Joel Geier has been a socialist activist in the US since the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He has written extensively on US imperialism, politics and economics. He spoke to Red Flag’s Robert Narai. The interview has been edited for length.
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How would you characterise the position of US imperialism today?
The US is still the world’s dominant economic, political and military superpower. But it now faces competition from a newly emerging superpower, China, and its allies. This introduces a new, more dangerous phase of imperialism, which has its roots in preceding phases.
There have been three previous phases of imperialism over the last century or so. First was the struggle for the world market and an international economy that led to World War One, the Great Depression and World War Two, the latter of which the US emerged from on top. It was the strength of US industrial capacity that, converted to war production, produced the planes, ships, tanks, trucks, guns and ammunition that were vital to the Allied victory.
After World War Two, there was superpower competition between the victors of that war: the US and the Soviet Union. This was a political and military struggle without economic rivalry, as the Soviet Union could not compete on the world market. 
The third phase begins at the end of the 1980s. After the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as the world’s only superpower. It used this phase to organise its globalised order under US auspices.
During this time, the US made its greatest strategic gamble and, ultimately, mistake. To gain access to cheaper labour and greater profits, it outsourced its industrial capacity and manufacturing to China and others. The US thought it could incorporate China into the economic world that it controlled. Instead, the US has found itself in the ironic position that it is dependent upon the decisions of the Chinese Communist Party for some of its industrial goods, and even its military is dependent upon parts and supplies from China. The US currently lacks the industrial-military capacity to engage in a major conflict with China. 
There is now an attempt by the US to restore its industrial-military capacity. This requires a major struggle for the world market, raw materials and the military preparations necessary for world domination. This is a new phase of imperialism that has been accelerated by three recent events.
First, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted US industrial supply chains that were dependent upon China. Manufacturing parts didn’t arrive from China and so sections of manufacturing ground to a halt. Supplies of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies were dependent upon China. This highlighted to the US ruling class that it could not remain dependent upon China; it was necessary to restore self-reliance to ensure its continued control over the world. 
Second, the Russian invasion of Ukraine convinced sections of the American ruling class that they must control Middle Eastern oil and should not pivot away from this commodity that the US’s allies and rivals depend on.
Third, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s advance against Iran and its allies in the Middle East—all of which is dependent upon US support—have strengthened the US’s position in the region.
These events have restored or reinforced alliances and the formation of blocs and coalitions over the last few years. The US has used the war in Ukraine to restore its military dominance over NATO and Europe. In Asia, the US has created AUKUS and restored its alliances with the Philippines and cemented ties with South Korea and Japan against China. On the other side, Russia and China have formed an alliance. Both now have ties with Iran, which is supplying military goods to Russia, and North Korea is sending troops to support Russians fighting in Ukraine.
What were US imperial interests in the Middle East prior to the war in Gaza?
The US’s strategic objective for more than 80 years has been to control world oil and to use this leverage over other countries because no modern capitalist economy or military can function without oil. 
During the first half of the twentieth century, the US was the leading oil producer in the world and supplied oil to the Allies that contributed to their victory in World War Two. During the war, the US made an alliance with Saudi Arabia. It created the modern Saudi state and military in order for US oil policy to be supported by Saudi Arabia. And with the decline of British and French imperialism after the war, the US came to dominate the Middle East and Middle Eastern oil. 
The US fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to extend its control over Middle Eastern oil. These wars were won militarily but were a disaster from the vantage point of US imperial interests. They cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of deaths of US soldiers and many tens of thousands of injuries. These were endless wars: they could not control and maintain the occupations they were involved in. This weakened the US’s ability to confront China and so they were determined to pivot away from the Middle East, starting with Obama.
Obama was also the fracking president. He restored oil production in the US, which is now again the leading oil producer in the world. The US no longer depends on oil imports from the Middle East: it is now a net exporter of oil. Biden continued this policy by pulling the last troops out of Afghanistan and scaling down the troops in Iraq to a few thousand.
The US withdrawal from the Middle East created a vacuum that was mainly filled by Iran, which has set up allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. This shifted the balance of forces in the Middle East and created a clash between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others against Iran. These Arab states wanted the US back in the region as protectors against Iran.
The US also changed its attitude towards the Middle East after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany and other EU countries were dependent upon oil and gas from Russia, which made it difficult for the US to organise Europe and NATO against Russia until that question was solved. However, the US and its Arab allies were now in a position to supply oil and natural gas to Germany and others in Europe. 
The war in Ukraine convinced the US that if they are moving towards a conflict with Russia and China, they have to control Middle Eastern oil. They therefore came up with various plans to reorganise the Middle East, the most important of which was an alliance of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and so on with Israel against Iran and their allies, under US military auspices. This is what was being proposed prior to the war in Gaza. One of the reasons Hamas gave for taking on Israel militarily on 7 October was they wanted to prevent this alliance from taking place. 
How have Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon, as well as their repeated confrontations with Iran, changed the US plans for the Middle East?
The war in Gaza has altered US plans for the Middle East. Although its Arab allies are for an Israeli victory, they cannot openly ally with Israel while the genocide of the Palestinians is taking place, out of fear of how unpopular it would be with their own populations. These plans are either postponed or have to be readjusted when the war ends.
Israel is a close ally of the US: the Israeli military, intelligence services, technology etc. are heavily intertwined with their American equivalents. This has been true for decades. Israel does the dirty work for American imperialism in one country after another throughout the world. When the US do not want to get their hands dirty, they often have the Israelis do it for them.
Israel’s current war could not exist without US-supplied arms, intelligence, technology and so on. The US want an Israeli victory but not a generalised regional war. 
The ongoing support by the US for Israel in this war is not because Netanyahu is smarter than them, or that Biden is a lifelong Zionist, or any of the other reasons the liberal press give that cover up the real nature of US imperialism, which many of them support. They do not want to present the truth: the US is also genocidal, not just Israel. Israel has killed 43,000 people in Gaza. In Vietnam, the US killed between 2 and 3 million civilians. In Iraq, the US killed half a million people, of whom over 200,000 were civilians. It is the US that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the US that firebombed Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden during World War Two. This is what it takes to become the global superpower.
At the same time, the US does not want the fallout from a genocide against the Palestinians. Politically, it has been a disaster for Israel and the US in parts of the world. And so the US issues press releases to quiet liberal opinion about how terrible it is, that Israel should be giving more humanitarian aid, protecting civilians and so on. At the same time, the US provides Israel with all the support needed to carry out these atrocities. 
Meanwhile, the US has supported Israel’s expansion of the war into Lebanon against Hezbollah and confrontations with Iran.
The US enables Israel—but just as important, Israel is enabling a victory for the US. Unless there is dramatic change in the war, this is becoming the biggest Israeli victory in the Middle East since the 1967 war against the Arab states. It is the biggest US military victory in decades.
Israel enables the US to change the balance of power in the Middle East to the detriment of Iran, which has been rising in importance in the Middle East for the better part of a decade now. This is an enormous shift. It is one that is vital to the US if it is to restore its control over Middle Eastern oil in preparation for bigger conflicts with China and Russia. If the US can control the Middle East, it can control the oil supply from the Middle East to China (even though Russia can provide a large amount of oil for China). This is the long-term goal of US imperialism. 
Israel, with the full support and backing of the US, has inflicted a huge blow against Iran’s allies in Hamas and Hezbollah. It is probably the US that took out the air defences in Syria and Iraq that allowed Israel to get to Iran. Israel has used air power to take out the Iranian air defences. There is total cooperation between the US and Israeli intelligence and military services in carrying out these attacks.
The US has totally decided what Israel could do in terms of Iran. It has protected Israel by providing them with the THAAD defences against Iranian missiles. The US bombed Yemen to send a signal to Iran that the US will take part if they continue to fire missiles at Israel.
The US has told Israel that it would not go to war against Iran and has refused to allow Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The US refused to provide Israel with the necessary equipment: bunker buster bombs necessary to take out their nuclear facilities or the B-52 bombers that deliver them. It has not allowed Israel to target Iran’s oil infrastructure. Iran said if Israel takes out Iranian oil, Iran will take out oil in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 
The US also leaked the Israeli war plans to Iran. This is something that is not usually done among allies. The US have also been negotiating with the Iranians publicly and behind closed doors. If the US was for Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and oil infrastructure, it would have happened. 
At this point, the US attitude has been, We will protect and support our ally Israel, but we will not allow this to become a war against Iran. 
The US demanded and got compliance from Israel that US national interests were to be decisive—not Israeli war ones—in the confrontation with Iran.
Israel might do some things that make it difficult for the US to carry out their political objectives for the region. But this is a fight among friends. Despite whatever headaches the Israelis might give them, this is providing the US with the biggest military victory that it has had in decades after winning militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan but losing the occupation.
This has been a cheap war for the US so far. The US spent US$2-4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the strategic vantage point of US imperialism, they were a disaster. The US has spent US$20 billion on Israel in the past year and achieved its biggest military victory in the region in decades by pushing back Iran and its allies. 
There were several thousand American soldiers killed in those wars and many tens of thousands injured. This victory is taking place without one American soldier being killed or injured and no political blow-back at home for these causalities. It is a very cheap victory for the US.
As this war has shifted from Gaza to include Lebanon and Iran, the left is finally starting to wake up to the idea that the US may be doing more than just enabling Israel. Israel is enabling a victory for the US to restore its power in the Middle East. This victory also pushes back China and Russia, which are allied with Iran. 
What implications does the election of Donald Trump have?
The new Trump presidency will not be a repeat of his first administration. The new phase of imperialism we have entered will accelerate even more with Trump in power. We are in a very different world because of the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, supply chains that must be uncoupled, of the new alliances and bloc formations taking shape.
The foreign policy of the US will not be the ruling-class foreign-policy establishment political strategy pursued by Biden, of managing the status quo of a US-dominated world order. Trump and Republican imperialist foreign policy is to change the world order. It is divided about how to pursue that.
The Trump administration includes both wings of the Republican Party. The traditional Republican hawks generally supported Biden’s foreign policy of restoring American alliances, but criticised him for not being aggressive enough: the US provided weapons to Ukraine but didn’t deliver the weapons that it needed and did not allow Ukraine to use them against Russia. These Republican hawks also criticise the US for holding back Israel against Iran. 
But the greater section of the China hawks—Trump and his associates who now dominate the Republican Party—argue that the US does not have the resources to effectively intervene everywhere in the world: they have to concentrate on China. Despite what Trump and the liberal media say, they are not going to dissolve NATO. Europe is militarily dependent on the US, and NATO is a key pillar of US domination over Europe. Instead, Trump argues that the Europeans have to deal with Russia and make it their responsibility. And he wants to end the Ukraine war and its costs to US imperialism. Trump doesn’t step back in terms of the Middle East because Israel is restoring US power in the Middle East against Iran. 
Trump’s strategy is “make America great again”, to rebuild American economic industrial and military power so that it is capable of preparing for competition and war with China.
Trump has presented this mainly in terms of a trade war against China and if necessary whole sections of the world in order to restore US competitiveness and industry. This is part of what the stock rally was about when he got elected. The capitalist class expects there to be an enormous boom under Trump, who will do away with as many regulations as possible.
The other aspect of Trump’s policy is to quickly raise the war budget from 3 percent of GDP to 5 percent to US$1-1.5 trillion annually. 
Deregulation and lower corporate taxes will be used to try to unleash a new trickle-down scheme that aims to convince US corporations to rebuild the military-industrial complex. 
Biden made a small gesture in that regard with infrastructure and the subsidies for electric vehicles. Trump will make more moves to re-shore production to the US mainland.
Trump’s strategy has been primarily that of a trade war than can threaten the entire world economy through economic nationalism and economic warfare. 
We are in a world in which imperialism threatens not just war but total economic instability. We are entering a whole new period that can produce crises. Both of wars like Gaza and Ukraine. There can be even bigger ones coming. And alongside it there is the threat of economic instability as the US and China attempt to separate and become self-reliant. As these great powers attempt to uncouple from each other, we are back in a world that existed before World War Two. 
What are the tasks for socialists in this new era of imperialism?
Revolutionary socialists, like everyone else, have to face reality, draw conclusions and act on them. We have to understand that the decades of globalisation and one superpower, however bad that was, are now over, and that we are in transition to a more unstable, volatile, dangerous world. A world that threatens economic warfare that impacts on people’s daily living standards, as well as more wars that could culminate in a struggle between the superpowers for world domination. 
Imperialism and war radicalised generations throughout the twentieth century. They created an international movement and led to revolutions—from Russia in 1905 to Portugal in 1975. This new phase of imperialism has the potential to do that again. During previous decades, consciousness of imperialism, war and revolution practically disappeared, even in most sections of the left. We are starting again almost from scratch. In the twentieth century, imperialism and war also created vicious, right-wing and fascist movements. A more aggressive far-right, nationalist movement is under way internationally. 
In the last year, the war in Gaza has produced a new international movement in support of Palestine. It is centred on a new generation of young people opposed to war and its horrors who, like all newly radicalised people, do not have consciousness of imperialism or revolution, but who are suspicious, if not outright hostile, to their rulers, who have excused and supported genocide. Like all new generations, it will take time and experience of struggle for this consciousness to reach radical and revolutionary conclusions. But it is the key question: how to raise the consciousness of people who have been moved by war in the last year to the road of the socialist struggle against imperialism; how to raise their consciousness through struggles, battles, including ideological ones, to win them to the conclusions of the socialist struggle against imperialism and war. We have to win them to internationalism, to support all the struggles of workers, students and the oppressed against all the ruling classes in the world, that the struggle against imperialism and war have to be connected to the struggles against exploitation and oppression. It is a long struggle in front of us. But it is essential we build a much larger and stronger revolutionary organisation committed to this goal.

Robert Narai

US imperialism and the war for the Middle East

1. A militant minority can have a global impact
The most effective way to fight for change, we are told, is to work through the proper channels. If we politely ask the people in power to listen to our concerns, our message will be heard, so don’t do anything radical that might upset the people in charge. 
The Gaza solidarity encampment movement illustrates that the opposite is true. When small numbers of students take action to disrupt the status quo, they can inspire thousands of others to do the same. 
Beginning with small numbers at some of the most elite universities in the United States, the encampments have spread to hundreds of cities across the United States and all across the world: from New York to London, Melbourne to Cairo, Berlin to Beirut.
The student protests have created a political crisis for the establishment by highlighting the deep links that exist between weapons manufacturers, universities and governments, and their complicity in Israel’s genocide. And with wall-to-wall media coverage, they have sent a clear message across the world—that universities must divest from weapons research, that universities and government must break links with Israel and Israel must immediately end its assault on Gaza.
This is how any movement for social change has been initiated, from civil rights to ending the war in Vietnam. It has been small groups that led the charge and inspired others to take up the fight. That is because progress happens in spite of, not because of, the people in power.
2. The ruling class will try to crush you—be prepared to fight back
The encampment movement has brought students into conflict with the institutions that drive support for Israel, the organisations of the capitalist ruling class. These have dealt a blow to universities’ rhetorical commitment to free speech.
In Australia, as elsewhere, the ruling class have tried to stifle criticism of Israel’s genocide by any means necessary. Charges of antisemitism and accusations that they represent a threat to student safety have been hurled at the encampments; students have met physical violence at the hands of Zionists; university administrations have both threatened and carried out the dismantling of a number of camps; and a number of students have been hit with suspension and even expulsion from their universities.
But students have refused to back down in the face of these attacks. Instead, they have provided an example of how to fight back.
“Hundreds of supporters have repeatedly turned up to demonstrations called by the encampments to defend them from physical attacks by Zionist organisations and threats by university administrations to forcibly remove them from campuses”, Madi Curkovic, a Monash Students for Palestine organiser who is currently facing disciplinary action from the university, told Red Flag. “Students have published statements and held press conferences that have defended our decision to set up the encampments. We have repeatedly called out the lies of the people in power and pointed to their complicity in the bloodshed being carried out by Israel in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.”
By standing their ground—against Zionist organisations, university administrations, the media and politicians—the students and their supporters will be remembered as those on the right side of this fight..
3. The strength of any movement is its ability to involve people
Mass movements change people. The act of collectively standing together pushes aside the powerlessness we experience in everyday life, builds our confidence and generates a sense of strength. The encampments offer a glimpse into that process.
“The best thing about the camp has been meeting and involving more people”, El Hall, a Students for Palestine organiser at the University of Adelaide, told Red Flag. “We’ve done this through open organising meetings at the camp to coordinate activities like putting up posters, handing out leaflets, information stalls, regular rallies, as well as teach-ins [public meetings on a number of topics designed to attract more people to the camps]. At our campus and a number of others, students are petitioning for a student general meeting to discuss their demands with the wider student body.”
For many students, this has been their first experience of activism, through which they have learned a variety of new skills, from how to convince others of political arguments (such as the purpose of protest, the reasons why the establishment supports Israel’s genocide and so on) to planning demonstrations and even speaking at rallies for the first time.
This transformative experience lies at the heart of all movements against tyranny and oppression. Protests and activism are not simply a mechanism to achieve demands: they are essential if fundamental social change is to be achieved.
4. Political diversity and cooperation are crucial to success 
Political movements will always be heterogeneous; it is in their nature to inspire and involve people from diverse backgrounds, united in fighting towards a common goal. The encampments illustrate that it is important to learn how to cooperate with others, even if you have significant disagreements with them.
“Our camp has involved a number of different clubs and political groups working together: socialists, Muslim students, the Greens, student clubs, activists from the NTEU [National Tertiary Education Union], as well as independent students and staff”, University of Queensland camp organiser Liam Parry-Mills told Red Flag. He emphasises that this has been one of the camp’s greatest strengths. “It has meant we have been able to have consistently large numbers at every one of our campus protests and teach-ins, even during the last week of classes.”
 Most encampments have striven to make decisions openly and democratically through camp meetings made up of any and all participants who wish to attend. And while they have called for university management to meet with them and answer their demands, most camps have refused to meet with them behind closed doors or carry out secret negotiations.
“There have been debates within our camp about whether political groups should be allowed to sell their publications and leaflet students for other activities not immediately related to the camp”, Hall told Red Flag of the experience in Adelaide. “But a number of political groups defended the right to do so because the stifling of political discussion, debate and diversity within our movement can only weaken the effectiveness of our side.”
5. Experience helps when struggle picks up
No-one predicted the impact that the Columbia encampment would have in the United States and around the world. But once it caught people’s imaginations, it was important to act quickly. 
The movement drew in lots of people new to activism, but it was also vital that there were people there who had been involved in similar activities before. This includes both people who know how to get an action off the ground—how to get the word out, formulate demands and make the camps welcoming to people—as well as people who had previously taken a stand for Palestine, and so were familiar with the lies and slander that were likely to be thrown at us and were confident to counter them. 
In situations like this, the day-in, day-out nature of socialist activity really comes to the fore. Not only are socialist students organised through a network of Socialist Alternative clubs around the country that was able to spread the movement quickly all over the country, but socialists are also used to the detailed work that any movement needs to succeed. Whether it’s making posters and leaflets or talking to people about the issues and convincing them to get more involved, socialists have had a lot of experience in struggle. 
Indeed, the fact that Socialist Alternative had years earlier played an important part in creating Students for Palestine clubs meant that we weren’t beginning from scratch when the camps started. There was already a loose network of people interested in the issue of Palestine with a history of organising. 
And perhaps most importantly, socialists have the politics to convince others to support Palestine and oppose Israel’s powerful supporters. Through Red Flag and other publications, socialists can bring ideas and politics to the actions that others can engage with, learn from and perhaps decide they agree with. 
Of course, socialists aren’t the only ones who have this sort of experience. But unlike most other forces, they organise precisely for this reason—to help win the struggles of today and use the experience to strengthen those in the future.

Lessons from the student encampments

Israel and its defenders argue that the bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza are about “destroying Hamas”. But this is not the first time Israel has conducted such a campaign—the history of the Zionist state is one of permanent war against the Palestinians. Israel committed countless assaults on the Palestinians well before the formation of Hamas in 1987.
During the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nakba-understanding-palestinian-catastrophe">Nakba</a> of 1948 that founded Israel—a process of ethnic cleansing and genocide that forced 1 million Palestinians to flee into the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the neighbouring Arab countries, such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt—the Zionist paramilitaries were supposedly preventing the barbarity of another Holocaust from taking place. 
Zionist leaders warned of a second Holocaust perpetrated by Palestinians (who were defending themselves from the colonising forces), and Zionist militias were instructed by their superiors to liken Palestinian villagers to Nazis. “[T]his was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings”, Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé writes in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 
In the lead-up to the 1967 Israeli war against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the Arab states were presented as a threat to the security of Israel’s borders—an existential crisis that would culminate in Israel’s Jews being “driven into the sea”.
The reality was that the Israeli establishment had always refused to accept the borders established at the end of 1948 (the “Green Line” or the “1967 borders” as they are known today). The Israeli establishment provoked their Arab neighbours into a war they knew Israel would win—providing them cover for further expansion and expelling more Palestinians from their land—defeating their combined armies in six days. 
During this time Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, Syria’s Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert up to the Suez Canal. They also forced another 325,000 of the 900,000 Palestinians in the West Bank to flee into Jordan. 
Throughout the 1970s, “defending Israel against terrorism” was the main justification given for a whole series of atrocities committed in the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian refugee camps of the surrounding countries, such as Jordan and Lebanon, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and large parts of the Palestinian diaspora were located. 
Before Hamas, the PLO was the declared target of these campaigns against “terrorism” because of its commitment to armed struggle to liberate Palestine. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas’ predecessor organisation) was promoted by the Israeli establishment as a moderate alternative to the PLO. 
During the Jordanian civil war of 1970-71, Israel supplied the Jordanian armed forces with ammunition and other supplies used to massacre more than 3,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps under the pretext of fighting the PLO.
During the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon several times in campaigns it said were about wiping out the PLO. Its third invasion in 1982 involved the wholesale destruction of West Beirut, in which 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed and more than 30,000 civilians were wounded. This included the massacre of between 3,000 and 3,500 Palestinians in the refugee camp of Sabra and Shatila, carried out by the Lebanese Phalange (a fascist paramilitary organisation) under the supervision of the Israeli army.
Then there is Israel’s supposed commitment to “peace” from the early 1990s to the present day. The “peace process” involved the PLO <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestinian-authority-complicit-occupied-west-bank">renouncing</a> its commitment to armed struggle to liberate Palestine in return for a Palestinian mini-state in the occupied territories. In reality, the peace process was a continuation of war and occupation by other means. 
During this time, Israel has maintained a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israels-permanent-war-gaza">permanent siege</a> on Gaza and used the pretext of Hamas’ retaliations to carry out repeated offensives against the enclave. Israel also expanded the illegal settlements in the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/how-israel-colonised-west-bank">occupied West Bank</a> in a slow-motion war of land dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The invasion of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israel-ethnically-cleansing-gaza-strip">Gaza</a> and the ramping up of terror in the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israel-ramps-west-bank-terror">West Bank</a> are an acceleration of these processes of ethnic cleansing and dispossession under the cover of “destroying Hamas”. 
Israel has had many different names for the targets of its campaigns: Holocaust supporters, terrorists, the PLO, Hamas. But there has only ever been one target: the whole of Palestinian society.

This war is not about Hamas

The struggle against Israeli apartheid in the West Bank faces its greatest obstacle in the people who claim to be its legitimate representatives: the Palestinian Authority (PA). Through the so-called peace process that created the PA—the Oslo Accords signed by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin between 1993 and 1995—the nationalist project of constructing an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories was transformed into a new means of Palestinian oppression.
Under the Accords, Arafat and the PLO agreed to recognise Israel, guarantee its security and renounce the armed struggle for Palestinian liberation with which the PLO had long been identified. In return, the PLO would be granted a bifurcated Palestinian mini-state alongside Israel: the so-called two-state solution. 
Critics were quick to point out that the PA was neither Palestinian nor an authority: Israel had control over security, borders, trade and a host of other functions typically carried out by a state, and much of the new body’s revenue was dependent on international donors in the West and throughout the Arab world.
The PA retains full civilian and security control over just 18 percent of the West Bank (a section of the territory called Area A); Israel maintains security control over 22 percent (Area B) in which the PA administers education, health and the economy. Sixty percent of the West Bank (Area C) remains under Israeli control.
Arafat and the PLO justified the creation of the PA as an interim governing body until an independent Palestinian state could be established. In reality, the PA has provided a more efficient way for Israel to achieve its strategic goal of controlling the occupied Palestinian territories.
The PA has maintained, courtesy of international aid from the US and the EU, one of the largest per capita police forces in the world to suppress the Palestinians on behalf of Israel. (The PA receives approximately $US400 million annually from the US alone, much of which goes toward supporting its 83,000 security personnel.) Through this police state, the PA has carried out the systematic surveillance, imprisonment, torture and targeted assassination of any forces deemed a threat to Israeli security. 
“We have had to kill Palestinians to establish one authority, one gun and the rule of law”, PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told US deputy Middle East envoy David Hale in 2009. “We continue to perform our obligations. We have invested time and effort and killed our own people to maintain order and the rule of law.”
The PA has facilitated the creation of a narrow layer of Palestinian capitalists who have grown rich in the Gulf states and across the Arab world. Through the monopolisation of government contracts for goods such as cement, steel, petrol, flour and cigarettes, as well as exclusive import permits and custom exemptions, sole rights to distribute goods in the West Bank and distributing government-owned land below its value, this Palestinian capitalist class has been the main beneficiary of the state-assisted “aid” funded by foreign donors. 
Under Arafat’s successor, multimillionaire and hand-picked stooge of US imperialism Mahmoud Abbas, the PA has worked with Israel and the West to crush its main rival, Hamas. This has included a partially successful coup, backed by Israel, the US and the EU, to overturn the 2006 election results, when Hamas won unexpected control of most urban councils and a substantial majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Abbas seized power in the West Bank, but Hamas regained control of the Gaza strip through force. Abbas, whose mandate expired in 2009, has since then dismantled all elected bodies and now rules by decree.
The Fatah leadership of the PA has also collaborated with Israel in the collective punishment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The “Palestine Papers”—a collection of classified documents about the “peace process” leaked to Al Jazeera and published in 2011—reveal that PA officials were informed in advance of the 2008-9 Israeli invasion of Gaza, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. 
PA officials several times urged the Israelis to tighten their grip on the strip, which has subjected more than 2 million Palestinians to hunger and misery. In response to the revelations, a Hamas spokesman remarked at the time: “The men of Fatah who created the Palestinian Authority represent nothing but a betrayal of the interests of the Palestinian people”.
But the signing of Oslo and the establishment of the PA were not merely a case of Fatah and the PLO “selling out”. It expressed the limitations of their political strategy for Palestinian liberation.
While the PLO (founded by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s in an effort to contain and control Palestinian political activity under the banner of the unification of the Arab world) and Fatah (which became the dominant faction in the PLO after the defeat of Nasser in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war) initially championed the liberation of the entirety of historic Palestine, their politics were always class-collaborationist and substituted armed struggle for mass mobilisation. Fatah and the PLO looked to the Arab ruling classes, and not the working classes, as the forces that could be enlisted in the struggle to liberate Palestine.
The PLO conducted operations within Arab countries whose ruling classes were suspicious of, and often hostile to, the revolutionary potential of the Palestinian struggle—in particular the effect it could have on their own working classes. This meant adopting a strategy that argued the liberation of Palestine did not require changes in the economic, social and political structures of the Arab world, and limiting demands to what the Arab ruling classes deemed acceptable. But the reactionary oil-producing Gulf states, from which the PLO received funding, together with Jordan, where the PLO was based until 1970, were just as much a part of the Western-backed regional order as their counterparts in Israel. 
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Israel exploited this policy of “non-interference” in the internal affairs of Arab states and inflicted a series of devastating defeats on the PLO. The result was Fatah and the PLO’s abandonment of the goal of the liberation of all of Palestine and the limitation of its demands to a Palestinian mini-state in the occupied territories.
Today, a security wall and a system of road networks, checkpoints and a plethora of other obstacles restricting the movement of Palestinians have carved up the West Bank’s towns and villages into an archipelago of non-contiguous Bantustans. 
This has been combined with an intensification of settler violence and military raids under Netanyahu’s far-right government. According to United Nations figures, 218 Palestinians in Area C have been forcibly displaced as a result of demolitions since the beginning of this year, and a further 200 have had their homes demolished in East Jerusalem. This has taken place alongside an increase in violence committed by the Israeli military—34 Palestinian youths were murdered in the West Bank in the first several months of 2023, according to Human Rights Watch.
Israel’s war on Gaza is accelerating these processes: more than 100 Palestinians have been killed, mostly in altercations with the Israeli military, since the start of the war. This has included a number of raids, such as that which took place at the Nour Shams refugee camp and resulted in the deaths of 13 Palestinians, including five children under the age of 15. More than 1,500 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli security forces in the West Bank since 7 October. 
In recent years, the PA has also faced resistance from public sector workers, in particular teachers, over wages. During the previous school year, teachers led a 57-day strike that ended with an agreement signed by PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, in which he agreed to raise teacher salaries by 15 percent and establish an independent and democratic teachers’ committee. (Neither has yet come to fruition.) Palestinian public teachers’ protests since 2016 have been described as Palestine’s most significant social movement in decades. Currently, some 54,000 Palestinian teachers work in the public education sector.
These strikes have taken place against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis caused in no small part by Israel’s punitive measures against the PA. Chief among these is a law passed in 2018 to withhold half a billion shekels (around $140 million) each year from the taxes Israel collects and transfers to the PA in compliance with the Oslo Accords, due to the PA’s financial support for the families of those held in Israeli prisons. Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s far-right government further crippled the authority when it decided to deduct an additional 50 million shekels (more than $US14 million) each month from the tax revenues it collects on the Palestinians’ behalf, among other punitive measures.
Israel’s war in Gaza has also intensified the crisis of legitimacy facing the PA. After the Israeli bombing of Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, protests erupted throughout cities across the PA-controlled West Bank, including Nablus, Tubas and Jenin, a northern city that was the focus of extensive Israeli military operations earlier this year. In Ramallah (the administrative centre of the PA) crowds threw rocks at police cars near Manara square and chanted the slogan of the Arab Spring: “The people want the fall of the regime!”
The response of the PA has been to mobilise the armed forces at its disposal, firing tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and live ammunition at protests. In Jenin, a 12-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl was killed when PA security forces used live ammunition to crush the protests. 
Any serious challenge to Israeli apartheid in the West Bank will require standing up to, and ultimately overthrowing, the Palestinian Authority. And that will mean breaking with the class-collaborationist politics of the PLO and Fatah that led the Palestinian struggle into this disaster.

Palestinian Authority complicit in the occupied West Bank

Millions of people across the Arab world have joined demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza. Mass demonstrations have taken place in Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Yemen and Qatar. In Damascus, Syria, Palestinians from the Yarmouk camp rallied in support of their compatriots in Gaza.
Outside both the <a href="https://twitter.com/LaCadutaDiRoma/status/1714414990310920495">French</a> and US Embassies in Tunis (Tunisia’s capital) thousands demonstrated as part of calls for national mobilisations by most of the country’s political parties and trade unions. (Many cite these as the <a href="https://twitter.com/ASE/status/1714682816682701131">largest</a> demonstration in the country since the 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Ben Ali.) Protesters held signs pointing to US lies that justified the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, chanting: “No one of is free until Palestine is free!”
In <a href="https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1715693477667684397">Yemen</a> an estimated 1.5 million people took part in demonstrations against the war. In many countries, such as <a href="https://twitter.com/muslim/status/1713628462643122336?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">Morocco</a> and Bahrain, protesters have demanded a reversal of their government’s “normalisation” with Israel—the act of recognising and establishing diplomatic ties with the Zionist state—and collaboration with Western powers.
Hundreds of demonstrators <a href="https://twitter.com/chrisllayne2/status/1714694825511973009?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">clashed</a> with Lebanese armed forces outside the US Embassy in Beirut, the capital, after Hezbollah called for a “day of unprecedented rage”.
In Istanbul, Turkey, 80,000 people massed outside the Israeli consulate, including some who attempted to storm the building armed with stones, sticks, torches and fireworks, forcing Israel to withdraw its diplomats from the country. 
In Jordan, <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffreyGuterman/status/1715414923881152525?s=20">mass demonstrations</a> have taken place in the capital, Amman, as well as the cities of Irbid and Zarqa. Protesters <a href="https://twitter.com/thewakeninq/status/1714510979894022343?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">demanded</a> the <a href="https://twitter.com/mylordbebo/status/1714382007709438105?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">expulsion</a> of the <a href="https://twitter.com/arsenze1/status/1715140868494020882?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">Israeli ambassador</a>, the end of the 1994 peace treaty with Israel, and the nullification of an agreement to buy natural gas from Israel, which Jordan signed in 2016. Protesters have also demanded the <a href="https://twitter.com/sprinter99800/status/1714401764722495794?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">opening</a> of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank (there are an <a href="https://minorityrights.org/minorities/palestinians-2/">estimated</a> 3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan) and many <a href="https://twitter.com/doamuslims/status/1712747865443828171">descended</a> on the border and even attempted to <a href="https://twitter.com/epsa_media/status/1712808811184914901?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">scale</a> its walls.
After the Israeli bombing of Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, Jordanian officials were forced to cancel a summit that was to host US president Joe Biden, Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Meanwhile, hundreds of young people tried <a href="https://twitter.com/leandro_ptbr/status/1714884341820440866?s=20">storming</a> the Israeli Embassy building in the capital, shouting: “No Zionist embassy on Arab land!” 
Sisi, who seized power in a 2013 coup, and his regime, which plays an important role maintaining the siege on Gaza, have also become targets of demonstrations, with protesters demanding the closure of the Israeli embassy and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador. They also called for the peace treaties between Egypt and Israel to be scrapped.
<a href="https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1714612622614561010">Protests</a> have taken place at several <a href="https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1714619569245921633">university</a> campuses, in Alexandria’s Port Said, as well as at the Rafah Crossing linking Gaza and Egypt. Protests have also erupted at Cairo’s <a href="https://twitter.com/arsenze1/status/1715319036475514900?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">Al-Azhar mosque</a>, as worshippers took part in unplanned demonstrations after Friday prayers. 
For the first time since the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/remembering-egyptian-revolution-hossam-el-hamalawy">Egyptian revolution of 2011-13</a>, protesters <a href="https://twitter.com/ahmedanglian/status/1715365146434945463?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">broke</a> through police lines into Tahrir Square, the historic centre of the 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak. Protesters chanted, “The people want the fall of Israel!”, modifying a common <a href="https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1715357397332463853">chant</a> from the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/ten-years-great-arab-revolutions">Arab Spring</a>: “The people want the fall of the regime”.
The mobilisations are significant not only for the solidarity they express with Palestinians facing occupation, war and genocide—they are a potential nightmare for Israel, the West and the complicit Arab regimes. 
Because there is no substantial Palestinian working class or urban population that can strike decisive blows against Israel, any serious challenge to Israeli apartheid will require standing up to, and ultimately toppling, the Arab ruling classes that help normalise the Zionist state. 
Throughout the Middle East there are areas in which concentrations of workers are endowed with immense potential power: oil and transport workers, including dock workers, who can disrupt the flow of profits to the ruling classes and who can restrict the movement of goods in and out of Israel; and white-collar workers in the government sector who have the power to cripple the state apparatuses.

Protests in the Arab world

Two years after seizing power in a coup, Min Aung Hlaing’s junta in Myanmar continues to be ensnared in a civil war that shows no signs of abating. 
Since the military crushed the mass strikes that emerged in opposition to the coup, tens of thousands of armed youth, small farmers and workers (people’s defence forces, or PDFs), alongside ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) have clashed with the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, in parts of Chin, Shan, Karen and Kachin states, across the Sagaing region and throughout the Irrawaddy delta.
The Tatmadaw is reportedly suffering from a lack of resources and morale problems that are undermining its ability to fight. As many as 8,000 soldiers and police are thought to have been killed by opposition groups, while an estimated 10,000 have defected to the opposition. By contrast, EAO and PDF forces in Chin, Karen and Kachin states are now advancing into previously junta-controlled territory and setting up interim local governments as they secure control over the newly won territories.
The junta has waged an ongoing campaign of terror against its opponents. More than 16,500 people have been arrested since the coup and more than 13,000 of them remain in prison, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. The AAPP estimates that more than 2,500 people have been killed since the junta took power.
Junta-run courts have imposed the death penalty on 138 people, including 41 in absentia. In July, four political prisoners accused of carrying out “terror acts” against the military government were hanged. The executions are the first to be carried out in Myanmar since the late 1980s. In November, seven Dagon University students were sentenced to death on similar charges. It is unclear when the students will be executed.
“The junta is targeting students and young people because we have been at the forefront of resistance to the regime”, Min,* a student activist and member of the University of Yangon Students’ Union, tells Red Flag from Myanmar. “The purpose of the trials and executions is to strike fear in the hearts of those who wish to resist the regime.”
But Min says it is the regime that lives in fear. “The junta is terrified by the prospect of young people leading a revolution against the regime. The junta is despised and hated by the majority of people in Myanmar. The junta may be in power, but they are not in control.”
Min has been on the run from the Tatmadaw since early April 2021, after arrest warrants were issued for him and other student activists on the charge of inciting mutiny in the armed forces. Since then, Min has been based in the “liberated areas”—territory in the borderlands that is controlled by EAOs and no longer under the control of the Tatmadaw. He has recently returned to the central lowlands but remains in hiding.
“Because of the terror, student activist networks are scattered and isolated all throughout the countryside”, Min says. “And the situation in the major cities makes it impossible to organise protests that won’t be violently crushed by the security forces.”
It is a similar story in Yangon’s industrial zones. “The factory managers attempt to rule through fear and terror”, Ko Maung,* an independent researcher and labour activist, tells Red Flag. “If workers have grievances, there is the threat that if they protest, the managers will call in the military. The fear has a huge impact on the confidence of workers to organise and resist.”
Ko Maung and many labour activists were forced to flee to the Thailand-Myanmar border after the junta outlawed a number of trade unions and issued arrest warrants for trade union leaders associated with the illegal unions. But in an attempt to legitimise the post-coup arrangement, the junta maintains that unions, unionisation and collective bargaining remain legal, which means that a number of trade unions remain legal. It has provided limited space through which workers have continued to organise collectively for improved wages and conditions.
In garment factories across Yangon’s industrial zones, where factory-level unions maintain strength and cohesion, Ko Maung says that the threat of strike action is enough to ward off attacks from factory managers and force concessions. “The bosses don’t dare force these workers to do overtime”, he says. “Because workers respond by saying: ‘If you call overtime, we will go on strike!’”
The residual class confidence that Ko Maung points to is the legacy of more than a decade of union organising that took place under civilian-military rule. The expansion of the rights to strike and form a trade union created space for activists to create hundreds of new unions during this period. And unlike countries in which trade unions are well established, with entrenched bureaucracies and passive leaders, many of these unions were established through wildcat strikes and riots.
The period of civilian-military rule also created a combative environment among students, who fought to re-establish student unions, which had been banned under the previous junta. This activism led to the creation of political associations in which students could discuss and debate political topics openly for the first time in more than five decades.
A number of more explicitly radical forums also flourished, including Marxist discussion circles. These groups have become the main organisations on the far left in Myanmar today: the Stalinist-Maoist Leftist Youth Organisation, the Trotskyist group Revolutionary Marxism and the Social Democratic United Front (SDUF). Alongside the militant sections of student and trade unions, these groups were crucial to calling the early demonstrations in opposition to the coup, which in turn acted as the social detonator for the mass strikes that followed.
Aung Maung,* a member of the SDUF, says that political experience meant that the radical left was able to seize the possibilities opened up by the coup. “We knew that if we provide a lead, mass resistance will follow”, he explains. “And if there was mass resistance, we knew there would be a revolution to stop the coup, a revolution to completely abolish the junta, the military clique and the military-bureaucratic capitalism.”
Min Aung Hlaing’s junta represents a wing of the Burmese ruling class: the leading personnel of the Tatmadaw, military-controlled conglomerates, Burmese state capitalists, cronies subservient to state patronage networks and the most reactionary sections of the Buddhist clergy and the far right. 
The dominant perspective on the left in Myanmar is that armed struggle can act as a substitute for the social power of the working class in overthrowing the junta. It is partly informed by the conclusion drawn by many after the collapse of the February and March strike wave: the working class does not have the power to defeat Min Aung Hlaing’s regime; only armed struggle can win.
The important exception is the Trotskyist group Revolutionary Marxism. They argue that the inability of the February and March strike wave to topple the junta was due to the absence of a political leadership that could extend the strike movement into broader sections of the working class, transform the movement into a fight for control over production and promote widespread mutinies within the armed forces. 
The key task for revolutionaries in Myanmar, they argue, must be to build a revolutionary Marxist party that can organise the most advanced workers to lead the mass of workers and draw behind them the broader masses (small farmers and ethnic minorities) in a revolution that not just overturns military rule but smashes the entire Burmese ruling class.
In a polemic with the Trotskyists written for the SDUF’s publication Social Democrat, Lin Htal Aung* argues that, to be successful, the struggle against the junta needs a cross-class alliance: 
“The movement is a national liberation struggle in which the emerging bourgeoisie and some of the revolutionary national bourgeoisie joined forces [with the working class and small farmers] ... It is true that the revolution needs to build working-class leadership. But at the same time, the practical conditions demand that we fight for a form of democracy that is lower than workers’ democracy. Therefore, we are trying to build a revolutionary front that includes all classes.”
Marxists argue that social class divisions are irreconcilable and that political programs that express a desire for unity between workers and capitalists can only strengthen the hand of the ruling class while hamstringing the workers’ movement. But Lin Htal Aung argues that the movement against the junta “cannot have a political view that represents only one class”. This is precisely what he is proposing when he says that elements of the “revolutionary bourgeoisie” (the leading personnel of EAOs and associated parties) have the same interests as the classes that they oppress and exploit. 
Only one class can become dominant in such a movement: either the capitalists, who want a form of democracy in which they can exploit and oppress the other classes, or the working class—leading other oppressed groups—which aims not only to establish democracy, but to overthrow the entire ruling class. 
In an article for the publication The Struggle, Jack,* a member of Revolutionary Marxism, argues that in practice this perspective means abandoning the political independence of the working class: “Presenting reactionary elements to the public as the revolutionary class is a betrayal of the revolution. In other words, the interests of the working class are subsumed under the interests of a section of the bourgeoisie”.
Fighting for a perspective that maintains the political independence of the working class does not mean that an organisation will be able to gain a mass audience. Indeed, the government’s terror makes opposition in urban centres increasingly difficult and dangerous. But the ongoing resistance by workers—combined with ongoing flash mob demonstrations organised by young people—illustrates that there is still space for underground organising in the cities.
This is because the brutality that characterises Min Aung Hlaing’s junta is not only producing misery—it is also producing widespread anger and a desire for an alternative. If the situation shifts, a renewed mass movement in urban centres could develop.
Rahul Kyaw Ko Ko contributed to this article.
* Names changed.

What future for Myanmar? Perspectives from the left

Video footage from late December shows elderly patients infected with COVID-19 on stretchers receiving oxygen stored in large blue bottles. They are being treated on the road outside the emergency department of Zhongshan Hospital, one of the largest in Shanghai.
Behind the emergency room doors, hundreds of patients and their relatives fill the foyer. More than 50 people can be seen waiting in a line in front of the first counter, regularly pushed by passing stretchers, wheelchairs and doctors in a hurry. In the rooms, corridors and even in front of the toilets, hundreds of mostly elderly patients are receiving the same treatment as those on the road outside. 
“The healthcare system has collapsed. Hospitals everywhere in China resemble the one that I work in”, Li,* a doctor at Zhongshan Hospital, tells Red Flag via encrypted message. He says that while staff at the hospital no longer have to treat patients on the road, the hospital continues to be overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. “Many are stuck waiting in the emergency room for hours, and there are not enough staff or resources to treat them.”
Since the ruling Communist Party abandoned its commitment to COVID zero in early December, the Omicron variant has moved through major cities at a blistering pace. In Beijing, an estimated 17 million people (80 per cent of inhabitants) have been infected, while in Shanghai, an estimated 17.5 million people have been infected (70 per cent of inhabitants, according to statements by local health officials). The highest rate of infection is in Gansu province in north-western China, with 23.9 million people (91 per cent of the population) infected with COVID-19. An estimated 900 million people in total have been infected since mid-December, according to a recent study by Peking University.
Official statistics are skewed by the lack of testing and criteria that rule out the virus as the cause of death if the deceased had a pre-existing health condition. But evidence is mounting of a massive unrecorded death toll from COVID-19: video footage on Chinese social media from countless locations across the country shows vehicles delivering bodies and residents in long queues at crematoria, and many social media users have posted about losing loved ones to the virus.
Most estimates put the likely death toll at more than 1 million in the coming year. UK health analytics company Airfinity estimated that China's cumulative deaths since December would reach 584,000 by 23 January and 1.7 million by the end of April. It pegged daily cases at 2.99 million and daily deaths at 18,900 as of 9 January.
Although the wave of infections has reportedly peaked in major cities, the virus is now hammering smaller cities and rural areas, where serious illness and death will likely be more widespread given older populations and the lack of medical resources. As of 2020, there were only 1.6 healthcare workers for every thousand people in rural China, compared to 2.9 doctors and 3.3 nurses nationally.
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters that the second wave will be accelerated by the arrival of Chinese New Year on 22 January, when many migrant workers traditionally travel from cities back to their homes in the country. He added that these two waves will be followed by a third wave lasting until mid-March. Many provinces, including Zhenjiang, Shandong and Hubei, expect the outbreak to peak later this month.
Despite the peak of the first wave of infections in major cities, hospitals continue to be overwhelmed. In addition, deaths tend to lag infection by several weeks, so hospitals and morgues will continue to fill even as cases in major cities decline. “The hospital cases and the severe cases will not peak at the same time”, Li says. “It’s one or two weeks later. So we may still be seeing more hospitalisations in the coming weeks and more severe cases and more deaths, even if the infections have already peaked. Health workers must continue working even when they test positive or have not fully recovered.”
Li contracted the virus in December and “had no choice but to continue working”. He says that many staff are having to work shifts of anywhere up to 48 hours while infected. “We work with high fever, tight chest, constant coughing and pumping heart. We can work hard; we can work overtime. But we are made of flesh, not iron.”
According to a survey by Yimi Research, an estimated six out of ten doctors and nurses have been working while infected. The survey found that 70 per cent of the surveyed 3,013 medical workers across China had contracted COVID-19 between 20 and 26 December.
Many hospitals have tried to separate the positive cases from the negative to protect the most vulnerable groups—including the pregnant, the elderly and those with severe chronic conditions—but they soon find there aren’t enough COVID-free health workers for the negative zone. 
Hua,* a doctor from the obstetrics and gynaecology department at Wuhan University’s Renmin Hospital, central Hubei province, told Red Flag via encrypted message that her hospital initially designated an area for pregnant women, but a patient who tested positive after undergoing surgery on 19 December soon infected the entire department.
Hua says she is concerned about the prevalence of severe illness caused by COVID-19 among pregnant women. “Fever is a dangerous situation for pregnant women and babies”, she says. “When some babies are cut out of the amniotic fluid, it feels like they’ve been in boiling water. Many are sent to the ICU immediately after birth.”
Jing,* a nurse at the same hospital, says there are so many patients with pneumonia caused by COVID-19, mostly in their 70s and 80s, that the hospital had to take over wards from other departments, such as paediatric, surgical and orthopaedic, with beds filled as soon as they become available.
Jing also witnessed deaths, mostly of the elderly, more frequently than before the COVID-19 wave. “Too many old people have passed away lately. One or more every day on average in our hospital. It used to be very rare, maybe one in a few months”, she says.
Li says that those who are routinely held up by the Communist Party as “the heroes who build the nation”—mothers, the elderly, health workers—have become “nothing but cannon fodder in this crime against humanity”.
For many commentators, the pace at which the Chinese government has abandoned its commitment to COVID zero has come as a shock. For almost three years, Xi Jinping pinned his legitimacy to suppression of the virus. Unlike the United States, where a “profits before people” political framework often dominated, resulting in more than 1 million fatalities, China’s policy had, until late last year, averted mass death. (Despite having four times the population of the US, China had reported just more than 5,000 fatalities by late November.) For the Communist Party, COVID zero demonstrated a commitment, in its words, to put “people first, life first”.
Ji Hengge,* a Marxist on the Chinese mainland, says that despite the different approaches of the US and China towards COVID-19, both strategies have been underpinned by a commitment to maintaining the logic of competitive capital accumulation.
“When COVID-19 first emerged in late 2019, the Chinese government initially adopted a policy of suppressing information about the virus”, he says. “It was only when COVID-19 was no longer under control—generating popular backlash against the Chinese state’s failure to deal with the virus—that the government shifted to a strategy of suppressing the virus. By April 2020, these measures had evolved into the ‘dynamic COVID zero’ strategy.”
During 2020 and 2021, COVID zero was largely successful, with overwhelming public support for the health measures. For the Chinese capitalist class, the economy was able to maintain growth and profitability, while the avoidance of mass infection and death was used to increase the legitimacy of the government. Meanwhile, the surveillance capacities of the regime were expanded by increasing its monitoring of personal information and movement. 
Over the course of 2022, however, confidence in the strategy began to fall apart. “During the Shanghai lockdown, which brought production and life to a halt, many more people died from the lockdown measures than from COVID-19 itself”, Ji Hengge says. “This discontent finally erupted into the anti-lockdown social movement in November 2022. In response, they quickly abandoned COVID zero.”
Before the pandemic, China’s economic growth rates had been in decline for several years. Ji Hengge says that the impact of the pandemic has exacerbated a decline in Chinese manufacturing and burst China’s real estate bubble: 
“Although the abandonment of COVID zero will lead to a recovery in industries such as hospitality and tourism, and a small recovery in manufacturing, the fundamental problems that triggered the economic crisis will not have been solved. Factories will continue to lay off workers and attempt to relocate overseas. The US-China trade war over high-tech industries such as semiconductors will continue. The real estate crisis will increase the level of financial risk in China, which will make international finance capital less stable. And so, the Chinese economy will show slow growth in the next few years, and may even contract at times.”
Ji Hengge says that recession in China would further concentrate monopoly in the economy and push big capitalists to increase their export of capital overseas. “In terms of trade and investment, this will intensify competition with other countries. It will also lead to increased geopolitical confrontation.”
Inside China, political polarisation has emerged among some of the government’s most ardent online supporters. Many have begun to express unease at the way in which the abandonment of COVID zero is playing out.
“The tsunami of infections caused by Omicron in Beijing has surpassed expectations”, wrote Hu Xijin, a nationalist former newspaper editor, on his Weibo account on 25 December. Concerning the COVID-related deaths of old people, he told his nearly 25 million followers, “This kind of price causes people sorrow”. Another Chinese journalist, with nearly 1.9 million followers, called the relaxation of COVID controls “chaotic” and “ill prepared”. On 29 December, a neo-Maoist website, Utopia, published a commentary accusing the government of ditching its strategy too swiftly. “We’re not a racing car, but a big bus full of old, weak, ill and handicapped people”, it said. “A smooth and steady transition is extremely important.” (The article has since been deleted by the censors.)
Many commentators have also sought to blame the protests that took place in late November for the current outbreak and rising deaths. But Au Loong Yu, author of China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility, says that the demands and aims of the November protests must be separated from the current wave of infections and deaths. “The November protests did not have as their goal the abandonment of all the health measures. The protests were not even anti-lockdown per se. What they were fighting against was ‘lock up’: ‘lockdowns with Chinese characteristics’”, he says via email.
He notes that “lockdowns with Chinese characteristics” had no regard for basic human needs, such as access to food or medicine, and failed to protect human life. “The people endured the lock up for three whole years”, he says. “Then they understood that the only way to protect human life and their freedom of movement was to rebel against the lock up.”
In the absence of any political leadership that could provide the protests with coherent demands—such as public health measures that both protect lives and respect other basic human needs—the Chinese state was able to suppress the protests through the threat of repression, while conceding to one of their main demands (“end the lock up”). In doing so, the government was able rapidly to abandon the entirety of the health measures over the course of December.
Although the abandonment of COVID zero has not been met with the same scale of resistance seen in November, there have been moments of confrontation.
In mid-December, demonstrations took place at medical schools and hospitals in Chongqing, Chengdu, Nanjing, Xuzhou, Nanchang, Kunming, Guangzhou, Nanning, Nanchong and Hefei. Most of the demonstrators were professional graduate students in various hospitals who must perform the same work as other trainees and residents, but are deprived of the same salary rights on the grounds that they are students. “If we are regarded as doctors, then we must have equal pay for equal work, guaranteed treatment and clear scope of work responsibilities”, graduate students from Soochow University said in a statement. “If we are regarded as students, then unreasonable requirements for posting must be cancelled, give the students a holiday to go home and rest, and stop the squeeze in the name of dedication.”
In Chengdu, Sichuan province, south-western China, 300 students from the West China School of Medicine demonstrated and marched in mid-December after the death, due to heart failure, of a medical student surnamed Chen, who was working as a trainee. Although the administration did not link his death to COVID-19 or any underlying health issues, a post by Chen’s classmates on Weibo revealed that he was forced to continue working after testing positive for the virus days before he died.
In early January, thousands of retrenched workers clashed with riot police at a pharmaceutical plant in Chongqing operated by COVID test kit manufacturer Zybio. The factory fired more than 10,000 workers, many of whom were owed back pay, due to a drop in orders from medical companies following the government’s abandonment of the COVID zero strategy.
Video footage shows workers throwing traffic cones, boxes and stools at police carrying riot shields. In another video, hundreds of workers are seen destroying rapid antigen test supplies and finished products while chanting, “Return our money!” In response, Zybio has been forced to pay at least some of the unpaid wages. 
Ji Hengge says that sporadic struggles of Chinese workers have been taking place around unpaid wages for the period of leave due to COVID-19 infection, albeit in an isolated manner. “Alongside the Foxconn riots in Zhengzhou last November, these are early indicators that working-class combativity may become more frequent in the coming period”, he says.
The handling of the outbreak has created a crisis of legitimacy for Xi Jinping’s government. “This crisis further exposes that the CCP is corrupted to its core”, says Au Loong Yu. “And one thing is increasingly clear to larger numbers of the population: Xi Jinping and the CCP are the biggest threat to the health of the Chinese people.”
*Name changed.
Lam Chi Leung contributed to this article.

From crisis to catastrophe: COVID-19 engulfs China

Video footage shows a crowd of students at Tsinghua University in Beijing holding up blank pieces of paper and chanting, “Democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression!” Through a loudspeaker, a young woman can be heard in the background shouting: “If because we are afraid of being arrested, we don’t speak, I believe our people will be disappointed in us. As a Tsinghua student, I will regret this my entire life!”
“We are holding up blank pieces of paper because it represents everything we want to say but can’t due to the censors”, Zhao* tells Red Flag via encrypted message from the Chinese mainland. He is a 22-year-old Shanghai native who recently graduated from a university in Beijing. Zhao says many young people have lost confidence in COVID zero after a string of tragedies such as the Guizhou bus crash, which killed 27 patients who were being transported to a quarantine facility. Meanwhile, the consolidation of Xi Jinping’s rule for a historic third term—combined with widespread youth unemployment and diminishing job prospects for university graduates—is creating disaffected layers of youth in Chinese society.
“This sense of powerlessness and fear makes us feel disheartened about our future”, Zhao says. “Many of us say we’ll be the ‘last generation’ [young people in China who choose not to have kids as a form of protest] and choose to ‘lie flat’ [do the bare minimum], because we don’t think that things will get any better. We’re unwilling to allow the unborn generation to come into this world and endure the torture of not being free.
“I joined the protests because they were a new and incredible experience for me. It is difficult for us mainlanders to have any first-hand experience of social movements because of state repression ... I stand with all those who are fighting for their freedom: Uyghurs, Tibetans, the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan. I want the entire system to be dismantled and for everyone to be able to speak freely.”
Historically, students have been at the forefront of resistance to Communist Party rule. During the 1989 uprising, they played a leading role in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which acted as the social detonator for a nationwide strike movement. But after the movement was defeated, university campuses became tightly monitored and increasingly repressive. 
From the mid-2000s, a less authoritarian environment led to the emergence of Marxist student groups with some degree of independence from the Communist Party. Student activists connected with networks of labour activists in the Pearl River Delta and involved themselves in labour organising. 
This came to an end in 2018, when a failed unionisation drive provoked a crackdown by authorities. University administrations disciplined students and severely restricted the activities of the Marxists. Peking University disbanded its Marxist Studies Society in the name of “reorganisation”. In early 2019, the students who protested against disciplinary actions were harassed, beaten and jailed; some even disappeared.
“The protests on campus mark the beginnings of a student movement, especially as some activist students are beginning to distrust the government and school authorities”, Ji Hengge,* a Marxist, tells Red Flag from the Chinese mainland. “These demonstrations, which took place at more than 50 university campuses [from 26 to 27 November this year] were the largest since the 1989 uprising. This is still a long way from a large-scale student movement, especially as students are not sufficiently organised at the moment. Their protests are mostly spontaneous, their demands are often not unified, and most students have not even acted yet. But these protests in university can become a model for other students—they have shown that students can fight for their rights through protest.”
The Foxconn iPhone assembly plant in Henan, the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, employs more than 200,000 workers and accounts for 60 percent of the province’s exports. It has been the site of fierce resistance to industrial policies that force workers to live inside the factory. 
In late October, information began circulating about COVID infections and deaths inside the factory. Fearing infection and being unable to leave, thousands of workers scaled the factory walls and squeezed between fences to escape to their hometowns. “They always put the quantity of products first and human life comes second. Human life means nothing to them”, remarked Ms Zhang,* one of the workers who escaped, in a Chinese-language interview on WeChat. 
In the aftermath, local governments across Zhengzhou initiated a draft to ease Foxconn’s labour shortages. (Apple was counting on Zhengzhou Foxconn to produce its new iPhone 14 in time for the Christmas season.) 
In early November, 10,000 new workers from Henan and surrounding provinces arrived at the factory. But the bonus payments the new workers had been promised upon arrival (6,000 yuan, approximately US$860) were reported to be withheld until March next year. In response, thousands of workers clashed with riot police, breaking through barricades and hurling them at security personnel. Foxconn was forced to compensate each recruit 10,000 yuan and provide free bus rides to workers who wanted to leave the factory and return to their hometowns.
“Foxconn presented in concentrated form what many people have been experiencing inside China”, Eli Friedman, co-editor of China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance, says via Zoom from the United States. “Since the Shanghai lockdown earlier this year, capital has been allowed to circulate freely while human mobility is reduced to a bare minimum—with workers forced to sleep, eat and work in their places of employment—in an effort to contain the virus while maintaining economic growth. This is a very different situation to the zero COVID policy in Wuhan in 2020, when only the bare essentials of life were operating.” 
In this “closed loop” system, responsibility for the workers’ welfare (including COVID measures) is placed on individual firms such as Foxconn. “These corporations have no experience, no capacity and frankly no interest in keeping these workers alive at any decent level of humane subsistence”, says Friedman. “It is easy to see how a situation like this quickly falls apart: rumours start to spread, healthy people are getting sick, co-workers are dying in their dormitories. And so it makes complete sense: workers ran for the exit.”
Friedman points out that any form of coordinated action such as this requires at least some level of organisation. “From the outside it is hard to know exactly what networks were involved. But if you lock up 200,000 mostly young people in a factory and force them to live in dormitories together—it is precisely this type of environment where grievances can be discussed and labour organising can start to happen.”
Jude Howell, in a piece for Made in China journal, notes that, from the early 2000s, a more relaxed attitude toward foreign NGOs on the part of the Chinese government led to the creation of independent labour organisations. These, in turn, helped generate activist networks involved in an upswing of working-class self-activity, which coincided with a boom in export-oriented manufacturing. In 2010, strikes erupted at Foxconn and Honda in Guangdong province, before spreading to Toyota in Tianjin, a city near Beijing in the north-east, and throughout several factories in the south of the country. The strikes won a series of wage increases and improved conditions, spurring on a strike wave in mostly foreign-owned factories until late 2015.
Since then, Xi Jinping’s government has been largely successful in eliminating the networks, arresting labour leaders and activists, driving others into hiding, and closing the independent labour organisations. Combined with an economic slowdown and a decline in working-class confidence, the result has been a dramatic decrease in strikes and labour organising in recent years. 
The initial impact of the Foxconn uprising is cause for quiet optimism. “The image of migrant workers standing up to big capital and the Chinese state has now entered the national imagination”, Friedman says. “Although it has been erased from the mainstream narrative, the Foxconn uprising laid the basis for the riots that would follow in Urumqi and the subsequent demonstrations that erupted on the campuses and in the streets.”
A fire in an apartment block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in which at least ten people died—widely blamed on COVID restrictions that lock apartment buildings from the outside and prevent access to emergency services—sparked demonstrations across the country that took aim at aspects of the public health measures that many believe are failing to protect lives. The victims of the fire were all Uyghur: the oppressed Muslim-majority ethnic group in Xinjiang. After the fire, riots broke out when thousands of Han majority demonstrators surrounded government buildings and demanded justice for the victims, as well as the relaxation of COVID restrictions to allow greater access to food and essential services.
Demonstrations in solidarity with the victims of the Urumqi fire soon spread to Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou and many other towns and cities in late November—lighting candles, laying white flowers and holding blank pieces of paper over their faces and heads (white is the traditional colour of mourning in China). Many demonstrations evolved into calls to end the lockdowns; some even demanded that the Communist Party and Xi Jinping step down. In Beijing, at least a thousand people gathered along Beijing’s third ring road, chanting: “We are all Xinjiang people!”
“Fewer Uyghurs than Han participated in the protests, in large part because the government has been more politically repressive and vindictive towards Uyghurs”, Ji Hengge explains. “Although the movement quickly subsided and the subject of Uyghur oppression is not currently on the agenda, the demonstrations showed the potential for Uyghurs and Han Chinese to fight in unity in the face of a common oppressor ... Overall, it was a struggle for unity between the Uyghurs and the Han Chinese.”
Outside the mainland, solidarity protests spread to Hong Kong on 27 and 28 November. Students at the University of Hong Kong distributed leaflets relating to the Urumqi fire and held up blank pieces of paper, while small groups of people gathered in the central business district with messages of solidarity for the mainland. 
“These people have shown immense courage by gathering again to express their dissatisfaction with the regime”, Lam Chi Leung, a socialist, says via email from Hong Kong. “Since the defeat of the 2019 uprising and the passage of the national security law, many people have been too afraid to protest. The mainlanders have given Hong Kong activists some confidence and provided them with a reason to stand up and fight.”
Since the 1990s, Hong Kong has been home to groups dedicated to the development inside the Chinese mainland of social movements related to gender equality, human rights, environmental issues and labour solidarity. Most organisations have either ceased operations or significantly reduced their work due to the increased repression.
Small numbers of pro-democracy activists who once held a negative view of mainlanders—due to their indifference (or opposition) to the 2019 uprising and the previous waves of pro-democracy struggles—have changed their attitude and involved themselves in solidarity protests. Others have refused to do so because of the lack of mainland solidarity with Hong Kong in the past. 
“I completely disagree with this attitude”, Lam Chi Leung says of those who refuse to offer solidarity. “It serves only to divide the people of Hong Kong from the mainland; it strengthens the CCP regime that oppresses us both. The working class of China and Hong Kong have a common interest in fighting for democracy and social equality in our countries. Only when people in China and Hong Kong unite in common struggle do we have any chance of defeating the CCP.” 
Since 1989, the Chinese Communist Party has faced much larger protests than those that took place in recent weeks. But the previous waves of struggle have been mostly localised and have tended to avoid criticising the national government. The narrowing of the field of acceptable dissent under Xi Jinping—primarily through greater repression—created the conditions for the most widespread protests since 1989. 
Beijing has now abandoned its commitment to COVID zero and lifted certain public health measures such as lockdowns. Feng Zijian, an adviser on China’s COVID task force, estimates that the resulting surge could infect 60 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion population. New modelling by Wigram Capital Advisors, a macroeconomic advisory group that has provided modelling to governments during the pandemic, published in the Financial Times suggests that as many as 1 million people could die in the coming months. The figure might seem improbable, implying as it does a death rate higher than any other country has yet experienced. But even a fraction of such a total would be a public health disaster. In a country such as Australia—which is far better placed and better prepared to deal with the fallout from letting the virus rip—the hospital system remains in crisis and long-COVID has become its own public health disaster, crippling tens if not hundreds of thousands of working-class people. 
One question is whether Beijing, in dropping its incredibly punitive lockdowns, will implement public health measures that both protect lives and respect other basic human needs. Such measures would include paying workers to stay at home while ensuring their needs are adequately met, shutting down non-essential industries, implementing strict occupational health and safety measures in essential industries that remain open, dramatically expanding healthcare infrastructure and introducing vaccination mandates using vaccines that are scientifically proven to be the most effective.
Another question is whether those forms of “institutional memory” in the Chinese labour and student movements that Xi Jinping’s regime has effectively destroyed can now be regenerated as the virus widely spreads. Only time will tell. After all, while the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States flourished despite the carnage of the pandemic, in other places, such as Hong Kong, political activity was severely reduced as young people implemented their own public health measures, cautioning against public gatherings that might contribute to a deadly outbreak of the virus, particularly among the elderly.
For a brief moment, the protests against the Chinese state highlighted the potential power of workers and students to challenge the regime. “From the outside, the CCP can appear monolithic, with Xi cementing total power and control over China for many years to come”, Ji Hengge says. “These [protests] have now completely shattered that illusion—their impact will be felt for many years to come.”
* Names changed.

Inside China’s protests

A surge in both COVID-19 cases and protests inside China presents a dilemma for the ruling Communist Party. 
The regime has long adopted a successful strategy of eliminating the virus. Unlike in the United States, where a “profits before people” political framework often dominated, resulting in more than 1 million fatalities, China’s policy has averted mass death. Despite having four times the population of the US, China has reported just more than 5,000 fatalities. 
“Even allowing for propagandistic understatement of the Chinese numbers, Xi’s China has clearly been far more successful in protecting its population from the worst effects of the virus than any country in the West”, historian Adam Tooze noted last week. “As a result, it cannot be stated too often, China’s life expectancy overtook that in the United States in 2021, a truly historic marker.”
Yet three years into the pandemic, China appears ill prepared to deal with its most serious outbreak yet. According to OECD data, the country has fewer than four ICU beds per 100,000 people—compared to 9.4 in Australia and 34 in Germany—and a nurse-to-population ratio that is perhaps one-fifth of the average in developed countries. Its elderly population has a relatively low vaccination rate by international standards and as such is incredibly vulnerable.
The Chinese Communist Party has relied almost totally on lockdowns and an incredibly punitive quarantine system, which is generating increasing resentment that has exploded in street demonstrations and riots in recent weeks.
Beginning in response to a fire in an apartment block in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in which at least ten people died—widely blamed on COVID restrictions that lock apartment buildings from the outside and prevent emergency services from accessing those in need—the demonstrations have taken aim at draconian aspects of COVID-19 measures that many believe are failing to protect human lives. 
On 25 November, thousands of Han majority demonstrators hit the streets of Ürümqi. Demonstrators surrounded government buildings and demanded justice for the victims of the fire, as well as the relaxation of COVID restrictions to allow greater access to food and essential services. They sang China’s national anthem, with its lyric, “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!”
Demonstrations in solidarity with the victims of the Ürümqi fire spread to major cities across the Chinese mainland from 26 to 29 November. In the capital Beijing, at least a thousand people gathered along Beijing’s third ring road, chanting: “We are all Shanghai people! We are all Xinjiang people!”
In Shanghai, youth-led gatherings converged on Middle Ürümqi Road—named after the Xinjiang capital—lighting candles, laying white flowers and holding blank pieces of paper (in reference to state censorship) over their faces and heads (white is the traditional colour of mourning in China). Demonstrators openly criticised the Communist Party and President Xi Jinping, chanting: “Communist Party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!”
Student demonstrations took place at more than 50 university campuses, including a number of elite universities, such as Tsinghua University and Peking University. Video footage shows students singing “The Internationale” and chanting “Freedom will prevail!”
In cities including Lanzhou, Wuhan and Guangzhou, demonstrators clashed with police and destroyed tents and COVID-19 testing booths. Security forces responded by erecting barricades, closing university campuses, deploying pepper spray and carrying out mass arrests. By 30 November, hundreds of government vans, SUVs and armoured vehicles had been stationed in major cities; police and paramilitary forces were conducting citizen ID checks and searching mobile phones, looking for foreign apps, photos of the protests or other evidence that people had taken part; online mentions of the protests were deleted by the regime’s censors. 
“There has been nothing like this on this scale and so openly anti-government in China for more than three decades”, Bai Zhi,* a long-time activist, says over the phone from outside the mainland. 
“China has had waves of large-scale protests and strikes in the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s. But these actions have been localised, and protesters tended to avoid criticising the national government. Instead, they blamed local officials or employers in the hope of avoiding repression and persuading the national government to take their side in the disputes. Not since 1989 [Tiananmen Square] have there been protests on a national scale.”
This is because large sections of the population have begun to lose faith in the ability of the regime to handle COVID-19.
During 2020 and 2021, COVID zero was largely successful, with overwhelming public support for the health measures. Over the course of 2022, however, Bai Zhi says a string of incidents have undermined confidence in the strategy: many cities have been in lockdown for months at a time; untold numbers of people have become seriously ill and died after being locked in their homes, unable to access medical care; suicides are on the rise; mandatory tests have become super-spreader events; a bus carrying infected patients to a quarantine facility crashed, killing 27 people; and the “big whites”—public servants and police in white hazmat suits—have gone from national heroes embodying the collective good to impersonal enforcers of brutal policies, who regularly carry out public beatings of individuals. 
The consolidation of Xi Jinping’s rule for a historic third term has also stifled any illusions in political change taking place within the CCP. Combined with a slowdown in economic growth, rising youth unemployment (almost 20 percent among those aged between 16 and 24) and diminishing job prospects, the economic uncertainty and pain are being felt by wider sections of the population.
“The majority of people on the streets think that COVID is a threat and needs to be adequately dealt with”, he says. “But they also think that their livelihoods need to be met. The CCP is failing to achieve either.”
To keep industrial profits flowing, the state has instituted a range of inhumane policies. Eli Friedman, writing in the Boston Review, calls it the “closed loop” system, which allows capital to circulate freely while human mobility is reduced to a bare minimum in an effort to contain the virus while maintaining economic growth: 
“Closed loop manufacturing requires that workers enter the factory and stay there—eating, sleeping, and working solely within the grounds of the plant ... Meanwhile the work-from-home regime that white collar workers endure is in essence a closed loop organised at the level of the household.”
But many poor and working-class residents of the major cities don’t fit into either of the closed loops, being rural-to-urban migrants prevented from leaving the city to go back to their homes during lockdowns; they are denied access to state provisions such as welfare, food and medicine. These measures have generated forms of resistance among those trapped inside (or outside) the closed loop.
Food riots occurred on the outskirts of Shanghai after migrant workers in informal housing went weeks without either income or state-provided food deliveries. In at least one reported incident, they commandeered a vegetable truck and distributed the goods freely to a gathering crowd.
The most dramatic example of working-class resistance to the closed loop system erupted at the Foxconn iPhone assembly plant on 22 and 23 November. The factory in Henan, the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, employs more than 200,000 workers and accounts for 60 percent of the province’s exports. Workers rioted when the company tried to prevent them from leaving the factory after COVID was detected.
Video footage shows thousands of workers clashing with riot police, breaking through barricades and hurling them at security personnel, before thousands are seen jumping over walls and squeezing between fences to escape to their home towns. Many had to walk for miles along roads and through fields without food or water, surviving thanks to the goodwill of locals who provided them with provisions and shelter. 
Zhengzhou was subsequently placed under lockdown in an attempt to quell the rioting; Foxconn was forced to offer 10,000 yuan (approximately US$1,400) and free bus rides to workers who wished to leave the factory and return to their home towns. 
“What started as a labour dispute escalated into a riot that caught the attention of the entire country”, says Bai Zhi. “The Foxconn workers demonstrated that if you stand up to the Chinese state and capital, you can win.”
The Communist Party has responded to the wave of protests by lifting some restrictions, such as lockdowns and mandatory PCR testing, while placing the blame on local politicians for the poor implementation of national policy. In the meantime, the threat of repression has been enough to keep demonstrators off the streets of major cities. But none of this has solved the dilemma the Chinese state now faces. 
If Beijing continues to lift restrictions and lets the virus circulate freely, then China will suffer a surge in cases and deaths. “Such a catastrophe could provoke an even worse legitimacy crisis for the Chinese state, which likely has been part of their calculation to maintain COVID zero”, says Bai Zhi. If the state attempts to suppress the virus through the blunt instrument of onerous lockdowns, it could generate new rounds of mass protests and a potential crisis for the regime. 
“Whatever the outcome of this unfolding crisis”, Bai Zhi says, “it will leave a mark on collective consciousness for years to come”. 
* Name changed.
Lam Chi Leung contributed to this article.

China’s COVID-19 crisis

“Either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the West, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution.” It was 25 October 1917, and Trotsky was addressing the delegates of the Second All Russia Congress of Soviets in Petrograd (formerly Saint Petersburg). Earlier that day, he had helped organise and lead the first successful workers’ insurrection. 
Trotsky’s assessment would be vindicated over the coming years. The mass revulsion at the horrors of World War One, combined with the inspiration of the Russian Revolution, ignited a six-year wave of revolt that spread across Europe. And within days of the October revolution, the Whites—former Russian generals, landlords and capitalists backed by governments across the world—began subjecting the new workers’ state to counter-revolutionary terrorist violence and war.
The workers’ Red Army, led by Trotsky, ultimately defeated the Whites. But the civil war ruined the already feeble Russian economy and decimated the working class. Hundreds of thousands of militant Bolshevik workers had joined the Red Army; many of them perished. Tens of thousands became officials within the administration of the new state. 
In all the old Bolshevik strongholds, militant workers were replaced by peasants from the countryside who had none of the traditions of class struggle and socialism. The number of industrial workers declined by more than half. Manufacturing collapsed. The institutions through which workers had taken power—the soviets—were reduced to empty shells. 
The Bolshevik (renamed Communist) Party was forced to substitute itself for the decimated working class. This led to the increasing fusion of state and party and the centralisation of decision making in the party itself. It also led to the suppression of other political organisations that had joined the side of the counter-revolution. The result was a Bolshevik monopoly on political power. These extreme measures reflected what was at stake: the alternative was to give up and hand power to the Whites. Trotsky commented at the time that if Bolsheviks had done this, “fascism” would have been a Russian word.
The end of the civil war brought the regime new problems. Now that the peasantry had been granted their main demand, the redistribution of land, they had little interest in the collective struggle for socialism. Peasant revolts—the most famous taking place in Kronstadt—signified that a political retreat was necessary to keep the peasantry on side while the regime held out for a successful workers’ revolution in an industrially developed country such as Germany. 
In 1921, the New Economic Policy reintroduced elements of the market into the economy. The result was another shift in the balance of class forces: a new class of capitalist farmers emerged from the ranks of the peasantry along with a layer of urban capitalists.
The impact of the civil war and the isolation of the revolution led to the rise of a new state bureaucracy. The Bolsheviks were compelled to integrate functionaries from the old regime into the new state apparatus during the war. Initially, they could be disciplined by the revolutionary movement, but as it ebbed, the bureaucracy began to develop a will of its own. 
Bolshevik Party members such as Joseph Stalin—who had made no useful theoretical contributions to Marxism, played no notable role in the October Revolution and had been wrong in all the major party debates in 1917—rose to prominence in the authoritarian environment of the bureaucracy. If political leaders express the needs of different classes in their struggle for power, then the bureaucracy found its leading figure in Stalin.
The Bolsheviks assumed that if counter-revolution emerged victorious, it would do so through conquest by foreign armies or by the restoration of the old ruling class. No-one envisaged that it would take place through the bureaucratised Bolshevik Party itself.
Trotsky became the leading figure in the struggle against the bureaucracy. In 1923, he led what became known as the Left Opposition, which took up the fight, initiated by Lenin in the last months of his life, to democratise the party and revive the soviets as genuine institutions of workers’ democracy. 
In response, Bolshevik leaders Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin (known as the troika) launched a hysterical campaign against “Trotskyism”. “All the old formulae of Bolshevism were named ‘Trotskyist’”, Trotsky later commented. “The genuine thing in Bolshevism is opposed to every privilege, to the oppression of the majority by the minority. It was named ‘the program of Trotskyism’. That was the beginning of the frame up.”
The troika relaxed the rules governing party membership, opening the organisation to hundreds of thousands of careerists who viewed membership as a ticket to personal advancement. They consolidated the control of the Russian party over the Comintern (the international organisation of communist parties). “The attitude towards Lenin as a revolutionary leader gave way to an attitude like that towards the head of an ecclesiastical hierarchy”, wrote Trotsky. The troika was able to defeat the Left Opposition politically through their control over the party apparatus. Their victory was assured when the post-WWI revolutionary wave that had swept Europe finally ended with the defeat of German workers in 1923.
If Trotsky and his supporters were to defeat the bureaucracy, they would need a revolutionary upsurge of the working class. But the working class inside Russia was exhausted after years of war and famine. 
The 1926 general strike in Britain and the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 led to an upsurge of oppositional activity inside Russia (now organised as the United Opposition, Zinoviev having joined Trotsky) and presented an opportunity to put workers’ struggle back on the agenda in Europe and Asia. But each opportunity was sabotaged by the class-collaborationist policies of the Comintern, which now promoted the bureaucratic interests of the apparatus in Moscow through the various international communist parties.
These defeats helped consolidate the bureaucracy against the United Opposition which, at the end of 1927, was expelled from the party. Trotsky was exiled first to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, then to Turkey, Norway, France and, finally, to Mexico.
The horrors of Stalinism in the USSR proceeded apace. Forced collectivisation of peasant land and rapid industrialisation at the expense of consumption led to the deaths of millions. Show trials led to the murder of the surviving revolution-era Bolsheviks and their replacement with a new generation of bureaucrats moulded by Stalin’s regime.
“The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not only a bloody line but a whole river of blood”, Trotsky wrote in 1936, at the height of the purges. “The elimination of the entire old generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation, which participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth which took seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism.”
Nevertheless, thousands of new “Trotskyists” (who identified the label with opposition to the regime) continued to organise and resist from inside Stalin’s dictatorship. 
In 1936, Trotskyist prisoners at the Vorkuta forced labour camp organised a hunger strike that lasted 132 days. One report described “a group of nearly a hundred, composed mainly of Trotskyists” being led away to be shot. “As they marched away, the condemned sang the ‘Internationale’, joined by the voices of hundreds of prisoners remaining in the camp.”
Stalin also took revenge on Trotsky’s family. Of his four children, two were executed in the gulags, one was driven to suicide in Berlin and another was murdered by Stalin’s agents in Paris. In his obituary for his son, “Leon Sedov—Son, Friend, Fighter”, Trotsky summed up the scale of the defeat: “That which tsarist hard-labour prisons and harsh exiles, the hardships of emigration, the civil war and disease had failed to accomplish has in recent years been achieved by Stalin”.
Despite these defeats, Trotsky fought to keep the tradition of genuine Bolshevism alive. His History of the Russian Revolution, published in 1930, upheld the memory and lessons of the October Revolution just as they were being buried by the Stalinist bureaucracy. 
Trotsky continued to organise the opposition internationally. His writings on the rise of fascism in Germany, the revolutionary wave of May-June 1936 in France and the Spanish civil war of 1936-39 put forward a clear line of action for the working-class movement. Despite the correctness of Trotsky’s analysis, however, his supporters remained small and isolated—vastly outnumbered by the forces of reformism and Stalinism—and were unable to translate Trotsky’s ideas into mass action.
It was during this period that Trotsky wrote his analysis of the USSR, The Revolution Betrayed. Published in 1937, the book refuted Stalin’s claim that Russia had achieved socialism. Trotsky demonstrated how in every aspect of life—work, family, gender and sexual relations, politics, education, health care—the oppression of Russian workers continued. The state apparatus, instead of withering away, had grown into a monstrosity towering over the masses. “With the utmost stretch of fancy it would be difficult to imagine a contrast more striking than that which exists between the schema of the workers’ state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and the actual state now headed by Stalin”, he wrote.
Trotsky believed that the Stalinist bureaucracy was highly unstable and would collapse under the pressure of the World War Two. But the USSR emerged from the war strengthened, setting up a series of satellite states in Eastern Europe. Trotsky also argued that the world capitalist system was in an intractable crisis that would lead to revolutionary struggles. Instead, capitalism entered a long period of growth and relative stability.
Trotsky did not live to participate in the political debates that followed the war. In his obituary on Trotsky, Victor Serge, an anarchist who had been won to Bolshevism during the Russian Revolution and later became a member of the Opposition, reflected on his comrade’s legacy:
“I have never known him greater, and I have never held him dearer, than I did in the shabby Leningrad and Moscow tenements where, on several occasions, I heard him speak for hours to win over a handful of factory workers, and this well after he had become one of the two unchallenged leaders of the victorious revolution. He was still a member of the Politbureau but he knew he was about to fall from power and also, very likely, to lose his life. He thought the time had come to win hearts and consciences one by one—as had been done before, during the tsar’s rule. 
“Thirty or forty poor people’s faces would be turned towards him, listening, and I remember a woman sitting on the floor asking him questions and weighing up his answers. This was in 1927. We knew we stood a greater chance of losing than of winning. But, still, our struggle was worthwhile: if we had not fought and gone under bravely, the defeat of the revolution would have been a hundred times more disastrous.”

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