Stalinist bloodbath in
ED -Claiming to be acting against 'reactionaries" and anti-socialist elements, the tanks and machine guns of China's 27th Army have mown down thousands of unarmed students and workers in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in the traditional Stalinist response to a mass popular movement.
The brutality of the armed repression has not succeeded in quelling the courageous resistance of the protestors even in the capital: rather it has triggered a new wave of revulsion against the regime, protests and even strikes in China's largest city, Shanghai, and other major cities. Far from snuffing out the flame of opposition, the military crackdown has ensured that the regime will have to contend with a heightened, long-term challenge.
The barbarism of the tactics of the 27th Army has also clearly caused major splits in the armed forces. Some army units refused point blank to intervene against the demonstrators; now it seems that many of the occupying soldiers of the 27th Army itself have already deserted their posts, armoured vehicles and weapons to join the masses in Beijing, while as we go to press rumours abound of a possible counter-strike by troops supporting the more liberal' wing of the Communist Party bureaucracy.
Whether or not the crisis escalates swiftly into an all-out civil war, there is no doubt that the crackdown was an expression of the weakness and isolation of the faction around Deng Xiaoping, rather than a sign of strength. As a Stalinist bureaucracy, their power and privilege rest not on private property or ownership of the means of production, but on their monopoly grip on political power and control of the state machinery, especially the armed forces and police.
It is the fact that the mass movement for democracy has threatened this control, and challenged the very government itself, with explicit demands for the ousting of Premier Li Peng and of Deng himself, that has compelled the bureaucracy - after a period of obvious indecision and internal crisis - to strike back, reverting to the traditional tactics of Stalinism. While the students in Beijing, increasingly backed by the workers, demanded democratic reform of the Communist Party and an end to corruption, the tanks that crushed their bodies were defending not socialism but the privileges of a bureaucracy all wings of which are steeped in corruption.
The regime's cynical claim that the students represented an anti-socialist opposition was never more than a flimsy pretext for repression. In over three weeks of massive mobilisations under the microscopic gaze of the western press, not a single serious pro-capitalist current has been uncovered. Indeed, irrespective of the mock 'statue of liberty" erected by art students, the Beijing protestors were consistently demonstrating for socialist democracy, under red flags, singing the Internationale and even unwisely quoting Mao Zedong against Deng. The ruling bureaucracy are the ones whe have actually sponsored capitalism and privatisation in China, to the extent where 30 million out of 130 mil-
=
Beijing
lion workers are now employed in the private sector.
The economic links Deng has forged with the west are one of the key reasons why the hypocritical response from Bush, Thatcher and other imperialist leaders has so categorically ruled out any thought of economic sanctions. The US and other imperialists have been quite willing to sponsor - even organise- brutal repression of mass movements in their own "sphere of influence? (Chile!); and now they are reluctant to break politically from the most sympathetic wing of the Chinese CP, especially if this may jeopardise future profits and access to the huge Chinese market.
The beroic students and workers of Beijing have shown they are willing to die in the struggle for their idents of socialism and democracy. The Deng faction has shown that like Stalin, Khruschey, Brezhnev and regimes in Eastern Europe, it is ready to kill in defence of its material self-inter-
The political line of Stalinist bureaucracies have always vacillated wildly - embracing both right wing opportunism (Stalin and Bukharin's call to peasants to "get rich' in the mid 1920s: Deng's New Economic Policy after 1978) and "altra-left' policies of forced collectivisation and wholesale expropriation (Stalin in the "liquidation of the kulaks' in the late 1920s: Mao in the Great Leap Forward): the one common factor is that they cannot relinquish political control on the state machinery which is their guarantee of power and privilege.
This is why Stalinism has consistently shown itself more ferocious and determined in repression of the working class than in its measures against capitalism and imperialism. However, Gorbachev has shown that outright repression is not the only tactic available to Stalinist regimes: from the onset of the Beijing protests the Chinese CP and the army high command have been divided on how best to contain the movement. The army chiefs have been torn between the instinctive desire to crush the popular movement, and the practical problems of maintaining a long-term repression of the big cities with a largely conscript army. These political differences have not been resolved by the Beijing crackdown, and could yet lead to civil war.
For the hundreds of thousands of workers and students who continue the fight despite the huge repression unleashed upon them, the bitter lesson of the June 4 massacre is that there is no peaceful way to dispose of the ruling faction or reform the hopelessly bureaucratised Communist Party. Many of the ideas thrown up in the debates of the movement for democracy since the early 1980s have already moved very close to those of Trotskyism: it is now even more important that an organised current inside China takes up the slogan of political revolution to defend China's nationalised economy and oust the reactionary bureaucracy, and for an independent political party to direct that revolutionary struggle.