1st October – Declaration of the People’s Republic of China

Posted on 01/10/2014 by Michael

Mao Tse-tung October 1949

1st October – Declaration of the People’s Republic of China

In the autumn of 1949, in front of thousands of people in Tienanmen Square, Mao Tse-Tung, Chairman of the Communist Party of China stood on the podium over the Gate of Heavenly Peace (which gives its name to the square) and made a short speech which was to see the country follow a road for which millions had fought and died during the majority of the first half of the 20th century. The date was 1st October, the speech, the Declaration of the People’s Republic of China.

After a bloody war against the Japanese invaders and then an equally bloody civil conflict against the United States supported Nationalist forces of the Kuomintang, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese people had, as Mao declared a number of times during that period, ‘stood up’.

No longer would the Chinese people be treated as slaves for the invading powers; no longer would imperialist powers (both minor and major) treat China as a country they could do with as they liked; no longer would the people kowtow to the Emperors who ensconced themselves in the palace at his back; no longer would the workers and peasants live in abject poverty whilst the wealth of their country was being enjoyed elsewhere; no longer would peasants be abused by avaricious and cruel landlords; no longer would the fate of poor Chinese women be that of concubines or prostitutes; no longer would it be necessary for Chinese families to migrate and face racism and humiliation in far off countries in efforts to achieve a better standard of living.

Although there were still pockets of Nationalist opposition at the time of the declaration the new government set about challenging and changing what had become the lot of the majority of the Chinese people.

As had happened immediately after the Russian Revolution, another country with a peasant majority, one of the first tasks was to take the land from the landlords and distribute it amongst the peasants who worked the land.

Laws were passed to free women from the shackles of feudalism and patriarchy, where they were often treated as no more than chattel; education that had been denied to all but a privileged few was to be made universal; health care was to be made free for all and care of the elderly was to be an obligation of the State. This was the start of the era of the ‘iron rice bowl’, when State employees (which encompassed most workers in the cities as industry as well as ‘white collar’ jobs were all part of the nationalised structure) were guaranteed a job for life and access to the other welfare benefits.

But the construction of socialism is not easy. Within a year of the declaration of the People’s Republic thousands of Chinese volunteers went off, yet again, to war, this time to prevent the United Nations troops from intervening in North Korea.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s different movements sought to learn from some of the mistakes made in the Soviet Union culminating in the Great Socialist Cultural Revolution that started in 1966. Although these mass political movements sought to prevent the restoration of capitalism in China a very short time after the death of Chairman Mao in September 1976 those who had been denounced during the Cultural Revolution had engineered a successful coup against the revolutionaries and started to dismantle all those advances in the construction of socialism that so many had fought for after Mao’s declaration on October 1st 1949.

(Why they were able to do so, and in such a short space of time is an issue that Marxist-Leninists-Maoists need – at some time in the future – to analyse and try to understand.)

The 38 years since the death of the Chairman have not been good for China. In agriculture the communes and collective farms have been broken up and privatised – although not without resistance as news leaks out of countless battles between farmers and the security forces.

Because there is no work in the countryside the whole demographic of the country is changing. Young people leave the villages to find work in the Special Economic Zones where they work in the factories to produce all the consumer goods that working people in the west buy with money they don’t have. Any family life is more or less destroyed as children remain in the villages with their grandparents and only see their parents twice a year – at Chinese New Year and during the National Holiday which is celebrated at this moment, the beginning of October. (There used to be a third occasion, the May Day holiday, but that was reduced to a couple of days in 2007, too short a time for people to make the long journeys necessary to travel to their home towns.)

Industries have been privatised and State enterprises broken up and organised in a way no different from what exists under capitalism. The once proud People’s Liberation Army, set up under the principal of ‘serving the people’ has transformed itself into an oppressor of the people and generals and other high officials have gorged themselves at the trough of the people’s wealth.

Millionaires and billionaires abound and now the biggest market for luxury goods in the world is now the ‘People’s’ Republic of China, but a republic that is in the hands of the people in name only and led by renegades who besmirch the achievements of the once glorious Communist Party of China.

The Chinese people, in the main, have accepted these changes. They now have ‘things’, consumer goods which were in short supply in the early years of the Republic. But these ‘things’ have been ‘gained’ at a price. The ‘iron rice bowl’ has been smashed to smithereens; education is being privatised, as is health; the once independent country that ‘stood up’ in 1949 is now allowing itself to be controlled and influenced by the very same countries that spent the first part of the 20th century trying to destroy and humiliate the Chinese people in general; and – in some ways even more disgraceful – China is turning into an imperialist power and exploiting and using its military strength to oppress people in other countries, especially a number of countries in Africa.

Why the Chinese people have allowed this happen I don’t know. But then I don’t understand why this situation has been allowed to develop in a number of other countries where, at one time, the people had ‘stood up’, proud, independent and with a perspective on the future that wasn’t based on exploitation and oppression.

So if 65 years ago there was a sense of optimism at the time of Chairman Mao’s declaration what are the main subjects presented in the current edition of Beijing Review, the long-established foreign language publication of the People’s Republic?

A boasting of the level of Outbound Direct Investment; a celebration of the floatation of the e-commerce company Alibaba on the New York Stock Exchange in September, the largest amount of trading in one company in one day ever; a call for more private (read foreign) capital investment in China’s oil, natural gas, banking and railway enterprises; boasts about the unsustainable rates of growth in China outstripping those of the United States by factors of 5 or 6; and boasts of how the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of China will soon overtake that of the US and become the biggest in the world.

But this all comes at a price. And that price is always paid by the poorest in society. They can either accept it or pick up the baton that was carried by the Maoist Communist Party of China for many years but which has been dropped and trampled in the dust.

The people of China are yet again on their knees. How long will it be before a future leader stands over the Gate of Heavenly Peace and pronounce such inspiring words as the Chairman did on Saturday 1st October 1949?

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4th August – Centenary of the start of the First World War

Posted on 04/08/2014 by Michael

The Western Front

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4th August – Centenary of the start of the First World War

It’s a sign of the redundancy of capitalism when nations consider they need to commemorate the centenary of the BEGINNING of such a war as that which devastated Europe between 1914 and 1918. It’s even more of a condemnation of that social system when that celebration is spread over the whole year. Such is the situation surrounding the 4th August – centenary of the First World War.

At the same time we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians of all hues try to jump on the band wagon of sympathy that the population holds for those who had to face the horrors of the trenches – and for a war that the British ‘won’. However it’s sad that working people aren’t able to see through the cynical manipulation of their emotions by such politicians who are always looking for ways to advance their own agenda.

And to re-write history.

The coverage on the events for the three weeks leading up to the date of the declaration of war have attempted to give the impression that Europe was at peace for years prior to 1914 and it was the random act of a Serbian nationalist in killing a member of the Hapsburg imperial family that moved things on which got out of hand.

In Britain the huge number of programmes on the radio and television, the slew of books that have been published as different authors also seek to feed at the trough have, in the main, ignored the fact that Europe had been moving inexorably towards a major conflict as the only way to resolve the issue of which country was going to hold sway on the continent. In that struggle it would be decided whether the old empires, the Hapsburg, the Russian Tsarist or the Ottoman, or the more aggressive industrial capitalist nations, Britain, Germany or France, would come out on top.

If the contending capitalist/imperialist powers themselves didn’t know that a war was developing in those first years of the 20th century and historians and programme makers a hundred years later aren’t sure, even with the benefit of hindsight, at least organised labour, in the form of the Second International were very clear of where the world was going unless socialists and trade unionists took matters into their own hands to stop it.

At two important international congresses, at Stuttgart in August 1907 and at Basle in November 1912, organised labour declared unanimously that it would do all in its power to prevent a war from breaking out and would work for its earliest termination if such a war was to start. Now it’s possible to say that the members of the Second International over-estimated their influence in their respective countries, that they didn’t have the power they thought they had in the major industrial countries and were therefore not strong enough to prevent the four years of carnage.

The matter that definitely does have a bearing on the start of the war was the fact that when it came to actually putting into practice the fine words and sentiments of the two congresses:

‘ … the working class, which provides most of the soldiers and makes most of the material sacrifices, is a natural opponent of war, for war contradicts its aim – the creation of an economic order on a socialist basis for the purpose of bringing about the solidarity of all people.’

‘If war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working class and of its parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, …. to exert every effort to prevent the outbreak of war by means they consider most effective….

Should war break out nonetheless, it is their duty to intervene in favour of its speedy termination and to do all in their power to utilise the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the peoples and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.’

From the Resolution of the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, August 18-24, 1907

‘The Balkan crisis, which has already caused such horrors, would become the most terrible danger to civilisation and the proletariat if it should spread further. At the same time it would be the greatest outrage in all history because of the crying disparity between the magnitude of the catastrophe and the triviality of the interests involved.’

It goes on to say:

‘It is with satisfaction, therefore, the Congress notes that there is complete unanimity among the socialist parties and the trade unions of all countries in the war against war.’

‘The fear of the ruling classes that a world war might be followed by a proletarian revolution has proved to be an essential guarantee of peace.’

‘But the most important task in the International’s activities devolves upon the working class of Germany, France and England.’

‘The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the benefit of the capitalist profits, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.’

From the Manifesto of the Extraordinary International Socialist Congress, Basel, November 24-25, 1912

The organised labour and socialist movement, dominated by reformists, social democrats and opportunists, proved itself incapable of facing up to the challenge history had placed before them. The overwhelming majority of the reformist ‘leaders’ of the various European socialist parties sided with capitalism and where they had elected representatives in some Parliaments actually voted in favour of finance for the war.

There were a few memorable exceptions to the long list of traitors who find words easy but actions way beyond their abilities.

Of the French Socialists Jean Jaures called for a general strike just two weeks before hostilities broke out. He was rewarded by being assassinated on the 31st July 1914.

Rosa Luxemburg continued her opposition to the war throughout the period of fighting, being imprisoned a number of times for her ‘unpatriotic’ activities. She failed to really understand the meaning of revolution and what it entailed against a ruling class that would stop at no means to prevent their loss of power. For that she paid with her life, being murdered by the nascent German fascists of the Friekorps on the orders of her erstwhile student and ‘comrade’ from the German Social Democratic Party, Frederick Ebert. This close working connection between social democracy and fascism/militarism is something that has continued throughout the last century.

Although not present at either of the International meetings James Connolly, the most significant and clear minded Irish revolutionary to date, was also clear about the true meaning of the war. Commenting on the betrayal of the leaders of the Socialist International, he wrote in Forward (15th August, 1914):

‘What then becomes of all our resolutions; all our protests of fraternisation; all our threats of general strikes; all our carefully built machinery of internationalism; all our hopes for the future?’

In response to pacifism he wrote:

‘A great continental uprising of the working class would stop the war; a universal protest at public meetings would not save a single life from being wantonly slaughtered.’

Unfortunately he was dragged into the badly organised and adventurous petty-bourgeois putsch of the Easter Rising of 1916, the defeat of which allowed British imperialism to kill him with impunity. Ireland lost their greatest leader at a time when someone of his stature was needed to stand up against the narrow-minded nationalists. When the Irish Republicans ‘celebrate’ the centenary of the rising in 2016 the country will be no closer to unity and independence than it was a hundred years before.

The most significant Marxist to consistently oppose the sending of workers to kill workers was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks. His words, written a few days after the shooting started, gave a clear analysis of what was happening in Europe:

‘The European and world war has the clearly defined character of a bourgeois, imperialist and dynastic war. A struggle for markets and for freedom to loot foreign countries, a striving to suppress the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and democracy in the individual countries, a desire to deceive, disunite, and slaughter the proletarians of all countries by setting the wage slaves of one nation against those of another so as to benefit the bourgeoisie – these are the only real content and significance of the war.’

Lenin Collected Works Vol 21, pp15-16

His leadership and the clarity of the Party allowed them to lead the Russian Revolution of November 1917 and to start the struggle to establish the first workers and peasants state in the Soviet Union.

That revolution was one of the few positive outcomes of the conflict of 1914-18 and the threat that event posed to capital can be seen by the speed at which former enemies came together in the desire to crush the world’s first socialist experiment on a countrywide basis. They weren’t successful in the 1920s but if workers and peasants sometimes relax or give up the fight capitalism never tires and has used and will use everything in its armoury to gain anything it has lost, whatever the cost in terms of lives or resources.

During all the statements that will be made today, the day that Britain declared war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, only passing, superficial mention will be made of the fact that what we now known as the First World War was also considered by many to be the ‘war to end all wars’.

Not for the bankers and industrialists who were set to make fortunes out of the suffering of millions; not for the politicians who soon realised the ludicrous nature of the statement soon after it became popular (and which was later paraphrased by such Richard Nixon in reference to the war against the Vietnamese); not for the military hierarchy who would never accept the disappearance of their reason for existence; not for the church (of whatever denomination) as there’s nothing better than the futility of war to try to sell ‘the pie in the sky when you die); but for the ordinary soldier.

Conscripted from the farms, mines and factories of Britain they were thrown into the horror of trench warfare of the western front or the slaughter on the beaches of Gallipoli. They wouldn’t be the same after seeing ‘Paree’ on their return home (if they weren’t destined to remain at places like Tyne Cot outside Passchendaele) and would have been a force to reckon with if they had proper leadership.

Lied to by the ruling class and betrayed by the social democrats the majority of the British population supported the war to the end believing that its successful conclusion (that is, a British victory) would see a new and better society for all. With another lie Lloyd George, in November 1918, churned out another famous phrase of the time: ‘To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.’

But what did those ‘heroes’ face.

A country where the Treasury, before 1914 bursting with the plunder of centuries from the ‘Empire’, was now looking for more savings. If not even the crumbs of Empire would fall from the table before the war there was no chance of increases in public spending after. Times of austerity had arrived – anything sound familiar here?

Thousands of men traumatised from their experiences at the front wandered the country in a daze and many gave up altogether. Unemployment increased and wages, hours and conditions of workers worsened. The defeat of the 1926 General Strike encouraged the employers to do as they wished. Then came the Crash of 1929 and its consequences, austerity layered on austerity. Unemployed Marches and the Means Test followed.

‘Salvation’ was another war, even more destructive in terms of human lives and resources. The ‘achievements’ of the conflict of 1939-45 in Britain, the Welfare State, introduced to stave off revolution, were under attack from the start and now there’s no Communist country in the world to pose an alternative the capitalist wolves are out to take back anything (and more) that was taken from them.

The present day social democrats, the Labour Party, vie with the other political parties to see who can be the best servant of capital. Before 1914 their words were brave even though their actions were pusillanimous. Now they are the most ardent and strident war-mongers of the lot.

The hypocrisy of the annual November 11th Remembrance Day parades and speeches has been surpassed today. If we want to truly pay homage to those who went so keenly off to war a hundred years ago we should be declaring an end to all wars and not preparing for the next one, whether it be the never-ending ‘War Against Terror’ or a return to the Cold War.

Today we are in the ludicrous and pitiful situation of commemorating the start of a war, surely that must be a first. We should make sure that in 25 years and one month, the centenary of the start of the Second World War, we have learnt the lessons of the past and realise that unless society is changed fundamentally we will be facing such anniversaries forever.

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7th May 1954 – Vietnamese Liberation of Dien Bien Phu

Posted on 06/05/2014 by Michael

Vietnamese Liberation of Dien Bien Phu – 7th May 1954

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7th May 1954 – Vietnamese Liberation of Dien Bien Phu

At 17.30 on the 7th May 1954 the flag of the Viet Minh, a yellow star on a red background, replaced that of the French imperialists over the command bunker of the Dien Bien Phu military base in the far north-western corner of the country. With that act, and the sacrifice of many thousands of patriots leading up to that event, the Vietnamese Communists had put an end to French colonialism in the part of the world then known as Indochina.

Although the Vietnamese, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party had effectively defeated the Japanese invaders during the Second World War the French colonialists were allowed to crawl back with the aid of some of the ‘victorious allies’ in the war against fascism and militarism. Notable here is the involvement of the British (and the Labour Government in power at the time) who, amongst other things, re-armed the defeated Japanese army so they could hold the ground until significant French forces could arrive to re-claim their stolen legacy that had, in turn, been stolen from them by the Japanese.

The Vichy French forces and politicians, who for the majority of the 1939-45 war had been collaborators with Nazism, crawled out of their rat holes and tried to re-establish what remained of their ’empire’. In the same way that German fascists were allowed back into positions of power in Germany the French imperialists were encouraged and supported in the immediate post-war period to take up position against what was seen, especially by the British and the Americans, as the greatest threat of the time – communism and the assumption of state power by the workers and peasants.

Situation of the Fronts in winter 1953 and spring 1954

Whatever their aspirations the French were neither militarily or economically capable of independently maintaining their control of Vietnam and by the early 1950s the US was picking up almost 80% of the tab. By that time the French were effectively loosing, having control of only some of the major towns and cities whilst vast swathes of the countryside were no-go areas. It was during this period that the then US Vice-President, Richard Nixon, was forever visiting the country in an attempt to boost the morale of the failing European imperialists so that they would continued to pursue the interests of the new ‘superpower’.

The French arrived at the end of 1953 with the arrogance and stupidity characteristic of European (and later North American) colonialists and imperialists. They recognised that the very remote region close to the Laos border was important as a conduit for war materials arriving from the Soviet Union and attracting more material as it passed through the young People’s Republic of China. For some reason, that seems to lack any logic, the French commanders thought that by establishing a base, with huge resources in terms of manpower and war material, they would encourage the Vietnamese to take on an enemy it was ill-equipped to defeat.

There’s an adage in military analysis suggesting that ‘generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it’. For this reason France had built the Maginot Line of fortifications in the 1930s which was considered a work of genius at the time but all the German Fascists needed to do to mitigate the effectiveness of such a ‘defensive line’ was to go around it. This arrogance of the French in 1940 led to the defeat of their armies and the occupation of the country and their capital within six weeks.

Dien Bien Phu Map

The French generals at Dien Bien Phu seemed to have assumed that to defeat the mobile peasant army of the Viet Mihn, an army led by ideology and steeped in guerilla tactics honed in the war against the Japanese and the experience of the Chinese in their war of liberation, could be defeated by establishing a heavily manned and armed enclave in a wide valley in the middle of the jungle.

We have the advantage of hindsight and know what eventually happened but didn’t anyone with influence (including their allies in Washington and London) express any doubts about this tactic at the time? The area is not that accessible by road today, it was much less so in 1953. Virtually everything had to be brought in by air but that created a weak point. Dien Bien Phu is about 500m above sea level, a long way from the sea and fresh sea breezes and is surrounded by higher mountains. Added to that apart from the cultivated areas and towns the area has a tropical climate. This, in the humid environment of a jungle, means episodes of low cloud are very high and in the 1950s that would have meant a possibility of days on end when no flights could take off or land.

VPA High Command working out plan of operations

Not only that the dependence upon air freight limited the amount of heavy artillery that could be brought in to defend the base. There are still a few derelict tanks that litter the site of the battle but they are relatively light and wouldn’t have been able to go too far into the jungle before sinking out of sight. And going into the jungle was what the French colonel, Christian de Castries (a descendent of the aristocratic family that, among other things, gave their name to the town of Castries in Saint Lucia) did, with disastrous consequences.

Putting a European aristocrat in charge of an army in a tropical country with an undeveloped infrastructure against an enemy of ideologically determined peasants was unlikely to lead to success for the European side. To give an indication of the dilettante, out of touch and arrogant approach of de Castries he named the hills and strong points established in the valley bottom after his past mistresses. All his actions showed a complete lack of understanding of guerrilla warfare, what it entailed, how that gave flexibility to his opponents, how by being in a static position he would be constantly reacting to events and how he would have little chance of taking the initiative.

The whole Dien Bien Phu operation took little more than six months from beginning to end and things moved very quickly. Getting intelligence of the build up of Viet Minh forces to the west of his position de Castries was reinforced by something like 800 ‘crack’ paratroops. It wasn’t long before the French realised that going any distance into the jungle just wasn’t a viable tactic given the nature of the terrain. The Americans, who were later to receive their bloody nose from the Vietnamese peasants in the next couple of decades, were only able to get troops into combat because they had access to thousands of Bell Huey helicopters, something the French didn’t have in 1954.

But what really defeated the French invaders was the determination and sheer hard work of the Vietnamese people. The logistical achievements of the Vietnamese in transporting: hundreds of artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns; the necessary ammunition to make them effective; the munitions for the fighting soldiers; the supplies to feed all the thousands of people involved in the construction of the bunkers for the artillery as well as the fighting soldiers is considered to be one of, if not the most, amazing feat of organisation and determination in the history of warfare.

Within a couple of months of the start of the operation the French realised they had drastically under-estimated the number of troops facing them. By March 1954 they were caught in the trap they thought they had set for the Viet Minh. Destruction of the airstrip and the increasing danger faced by any aircraft attempting to land meant that supplies could only arrive by parachute. That was bad enough but what was probably worse for morale was the fact that none of the injured could be evacuated.

One effect this had on the now beleaguered French was that they fought with even more desperation. They could depend upon no one but themselves. The situation was made worse when one of the last communication from the French High Command, in the safety of their luxury hotels in Hanoi, was basically an order for ‘no surrender’.

Thirty minutes after that conversation the red flag of the Viet Minh flew above de Castries’s command bunker.

Situation of the belligerent forces following the Dien Bien Phu Battle

General view of camp after surrender

In the years that followed it came out that there was even a plan, called Operation Vulture, to drop up 4 tactical nuclear bombs on the Vietnamese. Due to the close quarters in which all this fighting took place it is inconceivable that such weapons would not only have had a dramatic impact upon the guerrilla fighters but also the French soldiers in the valley bottom. The official reason why these bombs were not dropped is said to be the insistence of Eisenhower on support from his western allies, which was not forthcoming.

What’s interesting here, though, is the very fact that there was a proposal to use the most destructive weapon devised up to that time against a peasant army fighting for the independence of their country. There seems to have been no consideration on the impact the dropping of the bombs would have had on the thousands of people who would have died in a most unpleasant manner. The argument to support the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that it would shorten the war (a fallacious argument but I won’t go into that here) in Dien Bien Phu it would have been dropped just to pull the French colonialists out of the disaster they had created for themselves.

What’s also interesting is that in less than 20 years another General from another country was again proposing to drop (by that time even more powerful nuclear weapons) on the same country, whose population was still fighting for the liberation of their country, and for the same reason – this time it was the Americans who were losing their undeclared war.

Today, 7th May 2014, is the 60th anniversary of the Vietnamese victory but it will be forgotten or ignored in most of the world and will be celebrated in a muted and apolitical manner in Vietnam itself. To celebrate a battle of liberation when the country has been throwing itself at the feet of imperialism for more than 20 years means that what will be officially remembered will be the military victory and not the political. If you celebrate independence people might start to ask where that independence is today.

The Vietnamese Workers Party policy of Doi Moi preceded Perestroika of the Soviet Revisionists but had the same goals – the complete restoration of capitalism – and aims – the plundering of the wealth of the people by a few for the benefit of foreign interests. The sacrifice of those who lost their lives in the north-western mountains and those who died in the brutal undeclared war of the US in the years up to final liberation in 1975 has been squandered. Due to the lack of vigilance of the Vietnamese people those who had inherited a free country were not up to the difficult task of building socialism.

This notwithstanding it has to be remembered, and celebrated, for eternity that the victory over the French 60 years ago was only one of the crushing blows that Vietnamese peasant army and population dealt imperialism. Ten years before they defeated Japanese militarism; 20 years in the future they were to shame the most powerful imperialist state to have existed to date. Three empires humbled in the space of less than 40 years! The tragedy of the acquiescence of their children and grandchildren will never be able to wipe away that honour, which belongs to the Vietnamese people alone. It’s unlikely that any other nation will ever be able to claim such an accolade.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military commander of the Viet Minh at that time, and also at the time of the defeat of the Yankee imperialists and their lackeys 21 years later, wrote about his thoughts in the planning of the battle if you are interested in more of the military and political background.