Bob Dylan and the Communist Party

Socialism Today           Socialist Party magazine

Socialism Today 144 - December/January 2010/11

We live in a political world

Bob Dylan and the Communist Party

This autumn saw the death of Irwin Silber who, as a member of the American Young Communist League and editor of the US folk-music magazine Sing Out! in the 1960s, arguably began the campaign against Bob Dylan for allegedly ‘betraying’ the radical movements of that decade. FRANK RILEY, a former Labour deputy leader of West Lancashire council, looks at the relationship between Dylan and the Communist Party.

SELDOM HAS A popular artist received such venomous attacks and opprobrium than Bob Dylan on his appearance at Newport Folk Festival in May 1965 and after when he ‘went electric’. Indeed, this continued for years, and even has echoes today. Dylan’s performance at Newport had tremendous repercussions, not only in the folk music world, but throughout popular music based on American traditions, especially rock music.

Dylan brought the use of meaningful lyrics back into the popular song. More than that, he sparked poetic lyrics and was, for good or ill, the progenitor of a myriad of singer-songwriters. Even the Beatles said that they got away from teeny-bop words under the influence of Dylan. But the role of the ‘Communist’ Party (CP) – in the US and, later, Britain – in, first, building him up, and then trying to knock him down, has not been explained adequately. The Communist parties were allied to the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union, supported the totalitarian state as genuine socialism and, invariably, justified every twist and turn of Soviet policy.

When Dylan turned up on stage in Newport with an electric rock band and burst into the song Maggie’s Farm, a rewrite of an old folk song, Penny’s Farm, there was uproar among the folk traditionalists. Pete Seeger, the then (and now) veteran ‘leader’ of the American folk scene, who had suffered blacklisting during the McCarthy era, went apoplectic. There are many legends told about that day: such as, that Seeger tried to cut the electric cable with an axe, and that his and Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, wrestled in the mud.

Seeger did admit to saying: "If I had an axe I’d cut the cable", and there were rows going on between the organisers and ‘Dylan’s people’ behind the scenes. What is certain is that Dylan was booed by a substantial part of the crowd. Order had to be restored and, eventually, Dylan came back on stage with an acoustic guitar and sang some of his more ‘acceptable’ songs.

To what extent the Newport outburst was organised heckling no one really knows, although there certainly seemed to be organisation behind the booing that he received at all his concerts on his ensuing world tour. His ‘going electric’, however, should not have come as a great surprise. Dylan’s album, Bringing It All Back Home, acoustic on one side, electric on the other, and which included Maggie’s Farm, had been on sale for months.

In fact, Dylan had started out playing rock and roll when at school, and had even played piano at a couple of gigs with Bobby Vee, very much a bubblegum pop star. In his school yearbook, where students write down what they intend to do next, even though he was going to Minnesota University, he wrote: "Gone to join Little Richard". If anything, therefore, his ‘treachery’ was merely a return to type. And he was to switch codes many times during his long career, often delighting, bemusing and irritating fans, colleagues and critics in equal measure.

The young Robert Allen Zimmerman who became Bob Dylan, from Hibbing, a Minnesota mining town, rapidly rose to fame in 1962-63 on the back of a couple of ‘protest’ songs he had written in the folk tradition, notably Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times they are A-Changin’. Since then, Dylan has written and performed all forms of American popular songs from diverse traditions – folk, rock, blues, country, gospel, even jazz – becoming, probably, the most influential songwriter and performer in the post-war era. Although he was originally held up as some sort of political Messiah, and carefully groomed by the American CP, against his wishes and knowledge, he suddenly became a ‘traitor’ for moving on.

A new Woody Guthrie?

DYLAN HAD ARRIVED in New York in 1961 aged 19, a musical devotee of folk singer Woody Guthrie, whom he visited before he died in a New Jersey hospital. Guthrie was a close associate of the CP. His colleagues, led by Pete Seeger, were reviving what they regarded as ‘the people’s’ songs as part of their political activity. Although Guthrie probably never formally joined the CP, he accepted the party line just as much as his card-carrying colleagues. He had for a time a column in the CP newspaper, People’s Daily World. He also wrote and sang peace songs between 1939-41, during the time of the Stalin-Hitler pact, when the Communist parties in Britain and the US opposed the war.

Indeed, according to Seeger, it was Guthrie who first changed the line when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Seeger said: "Woody had a smile on his face. He said: ‘Well I guess we won’t be singin’ any more peace songs’. I said: ‘What? You mean we’re gonna support Churchill?’ He said: ‘Yup, Churchill’s flip-flopped. We got to flip-flop’. He was right". (Interview with Phil Sutcliffe, Mojo issue 193, December 2009) It is interesting that they did not say that it was Stalin, but Churchill, who had been forced to flip-flop!

Guthrie had become famous in the US mostly through his song This Land is Your Land, which he conceived as a radical alternative ‘anthem’ to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. However, the feeling of the song owes more to the American Dream than a demand for public ownership of the land. He was co-opted by Roosevelt government agencies to promote the New Deal, being paid to sing in depressed towns and villages about to be destroyed to make way for hydro-electric schemes, including the Grand Coulee Dam, honoured in his song of that name.

Dylan gravitated to the working class-cum-bohemian Greenwich Village, New York. A precocious talent, he was nurtured by the much older artists around Seeger and became romantically involved with Suze Rotolo, a 19-year-old artist who worked in the civil rights movement. (She was on the cover of his second album, Freewheelin’.) Rotolo was what she calls a ‘red diaper baby’, her parents having been working-class CP activists. She had grown up in this milieu.

CP members, Seeger and Irwin Silber, publisher of Sing Out! a magazine that put out new ‘topical’ songs, were constantly in touch with Rotolo, making sure she kept their protégée onside, although it seems that she was not wholly aware of what they were up to. As far as she was concerned she was just helping Bobby. They were hoping Dylan would become the new Woody Guthrie and help spread their version of socialism while becoming the big star of the folk world.

Dylan openly admits that he ran his political songs past Rotolo before release. "She’ll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her ‘Is this right?’. Because I knew her father and mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked the songs out with her". (Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan) He later said that he did not know that they were communists, and would not have cared even if he had. Dave von Ronk, folk singer and self-styled ‘Trotskyist mayor of McDougall Street’ (Greenwich Village), also befriended Dylan, and soon discovered he was apolitical.

A ‘musical expeditionary’

THIS DOES NOT mean that Dylan was not sincere in his civil rights songs and actions. His love of music with African-American roots, and his Jewish upbringing, made him a natural anti-racist. Black artists also had a great rapport with Dylan – he was never regarded as a white liberal salving his conscience. American black artists, from gospel singers, the Staples family, through Stevie Wonder to Jimi Hendrix, recorded Dylan songs. Bobby Seale dedicates a chapter of his book, Seize the Time, to a discussion with Huey P Newton, leader of the Black Panthers, of the Dylan song Ballad of a Thin Man. Ironically, while the CP was attacking this song and others, Columbia records almost did not release it on the grounds that it was ‘communistic’!

Harry Belafonte, a black singer who had been successful in the mainstream, dedicated much of his time and money promoting new black artists. Nevertheless, he gave Dylan his first recording experience: playing harmonica on the Belafonte album Midnight Special. Dylan still occasionally reverts to political comment in his songs. As recently as 2006, Workingman’s Blues #2 contains the lines: "The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down/Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak".

Dylan was greatly underestimated by those who sought to exploit him, including the CP. Far from being the country hick from Hibbing, Dylan was a ruthless user of everyone who could further his career. His fellow students and musicians at St Paul’s and Minneapolis had discovered this. He soaked up everything that could be used later, nicknamed the ‘sponge’ for his merciless theft of anything he could use musically: ideas, songs and arrangements. He still attempts to justify this by saying he was a "musical expeditionary".

What the folkies around Seeger really objected to most in 1965 was not the switch to electric instruments but Dylan’s refusal to write any more "finger-pointin’" (as Dylan called protest) songs. They accused him of being ‘introspective’ and, therefore, it was implied, reactionary. This was an echo, in fact, of the sterile ‘socialist realism’ and ‘proletarian culture’ espoused by Stalinism and which manifested itself in the folkies’ insistence on musical ‘purity’.

Britain’s folk scene

IN BRITAIN, A similar development had occurred in the folk music world. In 1951, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) published a pamphlet, The American Threat to British Culture. The perceived threat to ‘British’ music was taken up in earnest by party members Bert Lloyd (well known as folklorist A L Lloyd) and folk singer Ewan MacColl (real name Jimmy Miller), writer of the popular song Dirty Old Town, about his home town of Salford.

MacColl had started out in radical drama (his first wife was Joan Littlewood). After meeting American folklorist and CP member Alan Lomax, whose secretary happened to be Carla Rotolo, sister of Suze, he switched his attention to folk music. MacColl and Lloyd set out, successfully, to launch a folk revival in Britain. There was much cross-fertilisation between Britain and the US. Indeed, there is some evidence that Pete Seeger, whose folk singer sister Peggy later became MacColl’s partner, modelled his folk revival in the US on the work of Lloyd and MacColl.

This was also the year that produced the CPGB programme, The British Road to Socialism, a completely reformist affirmation of the Stalinist theory of ‘socialism in one country’. MacColl’s theories on music flowed directly from this. A debate about ‘purity’ and ‘workers’ songs’ raged in the British folk world, with MacColl being a leading protagonist. He eventually reached the absurd position that if a singer was from England the song had to be English; if American, the song had to be American, and so on. There were also detailed definitions of ‘traditional’, ‘commercial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘amateur’, etc. This was adopted as policy in those folk clubs (a majority) where MacColl and his supporters held sway.

Enter Bob Dylan into this minefield. In 1962, Dylan came to Britain. After some difficulty getting into the Singer’s Club, based in the Pindar of Wakefield pub in London, he was allowed to sing three songs, two of them his own. Contemporary accounts say that MacColl and Peggy Seeger, who ran the club, were hostile. As Dylan was little-known, one interpretation could be that Alan Lomax had talked to them about him. Dylan did not get on well with Carla Rotolo – a relationship immortalised in Dylan’s Ballad in Plain D: "For her parasite sister I had no respect" – so this may explain it. Or it may be that they did not regard his self-written songs ‘valid’ folk. Later, when Dylan was pronounced anathema by the CP, MacColl went one step further and announced that all Dylan’s previous work in the folk idiom had not been true folk music.

Civil rights campaigning

DYLAN ONLY RARELY got involved in public political action. He went to the southern states of the US with Pete Seeger to support the black voter registration campaign. He also sang, with Joan Baez, next to Martin Luther King on the platform on the March on Washington – the occasion of the ‘I have a dream’ speech. (Baez’s political activity stemmed from a Quaker peace movement background: her father was an eminent physicist who refused to work on weapon-related projects and her hardcore traditional folk songs came from her Scottish-American mother.)

When he was with Seeger in the south, Dylan sang a new song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the recent murder of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers. Everyone knew that redneck Ku Klux Klan member, Byron De La Beckwith, did it. But it took 30 years (1994) to find a Mississippi jury prepared to convict him. In the song, Dylan lays the blame firmly on capitalism, pointing out that the poor whites are used to split the working class as pawns in the ruling class’s game. The line: "The poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool", sums up the message of the song.

Seeger says he found this an "interesting new slant" on the issue. (No Direction Home, film documentary by Martin Scorsese, 2005). This exposes the CP’s liberal position: seeing racism simply as a black-and-white issue. Dylan’s words, on the other hand, reflect a certain class consciousness.

The ‘Judas’ protest

ONE MONTH AFTER the Newport debacle, on 28 August 1965, Dylan played Forest Hills with a newly formed rock group based on The Hawks, later to be called The Band. A crowd of 14,000 applauded his opening 45 minutes acoustic set and then booed throughout the second half of the concert when the band came on. On 24 September 1965 in Austin, Texas, Dylan began a tour across America and then the world which would last a full year. The pattern of Forest Hills was to repeat itself everywhere. Never before had anyone known people buy tickets to go to a concert to express vociferous dissatisfaction. Levon Helm, the drummer, gave up in disgust before they even left America and was replaced.

By the time the tour reached Britain in May 1966, the pattern was set. In Edinburgh, the Young Communist League had a debate and decided to stage a walk-out when the electric instruments were brought on stage. Similar events occurred in Dublin and Bristol. There was little press coverage of this, except for the Melody Maker which carried the headline on 14 May, The Night of the Big Boo, so the suspicion of covert organisation remains. Prior to the concert in Manchester the University Folk Society had a meeting which voted to boycott, though not disrupt, it.

This was the background to the extraordinary scene at Manchester Free Trade Hall on 17 May 1966 (See CP Lee, Like the Night, Helter Skelter publishing, 1998). The concert had the usual trouble-free first half. Then, three songs into the second set – ironically, immediately after the ‘communistic’ Ballad of a Thin Man – slow-hand clapping began, then individual heckles. A girl went up to Dylan and gave him a piece of paper which, it later transpired, said: "Tell the band to go home".

Then, in a moment of silence between songs there rang out loud and clear the now infamous protest call: ‘Judas!’ Dylan was audibly angry and shaken – the concert is now on official CD release after years of availability as a bootleg (misnamed the Albert Hall Concert). Although this is generally regarded as the peak of this bizarre period, things became much more serious in Glasgow, where a ‘fan’ tried to get into Dylan’s hotel room armed with a knife. No one can seriously blame the Communist Party for this last event, but there is little doubt that some of its members were cheerleaders in the extraordinary events of the 1965-66 tour, based on a twisted Stalinist interpretation of ‘proletarian culture’ dashed with an unhealthy dose of nationalism.

Note:

We live in a political world is the first line of the song, Political World, which opens the 1989 Bob Dylan album, O Mercy.

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

       Purchase "Unnatural Beauty;Poems from the Han Riverside" here.

        Copyright © 2019 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.

A historical perspective on China By Sam Marcy

A historical perspective on China

By Sam Marcy 

This article by Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy appeared in WW on June 3, 1993, when the bourgeois media were attacking China on the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square events. It continues to have great relevance today.

Once again, China is shaking the world. This time, however, it is not experiencing a great revolutionary convulsion like the Peiping Rebellion of the 1850s, the May 4th Movement, The Canton and Shanghai Communes of the late 1920s, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, or the Cultural Revolution. These events shook the capitalist world to its foundations and inspired revolutionary struggles of oppressed people all over the world.

The latest development, while it is shaking up U.S. imperialism, is of a very different type [and] may in the long run be of decisive importance.

A surge of production

It has become plain in the last few months that there has been a phenomenal surge of production in China. Capitalist accounts here tell us that China’s economy is likely to expand at a rate of 13 percent this year, after a similar growth rate in 1992.

It is alarming the bourgeoisie here. They express concern over the plague of inflation, which of course would erode the economic gains. But why would the bourgeoisie here worry about that? The truth of the matter is they are far more worried that China has demonstrated its capacity to produce in great quantity and can compete to some extent with Western capitalism in the production of certain goods, if not services.

China’s growth rate has come to the fore in the capitalist press just at a time when the Clinton administration is to decide whether to allow Chinese imports on the same basis as before, or utilize a provision of the Jackson-Vanik law that gives the president authority to ban them by imposing onerous restrictions.

New method shows much bigger economy

The New York Times disclosed on May 20 that a new calculation of the world economies catapults China into third place in world production, exceeded only by the U.S. and Japan. It is, of course, a remarkable feat.

Under the new method, based on the purchasing power of a country’s currency at home rather than its value on international exchanges, China’s gross domestic product in 1991 was calculated at $1.66 trillion, as against only $370 billion using the old method.

Why the sudden change in methodology? Was it to do China a favor?

Under the new method, if China needs loans from the IMF or the G-7 imperialist nations, the interest would be based on a different formula. Now that China is no longer categorized as one of the poorest countries, it is not eligible for certain kinds of debt relief.

The imperialists are quite disturbed by China’s ability to expand its production at such a fast rate.

Different from Gorbachev’s reforms

China’s economic growth is based upon the introduction of capitalist reforms similar to those introduced in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. This can scarcely be disputed.

The difference, according to Chinese sources, is that the reforms are working and that the growth in production is the biggest boon to the Chinese people since the revolution triumphed in 1949.

However, it is important to differentiate China’s reforms from the way capitalist practices were introduced in the USSR. It is now seven years since Mikhail Gorbachev began to experiment with market reforms. The result has not been a socialist modernization of the industrial and agricultural apparatus but a dismantling of socialist projects in industry and in agriculture. Indeed, it has resulted in a breakdown, a vandalizing, of the achievements of socialist construction in an effort to bring about a restoration of capitalism.

In China, however, as best as we can see from here, there has been a rapid development of industry, a tremendous surge in the construction of hundreds of industrial projects, rather than the dismantling of existing socialist projects with a view to privatization, as has been going on in the former USSR.

However, China’s industrial growth is being carried out openly and unabashedly on a capitalist basis. And it is going forward at a very rapid rate, even exceeding the objectives of China’s economic planners.

Production under capitalism, except when it is interrupted by crisis, natural disasters or war, can and does rise to phenomenal heights, exceeding all previous modes of production. Raising production is not a huge, let alone formidable, problem under capitalism. The problem lies in the antagonism between private ownership and the social character of production.

Since the bourgeois counter-revolution, however, a rise in production has not been achieved in what was the USSR. Just the opposite. This is because the objective of the reformers there is not to increase production but to privatize the existing means of production, and there is tremendous opposition to that. The difference must be kept in mind.

Struggle over trade

During the [George H. W.] Bush administration, an opinion piece in the New York Times by Leslie Gelb communicated a threat to China that it was vulnerable to having its coastal provinces detached from the rest of the country. These are the areas where the free-market “special economic zones” are located. The threat was meant to force China to accommodate to the U.S. on matters regarding “human rights”–a code name for allowing counter-revolutionary activity.

However, Bush was opposed to tightening trade restrictions on China, notwithstanding the uproar by the Democratic Party faction in Congress. [Bill] Clinton, on the other hand, attacked Bush’s stand on China during the election campaign and called for new restrictions on trade.

Now Clinton finds himself in the same position as Bush. He has changed his position and is opposed to giving so-called human rights pre-eminence over trade with China. Once again, economics determines politics and not vice versa.

Class character of China

The growing influence of the capitalist market in China has occasioned economists and political leaders on both sides of the Pacific to give consideration to a class definition of China’s social structure and state. For instance, last year the Congress of the Communist Party characterized China as a “socialist market economy.”

It is well known by all students of Marxist economics that the two terms are incompatible with each other. China has had a planned economy. How well or poorly it has been doing is not the issue. The fact is that it instituted a planned economy soon after the revolution’s triumph in 1949. The kernel of a planned economy has persisted through all the struggles and turmoil since.

A capitalist market economy is not planned, but is spontaneous, unpredictable, chaotic. The capitalist class everywhere is lyrical about the freedom of the market, about how it sets free prices and production. But this should not be taken as literally true. Monopoly capitalism restricts capitalist trade and production….

A market economy by definition is generally understood to be the very opposite of a planned economy. The two terms are incompatible with each other. But that does not necessarily exclude the possibility of their coexistence within the framework of a national state for a period of time.

In fact, such a situation was created in the years closely following the Bolshevik Revolution. Under far different circumstances than exist today in China, the capitalist market was reintroduced for a time, even as plans were laid for the building of a socialist economy.

GATT enters the debate

The question of the class character of China’s state and of the reforms has undoubtedly caused a great deal of debate in China. Nor is it of theoretical or political significance in China alone. For instance, the organization known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is by no means an innocent bystander watching the debate in China. GATT is an organization set up by the imperialists that includes 105 countries. It says in so many words: If you want to trade with any one of us, you have to abide by certain rules that we set.

Under GATT’s rules, devised some years, ago, China, the USSR, Eastern Europe, Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam and a few other countries could not become members unless they agreed to certain restrictions. Such as free trade.

China is undoubtedly trying very hard to meet those restrictions and get into GATT. An article in the Wall Street Journal of March 3, entitled “Chinese Entry into GATT Is Stalled by Thorny Socialist Market Economy,” explains that the officials of GATT, servants of the seven imperialists, have asked China to describe precisely what it means by “socialist market economy.” Part of the debate in China over this term is precisely over how to meet the restrictions of GATT. [Editor’s note: GATT morphed into the World Trade Organization, which China joined in 2001.]

Thus the struggle over the class characterization of China’s economy and state is not solely a debate among so-called doctrinaire communists, it reaches into the summits of the capitalist government as well.

Agriculture since the communes

If China is to be called a socialist country, what about the class character of the agricultural system? China has a vast population of peasants and a minority of workers. In the early 1960s, after collectivization, the commune was established as the unit of agricultural production. Farm work was elevated to collective labor, and private ownership of the land was abolished.

The dismantling of the communes in the 1980s signified that agriculture in the main returned to private ownership….

Either because of crop failures, natural disasters, or the inability to sustain themselves on the farm, peasants in China are now flooding into the cities in a manner similar to that in many Third World countries. This has made it possible to employ millions in industrial projects.

One may say that what is going on in China is a period of industrialization similar to that in England in the last century. The millions who were dispossessed from the land made cheap labor in industry possible and profitable. Marx described the horrors of early industrial development, including the employment of women and children for long hours, in his illuminating chapter in “Capital” on primitive accumulation.

A planned economy?

China’s collectivized and nationalized property in industry has become weakened as a result of both the privatization of agriculture and the institution of capitalist reforms.

Is China today a planned economy in the sense that the basic elements of production and consumption are planned and that the operations are pursuant a given plan?

The answer at the present time is no. The introduction of bourgeois reforms inhibits full-scale planning, so that to a large extent it is becoming a commodity producing economy. The larger the special economic zones, the larger the capitalist reforms, the more China becomes a commodity-producing economy and not a planned socialist economy.

However, China’s history since the beginning of the 19th century has been full of convulsions as it has attempted to free itself from imperialist domination. It has also fought to remain a centralized national state with a degree of autonomy for the provinces. Were each province to decide for itself how and what it would produce, a planned economy for the state as a whole would be impossible.

Immediately before and during the Tienanmen Square days, China appeared to be in danger of disintegrating into warlordism. This was overcome and the decentralizing process that threatened to emerge was eliminated. That was a victory of socialism.

The question of how far the Chinese government can go with the capitalist reforms will certainly be up for review, notwithstanding a constitutional provision meant to make the reforms a permanent feature in Chinese society.

One fact has certainly emerged: the millions who left the rural areas for the great cities of China and were absorbed into the proletariat have given the Chinese government and Communist Party the opportunity to strengthen the socialist character of the state. The growth of the proletariat is the objective factor most needed for the building of socialism.

It’s important that the process of production be carried out in the spirit of socialist construction. The calculations of the bourgeoisie are that as a result of their widening influence in the special economic zones, they will ultimately overwhelm the socialist sector in China. They believe that the socialist sector, lacking the material conditions necessary for its growth, including skilled labor and specialists, will be stillborn. The alternative, they say, is massive material assistance from the imperialists, and this will undo socialist construction.

For the moment, the Party seems to be united on going forward with the reforms because they are bringing results deemed indispensable at the present time. Without a doubt, a generation of young people, a new breed of Tienanmen Square elements, is being accommodated politically to this situation. But the inevitability of a capitalist recession, especially if it stems from a worldwide capitalist crisis, is bound to create a classic confrontation between the socialized and the bourgeois sectors.

The question is how significant is the proletarian revolutionary element, what is their influence in the higher councils of the Party? Even if they are tiny and weak now, the objective basis for their revolutionary growth is assured.

As Frederick Engels explained in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (part of his book Anti-Duhring), the great philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment–Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Saint-Simon–reflected the disillusionment with the old order and tore to shreds feudal ideology with their brilliance and wit. On the other hand, socialism is the ideological offspring of the growth of the proletariat.

China had its own Enlightenment period that undermined feudal ideology. The period in which the proletariat comes forward with its own ideological approach has been more protracted, given the necessity to fight imperialism on all fronts and a more obdurate and stultified feudal system.

Nevertheless, with all its ups and downs, China is moving toward socialism. The efforts of the imperialists to stop it by force and violence have failed over the decades, and their efforts at economic strangulation will also surely fail. The road to socialism in China, like everywhere else in the world, may be difficult, but it is assured.

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

       Purchase "Unnatural Beauty;Poems from the Han Riverside" here.

        Copyright © 2019 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.

China is the only country- Mao quote

China is the only country in the world today where one or more small areas under Red political power have emerged in the midst of a White regime which encircles them. We find on analysis that one reason for this phenomenon lies in the incessant splits and wars within China's comprador and landlord classes. So long as these splits and wars continue, it is possible for an armed independent regime of workers and peasants to survive and grow. In addition, its survival and growth require the following conditions: (1) a sound mass base, (2) a sound Party organization, (3) a fairly strong Red Army, (4) terrain favourable to military operations, and (5) economic resources sufficient for sustenance.

- Mao Zedong

Is China Socialist? The New Afrikan Communist Party affirms

Is China Socialist? The New Afrikan Communist Party affirms the socialist character of the chinese revolution:

Given China’s increasingly important international role, it is critical that progressives and revolutionaries correctly understand the country.

This year marks the 68th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, established on Oct. 1, 1949. The Chinese Revolution, which nearly doubled life expectancy in its first 30 years, is recognized as a hallmark of the socialist tradition. After nearly seven decades, China’s Communist Party — now comprising nearly 90 million members — continues to lead the country and maintains its commitment to socialism and Marxism.

US-North Korea Relations: Experts Weigh in on Future Course

However, today, many, particularly in the West, dismiss the notion that China remains socialist or even a progressive force in the world. According to this view, China abandoned socialism for capitalism following economic reforms which were initiated in 1978. They fail to understand the nature and character of socialist development.

Given China’s increasingly important international role, it is critical that progressives and revolutionaries correctly understand the country. This article outlines why China is still a revolutionary, socialist state, and a friend to all those struggling against capitalism and imperialism around the world.

Reform or counter-revolution?

Existing in the periphery of global capitalism and facing consistent imperialist aggression, China has pursued socialist development under hostile conditions, having to address inequality not only within its society — the most populous in the world — but also globally, against the uneven development wrought by imperialism.

Since 1978, China has implemented economic reforms in order to overcome the severe underdevelopment which was historically imposed upon it by Western and Japanese imperialism. At that time, while having significantly improved living standards, China was still poor and underdeveloped, with a GDP per capita figure lower than that of India. The reforms allow for a sphere of bourgeois development, while the commanding heights of the economy remain under public ownership and the firm control of the socialist state. Following their introduction, China has achieved unprecedented economic growth, building a modern, moderately prosperous country and becoming the second most powerful economy in the world, establishing a socialist base of operation.

If these reforms constituted the overthrow of socialism, one would expect to see a significant reduction in Chinese living standards. In Eastern Europe, capitalist counter-revolution led to the greatest population loss in modern history.

However, in China, living conditions are consistently improving. Since 1978, China has lifted over 800 million people out of poverty, more than the rest of the world combined, and is working to eradicate poverty by 2020. From 1978-2015, real income for the bottom half of earners grew 401 percent, compared to falling by one percent in the U.S. Chinese wage growth is also soaring, with hourly manufacturing wages rising 12 percent per year since 2001. Social supports are expanding as well—just this week China declared health care a universal human right.

China is also a global leader in environmental sustainability — praised for the “best response to the world’s environmental crisis” — leading the world in renewable energy production and employment.

It is clear that China stands in sharp contrast to the capitalist world, where climate destruction runs rampant and the majority of people’s livelihoods constantly face attacks. The qualitative difference between China and capitalist countries is precisely because China’s economy is not dominated by the capitalist need to maximize profit. This is especially apparent when China is compared to capitalist countries also in the Global South.

Class struggle continues

While capitalists exist in China today, unlike in capitalist societies, they are isolated and not organized in pursuit of their collective interests. Instead, they exist under the rule of the socialist state to aid national economic development. Capitalists transgressing their boundaries are swiftly dealt with by the Communist Party and the Chinese people. An annual list of China’s richest citizens is commonly called the “death list” or “kill pigs list” because those named often are later imprisoned. Capitalists also regularly get taken hostage by workers to win labor victories with police actively assisting workers.

China: 'We Oppose Attempts to Divide Syria'

While the reforms have presented new contradictions for China — particularly, greater income inequality — the Communist Party recognizes these challenges and works hard to address them. Since 2008, income inequality in China has stagnated and steadily decreased. In recent years the Party has waged an anti-corruption campaign, including cracking down on inappropriate uses of public funds. Promotions of government officials have also been tied to achievements in advancing people’s interests, such as environmental protection and raising living standards.

China has also emphasized strengthening Marxist education in the Communist Party and throughout society. President Xi Jinping has called for efforts to deepen understanding of Marxism, stating that “if we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our Party would lose its soul and direction … On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.” In primary and middle schools, youth receive daily education on socialist values, and universities are implementing new standards for Marxist education.

China supports the Global South

Internationally, China works with nations in the Global South, providing beneficial alternatives to imperialism and promoting greater representation for developing countries in global governance. While imperialist powers like the U.S. threaten nations with regime change and total devastation, China is committed to world peace and development across the Global South, where it builds infrastructure, forgives debt, and abides by the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. Close relations with China have significantly benefited nations facing direct imperialist aggression, including Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, and North Korea. A key example of China’s global impact is the Belt and Road initiative — called “the largest single infrastructure program in human history” — currently involving 68 countries and 1700 development projects.

China is the primary force building a multipolar, more democratic international order, ending 500 years of Western imperial dominance. As such, China’s rise is bound with and supports the liberation of all peoples oppressed by imperialism.

The most promising hope

In spite of its achievements and distinction from capitalism, some still refuse to consider China revolutionary or socialist because of a supposed failure to conform to preconceived notions of a “true socialism”. This idealism was addressed by Fidel Castro, speaking in 1994:

"I think China is a socialist country … they insist that they have introduced all the necessary reforms in order to motivate national development and to continue seeking the objectives of socialism. There are no fully pure regimes or systems. In Cuba, for instance, we have many forms of private property. We have hundreds of thousands of farm owners … Practically all Cubans own their own home and, what is more, we welcome foreign investment. But that does not mean that Cuba has stopped being socialist."

Impressed by China’s achievements, Fidel declared, in 2004, that “China has become objectively the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries,” and that “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life."

As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the U.S. aggressively seeks to defend its unipolar dominance over the world. The greatest force challenging U.S. imperialism is China, and for this reason, the U.S. considers China it’s “greatest threat” and increasingly hostile towards it. As such, China’s character is not an unnecessary, abstract subject to consider, but of crucial, immediate importance to all those who are struggling for peace and justice against capitalism and imperialism. In understanding China to be a revolutionary, socialist state, we must recognize that China is a leading member in that struggle and a friend to whom we owe respect and solidarity.

By Ajit Singh with NACP edits. Comrade Ajit Singh is a Marxist, anti-imperialist writer and activist. He received his Juris Doctor in Law from the University of Western Ontario in 2014.

CLB: Pro-Worker or Anti-China?

          About China Labour Bulletin’s sharing “HKCTU urges Hong Kong workers to take tomorrow off and protest the government's proposed amendments to the extradition law,” I commented to them: "You say CLB is a workers' rights NGO about China, but you are lying. You are really an anti-Chinese government group using workers' struggle in China as an excuse. I urge you to keep to your mission in your title and cease your useless political propaganda.”

      About “CLB Director Han Dongfang, Wuer Kaixi, Dr. Shao Jiang and Zhou Fengsuo discuss[ing] the nature of democracy, the legacy of China's 1989 protests and June 4 crackdown at the Oxford Union,” I commented: “This article has nothing to do with labor in China. It is a political piece. CLB should stick to reporting labor issues in China.” But most of their posts do support workers’ rights in China, if not Taiwan.“CLB is introducing more original Chinese language content on our website. Here we look at the working conditions of China's truck drivers, one year after their nationwide strike.” 

     But about some alleged workers and students uniting for Tiananmen, they support the western propaganda against Chinese 'lack of free speech' when it is clear there is as little free speech there as  in the U.S. I commented: “China could have been another Iraq if the U.S. had its way. China was almost caught flat footed for the destabilization attempt that the U.S./NATO would have jumped on.” About a piece longing for the road not taken after Tiananmen, I commented: “This is anti-Chinese propaganda. Subversion by capitalism is not acceptable in socialist nations. China dealt with it the only way how.” About the alleged survival of ‘free thought’ after Tiananmen, I commented: “This article has nothing to do with labor issues.”  

     CLB won’t touch Taiwan worker issues, and for that I shame them. I asked why not and they wrote back "China Labour Bulletin as an NGO we have limited resources and we have to focus on what we know best, the Chinese mainland, when conducting our work. Since its establishment in Hong Kong in 1994, China Labour Bulletin has always focused on mainland China, leaving even Hong Kong labour issues to other institutions." So when they posted  'about ‘Brother Chan Kam Hong, tireless fighter for workers' rights and occupational health and safety in Hong Kong [who]passed away [that day] aged 60-years old [and] will be greatly missed,” I pointed out their hypocrisy. CLB insisted their only concern is China, not HK or Taiwan, so why are they concerned with this HK man? 

    I complained that they do not follow up on labor issues in Taiwan or even Taiwanese businesses in China such as Foxconn. Response from CLB to my alerting them to labor issues in HK and Taiwan are not investigated.  They only do Chinese labor issues? No.  I pointed out they comment on Hong Kong issues, too, as is evident supporting the organized opposition to China extradition law for Hong Kong criminals; someone thinks lawbreakers, especially ‘free speech’ against China, will get off easier in Hong Kong courts.

      The jury is still out on that. Hong Kong is an enclave of privileged capitalist leftovers from colonial times.There was subterfuge then and there is subterfuge now. CLB is not neutral or on workers' sides in Chinese speaking lands. To CLB, an injury for China is an injury to all. 
     I’ve had it with China Labour Bulletin; their only interest in helping workers is destabilizing China. They are one of the NGO instigators of the anti-Chinese riots in Hong Kong. For many years I have been sharing their reports on my blog and Facebook page to friends and comrades. I was bamboozled by their intentions in an “Injury to one is an injury to all” Wobbly worker solidarity but CLB isn’t interested in injury to workers anywhere if it can’t be blamed on the CCP. 
     Their Facebook monitors kept throwing “like” icons when I shared their posts about worker grievances in China but I will share them no more; in fact I condemn the CLB for their role in destabilizing Hong Kong for no worker’s well-being at all; all in the name of protecting their right to spread negative or false news about China from within their H.K. Trojan Horse. They have helped do young people and workers of Hong Kong a disservice and they are not constructive about helping workers in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or anywhere else. I hope they are investigated, get arrested, and put on trial for treason in Chinese courts

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com      

        Copyright © 2019 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.