What difference does a Revolution make? A Contrast of China and India

The Indian ruling class opened the floodgates of globalized imperialism in 1991, almost fifteen years after China entered the path of capitalism and after the death of Mao Tsetung in 1976. In India, this move has resulted in massive assaults on the working class as well as the peasantry was exposed to the unbridled exploitation and vulnerability characteristic of the phase of Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation (LPG). At the same time, this has also helped in drawing the class contradictions more sharply in the Indian society, thereby intensifying the class struggle manifested throughout the country today. This militant assertion of the masses against the imperialist dictated policies of the Indian government is perceptible in a diversity of ways, with people’s movements breaking out in all corners of the country. The most potent and politically advanced of these movements which has organised and consolidated the worst victims of the state-big corporate-landlord juggernaut has been the Maoist movement in India. While it has been identified by the ruling classes as the ‘biggest internal security threat’ and the biggest hindrance in the way of implementing LPG, the movement has been able to voice the aspirations of the fighting multitude.

This intensifying crucible of resistance is bound to reach new heights as global capitalism is facing its gravest challenge with the deepening of the present economic crisis. As the attempt of the state and big business is to characteristically pass the burden of the crash onto the working class and the peasantry to tide over the crisis, it is also opening up new grounds for the larger unity of the struggling masses across regions and countries, garnering their energies against the repressive states, ruling classes and imperialism. It is this threat from the resilient masses that has forced the Indian state to launch a full-scale offensive the Operation Green Hunt on behalf of the MNCs and to implement the MoUs, in the vast stretches of central and eastern India.

The developments in China after more than three decades of ‘market socialism’ under the aegis of the Communist Party of China have traversed somewhat different trajectory. The revolutionary socialist policies in China that had been carried out under the leadership of Mao has been steadily dismantled over the years by the present ruling class under the garb of ‘Communism with Chinese characteristics’. The set-back of socialism and return to the capitalist Road has left the working class as well as the peasantry in an increasingly precarious situation. This has been manifested in a widening polarization of classes in the Chinese society with workers and peasants at the bottom facing extreme hardships after the breakdown of the communes, collective ownership and the loss of state and political power by the working class. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few who uses their hold in the Communist Party and the state to exploit the growing ranks of the working people has deprived them of their entitlements won during the days of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In this regard, the insights provided by the path-breaking works of Professor Robert Weil are very inspiring.

What is most notable in this context is the tendentious but growing assertion and emergence of the revolutionary forces in China and the rising unity of consciousness among the various sections of the working class, the peasantry as also the youth. The Chinese working classes, as Professor Weil shows, has been far from passive in the face of their deteriorating conditions and the loss of rights won over decades through struggle and sacrifice in the socialist revolution. Class conflict and social turmoil have surged to levels not seen for decades. The workers, peasants, and migrants in China today are mounting some of the largest demonstrations anywhere in the world, at times involving tens of thousands.

Much like in India, violent clashes with the authorities is growing in China too, as the state and the ‘Communist’ Party tries to cope with the present economic recession with the same technique of cushioning the capitalists by hitting hardest at the working class. But in spite of the above similarities in the trajectories of the two ‘Asian Giants’, there is something that definitely demarcates the two. And it is in this context that we look into the question as to ‘What difference does a revolution make?’ A significant section of the working class in China as well as the peasantry has the advantage over those in India of actually experiencing and being a part of the rising tide of socialism during Mao’s leadership. They had enjoyed the resultant social security, pride and power that the Great Revolution endowed on the working class. Older workers understand the present historical context and most of them who went through the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution and experienced Mao’s Thought, today wants to bring China back to ‘Mao’s Road’, or Socialism. This experience of a successful Revolution gives them the vantage position to understand more clearly the dynamics of a “two-line struggle,” as a clear demarcation between the socialism of the revolution and the capitalism of the present, which is now coming out primarily from the working classes themselves, and not mainly from the intellectuals.

As the working class in China is increasingly showing the historic maturity to roll back the reactionary reforms of the post-Mao era and re-engaging in a heightened spirit with Maoism, we too, being in largely similar objective conditions must comprehend the significance of and strive towards the building a larger revolutionary unity of the toiling masses as taught by Marx, Lenin and Mao. This is imperative not only for China, but also for India and a larger international struggle to tread the socialist path fighting the onslaught of imperialism.