Establishing the Chinese Workers’ State¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: Establishing the Chinese Workers’ State¶
This chapter examines the complex and contradictory process by which the Chinese Revolution of 1949 gave rise to a workers’ state, albeit one deformed by bureaucratic rule. The core argument is that the New Democracy regime (1949–53) was a transitional, historically unprecedented formation—a workers’ and peasants’ government, not a dictatorship of the proletariat. Revolutionary Marxists date the establishment of a bureaucratically-deformed workers’ state from October 1953, when the First Five-Year Plan launched the transition to socialism. The plan extended state control over all major economic areas, nationalised private industry, eliminated private markets, and monopolised foreign trade. Agriculture was reorganised through Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives, moving from Lower Stage (private land ownership with payments proportional to input) to Higher Stage (collective land ownership and wage labour). Mao forced through rapid collectivisation by bypassing the Politburo and packing a Central Committee plenum with supporters; by the end of 1957, nearly 95% of peasant households were in Higher Stage APCs, a process marked by coercion, violence, and falsified production reports.
The plan achieved major economic growth: real wages rose by a third, life expectancy increased from 36 to 57 years, primary school attendance doubled, and famine appeared eliminated. In September 1956, the CCP declared China a proletarian dictatorship. The chapter distinguishes this transition from Russia’s 1917–18 experience, where the proletariat led the revolution and the workers’ state was established through nationalisation, state planning, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Drawing on the 1922 Fourth Congress Thesis on Tactics and the Transitional Programme, the chapter argues that under exceptional post-war conditions—with imperialism temporarily impotent—petty-bourgeois Stalinist parties could break with the bourgeoisie and produce a workers’ and farmers’ government as a short episode en route to proletarian dictatorship. Joe Hansen observed that such regimes could progress to a workers’ state, as in China and Cuba, though some regressed. The CCP, a petty-bourgeois Stalinist party carried to power by mass mobilisation, initially protected private property and the national bourgeoisie under its New Democracy programme. However, the pressures of reconstruction—overcoming starvation, hyperinflation, and industrial devastation—forced it toward state planning and socialist measures. The chapter concludes that while the revolution destroyed capitalist property relations and established state ownership and planning, the lack of workers’ democracy allowed the party-state bureaucracy to rule in its own interests. Applying Trotsky’s theory of the degenerated workers’ state, the text argues that the revolution was progressive, but the political revolution to overthrow bureaucratic rule remains incomplete.