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Why China’s Workers are Losing Their World
by Marc Blecher
<...continued...> The state makes at least two other kinds of ideological appeals to the working class. First, it argues that the current situation facing workers coincides with modern international norms. For example, Britain's "workfare" program was cited favorably in support of a plan to deny any benefits to workers who do not join training schemes. Likewise, the 1995 Labor Law is justified because it is similar to legislation of other industrial countries. Second, it has argued that there is no alternative either to the "reforms" or to the problems that they have brought in tow for workers. "At some stages of development, unemployment represents and is a necessary stage for social progress," a Workers Daily reader wrote in its pages.
Aside from ideological appeals, a number of political factors have helped the state develop and maintain its hegemony over the working class. Its bold and decisive reversal of the overbearing political radicalism of the Cultural Revolution remains important, especially to those who lived through it. The state's willingness to respond positively or at least not aggressively in the face of many local protests both mollifies flash points and helps persuade other workers that it can play a positive role for them. Likewise, the state's willingness to open up limited space for grumbling and even criticism--some of it, as above, published in the official press--helps workers blow off steam and is meant to persuade them that the state is not an utterly implacable enemy. Finally, the fanfare with which the state publicly attacks corruption may actually help place it in common cause with workers angry at their shady bosses and complicit local officials.
Conclusion
The
Chinese working class is a diverse lot of people in rapid flux. China's
workers are responding to their lived experiences in a variety of ways.
Many are participating in various forms of collective action. Balancing
all this ferment is a set of countervailing forces that dampen working
class collective action.
How durable is the hegemony of the market and of the state over the thinking of the working class? The stunning rapidity with which hegemony of the market and the Dengist state emerged over the past two decades could affect that hegemony’s future either way. On the one hand, it might suggest that working class thinking is capricious, responding primarily to the immediately preceding crisis (in this case, of the Maoist period) and/or to the positive aspects of the macro-economic and political changes of the Dengist period. If this is so, then the hegemony of the market and the state might be fragile, particularly in the event of a serious and sustained economic crisis. On the other hand, the fact that many of the core political and economic values of the Maoist period were tossed aside so quickly might suggest that they had not really taken root. In this case, market and state hegemony would appear more durable.
For Gramsci, hegemony and counter-hegemony are built by political movements, a project requiring extraordinary patience, skill, and determination, as well as a civil society in which to grow. So long as the People's Republic continues to survive as China’s state in anything like its present form, there seems almost no likelihood that a robust working class political movement capable of building a counter-hegemony against the market or the state could emerge. And if the state falls, the ensuing political situation would, in all likelihood, be confused and unstable enough to provide a poor environment for a durable, vigorous anti-market social movement.
Of course, as a Marxist Gramsci also knew that economic crisis could undermine hegemony and create opportunities for the development of counter-hegemony. The state's hegemony is built upon its ability to guarantee and claim credit for China’s stunning economic expansion since 1978. Were that economic growth to end in a serious, sustained economic crisis, workers might respond with outbursts that could threaten the survival of the People's Republic of China. But even in that scenario, it is difficult to see how the hegemony of the market would be undermined. As my Oberlin colleague Steve Crowley has shown, in the last days of the Soviet Union, striking coal miners saw the market as their salvation from the grips of a corrupt state and a political economy that had failed them. In China as elsewhere, a deep economic crisis would be far more likely to incubate a movement against the state--which is, after all, an overt, palpable target--than against the market itself. The latter is, after all, far more diffuse and amorphous an object of political struggle. Mobilization against the market also requires a robust left in command of considerable political resources, something not at all likely in China. In short, even if state hegemony were to fail, market hegemony would probably survive, and might even be strengthened, at least in the short or medium run.
For a latter-day Gramsci interested in elaborating a working class political movement, then, China today provides good cause for the "pessimism of the intellect" professed by the master, and a sore test of the "optimism of the will" he strove so nobly to affirm. <...back...>
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