REPRINT

Sunday, December 01, 2024

The Fascist Counter-revolution



Karl Korsch

 1940

First Published: in Living Marxism, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 1940, pp. 29-37
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;

What hope have we revolutionary Marxists, remnants of a past epoch, inheritors of its most advanced theories, illusions, ideologies-what hope have we left for a revolutionary turn of the sweeping counterrevolutionary movement of victorious fascism? The fate of France has finally proved that the old Marxist slogan of "world revolution" has in our epoch assumed a new meaning. We find ourselves today in the midst not of a socialist and proletarian but of an ultra-imperialistic and fascist world revolution. Just as in the preceding epoch every major defeat-the defeat of France in 1871, that of Russia, Germany, Hungary in 1905, 1917, 1918-resulted in a genuine revolution, so in our time each defeated country resorts to a fascist counterrevolution. Moreover, present-day war itself has become a revolutionary process, a civil war with an unmistakably predominant counterrevolutionary tendency. Just as in a horse race we do not know which horse will win but we do know that it will be a horse, so in the present war the victory of either party will result in a further gigantic step toward the fascization of Europe, if not of the whole European, American, Asiatic world of tomorrow.

I

There seem to be two easy ways for the "orthodox" Marxist of today to handle this difficult problem. Well-trained in Hegelian philosophical thought, he might say that all that is, is reasonable, and that, by one of those dialectical shifts in which history rejoices, socialism has been fulfilled by the social revolution implied in the victory of fascism. Thus Hegel himself at first followed the rising star of the French Revolution, later embraced the cause of Napoleon, and ended by acclaiming the Prussian state that emerged from the anti-Napoleonic wars of 1812-1815 as the fulfilment of the philosophical "idea" and as the "state of reason" corresponding to the given stage of its historical development.

Or, for that matter, our orthodox Marxist might not be willing, for the present, to go so far as to acknowledge the fascist allies of Stalin as the genuine promoters of socialism in our time. He would then content himself with feeling that the victory of fascism, planned economy, state capitalism, and the weeding out of all ideas and institutions of traditional "bourgeois democracy" will bring us to the very threshold of the genuine social revolution and proletarian dictatorship - just as, according to the teachings of the early church, the ultimate coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by the coming of the Anti-Christ who will be so much like Christ in his appearance and in his actions that the faithful will have considerable difficulty in seeing the difference.

In so reasoning, our orthodox Marxist would not only conform with the church but would also keep well in line with the precedents set by the earlier socialists and "revolutionary" Marxists themselves. It was not only the moderately progressive bourgeois ex-minister Guizot who was deceived by the revolutionary trimmings of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat of 1851 and, when he heard the news burst out into the alarmed cry, "This is the complete and final triumph of socialism." Even the leading representative of French socialism, P. J. Proudhon, was taken in by the violently anti-bourgeois attitude displayed by the revolutionary imperialist, and he devoted a famous pamphlet to the thesis that the coup d'etat of the Second of December did in fact "demonstrate the social revolution."[1]

Indeed, in many ways that counterrevolutionary aftermath of 1848 is comparable to the infinitely more serious and more extended counterrevolutionary movement through which European society is passing today after the experience of the Russian, the German, and the other European revolutions which followed in the wake of the First World War. Every party and every political tendency had to go through a certain period of bewilderment until it had adapted itself to a totally changed situation. Marx himself, although he utterly despised the imperialist adventurer because of his personal inadequacy, was inclined to believe in the revolutionary significance of the counterrevolutionary coup. He described the historical outcome of the two years of revolutionary defeat from 1848 to 1849 by the paradoxical statement that "this time the advance of the revolutionary movement did not effect itself through its immediate tragicomic achievements but, the other way round, through the creation of a united and powerful counterrevolution, through the creation of an antagonist by opposing whom the party of revolt will reach its real revolutionary maturity." And even after the fateful event he most emphatically restated his conviction that "the destruction of the parliamentary republic contains the germs of the triumph of the proletarian revolution." This is exactly what the German Communists and their Russian masters said 80 years later when they welcomed the advent of Nazism in Germany as a "victory of revolutionary communism."

This ambiguous attitude of Proudhon and Marx toward counterrevolution was repeated ten years later by Ferdinand Lassalle, a close theoretical disciple of Marx and at that time the foremost leader of the growing socialist movement in Germany. He was prepared to cooperate with Bismarck at the time when that unscrupulous statesman was toying with the idea of bribing the workers into acceptance of his imperialistic plans by an apparent adoption of the universal franchise and some other ideas borrowed from the 1848 revolution and the Second Empire. Lasalle did not live to see Bismarck at the end of the 70's, when he had subdued the liberals and the ultra-montane Catholic party, revert to his old dream of enforcing a kind of "tory-socialism" based on a ruthless persecution and suppression of all genuine socialist workers' movements.

There is no need to discuss the wholesale conversion of internationalists into nationalists and proletarian Social Democrats into bourgeois democratic parliamentarians during and after the First World War. Even such former Marxists as Paul Lensch accepted the war of the Kaiser as a realistic fulfilment of the dreams of a socialist revolution, and the about-face of the socialists they themselves glorified as a "revolutionization of the revolutionaries." There was a "national-bolshevist" fraction of the German Communist party long before there was a Hitlerian National Socialist Party. Nor does the military alliance that was concluded "seriously and for a long time" between Stalin and Hitler in August 1939, contain any novelty for those who have followed the historical development of the relations between Soviet Russia and imperial, republican, and Hitlerian Germany throughout the last twenty years. The Moscow treaty of 1939 had been preceded by the treaties of Rapallo in 1920 and of Berlin in 1926. Mussolini had already for several years openly proclaimed his new fascist credo when Lenin was scolding the Italian Communists for their failure to enlist that invaluable dynamic personality in the service of their revolutionary cause. As early as 1917, during the peace negotiations in Brest Litovsk, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been aware of the dreadful danger that was threatening the proletarian revolution from that side. They had said in so many words that "Russian socialism based on reactionary Prussian bayonets would be the worst that still could happen to the revolutionary workers' movement."

It appears from this historical record that there is indeed something basically wrong with the traditional Marxian theory of the social revolution and with its practical application. There is no doubt, today less than at any former time in history, that the Marxian analysis of the working of the capitalist mode of production and of its historical development is fundamentally correct. Yet it seems that the Marxian theory in its hitherto accepted form is unable to deal with the new problems that arise in the course of a not merely occasional and temporary but deep-rooted, comprehensive, and enduring counterrevolutionary development.

II

The main deficiency of the Marxian concept of the counterrevolution is that Marx did not, and from the viewpoint of his historical experience could not, conceive of the counterrevolution as a normal phase of social development. Like the bourgeois liberals he thought of the counterrevolution as an "abnormal" temporary disturbance of a normally progressive development. (In the same manner, pacifists to the present day think of war as an abnormal interruption of the normal state of peace, and physicians and psychiatrists until recently thought of disease and more especially the diseases of the mind as an abnormal state of the organism.) There is, however, between the Marxian approach and that of the typical bourgeois liberal this important difference: they start from a totally different idea about just what is a normal condition. The bourgeois liberal regards existing conditions or at least their basic features as the normal state of things, and any radical change as its abnormal interruption. It does not matter to him whether that disturbance of existing normal conditions results from a genuinely progressive movement or from a reactionary attempt to borrow revolution's thunder for the purpose of a counterrevolutionary aggression. He is afraid of the counterrevolution just as much as of the revolution and just because of its resemblance to a genuine revolution. That is why Guizot called the coup d'etat "the complete and final triumph of the socialist revolution" and why, for that matter, Hermann Rauschning today describes the advent of Hitlerism as a "revolt of nihilism."

As against the bourgeois concept, the Marxian theory has a distinct superiority. It understands revolution as a completely normal process. Some of the best Marxists, including Marx himself and Lenin, even said on occasion that revolution is the only normal state of society. So it is, indeed, under those objective historical conditions which are soberly stated by Marx in his preface to the "Critique of Political Economy."

Marx did not, however, apply the same objective and historical principle to the process of counterrevolution, which was known to him only in an undeveloped form. Thus, he did not see, and most people do not see today, that such important counterrevolutionary developments as those of present-day fascism and nazism have, in spite of their violent revolutionary methods, much more in common with evolution than they have with a genuine revolutionary process. It is true that in their talk and propaganda both Hitler and Mussolini have directed their attack mostly against revolutionary Marxism and communism. It is also true that before and after their seizure of state power they made a most violent attempt to weed out every Marxist and Communist tendency in the working classes. Yet this was not the main content of the fascist counterrevolution. In its actual results the fascist attempt to renovate and transform the traditional state of society does not offer an alternative to the radical solution aimed at by the revolutionary Communists. The fascist counterrevolution rather tried to replace the reformist socialist parties and trade unions, and in this it succeeded to a great extent.

The underlying historical law, the law of the fully developed fascist counterrevolution of our time, can be formulated in the following manner: After the complete exhaustion and defeat of the revolutionary forces, the fascist counterrevolution attempts to fulfil, by new revolutionary methods and in widely different form, those social and political tasks which the so-called reformistic parties and trade unions had promised to achieve but in which they could no longer succeed under the given historical conditions.

A revolution does not occur at some arbitrary point of social development but only at a definite stage. "At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing production-relations (or property-relations) within which they hitherto moved. From being forms of development, those relations turn into fetters upon the forces of production. Then a period of social revolution sets in." And again Marx emphasized, and even to a certain extent exaggerated, the objectivistic principle of his materialist theory of revolution according to which "a formation of society never perishes until all the forces of production for which it is wide enough have been developed." All this is true enough as far as it goes. We have all seen how evolutionary socialism reached the end of its rope. We have seen how the old capitalistic system based on free competition and the whole of its vast political and ideological superstructure was faced by chronic depression and decay. There seemed no way open except a wholesale transition to another, more highly developed form of society, to be effected by the social revolution of the proletarian class.

The new historical development during the last twenty years showed, however, that there was yet another course open. The transition to a new type of capitalistic society, that could no longer be achieved by the democratic and peaceful means of traditional socialism and trade unionism, was performed by a counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian yet objectively progressive and ideologically anti-capitalistic and plebeian movement that had learned to apply to its restricted evolutionary aims the unrestricted methods developed during the preceding revolution. (More particularly, both Hitler and Mussolini had learned much in the school of Russian Bolshevism.) Thus, it appeared that the evolution of capitalistic society had not reached its utter historical limit when the ruling classes and the reformistic socialists-those self-appointed "doctors at the sickbed of capitalism" -reached the limits of their evolutionary possibilities. The phase of peaceful democratic reforms was followed by another evolutionary phase of development-that of the fascist transformation, revolutionary in its political form but evolutionary in its objective social contents.

The decisive reason that the capitalistic formation of society did not perish after the collapse of the First World War is that the workers did not make their revolution. "Fascism," said its closest enemy, "is a counterrevolution against a revolution that never took place." Capitalistic society did not perish, but instead entered a new revolutionary phase under the counterrevolutionary regime of fascism, because it was not destroyed by a successful workers' revolution, and because it had not, in fact, developed all the forces of production. The objective and the subjective premises are equally important for the counterrevolutionary conclusion.

From this viewpoint all those comfortable illusions about a hidden revolutionary significance in the temporary victory of the counterrevolution, in which the earlier Marxists so frequently indulged, must be entirely abandoned. If counterrevolution is only extremely and superficially connected with a social revolution by its procedures, but in its actual content is much more closely related to the further evolution of a given social system, and is in fact a particular historical phase of that social evolution, then it can no longer be regarded as a revolution in disguise. There is no reason to hail it either as an immediate prelude to the genuine revolution, or as an intrinsic phase of the revolutionary process itself. It appears as a particular phase of the whole developmental process, not inevitable like revolution yet becoming an inevitable step within the development of a given society under certain historical conditions. It has reached its up-to-now most comprehensive and important form in the present day fascist renovation and transformation of Europe, which in its basic economic aspect appears as a transition from the private and anarchic form of competitive capitalism to a system of planned and organized monopoly capitalism or state capitalism.

III

It would be the greatest folly and, for people even slightly imbued with the great discoveries of Marx in the field of the social sciences, a total relapse into a pre-materialist and pre-scientific manner of thought if one were to expect that the historical progress from competitive capitalism to planned economy and state capitalism could be repealed by any power in the world. Least of all can fascism be defeated by those people who, after a hundred years of shameless acquiescence in the total abandonment of their original ideals, now hasten to conjure up the infancy of the capitalist age with its belief in liberty, equity, fraternity, and free trade, while at the same time they surreptitiously and inefficiently try to imitate as far as possible fascism's abolition of the last remnants of those early capitalist ideas. They feel a sudden and unexpected urge to celebrate the French Revolution's fourteenth of July and at the same time dream of destroying fascism by adopting fascist methods.

In opposition to the artisan and petty-bourgeois spirit of early utopian socialism, the first word of scientific and proletarian socialism stated that big industry and the machine age had come to stay, that modern industrial workers had to find a cure for the evils of the industrial age on the basis of a further development of the new industrial forces themselves. In the same manner the scientific and proletarian socialists of our time must try to find remedies for the wrongs of monopoly capitalism and fascist dictatorship on the basis of monopoly and state capitalism itself. Neither free trade (that was not so free for the workers after all) nor the other aspects of traditional bourgeois democracy - free discussion and free press and free radio - will ever be restored. They have never existed for the suppressed and exploited class. As far as the workers are concerned, they have only exchanged one form of serfdom for another.

There is no essential difference between the way the New York Times and the Nazi press publish daily "all the news that's fit to print"-under existing conditions of privilege and coercion and hypocrisy. There is no difference in principle between the eighty-odd voices of capitalist mammoth corporations-which, over the American radio, recommend to legions of silent listeners the use of Ex-Lax, Camels, and neighbourhood groceries, along with music, war, baseball and domestic news, and dramatic sketches-and one suave voice of Mr. Goebbels who recommends armaments, race-purity, and worship of the Fuehrer. He too is quite willing to let them have music along with it-plenty of music, sporting news, and all the unpolitical stuff they can take.

This criticism of the inept and sentimental methods of present-day anti-fascism does not imply by any means that the workers should do openly what the bourgeoisie does under the disguise of a so-called antifascist fight: acquiesce in the victory of fascism. The point is to fight fascism not by fascist means but on its own ground. This seems to the present writer to be the rational meaning of what was somewhat mystically described by Alpha in the spring issue of Living Marxism as the specific task of "shock-troops" in the anti-fascist fight. Alpha anticipated that even if the localized war-of-siege waged during the first seven months of the present conflict were to extend into a general fascist world war, this would not be a "total war" and an unrestricted release of the existing powers of production for the purpose of destruction. Rather, it would still remain a monopolistic war in which the existing powers of production (destruction) would be fettered in many ways for the benefit of the monopolistic interests of privileged groups and classes. It would remain that kind of war from fear of the emancipatory effect that a total mobilization of the productive forces, even restricted to the purpose of destruction, would be bound to have for the workers or, under the present-day conditions of totally mechanized warfare, for the shocktroopers who perform the real work of that totally mechanized war.

This argument of Alpha’s can be applied more widely and much more convincingly. First of all we can disregard for the moment (although we shall have to return to it at a later stage) the peculiar restriction of the argument to the "shock-troops" and to the conditions of war. The whole traditional distinction between peace and war, production and destruction, has lost in recent times much of that semblance of truth that it had in an earlier period of modern capitalistic society. The history of the last ten years has shown that ever since, in a world drunk with apparent prosperity, the American Kellogg Pact outlawed war, peace has been abolished. From the outset Marxism was comparatively free from that simple-mindedness which believed in an immediate and clear-cut difference between production-for-use and production-for-profit. The only form of production-for-use under existing capitalistic conditions is just the production-for-profit. Productive labor for Marx, as for Smith and Ricardo, is that labor which produces a profit for the capitalist and, incidentally, a thing which may also be useful for human needs. There is no possibility of establishing a further distinction between a "good" and a "bad," a constructive and a destructive usefulness. The Goebbelian defense of the "productivity" of the labor spent on armaments in Germany by referring to the amount of "useful" labor spent in the United States for cosmetics had no novelty for the Marxist. Marx, who described the working class in its revolutionary fight as "the greatest of all productive forces" would not have been afraid to recognize war itself as an act of production, and the destructive forces of modern mechanized warfare as part of the productive forces of modern capitalistic society, such as it is. He, like Alpha, would have recognized the "shock-troops" in their "destructive" activity in war as well as in their productive activity in industry (armament and other industries-war industries all!) as real workers, a revolutionary vanguard of the modern working class. Historically it is a well-established fact that the soldier (the hired mercenary) was the first modern wage-laborer.

Thus, the old Marxian contradiction between the productive forces and the given production relations reappears in the warlike as well as in the peaceful activities of modern fascism. With it there appear again the old contrast between the workers, who as a class are interested in the full application and development of the productive forces, and the privileged classes, the monopolists of the material means of production. More than at any previous time the monopoly of political power reveals itself as the power to rule and control the social process of production. At the same time this means, under present conditions, the power to restrict production-both the production of industry in peace and destructive production in time of war-and to regulate it in the interest of the monopolist class. Even the "national" interest that was supposed to underly the present-day fascist war waged by Hitler and Mussolini is revealed by the war itself and will be revealed much more clearly by the coming peace as being ultimately an interest of the international capitalist and monopolist class. Much more clearly than at the end of the First World War it will appear that this war is waged by both parties-by the attacking fascists as well as by the defending "democrats"-as a united counterrevolutionary struggle against the workers and the soldiers who by their labor in peace and war prepared and fought the truly suicidal war.

What, then, is the hope left for the anti-fascists who are opposing the present European war and who will oppose the coming war of the hemisphere? The answer is that, just as life itself does not stop at the entrance of war, neither does the material work of modern industrial production. Fascists today quite correctly conceive the whole of their economy-that substitute for a genuine socialist economy-in terms of a "war economy" (Wehrwirtschaft). Thus, it is the task of the workers and the soldier to see to it that this job is no longer done within the restrictive rules imposed upon human labor in present-day capitalist, monopolist, and oppressive society. It has to be done in the manner prescribed by the particular instruments used; that is, in the manner prescribed by the productive forces available at the present stage of industrial development. In this manner both the productive and the destructive forces of present-day society-as every worker, every soldier knows-can be used only if they are used against their present monopolistic rulers. Total mobilization of the productive forces presupposes total mobilization of that greatest productive force which is the revolutionary working class itself.

Notes

[1] Oeuvres Completes de Proudhon, vol. VIII, Paris, 1868.

[2] First article on Class Struggles in France, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, January, 1850.

[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, February, 1852.

[4] Ignazio Silone, School of Dictators, 1938.

[5] Living Marxism, vol. V, no. I, pp. 44-58.

Karl Korsch Archive

China's Engine of Environmental Collapse

Workers' Liberty

Author: Owen Falls

21 December, 2025 

China is responsible for over 30% of GHG emissions. It is responsible for more emissions than the next 5 highest emitting countries combined (USA, India, Japan, Russia, and Germany). However, China’s population is two-thirds the combined population of those countries and its GDP is 32% of their combined GDPs. Is there something special about China’s economic model that makes this the case? This is the conundrum that Richard Smith tries to answer in China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse.

The book was written in 2020 and covers the extent of China's environmental destruction, with a focus on the past 20 years. Richard Smith covers how from 1978 China has ramped up its emissions. He covers a range of topics from pollution of soil and rivers to excessive building and construction, to the inner workings of the CCP. The book was published before the Covid-19 pandemic and so does not cover the period of China’s ultra-lockdowns.

China is now fully integrated into the world economy. It has played an ever-increasing role in the renewable technologies market. Since 1978, China’s economy has grown on average 10% per year. Its rapid growth and growing share of world manufacturing (now at around 30%) has been due in no small part to its ever expanding capacity to burn coal. Coal plays a massive role in China’s economy not only in its energy supply but also in its iron and steel production. China leads world production in the latter and is the third largest producer of iron-ore after Australia and Brazil.

A significant part of the left cheer on China and play down its authoritarianism. Smith’s book is a useful antidote for anyone who needs a reminder of the extent to the Chinese state suppresses national minorities, intimidates and elilinatesn political opponents, leads the world in executions, and regularly crushes dissent with police violence - whether this to repress Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans or to attack and crush the labour and other progressive movements.

Smith paints a vivid picture of China’s environmental destruction. He describes at length China’s excessive construction projects that have led to entirely redundant office blocs, railway stations, airports, districts of cities, and even so-called “ghost cities” that lie completely empty. In its populated cities, Smith describes the extent of the air pollution, the heavy use of cars and massive multilane motorways that nonetheless have not abated China's massive traffic and congestion issues. China’s rivers, lakes and soils are massively polluted and in large part this due to a combination of unenforced but existing environmental and health and safety legislation, corruption within the CCP bureaucracy, and of course a rapacious drive to grow the economy at nearly any cost.

Since 2017 Xi Jinping has announced his intention to make China into an “ecological civilization”. This has included promoting the State Environmental Protection Agency to ministerial rank, which gives the agency more powers to intervene and the real steps being taken to tackle small polluters, limit combustion vehicles, tackle issues of plastic and e-waste, and bring in more protections for natural reserves. Yet as Smith argues even if Xi Jinping were serious about tackling environmental issues, he runs a state and economy where it is near impossible to decarbonise without a massive overhaul of the political system. As Smith puts it Xi Jinping “runs a politico-economic system characterized by systemic growth drivers which are, if anything, more powerful and more eco-suicidal than those of “normal” capitalism in the West.”

Smith’s explanation of what drives China’s internal growth and environmental destruction is in parts clear and in other parts confused and contradictory. In his earlier writing Smith argued that China was a bureaucratic-collectivist. He has since revised this position to argue that it is some mix of bureaucratic-collectivist and capitalist. And he breaks down the drivers of China’s emissions as being: intra-bureaucratic competition, nationalist and imperialist ambitions, employment maximisation, consumer maximisation, and corruption. These are all major drivers, however, an important aspect of China’s growth that Smith leaves out (or at least understates) is its integration into the world capitalist economy.

Moreover, at various points in the book Smith seems to be at pains to say that the mix of the economy being both bureaucratic-collectivist and capitalist provides a more potent mix when it comes to growth and environmental destruction than if it was just capitalist or just bureaucratic-collectivist. Broadly speaking Smith argues that there is something qualitatively different about China’s political-economic system from that of capitalist states in the rest of the world.

I am not convinced there is something qualitatively different about China, so much as the world is more capitalist and more capable of driving development from a low starting point - and China provides a prime example of this.

Much of what Smith claims about China being uniquely different from capitalism does not stand up to scrutiny. For example, Smith argues that Xi can’t stop his party subordinates and other officials from wasting resources and polluting because if he did, he would have to challenge their economic interests. Do we not have this in the West and nearly any capitalist economy? If states try to impose regulations on waste and pollution they get push back from sections of capital and reactionary political forces. Smith does not account for why the supposed bureaucratic-collectivism in China makes this so qualitatively different.

On a different occasion Smith argues that the main driver for growth under capitalism is competition. The only limit to growth is if profits can't be made. So far so good. Smith goes on to argue that this is not the case for China. He maintains that because China is a hybrid of bureaucratic-collectivist and capitalist, the system is “largely exempted from the laws of capitalism”. He argues that exemplary of this is that not one SOE has gone bankrupt or failed. Smith seems to have blinded himself to all the ways in which companies and banks under capitalism are regularly kept afloat, subsidised and saved by the state - in fact it is something distinct about how how a capitalist state acts. If anything, China under the rule of the CCP does this aspect of capitalism better than other countries. And if anything its combination of lack of regulation in health and safety and the environment and its willingness to keep SOEs going at any cost, along with China’s nationalist ambitions to be dominant on the world stage, account very well for why it has outdone itself in economic growth and environmental destruction.

Smith’s book is a great primer on China’s environmental and economic record. While I think Smith’s analysis of China in part is confused and the analytical conclusions he draws are mistaken, his insights into how the CCP functions and what ambitions drive it are valuable. Anyone who wants to learn more about China and the environment should make time to read and discuss this book.

The Proof is in the Pudding: A Few Comments on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

by Gary Olson / December 22nd, 2025

Anyone interested in socialism in the twenty-first century must take into account what is happening in China seriously. It’s future economic supremacy will either shape global capitalism, which socialists worldwide will have to respond to or the future of socialism will be determined by China’s planned transformation toward a socialist economy                                                                       —  Jan Turowski [1]

China has achieved what is perhaps the most spectacular modernization in the history of the world in timespan and scale, accomplishing in decades what took centuries elsewhere… it has developed productive forces in agriculture, industry, technology, science and culture. It has raised millions from poverty to prosperity. It has integrated into the world system, for better or worse. It manufacturers much of what the rest of world consumes. It leads the world in green energy and other scientific and technical advances necessary for global survival. It is a force for peace in a mad world where the drums of war are beating more dangerously than ever. Because of this, I see China as the hope of the world.                                           — Helena Sheehan [2]

The Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded in Shanghai in July 1921. At its inception the CPC had only 50 members ( 100 million today) and came to power in 1949 after 28 years of revolutionary struggle. Mao Zedong reminds us that “Revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous and restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overturns another.”

The Communist revolutionaries, freed China from foreign domination and defeated the virulently anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. They attempted to meet the immediate basic needs of the people while operating under extremely debilitating circumstances. China was an immense, semi-feudal, semi-colonial country and the new government encountered problems that were both challenging and often sui generis. They needed to find answers in order to continue the socialist transformation of the country, the historical mission begun in 1949.

The ideal of “Common Prosperity” had its origins in the CPC’s founding and was made official policy in December 1953 in a report drafted by Mao Zedong. The phrase then appeared in the September 25 issue of the semi-official People’s Daily in an article entitled, “The Path of Socialism is the Path to Common Prosperity,” and again in December 12, 1953. It’s important to clarify that the term envisioned an egalitarian, mutual aid type society in which resources would be held in common. In 1956, the CPC understood that the primary contradiction facing China “was between the need for building a modern industrial society and the reality of a backward agricultural economy,” and further, “the needs of the people for rapid economic and cultural development and the failure of current economic and cultural supplies to meet these needs.” [3]

All the evidence suggests that in the period following the Revolution, China saw gains in the material living standards of peasants and workers, including extending life expectancy, literacy rates improving from 20 to 93 percent, land reform initiated, women liberated, a decline in infant mortality and “Barefoot doctors” insured that basic medical care reached a population that was 99% peasant in composition. Unquestionably, impressive strides were accomplished — until things began to stall.

Later, Deng Xiaping was to characterize the Mao Zedong period as 70% good and 30% bad and that has been the common formula adopted to this day in China. The Chinese people still revere Mao and view his errors as “the errors of a great proletarian revolutionary.” Although Mao’s contributions are seen as far exceeding his errors, Deng’s 30% includes both the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution which set back China in serious ways. There are still debates among respected scholars about those two events but there is agreement that China remained at a very low level of development, lagging decades behind Western nations in terms of technology, science and services.

Without in any way disparaging the heroic gains cited earlier. I don’t think Hua Bin overstates his assessment of the Maoist period when he writes, “The CPC in the first thirty years of its rule was a revolutionary party led by people who didn’t understand modern economics, science and technology. So it imported a rigid system from the USSR — we can call it Marxism with Russian characteristics. Obviously, the result was disastrous.” [4]

The socialist market economy eventually chosen by the CPC remains controversial in some quarters but as China specialist Carlos Martinez asserts, had there not been genuine improvement in the standard of living, the CPC’s socialist project and socialism itself would have lost legitimacy. In that sense, we can interpret Deng’s statement about Maoism’s shortcomings as necessary to differentiate his new “pragmatic” path in 1978 from what preceded it.

The link between egalitarianism and common prosperity was officially severed on April 15, 1979, when the People’s Daily carried an article, “A Few Get Rich First and Common Prosperity.” In Deng Xiaping’s words, “in encouraging some regions to become prosperous first, we intend they should inspire others to follow their example and that all of them should eventually help economically backward regions to develop. The same holds true for some individuals.” From that point onward, the path was all about maximizing the development of productive forces because China was decades behind the advanced countries, especially in science and technology.

Deng was acutely aware of the dangers of polarization that could result and said, “As long as public ownership occupies the main position in our economy, polarization can be avoided.” It’s important to note that this new path was to be temporary, an expedient but absolutely necessary stage in what would ultimately achieve common prosperity via a comprehensive national strategy. Trial and error was not discouraged and in Deng’s words it involved “crossing the river by feeling the stones.”

Here we should be mindful that in China, Marxism has been adapted to the country’s concrete material conditions. Again, quoting Martinez: “Marx wrote that the development of the productive forces of social labor is capitalism’s ‘historic mission’ and justification. For that very reason it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production. The CPC replaced “unwittingly” with “purposely”: using capital with strict limits and under heavy regulation, to bring China into the modern world.” [5]

China opened the door to transnational capital in order to obtain access to technology and science on behalf of economic development. Martiniz continues, “Deals with foreign investors were drawn up such that foreign companies trying to expand their capital in China were compelled to share skills and technology and operate under Chinese regulation.” This was all in sync with the state’s development planning and although there was resistance from investors, it was the price of “gaining access to the vast and growing Chinese market.”

China incorporated market mechanisms but they operate under the socialist state which is controlled by the CPC, not private capitalists as is the case in the United States. Deng Xiaping put it this way: “In order to realize communism, we have to accomplish the tasks set in the socialist stage. They are legion, but the fundamental one is to develop productive forces so as to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism and provide the material basis for communism.”

Yes, millionaires and billionaires exist in China (some are even party members) but the CPC does not allow them to constitute a capitalist class. They’re prevented from establishing their own political parties or organizing their own media. Further, the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy remain under the stringent control of the party, including heavy industry, energy, transport, aviation, communications and foreign trade. China’s ‘big four’ banks are majority owned and accountable to the government, not shareholders.

In their socialist market economy, 71% of China’s Forbes 500 companies are state-owned enterprises (SOEs). There are some 360,000 SOEs in China and they dominate the economy. For our purposes, it’s imperative to note that in keeping with “socialism with Chinese characteristics” they are required to operate in accordance with the government’s macro-economic plan. They answer only to the Communist Party’s leadership.

The New Era, began in 2012, with Xi Jinping as Chairman of the Communist Party and his use of Mao Zedongs’s words, “carrying the revolution to its completion.” After first publicly uttering the phrase on December 30, 2012,  President Xi has reiterated it over one thousand times. For him, it’s quintessential Marxism. And in 2017, the new principle contradiction was, “between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever growing need for a better life.

Common Prosperity, when employed in the Xi era, means reducing income inequality, enhancing welfare and curtailing excessive wealth. There will be both incentives and pressures for charitable giving and also crack downs on tax evasion. In 2012 the CPC specified that by 2035, “substantial progress” toward common prosperity would be achieved. This means narrowing regional, urban-rural and income disparities. It does not mean, “robbing the rich to help the poor “ or sharing everything equally. Nor does it mean imitating the Nordic welfare state model. The goal is that the “middle income group” — neither rich nor poor — will be significantly expanded. A recent, authoritative, data-based study found that China is fully capable of achieving common prosperity by 2035, including providing assistance to low-income people in difficult situations (200 million to 300 million people.) [6]

It also means guarding against, as Xi has often mentioned, party officials becoming part of a privileged elite and departing from the socialist project. Further, it entails dealing with corruption which is openly acknowledged by the government. Officials caught being involved in graft have been made examples in keeping with the Chinese adage, “kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.” President’s Xi’s well-known, ongoing anti-corruption campaign is highly popular with ordinary Chinese citizens, including his recent actions against the high tech sector, the gaming industry and for profit private tutoring companies.

Going further, Hua Bin writes that the campaign has, “Taken down hundreds  of thousands of officials at national and local levels, including members of the Politburo, defense minister, foreign minister, railroad  ministers, provincial governors, mayors of many cities, bank CEOs, state owned company executives, military procurement officials, hospital administrators and countless others. Chinese corruption is about corrupt individuals. Corruption is illegal and highly punishable. It may never go away as human defects won’t go away but it is risky for the corrupt individuals. Corrupt officials can steal a lot of money, but they run a risk of being shamed and losing everything, including their lives (the railroad minister was executed).” [7]

It’s a well-known fact that by 2021, the hundredth anniversary of the CPC founding, China had eradicated “extreme poverty” (the poverty reduction miracle) 10 years ahead of schedule. By 2022, 1.346 billion people were covered by basic medical insurance and 1.1 billion by basic pension insurance, an increase of 24 million from the previous year. In 2023, the “middle income group” already constituted almost 25 percent of China’s population. It rose from 10 million in 2002 to 336 million in 2023. [8] China projects that its middle-income group will increase to 800 million in the next 10 years, creating an olive-shaped distribution chart. This will occur as the government “invests more in people” and spends more on human capital and social safety nets.

This higher stage of socialist development or “advanced socialism” will also entail increased government control over resource allocation. In a sense, the inevitable inequality which accompanied the introduction of private capital to China, must be deconstructed. There will be resistance to these efforts and the CPC will need to employ appropriate responses. Socialism with Chinese characteristics or “Common Prosperity” must coexist within a global capitalist system for the foreseeable future but the goal for 2049, the centenary of the Chinese revolution, is to have built, “a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and beautiful.” The exact term is “advanced socialism.”

Further, Xi has often spoken about the need to “build a world of common prosperity through win-win cooperation” and “a shared future for mankind”. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) embodies this vision and Beijing has committed more than $1.3 trillion to the BRI since 2000. A recent report found that over 79% of leaders in the Deep South viewed Beijing as actively supporting their countries’ development. Without naming the United States, the report also noted “heavy handed attempts by the PRC’s strategic competition to vilify Beijing’s contributions as entirely bad for local economies are likely to ring hollow.” [9]

Finally, constructing socialism is a long term historical process and nothing I’ve suggested here guarantees that China will move on to Marx’s higher form of production, to “advanced socialism,” by 2049. There are forces both within and especially outside China that will attempt to subvert or even doom further efforts. However, to affirm their achievements so far, the Chinese have adopted the English proverb, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” or shortened, “the proof is in the pudding.” At this juncture, it’s safe to conclude that they’re correct.

[1] Jan Turowski, “How the Chinese Talk About Socialism,”Rosa Luxemburg Stifling.
[2] Helena Sheehan, “Exploring the Chinese Revolution Today,” Monthly Review, Vol.77, No.6 (November, 2025).
[3] For details, see, Roland Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners (New York: Springer, 2021).
[4] Hua Bin, “Making Sense of China’s Meteoric Rise, “The Greanville Post, December 11, 2025. This was a response to interview questions posed by Mike Whitney and was originally on Hua’s Substack. There are, of course, analyses that interpret this period more sympathetically and some dismiss Mao’s critics as capitalist roaders.
[5] For these quotes and his compelling explication, I’m indebted  to Carlos Martinez’s book, The East Is Still Red (Glasgow, Scotland: Praxis Press, 2023)
[6] Angang Ha and Shaoje Zhou, China in 2025: Toward a Society of Prosperity for All: London: Palgrave Macmillan,2024). See, https://researchgate.net January 20247]
[7] Hua Bin, “Corruption in the US and China — A Comparative Analysis,”  The Unz Review, December 4, 2004.
[8] See, Terry Sinclair, Xiune Yang and Bjorn Gustafson, “China’s Middle-Income Class, Macroeconmic Growth, and Common Prosperity,” China Leadership Monitor, CLM, November 30, 2024.
[9] Sarina Patterson, “The BRI at 10: A Report from the Global South, AIDDATA, March 26, 2024. I wrote about this in my piece, Gary Olson, “China’s BRI: Toward a Hybrid International Order with Chinese Characteristics,” Left Turn, #13, Summer, 2023.

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Gary Olson is Professor Emeritus at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Contact: glolson416@gmail.com. Per usual, thanks to Kathleen Kelly, my in-house ed. Read other articles by Gary.

Turkey/Kurdistan

Türkiye: From the Kurdish movement to mass mobilizations

Saturday 6 September 2025, by Uraz Aydin

On the occasion of the agreement on the dissolution of the PKK, Uraz Aydin presents the history of this movement and the evolution of the protest against the Erdoğan regime.

Can you explain what the PKK is and its main orientations, and what differentiates it from other left-wing or nationalist political groups?

The founding of the PKK must be seen in a context of politicization and radicalization. The 1960s witnessed a development of the workers’ movement and revolutionary radicalization, particularly among the youth. But it was also a decade of awakening of Kurdish national consciousness. This Kurdish national politicization was largely achieved within the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TIP), which was the main political actor in the workers’ movement of that decade. It was towards the end of the 1960s, but especially after the amnesty of 1974, when the thousands of Turkish and Kurdish activists detained since the military intervention of 1971 were released , that Kurdish revolutionaries began to found their own independent organizations . [1]. The PKK was founded in the wake of this, but relatively late. Although the organization’s official history dates its origins back to 1973, the founding congress was not held until 1978. Before that, it was a core group of students and especially teachers gathered around Abdullah Öcalan. They called themselves the "Revolutionaries of Kurdistan" but were better known as "Apocu" ("Apo’s supporters" - short for Abdullah). Thus, from the very beginning, Öcalan’s personality had a central influence.

At the programmatic level, nothing specific differentiated it from the multitude of other Kurdish radical left organizations that advocated armed struggle for an "independent, unified, democratic and socialist Kurdistan" in a stagist perspective. [2]. But in the meantime, weapons were mainly used to defend against attacks by the fascist far-right "Grey Wolves" or in the fratricidal war that reigned within the revolutionary left. The PKK was one of the two main groups that did not hesitate to use weapons against other rival Kurdish (and Turkish) groups, but it was not alone in this. Thus, before the 1980 coup d’état [3], the PKK was a Kurdish revolutionary organization among others.

What justified the launch of an armed struggle strategy against the Turkish state in 1984?

In fact, it was mainly after 1984 that the PKK began to take root among the Kurdish plebeian and peasant population. Let’s go back a little. Öcalan left Turkey in 1979 during the state of emergency, but before the coup d’état. This was a decisive element in the construction of the organization. He thus had time to establish contacts with Palestinian resistance groups in Syria and Lebanon, to prepare the conditions of exile for his militants, conditions that would also be those of a real military apprenticeship. After the coup d’état of 1980, Apo thus called on his militants to return clandestinely to Syria. They were trained in the same camps as the Palestinians in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon under Syrian occupation. Some would participate in the resistance against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The PKK lost several dozen members, which also gave it a certain legitimacy.

The PKK launched the armed struggle in August 1984… because Öcalan considered that his army was now ready. The question of military combat as a method for the liberation of Kurdistan had been justified, not by conjunctural conditions or relationships of forces, but on a programmatic level, since 1978.

The offensive against the Turkish state was planned as early as 1982 but was postponed several times. Moreover, Öcalan was operating in the Middle East, where alliances and adversities between various states and Kurdish national movements (from Iraq and Iran) constituted a highly shifting terrain. This unstable context also weighed on the conditions of the struggle. The alliance he formed with Barzani’s group, dominant in Northern Iraq, a movement he previously considered feudal and reactionary, was, for example, decisive in building his camps in the mountains on the Turkish border and thus being able to launch his guerrilla war. Thus, while all the other Kurdish and Turkish groups tried to preserve their forces in exile, in Syria but especially in Europe, the PKK was the only one to engage in a real armed struggle. The legitimacy it gained through its offensives allowed it to recruit more and more, despite the significant losses of fighters suffered in the field.

40 years later, does the announcement of the dissolution not appear to be a failure, on the military and political levels?

I think that military objectives had already been non-existent for several decades. If for the Öcalan of the party’s founding and of the 1980s, any objective short of independence (various forms of autonomy, federative entities, etc.) was reactionary, the leader of the PKK had begun to revise his ideas from the beginning of the 1990s, particularly after the fall of the bureaucratic dictatorships. As we know, he would eventually come to criticize the nation-state form.

Öcalan had already attempted negotiations in 1993. After his arrest in 1999, he began to advocate a completely new direction, much to the surprise of PKK leaders and activists who were preparing to escalate the war and suicide attacks. This new direction aimed to end the armed struggle in favour of a permanent ceasefire, to pave the way for a political solution. He thus unquestionably renounced the strategic objective of an independent Kurdistan. Two further negotiation processes followed in 2007-2009 and 2013-2015, which unfortunately failed. However, the creation of the autonomous zone of Rojava in northeastern Syria must also be interpreted within this military and political framework. The existence of an administrative structure linked to the PKK on the Turkish border constitutes an important achievement for the organization, against the Turkish state and vis-à-vis its historical competitor in northern Iraq, the Barzani clan and its Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Where are we today in the new talks?

It should be clarified that the Kurdish movement is not only an armed movement. The PKK has managed to form a massive movement of several million people, with various civil structures that have sometimes developed with autonomous dynamics, despite the authoritarianism of the organization. Today, the civil-democratic base seems to be much more important and effective in its fight than the armed structure in terms of the objectives to be achieved for the Kurdish people. So, while there are certainly highly questionable aspects such as its authoritarianism, its excessive fetishism of the leader, the arbitrary internal mass executions (especially at the turn of the 80s and 90s), the dozens of indiscriminate attacks... it must be recognized that this movement, over time, has very strongly contributed to the consolidation of a national consciousness of the Kurdish people, and has largely anchored it on the left, with feminist, egalitarian values, and fraternity between peoples. From a historical point of view, this is an important asset.

At the level of the negotiations, everything started with the unexpected call from the far-right leader and main ally of Erdoğan, Devlet Bahçeli , on October 22, 2024, for Abdullah Öcalan to come and speak in parliament to declare the end of the armed struggle and the dissolution of the PKK. After a period of very opaque negotiations between the Turkish state and Öcalan, with the participation of a delegation from the DEM Party (a left-wing reformist party from the Kurdish movement) and the leadership of the PKK, the founder of the organization, from his prison on the island of Imrali, in the Marmara Sea, announced in a letter on February 27, 2025, that the PKK was to dissolve.

We don’t know what the debates were within the organization. There had already been tensions between Apo and the organization’s Presidential Council in previous negotiations. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine that the PKK leadership would have quickly agreed on a process declared so abruptly. The organization’s leadership strongly emphasizes that the entire process must be led by Öcalan, which can be perceived as a desire not to take direct responsibility for it.

The disarmament of the PKK certainly constitutes an important basis for a demilitarization of the Kurdish question, even though the Erdoğan regime will undeniably try to steer this process according to its interests and in particular to break the alliance between the Kurdish movement and the bourgeois-democratic opposition led by the CHP [4] ,criminalized by the regime. However, we still do not know what democratic advances the Kurds will be able to benefit from with the dissolution of the PKK. A parliamentary commission will probably be formed to determine the measures to be taken. These should include, in a first step, the release of political prisoners (linked to the Kurdish movement), the withdrawal of the guardianship (kayyum) of Kurdish municipalities and the return of mayors to their functions, the reinstatement of "peace academics" to their work and the possibility for Öcalan to freely lead his movement, to be able to communicate with the outside world, to receive visits, etc.

According to the Kurdish movement, other, more structural reforms should follow, concerning the status of their national identity and culture within Turkish society, which would require a new constitution. Erdoğan is planning to change the constitution in order to be able to run in the next elections. Will it be a constitution that will guarantee rights to the Kurds while consolidating the autocratic nature of the regime? The question is controversial, but we are not there yet.

Another issue is the order in which the steps will be taken. Will the state wait until the complete surrender of arms is complete before implementing the supposed democratic reforms, or will the two processes overlap? It seems that Erdogan is opting for the first option—which is difficult for the PKK to accept—while Bahçeli seems more realistic on this point.

What political developments has Turkey experienced since the movement against the imprisonment of Istanbul Mayor İmamoğlu ?

After March 19, we witnessed a social mobilization the likes of which we hadn’t seen in a long time. Millions of citizens took to the streets to defend elected mayors, the right to vote, democracy, and freedom. Although the movement was extremely heterogeneous, there was a notable radicalization, particularly among university and high school students.

As is often the case after spontaneous outbursts, the movement’s momentum faded after a while. However, momentum persisted for a while thanks to boycott campaigns against certain capitalist groups that supported the AKP. But in the absence of sustainable social struggle bases, platforms, and coordination capable of prolonging resistance—aside from occasional calls for meetings launched by the CHP—it can be said that today the movement has lost its momentum in the streets, even though indignation remains very much present.

But the regime continues its crackdown on the CHP, with successive waves of arrests in various Istanbul municipalities. Eleven mayors are currently detained awaiting trial. A final "anti-corruption" wave has been launched against the former CHP mayor of İzmir and his staff (a total of 160 people in custody). Today is the hundredth day since İmamoğlu ’s arrest , and the indictment is still not ready. This clearly shows the extent to which the Erdoğan regime is acting in a completely arbitrary manner. Furthermore, there is also a legal attempt to split the CHP. A trial has been opened for alleged irregularities at the 2023 CHP congress, at which Özgür Özel , the new party chairman, was elected – a leader who, since İmamoğlu ’s arrest, has pursued an opposition policy of unusual firmness for the CHP.

However, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the former party chairman (and former presidential candidate, who lost to Erdogan in 2023), has suggested, in a spirit of revenge, that he could take over the party leadership if the congress were to be cancelled. He also claims that he believes the mobilization that began on March 19 was pointless, that it is a matter between Imamoglu and the judiciary. Thus, there is a clear and public tension between Kilicdaroglu’s team and those of Özel and Imamoglu . For the time being, the trial has been postponed until September.

What is the state of the labour movement today?

The labour movement’s trade union organizations played virtually no role in this protest movement. The working class did not identify with the movement. A significant portion of it remains receptive to Erdoğan’s propaganda, despite a dramatic deterioration in purchasing power over the past several years. And so far, very little effort has been made (particularly by the radical, anti-capitalist, revolutionary left) to make people understand that the democratic question and the social question are intimately linked.

Democratic aspirations must be fertilized with class content. The "proletarian shock" of which Ernst Bloch spoke is still the main thing missing from the fight against the regime. This is the most important, historically decisive, and difficult strategic task facing the revolutionary left. It is about breaking the cultural-religious divide, the maintenance and deepening of which is the AKP’s main weapon, and replacing it with class polarization.

But to return to the weakness of unions in the movement, there are several reasons for this. First of all, the rate of unionization is low in Turkey, at only around 15 per cent. And it must be taken into account that this percentage only includes "declared " workers , therefore not those who work illegally. Thus, the actual level of unionization is even lower.

Moreover, the largest union confederations are conservative and right-wing nationalist. Some are fully in the AKP fold. So we shouldn’t expect any strikes from them, especially in the current political climate. DISK and KESK are the most left-wing confederations. But here, as elsewhere, the links between unions and their members are not always very organic, and there are serious doubts that workers will participate massively in these strikes. Especially since this can represent a serious risk of losing one’s job, given that the laws, and even the Constitution, no longer mean anything in this country. For several years, every strike has been banned ("postponed") because it would undermine national security.

However, in June 2025 there was a strike of 23,000 workers at the Izmir city hall, with a main, very legitimate demand: to obtain wage increases and equal pay with colleagues who do the same work. The strike was led by the Genel-Iş union linked to DISK, organized mainly in the CHP city halls and in strong collusion with them. The strike lasted only less than a week and the workers obtained significant gains at the end of it [5]. But the rank and file of the CHP and the "white collar" fraction of the working class reacted to this strike in a very negative way: "you are playing into the hands of the AKP by weakening our city halls", "why are garbage collectors demanding the same salary as doctors?" This reaction has shown us once again how solidarity and class consciousness always need to be rebuilt even (and perhaps especially) in times of mobilization against a dictatorial regime.

What is the mood among the population regarding the wars waged by Israel?

Anti-Zionism is, by all accounts, a position shared almost unanimously by the population. But there are some difficulties in building a united movement in support of Palestine and against the Israeli offensive against Iran. Erdoğan’s Islamist and nationalist regime naturally adopts an anti-Israeli stance and organizes large rallies in solidarity with Palestine. But it has been shown that trade with Israel and financial and military relations with Tel Aviv continue! Recently, Selçuk Bayraktar , Erdoğan’s son-in-law and manufacturer of the famous Turkish drones, announced the creation of a joint venture with Leonardo, an Italian company criticized for its arms sales to Israel and targeted by protests in several cities around the world. Moreover, the Kürecik radar system, in the NATO military base in Malatya province, is directly integrated into the Israeli defence network. Therefore, Erdoğan’s anti-Zionism is more rhetoric than concrete facts.

Another difficulty is that the Kurdish movement rarely mobilizes on the Palestinian issue. Relations between the Kurdish movement and the Palestinian resistance—whether Öcalan and Arafat, the PKK with the PLO, or Hamas—have been marked by tensions and disagreements since the 1990s. More recently, Cemil Bayık, one of the PKK leaders, had criticized Hamas’s methods during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and declared that the Palestinian and Jewish peoples must find ways to live in brotherhood. But a more circumstantial reason undoubtedly lies in Washington and Tel Aviv’s support for the YPG (included in the SDF), [6] seen as an ally in Syria. Öcalan had also strongly criticized this situation. During his meeting with the DEM delegation on April 21, 2025, he stated, speaking of the SDF, that "Israel has formed its own Hashd al- Shaabi" (pro-Iranian militias operating in Iraq).

Can there be a new convergence between the Kurdish movement and the opposition, despite Erdoğan’s manoeuvres?

It should be remembered that the convergence between the Kurdish movement and the secular bourgeois opposition worked especially well for the elections. These two opposition forces needed each other to triumph over the regime’s forces, both at the municipal and presidential levels. Ultimately, this was not enough to overthrow Erdoğan in 2023. It is very difficult to predict what the relationships of forces and the dispositions of each of these elements will be by the next election, scheduled for 2028 but which will most likely take place earlier. Will the peace process continue with all the instability and atmosphere of war that reigns in the Middle East? What state will the CHP be in after this immense attempt to criminalize it? Ekrem Will İmamoğlus be free and, above all, eligible to unite the opposition against Erdoğan?

But I think the key is to forge structures capable of guaranteeing the continuity of struggles against the regime in various areas. Whether it is the fight against the opening of olive groves to mining, the women’s movement, the housing crisis – which has become a major problem – the LGBTI movement, or the mobilization of parents against the commodification and Islamization of education, the fundamental objective for the revolutionary left must be to create structures, coordinations and committees in all these fields, to be prepared for the next mass social and/or democratic mobilizations, to prevent this dynamic of combat from evaporating in the space of a few weeks.

4 July 2025

Translated by International Viewpoint from Inprecor.It is an updated version of the one conducted for the Swiss site SolidaritéS .

Attached documentsturkiye-from-the-kurdish-movement-to-mass-mobilizations_a9158.pdf (PDF - 903.5 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article9158]

Footnotes


[1] The memorandum of March 12, 1971, marked a "Turkish-style" military coup, in which the army, without directly seizing power, imposed an authoritarian government under the pretext of restoring order. This intervention aimed to crush the burgeoning labour and student movements, establishing a brutal repression against the revolutionary left. However, with the rise to power of Bülent Ecevit in 1973, an amnesty was proclaimed, allowing the release of many left-wing activists imprisoned after the coup.


[2] Our current considers as "stagist" the idea that the revolution in dominated or feudal countries should be achieved in two stages: first the national or bourgeois revolution, which would constitute a democratic capitalism independent of imperialism, and secondly the social revolution. To this conception, we oppose the theory of permanent revolution, which indicates that the two stages must be combined to succeed.


[3] On September 12, 1980, the military seized power, citing clashes between left-wing and right-wing nationalist political groups. This coup d’état destroyed the gains of workers’ and popular struggles, established a bloody military dictatorship, and laid the foundations for authoritarian neoliberalism in Türkiye.


[4] Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Republican People’s Party, created in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, member of the Socialist International and associate member of the Party of European Socialists.


[5] A retroactive 30 per cent wage increase for the first six months of the year and a 19 per cent increase in July. Inflation is above 35 per cent a year in Türkiye, according to official figures.


[6] The People’s Protection Units (Kurdish: Yekîneyên Parastina Gel) form the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria. The SDF is the Syrian Democratic Forces, which includes the YPG.


Turkey
‘Well dug, old mole!": Mass resistance in Turkey
Kurdistan/Turkey: A Newroz of hope against a backdrop of coup d’état
Türkiye: Political Crisis and Democratic Movement
Turkey and the Neofascist Contagion
Turkey: a mass movement builds against Erdogan’s power grab
Kurdistan
Dissolution of the PKK and new perspectives
Kurdistan: ‘Turkey must choose between the status quo, endless war and peace with the Kurds’.
The Turkish State and the Kurdish Question: Contradictions and fragilities of a new hope
Syria: "The West is sacrificing dozens of peoples and faiths"
Kurds under attack on all fronts

Uraz Aydin
* Uraz Aydin is the editor of Yeniyol, the review of the Turkish section of the Fourth International, and one of many academics dismissed for having signed a petition in favour of peace with the Kurdish people, in the context of the state of emergency decreed after the attempted coup in 2016.


International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

 

Britain: Is the working class back?

By Dan Evans

Published 10 April, 2025

First published at New Socialist.

As the welfare state wobbled in the late 1970s, the spectres of rapid deindustrialisation, automation and the parallel explosion of white-collar service work led Andre Gorz to do the unthinkable and question the historic role of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, the historic force that would bring a new socialist society into being. Shortly after Gorz published Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, in 1982, Reagan and Thatcher attacked — and then crushed — the most militant sections of the organised labour movement.

Following the destruction of the union movement and the open abandonment of the working class by their traditional political representatives, the working class disappeared from the political scene by (largely) ceasing to vote — in the 2024 General Election, fewer than 50% of working class adults voted, 1 leading to an enormous gulf or ‘void’ between the people on the one hand and ‘politics’ on the other. This void, as Peter Mair argues, is constituted by political parties becoming detached from wider society and their traditional bases. “The age,” he writes, “of party democracy has passed”.2

As the working class exited stage left, a new subject came to take their place. To the extent that ‘politics’ involves any actual engagement with ordinary people outside a technocratic elite, it has been the middle or intermediate classes, not the working classes, who have driven both establishment and insurgent politics since the nineties. Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 had little to do with working class power, but was substantially the result of Tony Blair having won over the lower middle class voters who previously had been the bedrock of Thatcherism.3 Corbynism (like Syriza and Podemos) was, at least in its activist core, the political movement of the younger new petty bourgeoisie.4

The last fifty or so years have arguably been the lowest point for working class struggle and class consciousness since the Industrial Revolution. Gorz’s heretical hypothesis had, until recently, seemed to have been vindicated: the forward march of labour, the inevitable rise of the proletariat, had ground to a halt. Yet class struggle ebbs and flows. As the late, great Mike Davis reminds us, capitalism’s cyclical crises periodically opens (although it can also close off) the possibilities for proletarian advance.5 Organised labour responded belatedly to the interlocking crises of contemporary capital, culminating, in 2022, in the biggest wave of strikes in Britain for 30 years. This period of sustained and coordinated industrial action was itself a significant achievement given the severity of Britain’s anti-union laws and given the traditionally craven and partisan attitudes of the British trade union bureaucracy. At the height of the strikes, Mick Lynch — the de facto leader of the labour movement — famously proclaimed: “the working class is back”.

Given the torrid time the left has had, aspects of the recent strike wave certainly felt invigorating in some ways. Although striking is difficult, it is good and healthy to get away from the sewer of social media, to escape the frustration at the blocked possibilities of electoral politics, and speak to people face to face; to feel and experience the sense of solidarity and comradeship that tends to resurface during strike action. Unionism and strikes can build class consciousness, build new subjectivities, and very often reveal the true nature of class society to those who were previously on the sidelines.

Above all, the strikes were a long overdue — and relieving — reminder that the organised working class retains significant structural power and leverage in society. It still retains the potential to shut down capital and hurt profits. Undoubtedly the recent strike wave was an important period in the class struggle, and will go down in the history of the labour movement in this country. But it is also crucial that we accurately understand the actual ‘balance of forces’ that exist in Britain at present. This is not being miserablist for the sake of it. Corbynism as a movement was defined by naivety. It did not grasp the scale of the challenge it faced or the powerful forces lined up against it. It didn’t even understand the glaringly obvious threat from its own right wing, let alone the power of the British state. Following Lynch’s speech, in the excitement of the early part of the strike waves, some of these tendencies resurfaced: the confusion of political slogans with reality; the desperate longing for a shortcut to power through a charismatic figurehead who will make everything better; a tendency to dramatically overstate the ‘radicalism’ of the present moment and the strength of the trade union movement, best evidenced by repeated calls for a general strike.

For all the positives surrounding the strikes, they were — and are — ultimately defensive struggles. Since the optimism of 2022, hopes that the political left might seize the initiative have ebbed away. In mid-September, after two years of struggle, both the RMT. and ASLEF. voted to accept a pay deal from the new Labour government. In the postal and higher education disputes, workers were forced back to work after accepting ‘deals’ which reduced workers’ terms and conditions. Although the potential capacity of working class power was on display, what was ultimately revealed was the strength and confidence of capital relative to labour in the current conjuncture. Across the board, partnership agreements were torn up. Employers didn’t, as union leaders had hoped, respond to pleas about being reasonable, or fold in the face of bad publicity. Royal Mail, for example, was content to absorb bad publicity (its CEO being humiliated by MPs) and to openly run down the public service in pursuit of its ultimate, long-standing goal — breaking a militant, highly-organised union. Belated threats regarding an all-out strike did not prevent the closure of the Port Talbot blast furnaces, which shut their doors for good at the end of September.

Given the vanguard role played by the CWU over the last 25 years — ‘the miners of the 90s’ — the Royal Mail dispute was a particularly important barometer for understanding the true position of the labour movement in Britain. The scale of Royal Mail’s union busting, and its very real threats to derecognise the CWU, harked back to a different period, and shocked even the most experienced unionists. None of this bodes well for the future of British trade unionism.

The crisis of proletarianisation

Now that the dust has seemingly settled, we can take stock of where we are as a movement. We should return to Lynch’s claim and the questions it raises. Who and what is the working class? Is it back? If it is back, what should we do? If it isn’t, then what next? Who is the revolutionary subject that will carry out societal change?

Much of the modern discourse around class is focused on class in itself; i.e. determining what a class is ‘objectively’, or mapping out what the different classes are and who belongs to which class. It tends to neglect the crucial idea of class consciousness (or class for itself). It is one thing to just describe the working class and their hypothetical potential size and power, but another entirely to think about the conditions and institutions which produce the thorny (and much-debated) process of transubstantiation from merely existing to acting as a collective, coherent and revolutionary body.

As Richard Hoggart argued, in The Uses of Literacy,6 socialist intellectuals have a tendency towards hagiographic portrayals of the working class’s revolutionary tendencies. But romantic, sepia imagery of mining, manufacturing and the welfare state obscures a confrontation with reality: that the working class has been recomposed (or more accurately, decomposed). The era of ‘the job’ (in the sense of steady, secure ‘collectivised’ waged work) seems to be over. It makes more sense to think of the period between 1945-1979 as a historical anomaly, a blip that is not coming back. And as the world of work has changed, so the idealised proletariat of the bygone era is also not coming back, either in appearance or behaviour.

Not only has the working class shrunk in size, it is currently hopelessly divided and scattered by the modern labour process — by short-term, part-time contracts, bogus self-employment, and modern forms of piecework, now carried out by a growing lumpen strata. On top of this, working class communities, and the institutions which historically sustained working class culture and political class consciousness beyond work — sports clubs, libraries, community halls — have similarly been destroyed, very often (of course) by Labour-run councils. The way we work and live is becoming increasingly fragmented and isolated. As Anton Jaeger argues, we live and work more and more like Marx’s French peasants, as ‘potatoes in a sack of potatoes,’ whose relation to their mode of production isolates them from one another.

Changes to work, to communities, to how we live, matter because class consciousness — or coherent politics — does not simply emerge from being poor, however much we might want it to. It requires conscious, boring, long-term organisation, and to be scaffolded by institutions. If we understand proletarianisation purely as ‘lots of people are getting poorer’ or becoming deskilled and stripped of their autonomy, then optimistic accounts of how ‘the working class is growing’ as more and more professionals and white-collar workers slip into it make perfect sense. This understanding of proletarianisation stands behind the discourse of ‘the 99%’ or the wage-earner thesis: the idea that society is polarising into two camps, and that deskilled and degraded professionals and white-collar workers like junior doctors and early career academics can now be identified as part of the working class.

But if we understand the concept of proletarianisation as Mike Davis interprets it in Old Gods, New Enigmas, as the social process of transubstantiation by which workers developed a collective conscience (whereby workers are concentrated in greater masses in workplaces, where they ‘feel their strength more’, and where they get organised) then what is happening under neoliberalism — not just in the developed world, but to a large extent across the globe — is in fact a ‘crisis of proletarianisation’.7 Alejandro Portes and BR Roberts have similarly argued that the rise in the informal, grey economy and of bogus self-employment represents a global trend of ‘deproletarianisation’, as we move away from ‘collective’ workers concentrated in larger workplaces.

In previous epochs there were always sectors and groups which union organisers regarded as impossible to organise. Today, with work and social life fragmenting into isolated bubbles, much of the workforce occupies similar conditions. While workers are becoming poorer and deskilled, they are also becoming harder to organise, and the capacity for class consciousness and coherent action as a collective is declining. Even in our remaining huge workplaces — for example Amazon warehouses — the workforce is transient and vulnerable, and hence the noble efforts to organise these sectors have thus far come to nothing. Davis uses the metaphor of a ‘power grid’ to describe the modern working class, with the organised, class-conscious workers as the core which keeps the grid powered and which provides the main challenge to capital.8 Today, workers like the RMT and the CWU are the ever shrinking, flickering core — an ideal type of politically educated, motivated, experienced and disciplined worker which also has leverage in key industries (and this is precisely the reason they were targeted by the Government) — but the rest of the grid is dimly illuminated indeed. Despite public support for the strikes, union density continues to fall. Among the 27 million workers in the private sector, only 12% are unionised. Unions are now more popular among foremen and supervisors than workers. In most industries, and in former trade union heartlands, union density is falling.

Today, most working-class people are not in unions — many people don’t know what they are: the political culture and residual familial links to unions have largely disappeared. Even in the vanguard industries and unions, something akin to a blood transfusion is taking place, with older, militant workers leaving en masse, being replaced by younger workers on worse terms and conditions — meaning less security, and so less capacity to act — and with less awareness of their rights and the role of unions.

Modern class politics: Anger without organisation

Under conditions of fragmentation, class politics takes on incoherent forms. Most people possess an enduring class identity as well as class instinct — the ‘muscle memory’ and knowledge of what class you are in, an innate dislike of the bosses, and a feeling of unfairness. The majority of people still identify as the working class or ‘the people’, and understand that society is unfair and that social mobility is a lie. Moreover, Resistance is still widespread, but as Daniel Zamora notes, this now tends to be individualised rather than collective: walking off the job, quitting, sickness, etc. We have class struggle, but an atomised form, which allows the status quo to continue.

Without the direction and ‘discipline’ that was previously provided by mass parties and unions, and with the right frequently, however disingenuously, speaking the language of class better than the left, class politics no longer takes the forms we are used to. As Sherry Ortner argues, class is increasingly hidden in other issues, and popular anger is frequently being harnessed by right wing forces. This is clear in the rise in conspiracy theories and in the uptick in non-unionised, anti-state, anti-globalisation protests such as the Gilets Jaunes, the Canadian Trucker Protests, and the rise of farmer protests across Europe. Modern class politics is coalescing into an often chaotic but deeply- rooted (and justified) anti-statism and anti-liberalism among growing sectors of the population that feel ignored, silenced and angry.

The class structure under neoliberal, deindustrialised capitalism increasingly mirrors the complexity of the historical period during the messy initial transition to industrialisation: a mélange of rootless seasonal workers, artisans and hand-workers in cottage industries — semi-proletarians — before industrial factory workers emerged as the idealised vanguard. And just as the class structure has returned to the period immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution, so class struggle increasingly mirrors the dangerous unpredictability of early semi-proletarians. Influenced and moulded by peasant and artisan culture, this group was simultaneously deeply radical yet also unpredictable, spontaneous and violent, acting without the ‘discipline’ of the industrial unions, and often combining composite elements of radicalism and national chauvinism. Yet of course, whether one is a revolutionary agent has nothing to do with one’s individual politics, but is about one’s actions vis a vis the status quo.

Such is the scale of the proletarianisation crisis that Davis wrestles with the idea — raised by Hobsbawm and, of course, Gorz — of whether there is even a historical agent or force that still exists to support socialism in the modern period. If there is still something approaching the idealised proletariat, then it is in militant workers like the RMT and the CWU; but they are outposts, anomalies. ‘The working class’ of course remains, as a cultural category and identity — but is increasingly not the ‘idealised’ factory proletariat of sepia-toned nostalgia, and we also cannot guarantee whether its instincts will align with ‘left’ values.

What next? Organising during times of chaos

Broadly, there are two possible responses to these changes. The first is aiming for renewal: organising and rebuilding within this new society, using the tools and methods of the past in order to try and achieve what was achieved in previous decades — a mass trade union movement, strong communities with anchor institutions, a new mass left party with roots in these communities. Moulding the new, inchoate class structure into the ideal proletariat would require (at least) a decades-long programme of deep organising : new unions, new community institutions, new parties. I would imagine this is the vision of most socialists who are now thinking of a new left party. But is this realistic, or even desirable? The scale of the work needed may simply be too great, which may explain the emergence of a strain of nihilism and despair among some sections of the left, and, from others, the tendency to stick with the shortcut of the Labour Party, or to imagine that a new left party, without any of the limits of Labour, can easily be formed. I have a recurring, nagging feeling that we may be trying to force the new, changed society into forms of organising and praxis that were developed in and for a different period, and which were never successful anyway. The objective basis for these forms of politics may well be past. Perhaps we need to relieve ourselves of nostalgia for that kind of politics, as well as the perennial nostalgia for an older form of working class life of the kind that Hoggart critiques.

We must also reflect on whether we are in fact pining for a past that never was: one could certainly argue that, barring 1926 (the impact of which has itself been overstated), movements comprised of the ‘ideal’ proletarian subject were never as revolutionary or oppositional as is commonly claimed, and of course have often been unsuccessful and unpopular. David Edgerton and Ross McKibbin have repeatedly pointed out that the British socialist movement—or at least its parliamentary form—never commanded the broad electoral support of the majority of workers.

Indeed, as Craig Calhoun famously noted, throughout history, community-based social movements have existed alongside ‘pure’ class-based movements. These movements, which we would today call ‘populist’, were often far more radical in their demands and actions than the ‘ideal’ organised class-based movements. In Britain, the first wave of the Industrial Revolution—a period of proto-industrialisation—represented the most dangerous period for the British state: the Merthyr rising, the Chartists, Peterloo. This period of social insurrection was not led by ‘the proletariat’, but by a mixture of artisans, farmers, and semi-proletarians.

In fact, across the world, the majority of social change and protest has never in fact been led by the ‘proletariat’, but by cross-class movements in which ‘class’ alone has never been the sole locus. This was the case in national liberation movements, including the Cuban revolution; in race- and gender-focused civil rights movements across the West; and in recent years has also been the case for the Arab spring. Today, environmental movements and pro-Palestine movements have been far more willing to take on the state and imperialism than the union hierarchy, using innovative forms of direct action which replicate the disruption of strikes. Whilst sometimes incoherent, many of these movements have been more ‘oppositional’ vis a vis capital and the state than purely class-based movements. Indeed, the ‘discipline’ of the formal, organised, class-based movements has often acted as a dampener on action, tending towards a narrow ‘trade union consciousness’ and compromise through the incorporation of the unions and social democratic parties into the state, including into the imperialist state. This is not to claim that these movements or intermediate classes are innately more revolutionary or progressive, but rather to say that there is clearly no perfect revolutionary subject or method of organising: proletarian movements have failed, and so have non-proletarian ones.

The class structure has changed, and so has the ‘revolutionary subject’. But rather than despair, there is cause for optimism. The problem is not with ‘the people’: there is widespread hostility to the state, to politicians, and to war, and mass support for redistributive politics. Perhaps we should not try to go back, to use the rigid tools of the past for a changed, chaotic class structure; to try and cram the existing, chaotic class society into outdated political categories, frameworks and organising methods developed for a simpler class society. The task facing us now is to find the right tools with which to organise, and to discover how to embed ourselves in a milieu with which we are not familiar.

Dan Evans is a writer and academic based in South Wales. He is the author of A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie (Repeater, 2023).

• 1

  The IPPR’s report “Half of Us: Turnout Patterns At the 2024 Election” found that 52.8% of the working age population voted in 2024 (this is lower than the 59.9% “turnout” figures which account for the percentage of registered voters). The report also found that “the less wealthy” were significantly less likely to vote. Other work by the report’s authors, shows a widening turnout gap between the university and non-university educated, between top and bottom income terciles, and between homeowners and renters. Whilst none of this can precisely be treated as a proxy for “class”, the classed tendencies ought to be clear.

• 2

  Peter Mair. 2013. Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy. London: Verso, p.1

• 3

  For Blair’s success in winning over lower middle class voters see Robin Blackburn’s 1997 NLR essay “Reflections on Blair’s Velvet Revolution”.

• 4

  I argue this in more depth in my 2023 book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie. London: Repeater, p.77, 279

• 5

  Mike Davis. 2018. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. London: Verso, pp.25-33

• 6

  Richard Hoggart. [1957]. 1958. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. Harmondsworth: Pelican, p.14

• 7

  Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas, pp.5-6

• 8

  Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas, p.24