China is not only oppressed by a brutal bureaucracy, but also by profit-hungry multinational corporations.

Recently, Steven Spielberg resigned as artistic advisor to the upcoming Beijing Olympics in order to protest China’s support for the government behind the Darfur genocide. Human rights organizations and Free Tibet protesters are gearing up to make a scene at the Olympics.

With Long March veterans speaking out for democracy, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) morale in a lull and a booming economy that is inequitably distributed, Olympic protesting could spark a popular uprising.

History has shown that so-called communist countries that lack democracy and protection of human rights will sooner or later restore capitalism, unless the working class successfully fights an anti-bureaucratic revolution.

Tellingly, the capitalist restoration is not something that is fought for by the working class, but rather occurs as a betrayal by state bureaucrats. Workers in the failed anti-bureaucratic uprisings in Eastern Germany in 1953, Poland and Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 (the Prague Spring) and Poland in 1980-81 were not fighting for capitalism. They were fighting for working class democracy and factory self-management, that is, authentic socialism.

Who crushed these uprisings and eventually sold their nations on the market to capitalism? The “Communist” Party of the Soviet Union and their post-Stalinist allies in the satellite nations did. The fall of the USSR shows that bureaucracy’s attempts at self-reform are insufficient, and cannot defy the parametric determinism that faces all bureaucratized workers’ states: either an eventual return to capitalism, or an anti-bureaucratic socialist revolution.

Bureaucracies fear democracy since it threatens their tenure. Only the working class can lead an anti-bureaucratic revolution; bureaucrats don’t eliminate bureaucracy because that would be against their material interests.

Far from being strictly a student uprising, the Chinese Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 saw over a million citizens take to the streets, meaning a great part of the Beijing working class joined in solidarity with the students’ demands. In fact, the first independent workers’ union in Beijing (the Beijing Independent Workers Association) materialized during the protests while bus drivers, postal workers, steel plant workers and several other industries went on strike.

Students of the Beijing University put forward seven demands during the protest: 1) inter-party democracy; 2) reprisal against those who used violence on the protesters; 3) freedom of the press; 4) publicizing bureaucratic financial opportunism; 5) raising teacher salaries and better fund education; 6) rehabilitate political criminals; 7) request the media cover the uprising truthfully.

These are all genuinely socialist demands. You’ll notice there was no mention of expanding capitalist inroads in China, or further prostitution of Chinese sweatshop labor for the capitalist market. Who militarily crushed the Tiananmen Square? Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, the same man who introduced market reforms as he came into power.

Deng’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” really means “bureaucracy with capitalist characteristics.”

The first article of the Chinese constitution states “The socialist system is the basic system of the People’s Republic of China. Sabotage of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.”

The CCP is itself guilty of treason then, for opening the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 1990, joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, and two years ago the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China went public, in the capitalist sense, which really means it is now privately owned. Did I mention Hong Kong is the most capitalist place on earth?

A year ago there were 10 Chinese billionaires; now there may be as many as 100, according to the International Herald Tribune. China is not only oppressed by a brutal bureaucracy, but also by profit-hungry multinational corporations. Unlike all former uprisings in bureaucratized workers’ states, the next uprising in China cannot fail to be anti-capitalist as well as anti-bureaucratic.

Many people criticize the CCP for its human rights abuses, but completely gloss over the corporate exploitation drawing sweatshop labor out of the Chinese proletariat. If China should turn capitalist, human rights abuses may very well increase, if the current capitalist sweatshops are any indication.

Democracy does not go hand in hand with capitalism. For example, even though Russia is now capitalist, it is still considered “unfree” by the United Nations.

If there ever was a time for the Chinese people to have another uprising, it would be during the Beijing Olympics this summer. Can the CCP afford to send out tanks against protesters, as it did in Tiananmen Square, when the whole world is watching and reporters from across the world are broadcasting live?

All sincere Marxists earnestly work toward and look forward to the future Chinese democratic revolution, as with Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea.

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