needs of one to two million people. This has been applauded by many reformists. Professor Larry Hsien Ping Lang from Chinese University of Hong Kong even claimed “only the Chongqing Model can save China’s real estate market”. Many lower class people and youth also hope that the public rental apartments can solve their housing problems.
Yet, amidst a chorus of praise, there are also criticisms concerning the apartments being too small, or too far from the city centre [where most people work]. Some of the public rental apartments in Chongqing have been turned into workers’ dormitories built cost-free for capitalist factory owners. According to the Chongqing Daily News, the public rental apartments in Xiyong Duty Free Zone are designed as “structured dormitories”: “The public rental apartments in Xiyong Duty Free Zone are divided into four phases, each phase containing ten blocks of buildings, able to provide 3,123 apartments. Assuming each apartment can hold 6-12 workers, the whole project will be able to accommodate around 18,348 people. The supporting facilities also include dormitories for white-collar employees, dining halls for workers, services such as shopping streets, etc.”
Chongqing’s mayor and economic czar, Huang Qifan, spoke to the publication China Reform: “Due to the separation of the government and business, the government and society took responsibility for the livelihood of the workers; business now only builds factories, and without the need to build dormitories its investment requirements are decreased, therefore this promotes foreign investment.”
Li Yongyan from the Chongqing Academy of Social Science states that when Foxconn [the contract electronics maker] also dropped plans to build a housing complex for its Chongqing plant, it was closely related to the two main reforms of the Chongqing government – the public rental apartments and reform of the hukou system – and that these would increase the city’s competitiveness.
Reform of the hukou system
The aim of the so-called hukou [household registration system] reform as stated in the Chongqing government’s policy paper “The 10 points of people’s livelihood” is to convert the village hukou of the peasants into urban hukou.
The separation into two hukou systems has limited the free flow of labour. Bourgeois liberals have increasingly called for the abolition of the hukou system in order to realize the free flow of labour and build a fully competitive labour market. The bureaucratic authoritarian government of Chongqing decided to “gradually and in a planned way” turn peasants into non-peasants (village hukou into non-village hukou), and at the same time achieve the free sale and exchange of rural land. The bureaucrats hope that this will realize the marketization of the two main means of production – labour and land – to develop capitalism.
Common Prosperity – privatisation of rural areas
The rural policies of the Chongqing government have nothing to do with ‘socialism’; instead the policies are of privatisation. For instance, in the third point of the Chongqing government’s policy paper ‘12 points of common prosperity’, it states it will “develop 2,000 new rural shareholding co-operatives and open the way for mortgage financing of the ‘three rights’ of rural villages up to the level of 100 billion yuan.” (The ‘three rights’ refer to peasants’ usage rights over forests, land and buildings. Under the Chongqing policy the peasants can get money from mortgaging land.)
The so-called new shareholding co-operatives are not producer organisations of the peasants that pool the means of production; instead they are capitalist agricultural companies. Those that own the shares are mostly members of the village committee, or CCP party branches, or wealthy peasants. The co-operatives not only share the peasants’ own land, but also rent land from other peasants; some ‘co-operatives’ also hire other peasants as seasonal farmhands. Apart from professional co-operatives, there are also rich families that rent and hire other peasants’ land and labour, and enjoy government subsidies through selling agricultural products.
The fourth point of the statement ‘12 points of shared wealth’ deals with the plan “to build 2,500 new rural villages, by means of trading in ‘land tickets’ (dipiao) to increase the wealth of peasants.” These ‘new rural villages’ and ‘land tickets’ are closely inter-linked. Through building new villages for peasants to live in a more concentrated area, the government obtains large amounts of land from the original homes of the peasants that can be turned into ‘land tickets’, and thus transferred at a profit to property developers and new industrial investors.
Since 4 December 2008, with the opening of the Chongqing Land Trading Centre, and China’s first exchange of ‘land tickets’ on that day, the cumulative value of these deals has reached more than 10 billion yuan.
Attracting investment (from overseas business)
At the same time, the Chongqing government is still pushing for more policies to “attract foreign business”. In January to February this year, Chongqing city obtained foreign investment of US$1.05 billion, an increase of 52 percent compared to the same period last year. Foreign trade has also risen to US$5.36 billion in the same period, an increase of ten percent on the same period last year, the second highest rate in China.
The Chongqing government official paper ‘Ten points of people’s livelihood’ launched the goal “to set up 60,000 new small enterprises. City government will spend 300 million yuan each year, subsidizing 30-50 percent of the registered enterprises’ capital. And the government supports new businesses through tax rebates, financial guarantees and exemption of duties/taxation.”
“Hitting the black” – campaign against gangs
The government’s campaign against organised crime has indeed improved public safety in Chongqing, and therefore is supported by the people. But at the same time, left activists have been repressed by the police in Chongqing. In 2009, a Maoist underground organization, the Chinese Maoist Communist Party was ambushed by the police while holding a national congress in Chongqing’s Wansheng district. All the participants were arrested and five of them were sentenced to a combined 35 years of imprisonment. [There are many Maoist currents in China today including reformist-Maoists who seek change within the CCP and current system, and self-styled ‘Red Maoists’ or ‘revolutionary Maoists’ who call for its overthrow – this layer includes those arrested in Chongqing in 2009].
In addition, Zhang Shujie [the author of this article], a Trotskyist and supporter of the chinaworker.info website, was also persecuted by the state security police and forced into exile.
“Singing red songs”
The liberals often portray the Chongqing model, especially the “sing red songs” campaign, as a revival of the Cultural Revolution. Even some reformist-Maoists regard Chongqing as the “new Yan’an” [the capital of liberated region under Mao’s control during the 1930s to 1940s]. But to “sing red songs” does not mean the Chongqing government is leaning towards socialism. As Professor He Bing of China University of Political Science and Law commented, “[They] encourage you to sing revolutionary songs, but they do not encourage you to wage a revolution; they encourage you to watch [the film] ‘The Great Achievement of Founding the Party’, but they do not encourage you to establish a party.” Moreover, the so-called red songs are mostly songs that praise the CCP such as ‘Without the CCP, there would be no new China’, and not songs like ‘The Internationale’.
New “Down to the Countryside Movement”
As part of its propaganda the Chongqing government promotes the “Three enters and three together”, telling government officials to “enter the poor layer, enter the villages, enter the farmer’s home, and eat together, live together, labour together with the peasants”. Both liberals and some Maoists see this as a new version of the “Down to the Countryside Movement” of Mao Zedong. However, according to a village official in Chongqing who spoke to chinaworker.info, “In fact, most officials do not really live and eat together with the peasants, sometimes they simply write up a report and that is it. And the so-called living with peasants, in reality it is living in a room prepared by the village government. Even fresh graduate ‘village officials’ do not live in the village, to say nothing of senior government officials. The living standards of most peasants lag behind the city-dwellers by decades, for instance there are no flush toilets or they are very backward. On the other hand for security reasons, low-level governments do not want government officials, especially female officials, to live at peasant homes. The leaders at county-level just go to visit a village, while the village government has to spend large sums on banquets and hospitality to welcome these officials. This has turned into a common formality.”
Reformist-Maoists
Some reformist-Maoists, such as Zhang Hongliang from Minzu University of China, see the Chongqing model as the last hope to “save the party and rescue the country”. They even state that “the Republic lives if the Chongqing model lives; the Republic falls if the Chongqing model falls.”
The leaders of these reformist-Maoists are mainly retired officials of the CCP or university professors. On one hand, they do not believe in the power of working class, and see it as a “vulnerable social group”. Thus for them the only way out is to reform the party from the top to the bottom, or they hope for a new Mao to lead the workers and peasants to socialism. Zhang Hongliang even states, “To rely on the people to start their own revolution is a dead end. Only through merging the people with the party can the CCP and the masses both become strong and become a united force.”
On the other hand, the class position of this layer of Maoists separates them completely from the working class. Some of them even belong to the ‘vested interest groups’ of the bureaucratic system and capitalist economy. Therefore they support ‘order and stability’ and fear any movement or attempt by the masses to overthrow the current system. They would even maliciously describe the ‘revolutionary Maoists’ (those Maoists and other left forces that insist on overthrowing the current regime through revolution) as a “Left Traitor Party”. Zhang Hongliang claims that, “how to solve the problem of the Left Traitor Party, will be a big challenge for the future left movement in China, it will also be a huge challenge for the Chinese nation.”
The Bo Xilai affair has led to disillusionment in the Chongqing model among some Maoists, and some of the reformist-Maoists and youth, who had illusions in reforms before, have been radicalised.
The need for a mass struggle
Socialists clearly understand that the working class is not what some of reformist-Maoists portray as a “vulnerable social group ”. A general strike by the working class is capable of bringing the whole economy to a halt, and this is due to the fact that working class is the driving force of the economy.
The working class and working masses can only rely on our own power to change the current unjust system. Demands for reforms – which we fight for – such as free healthcare and education, are not as the bourgeois liberals claim, things that will come automatically when ‘bourgeois democracy’ is realised. Neither are these things, as the Maoists believe, given by a ‘great leader’. Even demands for economic reforms can only be won by radical mass struggle, especially by an organised workers’ movement.
Real socialists do not stop at this. Under the capitalist system, such reforms are only temporary and inevitably come under attack as shown by the neo-liberal counter-reforms in the Nordic states and throughout Europe. Only through public ownership and control of the economy and natural resources, and a socialist planned economy controlled by elected committees of the workers and masses, to democratically plan, manage and produce, can ensure that social production meets the needs of all.
This is why the Committee for a Workers International stands for immediate democracy, an end to one party-rule, free elections to a revolutionary constituent assembly, the building of a workers’ and poor peasants’ government, massive increases in the basic wage and a maximum 8-hour working day, free public healthcare and education, nationalization of big corporations and banks under public democratic ownership.