The following is excerpted from remarks by Sam Marcy, chairman of Workers World Party, to a plenary meeting of the National Committee of the Party on Saturday, May 20.
We are meeting at a time of one of the world's greatest crises.
The world bourgeoisie seems to be celebrating it, cheering it on. They look hopefully toward a resolution of the crisis in China in such a way that it will benefit all the forces of reaction, of the bourgeoisie, of imperialism.
We see a lot of students demonstrating and it's natural for our hearts to go out to them. There's a certain affinity among all youth. We always want to be with the young, young in revolutionary ideas and perspective. For many long years the Chinese Communist Party fought very hard to win the young. In the countries where there are guerrilla movements, the young carry the weight.
Now what has gone wrong? How could a revolution lose its youth?
When the landlords were overthrown, the bourgeoisie ousted and the country unified, the land was distributed and the factories were taken over by the workers. But some things don't lend themselves to quick solutions. The communists also took over the schools and universities. There were so many people and so few schools of higher learning. Who gets in first? There was a sea of peasants, a small working class, a middle group, the former landlords, and then the mass of officialdom, who year by year get more power and privilege.
In the colleges and universities, there are certain admissions tests. In light of our experience here, we know there are prep schools and universities, and then there are community colleges. The universities like Harvard, Yale and MIT don't have the same social and ethnic composition as the community colleges. Of course, all this is supposed to be based on who's brainier.
In China, the question was who should get into the higher colleges. According to Marxism and Leninism, those subject to class and national oppression should be considered first. Class criteria should decide it.
If you have two or three children of school age, you think about it. Are they going to go to college? Will they be treated equally? Or will they be nosed out by someone who is rich and powerful?
If course, it's harder for a worker to get into Beijing University if all he or she has known is the assembly line. It's especially difficult when it comes to math or physics. They'll need help. But any other way is to perpetuate and develop a class system. This is a political task of the highest significance.
By and large, that's how it was supposed to work. They had no big upheaval for a long time on that score. But then something happened. The authentic communist leadership got thrown out and the right-wing under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping got in. We analyzed it then as a reactionary move, bad enough, but not a total counter-revolution. It was still a workers' state.
What happened with Deng? He was in a hurry to change the school system. The revolutionary idea that the class composition of the country should determine the class composition of the universities was abandoned, for the most part. Over the last 15 years, the sons and daughters of the privileged got in. The class character of the student body has changed.
The privileged groupings got in. They're in the government, in trade, finance, commerce, industry. They dismantled the communes. They've brought back a good part of the capitalist economy. They've brought back inflation, the high cost of living. There isn't enough housing. Those with more privilege shout the loudest and get it first. They're bringing the imperialists back into special zones. They had the U.S. fleet come right when Gorbachev was there. Just a small thing, they said, a mistake in timing. Well, they could have asked it to go back, but they didn't.
With all that's happening economically, these false leaders are blaming it on the Maoists, not on themselves. They're blaming centralized planning and communism. They don't say, "We caused it all." But they unleashed the capitalist market, which brought about inflation and a great deal of hardship.
This movement started in Beijing. But Beijing is an administrative center. That's where the bureaucracy lives and prospers. It's not an industrial town. It's not near the rural areas. It's like Washington, D.C., except that it's not an ethnic nationality there. It's mostly Han people.
It differs from Shanghai, which has always been a proletarian center. The Shanghai Commune, all the great struggles and leaders have always come from Shanghai, not Beijing.
So Beijing is the ground on which you can organize the privileged on their demands.
We must keep in mind that this is not an underprivileged student body. Or a student body mainly composed of rich but with an affinity toward those nationally oppressed — like during the Vietnam War in this country when many from the rich colleges like Columbia organized against the war. They had sympathy for the nationally oppressed.
But this movement in China is not known for internationalism. At the time of the attacks on African students, there were no sympathy demonstrations for them. That was very important and a very disturbing thing. A revolutionary youth movement would have been very up front on that.
There are different political currents in this movement. Some sang the International. Some held up Mao banners. Generally, in a student movement there are different political tendencies which don't lend themselves to cohesion. However, those who are setting the general tone of it are bourgeois elements. How do we know that? We know by the demands they raise.
From the very beginning, it's democracy. That's a fraudulent phrase. As important as democracy is, it's even more important to define it: democracy for what class and under what conditions? They are students, some are sociologists, and that's no way to formulate an issue. It suits the imperialist bourgeoisie admirably.
What drives them in this direction? It's the mismanagement by the bureaucracy. They turned away from socialist construction and things are not going well. And they blame it on the communists!
Last updated: 23 March 2018