Foreword¶
Core Argument¶
Fred Weston’s foreword to John Roberts’ China: from Permanent Revolution to Counter-Revolution sets out a Trotskyist framework for interpreting the entire trajectory of the Chinese Revolution, from 1949 to the present restoration of capitalism. The core argument is that the Chinese Communist Party’s abolition of capitalism in the mid-1950s was not the result of a conscious socialist plan but an objective confirmation of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, carried out despite the Stalinist “stagist” outlook that dominated the CCP’s leadership. Weston insists that Mao initially sought a bourgeois-democratic stage, attempting an alliance with sections of the Chinese bourgeoisie after taking power. This perspective failed because the bourgeoisie refused to cooperate: the bulk backed Chiang Kai-shek and fled, while those who remained sabotaged reform. The key enabling factor was that the CCP held state power—the old semi-feudal bourgeois state had been smashed by the People’s Liberation Army—meaning the party could progressively expropriate the capitalists, step by step, until by the mid-1950s China had become a “deformed workers’ state”: a planned, state-owned economy without direct workers’ political control.
Weston draws heavily on the historical and theoretical context of the Russian Revolution. He contrasts Lenin and Trotsky’s understanding of Permanent Revolution—that in backward countries the working class must lead the bourgeois-democratic phase immediately into socialist tasks—with the Menshevik and later Stalinist theory of “stages,” which held that a period of capitalist development under a progressive bourgeoisie was necessary first. This erroneous stagist outlook, Weston argues, explains the catastrophic defeats of the Spanish workers in the 1930s and of the Italian and French workers after World War II, where Communist Parties sought accommodation with bourgeois forces. The Chinese case, he claims, repeated this pattern in theory but was saved in practice by objective class forces.
The foreword’s polemical thrust is directed squarely against Stalinism and its official historiography. Weston charges that the rising Chinese bureaucracy later rewrote history to present Mao as having consciously aimed for socialism all along, a falsification Roberts’ book allegedly exposes by comparing different versions of party texts. The later return to capitalism under Deng is analysed through Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed: a privileged bureaucratic caste, unable to pass on its privileges to offspring without becoming owners, inevitably pushed for restoration. Weston concludes that the Chinese working class, now the largest in history, will eventually need to unbury this real history from official mythology.