Ralf Ruckus: History of China: A Series of Great Leaps

In 1964, a remarkable new magazine appeared in Italy: Classe Operaia. It was founded by some dissident Marxist theorists to break with the reformist practices of the socialist and especially the communist party of Italy and to give future proletarian movements a new basis. One of its editors and most important theorist, Mario Tronti, formulated the new direction that would soon be called operaism.

In his programmatic article “Lenin in England”, which practically filled the entire first issue alone, the philosopher quickly reversed the premises of historical materialism: it was not the development of the productive forces and the production relations based on them that would provide the framework for the class struggles in capitalism, On the contrary, the conditions must be understood as products of current and past struggles. “The starting point of the new discourse tells us,” said Tronti’s thesis at the time, “that on a national and international level the current special political situation of the working class determines and forces a certain development of capital.” Only “in the light of this principle” can “the entire network of social relationships in the world be understood” – and the social revolution prepared.

This largely forgotten approach forms the framework for the activist and proven China expert Ralf Ruckus to reinterpret the history of the People’s Republic of China in his book “The Communist Path to Capitalism,” which was recently published in German. “Decisive upheavals in the period since 1949,” says the work, which was published in English in 2021, “can be traced back to the repeated proletarian or peasant protests as well as the regime’s subsequent containment measures and structural reforms.” And even if these revolts could not have ended the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party (CP), the “profound changes in the respective forms of exploitation, oppression and discrimination” could hardly be understood without them, as Ruckus makes clear several times.

History of class rule

The focus of his investigation is therefore on the turning points that initiated the following periods in the history of the People’s Republic. Ruckus distinguishes between four eras of development: He sees the decisive break in the policy of “reform and opening” announced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, in which many leftists see the transition from a (state) socialist system to capitalism. However, for Ruckus there were transition periods before both the socialist and capitalist phases.

The transition to the socialist phase only ended in the mid-1950s with the “Hundred Flowers” ​​movement and the “Great Leap Forward,” while the real implementation of capitalist production relations did not occur until the mid-1990s. During these transitional periods, the extremely flexible CP succeeded in establishing a new class society and basing its rule first on a “socialist and bureaucratic ruling class and finally on a capitalist ruling class.”

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Regardless of whether one follows this classification: with the help and after evaluating a mass of literature that is difficult to keep track of, Ruckus succeeds in presenting a dense and easily readable overview of the history of the People’s Republic in the four main chapters of the book, which are paced according to the periodization , which is second to none. On just over 150 pages, not only the political developments, but also the respective class and gender relations are traced.

Ruckus can draw on over a decade of his intensive academic and activist work, which not only led him to the mountains of literature, as a result of which he himself translated several important studies. His various longer stays were also characterized by his own political interventions, which are documented on the website he runs gongchao.com (Workers’ Struggle), as well as an intensive exchange of experiences with “dissatisfied workers, rebellious women and left-wing activists” like himself emphasized.

What role do the fights play?

However, the evidence regarding the book’s core thesis that it was the social unrest and its containment that determined the course of events is less convincing. Especially for the breaks in the history of the People’s Republic that he identified, the social conflicts do not seem to have taken on a qualitatively new or even eruptive character. So it sounds understandable that the Communist Party leadership around Mao Zedong took up the strikes in some companies and universities in Shanghai that broke out at the end of 1956 as the start of future waves of strikes. But the fact that these strikes by barely 100,000 workers and the protests at 30 schools or universities, which were regionally limited to Shanghai, prevented the leadership in Beijing from implementing the program of decentralization of production, as described in the “Great Leap Forward « culminated, would have suggested, but seems too far-fetched.

This also applies to the other two caesuras. The strikes and uprisings that intensified in 1974 had already been suppressed by the repressive measures when Deng Xiaoping began his economic reforms. And the emerging democracy movement, which Deng initially let itself be exploited against the internal party “left” around Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and her “Gang of Four”, hardly represented such a large power factor that could be used to explain the reforms.

Finally, in the early 1990s, Ruckus points to various unrest in the countryside and among workers in state-owned companies who desperately opposed the expropriation or loss of jobs and the associated social security. However, it is hardly clear why the CP, if it had only been about containment, should have reacted to this by continuing privatization.

The two largest waves of social and political struggles did not lead to breaks in class relations.

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In addition, the two largest waves of social and political struggles in the history of the People’s Republic – the Cultural Revolution in the mid to late 1960s and the democracy movement in the 1980s – did not lead to breaks in political and class relations. Ruckus treats both movements intensively. And for both he also points to the partly spontaneous and proletarian movements and uprisings that unfolded in them. Based on Wu Yiching’s book “The Other Cultural Revolution”, which Ruckus himself translated and published, he states that the rebels initially mobilized by Mao went beyond his intention to “end the social exclusion and economic exploitation by the ‘reds.’ “Capitalists” would have demanded.

But structural in nature?

Why the CP emerged from this very complicated situation without major changes and through repression and co-option of individual cadres of the movement, while reacting to comparatively minor events by changing the previously valid parameters, seems difficult to understand – at least not if you take Ruckus’ basic thesis follows.

At least the author himself seems to notice this a little. Ruckus ultimately classifies the return to capitalism in a more general way: “The path that began in the 1950s and was originally supposed to lead to communism,” he writes, “turned into a detour in which the country was fundamentally changed and into that was integrated into the capitalist world system. Ruckus defines this process as “neither planned nor accidental” and as the result of “structural elements (…) as well as social, political and economic driving forces”.

When looking for the motives for the various turns of the Communist Party leadership and the eventual path to capitalism, one will probably be more likely to find what they are looking for at the level of structural conditions. But Ruckus’ book should also prove to be extremely valuable for this search.

Ralf Ruckus: The communist path to capitalism. How social unrest and its containment have driven China’s development since 1949. Dietz Berlin, 300 pages, br., 20 €.

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