IDEASTHEORY

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AMRAustralian Marxist Review – Journal of the Communist Party of Australia

#64  April 2017  $5

•  SYRIZA: A false left

•   On the illegality  of war

•   Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre

•   The NEP and  China’s opening  and reform

•   The study of theory  is necessarily linked  to practice

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Contents

Editorial notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

SYRIZA: A false left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

On the illegality of war . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Opposite directions: The NEP and China’s Opening and Reform . . 14

The study of theory is necessarily linked to practice . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre by Samia Halaby: A review . . 28

Comment on Reliable friends of China & The task of our time . . . . 30

Printed and published by the Communist Party of AustraliaPostal: 74 Buckingham Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010 AustraliaPhone: + 61 2 9699 9844 Fax: + 61 2 9699 9833Email: cpa@cpa.org.auWebsite: www.cpa.org.auISSN: 0310-8252 Issue # 64 – April 2017

Editorial BoardDr Hannah Middleton (editor)

Michael Hooper (assistant-editor)David Matters

Bob Briton

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Welcome to the first issue of the Australian Marxist Review for 2017, a year that is shaping up to be an impor-tant one for the international working class movement. Issue #64 focuses on international issues in a broad way with topics ranging from an examination of the tactical decisions of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to broader strategic questions of international law.

The 2015 victory of Syriza in the Greek elections was warmly welcomed by forces across the left but greet-ed with antipathy by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). As events have shown, the KKE’s scepticism of Syriza was proven correct. In his article, “Syriza: A false left”, Elias Alevizos explains the KKE’s reasons for doubting Syriza and presents the dire consequences of Syriza’s betrayal.

In keeping with an international theme, this issue of the AMR features the first instalment of a multi-part series by Craig Ryan on questions of law, especially interna-tional law and how Marxists should understand and use struggles around law to further the goals of the working class. Part one of “On the illegality of war” focuses on describing different Marxists’ understandings of law and the potential for international law to be used in the inter-ests of class struggle.

Discussions of international issues cannot ignore the Chinese elephant in the room. In “Opposite direc-tions: NEP and China’s Opening and Reform”, Michael Hooper addresses the common comparison made be-tween the Bolshevik New Economic Policy and China’s

current “Opening and Reform”. He contrasts not only the specific economic aspects of the policies but the cir-cumstances they originated from, their respective politi-cal characters and their differing aims. He concludes that while the Bolsheviks considered the NEP to be a tem-porary retreat, establishing state capitalism in order to bring about a centrally planned, socialist economy with no exploitation, the Communist Party of China has no such plans.

Questions of theory and practice are further explored in David Matters’ “The study of theory is necessarily linked to practice”. In this piece, David demonstrates the breadth of his theoretical and historical knowledge, ar-guing against a wide range of trends he considers harm-ful to the Party of the working class.

The final article of this issue is a review of artist Samia Halaby’s most recent work Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre. Eric Brooks summarises the author’s work as a “moving set of images melded with text into a seam-less whole”, while explaining the background and sig-nificance of what the work represents for those readers who may not be familiar with the massacre.

As always, we encourage readers to submit articles and discussion comments for inclusion in the next issue of the AMR. Reader feedback and comments are also much appreciated! The editorial board of the AMR wishes all readers a productive year of activity and victory in the struggles ahead!

Editorial notes

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In its first days in office, the Syriza government made important symbolic gestures. Its leader, Alexis Tsipras, was sworn in as prime minister without taking a reli-gious oath. He later went to pay his respects at a memo-rial for anti-Nazi fighters massacred by the occupying German army during the Second World War. These were highly symbolic events for Greeks.

The new Syriza-led government also appeared to stand by its pre-election pledges and announced a series of popular new policies. These included restoring the mini-mum wage to pre-crisis levels; a small raise in low pen-sions; abolition of hospital visit fees and prescription charges; ending the forced sale of homes of people who cannot keep up with mortgage repayments; scrapping planned privatisations; re-employing sacked teachers; abolishing the civil service “evaluation” system, which was created to provide continuous layoffs; the re-em-ployment of more than 3,500 sacked civil servants and public-sector workers; re-establishing ERT as the state broadcaster and re-employing its workforce; and pro-viding citizenship for children of immigrants born and raised in Greece.

The promise of these policies came as a huge and wel-come relief to Greek workers after years of austerity.

SYRIZA has formed a coalition government with the Independent Greeks party, a party that emerged from a New Democracy (ND) split and which therefore is a party faithful to the capitalist system and which is pen-etrated with the logic of capital and of the “forces of the market”. SYRIZA’s cooperation with such a party is of course a dangerous trap!

SYRIZA moved in this direction after having contacted the KKE (Communist Party of Greek) to discuss the pos-sibility of forming a left coalition government. The KKE refused any kind of collaboration with SYRIZA, even refusing to give a vote of confidence to a SYRIZA gov-ernment. This stand, a refusal by the KKE of any kind of collaboration and of a vote of confidence in a SYRIZA-led government, was repeated publicly many times in the course of the election campaign by the KKE leader-ship. Off the record information from inside SYRIZA says that Tsipras telephoned the general secretary of the KKE, Koutsoumbas, on the night of the election results but the latter refused even to meet Tsipras.

Why did the KKE refuse?

The KKE justifies this refusal on the basis of “ideologi-cal and political differences”.

But what prevented the KKE from saying “yes” to working with Syriza “under certain conditions”? What prevented the KKE from putting a number of minimum conditions as necessary for possible cooperation or a vote of confidence, i.e. a series of measures in the inter-ests of the working class and the mass of Greek people and against the power of the big capital?

The KKE could have given a vote of confidence to the SYRIZA government, on the basis of, and as long as it carried out, pro-working class policies. It could give given a vote of confidence but at the same time claimed to maintain its full ideological, political and organisa-tional independence. The SYRIZA leadership would thus have had no “justification” for turning to the popu-list, right-wing Independent Greeks. The KKE would thus have been able to reach out to SYRIZA’s left wing and the millions of workers that voted for SYRIZA, to get rid of the barbarism of the Troikans.

The general secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoumpas, spoke before the multi-faceted program, which included a musical-theatrical production with the participation of 200 artists and tech-nicians, and he stressed amongst other things:

Ninety-six years! We learn from our heroic history, we remain unwaveringly committed to our goal of abolishing the exploitation of man by man. We creatively utilise the conclusions we have drawn from the titanic struggles of our people, with the KKE in the frontline!

In reference to political developments, he noted:

The day after the elections, a government, either based on ND or based on SYRIZA, will take the baton passed by the previous one and even if it follows a slightly different route, you can be sure that it has the same starting point and the same goal, in line with the strategy of the EU, the profitability of the monopolies, the capitalist development path.

For this reason, this government will inevitably be an anti-people one, because it will implement the EU commitments. It will be a government that will negotiate the debt, because it accepts that it is the debt of the people and the country. It will be a government that will defend the interests of the big business groups.

And we are not only ones who say this. They themselves admit it. For example, ND says, that:

SYRIZA: A false leftElias Alevizos

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“We must implement reforms on our own without being asked to do it and we will go beyond our commitments” … and when SYRIZA says that “We will negotiate inside the framework of the European Union and European institutions.”

D Koutsoumpas provided a detailed exposé of the char-acter of the common anti-people strategy of ND and SYRIZA, despite their various differences, and added: “ND with its previous experience in government and SYRIZA with its previous experience in undermin-ing the movement are struggling to undertake the role of the chosen one of the EU and the monopolies.” He made special reference to the president of SYRIZA’s, A Tsipras’ promise, in a statement made on a British TV channel, that SYRIZA will do whatever is necessary “to save our common home, the EU”. D Koutsoumpas noted that this is the reason SYRIZA is promising only crumbs.

Koutsoumpas further commented regarding the Party’s refusal to participate or support a “left” government:

Everyone should consider the following: in previous years one-party and coalition governments came and went, extorting the popular vote sometimes through fear of the “worst” or through illusions about the “lesser” evil.

They are repeating the same fairy-tale now. That if we can agree on two to three issues, we should give SYRIZA our tolerance. But things are not that simple, because the two to three small issues are determined by the big, strategic issues.

In essence, they are asking the KKE to support such a government in its entirety.

Because, in reality, a government in its entirety has to deal with all the issues. The developments do not restrict themselves to two to three issues.

It will deal with all the problems of the economy, health, education, immigration, state repression, justice, foreign policy etc.

There are some who say that if SYRIZA can solve one issue that is good. However, a government does not only deal with one or two issues. It has to deal with a vast range of matters related to the EU, NATO, Greek-Turkish relations, matters related to the Aegean Sea, the Cyprus question, the military interventions and conflicts in the region and beyond, i.e. everything. In reality, has any government ever been judged just on one or two issues?

Alexis Tsipras signs documents as he is sworn in as Prime Minister.

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What we must all be clear about is that as long as a government manages the fortunes of the people and the country, trapped inside the shackles of the EU and the capitalist development path, which is obsolete and rotting, this trap of the lesser evil will continuously lead to new anti-people governments.

The people must be freed from all the anti-people governments and their political line, they themselves must take power. The situation today – both in Greece and internationally – does not allow for any time to be wasted.

With extraordinary speed, the Syriza-led government in Greece has repudiated the landslide “no” vote in the referendum on European Union (EU) austerity demands.

Only four days after Greek workers and youth voted overwhelmingly to reject the dictates of the EU, the gov-ernment presented a proposal for €13 billion in austerity measures for the consideration of European finance min-isters and government heads. This proposal included:

• A gradual increase in the retirement age from 62 to 67, completed by 2022, along with “disincentives” to early retirement.

• The elimination of a solidarity grant for poor pensioners and a 50 percent increase in health costs for pensioners.

• A socially regressive increase in the VAT (sales tax) on most goods to 23 percent, applied also to Greece’s numerous, often remote and impoverished islands.

• Cuts to public-sector salaries imposed by “unifying” the wage grid for government workers, together with further attacks on labour laws.

• The completion of all currently planned privatisations, including regional airports and the ports of Piraeus, Thessaloniki and Hellinikon.

• Cuts to fuel subsidies for farmers, along with stricter en-forcement of tax laws to increase the tax burden on small businesses, property owners and the self-employed.

The shameless prostration of Syriza to the demands of the EU is the inevitable conclusion of its entire course since taking power in January 2015. From the beginning, it sought nothing more than marginal modifications in EU policy. It immediately pledged not to take any uni-lateral measures to repudiate Greece’s €300 billion debt, nor to impose controls to stem the flight of capital from Greek banks.

Syriza rejected any appeal to the mass opposition to EU austerity in the European working class. Instead, the government sought to ingratiate itself with the major banks and European imperialist powers, as well as the Obama administration. The European governments, led by Berlin, treated Tsipras with well-deserved contempt, knowing that they had absolutely nothing to fear from the Syriza leader.

Syriza’s move to impose an unprecedented EU austerity package is a serious defeat for the working class. Not only does it place the Greek masses at the mercy of the EU, but to the extent that the cowardly actions of Syriza are understood as “left” politics, the most reactionary political forces, such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, will and have been strengthened.

The working class is seeing as well what a pseudo-left party does when it comes to power. Confronted with the conflict between European capital’s demands for auster-ity and the social anger in the working class, Syriza fled into the arms of the banks.

No one can claim that the outcome in Greece is the result of a refusal of the working class to fight. The workers voted “no” on EU austerity and mobilised large sections of the youth and the middle class behind them. The cen-tral obstacle that emerged to the working class in Greece was the reactionary role of Syriza.

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On the illegality of warPart 1C T Ryan

Editorial Note: This article appears in mul-tiple Parts; this Part 1 contains Sections I-III as described below with Sections IV-VI to be published in later issues.

I. IntroductionIn its quest to secure the predatory interests of transna-tional capital through the political and economic subjec-tion of the world, imperialism baulks at no strategy to undermine the national independence and sovereignty of states. The imperialist powers, primarily the United States, Britain, and the European Union, variously spon-sor terrorism, uprisings, coups (Syria, Libya, Ukraine), outright military assaults (Afghanistan, Iraq), or com-binations of these and other strategies (Libya, Syria) to subvert the independence of states.1

The imperialist powers appear supremely unconcerned about complying with international law when they

1  In 1915 Lenin wrote that capitalism in its imperialist stage strives to seize territory for the investment of capital and obtaining raw materials: “From the liberator of nations, which it was in the struggle against feudalism, capitalism in its imperialist stage has turned into the greatest oppressor of nations.” See Lenin VI, On Imperialism and Imperialists (Progress Publishers, 1973) pp 38 – 39.

engage in such aggression, and ultimately they are not constrained by legal considerations. Short of this final position however, the imperialist powers strive to achieve an imprimatur of legality for their actions, because they have a vested interest in maintaining the system of in-ternational law which is part of the apparatus that en-sures their global domination. Thus there have been the imperialist powers’ efforts to develop and incorporate in international law various interventionist doctrines to legally justify their aggressions against other states, such as humanitarian intervention and anticipatory self-defence.2 These attempts are explored in this paper with particular reference to the 2003 war against Iraq.

It is necessary then for progressive forces to engage with questions of the legality of the imperialists’ aggressive actions under international law. Engagement with legal questions, however, should not simply be considered as a means to expose the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the imperialist powers in their acts of aggression. It also has larger significance.

2  In more recent years, the imperialist powers have also relied on the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine to legitimise intervention. That doctrine was utilised in the context of the 2011 NATO military assault on Libya, and again in Syria in relation to the United Nations Security Council’s authorisation of UN humanitarian agencies and implementing partners to use routes across Syria to provide aid: see UN Security Council Resolutions 2165 (2014) and 2258 (2015).

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A dialectical understanding of international law recog-nises that international law can be and should be appro-priated to help further causes that advance the economic, social, and political liberation of the world’s peoples and consequently progress towards socialism.

In addition to this introduction, the article contains five Sections. Through a consideration of Marxist writings (both classical and in recent legal scholarship) on law generally, international law specifically, and the state – Section II examines the nature of international law and aspects of its history. There is particular reference to commodity-form theory, the base/superstructure di-chotomy, and the concept of the withering away of law and the state. The conclusion is reached that ideological struggle by progressive forces and the non-imperialist countries for a version of international law that helps counter the globalisation of transnational capitalism and which furthers the cause of economic, social, and politi-cal advancement for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, is a necessary element of the revo-lutionary process. Not as a substitute for other forms of struggle, but as one expression of the larger social and class struggles.

International law evolves socially through the broadest interconnection between, and complex interaction of, the different sections of national and international society, particularly in ideological, political, class, and national struggles. This evolution is facilitated by international law’s peculiar form of apparent neutrality and autonomy, and history shows that as a result of these formative pres-sures international law is susceptible to modification and transformation. Though at base it serves to maintain the status quo, international law has helped effect progres-sive change, including contributing to the success of the de-colonisation movement after the Second World War and advancing the cause of economic re-distribution in favour of developing countries, and has been changed itself in the process. Section III therefore considers how its malleability renders international law of vital impor-tance to the struggle against war.

Section IV considers International law as a contestable realm. One of the sharpest expressions of the ideologi-cal conflict between reactionary and progressive forces over interpretations of legality has been the attempt by the leading imperialist states to overturn the post-Second World War international consensus on the prohibition on states waging aggressive war against other states, as en-shrined in the United Nations Charter. The corollary of such a development, should it succeed, would be to cre-ate a world in which aggression by the imperialist pow-ers against other states is legally legitimate.

In this context there is a pressing imperative that pro-gressives and the non-imperialist states argue for their

interpretations of legality and in particular assert that the existing fundamental prohibition on the use of force by states against other states in international law is the cor-rect legal position. For that reason, Section V offers a proposal for an opinio juris for anticipatory self-defence of nations. There is the potential here to strike a blow against the imperialists’ ceaseless drive to war, such as evident in the US-led preparation and planning for war against China.

Section VI concludes.

II. Marxism and lawMarx said that the “legal and political superstructures” of society arise on its economic foundations.3 Within Marxist legal scholarship, however, there has not been universal agreement that law is superstructural in nature; some see it primarily as a constitutive part of the eco-nomic base of capitalism. The question – base or super-structure – is of real significance for Marxists. If law is superstructural, evolving through complex social proc-esses, then it is malleable and capable of being trans-formed, including to serve as a medium for enhancing the capacity of progressive social forces and for helping effect incremental advancement in the material condi-tions of society. If it is a constitutive part of the base, however, then it arguably follows that any meaningful practical contribution law would be able to make to in-cremental, pre-revolutionary, social progress, must nec-essarily be limited as being intrinsically counteractive.

The essential question then is whether law and consid-erations of legality have a useful role to play in Marxist revolutionary strategy?

A. Base or superstructure: The “commodity-form” theory of law The “commodity-form” theory of law4 espoused by the early Soviet legal philosopher and scholar, Yevgeny Pashukanis, and defended and elaborated upon in recent years by Miéville,5 argues that law in its embryonic form is an integral part of the base in capitalist society.

The legal form is said to be intrinsic to the commodity exchange relations fundamental to capitalism. The theo-ry holds that in the exchange of commodities, the parties to the exchange are regarded as both owners of private property and formally equal to each other – enabling

3  See Bottomore TB and Rubel M (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Pelican Books, 1976, p 67.

4  Also described as the “commodity exchange theory of law”, see Collins H, Marxism and Law, Clarendon Press, 1982, p 108.

5  Miéville C, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, Pluto Press, 2006.

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the free exchange of commodities between them. The legal form is “the necessary form” of this relationship.6 Implicit in this exchange relationship is contestation, and law is said to develop as the formalisation of the method of dispute settlement in exchange, ensuring respect for each party’s sovereignty and equality. For example, contracts entail the formal mutual recogni-tion of equal subjects giving life to the abstract essential legal relationship. Law as a regulatory mechanism be-comes generalised in an economy based on commodity production.7

According to commodity-form theory, the development of international law proceeded on similar lines: from the need to regulate commodity exchange relationships between organised groups, through the development of the system of sovereign states which are “intrinsically constituted” by the legal forms of these exchange rela-tionships – being property owners writ large, therefore necessarily capitalist, and formally equal to each other.8

Notwithstanding its recognition that the legal form be-comes visible and “actualises” in the legal superstruc-ture – via the medium of law – commodity-form theory concludes that, given its essential quality in the com-modity exchange relationship, the legal form is not part of the superstructure of capitalist society but part of its economic base.9

B. Against commodity-form theory: the social evolution of lawFor commodity-form theory then, law is in effect indi-visible from capitalism and not amenable to modifica-tion, short of revolution. Criticisms of commodity-form theory’s fundamental identification of the legal form with commodity exchange relations and the implications of this, include that it: fails to see law as changing with the development of productive relations; reduces differ-ent social relations to a “single, static and illusory” legal form; and, sees any legal form as necessarily bourgeois.10

In contrast to commodity-form theory, Chimni expounds the connection between the development of law and the development of capitalist relations of production. Chimni explains the development of international law as being closely related to the actual historical development of the productive forces of capitalism and its global expan-sion. Ultimately determined by the development of the

6  ibid., pp 78, 84, 91 - 93.

7  ibid., pp 78 - 79, 86, 88.

8  ibid., pp 130 - 137, 224, 289 - 293, 316.

9  ibid., p 96.

10  See Bowring B, “Positivism versus self-determination: the contradictions of Soviet international law”, in Marks S (ed), International Law on the Left: Re-examining Marxist Legacies, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p 150.

dominant capitalist mode of production, international law is a system through which states seek to realise the interests of particular groups and classes. In the context of supranational capitalism – with its world market and international division of labour – these interests, Chimni concludes, are “sectional global interests.”11 In this view, it is not that the enabling and regulation of commodity-exchange relations between states is not part of the func-tion of international law, it is that international law is not (in contrast to the commodity-form view) confined to that narrow purpose.

Certainly Miéville does delineate a link between interna-tional law and the development of capitalist relations of production, conceding that the relations of international juridical equality are “actualised according to what is ultimately a class logic, rather than a market logic.”12 Again, at another level, commodity-form theory draws a distinction between the legal form which it sees as part of the material base of society and evolved law which it identifies as necessarily manifested in the superstructure (eg court proceedings).13 However, despite its view that law in its evolved state is distinct from the legal form, for commodity-form theory law never really transcends the legal form in a functional sense.

For commodity-form theory, the decisive factor deter-mining the role of international law is the fact that states stand in relation to each other as capitalist states in the international market place, this means international law’s only real function is to mediate that exchange relation-ship. The most dramatic manifestation of this is the role of international law as facilitator, through its institutions and mechanisms, of national states using armed force to resolve their disputes and otherwise achieve their ends. This translates into war and imperialism. For Miéville, modern imperialism and its violence inevitably follows from the contestation inherent in exchange relationships. International law, premised as it is on the principle of the sovereignty of states, assumes the right of states to resort to violence to enforce their claims in the absence of any one state to act as “final arbiter”.14 In a militarily and politically unequal world, the more powerful states invariably win the contest.

“A world structured around international law cannot but be one of imperialist violence”, concludes Miéville.15

11  Chimni BS, “Marxism and International Law: A Contemporary Analysis”, in Economic and Political Weekly, 6 February 1999, pp 337 - 339. Chimni identifies the different historical phases in the evolution of international law which correspond to phases in the development of global capitalism.

12  Miéville, op. cit., p 293.

13  ibid., p 96.

14  ibid., pp 135 - 137, 286 - 289, 291 - 293, 316 - 317.

15  ibid., pp 292, 319.

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That international law acts as the agency of militarily aggressive imperialism in this interpretation, points to its servicing of the predatory activities of finance capital: the exploitation and acquisition of ever greater resources and market share. This role is qualitatively different to the function of regulating international exchange rela-tions (even if the outcome is the same) because it is actu-ated by the production and financial demands of mature capitalism, rather than just being incidental to the ex-change relations function. Miéville even acknowledges Lenin’s recognition of the penetration of finance capital into the state and the determinative impact this has on the geopolitical strategies of the imperialist states. However, despite what the recognition of international law’s role in imperialism implies for understanding international law’s development, commodity-form theory is shackled by its basic perception of the role of law. Speaking of imperialist violence, Miéville says:

[T]his violence at the hands of the juridical subjects themselves is the violence of the market, of the commodity and of the legal form, but it is not class-violence. The necessity of coercion inheres in the exchange of commodities, not on a particular mode of production and exploitation.16

Bound by its complete identification of law with com-modity-exchange relations, commodity-form theory is incapable of applying a dialectical understanding to the reality of law. It cannot recognise the fact that law, including international law, changes over time in com-plex interaction with the widest range of economic and non-economic factors.17 Rather it suggests there is some mysterious process of transubstantiation by which law is indissolubly one with the commodity-exchange rela-tionship, as giving actual expression to the legal form, which, in the theory, is both an essential quality and circular, self-referential description of that relationship. Ultimately, it is the confusion of form with content.

In expounding that the legal form is part of the base in capitalist society, Miéville places weight on a passage from Capital in which Marx says the “juridical relation” (the legal form) “is a relation between two wills which mirrors the economic relation. The content of this juridi-cal relation ... is itself determined by the economic rela-tion.” (Miéville’s emphasis). According to commodity-form theory, this demonstrates that Marx saw mutual recognition of formal (legal) equality/property rights by

16  ibid., p 292.

17  In discussing Pashukanis, a shortcoming of the commodity-form approach identified by Collins was that its “crude materialism” did not allow for recognition of the role of social practices in determining conscious action, simply explaining all legal rules as “reflections of commodity exchange”, Collins, Marxism and Law, p 109.

property owners (law’s foundation), as being intrinsic to the process of commodity exchange.18

To conceptualise as legal the elemental recognition by property owners of each other’s property rights and equal status is understandable – implying as it does rec-ognition by property owners of a mutually acceptable regulatory foundation for their systematic engagement in commodity-exchange. However, exchange can only meaningfully occur – products brought to market by their owners be transformed into commodities with ex-change values – by there being a “universal equivalent” to enable the magnitude of values to be computed. The universal equivalent is money and it facilitates “com-mercial intercourse”; the realisation of exchange value. The acceptance of the universal equivalent – money – is socially determined. In the same section of Capital quoted by Miéville above, Marx described this process:

The social action of all other commodities, therefore, sets apart the particular commodity in which they all represent their values. The natural form of this commodity thereby becomes the socially recognised equivalent form. Through the agency of the social process it becomes the specific social function of the commodity which has been set apart to be the universal equivalent. It thus becomes – money.19

This elaboration of the context necessary for meaningful commodity exchange to take place is pertinent to a prop-er understanding of the development and role of law, both domestically and internationally. Just as money emerges through society sanctioning it as the gauge of value to facilitate commodity exchange, so law evolves through social processes. These involve the broadest interconnection and interaction between the different parts of society at national and international levels, in particular their interaction in different forms of strug-gle – ideological, political, class, national. The dominant mode of production is the decisive context for shaping the development of law, but law is not a constitutive ele-ment of that mode, rather it is part of the superstructure built upon it.

The diversity of law and its functions attests to its his-torical social evolution and its having a qualitatively dis-tinct role from that of simply vindicating property rights in commodity-exchange. Thus superstructural, the legal system regulates all aspects of life of society in a mesh which primarily responds to and facilitates the operation of advanced capitalism. Laws regulating development, environmental protection, and industrial relations, for example, attempt to reconcile and manage contending

18  Miéville, op. cit., p 87.

19  Marx K, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Penguin Books (ed), 1976, pp 178 - 181.

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social interests. Laws protect the proprietary interests of large corporations (eg trademarks law), including such interests conceptualised as “national”. Laws facilitate the mobilisation of capital and manage its tendency towards concentration (eg laws in relation to takeovers and financial regulation). Some laws have overlapping functions, such as those regulating foreign investment which have both capital mobilising and proprietary in-terest protecting roles. Finally, there is the whole body of international economic laws which provide the legal foundations for capital expansion and accumulation in globalisation.20

C. De-mystification of the rule of law The recognition that law evolves through social proc-esses allows for a broader Marxist understanding of the social and political function of law than that coun-tenanced in commodity-form theory. Moreover, what occurs in the social superstructure is not independent of what occurs in the economic base, but this interconnec-tion and interaction of the material base of society with its superstructure is complex and dynamic. Dialectical/historical materialism recognises there is reciprocity: ideas and institutions originate in the material conditions of society, but having arisen, and evolving socially, then effect “the development of the material conditions of the life of society.”21 Social ideas and institutions such as those embodied in society’s legal superstructure do not simply reflect the material base of society, they also have motive force.

This understanding allows for a more subtle interpreta-tion of the role of law than does commodity-form the-ory’s conception of law’s function – as being identical with the essential determinative role played by the legal form in commodity exchange. The more subtle interpre-tation holds, for example, that laws, though superstruc-tural in nature, serve to direct the relations of production facilitating the development of ever more “complicated social structures”.22 Society’s continuous development is seen to accord with the interaction between “productive activities and conscious regulations.”23

This interaction – both within the superstructure and be-tween the base and superstructure – is cumulative, ongo-ing, and complex; and law continues to evolve through this process. Chimni noted in relation to international

20  Chimni BS, “International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making”, 2004, 15, European Journal of International Law, 1 at p 7.

21  Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939, pp 116 - 117.

22  Collins, Marxism and Law, p 89.

23  Collins, Marxism and Law, pp 89 - 90.

law, that its own “internal structure and dynamics [in part] ... shapes its content and discourse”.

Bolstered by principles such as formal equality between states and state sovereignty, and international and na-tional mechanisms designed to enforce compliance with international obligations, international law has an appearance of neutrality and its rules some autonomy.24 These ideas of state equality and a neutral and autono-mous international legal system (and their counterparts at the national level), are propagated in the bourgeois ideology of the Rule of Law. It is important to note at this point, that modern international law crystallised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the system for regulating relations between European states emerging from feudalism to capitalism, particularly in their mer-cantilist interactions and early colonialist expansion and division of the rest of the world.25 So the sovereign state vaunted in liberal ideology is a capitalist state.26

The seeming autonomous quality of international law influences the distribution and exercise of power in the international system. Chimni argues that while interna-tional law serves to maintain the status quo – “safeguard the interests of a coalition of dominant global social forces and states”, in a world of unequal distribution of power between states – it simultaneously acts as a constraint on the dominant states. Its apparently neutral and autonomous character, reinforced by compliance mechanisms, compels even the most powerful states to refer to international law in justifying their actions, and prevents them from “openly flouting” its authority.27 Powerful states are wary of undermining the legitimacy of international law given its primary role as a defender of their interests, but also, it would seem, in recognition of the potency of the idea of the Rule of Law in the in-ternational system.

This contradictory operation of the Rule of Law ideol-ogy demonstrates the potential both for the legal system to be made to serve a progressive political function and its malleability through social evolution. Thus Chimni explained that the entrenchment of the idea of the Rule of Law, resulted from the struggles of colonial peoples for independence and the concomitant struggles of dem-ocratic forces within the colonial powers. It encapsu-lates notions of formal equality between states and state

24  Chimni, Marxism and International Law, p 338.

25  Chimni BS, “An outline of a Marxist course on public international law” in International Law on the Left, p 58; Chimni, “Marxism and International Law”, pp 338 - 339. See also Miéville, Between Equal Rights, pp 203 - 214.

26  And in co-existence “with the colonial state in an evolving capitalist world economy, [the capitalist state] indelibly mark[ed] the body of international law”; accordingly, the bourgeois/liberal version of international law does not allow for the reality of structurally determined “uneven development between states” under capitalism: see Chimni, “An outline of a Marxist course”, p 58.

27  Chimni, “Marxism and International Law”, pp 338 - 339, 345.

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sovereignty within a seemingly neutral and autonomous international legal system. Chimni concludes:

[T]he idea of the rule of law is not a vacuous one in the contemporary international system. It is not merely an ideological device which is manipulated by powerful states to their advantage. It has real significance. 28

Implicit in this view, is the conclusion that powerful states are to some extent restrained by the possibility of exciting the wrath of the world’s peoples from baldly ignoring international law,29 and that the meaning of the Rule of Law has undergone some transformation.

D. Law generallyIn his call for demystification of the Rule of Law ideol-ogy, Collins effectively pointed to one way for Marxists to think about the process of transforming international law. Collins discussed how the bourgeoisie use the ide-ology of the Rule of Law to prop up their class rule.30 The Rule of Law ideology, with its notions of state neutrality and the sovereignty of law, enables the legal system in capitalist societies to be characterised as being constituted by concepts of formal justice (the law ap-plies equally to all) and the autonomy of legal thought (legal officials and courts apply legal rules impartially according to neutral principles via juridical logic) – un-dermining “any claim that [the state/legal system] is an instrument of class oppression”.31 Laws and legal prac-tices in capitalist societies do in fact comply with the stated attributes in a formal sense.

Characterised and constituted in these ways, law under capitalism serves to help maintain capitalist class rule. For example, working class victories in the area of pro-gressive legislation confirm the image of legal neutrality, in turn leading the working class to interpret the liberal

28  Chimni, “Marxism and International Law”, pp 338 – 339, 345. Here, Chimni notes too that the Rule of Law was something that “was far from being the reality for centuries in the sphere of international relations”, and that therefore to dismiss the idea of it is to “belittle” the anti-colonial and progressive struggles.

29  While Chimni is conscious of the constraining effect of international law on the world’s powerful states, he reiterates that it primarily serves the interests of the powerful in a world where formal equality co-exists with material inequality: Chimni, “Marxism and International Law”, p 339.

30  Collins explained the development of the Rule of Law ideology in terms of the bourgeoisie’s consolidation of its class rule in the struggle against the dominant classes of feudalism: through its instituting of the (apparent) sovereignty of the legal system to ensure (apparent) neutrality of the state, with laws determining who holds political power and how it is exercised – stifling feudal claims to privilege: Collins, Marxism and Law, pp 134 - 135. Collins can be criticised for not recognising the role that class struggle by subordinate classes had in compelling the relative neutrality of the state.

31  Collins, Marxism and Law, pp 128 – 138. According to the Rule of Law ideology, “justice [does] not venture afield into questions of social justice involving the distribution of wealth and power”: p 135.

state “as an impartial arbiter between conflicting inter-ests ...”32

Marxists, of course, do not accept the bourgeois notions of formal justice and the autonomy of legal reasoning at face value. Collins argued for demystifying the Rule of Law ideology. He suggested a number of ways in which Marxists may approach this task, including: ensuring that collective struggles transcend concerns for individ-ual legal rights and justice according to law; undermin-ing the ideal of formal equality – eg by highlighting that the poor cannot afford to pay for legal representation in court; and, examining the material origins of laws, revealing that the bourgeois ideological interpretations of reality they contain “are contingent upon the main-tenance of a mode of production which necessarily in-volves class exploitation.”33

This argument for Marxists engaging ideologically with the Rule of Law idea is also implicit in the recognition that the Rule of Law in the international sphere has been shaped by the historical struggles of oppressed peoples and democratic forces against colonialism. It is an ar-gument that recognises that the forms of law are super-structural and susceptible to ideological appropriation.

By contrast, commodity-form theory sees nothing to be gained by progressive forces struggling for their ver-sions of international law, because, for that theory, inter-national law only exists as a manifestation of capitalist commodity-exchange relations from which it is effec-tively indivisible. This ultra-leftist view sees no possi-bility of transforming international law or modifying its operation short of revolution. There is no potential for “systematic progressive” advance through international law, says Miéville:

To fundamentally change the dynamics of the system it would be necessary not to reform the institutions but to eradicate the forms of law – which means the fundamental reformulation of the political-economic system of which they are expressions.34

E. The “withering away” of lawFor commodity-form theory, the complete identification of law with capitalist commodity-exchange relations precludes any notion of a different form of law being created outside of capitalism. For example, Pashukanis could not accept there was such a thing as proletarian law in the Soviet Union. Reinforcing his rejection of the idea of socialist law, was Pashukanis’s understanding

32  Collins, Marxism and Law, p 138.

33  Collins, Marxism and Law, pp 139 - 141.

34  Miéville, Between Equal Rights, pp 316, 318.

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that, according to Marxism, law would wither away under socialism.35

What Marxism means by the withering away of the state and, with it, law, is important to a consideration of ques-tions about the correct strategic/tactical approach for Marxists to take towards law. Especially, whether any particular approach that might be taken could be coun-ter-productive to progressive advance by being reformist or diversionary.

One sense in which the Marxist idea of the withering away of law is understood is that, with the unfolding of the class struggle through the inevitable and increas-ing confrontation of the proletariat with the exploitative reality of the material conditions of its existence, the liberal version of the state and law will be exposed as fraudulent and be fatally undermined. According to the religiously inspired notions of liberal humanism, law and the modern state realise, universalise, and politically emancipate the abstract individual. This version of the state and law obscures the reality of capitalism – with its “forms of factual subordination (capitalist/worker, man/woman)” and premised on maintaining the primary right of private property – by claiming that all in society enjoy equality as citizens. The realisation in experience that this equality is illusory, will result in the working class challenging the system of private property and its political and legal superstructure causing it ultimately to collapse.36

The idea that the state and law is fundamentally incom-patible with communism in its higher phase, is also expressed in the argument that the Marxist theory of alienation provides for the state and law (conceived of here as coercive systems) withering away. The state and law become unnecessary and wither away in communist society when there is achieved the reconciliation of the “conflicting demands of individuality and community”.37

In considering the Marxist understanding that the state and law will ultimately disappear, it is important to avoid crude simplification. It will not automatically hap-pen with the revolutionary seizure of state power by the proletariat, but will necessarily require the politically conscious involvement of the people in deliberate social transformation over time thereby ultimately removing the basis for the state and law.

35  Miéville, op. cit., pp 98 - 99.

36  Koskenniemi M, “What should international lawyers learn from Karl Marx” in International Law on the Left, pp 33 - 39. Marxism sees law, together with the modern state and human rights, as exemplifying the religious way of thinking of liberal humanism. In the underlying philosophy articulated by Hegel, it is the political life of the state that realises and universalises the abstract individual who is politically emancipated through universal human rights – conceptualised as being “transcendentally given”: pp 33 - 37.

37  Collins, Marxism and Law, pp 120 - 121.

In The State and Revolution, referring to the writings of Marx and Engels, Lenin explained that the capture of state power by the proletariat means the taking of pos-session of the means of production from private indi-viduals and converting them into the common property of society, but that “this does not abolish ‘bourgeois law’...”. In this first phase of communism – socialism – the continued existence of bourgeois law is seen in the ostensibly equal distribution of products to all. Such distribution in reality favours some over others, eg peo-ple with fewer dependants receive the same amount of products as those with more, because the liberal legal principle of equality of right38 continues in operation.39

While that aspect of the state and law concerned with class suppression will be the first characteristic to dis-appear with the abolition of capitalist class rule,40 the withering away of the state and law under socialism will be a “protracted” process dependent on the development of the forces of production that will lay the material basis for the fulfilment of the objective of ensuring that the needs of all in society are met. Importantly, Lenin warned against a utopian outlook, stressing that it was impossible to predict either how long or what “concrete forms” the withering away process would take, and that it was not, as a practical matter, part of the immediate communist program.41

Indeed, far from rapidly disappearing, the state and law, Lenin made clear, will play pivotal roles under socialism in overseeing the development of the socialist economy, in particular of its productive capacity.42

Lenin indicated that the withering away process would involve the active participation of the engaged citizenry of the socialist society. Just as “the formal recognition of the equality of all citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure and administration of the State” in bourgeois democracies facilitated the rallying of the proletariat as a revolutionary class against capitalism and, in turn, the establishment of a more democratic state in which the working class hold power, so social-ism will further society’s development by enabling mass participation of the population in governing the state,

38  This principle of equality of right “‘pre-supposes inequality’”: Lenin quoting Marx in Lenin VI, The State and Revolution: Marxist Teachings on the State and the Task of the Proletariat in the Revolution (Australian Socialist Party (ed), 1920) p 97.

39  Lenin, The State and Revolution, pp 16 - 23, 97 - 99, 103 - 104; that “for a certain time not only bourgeois law, but even the capitalist State may remain under Communism ... is economically and politically inevitable in a society issuing from the womb of Capitalism”: pp 103 - 104.

40  ibid., pp 98 - 99; “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another”: Marx K and Engels F, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Books (ed), 1983) p 105.

41  ibid., pp 100 - 104.

42  ibid., pp 100 - 103.

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ultimately opening the door to the state’s “complete withering away”.43

The key point here is the decisive part played by the people through the machinery of the state and law, in the conscious transformation of society. Implicit in this identification of the role of an active citizenry under capitalism and socialism, is also the recognition that the superstructure of any society is malleable. Law, the state, and society are transformed by the struggles and ideological and political engagement of the people.

III. Dialectical appropriation of international lawThe dynamic nature of history means that law is open to being changed, and just as we expect law to be trans-formed under socialism, so it is susceptible to modifica-tion under capitalism. Commodity-form theory, howev-er, with its perception of the fundamental determinative role of the legal form, holds that law is effectively im-mutable. The evidence of history denies this. Many writ-ers have elucidated how international law has been used in concrete historical circumstances to effect progressive change, and, reciprocally, has itself been further trans-formed in the process.

The history of the principle of national self-determina-tion, a contribution by the Soviet Union to international law, demonstrates this. In the wake of the Bolshevik rev-olution, the Soviet Government recognised the right to self-determination of Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, among others.44 In the years after the Second World War, with its strengthened role in world affairs, the Soviet Union played a leading role in cham-pioning the cause of self-determination in the United Nations. It did this in the context of the break-up of the old European colonial empires and in alliance with the newly emerging independent states of Asia and the other socialist states. In these historical contexts, formal self-determination was invested with social transformative content: self-determination as a blow against imperial-ism and a foundation for genuine internationalism.45

The Soviet Union’s approach was consistent with the revolutionary imperative, as implicit in the Cominform’s

43  “When all, or be it even only the greater part of society, have learnt how to govern the State ... when all have learnt to manage, and really do manage, socialised production ...”, Lenin, The State and Revolution, pp 104 - 107.

44  Bowring, “Positivism versus self-determination”, p 145.

45  For Lenin, national self-determination was a revolutionary imperative in the context of bourgeois-democratic revolutions occurring in the Tsarist and other empires. He had argued that true internationalism, required “the freedom to secede”, he explained that historically the emergence of nation-states had provided the most favourable conditions for the development of capitalism; such self-determination in turn providing the foundation for the eventual “truly democratic, truly internationalist … free union between [nations/states]”, see ibid., pp 142 - 143.

recognition: that the world was divided into an “imperi-alist and anti-democratic camp” and a “democratic and anti-imperialist camp” led respectively by the USA and the USSR; and that the peoples of the colonies were re-jecting colonialism, creating a crisis for the old system. The efforts of the Soviet Union and the other progressive forces led to the entrenchment in international law of the principle of self-determination.46 This found expression in Article 1(2) of the UN Charter47 and in Article 1(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966.48 In 1960 the Soviet Union had sponsored UN Resolution 1514 (XV) – the “Declaration on the grant-ing of independence to colonial countries and peoples”. Following its adoption, Bowring points out, there was a series of other resolutions adopted by the UN which further developed this historical tendency towards le-gitimisation in international law of the anti-colonial struggles.49

The political and revolutionary significance of the in-corporation in international law of the principle of self-determination was enormous. There was the UN’s consequential recognition of national liberation move-ments as the “sole legitimate representatives” of the peoples concerned; for example, the African National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Self-determination then was hugely important for such movements in terms of their gaining “external legitima-tion and ideological self-empowerment”.50 Bowring pin-points the dialectical implications for international law too of this process: the “juridical form” of the self-de-termination principle (the norm in legal terms) became transformed by the self-determination struggles. This “thoroughly material” process represented “the subver-sion and appropriation of bourgeois legal norms ... .” The UN was qualitatively transformed too; becoming truly a forum giving an opportunity for less powerful states to have their voices heard.51

Chimni’s analysis of the dynamic interaction between international law and the social and political forces that shape it – recognises that sometimes these forces push it in a progressive direction, at other times in a reactionary

46  Bowring, “Positivism versus self-determination”, pp 158 - 160.

47  The principles outlined in Article 1(2) include “respect for the ... self-determination of peoples”.

48  The Article stipulates that: “All people have the right of self-determination ...”. This Article is identical to Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966.

49  Bowring, op. cit., pp 161 - 162. Bowring cites UN Resolution 1803 (XVII) of 1962 and Resolution 2105 (XX) of 1965, which sought to give practical expression to international law’s recognition of the right of peoples to self-determination by respectively providing for national sovereignty over natural resources and for material support to be given to national liberation movements.

50  See Bowring, ibid., pp 162, 167.

51  ibid., pp 167 - 168. Note Bowring cites Williams P, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press, 1991) in reference to his conclusion about the “subversion and appropriation of bourgeois legal norms”.

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one. His dialectical analysis recognises that international law at base serves the interests of the dominant class forces; its specific characteristics of apparent neutrality and autonomy enabling this because of the substantive inequality of states. For example, treaties delimiting their scope of action are concluded between states which are deemed to be formally equal in international law (via the legal principle of state sovereignty) but in reality the substantive inequality of states shapes the content of the agreements.52

However, history is made in class struggle, and in this context, it is the logic of international law’s quality of formal neutrality and autonomy – demanding that it not be simply beholden to the interests of powerful states – that exposes international law to amelioration and appro-priation. Chimni identified that within the period of neo-colonialism under bourgeois democratic international law since 1945, there has been a “progressive phase” (the initial period) and a “regressive phase” (from 1975). The progressive phase was the period of decolonisation, and the universalisation of the state sovereignty princi-ple gave the newly independent states a greater say in international affairs, facilitating their attempts to bring about substantive economic and political transformation internationally. For example, there was the adoption of the Programme and Declaration of Action on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States (CERDS). NIEO sought to inject into the traditional international law of distribution “elements of equity and justice”, as seen in the efforts of the newly independent coun-tries through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Group of 77 to force the industrialised world to accept the principle of special and differential treatment (SDT) – aimed at giving preferential treatment to third world countries. In 1966 the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was amended to include Part IV – “Trade and Development” – in the agreement,53 which amounted to a formal commitment by the industrialised states to the SDT principle.54

Chimni also discussed how the progressive phase came under sustained attack from the mid-1970s – accentu-ated in the 1980s with the rise to power of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in Britain and the United States – when there commenced the process of restruc-turing international law “to facilitate the globalisation

52  Chimni, “Marxism and International Law”, pp 337 - 339, 345.

53  But not “hard legal obligations”, ibid., p 340.

54  ibid., pp 338, 340. The arrival of the newly independent states had seen “relative democratisation of international law” which enabled them to attempt to pursue these programmes of substantive reform: Chimni, “An outline of a Marxist course”, p 61.

process”.55 The point is that international law is change-able depending on the balance of social forces at any particular time. International law is loaded with contra-dictions and potential.

Even Miéville acknowledged that potential for “eman-cipatory politics” was advanced through the post-war decolonisation movement’s insistence on self-determi-nation and the universalisation of the principle of state sovereignty within the international system. However, ultimately he sees such potential as limited, arguing that the universalising dynamic that ended formal imperial-ism also “embedded modern imperialism”, through the universalisation of the capitalist state form and, there-fore, the broadening and entrenchment of combative ex-change relations between countries, in which, powerful states have the upper hand in the resolution of conflicts.56

Rather than taking a comprehensive view of interna-tional law’s development via the complex interactions between states and social forces, in which the stage of development of capitalist relations of production is ultimately the decisive determinant, commodity-form theory’s focus on exchange relations between states as the driving force of historical change in international law prevents it from understanding international law’s development in an all-round way.

Viewed dialectically, with globalisation and the further development of borderless transnational capitalism, the material conditions for the growth of international soli-darity action among progressive movements is emerging which in turn will affect the development of international law, just as happened with the transformation of the self-determination principle in international law under the impact of the post-Second World War anti-colonialism movement. Today the common experience of rapacious and globalising capital – war, poverty, environmental destruction – and attacks on workers’ pay, conditions, unions, and industrial rights, and on democratic rights, public sectors, welfare, social services, and national sovereignty – is translating into burgeoning people’s movements of millions fighting “for freedom, democ-racy, workers’ rights, national independence, peace, the environment and socialism” across the world.57 The in-ternational mobilisations against government austerity programmes and the effects of the global recession are examples from recent years.

Such international activism does utilise international law to achieve progressive outcomes, as is to be seen in the long-standing international solidarity campaign

55  ibid, pp 338, 341.

56  Miéville, op. cit., pp 269 - 271, 291 - 292.

57  Communist Party of Australia, Political Resolution adopted at the CPA 12th National Congress October 4-7, 2013: Active and united for a socialist Australia (New Age Publishers Pty Ltd , 2013) p 32.

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by maritime unions against Flag of Convenience (FOC) shipping. Shipowners have for many years utilised their ability to register ships in FOC states as a means of achieving low labour costs through the poor pay and third world working conditions imposed on FOC ships’ crews under the minimal regulatory regimes of FOC states. Globalisation has given impetus to this process through the effects of heightened competition, both between FOC states and between shipowners – the FOC states for the business of the shipowners who are compelled to seek the lowest regulatory cost to gain advantage over their competitors. One strategy in the anti-FOC campaign, led by the International Transport Workers’ Federation, is to assert the necessity for a “genuine link” between the real owner of a ship and the flag flown by the ves-sel, consistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea requirement. Such a link does not exist in the case of FOC-registered ships.58 This strategy exemplifies how progressive international activism will turn to international law as an avenue for achieving posi-tive outcomes. Inherent in this strategic approach is the potential for activism to shape international law to serve progressive ends – to invest legal norms with progres-sive meaning.

58  See “What are Flags of Convenience?” at the website of the International Transport Workers’ Federation.

While for commodity-form theory an incremental revolutionary strategy in relation to international law is ultimately pointless, Chimni by contrast calls for an “international legal strategy [to] form an integral part of a transnational counter-hegemonic project ... to form transnational alliances in order to resist the vision of globalised capitalism.” As we have seen, there are op-portunities for such alliances to be formed between those whose interests and common struggles are against globalisation and who are the victims of predatory impe-rialism and against war, including left parties, the union movement, new social movements, consumer move-ments, spontaneous resistance, progressive govern-ments, and the oppressed and marginal sections of the third world together with their counterparts in the North. Chimni argues that the participation of global progres-sive forces in the processes of international law-making and law enforcement, is also essential to their hopes of interrupting and thwarting “the reproduction of the rela-tions of transnational domination”.59

Progressives need to use existing international law crea-tively and imaginatively “to further the interests of the ‘wretched of the earth’, even as we underline its class character.”60

59  Chimni, “Marxism and International Law”, p 346.

60  Chimni, “An outline of a Marxist course”, p 91.

14

AMRThe Communist Party of China celebrates its 95th anniversary.

Opposite directions: The NEP and China’s Opening and ReformMichael Hooper

IntroductionSince the beginning of the “Opening and Reform” proc-ess in 1978, China has embarked upon a series of highly controversial reforms, causing debate in both bourgeois academic and Marxist circles. Proponents of current Chinese policy often justify their position by equating current reforms with Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), taking it as a precedent. However, despite some similarities, the comparison between the two policies is tenuous and can lead to dangerous misunderstandings regarding the direction and effects of reform in China. Although the NEP and the Opening and Reform have some striking policy similarities, they were implement-ed under very different circumstances, with very differ-ent political understandings.

This article will identify the key differences between the NEP and Opening and Reform as well as the wildly

different historical circumstances they emerged from. It will show that the NEP was envisaged as a transition stage with a view to developing state capitalism and fi-nally socialism based on central planning in Russia, al-lowing the Soviet government to win over the peasantry and survive while encircled by hostile imperialist pow-ers. Lenin himself considered the policy to be a retreat in order to later advance. In contrast Chinese officials don’t consider Opening and Reform to be a retreat but rather an improvement over the policy of Mao Zedong’s time and have no intention of returning to an economic model that eliminates exploitation, exploiting classes or re-introduces complete public ownership.

All of the nuances of Opening and Reform era policy cannot be adequately explained in a single article; neither can all of the resulting phenomena and changes to the lives of Chinese working people. This article will focus on the main policy trends that characterise Opening and

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Reform, in order to demonstrate similarities and differ-ences from the NEP, and will also briefly introduce some of the more important consequences of these policies.

The period leading up to the New Economic Policy in Russia was one of war and devastation. The Bolsheviks came to power in a country ruined by the First World War and were never given the chance to consolidate their position. Within months of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were under siege from all directions, beset by armies from 14 different nations, including all of the great imperial powers.1 Years of brutal warfare cost the lives of 7 million Russians and caused $60 billion worth of damage (this is a 1950s figure, adjusted for inflation the figure would be much higher today).2 Soviet Russia was cut off from the rest of the world by a cordon sani-taire, its industry and agriculture utterly ruined, with a population mired in illiteracy, poverty and disease.3 During the war years, the Soviet government imple-mented “War Communism”, a policy that was in Lenin’s words: “…forced on us by extreme want, ruin and war …”.4 It involved complete nationalisation of industry and seizing surpluses, and occasionally necessities, from peasants to feed workers and soldiers.5 Lenin credited this policy with the victory over the class enemy during the war but clearly identified it as an emergency policy, stating: “It was not, and could not be, a policy that cor-responded to the economic tasks of the proletariat”.6

China in 1978 was in a completely different and much better situation. The Communist Party of China had already held state power for 29 years and successfully carried out the socialist transformation of the economy by 1956 after passing through its own NEP called “New Democracy”. When the Peoples’ Republic of China was founded in 1949, the Communist Party of China was in a very similar situation to that of the Bolsheviks in 1921. The CPC, had come to lead a massive, semi-feudal country ruined by decades of war. At the 2nd plenary session of the 7th Party Congress, Mao Zedong laid out the economic tasks of the Party following the seizure of state power, recognising that approximately 90% of the economy consisted of handicraft or individual peasant production while peasants lived much as they had since ancient times.7 Land reform, which had begun in the red base areas, was limited in the first years of the Peoples’

1  Michael Sayers and Albert E. Khan, The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, 3rd ed., New York: Boni & Gaer, 1946, p.27.

2  ibid., p.34.

3  ibid., p.38.

4  Vladimir I. Lenin, The Tax in Kind, in Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 32, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973, p.342.

5  ibid., pp.329 - 65.

6  ibid., p.343.

7  Mao Zedong, “Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China”, in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 1st ed., vol. 4, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961, p. 361 - 76.

Republic in line with a united front policy. In 1950, Mao wrote: “… there should be a change in our policy towards the rich peasants, a change from the policy of requisitioning their surplus land and property to one of maintaining the rich peasant economy in order to facili-tate the early rehabilitation of rural production”.8 The policy was also intended to isolate landlords and support middle peasants. 9

The large industrial enterprises, transportation and bank-ing sectors, which were predominately owned by bu-reaucrat-capitalists and imperialists, were nationalised, while the property of the national bourgeois was left in private hands.10 Mao made the Party’s position on pri-vate capital clear when he stated: “… there will be need, for a fairly long period after the victory of the revolution, to make use of the positive qualities of urban and rural private capitalism as far as possible, in the interest of developing the national economy”.11 However, he also made clear that capitalism would be restricted by some means and that the state sector would remain the leading sector.12 As early as 1948, Mao stated that the industrial and commercial enterprises run by landlords and rich peasants needed to be “protected”, even as their feudal exploitative practices were abolished.13 Ultimately, the policy of this period can be described by Mao’s call for a “… correct policy of developing production, promoting economic prosperity, giving consideration to both pub-lic and private interests and benefiting both labour and capital”. 14

These policies marked the beginning of China’s transi-tion phase from a semi-colonial, semi-feudal economy to a socialist one. By 1953 the cooperative movement was transforming relations of production in the coun-tryside, while major investments lead to rapid growth in the state-owned sector.15 By the 8th Party Congress in 1956, the “socialist transformation” was effectively complete.16

8  Mao Zedong, “Fight For a Fundamental Turn for the Better in the National Financial and Economic Situation”, in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 1st ed., vol. 5, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977, p. 29.

9  ibid., pp. 26 - 32.

10  Liu Shaoqi, “The Political Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to the Eighth National Congress of the Party”, in Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, vol. 1, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956, pp. 30 - 31,

11  op.cit., Mao Zedong, “Report to the Second Plenary …” p. 367.

12  ibid., pp. 361 - 376.

13  Mao Zedong, “On the Policy Concerning Industry and Commerce”, in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 1st ed., vol. 4, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961, p. 203.

14  ibid., p. 203.

15  Liu Shaoqi op.cit., pp. 13 - 112.

16  Mao Zedong, “Opening Address”, in Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, vol. 1, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956, pp. 5 - 13.

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Contrary to commonly believed myths, the Chinese economy following 1956 was not a basket case.17 From 1952 onwards, Chinese industrial output grew at an an-nual rate of 11.2% and even managed to grow at over 10% during the Cultural Revolution years (roughly from 1966-1976).18 According to World Bank figures, the aver-age GDP growth rate between 1963 and 1979 was 8%.19 Agricultural growth and incomes were much slower; however China still regularly outperformed comparable third world countries. As Sheldon explained: “In 1977 China grew 30 to 40 percent more food per capita [than India] on 14 percent less arable land and distributed it far more equitably to a population which is 50 percent larger”.20 Despite stagnant incomes, Chinese peasants received improved public housing, healthcare, educa-tion and social security and the extreme inequality that characterised pre-1949 society was eliminated.21 Prices were strictly controlled so that even if income growth was limited, it represented real gains. All property was state, collective or cooperative owned and urban work-ers enjoyed life tenure and workplace provided social security.

Russian policy essentialsWhile elements of the New Economic Policy dealt with industrial production and foreign relations, it was pri-marily an agricultural policy.22 The key elements of the policy were the replacement of grain requisitions with a tax in kind and allowing peasants to keep their surplus to sell on the market.23 Commodity exchange was officially recognised as the “principal lever” of the New Economic Policy,24 with Lenin himself calling commodity exchange the most important part of this policy.25 Laws were passed allowing private enterprises in small-scale production and commerce while small state-owned enterprises were denationalised, being sold or rented to cooperatives and capitalists.26 In fact, this law was merely recognition of

17  Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, “China’s Economic Transformation”, Monthly Review 56, no. 3, July 2004, p. 28.

18  Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry Into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1979-1994, New York: Hill and Wang, 1996, p. 189.

19  “China’s GDP growth (annual %)”, The World Bank, 2016, accessed February 10, 2017, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2015&locations=CN&start=1961

20  Meisener, The DengXiaoping Era, p. 193.

21  op.cit., Hart-Landsberg, p. 29.

22  V. N. Bandera, “The New Economic Policy (NEP) as an Economic System”, Journal of Political Economy, 71, no. 3, June 1963, accessed February 9, 2017, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1828984. p. 268.

23  Jonathan J. Bean, “Nikolai Bukharin and the New Economic Policy”, Independent Review, 2, no. 1, Summer 1997, accessed February 9, 2017, Academic Search Complete.

24  Vladimir I. Lenin, “Tenth All-Russia Conference of R.C.P.(B.)”, in Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 433.

25  Vladimir I. Lenin, “Speech Delivered at Third All-Russia Food Conference”, in Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 34 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 447.,

26  ibid., p. 433.

the contemporary Russian economic system where ag-ricultural and handicraft production distributed by petty bourgeois traders was dominant, rather than primarily a change from public to private ownership.27 While small factories were denationalised and sold or leased to co-operatives and capitalists, the “commanding heights” of the economy were maintained in public ownership.28 By 1923, the commanding heights included all heavy in-dustry, transport, communal construction and industrial enterprises with over a certain number of workers.

The trends for industrial and agricultural output help to demonstrate this division of the economy into public and private spheres and their trends of development. State-owned enterprises increased their share of industrial output from 70% in 1923 to 77% in 1927, while the pro-portion from privately owned enterprises dropped from 25% to 14%, despite the total output of private enter-prises rising from 842 million to 1,106 million roubles over the same period. The difference between the two figures is made up by collective enterprises.29 This ratio is reversed in agriculture, where 88% of all output was provided by private farms.30

NEP reforms did not drastically alter already existing relations of production but rather repealed emergency measures taken during the civil war. It then established a system of state capitalism that cemented the worker-peasant alliance and neutralised the political influence of remaining capitalist elements. It provided a platform for industrialisation and the later implementation of the First Five Year plan. It was a direct step toward social-ism. The Opening and Reform process in China was something altogether different.

Chinese policy essentialsChinese Opening and Reform was a much more gradual process which involved a stage by stage replacement of central planning and public ownership with market forc-es and private ownership. Like the NEP, a major aspect of reform was agricultural. In 1980, the Chinese govern-ment ordered the de-collectivisation of agriculture and the replacement of communes with household based production.31 Land was still officially public property, however plots were given to individual households based on family size, to grow what they wanted.32 Agricultural

27  op.cit., Bandera, p. 267.

28  op.cit., Bean, (source without page numbers).

29  ibid., p. 268.

30  ibid., p. 268.

31   op.cit., Hart-Landsberg, p.34.

32  Fu Chen and John Davis, “Land reform in rural China since the mid-1980s”, Journal of Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives, September 1998, accessed February 12, 2017, http://www.fao.org/docrep/x1372t/x1372t10.htm#P9_1396.

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output growth rates more than doubled compared with the annual average since 1952, however these gains dis-appeared by 1985 while rural infrastructure and social support systems decayed with the abolition of com-munes.33 Despite Chinese government claims that gains were achieved as a result of de-collectivised practices, the increased value of output can also be explained by higher state-set agricultural prices and re-balancing of investment in favour of the countryside.34

By 1983, collective agriculture effectively ceased to ex-ist.35 Many peasants couldn’t survive on the tiny plots they were given and became either hired labourers for rich peasants or, with the liberalisation of the Hukou system (a registration system that formerly tied Chinese citizens to one location), moved to cities to become workers.36 Effectively a process of proletarianisation, primitive accumulation and restoration of exploiter classes took place.

33  ibid., (source without page numbers).

34  op.cit., Hart-Landsberg, p. 36.

35  Yanjie Bian, “Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility,” Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 2002, p. 94.

36  Alvin So, “The Changing Patterns of Classes and Class Conflict in China,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 33, no. 3, 2002, p. 366.

Urban reforms revolved around dual processes of mar-ketisation (particularly of labour) and creation of a mixed economy (largely though promotion of different forms of ownership). Original reform measures included utilising market mechanisms with a view to improving efficiency, diversifying forms of ownership and solving structural imbalances in the economy while maintain-ing the dominance of public ownership.37 During the early phases of opening and reform, small businesses employing less than seven workers were made legal38 and changes were made to the internal governance of state owned enterprises to improve their performance.39 In 1987, the 13th Congress of the CPC reduced restric-tions on the private sector, removing the seven employee limit and a year later the State Council allowed private managers to lease small state-owned enterprises.40

37   Chun Lin, “Against Privatization in China: A Historical and Empirical Argument”, Journal of Chinese Political Science, 13, no. 1, 2008, p. 3.

38  Raymond Lau, “The 15th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party: Milestone in China’s Privatization”, Capital & Class 23, no. 2. July 1999, p. 62.

39  Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song, and Yang Yao, “Impact and Significance of State-Owned Enterprise Restructuring in China”, The China Journal, no. 55, January 2006, p. 36.

40  ibid., p. 37.

Construction workers are part of the informal sector, which employs 63% of urban workers.

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It was only with the introduction of the term “Socialist Market Economy” by the 14th Congress in 1992 that forms of ownership became an issue.41 This marked a departure from the schema of the 12th Congress in 1982 which assigned planning a primary role and markets a secondary one, and the “planned commodity economy” of 1984.42 The number of privately owned enterprises exploded,43 especially as they were given preferential treatment over state-owned enterprises, paying less than half the enterprise tax rate and not being burdened by the need to provide social welfare to their employees as state-owned enterprises did.44

In 1994, state-owned enterprises were forced to raise fi-nances through bank loans instead of directly receiving funds from the State.45 They were also re-organised by company law into corporations expected to be “respon-sive to market conditions”.46 Conditions in the company law allowed these new corporations to restructure them-selves and engage in sales of shares, which quickly be-came a vehicle for privatisation.47 A year later, the great flood of privatisation, which until then had only been a small trickle, began. In 1995, the Central Committee promulgated a policy which would come to be known as “Grasp the big, Release the small”.48 The policy en-tailed selling all small and medium sized national state owned enterprises while keeping only the largest 500 to 1,000.49 With the blessing of the Centre, provincial and local governments began a fire-sale of public assets, with major provinces such as Shandong and Guangdong selling 70% of their public enterprises.50 By 2006, local level state-owned enterprises practically ceased to ex-ist.51 Despite the call to “grasp the big”, profitable large enterprises were sold too, with the number of “core enterprises” falling from 509 in 2003 to 191 in 2006.52 Overall, the number of state owned enterprises dropped by 90% from 1996 to 2004.53

The mass privatisation that took place in the 1990s and 2000s is a tragedy, not merely because of the incredible loss of public property, but because of the loss of social

41   Shaoguang Wang, “The Compatibility of Public Ownership and the Market Economy: A Great Debate in China”, World Affairs, 157, no. 1,Summer 1994, p. 39.

42  op.cit., Hart-Landsberg, p. 37.

43  op.cit., Lau, p. 53.

44  op.cit., Wang, pp. 39-40.

45  op.cit., Lin, p. 3.

46  ibid., p. 3.

47  ibid., p. 3

48  “国有企业“抓大放小”(1995年).” 中国改革论坛网, December 15, 2013. Accessed February 08, 2017.

49  op.cit., Garnaut, p. 37

50  op.cit., Lau, p. 60.

51  op.cit., Lin, p .4.

52  ibid., p. 4.

53  ibid., p. 4.

welfare and mass unemployment that followed, as well as the creation of new exploiting classes in the form of capitalists and “cadre-capitalists”.

After the socialist transformation had taken place in China, social welfare was provided and guaranteed by one’s place of employment, whether a collective, a commune or a state-owned enterprise. Workers in urban enterprises enjoyed life tenure, housing, retirement ben-efits, free health and education services for themselves and their children. Labour market reforms, facilitating the availability of labour for exploitation by capital, stripped workers of their life tenure and forced them into the constant uncertainty of the market. Private capital-ists who took over state-owned enterprises on the condi-tion that they protect workers’ benefits often reneged on their commitments. Reforms of state-owned enterprises lead to mass unemployment, with lower estimates of 30 million public sector workers sacked from 1998 to 200554 and higher estimates of 50 million between 1997 and 2002.55 There was little social welfare independent of work units so workers in the private sector as well as workers sacked or forced into early retirement from state-owned enterprises were left with nothing. Since the mid-2000s, social welfare provision independent of work units has been improved; however it is still inferior to the guarantees of the pre-reform era.

Just as the NEP produced a new class of “NEP men”, so too did Opening and Reform produce new classes of rich exploiters. However, while the NEP merely allowed already existing exploiters to do well within certain bounds, Opening and Reform turned a portion of gov-ernment and party cadres into capitalists who formed a common community of interests with private entrepre-neurs.56 Alongside new exploiters, new exploited classes and underclasses came into being. The formerly homog-enous urban working class became divided into remnant state-sector workers who, despite having lost life tenure and many conditions, still fared better than the sweat shop workers of the private sector,57 and an underclass of migrant workers, unemployed and retirees.

Workers are not merely divided by their employment in the public or private sector but perhaps, more impor-tantly, are divided between formal and informal sectors. Formal sector workers include those employed by the state and those hired by “legal persons” in “regular la-

54  Jin, p. 258.

55  op.cit., Lin C, p. 6.

56  David Goodman, “Sixty years of the People’s Republic: local perspectives on the evolution of the state in China”, The Pacific Review, 22, no. 4, September 2009, p. 439.

57  op.cit., Lin C, p. 6.

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bour relations”.58 Such legal persons include limited li-ability corporations and share-holding companies. The informal sector is everyone else but especially migrant peasant workers and workers hired under “task-based” relations such as in seasonal agricultural work and con-struction.59 Workers in the formal sector are officially protected by labour laws while those in the informal sec-tor are outside of this system.60 The role of the informal economy is growing rapidly, accounting for 63% of total urban employment in 2010.61 Informal sector workers are not included in official government statistics on la-bour and therefore official data on wages and working conditions only represent the relatively privileged condi-tions of formal sector workers, while ignoring the condi-tions of the vast majority of the urban population.62

The political character and transitional nature of the NEPAn important fact to keep in mind when evaluating the Chinese Opening and Reform, especially in comparison with NEP, is the completely different class conscious-ness of the processes presented by the respective com-munist parties. Lenin made it clear from the beginning that the NEP economy was not a socialist one but was instead an attempt to develop state capitalism in Russia as the foundation of a later socialist transformation. In describing the NEP, Lenin said: “… it means revert-ing to capitalism to a considerable extent”.63 He further stated: “Concessions to foreign capitalists … and leasing enterprises to private capitalists definitely mean restor-ing capitalism, and this is part and parcel of the New Economic Policy”.64

Any description of the NEP will mention Lenin’s char-acterisation of the policy as a “retreat”. Lenin referred to the policy as a retreat because it was a step back to capitalism from the leap to socialist principles of pro-duction and distribution that was attempted during the War Communism years. He said, “By the spring of 1921 it became evident that we had suffered defeat in our attempt to introduce the socialist principles of produc-tion and distribution by ‘direct assault’ … The political situation in the spring of 1921 revealed to us that on a number of economic issues a retreat to the position of

58  Philip Huang, “Misleading Chinese Legal and Statistical Categories: Labor, Individual Entities, and Private Enterprises”, Modern China, 39, no. 4, 2013, p.353.

59  ibid., pp. 352 - 353.

60  ibid., p. 353.

61  ibid., p. 354.

62  ibid., p. 362.

63  Vladimir I. Lenin, “The New Economic Policy and The Tasks of The Political Education Departments”, in Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973, p. 64.

64  ibid., p. 64.

state capitalism, the substitution of ‘siege’ tactics for ‘di-rect assault’, was inevitable”. 65

Lenin argued the desirability of state capitalism under Russian conditions in numerous articles and speeches, perhaps most famously in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It in 1917 and The Tax in Kind in 1921. Lenin referred to state monopoly capitalism as the “… complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs”.66 Russia’s conditions were so back-ward that state capitalism represented a leap in develop-ment. Lenin wrote: “I had also proved that state capital-ism is a step forward compared with the small proprietor (both small-patriarchal and petty-bourgeois) element. Those who compare state capitalism only with socialism commit a host of mistakes, for in the present political and economic circumstances it is essential to compare state capitalism also with petty-bourgeois production.”67 Under Russian conditions, the NEP represented a step towards socialism, rather than away from it. Control of the commanding heights of the economy by public ownership did not mean that NEP Russia was socialist, it simply allowed for state capitalism to develop out of petty-bourgeois production and for the foundation of an actual socialist transformation to be built.

Lenin never mentioned exactly how long the NEP was intended to last, instead stating that the policy was a “long term one”.68 However in the same speech where he called the NEP long term, he chided another com-munist who suggested the NEP will last for 25 years as being too “pessimistic”.69 Lenin’s closest ally on the NEP question was Bukharin, who continued to defend the NEP after Lenin’s death. Despite being one of the most ardent supporters of the policy, he also considered it a phase that would result in a planned economy where private capital ceases to exist and firmly rejected the possibility of socialism and capitalism being able to co-exist permanently in an economy. 70

In Lenin’s own words, the NEP was a retreat “to take a running start and make a bigger leap forward. It was on this condition alone that we retreated in pursuing our New Economic Policy”.71 The official Chinese position,

65  Vladimir I. Lenin, “Seventh Moscow Gubernia Conference of the R.C.P”, in Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973, p. 93.

66  Vladimir I. Lenin, “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it”, in Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 25, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974, p. 363.

67  op.cit., Lenin, “The Tax in Kind”, p. 345.

68  op.cit., Lenin, “Tenth All-Russia Conference of R.C.P.(B.)”, p. 429.

69  ibid., p. 430.

70  op.cit., Bean, (source without page numbers).

71  Vladimir I. Lenin, “Speech at the Plenary Session of the Moscow Soviet”, in Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973, p. 437.

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while in some ways rhetorically similar, could not differ further from Lenin’s spirit and practice.

Permanency of Opening and Reform and its state capitalist characterBy the time Opening and Reform policies were pro-posed, China already had a functioning socialist econ-omy where exploiting classes and exploitation in gen-eral had been eliminated. Twenty-two years had passed since the socialist transformation of the economy was completed and, despite significant systemic problems that had yet to be resolved, it continued to grow. Despite calling for similar, albeit more extreme, policies than the Soviet NEP, official Chinese sources never char-acterise the resulting economy as state capitalist. The most these sources will concede is that China is in the “primary stage of socialism”. In 1985, Deng Xiaoping stated that “Socialism has two major requirements. First, its economy must be dominated by public ownership, and second, there must be no polarization”.72 At the time, Deng claimed that 90% of the total economy was publi-cally owned, concluding that they had successfully kept to socialism thus far.73 Deng’s definition is problematic for modern Chinese claims that their economy is social-ist rather than state capitalist as the red line of dominant public ownership was long ago passed, while massive polarization is one of the most easily identifiable fea-tures of modern Chinese society.

According to census data from 2008, approximately 30% of all assets in the secondary and tertiary indus-tries belonged to state owned enterprises (either solely owned or where the state is the majority shareholder).74 The census also showed that State-owned enterprises accounted for only 3% of all enterprises in China.75 2008 is an important year when considering the topic of state-ownership because the international crisis of that year was followed by strong Chinese government stimulus spending that strengthened the public sector.76 Financial controls during the crisis years favoured the public sector and, much to the distress of the bourgeois

72  Xiaoping Deng, “Reform is the Only Way for China to Develop Its Productive Forces”, in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, 1st ed., vol. 3, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994, p. 142.

73  ibid., pp. 142 - 143.

74  Gao Xu, “State-owned enterprises in China: How big are they?”, East Asia & Pacific on the Rise, January 19, 2010, accessed February 12, 2017, http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/state-owned-enterprises-in-china-how-big-are-they.

75  ibid.

76  Gabriel Von Roda, “The State Advances, the Private Sector Retreats – Crisis Economic Policy in China”, Global Policy, May 14, 2010, accessed February 12, 2017, http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/14/05/2010/state-advances-private-sector-retreats-crisis-economic-policy-china.

press, helped state owned companies to buy out and out-compete private competitors in many fields. Even with these favourable conditions, the number of firms, total output and proportion of assets held by state owned en-terprises fell in almost every industrial field except the tobacco industry and electric power generation, between 1998 and 2011.77

Although the publically owned portion of the economy is smaller than the privately owned economy by almost any conceivable measure, it can be argued that state-owned enterprises do in fact control the commanding heights of the economy as they are often monopolistic in their own sectors and are especially consolidated in strategic industries such as defence, petroleum, elec-tricity generation and distribution, shipping, telecom-munications and civil aviation.78 In 2011, state-owned enterprises were responsible for 92% of petroleum and natural gas extraction, 53% of coal mining and washing, 68% of fuel processing and 93% of electrical power and heating generation.79

Over the course of the Opening and Reform process, China changed from being one of the most equal coun-tries in the world, to on a par with other third world countries. China’s Gini coefficient grew from 0.28 in the early 1980s to 0.48 in 2007, which is beyond the inter-national warning level of 0.4.80 By 2013, China’s Gini coefficient reached 0.53,81 roughly equal to Colombia. China also has the world’s worst inequality between rural and urban areas.82 The richest 1% of Chinese own more than one third of all household wealth, while the bottom 25% own less than 2%.83

China watchers are often wowed by state-mandated in-creases to minimum wages, while supporters of reform point to increasing wages as a sign of greater prosperity due to Deng Xiaoping’s policies. Unfortunately, wage rises during the ‘80s and ‘90s followed bouts of massive inflation, with an average inflation rate of 14% between 1985 and 1994, excluding a brief period of strong credit

77  Gang Fan and Nicholas Hope, “The Role of State-Owned Enterprises in the Chinese Economy”, China US Focus, N/A, accessed February 12, 2017, http://www.chinausfocus.com/2022/index-page_id=1480.html.

78  ibid.

79  ibid.

80  Guang Tian et al., “Pan-Marketization Phenomena in Contemporary China”, International Journal of China Studies, 4, no. 1, April 2013, p. 46.

81  Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou, “Income Inequality in Today’s China”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111, no. 19, May 2014, p. 6928.

82  Song Yang and Bruce Stening, “Cultural and Ideological Roots of Materialism in China”, Social Indicators Research, 108, no. 3, September 2012, p. 449.

83  Yu Xie and Yongai Jin, “Household Wealth in China”, Chinese Sociological Review, 47, no. 3, Spring 2015, p. 203.

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control, and peak years over 20%.84 Although inflation rates have eased during the 2000s, prices occasion-ally spike, such as in 2008 where food prices increased 20%.85 Accommodation, something previously provided for free to all workers, is now becoming so expensive that even new “middle-class” Chinese are finding it hard to afford. House prices in 10 major cities rose by more than 20% in 2016 with certain extreme cases such as Nanjing where they rose by 42.9%.86 Inflation and ris-ing prices of necessities such as food and accommo-dation disproportionately affect the poor, intensifying polarisation.

Opening and Reform – the new normalWhile proponents of the NEP expected it to be a lim-ited transition phase that would be superseded by central planning and non-exploitative relations of production, official Chinese sources do not define Opening and Reform in a similar manner. The current major goals set by the Communist Party of China under Xi Jinping are the “Two Centenary Goals”, set at the 18th Party Congress in 2012. The two goals are to: 1) establish a “moderately prosperous” society by 2021 (the 100th an-niversary of the founding of the CPC) and 2) establish a “prosperous, democratic, civilised, harmonious, mod-ernised socialist country” by 2049 (the 100th anniver-sary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China). Descriptions of this modernised socialist country in both official documentation and popular online commentary lack class analysis. There is no mention of the elimina-tion of exploitation, increased public ownership, greater workers’ control over production or participation in gov-ernance. All of these Marxist-Leninist concepts of what socialism is about are absent, replaced with supra-class

84  Christopher Tong and Xiaobin Zhao, “Impact of Inflation on Chinese Economy: Growth, Investment and Regional Development”, Journal of Contemporary China, 5, no. 1, November 1996, accessed February 13, 2017, Academic Search Complete, p. 96.

85  Jodi Xu, “China’s Rising Food Prices Cause Pain”, Time, April 17, 2008, accessed February 13, 2017, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1731738,00.html.

86  “Chinese cities are undergoing an insane housing boom with prices up as much as 43% in a year”, The Real Deal: New York Real Estate News, December 26, 2016, accessed February 13, 2017, https://therealdeal.com/2016/12/26/chinese-cities-are-undergoing-an-insane-housing-boom-with-prices-up-as-much-as-43-in-a-year/.

expressions of harmony, democracy and prosperity. One could be forgiven for thinking they were reading a so-cial-democratic manifesto.

A reading of any official Chinese literature makes it clear that the current Chinese model of state capitalism will be implemented for the foreseeable future.

ConclusionThe NEP and Opening and Reform are two processes that shared much in common yet were applied under completely different circumstances with completely different political awareness. In Russia, state capital-ism was promoted as a necessary rung on the ladder to socialism. The NEP recognised the dominant peasant and petty bourgeois economic forms of the time and en-deavoured to develop them into state capitalism, using public ownership of the commanding heights to direct development towards socialism. This temporary phase laid the foundation for the later socialist transformation of the economy, the result of which was a system where exploitative relations of production ceased to exist and where the means of production were publically owned.

Opening and Reform in China took a planned socialist economy and dismantled it through de-facto primitive accumulation in the countryside, fire-sale of public prop-erty and the stripping of workers’ rights and conditions. What remains is an economy based on private owner-ship where the bare peaks of the commanding heights are publically owned, what Lenin in his time would have called state capitalism. Most importantly, unlike the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), the Communist Party of China continues to publically claim that they have a socialist system and have not publically an-nounced plans to fundamentally alter the arrangements that exist today, especially in regard to the level of public ownership and the elimination of exploitation.

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The study of theory is  necessarily linked to practiceDavid Matters

The study of theory is necessarily linked to practice. The theory of scientific socialism of which Marx and Engels were originators was a scientific discovery of laws gov-erning human development.

There are many bourgeois liberals who masquerade as Marxists and rely on the low ideological and political development of the working class movement. We have an older ideology and there is much confusion.

Marxists study society in motion for the purpose of re-vealing the inner contradictions, the fundamental laws of motion in society and the laws governing human soci-ety’s development. The purpose of this study is enlight-enment, as a guide to action and as an integrated whole of theory and practice.

One of the laws that Lenin discovered was the fact that capitalism goes through convulsions of reaction and that revolution develops in waves. This seems to also apply to counter-revolution; this is the result of the uneven nature of its development. If we study the most recent of counter-revolutions we find a convulsion actually at the centre of the revolution brought on by the resistance of the remaining bourgeois forces as the change in agri-culture from bourgeois to socialist state-owned is being implemented.

Counter-revolution is itself, uneven in its development and requires a material basis. It relies on the internal contradictions within the revolutionary process. Errors in the realm of scientific application of the laws of de-veloping socialism cause outbreaks and opportunities for the defeated class to re-emerge and find support to re-establish their rule. The working class is not homog-enous and is composed of different layers. The vanguard and the leading section of the class can ossify and lose class character depending on the length of time needed for transitions.

The actual process of building socialism involves bring-ing more and more sections of the population into the ranks of the proletariat, if this is not combined with lifting the material and spiritual level of the class and consciously bringing the new layers to a higher material standard then the class itself can adopt alien class spirit.

The development of the party involves bringing the party under the spiritual and cultural domination of the

class. The concept that classes are abolished is correct in a sense but the truth is that they wither away along with the state. The erroneous concept that they had abolished classes or had no antagonistic classes fed the notion of the non-Marxist concept of the state of the whole peo-ple. Not enough attention was paid to Lenin’s thesis of the state withering away and this being the arrival of communism.

Those who, in reaction to the end of socialism in Europe and the Soviet Union, reject “20th century socialism” also reject the great achievements and strides made by the class. They appear to retreat to 18th or 19th century utopian concepts or at best adopt a reform view that we can, as Marta Harnecker says, seize the state and wield it for our class. They build this house of cards on already discredited theories espoused by the Mensheviks and later in a more ultra-left form by Trotsky.

It is not dissimilar to early revisers of Marx who argued that workers had no interest in the nation through the argument that “workers have no country” being turned on its head and gutted of its revolutionary content. It was equally the rejection of this position by the opportunists who adopted national chauvinism on the basis of Marx’s assertion that the worker’s had assumed the interest of the nation.

They take and turn the concept that the proletarian revo-lution is a world revolution and adopt the impossible po-sition that unless there is revolution in several countries then the proletariat should surrender power back to the capitalists. This has various extremes that go from op-posing the development of socialism in the successful revolutionary theatre which has been usually preceded by the doctrine of revolutionary war that is spreading so-cialism on the point of a bayonet. This revolutionary war doctrine is coupled with the national nihilism doctrine. This throws other oppressed classes onto the side of the reactionaries.

Instead of rejecting the experiences of the working peo-ples, in particular this sectarian approach to revolution, it behoves Marxists to adopt a scientific approach and to examine without fear the correct and incorrect ap-plications of the laws developed by the most advanced of Marxists, the Leninists, who succeeded in wresting power from capital, who defeated fascist reaction. They built a modern country that was able to advance human

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civilisation on the path of space utilisation and were the first humans to leave the planet.

A scientific and even a historical study of the Soviet Union is very difficult due to bourgeois falsifications. The study of this aspect of history often departs from historical materialism and descends into good or bad. This is done to make it impossible for our class to move forward scientifically and to bury the truth that the out-come of the situation in socialist Europe was the work of the capitalists as much as the errors of socialist leaders. That the actions of these individuals were mercilessly resolved by the underlying laws that they unearthed and applied, or those that they ignored or failed to discover. They also relied on the skills, knowledge and character-istics of those applying the science.

As Marxists and class protagonists life itself demands that we find these answers. It is ridiculous to equate the actions of Germany and Japan to the actions of deranged individuals as it is equally important to understand the Soviet Union as the culmination of the application of so-cial and economic laws. Just as Hitler was the represent-ative and agent of a class so to was Stalin the agent and representative of a class. To put an equal sign between them may assist the capitalists who unleashed their jug-gernaut on the people of Europe who sent their forces to destroy “Jewish Bolshevism” as they still rant about.

That Stalin could not have stood one minute against the might of this fascist horde if it had not served the people of the Soviet Union. That the coming into being of the Soviet Union was the action of real people who

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created and built this country. That the dismantling and overthrow of the Soviet government was the action of real men and women and that all these players were the agents of differing social classes and interests.

Debates and assertions rage about when socialism was destroyed in the Soviet Union and even if it had been destroyed at all. Socialism, whilst conceived of in the minds of men and women, is still something real that obeys laws of development that exist in reality. In the social production of life and in the mode of production the relations of society are also forged. What surprise awaited the capitalist explorers from Europe when they happened on the feudal society of Tonga and the slave society of New Zealand and of course the different evo-lutions of society in so much of the world? That Tonga had developed because of economic laws to a feudal society that this society had not been brought about in someone’s dream.

The same can be said of the reversion of the Soviet Union back to capitalism. It was not that people had de-cided that they wished to become wage slaves again, it was more that a section of society saw that their interests were served by a reversion to this form of development. It was a social decay and gangersterism became the offi-cial policy. This change could only come about by over-throwing the power of the working class and this could only be done by subverting that power from within.

The abolition of the Soviets and the restoration of bour-geois democracy was carried out by stealth. The corrup-tion and theft of state assets by well-placed individuals, all this had to be a gradual process and intriguingly the raising again of spiritual issues of the class. Factionalism within the Communist Party had been a problem and the development of leadership along factional lines created the opportunity for infiltration of individualism into the party.

Trotskyism was a pernicious form of factionalism in Russian politics and became so internationally. It re-flected an anarchist and therefore individualist tendency in the international working class and became a vehicle for posing intellectual or utopian concepts against the revolution. It had a ruthless disregard for everything that did not serve its interests. It was based on the layers of petty bureaucrats that follow any revolution. The inter-nal struggle against Trotskyism and its defeat put the revolution off guard. It also strengthened counter fac-tional tendencies. There was an administrative tendency to deal with a problem of deterioration or cowardliness that appeared in the revolution.

The most damaging effect of Trotskyism was to force the party towards administrative rather than political means of dealing with issues. The absolute and devastat-ing attack by Imperialism through the forces of fascism

and constant penetration of agents into the Soviet Union and even into the party.

From all accounts the party Political Bureau operated as a collective and worked well, the decisions were col-lective decisions and these were all human beings. The struggle against fascism took a tremendous effort and toll on the Party but some problems can now be seen to have been evident with hindsight. The split between Bukharin and Stalin engineered in 1937 represented an actual class split. It was skilfully engineered, a more ob-jective look at the activities of some of the Politburo and when and how they came to get there should form some study. A study of the career of Khrushchev reveals that many of those who stood in his way to promotion were eliminated under the cover of eliminating real threats. The vacancies that allowed Beria and Khrushchev into the political leadership came about with the assassina-tions of Kirov and Obrieklnsky. It is highly likely that these two comrades worked together until the arrest of Beria. The operation of the Political Bureau after Stalin’s death becomes a systematic blackmail and removal of comrades, a real terror came about. This terror resem-bled the later persecution of Communists in the Soviet Union as it fell and in Yugoslavia as Tito took his bribes from the USA.

Beria was arrested and accused of being a British spy by the comrades. At this point it is clear that a dicta-tor has arisen in the leadership. The previous generation of a cult around Stalin had undermined the position of Stalin but had set this dictatorship up. Those who have a cult built around them often become victims to this cult. Stalin had tried to remove some of the gang from the Political Bureau towards the end of his life but did not have the support to do so. He was accused of paranoia by Khrushchev about the doctor’s plot and it is possible that he was either right or was demented.

All this can only be speculation as this stuff is well-hidden. What is clear though is that Khrushchev was an inept and pompous leader. He brought about decisions that damaged the Soviet Union and appears to be a con-vulsion of the capitalist class. It was in itself a deepening of the cult and a weakening of the collective approach. In all the debate about personalities the actual issues have been obscured.

At no time is any Communist Party immune from oppor-tunism and this was the outcome of the sweeping wave of corruption that was launched across the Soviet Union. Disregard for natural laws will have repercussions. The immensity of the struggle in the Soviet Union saw the rise of a left opportunist trend accompanied by dogmatic interpretations. The struggles in the Soviet party infected all other parties and this is that Imperialism has interna-tional influence.

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To get to a renewal of Marxism we must come out of the argument over personalities as this is an infinite source of contradictions. The dogmatists who don’t want to work directly from reality create false dichotomies. The young Marx versus the old Marx, Lenin as the ultimate word on situations that he was no longer there for, the “what ifs” of history. Most of these positions fail to understand or refuse to allow that there is a scientific method and an art to politics. That Marxism is a science but that it is only a guide to the art of politics.

When someone like Putin says that the tragedy of the 20th Century is the loss of the Soviet Union but anyone who seeks its return is crazy it exhibits the art of poli-tics. Millions in Russia have, like him, a connection to their Soviet Past, but those who overthrew the Soviet power are now in power. Through these comments he brings with him those who would support the return, but then he takes advantage of the despair, then turns and attempts to bring with him those who would not want the return.

In dismissing 20th Century Socialism as an aberration dreamed up by Lenin and the Communists we are taking the class view of the bourgeoisie, that it was futile to dream of or create a society ruled by the downtrodden. This unscientific approach dismisses, without battle, the experience of millions of workers and discredits the actual fact that on this planet we discovered laws that unleashed a new world order. That this struggle is still playing out and finds its echoes in the existence of not only socialist Vietnam, China, Cuba, Korea and Laos but in the independence of over 200 nation states and the de-feat of the imperialists on this question. That Russia has not yet been torn into a balkanised mess is, in no short measure, due to the historical existence and legacy of the Soviet Union and the actions of millions of workers.

Underlying all historical progress is still the class strug-gle, which is still principally between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat. The alli-ance of national forces and the array of these are still characteristic of the nation states that are currently in existence. Communists have a responsibility within the theory of relativity as applied through dialectics to this struggle to approximate this experience and lend con-sciousness to this struggle. In doing so we continue to see a progressive role in the struggle of oppressed na-tions as allies of the working class. The freeing of our class from the bourgeois influences of opportunism in its left and right forms still needs the development of strong united Communist Parties. The communist movement itself has a responsibility to work for greater conscious-ness and unity.

It is not that we will not make left and right errors but that we must overcome them through our experiences

and struggles. Such errors will continue so long as the class representing the imperialist bourgeoisie exists. They represent a step towards the bourgeoisie, not some evil or good. The heroic struggle of the worlds’ work-ing classes in defeating the fascist bourgeoisie required a campaign to split the so called “democratic” imperialists from the “fascist” imperialists.

After the defeat of the “fascist” imperialists the “demo-cratic” imperialists went on the offensive against the vic-torious working classes. First off, they entered into class alliances with the defeated bourgeois forces of Japan, Germany and France. There was not an outbreak of de-mocracy across the capitalist world but a repositioning. Instead a dreadful new era of the use of science in the form of atomic and chemical as well as psychological warfare was unleashed.

Their task was to disarm the working class and national liberation forces. This was done in areas not occupied by the Red Army and the approach remained to bleed the Soviet Union through unequal trade and spheres of influ-ence. The Marshall plan was part of the atomic policy of containing then reversing Communism. The initial suc-cess of this policy was the splitting of the Communist movement by bringing Yugoslavia to a nationalist rather than an internationalist position. The mistakes in rais-ing the United Front with the democratic bourgeoisie weakened the position in France Italy and Greece. Direct occupation by The US and British forces and the rearm-ing of the French colonial bourgeoisie and Japanese by the USA weakened the international movement. Careful cultivation of splitting tendencies between countries added to the pressure.

The USA came out of the war as a militarised and po-litically dominant force whose sphere of influence in Latin America and dominance in the Pacific gave it enormous reserves. The intensification of exploitation of the American Continent whilst building a military force enabled the USA to fund enormous military expansion. This was coupled with the creation of nuclear weapons. The US was able to absorb the fascist bourgeoisie’s ex-perts and to carry forward social and psychological war-fare in Latin America, to refine its central intelligence operatives.

They were able to establish new bases throughout the world. The military expansion of the US is underrated as opportunist forces in the working class either openly support this expansion or talked more aggressively about Soviet expansionism. Since the Second World War the US successfully split Yugoslavia and fostered fascist and neo fascist forces, split Taiwan from China and played to the Sino-soviet split fostering ultra-leftist forces with-in the Communist Movement.

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They crushed national liberation movements in Greece, Albania, Yemen, Congo, Guatemala, Chile, and Grenada. They have killed millions throughout the world with their conventional weapons and have used chemical, biologi-cal and some limited forms of atomic warfare against millions in the world. They have successfully kept up a psychological barrage against the Soviet Union which even penetrated the socialist countries through the me-dium of backward religious and social conditions. The re-emerged alliance of left sectarians and right oppor-tunists were used to paralyse a response of workers.

The reality we face is that millions of the world’s citi-zens, while recognising that something is wrong, have been inoculated with anti-communism. Academics in capitalist universities are inoculated against Marxism through the use of a dry and sterile form taught and in-culcated at universities.

Despite all this, history continues to march forward and new struggles, sometimes using forms that have worked before, emerge. The reality of our world is that national independence is still irreconcilable with imperialism. That the dominance of finance capital over industrial capital and all forms of production still leads to crisis and decay, now on the very nations that gave birth to this beast, and the very existence of human life on this planet is challenged by the capitalist form of production. Finance capital is the genesis of the current decay and degeneration of democracy. Human existence places a question before us all, either abolish the rule of the fin-anciers and replace it with the rule of the vast majority or the most endangered species will cease to exist.

We are living in the era of the end of capitalism and it is up to us to finish with this beast and all its destruction or perish. To do this we need to oppose those who defend capitalism with their left Sectarian view of opposing a Communist Party welded in the working people, a party unreservedly biased towards the working people and towards the liberation of humanity. The many varieties

of sectarians have one common thread; they oppose the creation and building of such a party despite their noise, they all argue it is not the right time, they disguise their divisiveness and lack of acceptance of a collective will through their arguments for purity. Be they hiding under Anarchism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Hodxhaism or some other ism even Stalinism, their cult has only one exist-ence to deny the necessity of a revolutionary party of and for the working class. Its essence is anti-Leninist anti-working class and therefore anti-communist.

On the other wing of opportunists are those who direct us to subordinate the politics of the revolutionary class to the bourgeoisie. They oppose the class rule of the working people and put forward the rule of the financiers as the only form of democracy that can exist. They reject political struggle against this class and confine their pol-icies to a better attitude from the capitalists. Class strug-gle is to be suppressed, but in reality it is only the class struggle of the working people that is suppressed. This opportunism is a reflection of the actual dominance of the bourgeoisie in society. The forms it takes are liberal-ism, or labourism and sometimes national communism. They are resolutely opposed to the formation of social-ist rule but when under revolutionary pressure will, like the bourgeoisie, talk and manoeuvre about Socialism sometime.

It is the unity and struggle with these forces that progress towards socialism is made. Both opportunisms reflect vacillations that occur within the working class in re-sponse to the pressure and dominance of the bourgeoi-sie. They occur in many shades but it is one essence that unites these forces which often appear as opponents. That essence is fear and resistance of the revolution, op-position to the strengthening of revolutionary politics and most importantly anti-communism, thus an extreme hostility to the formation of the Communist vanguard of the working class.

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Samia Halaby has created a moving set of images melded with text into a seamless whole, a beautifully designed and produced book, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre. She is a Palestinian contemporary artist and teacher with work in many public and private collections including that of the British Museum, the Guggenheim, Chicago Institute of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Arab World Institute, Matahf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, and others.

Drawing spans the formats of art book, creative process diary, and documentary. The art is illuminated and con-textualised by intimate notes on the process and inter-pretive thinking underpinning the art’s creation, helping to ensure that the political meaning of the art is not open to reinterpretation or distortion. The actuality of the Kafr Qasem massacre is always kept at the centre of the art and of the book as a whole, which includes a substantial sampling of the available documentary history.

In the face of the Trump administration’s effort to divide the global working class by encouraging hate-filled na-tionalism and isolationism in the US, it is important to counterbalance his rhetoric with the reality that is all too familiar to those in countries living under imperialism and the violence and disregard for life which goes with it. Drawing captures this reality in multiple dimensions, including historical context, the voices of the survivors in documentary form, and the beautiful pictures which Samia Halaby has created.

About 25 minutes before 5 pm on October 29, 1956 the Israeli “Border Patrol” announced a 5 pm curfew in the village of Kafr Qasem, which is inside the Israeli borders. The announcement came at a time when many workers were not in the village and had no communica-tion with people there. Then, before 5 pm the “Border Patrol” started killing. “In less than three hours … Israeli soldiers killed 49 people in … Kafr Qasem. They were mostly workers and children returning home in the evening,” Samia Halaby writes.

Eleven discrete actions occurred, nine “waves” at the western and sole entrance to the village, one in the village itself, and one in the nearby fields. Unarmed Palestinians were slaughtered in cold blood as they rode or walked along the road, came out of their homes to see about loved ones, or walked in the fields. Samia Halaby

cites the remarks of one of the Israeli soldiers: “We were like Germans. They stopped trucks, took the Jews out and shot them. Same with us.” Forty-nine Palestinians were killed, others were left to bleed among the dead all night, then thrown roughly on the back of trucks and taken to the hospital.

Salman Abu Sitta’s article “Massacre as a Tool of Ethnic Cleansing” is included in Drawing. As Sitta notes, after “November 1947, just after the United Nations recom-mended a Partition Plan, and throughout 1948 and 1949, the people of over 600 towns, villages, and hamlets were uprooted from their homes by force of arms and threat of imminent slaughter. … This uprooting of Palestinians from their homes and communities was conducted by a foreign superior military force organised, planned, and financed and supported by colonial powers outside Palestine and motivated by an ideology built on the myth that ‘Palestine is a land without people’ and ‘Palestinians do not exist.’ Its objective was to make Palestine a land without people and eliminate Palestinians by massacre and expulsion so that they no longer existed in Palestine.” Over 700,000 Palestinian people were thus driven from their homes during the Nakba, the catastrophe.

Sitta quotes Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an early leader of an ex-tremist Zionist faction, who said in 1923: “Their [the Arabs] voluntary agreement is out of the question … Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must … be carried out in defiance of the will of the native

Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre by Samia Halaby: A reviewEric BrooksFirst Published in Peoples’ World

The Kafr Qasem Massacre of 1956, Killing Inside the Village, the Easa Family

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population. This colonisation can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force inde-pendent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs.”

The history of Israeli state relations with the Palestinian people from 1947 until today implements this Zionist iron wall policy, a policy seeking the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people from their homes and the region of their birth, a policy successive United States administra-tions have supported steadfastly by pouring billions of dollars annually into Israel’s military budget as well as by other forms of aid.

While the broad history of the Palestinian struggle for recognition of their human dignity, an end to ethnic cleansing, and power to develop as a people is fraught with tragedy, the Palestinians are also resilient and have done more than just survive. In one touching mo-ment in the book, Samia Halaby describes one of the women from Kafr Qasem, Aishy Amer, key to helping the artist pursue the project of her artistic rendering of the massacre. Samia Halaby writes: “At that time she [Aishy Amer] lived in Germany and we planned to meet. Eventually she came to visit me in New York. The beau-tiful scent of revolution and national resistance was all over her in each word and gesture.” Just wonderful!

In another light moment, though referring to the slaughter of women captured in the picture “Embrace in Death,” Samia Halaby mentions: “The women looked stiff and lacked the body language that I came to know as that of Kafr Qasem women who possess a certain pride of posture and feminine coquettishness that is charmingly self-aware.”

Throughout the book the dignity of the children, women and men of Kafr Qasem in the face of the most ex-treme Israeli state violence and terroristic behavior is pronounced. That Drawing captures this dignity and humanity so deeply and so clearly is at the heart of its beauty.

In Drawing, the images are stunningly beautiful, as is the book design and production. Samia Halaby describes the book as “… a combination of drawings and words … it became two books in one, one based on drawing and another based on documentation.”

This reviewer read the book in one sitting. Such was, for me, the power of the images and in the documented voices of the survivors.

The images are placed in a rich context by interviews and reports from first-hand witnesses and survivors, an article by an Arab Jewish journalist from Iraq newly im-migrated to Israel who defied Israeli edicts and military cordons to visit Kafr Qasem soon after the events oc-curred, and the report by a Palestinian Arab Communist representative to the Knesset bringing the tragedy to world attention.

Much of the art is conté crayon or pencil on paper, lend-ing a vibrant immediacy and intimate truth to the images that is compelling. Emotional and factual authenticity combine to engage the viewer with the Palestinian peo-ple being depicted, the oppressed, even in the process of the unfolding massacre.

The authenticity arises not only from the artist’s com-mitment to creating images consistent with survivor oral accounts and documentation, but also from the artist’s personal experience. As Samia Halaby observes, “Even while examining my failures and considering my doubt, a fact remains that empowers the drawings. I am the one who makes the drawings, a Palestinian woman who ex-perienced the Nakba and lives the history of Palestine.”

This reviewer’s sense of participating in a living process was pronounced. This process was an intersection of the artist’s creative journey as captured in notes and images, unfolding events of the massacre captured in documen-tation from multiple viewpoints, survivors’ attempts to deal with the experience, and the reader attempting to grapple with a growing understanding of the inhuman-ity of the massacre and the impact it had on survivors whose grief was magnified by their callous treatment by the Israeli state.

This reader was unwilling to break away, to skip one word, to avoid allowing any detail of the images from resonating in my heart. As Samia Halaby noted, “I want-ed the victims to be known, named, and looking out at the viewer at the moments prior to death. In this way the viewer could meet them as they gazed back from the drawing ... .” Meet them I did.

Drawing is powerful, intelligent, compassionate, chal-lenging, and enlightening, well worth the time to en-gage with the people of Kafr Qasem, those who were victims and those who survived the massacre, and with the amazing Palestinian woman artist, Samia Halaby, who offers such heartfelt exploration into her creative process while illustrating and documenting the relatively unknown but very important, tragic event, the massacre of 49 Palestinians on October 29,1956.

Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre, Halaby, Samia, Amsterdam, Schilt Publishing, 2016

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AMRAMR discussionsHave your say: amr@cpa.org.au

These are important contributions to the development of a world communism movement. The International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties may yet develop into an “International”, but this will probably require the commitment of a communist party in power, such as the Communist Party of China (CPC). In any case, what the movement needs now in the way of en-hanced communist education and collaboration to help counter the imperialist anti-communist threats would probably need to come from the CPC.

During the Soviet era, numerous Progress Press and Foreign Languages Press titles on the classics of Marxism-Leninism, as well as contemporary analysis and even art and literature were imported and distrib-uted through centres like the SPA’s New Era Bookshop and before that the Socialist World Bookshop. The World Marxist Review, the English-language version of Problems of Peace and Socialism, was produced by the communist and workers parties from around the world from 1958 to 1990 and supported by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Before that, the Communist Information Bureau (Comminform) of the CPSU produced the journal For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy from 1947 to 1956.

At the same time, there was an active local publishing scene providing analysis of the class struggle under Australian conditions. In the 1980s the SPA (as the

CPA was then known) was able to publish books on the Accord, how communists work in the trade unions, and Australia’s security and sovereignty, among others. Since the retreat of communism in the early 1990s, there has been a decline in the publication of books and pam-phlets by the CPA, even allowing for some displacement by online publication.

This new “Comminform” (for want of a better word) would be more than a news service like Granma or People’s Daily, but probably less than a fully developed International. It would assist in the publication and dis-tribution of books and magazines. A greater publishing presence would increase the level of ideological and po-litical education amongst comrades and the people.

The new “Comminform” would help keep alive the idea of communism. We have seen in the last decade and a half or so that when the class struggle did intensify, working class uprisings tended to be spontaneous or anarchist in outlook. In the Occupy movements, partici-pants were quite hostile to the idea of political parties. In the absence of revolutionary leadership, it is no wonder that Occupy fizzled out.

A new “Comminform” and new “World Marxist Review” would help strengthen the hand of progressive forces around the world against the imperialist forces that have long sought the destruction of the communist countries.

Comment on  Reliable friends of China by Bob Briton and The task of our time by Michael HooperAMR Issue 63 December 2016

David Bastin

People vs. Profit: Volume 2: The United States & the WorldPaper back – 442 pages by Victor Perlo $25

This volume deals with the reaction of Washington to developments all over the globe. America’s position as the strongest and richest imperialist nation, advancing and protecting the worldwide operations of the multinational giants, is traced and documented. The content provide a review of US foreign policy, the forces that propelled it, over the last half of the 20th Century: the arrogant military mayhem; the role of oil; the disregard for international treaties and for the national integrity of small nations; the influx of US business interests, protected by US troops, all over the world; the manic hostility towards socialist countries. [From introduction of the book by Ellen Perlo.]

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ABC Series: Classes and the Class Struggle?Paper back – 263 pages by A Yermakova & V Ratnikov $10

How often have you heard it said that the class struggle is dead, that the way forward is for workers to cooperate with employers? The book defines classes, deals with the origin and evolution of class, peculiarities of class struggle in modern times, the role of the class struggle, its various forms and moves on to the question of socialism and classless society.

Against Fascism and War $20

Paper back – 125 pages by George Dimitrov

Against Fascism and War, contains the famous report to the 7th World Congress of the Communist International, 1935 by George Dimitrov and a 1936 speech on The People’s Front. There is a foreword by James West from the Communist Party USA giving a historical background to the great Bulgarian Communist leader who was elected as General Secretary of the International.

Lenin T-shirt $25

Available in red or gray

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude

to the triumph of labour over capital.Lenin, The Three Sources and the Three Component Parts, 1913

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