[English] – Interview with Ralf Ruckus on the book The Communist Road to Capitalism. How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949 (Oakland: PM Press, 2021). Kevin Lin conducted the interview on June 12, 2021 as part of webinar series “China and the Left”. The interview transcription was published in the book China from Below. Critical Analysis & Grassroots Activism (2023).[1]
Kevin Lin (KL): Hello, and welcome to this final conversation in the Gongchao series “China and the Left. Critical Analysis and Grassroots Activism.” It is only appropriate that we have Ralf Ruckus with us in this final conversation. Ralf has done so much to make this series happen. Let me briefly introduce Ralf and his talk. Ralf has been active in social movements in Europe and Asia for decades, and he has published and translated texts on social struggles in China and elsewhere. I first met Ralf back in 2011. At the time, he had already been engaged with China and Chinese labor issues for years. He has a new book coming out in July 2021 with PM Press. The title is The Communist Road to Capitalism. How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949. The book is very timely because we are in the year of the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which will be officially celebrated on July 1, about two weeks from now.
The book is a history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the standpoint of the grassroots and of class struggle. For Ralf, despite the turmoil and ruptures in PRC history, one constant remained: the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The party has transformed itself repeatedly after taking power in 1949, during the socialist phase until the mid-1970s, the intermittent or transitional reform phase until the mid-1990s, and the capitalist phase since. In each phase, Ralf argues, the PRC’s development was pushed by a dynamic of social struggles from below followed by countermeasures of the CCP regime, a mix of repression, concession, cooptation, and reform. This argument is the reason why the book is so important. Ralf tells the story how capitalism emerged in the PRC not in spite of or against socialism, but because of this socialism. Without further ado, Ralf!
Ralf Ruckus (RR): Thank you, Kevin, for this kind introduction. I will take up three points you already hinted at in your short introduction. The first point is the periodization of PRC history that I use in this book; the second point is the pattern of struggles from below followed by countermeasures from above; and the third point I want to make regards the changes in the political, the economic, and the patriarchal system in the past seventy years. I will finish with a few remarks on conclusions and questions.
The book is meant as a political intervention into the debate on the history of the PRC—mostly the debate within the left which has intensified in the last few years. I call it a political intervention because the book is, on one hand, a historiography of social struggles, political developments, and economic crises, and, on the other hand, it is an evaluation of this revolutionary attempt of the forces behind the CCP to build a society without capitalist exploitation and patriarchal oppression.
How did I approach this project of understanding such a long historical phase? This is my first point, the specific periodization I use. When you look at the past seventy years of the existence of the PRC, you can see, on one hand, plenty of ruptures—crises, struggles, and campaigns. On the other hand, you can make out an important continuity: one party has been in charge throughout the whole period. This party is not just celebrating one hundred years of its existence but also its role of having been in power in this country for more than seventy years.
On the political left, we usually find three different positions how leftists characterize the essence of what the PRC was and is. According to the first position, the PRC has always been and still is socialist. This is, by the way, also the position of the current CCP leadership. The second position says that the PRC was never socialist but always capitalist. You find this in some older texts and forms of critique, for instance, by anarchists, but also in some newer texts that we can talk about later. The third position is that the PRC has been both socialist and capitalist: in the first half of its existence, it is considered as socialist, and in the second half, since the start of the reforms in the late 1970s, it then turned into capitalism.
I support a variation of the third position. There was rupture and transition, and I think it is important to acknowledge that we had two phases: a first transitional phase between the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and 1955/56 when the planned economy was actually constructed and working; and a second transitional phase from the start of the reforms in the late 1970s until the mid-1990s with the transition to capitalism. So, for me there are four phases or periods: transition, socialism, transition, capitalism. The book follows these periods, with one chapter on each, and each chapter is divided into several sub-chapters.
My second point is a central observation I made during the study and research for this book. During the three main periods, that is, socialism, transition to capitalism, and capitalism, we can see a similar pattern of struggles from below that took different forms followed by countermeasures from above by the CCP regime.
The pattern can be summarized in the following way. At the beginning of each period, we see a major social upheaval, a movement of workers, peasants, or students, and then the regime reacted to these upheavals with countermeasures. These countermeasures were a mix of repression, which was dominant in many ways, repeated concessions to the demands of the struggles, and also cooptation of people involved or of topics raised in the struggles. This was usually followed by larger reform efforts. These countermeasures and reforms then contributed to the development of a second large upheaval which was then followed by another mix of countermeasures and reforms. So, in every period—socialism, transition, and capitalism—I make out two cycles of struggles and countermeasures.
I will not go through all three periods now because that would take too long. I will just talk about the socialist period to make this point clearer. Right after the establishment of the planned economy we see a first wave of labor unrest and regime critique in the mid-1950s, before and during the so-called Hundred Flowers Movement in 1956 and 1957. The regime reacted with concessions at the beginning but then retaliated with harsh repression which was, at first, part of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. In 1958, the regime started a large reform, the Great Leap Forward, which failed in many ways. This was followed by another reform and intensified leadership conflicts in the early 1960s.
The second wave of major struggles took place during the Cultural Revolution, in the form of labor unrest of particular groups—struggles the regime called “economist”—and resistance of the rebel movement. The regime, again, reacted with certain concessions at the time, and some of the rebel leaders were coopted and integrated into the party leadership. This was accompanied by the harsh repression of “economism” and of a large part of the rebel movement by the CCP leadership which also employed the army. This was followed by new reform efforts in the early 1970s, a kind of consolidation, and the attempt to carry out the so-called Four Modernizations. That failed, at first, but soon afterwards the socialist period ended with the death of two major leaders, Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, in 1976, and with the coup against the so-called Gang of Four in the same year.
The next period, the transition, began like the previous socialist and the following capitalist period, with a wave of major struggles. In this case, it began with labor unrest and the so-called democracy movements starting in the mid-1970s and continuing in the late 1970s.
This was a short run through one of the three main periods. In the book, I obviously, discuss this in much more in detail and follow the chronology of events. In my view, the PRC’s historical trajectory was pushed by this dynamic of struggles from below followed by countermeasures from above. Obviously, this dynamic does not explain all the developments in the PRC. That is why, in the book, I also trace other major factors, for instance, the changing position and role of the PRC in the global system of nation states and the PRC’s relations to other socialist countries like the Soviet Union and later to the United States. I also look at the establishment and transformation of the new socialist ruling class as well as conflicts and faction-building within the CCP leadership in each period.
Now, I come to my third point. The pattern of struggles and countermeasures serves as a historical matrix for the book. I look at changes in the political, the economic, and the patriarchal system during the different periods. I will not go much deeper into this as we can discuss it later, so for now just this much: first, the political system was transformed after 1949, when the CCP established a so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat.” State institutions and practices were introduced, developed, and later adapted over time. The CCP and the reconfigured authoritarian state survived all ruptures and changes.
Second, the economic system was changed profoundly in the early 1950s, with the land reform, and later collectivization, the nationalization of industries, and the implementation of the planned economy. However, new forms of inequality and class divisions were established with the consolidation of the socialist system. They formed the base not just for the repeated waves of struggles I described, but also for the marketization and the transition to capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s.
Third, the patriarchal system was changed after liberation in 1949 when the legal position of women* in the PRC was strengthened and women* increasingly entered waged labor. However, soon it became clear that the improvements for women* were limited. For instance, women* were still systematically discriminated in rural collectives and urban work units, and they still had to do most reproductive labor—until today, actually. In the transitional and in the capitalist period, women* faced new attacks, such as the One-Child Policy and the sexist division of labor for migrant women* in urban factories or service industries. In each period, women* and feminist movements resisted the attacks on women*’s conditions, but they also faced serious backlashes several times—most recently in the form of reactionary gender policies promoted by the current CCP regime and in the form of its attacks on feminist activism.
Let me make just a few final remarks to wrap this up. The main part of the book provides a concise historical narrative of the developments in the PRC, especially of workers’, peasants’, migrants’, and women*’s struggles under socialism as well as under capitalism. In the conclusions, I discuss several questions. I want to mention two of them here. The first question is: can we envision fundamental revolutionary change in the PRC? Many of us will probably laugh and say, “No, of course, we cannot!” This makes sense, as the current situation of social movements and left-wing organizing in China is, indeed, difficult. However, in my view, the CCP regime is not as stable as it wants us to believe. In addition, the global crisis and instability in general offer more opportunities for movements from below compared to situations in which the capitalist world-system is rather stable. What is more, new cycles of social upheaval often occur when the political left does not expect them at all—as it was the case in the mid-1960s and the late 2000s.
A second question in the conclusions is: What shall we do while waiting for such a new cycle of struggles or a revolutionary situation? Obviously, we should analyze the situation and support social movements and left-wing organizing processes from below in China and elsewhere. That is what a lot of us already do. In my view, we should also use the time to learn from the experiences of earlier struggles and revolutionary attempts, like in the PRC, for the sake of refining a new left-wing strategy that avoids past mistakes. This strategy should take into account not just the limitations of these previous attempts—like class divisions, nationalism, gender discrimination, environmental destruction, all evident in the case of CCP rule in China. It should also consider the more recent experiences of social struggles elsewhere in the world that attacked some of these limitations—for instance, by trying to act globally, to establish forms of grassroots democracy in movements, and to take on capitalist exploitation, state repression, and all forms of discrimination at the same time.
I hope my book can contribute to these discussions on left-wing practices and strategies—strategies that can help facilitate a new cycle of struggles in the PRC and elsewhere. Such a cycle will hopefully be able to finish the revolutionary project that the CCP in very early stages of its existence might have anticipated but later abandoned.
KL: Thank you, Ralf, for giving a very concise overview of your argument and the book itself and for posing some very sharp political questions. As you said, this book is very much a political intervention. I remember you telling me a long time ago, that you purposely chose not to work in academia. Instead, you have been engaged intensively in political activities. So, I think it is appropriate to ask you, how your own political background and trajectory, your interest and concern, shaped and informed this book and your other writings.
RR: Since you ask, why I did not choose an academic career, let me first say that I attended university as a student in the 1980s. I came out of the radical social movements of the early 1980s, and, in my circles, it was, actually, not accepted at all to take an academic route. It also made no sense at the time, because we thought we would make revolution. Why would we go to university and teach there if the main purpose of what we were doing was to take our political project right to the end? In some sense, I was lucky that I could experience this radical mobilization in my youth that shaped my life but also the lives of others around me. I cannot think of anyone from the days back then who ended up in academia, actually. Obviously, that changed later.
Several influences shaped my thinking and practice, starting with debates that came out of the 1960s and 1970s when revolutionary hope existed and was discussed broadly. This includes the critique of the state, that was also directed against the Marxist-Leninist currents at the time, and the critique of the capitalist political economy. To get into the latter was new to my early political circles. Many people were more interested in subcultural activity while some of us started reading Marx’s Capital and critiques of that. Over the years, I was very much influenced by more global perspectives. That began a long time ago and intensified when I and others translated Beverly Silver’s book Forces of Labor into German and discussed more what we could call the “workerist” part of the world-system approach.[2] Another strong influence came from the feminist debates since the 1980s.
I want to mention another thing. I grew up in West-Germany, but I had contacts to radical left-wing groups in East-Germany and later in Poland. All that had a strong influence on me, just like the experiences that I made or that I learned about in China—experiences of what actually existing socialism was like and what it meant for ordinary people, workers, women*, and also for left-wing activists or organizers.
KL: You said you lived in East-Germany and in Poland, and you are still engaged in solidarity work with the labor movement in Poland. How do you make the connections between the different parts of your activism in Germany, in Poland, and in China?
RR: Answering this question is rather difficult. What I do is rather an improvised way of integrating different activities. Before I started engaging in research and activism around China in the early 2000s, I had lived in half a dozen other countries. I learned from different left-wing groups, different views, concepts, and strategies for change. I tried to overcome a division many left-wing activists make between, on one hand, the job or work done for money, i.e., the stuff done to survive, and, on the other hand, political activity. I worked in construction, in call centers, factories, in different jobs, and, together with others in the political groups I was part of at the time, I intervened in these work places, connected to other workers, tried to organized debates and resistance together with other workers while we learned from them. We discussed that as a practice that has its origins in the Italian conricerca, which is usually translated as “militant inquiry” in English.
In China, I could not do that, because as a white person and foreigner it is difficult to work in proletarian jobs. So, I had to change my strategy and focus on interviews and debates with workers and activists who did what I would have liked to do: work in factories, for instance, and start to engage with workers. I also concentrated on translating books, oral accounts, and other reports of workers, comrades, left-wing activists, and left-wing academics from China. This included books on the situation in Foxconn plants, on the situation of dagongmei, i.e., female migrant workers in world-market factories, and on similar issues.[3]
Apart from the activity around China, in the last few years, I have been involved in supporting the attempt of Amazon workers from Poland, Germany, France, and other countries to organize across borders and combine struggles.[4]
KL: Why did you write and publish the book right at this moment? And what is different about your book in comparison to, for instance, Maurice Meisner’s Mao’s China and After that has become a standard history of the PRC?
RR: There is a range of interesting books: Meisner’s book or Jackie Sheehan’s Chinese Workers. There are also more recent books I consider important, such as Joel Andreas’s Disenfranchised.[5] I do not see my book in competition to these books. I see it as an intervention, as I said earlier, as a particular interpretation of PRC history that I would like to discuss with people from Greater China and elsewhere. Parts of the left are confused about what is going on in the PRC and about how to confront or act upon what the CCP regime is doing. What shall we think and do about the repression of feminists or of labor activists, for instance? The book gives a different view, a different perspective.
I did not write the book for China experts but for people who have little access to the material I use and the debate as a whole, people who want to learn what has happened in the PRC in the past seventy years from someone who has been involved in this debate and has a particular left-wing perspective on this history.
KL: That flows nicely to the question about periodization. You look at four periods. Could you explain how you came up with those? And how far is the periodization you carved out unique to the history of the PRC? Can we find the recurrent pattern of struggles, countermeasures, and reform in other contexts or other countries?
RR: I started reading and writing about particular periods at first, without any idea of a strict periodization but rather with the aim to understand particular phases of struggles and reactions. The matrix in the book, the table that shows the periods and the dynamic of struggle and countermeasures, was something I sketched out after most of the chapters had already been written.
And on the second question: I have been thinking about whether we can see this pattern in other countries. Yes, I think we do, but I am not saying history is always working this way. In retrospect, history often sounds logic, and we make out such patterns, but that does not mean that China’s development will continue in this way. It might, and it might not. Making out patterns just helps to understand what happened in the past—and maybe it helps us to be better prepared for the future.
KL: One aspect of this is that the periodization coincides with warfare capitalism, the period of WWII, and the neoliberal period in Western Europe and North America. To what extent do you see this pattern and the cycles of struggle and state responses in the PRC as part of a global history?
RR: Developments outside the PRC had a great impact on developments inside the PRC, for instance, developments in the socialist world, such as the support from the Soviet Union in the 1950s, or developments of global capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s. The anti-colonial debates and struggles were reflected in the PRC, both inside the Communist Party and among rebel groups during the Cultural Revolution. We can see connections and influences both ways, on movements in the PRC and on the anti-colonial movements that reflected on Maoism, for instance. It is interesting, though, that Arif Dirlik once said that the movement in 1968 that occurred in many countries was not that important for China. However, the Cultural Revolution in China was important for many movements elsewhere.[6]
Of course, the end of the socialist bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the shock therapy we discussed last week during the event with Isabella Weber, played a major role for the changes in the PRC.[7] In addition, I think it is important to see that the transformation and the transition to capitalism was not the result of a big plan, in the way that the CCP leadership thought about it and then went ahead. It was a gradual change and slow development, and it only worked out as it did because global capitalism was at a point where capitalists in the Global North were looking for new sources of labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, they first went to the so-called Tiger States in East Asia and to Latin America. And then, in the 1990s, global capital tapped into the rural labor force the CCP regime willingly offered to them for exploitation. These were the migrant workers who became the largest working class and stood behind the “factory of the world” and, therefore, the “rise” of China. So, the development of the PRC and of global capitalism were closely connected.
KL: In the book, you write about the period from 1949 until the mid-1950s as the build-up of socialism and the period from the mid-1950s to mid-1970s as Chinese socialism. Then you lay out the different characterizations leftists make use of to describe the system. They called it socialism or state socialism or state capitalism or some other form of capitalism. Could you explain why you chose “socialism” to describe the period and not “state socialism” or some other term?
RR: The decision for using a certain term for the early period was rather pragmatic. Recently, Karl Gerth published a book focusing on the commodity markets and consumption in the early stages of the PRC. Gerth insists that it was capitalism.[8] It is an interesting book, but I do not agree with the decision to simply call that period capitalist. In my view, it is important to mark the differences of the particular system that was developed in the PRC in the 1950s and existed for about twenty years before it was transformed decisively.
I want to encourage everyone to also not talk about the socialism or the capitalism but to use the plural: socialisms and capitalisms. For instance, Tobias ten Brink does the latter in his description of current PRC capitalism.[9] In my view, from the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a particular form of actual existing socialism which was different in many aspects from capitalism. Still, I acknowledge there are aspects of that specific PRC socialism that also feature in capitalist economies. For this reason, it was fairly easy to gradually transform the PRC form of socialism into a system that I call capitalist.
PRC capitalism as it developed in the 1990s and later is, to say that again, not the same capitalism that we see in the U.S., for instance. A long tradition exists of comparing the Soviet Union and Eastern European type socialism with the PRC model and of highlighting the differences. The same works for different types of capitalism, for instance, the specific German type of capitalism, the Polish type, or the U.S. type of capitalism. We should be careful not to use just one category and make sure we talk about differences as well.
Things get more complex when we talk about the role of the working class and the question how the working class viewed the transition. During the phase of socialism, between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, there was not just one homogeneous working class but a working class that was in many ways divided. I like Joel Andreas’s recent book Disenfranchised, but there is one thing I want to mention: Joel describes the changing situation mostly of workers in larger state-run enterprises. As the socialist working class and a minority, they were rather privileged. Eighty percent of people in the PRC were still living on the countryside, and even within the cities not all workers got the full welfare package. There was not the one urban working class but different working classes or a complex class composition.
We also have to see who was involved in those struggles in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s I describe in the book, and who had an interest in preserving the socialist structures and who did not. Certain workers who had privileges defended their conditions, their permanent jobs, and their welfare provisions. Other workers had never reached the status some workers in the larger state-run industries had. They were more inclined to welcome reforms and put hope in changes. Similar things can be said about some parts of the peasantry.
KL: During the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, there was militant state workers’ resistance against privatization, lay-offs, and factory closures. I am wondering, how do you look at the way in which the working classes in the 1980s and 1990s responded to the transition. And how do people in the PRC remember that today?
RR: We have to consider that even people who are in their 30s now do not have the experience of what historical socialism or actually existing socialism was about. It is the same in Germany, Poland, or other eastern European countries. Everyone who is fifty or older remembers and has a particular position on the socialist period. That can be either nostalgia or anger and the feeling that socialism as it existed was also exploitative and authoritarian.
In the PRC in the 1990s and 2000s, we saw the rise of neo-Maoist tendencies and groups. Since then, some of them have developed a strong critique of the market reforms and see the CCP regime as capitalist or even as right-wing. Some of them have to be more careful recently because the regime increased repression of left-wing groups. The fact that people rediscovered or newly emphasized Maoist thoughts on class struggle, a critique of capitalism, and also of certain forms of CCP rule under socialism, is important. Around 2010, there was a generational hand-over among them. Before, the Maoist debates were dominated by people who came out of Cultural Revolution rebel groups and had been part of other mobilizations in the 1970s and 1980s. Some of them had also been involved in the struggles of the late 1980s and in those in the state-run enterprises in the late 1990s.
Around 2010, a generation of young activists, influenced again by Maoism, took over. Their analyzes and practices focus on the rise of the new migrant working class. 2010 was the climax of migrant workers’ struggles. Young activists started working in factories because they wanted to be involved in these struggles. I have had many debates on the way they see socialism. In my view, their perspective is often twisted. They idealize what Mao and the rebel factions during the Cultural Revolution were about and what the character of the socialist system was, but that is another story.
KL: Let us develop that point further, because the second part of the last question also relates to what the alternative is. The Maoist students have been very interested in reassessing or looking at the Mao era, the socialist era. Do you think that bears some fruit? Or is it a pretty marginal phenomenon, confined to small groups of Maoist students, activists, or intellectuals?
RR: It is very difficult in the PRC to organize such political debates and include a lot of people, also new people, because of the repression of this kind of political activity. So, this is hard to say. My experience is that when you talk to workers, young people, or students in the PRC, many of them are aware of the contemporary problems in Chinese capitalism. That ranges from economic problems to repression, and gender politics, for instance, the way the state tries to tell women* what to do and how to live. People are aware of these things. That does not mean they necessarily think that the CCP is responsible for all of this. A lot of people would rather criticize the boss of the company they work for or the local government.
Regarding left-wing activists, Maoism is the dominant left-wing tradition among them. There are other traditions, like anarchism, which was important one hundred years ago, Trotskyism, and influences that came out of the movements of the 1960s in other countries, but in terms of texts and sources and older comrades to refer to, Maoism is dominant.
For us who come from other political backgrounds and have a critique of what Maoism was about and how it shaped that particular form of socialism, it is important to stay open to debates about it and to encourage people to do their own research and question the Maoist narratives themselves.
In the radical or not so radical left outside the PRC, some tendencies still consider the PRC socialist and support the CCP regime for different reasons. With these younger, grassroots Maoist circles in the PRC, I usually have no problem finding common grounds when criticizing the regime as capitalist. We might have difficulties and problems regarding nationalist tendencies or the importance of discussions on patriarchy and other issues. But in terms of agreeing on the class struggle of workers against capitalist exploitation we usually find common ground.
KL: Let us take the conversation to the latest period from the mid-1990s until now that you describe in the book as capitalist. What makes you use that term?
RR: The first book I translated from Chinese is one published by Pun Ngai (Pan Yi) and Li Wanwei in the early 2000s. It describes the fate of the dagongmei (young female factory workers) and uses their koushu or oral history telling. They interviewed dozens of female migrant workers on their experiences. A young migrant worker said: “In lower middle school we read some stuff on Marxist theory. When the teachers explained the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production in the capitalist society, they also talked about the inhumane exploitation of workers. At the time, we did not understand that. Then I came to Shenzhen in order to work here. From then on, I began to understand how capitalists suppress and exploit the workers.”[10]
The main aspect we should consider when we describe the current situation in the PRC is the experience of these workers, of women*, and of other groups, their daily lives and their social relations. Migrant workers have to work long hours. They face exploitation, a hierarchical labor system, and a gendered division of labor. This is what they describe when you ask them about their experience and what they write in their stories.
This was in the mid-2000s, and since then I never had any doubts that this is a capitalist system. Having said that, obviously, we have to acknowledge that the form of capitalism or the form the capitalist class took is different from the forms in other parts of the world. That concerns, for instance, the role of the state and the way it intervenes in the economy or controls a large part of the financial sector and the currency without fully opening up to global financial markets. That might happen in the future but it has not happened so far. The way the state controls parts of the private capitalist class, as we have seen in recent years, is also important.
Still, that does not mean this is not capitalism. For me, state-ownership itself is not a sign of socialism and definitely not one of a socialism that promises to lead us into a society beyond exploitation and repression. And for me this is still the aim. Capitalism as a global system, as it is in Europe and in other parts of the world, as it is in China as well, needs to be overcome. It produces a lot of suffering and many problems for workers, for women*, and for other oppressed.
We need to organize and overcome it without going back to the model we saw in the Soviet Union and in the PRC. We need a different form that is actually in the hands of the people themselves. In my understanding, socialism in the PRC was never a workers’ state or a workers’ society, it was a society under the control of the CCP and the CCP leadership.
When discussing with left-wing activists from China, this is not something we argue about. I have not met anyone who wants to go back to exactly that type of regime. There has to be a form of grassroots democracy with grassroots control over all aspects of the society, including the economic, the social, and the political.
KL: You said that despite all these changes, turmoil, and ruptures, one thing that has remained is that the CCP is still in power. What transformations have been instrumental in maintaining the regime throughout the last seventy years and in maintaining the party for over one hundred years?
RR: First of all, the historical trajectory could have gone different ways. The CCP leadership faced its end several times, especially during the Cultural Revolution and during the movement in 1989. If people had taken different decisions, if the army had not been prepared to step in and rescue the rule of the CCP twice in the late 1960s and in the late 1980s, then things could have taken a different course. At times, forces within the party had different concepts and were fighting each other. Depending on whether a different faction or part of the leadership had prevailed, the CCP or the PRC could have gone into a different direction.
One thing you hint at and that I consider very important is that at certain times the CCP leadership did develop a way to reconfigure itself, to refine its strategies in an experimental way, and to “learn from practice.” This way it could gradually transform the system as it was and make it more stable. The flexibility the CCP showed contradicts with all the corruption and nepotism. Still, the party found a way to react to challenges and use historical opportunities which were both created by developments of global capital I mentioned earlier, by the global crisis in 2008, and also by global instability today.
Whether the party leadership is still that flexible and will continue to be, I do not know. The tendency to even more authoritarian, centralized forms of governance in the last few years under Xi Jinping gives evidence that something has changed and that the party might lose capabilities. The factional strife within the party leadership was also a way to wage different strategies and be able to decide for the one that would be most appropriate to face certain challenges. After all, there are elements of crisis within China’s economy, like bubbles, imbalances, and dependencies. And, last but not least, there is a lot of anger among different parts of the working classes because they expected further improvements and are still waiting to actually get them.
KL: There have been moments, as you also highlight in the book, where things could have gone different ways. But another thing has not changed, and that is the ideological insistence on some form of Marxism. Why do you think the CCP publicly insists on following Marxism even though, I guess, few people take this version of Marxism seriously.
RR: That is an amazing point: the party takes it seriously! We have to acknowledge that the political concepts developed in the 1950s and 1960s were based on an understanding of Marxism-Leninism as a concept of class struggle. In fact, the way the CCP used it at the time needs our critical reflection. The big change came in the 1980s, though, when CCP leaders gave up that part of their own political concepts and switched to an understanding of “social layers” as used by Max Weber, and of the integration of society. They kept certain aspects of Marxism, but the CCP leadership understands Marxism as some kind of science it can use for directing the economy and the society.
I heard a funny story from a comrade in Hong Kong. A leftist friend of his went to a conference on Marxism in the PRC where mainland scholars close to CCP positions debated Marxism. One of the CCP-type Marxist scholars turned to that friend and said something like: “I heard that in the West they still think that Marxism is a theory of class struggle. That is kind of backward, we are beyond that.” So, we have to acknowledge that the CCP leaders use Marx and celebrate his birthday. However, their type of Marxism is different from what most people on the left, including leftists in the PRC, consider a revolutionary theory or practice based on what Marx wrote and did. But let us take it seriously! They use it for their own purpose and they use it for promoting their CCP model of how to govern a society and run an economy.
KL: In the European context, what kind of confusion have you encountered when people on the left think about China?
RR: Let us look at what changed in the past twenty years. When I started focusing on China in the early 2000s, my main problem was that outside China many people did not recognize the social struggles there. Many thought Chinese workers were all obedient, and some shared that sexist image of “small Chinese women toiling away in the factories and not resisting at all.” My main task at that time was to underline that there were more strikes in the PRC than in any other place and that there is a long tradition of resistance, of uprisings, of undermining the rule of the dominant classes. That was an important discussion in the 2000s.
Today the conflict lies elsewhere. After all the changes in the world and the rise of China as a competitor of the U.S. dominated capitalist core countries, as a competitor for world hegemony even, you see a tendency within the left of people who criticize and attack U.S. imperialism, and rightly so, but who misinterpret the PRC as a kind of counterweight. That reminds me of debates in the 1980s and before, with similar arguments on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Some people supported the Soviet Union because they saw it as a force against U.S.-imperialism while ignoring the struggles from below there—left-wing protests, struggles for liberation, against exploitation, and for improvements. The regime in the Soviet Union organized crackdowns against these struggles, just like today’s CCP.
For me, for you, and for others, this is alienating. What shall I tell comrades in China? Something like: “You will not get any support because it is more important to fight U.S. imperialism”? That makes no sense. I think it is important to stay focused and take a grassroots perspective on struggles of workers, women*, feminists, and of other social movements like that of environmentalists. It is important to support these struggles in a way that envisions crossing borders between countries, borders between people with different political backgrounds, and that also envisions global class struggle and revolutionary change.
KL: After having looked at PRC history from this grassroots and class struggle perspective, what are lessons for today, for activists who are watching social movements and grassroots activism in China and want to support them?
RR: The first lesson is to question the mainstream and dominant narratives on what happened in actually existing socialism and what happens today. That includes narratives among the left that focus on isolated human rights debates and ignore capitalist exploitation or patriarchal oppression.
Another thing is that, when looking more closely at the revolutionary attempt, we have to acknowledge that, in the early phase, the CCP and many people who supported the CCP had this vision of revolutionary change. So, what went wrong? Just to give an example: the CCP regime ran the work units, the enterprises, with the so-called “one-man regiment” copied from the Soviet or Stalinist model; then it introduced some kind of co-management of workers that did not really work and never led to the handing-over of the control over production to the workers.
Obviously, there is no point to come up with an idealized picture of what could have been or what could happen in the future. We need to stay focused on today’s movements. At the moment, we live through a difficult time, not just in China but also in other regions. But, ten years ago, we had a cycle of struggles, and before the pandemic there was another beginning of a global cycle of struggles. Who knows what would have happened with that without the Covid-19 pandemic? Let us combine the historical analysis of socialism with an analysis of these more recent experiences, and let us bring in the Chinese comrades and their experiences as well. Then we can come up with some kind of global perspective for revolutionary change.
References
Andreas, Joel, Disenfranchised. The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Dirlik, Arif, “The Third World,” in 1968: The World Transformed, edited by Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 295–317.
Gerth, Karl, Unending Capitalism. How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Meisner, Maurice, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic. 3rd edition (New York: The Free Press, 1999).
Pun Ngai, Li Wanwei, dagongmei: Arbeiterinnen aus Chinas Weltmarktfabriken erzählen. translated and published by Ralf Ruckus (Berlin/Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2008).
Ruckus, Ralf, The Left in China. A Political Cartography (London: Pluto Press, 2023), https://www.gongchao.org/en/the-left-in-china.
Ruckus, Ralf, The Communist Road to Capitalism. How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949 (Oakland: PM Press, 2021), https://www.gongchao.org/en/the-communist-road-to-capitalism.
Ruckus, Ralf, “Confronting Amazon.” Jacobin, March 31, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/3d48t8zf.
Sheehan, Jackie, Chinese Workers: A New History (London: Routledge, 1998).
Silver, Beverly, Forces of Labor. Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
ten Brink, Tobias, Chinas Kapitalismus: Entstehung, Verlauf, Paradoxien (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013).
Additional Resources
Hao Ren et al., Streiks im Perlflussdelta. ArbeiterInnenwiderstand in Chinas Weltmarktfabriken. translated and published by Ralf Ruckus (Vienna/Berlin: Mandelbaum, 2014), https://www.gongchao.org/de/streiks-buch; an English version was published as China on Strike [Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016]).
Operaismo and Its Critique, three volumes (published in Chinese, 2018), https://www.gongchao.org/cn/gongrenzhuyi-ji-qi-pipan)
Pun Ngai, Lu Huilin, Guo Yuhua, and Shen Yuan (eds.), iSlaves. Ausbeutung und Widerstand in Chinas Foxconn-Fabriken. translated and published by Ralf Ruckus (Vienna/Berlin: Mandelbaum, 2013),https://www.gongchao.org/de/islaves-buch).
Pun Ngai, Ching Kwan Lee et al., Aufbruch der zweiten Generation. Wanderarbeit, Gender und Klassenzusammensetzung in China (Berlin/Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2010),https://www.gongchao.org/de/aufbruch-buch.
Unruhen in China. Supplement to the magazine wildcat #80, 2007, https://www. gongchao.org/de/unruhen-heft.
Wu Yiching, Die andere Kulturrevolution. 1966–1969: Der Anfang vom Ende des chinesischen Sozialismus, translated and published by Ralf Ruckus (Vienna/Berlin: Mandelbaum, 2019), https://www.gongchao.org/de/die-andere-kulturrevolution; German translation of the book The Cultural Revolution at the Margins. Chinese Socialism in Crisis [Harvard University Press, 2014]).
Zhang Lu, Arbeitskämpfe in Chinas Autofabriken, translated and published by Ralf Ruckus (Vienna/Berlin: Mandelbaum, 2018), https://www.gongchao.org/de/auto-buch; German translation of the book Inside China’s Automobile Factories [Cambridge University Press, 2014]).
Endnotes
[1] The webinar recording is available at https://nqch.org/2021/10/16/the-communist-road-to-capitalism-in-china. For this publication, the transcript was edited and shortened.
[2] Silver, Beverly. Forces of Labor. Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[3] The list of books Ralf Ruckus has translated and published can be found at the end of this transcript.
[4] For an early report, please, see Ruckus, Ralf, “Confronting Amazon.” Jacobin, March 31, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/3d48t8zf. More on the cross-border organizing attempt of Amazon workers can be found at https://amworkers.wordpress.com.
[5] Meisner, Maurice, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic. 3rd edition (New York: The Free Press, 1999); Sheehan, Jackie, Chinese Workers: A New History (London: Routledge, 1998); Andreas, Joel, Disenfranchised. The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[6] Dirlik, Arif, “The Third World,” in 1968: The World Transformed, edited by Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 293.
[7] See the transcript of the event with Isabella Weber in this volume.
[8] Gerth, Karl, Unending Capitalism. How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[9] ten Brink, Tobias, Chinas Kapitalismus: Entstehung, Verlauf, Paradoxien (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013).
[10] Pun Ngai and Li Wanwei, dagongmei: Arbeiterinnen aus Chinas Weltmarktfabriken erzählen. Translated and published by Ralf Ruckus (Berlin/Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2008), p. 149.
闹清楚 [nau̯ tɕʰiŋ ʈʂʰu] 