Onde os extremos se tocam: a classe operária chinesa e a Era Xi Jinping

Abstract

The thesis we defend in this paper is that China cannot be considered as the socialism of the 21st century, nor the bearer of a “benign multipolarity” in opposition to the belligerence of US imperialism. China has become an influential and decisive actor, within the capitalist system of states, in the dispute over who will pay the costs of the exhaustion of the neoliberal cycle of globalization. The policy of the People's Republic of China in the Xi Jinping era differs in its fundamental features from that of previous eras: we are dealing with a China that, for the first time in capitalist history, disputing niches of capitalist accumulation internationally, and showing an assertive posture in defense of the project of “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, which implies questioning (in perspective, transforming) the old unipolar order of neoliberalism of the last decades. However, far from the supposed “socialism of the 21st century,” China's actions in the concert of states do not have the character of subverting the capitalist system. The seminal goal of the “Chinese Dream” under Xi Jinping is to rearrange the ordering of that system in order to improve the People's Republic position in the global capitalist hierarchy. A rearrangement of such magnitude could not take place without new military conflagrations of historic magnitude. By taking the differences in the internal composition and characteristics of the decaying imperialism of the United States and the rising Chinese capitalism directed by the bonapartist regime of the CCP, we were able to shed light on the regressive character of the competition between Washington and Beijing for all humanity. Through the research, we were able to find that distinct processes have intersected China in the course of development that in the Xi Jinping era places it in geostrategic conflict with the imperialist superpower of the United States. On the one hand, the restoration of the capitalist mode of production, directed by the bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party itself, culminated in the blocking of the expansive dynamics of communism that originated in Mao Zedong's strategy from the 1949 Revolution. This constrained the development capacities of the productive forces of humanity and oxygenated the neoliberal offensive worldwide. On the other hand, due to China's backwardness at the end of the Cold War, the appropriation of the Revolution's achievements by the capitalist restoration propelled China from being an essentially agrarian economy to becoming a rapidly rising capitalist superpower with imperialist traits. Such a conjugation, unique in history, reshapes all the conditions of world politics, within the framework of the exhaustion of the neoliberal cycle and the Ukraine war. Through research, in critical debate with different intellectuals who have dealt, in their own way, with the subject of China (such as Perry Anderson, Giovanni Arrighi, Alain Badiou, Domenico Losurdo, Ching Kwan Lee, Alvin So, Au Loong-yu, Cynthia Estlund, Andrew Walder, among others) we have been able to establish the role of the Chinese working class, in its renewed configuration, as an revolutionary alternative to think about the challenge of preventing a reactionary outcome of the Sino-US intercapitalist dispute. By rescuing the Marxist tradition (with the seminal contributions of Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci) in the 20th century to think anew the original problems of our age, we present a reflection on the possibility of revolution and socialism in China in the 21st century.