The Communist Road to Capitalism explores how a dynamic of
social struggles from below followed by countermeasures of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has pushed the historical
evolution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949.
Under socialism
until the mid-1970s, during the ensuing transition until the
mid-1990s, and in the capitalist period since, the CCP regime
responded to the struggles of workers, peasants, migrants, and women*
with a mix of repression, concession, cooptation, and reform. Ralf
Ruckus shows that this dynamic took the country into a new phase each
time—and eventually all the way from socialism to capitalism: in
the 1950s, labor struggles and the Hundred Flowers Movement were
followed by the regime’s Great Leap Forward; in the 1960s, the
Cultural Revolution led to the CCP’s failed attempt to revitalize
socialism; in the 1970s, social unrest and movements for a democratic
socialism made room for the regime’s Reform and Opening policies;
in the late 1980s, the Tian’anmen Square uprising triggered more
radical reforms; in the 1990s, peasant and state worker unrest could
not stop the capitalist restructuring; and in the 2000s, migrant
worker struggles led to concessions, tightened repression, and the
regime’s global capitalist expansion strategy in the 2010s.
The Communist
Road to Capitalism breaks with established orthodoxies about the
PRC’s socialist “successes” and myths on its later rise as an
economic power. It combines a historiography of workers’,
peasants’, migrants’, and women*’s struggles with a searing
critique of exploitation, authoritarian state power and gender
discrimination under socialism and capitalism. Drawing lessons from
PRC history, Ralf Ruckus finally outlines political aims and methods
for the left that avoid past mistakes and allow to fight on for a
society free of all forms of exploitation and oppression.